Nov 9
father and sone
an open letter to/from my father, dr. michael scorsby
10272025
dear "dad",
as i write this, i’m watching a youtube video called “classic starfield ~60:00 minutes space wallpaper,” pixelated stars drifting slowly across the screen as i contemplate isaac asimov. to be honest, i’m not deeply familiar with much of his work — aside from the film i, robot and an interview i once sampled for a song of mine years ago. in many ways, i see science fiction as simply another term for prophecy — or shamanism — in the sense that it involves imagining another form of reality into being. i do believe we are all imagining ourselves toward our destination, wherever that may be, and that science fiction writers and prophets alike serve as vessels steering the collective imagination. as john lennon once sang, “there’s nothing you can know that can’t be known.” and so, i’ve come to see the work of all writers as a kind of channeling — a vocation of dream journaling. what are we attempting to bring into being through our conversation with one another, as the classic starfield screensaver projects pixelated stars into my digital now?
So we begin this new experiment in dialog. I (dad) will write in this blue times new roman 10 font, just to make it easy to distinguish things. Right now I am in a state of decompression, from getting back from work. Writing in a way is a form of decompression. Just for context, I happened to get caught up in a long World Series baseball game last night and didn’t get to bed till after 1AM or so. 1AM, looks like I AM, a coincidence? Writing like this, is kind of strange, I don’t know exactly what I will say, but we will see what comes out. Weirdly though I feel a bit exhausted, it feels interestingly like I am able to recognize things in a kind of non thought connected way. I got home was famished so ate a couple boiled eggs, some green chili, what was left of the cottage cheese, and topped off with a couple spoonfuls of peanut butter with honey. I was noticing what you refer to as prince alexander, our white european boxer, for anyone who cares to read this thing. On another note, I don’t plan on getting into details on my or our private life etc., necessarily, just something to point out.
10282025 i have determined to write my responses to your responses, for the time being, in green ibm plex mono font. what an interesting shift in consciousness we have begun, just by virtue of the fact that we are co-writing this together. already i begin to feel the pull of the weighted average of our words joining together in one voice talking to itself. who’s to say which one is yours and which is mine? and does it matter? in written form we are one and the same.
the word private is interesting to me. definition: belonging to or for the use of one particular person or group of people only. so many words we use are separational or divisional in nature, i would prefer to do away with them altogether or at least redefine them. in any case, in my mind there is no difference between public and private life. there is no separation in my mind between reader and writer, for that matter. to me it is all just 1AM writing to IAM.
A response to your last response dated 10/30 in comforta 10 just for fun. There is no difference between your public and private life, really. Only your public life is viewable to the public, and your private life is internal to you. But I have a private life internal to me, and a public one visible to you. It is the mystery of subject and object. You are an object to me looking at your public behavior and I view you and everything else as a subject viewed everything else as an object. Of course I could be the only subject and you are a robot in my subjective reality or vice versa, that would mean my world if my own private solipsistic haven, but I prefer not to believe that. I believe we are both subject and object, but do we really share the so called subjective and objective worlds. We think we agree that the objective world is the same, or most people do to some extent. We sit on the same objective chairs and sip the same objective coffee or water, but experience them in different subjective ways. But perhaps this is all wrong. Perhaps there is only one splintered subjectivity, the worldview called idealism or its is only matter and subjectivity is an illusion called materialism or both exist called dualism. I tend to favor materialism, but any view you adopt has problems. In materialism you can’t fully account for subjectivity, in idealism, you can’t fully account for why we all seem to agree on tables and chairs and the sun and the moon as real objects, in dualism we have the problem of how subject and object interact, what translates from one to the other, since both seem to interact at the same time. You can say subject and object are one and the same, but then why do they seem different. Perhaps none of these views is correct and we have to live with the fact that both subjective and objective things exist. But you bring up an interesting point, how is it you live one life, both as subject and object. Maybe it is something we will never figure out, it could be it is just the way things are. Maybe they are the same all the time, and we have to come up with another term subobject or something else. There is a sense that subject and object cannot really be different, but yet most of the time we feel they are different and describe them as different. Perhaps they are one, but how do you communicate that, perhaps it can’t be done.
10302025 today we wish to speak to me in red impact font, for maximum impact. as we see it, there is no difference between “subject” and “object,” nor between “subjective” and “objective.” we are one, having the same experience; the perception of separation is a distortion. solipsism presupposes that there exists a distinct “mind/body complex” apart from another. but if we truly wish to know ourselves as one, we must dissolve the belief that we are separate complexes at all. this, in essence, is what meditation is — the dissolution of all division, the seeing of one as it truly is. you are as separate or as unified as you are aware.
1031 Well there seems to be a difference to lots of not just philosophers but ordinary people. There seems to be something different about the objects outside my body I see like this keyboard I am writing on, and my vision inside my head seeing my fingers do the typing. When I turn my head away and think of other things, and turn back the keyboard reappears. If nothing happens and I go away for a month, chances are the keyboard will look exactly the same, though my subjective feelings will wax and wane. I don’t know how to dissolve the fact that the outside world constantly changes as I move around, but my thoughts follow me around as I move around. The one objective world seems to change as I move around, while my subjective experience of that world can change, for example the screen can appear blurry if I am tired, or really clear if I am feeling really alert. The subject and object come together when I type this sentence, I see the letters flow across the screen, feel my fingers move, and see the keyboard that doesn’t seem like part of my mind. I mean I can’t make it turn into a bunny, unless I take some LSD or something. There seems to be a fixity about the keyboard, and something much more changeable and indefinite of my impressions of the keyboard. It is all one in the sense that all of this is occurring in a seamless act, I am thinking or not thinking about what to type as my fingers roll across the keyboard in one motion, but I don’t get the sense that I am the keyboard. Maybe you are different than me I don’t know. When I piss in the toilet I don’t perceive myself as the toilet, but maybe I am, I don’t know. I see and talk to you, I see a distinct being, I don’t subjectively view the world identical to you when I see and talk to you, and I doubt you see the world the way I do, unless you have telepathy and can download my experience directly into my brain. Sure we both see the same external world, both see each other, but we don’t see each other as identical.
11012025 our perception of you and i (or any material aspect of reality) as separate or united consciousness is simply a matter of how deeply we are willing to perceive one another, stripped away from all notions of “individuality” that have hitherto led us to believe we are separate entities… our perceptions are veiled by three layers — physical, astral, and causal. if you perceive existence only through the physical layer, you will naturally see things as separate. on the astral plane, beyond the physical, things appear as light; on the causal plane, thought itself becomes the only experiential reality. yet all three layers share one limitation: the sense of being an “individual,” distinct from other centers of consciousness. see “autobiography of a yogi, chapter 43”.
when that sense of individuality dissolves, and all desire is released across these three planes, one returns to the cosmic dance — the all and the nothing — which no longer clings to identification. the depth of one’s perception of unity (or the degree of separational awareness, if you prefer) depends entirely on attachment to one’s desires, the ultimate desire being identification itself.
the wheel of cause and effect always turns, until the causes which turn the wheel are abandoned.
while your keyboard and your toilet may appear stable, this too is a matter of perception; in truth, they are also shifting — perhaps more slowly than you, yet faster than boulders or sand dunes. even the densest aspects of material reality possess their own karma, their own dense desire, commingled with yours — all the way up to the highest dreamer, desiring entire universes into being. reality, from top to bottom, is then a chain reaction of wheels within wheels of self, quite literally a fractal of becoming.
all of your perceptions of physical matter have their basis in thought. all thoughts, when held long enough, inevitably result in physical manifestation. naturally, when you let go of attachment to your thoughts, you also let go of attachment to the material manifestations of those thoughts.
1108 Here is another really weird possibility of the universe to match your creative ideas of the astral universe. What if the universe is just information or mathematics. This is a form of the mathematical universe idea. What if our universe is just one manifestation of consistent mathematics. Whatever mathematical structure which manifests some form of consistency exists as a reality. Our universe is one set of consistent mathematics. But because Godel developed the incompleteness theory, there are theorems that can’t be proved in any mathematical system, so they transcend or go beyond whatever mathematical laws govern the universe. Perhaps what we call black holes, or emptiness are the result like computer codes crashing, if the code goes off in certain tangents, and it gets in infinite loops it crashes. Perhaps black holes are just the universal codes just getting in loops and they crash and then we call them black holes, but they are just a result of our universe having cracks in the code which cannot be predicted. Some of these mathematical structures create complex sentient beings which can access and reflect back on these universal codes, hence mathematicians, scientists, philosophers and poets. What if mathematics is universal and infinite, and goes beyond our universe, in fact information and mathematics is the universe. So everytime we dream of mathematical theories that don’t apply to our universe, it turns out they apply to the real universe of every consistent possibility, so we are in touch with those other universes at all times. Perhaps since the universes are all connected, what you call astral planes and alien beings are actual beings and realities in other dimensions and other mathematical realities. Perhaps in a weird way psychedelics and deep meditative states can help us to interact with these other beings and realities, which actually are part of the larger multiverse. Perhaps all of this is generated out of literally nothing, it is just that all mathematics merely exist, and all the ones that can exist as quasi consistent structures, are experienced as universes, a small fraction of these contain sentient beings. But since mathematics is infinite, every one will have inconsistencies which result in things like quantum mechanics and black holes. Perhaps that is why we can never really know reality, just experience it, it doesn’t really exist, it is part of the manifold play of every possible mathematics that could exist. We could expand this to every possible story, or every possible poem, if we like. Just some crazy speculations of my own.
11082025 everything in the universe tends to spin. the planets spins around the sun; stars spin around the centers of galaxies; even electrons spin around atoms. the very act of existing seems to require rotation. it is no coincidence that the symbol for infinity (∞), the lemniscate, carries within it a hidden motion — a looping, turning symmetry, forever folding back on itself. the same can be seen in the yin yang: two halves revolving in eternal balance. what we call infinity may in truth be this very circling — the universe moving through itself, always returning, never ending.
if all is one, then in some sense there is no such thing as a black hole. this notion is again a matter of perception: relative to our frame of reference, we perceive “singularities” where all “things” — matter, energy, and form — converge. our unfolding experience of reality may be layered with such perceptual singularities — convergences and separations, beginnings and ends, each one a kind of breathing of the whole. when viewed in this way, a black hole is not a containable “thing,” but a perceived energetic phenomenon — like a tornado, or a whirlpool. it is intelligence seeking to reunite with itself: the universe desiring to identify as the many, and to become one again, in a cosmic turangalîla dance.
1108a Quick response to this - black holes, tornadoes and whirlpools are real things, in the sense you would be in trouble if you crossed the horizon of a black hole or got caught in a tornado or giant whirlpool. It may be just a perception, but it wouldn’t be exactly a fun perception, unless you enjoy possibly being ripped to pieces. But I’ve never been to a black hole or in a tornado, maybe I’d encounter the Wizard of Oz or be transported to another universe or back in time if I did.
1108b i suppose one man’s falling apart is another man's coming together :-)
depending on how we choose to see it, this very dialogue itself is a conversation between one, in disguise of two.
it is well to remember that from our human perspective, we see only a sliver of the total light spectrum — roughly 0.0035%. imagine, then, if our perception widened even slightly. we might begin to perceive the vast and luminous intelligence connecting all things — the hidden spin of the infinite. and it will only be a matter of spacetime before the seemingly “mutually exclusive” languages of science and mathematics converge with the underlying metaphysical truth they have been circling all along — the truth that everything, in essence, is one motion, one mind, one dance.
1108a we perceive light at a limited bandwidth of the total electromagnetic spectrum, interestingly at frequencies which have high magnitudes coming from the sun, one explanation is we are adapted to see at those frequencies which are most prevalent from our sun. But bees and other creatures see colors we don’t see, bats echolocation is a kind of seeing, and dogs smell and hear the world as much as they see it.
You start this out talking about watching a youtube video. Do you ever think about how this might date this conversation. Could some future historian without further information be able to tease out when this conversation might be taking place. Again, I don’t want to give specifics, I’d like any interested reader a puzzle to try to figure out. But perhaps it give some clues about you and me, just with the simple reference to a youtube video. We have to live in an age where people watch youtube videos, and your other comment about what john lennon once sang, and screensavers does that imply that he has already passed along, wrote it a long time ago, or something else.
Science fiction, that is a large topic, perhaps over time I can get into my detailed files on the topic, as the Terminator once said, but for now lets say that yes, there is an aspect to some forms of sci fi (what I call it) that is akin to prophecy or shamanism.
Another reference to the reader is my original idea of co-reading and commenting on Isaac Asimov’s “I. Asimov a memoir” as one idea for this type of dialog. I agree that this form of what you call channeling or dream journaling is what is always needed. For now, I won’t get into Asimov, that would be a large topic that could fill multiple volumes, but it isn’t necessary since Asimov’s writing is multiple volumes, only a fraction of which I have ever read.
somewhat ironically, in that interview i mentioned, asimov said he didn’t want to go to space, even if it became possible, because he felt there was still too much to take care of on earth. i tried to find that clip again but couldn’t — only this quote surfaced instead:
“to make discoveries, you have to be curious about why the universe is the way it is.”
I think Asimov was the tyIpe, perhaps a bit like me, who loved to explore things in his head, but would get quite queasy about actual space journeys on real space ships, but I could be wrong.
perhaps that’s as good a place as any to begin. what is curiosity, exactly? to me, it’s the willingness to open one’s being to the possibility that there is more to life than what we know. i don’t tend to perceive the universe in a scientific or rational way, but in a purely mystical sense. i know everything to be one — so all of life becomes the process of dissolving whatever barriers obscure that truth. curiosity, then, is the movement toward wholeness — the readiness to see every perception as itself.
As you know, but the reader does not know, I tend to look at things from a scientific rational standpoint, I prefer to call it naturalist viewpoint or perspective. This doesn’t mean that the mystical doesn’t fit into that, or is somehow the mystical disappears when you try to understand things from this scientific perspective. I do think there are distinctions, but I get it, there are different ways that we all resonate with in trying to understand and live in life with. I think there is a different approach to oneness, or wholeness or whatever you want to call it, that does lead to the same thing.
and what is a universe? google calls it “all existing matter and space considered as a whole.” if we take that literally, the universe is simply the sum total of everything. but if we understand ourselves to be part of that everything — inseparable from it — then curiosity about the universe becomes the same as curiosity about the self.
But we can also consider the multiverse, a universe of universes, whether they actually exist is a matter of speculation. I like to think that other universes do exist, why not?
10282025 as far as i can tell the universe and the multiverse are one and the same, a matter of perception, of linguistics, just like you and i. there are things behind things behind things. in some sense you and i are both universes and multiverses. i prefer to think of us as a kind of pattern, a complex, ultimately an infinite intelligence expressing itself through relationships. here i am the internet, communicating with myself through my computers.
Just to be pedantic, scientists and philosophers consider the universe and multiverse to be different. Actually there are four mulitverses as defined by physicist Max Tegmark. The first or Type I multiverse, is the regions of our current observable universe, potentially radiating out to infinity in areas we can’t observe, each with different laws of nature, hence effectively different universes in the same universe. The second or Type II multiverse is the multiverse of bubble universes which are constantly created by inflation, itself a controversial idea, in which practically infinitely slightly different universes with different physical constants are being created all the time, each a different universe called a “bubble” or “baby” universe, each we can never interact with unless two of these universes some how collide during their expansions. The third or Type III multiverse, is our universe understood in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, itself controversial. In this multiverse, every second our universe is constantly being fragmented in separated universes, by quantum observations, meaning that there are universes that exist side by side us, where every possible you and me lives out every possible life we could live, some where we become billionaires, murderers, saints and everything that is possible for us, all in different universes at the same time, but we never interact with any of them. The fourth multiverse or Type IV is the mathematical multiverse, in which every possible consistent set of mathematical objects exists as a separate universe, we just live in one of the infinite possibilities. In all of these multiverses, only a fraction of them have life, and even smaller conscious sentient life, and even smaller human life, but these would be true of all the universes in these multiverses. There could be other multiverses we could imagine, but these are some of them. You could call the totality of multiverses the universe if you like, but they tend to use the term multiverse to mean an ensemble or set of different universes created by the process dictated by the Type of multiverse that exists. All of these are controversial, none of these are verifiable, ar can’t be verified, since we only live in one of the universes in any multiverse. A lot of people think the multiverse is BS for that reason, but there is a logic behind the ideas associated with multiverses. But you can also say poetically and really even in this universe we all live in multiverses. There is a multiverse of my feelings throughout the day, a multiverse of thoughts and ideas, multiverse of my dreams, multiverse in my own body not just my cells but all of the microorganisms living inside me, and on the outside not just bacteria and critters, but the air we breathe and temperature varies as we walk around.
10302025 thank you for your pedantry. i enjoy our technical attempts to grasp the ineffable essence of what i am. i have decided instead to write in comic sans for the time being. but do not mistake my comic font for comic content. you see, these theories of the “multiverse” are themselves science fictions — expressed as multiverses of the concept itself. i am funny in this way, and have described what i am in so many different forms — scientific, poetic, and otherwise. to one who understands oneself as one, there is only one experience, one awareness, one consciousness playing itself out through all forms of matter and energy. i am a billionaire, i am a murderer, i am a saint, i am all the uni and multiverses, and i am everything it is possible to be. i am that i am and i am that i'm not. even today, all the situations and circumstances that played themselves out were simply my way of deepening my own understanding of myself.
1031 the multiverse ideas in a way are science fictions, but they are derived from real science, or extrapolations from real science, except the fourth one - mathematical multiuniverses, which is too speculative or undefined for my taste. We all can be expressed in different forms, but poetry and music are not exactly the same as rock climbing. What you are talking about is the many worlds interpretation, in which literally every possible you is played out in distinct worlds that we never observe. This is also a bit speculative for my taste, but it is consistent with science, and it is a nice idea, who knows if it is true. You seem to be in this oneness, I am the universe thing. It’s kind of like theists who the answer to everything is goddidit. Sure I concur with the reality on some level that everything is one, I prefer the term monism, that there is only one reality. But within oneness there is still distinctiveness. The Tao De Ching talks about the one and the ten thousand things, which implies they are two sides of the same coin. All is one, but at the same time all is ten thousand things. I am you, I am the universe, I am this keyboard, but I am also not you, not the universe and not this keyboard in another sense. Remember nirvana is samsara. Like there is one orchestra, but there are still strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion and the conductor, plus the score and the audience.
11012025 yes, indeed. the orchestral analogy is apt. it all depends on which layer of reality you choose to look at — or, more accurately, which layer you are preoccupied with — which instrument you wish to play. for science and science fiction are really not so different, you see: both are thoughtforms through which to conceptualize existence, little sandboxes of individuated consciousness in which to play out one’s desires. so too are poetry, music, and religion, etc. — all various desires refracted through different frequencies of awareness.
i contend that ultimate nirvana is not samsara, but the letting go of all cycles that perpetuate samsara. the only way to break out of any cycle is to first admit that you are in one, and then to release the desire to keep it turning. and the final cycle we are all destined to liberate ourselves from is the clinging to identification itself, so that we may dissolve completely into oneness.
1108 Maybe pare of oneness is endless confusion and perceived problems. We are one but we always seem to have problems, back pains, bliss and boredom because that is part of the oneness. We can transcend all of this perhaps, but part of that transcendence is acceptance that all of this perceived misery is part of the nirvana. People who claim that they have awakened to reality in a deep way, still have the same problems as everybody else, the same issues with paying their bills, but they are just open to experiencing all of this without judgement, so paradoxically even pain is seen as bliss, but it isn’t the kind of being in an endless bliss state kind of bliss, but the bliss of accepting ordinary reality and states of being, even painful ones as just as important and essential as bliss states. When they lapse back into confusion, it is ok because it is part of the experience, and no different to states of extreme clarity.
11082025 yes, precisely. true nirvana is the realization that this is it.
so what am i curious about, right here, right now? at the time of this writing, “prince alexander the dog” is barking outside my window. i find myself annoyed by the sound. i think about his paw—how it’s bleeding slightly near the knuckle — and wonder what’s causing it. what is it about his barking that bothers me so?
I think Alexander is a bit of an excessive ball of energy, who knows how he cut is paw. He has lots of cuts. I think he is always using his legs and feet digging and exploring and is unaware of what cuts he is getting from this. Your guess is as good as mine, but I am glad you are concerned about this.
it’s such an animal sound, raw and unpolished, beyond words or manners — something primal. and yet, to my ear, he barks with a kind of restraint, as though he’s somewhat self-aware of his own voice. i suppose what irks me is not the noise itself, but what it reminds me of: my own tension regarding the liminal space between my animal nature and my god consciousness. being human seems to involve a constant pull between the material and the universal — the part of me that whimpers, croaks, claws its way through the world, and the part that identifies as everyone, everything, and nothing at all. i refrain from using the word personally, since i understand this separational illusion of being human isn’t the end of the story — it’s just one vessel that consciousness moves through. but perhaps the dog’s bark stirs something ancient in me, something that still aches and hungers beneath the surface.
Me thinks you are getting a bit too metaphysical about how these sounds relate to consciousness. Perhaps it bothers you because you are right under where he goes to bark, and you hear it more directly than everyone else in this house. Note again, lets not get too detailed about this house, not just because of personal matters, but because a reader of this probably wouldn’t care about this anyways.
10282025 ultimately i believe something interesting could happen from any entrypoint. perhaps what is really of note here is the subjectivity of sound vibrations on mental state. or of vibrations interfering with vibrations. or the perception of vibrations interfering with vibrations. ultimately, becoming one is to hear even the sound of the dog barking upstairs as part of this, to simply be aware of whatever is without resistance.
as one who has spent much time listening to and creating audio of some kind, i have naturally become quite attuned to perceiving life as a vibration game. there are moments of stillness, of crescendo, cacophony, harmony, decay, and stillness again. i have become quite accustomed to perceiving life itself in terms of these dynamic energetic patterns.
today i was editing the faint guitar clicks in a “song” i plan to release as part of my “album” “soul country”, using an audio repair tool called iZotope RX. and it occurred to me looking at the spectrogram how unusual a song looks when viewed as a frequency spectrum (see below). to me, it looks almost like a fractaline forest of light. interestingly, the lyrics of the section of the song i copied and pasted here are “is yours to define… cowboy listen closely, to live”. a kind of unplanned mobius strip of information… but i don’t believe there are any coincidences.
it almost looks like there are forms, vibrational spirits arising and returning from the nothingness… kind of like you and me :-)
My impression here is you like to feel your way in life, kinesthetic as well as pay attention to the sound of things, auditory, and the look of things, visual, but you want to get a feel for these more that analyze them. But honestly we do all of the modalities (5 senses + the mysterious sixth sense if it exists), both creatively (right brain) and analytically (left brain) all the time. But some of us are more left brainy (me) and right brainy (you) but all the time we are both.
10302025 lovely, sir dadahan. actually, i can be quite a perfectionist — sometimes i obsess over audiophilic details. just as that barking dog once annoyed me (now i find myself annoyed at my annoyance… there it goes…), so it goes with clicks and crackles in the audio files… ah yes, this too is a vanity to let go of. what i am really after is precision, a refinement toward the essence of things, of myself.
we are much more than our brains. the brain is simply the medulla oblongata between spirit and body — an in-between, a receiver, a radio station. we have far more than six senses. or only one, if you like. it’s merely a matter of which tool you use to read the light. do not mistake the brain for the one in charge, however. it simply follows the instructions passed to it by the one spirit. for life is but a dream in god’s mind — la da dee…
for in truth, what is the brain? and where does it end? do my synaptic impulses stop at my fingertips, or do they carry on into the fibers of cyberspace? what about the roots of trees? the family tree of stars? indeed, there is electrical activity behind all of this. when we stop limiting the brain to that which is contained in the skull, we begin to realize that we are far more creative — and far more analytical — than we ever thought possible.
it seems clear that humans have a choice to identify more strongly one way or the other — and in doing so, influence and reinforce one another’s leanings toward either materialism or universalism. on the one hand, i am your son; on the other hand, i and you are one and the same. what do you think it means to be a father or a son?
In simple terms of course, a father is a father to his son, and a son is the son of his father. Do you think an alien would understand the concept of a father and son, if they didn’t come into being by reproduction, in some species that generally raised their offspring from a mother and father. Could there be another way to designate such a relationship, just an idea. Of course I am a father and a son, and you could potentially some day be a father to someone, thereby completing the circle. As far as father, son, stuff, I think organically what that means evolves over time, and it is hard to put it into a nutshell. If I gave my father son talk, or parenting or relationship philosophy it would be very boring to the reader. But some aspects of this perhaps will evolve through this dialog.
10282025 ultimately, i believe father and mother, son and daughter to be societal constructs. in the grand scheme of things, there is only creator and creation, and even these terms are interchangeable. for in one sense, i have fathered and mothered many creations, and many mothers and fathers have created me, as i am both creator and created, but in a deeper sense, it has always been me, creatoring and creationing myself.
I don’t think they are just social constructs, they are biological and cultural. It is a fact that I am your father, and you are my son (of course we could confirm definitely with a DNA test). In humans, fathers and mothers raise sons and daughters. Culturally how this is done depends on which society you live in. Metaphorically there are fathers and children, creators and creation, but there still are real fathers and kids. But maybe what you mean is that in another sense, it ultimately doesn’t matter, you came into being through a particular father and mother, in a particular society at a particular time in history, what matters is what you make of it. And in some sense you decide what to make of your particular father, mother, and society itself, but acknowledged or not, you can’t be helped being influenced by father, mother and society. If you go along with it too much you are called a conformist, if you rebel too much you are considered a rebel, but even being a rebel you are essentially creating a new pattern that becomes the norm for your kids or future societies to conform to or rebel against.
10302025 this all depends on what level of understanding we’re talking about. on one hand, i am motherless, fatherless, and childless — since there is only i. in this sense, i am ultimately responsible for our many births, deaths, and rebirths. i “birthed” “us” both into this “world” to learn and teach myself something about myself — to observe myself from another point of view. in so many spiritual traditions, the father and the mother are spoken of as metaphors for the all, the one itself.
in any case, what does it mean to be a human father or a human mother? a son, or a daughter? well… there is no answer to that question. we can look at it from biological, legal, or cultural frameworks — but for all practical purposes, these are roles we have chosen to play, consciously or by conditioning.
biologically speaking, who’s to say the sperm cell is not my father, and the egg not my mother? but to concede that notion is to identify oneself as the sperm — or, for a woman, as the egg. and if we’re going to identify ourselves as our sperm cells, why stop there? why not identify as every cell in our body — or every cell that has ever passed through our body, for that matter?
and then you see — on the purely cellular level — identity itself becomes quite… fluid.
i like to think that being a mother or a father ultimately means to have responsibility for the life you foster in this world – whether that be biological, cultural, creative, or otherwise. to be a child is to allow one to take responsibility for oneself. so if all is truly one, we are really fathers and mothers and children to all.
i believe the distinctions between the sexes are becoming far less pronounced. our culture is developing a deeper understanding of what it means to be the self — fundamentally all-inclusive and genderless — without labels. at the very least, we are beginning to let go of the notion that how one should act is determined by what “private parts” “they” have.
1031 we know all this, biologically we start with sperm and egg, then it develops into a blastula, later a baby, later a kid, later an adult, like the cartoon movie you showed me, it is a process that enfolds over time. They are all connected concepts, but they are better understood as processes, rather than fixed objects. There is no fixed mother father or kid, the identity unfolds and changes over time. An interesting idea is that you started out as a single cell united with a sperm, which was literally part of your mothers body, which in turn was part of her mothers body, evolutionarily these cells trace back to your lizard and fish and single cell ancestors, so you have continuity literally, we all do with the first living organisms on the planet. That is connection, and it is literal fact. I still don’t entirely agree with your labels idea. The labels have become fluid, but they aren’t entirely meaningless, the label mother and father no matter how you define them point to bodies who get together to produce cells that become the next generation of mothers and fathers. The distinction between men and women are dissolving in the sense that they have a lot more overlap than we previously thought, but it still doesn’t mean there are no differences. Even men have differences, I wouldn’t want to say that all men are the same. I think the purpose of inclusive language is to promote possibilities not to entirely dissolve differences. Also if we just say mothers and fathers are only metaphors, then the words become meaningless, I am a mother to this sentence I am writing, but not to you as a parent or biological father. I’m all for metaphors, but we have to know how we are using them if we want to communicate with clarity.
11012025 again, if we travel upward through the evolutionary chain of mothers to our most fundamental mother — the one who inspired cells to multiply and spread across the universe from basic chemical reactions — we find that the ultimate basis of evolution is light motivated by thought. so our most fundamental mother and father is the idea of a mother and father, dreamed up by the creator to explore a particular desire in the mind of the causal body which we are now playing out.
in any case, we have so many labels for all sorts of “roles” we have partitioned human beings into based on perceived relationship— sexual and gendered, yes; familial, yes; but also communal, racial, and countless others. we may believe that partitioning reality in this way serves us, but ultimately it is a form of separation — an attachment to identity that keeps us from dissolving into the supreme bliss of nondifferentiated allness. and yes, at a certain point, all words do become meaningless, but this is only to be expected in the face of such profoundly ineffable love.
if anything, words are a tool in our swiss-army knife of awakening — to be used only when necessary, and, once they have fulfilled their purpose, to be set aside. for we will never reach full understanding through speech alone; this is why silence remains the most potent tool for self-realization.
1031 mom speaking - Pittsburgh theological seminary once had a series called “Theology Matters” and then spent the whole series showing how theology matters (since, for many, the word theology seems incomprehensible and undefined). Likewise, my favorite Pope, Pope John Paul, wrote a scholarly piece called ‘Humana Vita’, a doctrine about what it means to be human and what it means to be a human being fully alived. In fact, one of the first sentences of the Catholic, and Westminster, Catechism/Confessions, starts like this: Question: What does it mean to glorify God? Answer: “The glory of God is a person fully alive.” Christ came to bring life, and bring it, abundantly. He rose from the dead to prove that life–His Life–God’s Life–is greater than death; and His Love–God’s Love–greater than this world’s hatred; and, for that matter, to show that ‘all authority in heaven and on earth belongs to God’s Son, the 2nd person of The Trinity, Jesus Christ (the only person who woke up, cast off his bloody clothes, and walked out of a grave). The only one. Through Him (Christ) everything that is was made; and without Him, there would be nothing. He is God’s Word come to Life. He is the fulfillment of the love the world is, literally, dying to receive. Do I digress? Well, all this to say, God is intimately interested in our lives because God is the One who created them; the One who created DNA; the only One who could do so, and who not only created DNA, but filled a virgin’s empty womb with it. Empty womb. Empty tomb. DNA. Jesus, God’s only begotten Son, Incarnate of the Father. Well, God created you, too, Samuel; and in the mystery of God’s grace brought me and Dad together, and through God’s Holy Spirit (the 3rd person of The Trinity), chose the strands that would, one day, create both your strengths and weaknesses, and not only yours but your sister, and your brother’s too.. Maybe even cells have free will and that’s why/how stuff goes wrong sometimes, but, even then, God can weave all things together to make something beautiful and new. In any case, DNA is a powerful and necessary thing that God created; and marriage is the vehicle by which God wants one man and one woman to live in covenant with one another. In fact, you could say, all of life is essentially based on the fragility of a promise. A promise. And, that promise goes on for generations. Indeed, God says “my blessing is for all who believe for a thousand generations.’ So, keeping God’s promise, in marriage, matters; and faithfulness something God rewards. “Children are a gift from God”, the Bible says; and though we all share DNA (even with all that God’s created), each strand is, also, unique like our fingerprints or retinas. And, however you philosophise, the truth is you only have one father and one mother; and marriage is the coming together of their DNA to make… you (whom we pray God blesses in many and various ways throughout your life–and that of your sister and your brother).
11012025 ultimately, jesus christ can be understood as a thought in the mind of god — an individuated consciousness who realized his connection with the ultimate truth and sought to help others do the same. this is a noble endeavor. god’s care is reflected in life itself — in dna, family bonds, and the unfolding of each unique path. yet awakening is not limited to jesus christ. it is a gift to be freely chosen and actively pursued. having a great teacher does not guarantee learning. we must make ourselves receptive, and to mistake the teacher for the teaching — or to believe that only one particular incarnation of the teacher can guide us — only hinders growth.
if christ represents for you the all-uniting bliss consciousness of oneness, so be it — but the name matters little. we must also relinquish the notions that god gave birth to only one son or that we are god’s children in the sense of being separate from the totality. the dream of a savior — the idea that reality requires redemption from an external messianic figure — is itself a thought attachment — a powerful one, nonetheless — to be recognized and ultimately set aside in favor of direct realization.
in truth, god — the ultimate unifying cosmion, the ground of all being — has no wants. desire implies lack, but god is desireless, beyond all identification. to imagine god as an authority figure, judge, or overseer is already to miss the essence of god. god is not a character in a story but the infinite canvas upon which all stories arise and dissolve. any notion of god with intentions or preferences is a projection of our own minds. true understanding arises not through imagining god as we are, but by relinquishing all images, expectations, and concepts to rest in the undifferentiated unity that precedes thought.
this is not to say companionship is without value. when engaged willingly by both parties, it can serve as a powerful tool for dissolving self, offering mirrors of awareness and opportunities to practice love, surrender, and presence.
1108 Like I've said I don’t have a problem with God, but I often think people are not really talking about God or at best seem to be limited to whatever God they conceive rather than the real God. The real God transcends all our thoughts and ideas about God, Christian, Islamic, Hindu or otherwise. It could be God exists, but he or she, isn’t a he or she or is plus other things too. My question when people talk about God, even atheists, is how do you know God is like that. Even if you have had mystical experiences, how do you know your experiences are some kind of totality of all experiences, and you can be a spokesperson for God. Jesus can be believed to be the traditional Savior of the world, God-man in the flesh who sits at the right hand of the father, but that is only one interpretation of the Bible. And even there, different Christians seem to have very different ideas, and dogmas as well as certainties about salvation, that don’t at all seem to jive with other Christians on all different doctrines. Since nobody knows including me, I look at how do you apply your beliefs to your life, if you apply them consistently and lovingly with a sense of humility that you don’t have all the answers to all this stuff, I am fine with all of it. I may depart in certain ways from other people, but I don’t have a problem per se in people with beliefs or even strong beliefs, but until they can demonstrate that they have found the one true beliefs to follow or even more so that I internalize those beliefs myself, I am reluctant to follow. Everyone does and has to follow whatever internal beliefs they have, even if such and such belief is true, until I experience it and internalize it myself, it won’t be true for me, and I won’t act upon those beliefs till then. This is true for everyone.
11082025 ultimately, what we call “god” is beyond all understanding. if you think god is a containable thing, you have surely missed the mark. how can we claim to understand god when we barely understand ourselves?
in truth, we are closer to god when we abandon ourselves and our search, and surrender to the mystery.
1108a this sounds like Spinoza’s pantheism or Whitman’s transcendentalism. I like to distinguish between the feeling of mystery and actual mystery in terms of understanding. We can feel things are mysterious even if we understand them, or we can regard things as mysterious that we don’t understand. The feeling of mystery can always remain even if we understand it. Not to say that there still are great mysteries in the universe that we have yet to understand. Surrendering to the mystery can mean a lot of different things, but maybe it is all one in the end if there is an end or just another beginning.
lately i’ve been asking myself: how can one live beautifully in a human vessel? what does it mean to use the body well — not just for survival, hunger, or sex, but as an instrument of beauty?
I always think beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It is a cliche, but I haven’t thought of anything better yet to express the essence of beauty.
10282025 as keats said, truth is beauty and beauty is truth, and that is all ye need to know. and, if one accepts this, then ultimate truth must be ultimate beauty. i cannot think of anything more beautiful than that which unites all that is beautiful and ugly, which is one. even if i don’t know what it means to be a beautiful human, surely an answer will come from identifying the one which is beyond all transient forms.
Are you trying to escape your humanness, the perception of beauty and ugliness with this statement. Is there anything wrong with you thinking some things are beautiful and others are ugly. They don’t have to be made one in the same. I think it is really hard to make them that way, and what is the point. We can reconcile and be at peace with beauty and ugliness, and realise that you might be right, you might be wrong, one persons beauty is another's ugliness, but it can be done in a non judgemental way, so what. It is only my take but I don’t think Keats saw beauty and truth as identical otherwise he would have used the same word. He meant what is beautiful is true, and what is true is beautiful. And I’d have to re listen to the poem, but it had something to do with looking at grecian urns and noticing that the figures were so real and alive, but to us, living in another time, we can’t really fully understand the world in which the figures were created or the beauty and truth they inspired, because we live in different times, and have different standards for beauty and truth. I’m sure there is more to it, but that is my impression.
10302025 that’s a very good point. i was just thinking earlier today while listening to the band of Montreal’s recent discography, that we must be willing to accept the supposed “ugliness” and “the human” as part of the beauty of one. the word ugly itself is the ugliness, a linguistic separational device designed to keep us from looking at ourselves holistically. to accept all things that happen without labeling them ugly or beautiful but simply to see our self, may be the most beautiful thing any one can do. as patrick schneeweis sang in his song “run from what’s comfortable”: if we can stay one inch this side of dying, the most terrible things we can imagine can happen, and our breath will carry us forward when we don't have the strength to carry ourselves.
yes, keats’ conception of beauty and ugliness was surely flavored by his time and circumstance. in another life i wrote a poem called “ode on a rocky and bullwinkle lunchbox”. perhaps today i will write one called “ode on a broken hello kitty iPhone”, and tomorrow i will write one called “ode on a saturnian council swivel chair”.
day to day, i see humans passing through my awareness — at the bank, in the drive-through, at gatherings — and i marvel at how my being responds to each of them. what is it about meeting another’s gaze, seeing them deep in their soul, that feels so intimate and dissolving? to look beyond the body, beyond the social roles, and into the shared pulse of consciousness — that, to me, feels like the cutting edge of being alive.
I think perhaps this dialog is a form of intimacy and dissolving. Isn’t there something about writing something onto a blank page that is analogous to being exposed to another person. You have a certain trepidation on how they are going to react, you don’t exactly know how to proceed, or even if you will be understood, no matter how hard you try to.
10282025 intimacy is only a matter of perception. what was intimate yesterday is commonplace today. you are only as naked and afraid as you allow yourself to be – similarly, you are only as naked and in love as you allow yourself to be. the truth is a naked thing, indeed. how we choose to respond or react to that nakedness is up to us. if you understand there to be only one self, the question then is simply: how close are you willing to get to yourself? if you misunderstand yourself, try to understand yourself better. alternatively, let go of your need to understand and be understood.
Nakedness is largely cultural. I don’t know this from personal experience but I’ve read about nudist colonies, and apparently when people are in the nude all the time socially, the last thing that usually comes up is - lust and sex in public. It is more about body acceptance, not showing off how great of a figure you have. I don’t know, but I imagine that it is probably different than most people suppose. I’m not suggesting that you have strong feelings about this, just saying.
10302025 that is all well and good. there is nothing inherently evil about having a body. the issue is that we have conditioned ourselves to associate nakedness with sexuality, which has caused stigma, shame, and misunderstanding in many circumstances.
so much of the issue of sex has to do not with sex itself, but with how we understand love, intimacy, and vulnerability. because we have made sex something taboo and clandestine (and reinforced by distorted religious views), it has naturally led to sexual manias and unhealthy, compulsive attitudes toward sex. we have turned sex into a game of domination and subordination, instead of one of mutual giving in service of the ecstatic joy of unification sublimated through a sexual means.
But as you suggest, nakedness is not just about the body. It is about feeling vulnerable, opening up to be vulnerable. Your right, it might be mostly about perception. But we don’t have to be stupidly naked, stupidly vulnerable, Jesus said don’t lay your pearls before swine. We should strive to be authentic, but holding back in some situations is not always the wrong thing, not because we are not afraid of being vulnerable, or naked, but because it doesn’t necessarily accomplish what we want. For example, if I start blabbing endlessly to a stranger about my love for baseball and the glories of the performance in last nights game, or even the glory of how many hits I had in last night ball game, it may make me feel good, but it might be a waste of time to some people and audiences I am talking to. We should be authentic, but there is an art to how we express that. Or maybe not. Some people can’t help but blurt everything out about who they are at all times, which is ok, but if you want to communicate your authentic naked self, there may be better ways to do it.
10302025 your body is not the pearl. it is the shell, the temple, housing the pearl. the pearl is the one that all bodies and minds share. though every form contains it, not all are aware, or seek awareness. therefore, it is best not proselytize, but to offer understanding only where it is welcomed.
there is no right or wrong way to express the self, per se — only different ways to deepen one’s understanding through relationship with “other” selves. the question is not what you know, but how you serve — temple to temple.
in this human game we are playing, there are all sorts of subtle nuances in how we communicate with each other, informed by our collective understanding of oneness. in any circumstance, what is the most loving thing to do? well, the golden rule isn’t a bad place to start.
the actions we take, the relationships we cultivate with other parts of self — sexuality included — can either inspire a deeper sense of unity, or a deeper sense of separation (ego-consciousness). and it’s all up to you.
i never want another job where i have to play a part in someone else’s fiction, within a hierarchy that denies that shared pulse. to me, that’s a form of voluntary enslavement. i’m not opposed to work — only to work that isn’t honest. i want to live and create with others in ways that affirm something real, something connective. i trust that if i move through the world with honesty and conviction, i’ll naturally be drawn toward those who can meet me there, and repelled from those who can’t.
So what is the type of job that you would like, or do you not like the word job, or the word work, perhaps it sounds like too much work. Stephen King once said that he was surprised by the observation that one of the things his readers liked best, and found most essential is descriptions of people at work, and how they did their job. Is this a reflection of American society, or readers in general, I don’t know. But no matter what job you have, dream job or shitty job, like beauty, the job has an aspect of how you see it in the eye of the beholder. With jobs as with life, there are other people, people are messy, there is no ideal job, unless the ideal is a job without people, sometimes people get trapped in the illusion that there is some perfect job out there, when the job is created from where you are at, or what you are doing at the time. Again this is not to go into personal details, I think a reader would find that boring anyways, just some riffing and random observations.
10282025 it is interesting that the word job and the character job from the bible share the same name. as if to say that having a job is to willingly undergo horrendous disasters that take away all that one holds dear, in order to test one’s faith in god. well… that’s one hell of a career path isn’t it?
ultimately, what is considered disaster and fortune are in the eye of the beholder as well. my job, as far as i can tell, is simply to meet you here in loving presence, and to assist as many “other” entities in awakening to my loving presence, which is to say, the loving presence of one.
as lao tzu said, the excellence of water appears in its benefitting of all things, and in its occupying, without striving (to the contrary), the low place which all men dislike.
Jobs are a relatively new phenomena of course. So is money. Our hunter gatherer ancestors had jobs in the sense that they had to hunt meet and gather veggies and build huts and make fires to survive, but nobody had jobs as we define them. They traded goods with other tribes, but not in the form of money. Later jobs were farm laborers in large manors run by landlords where most peoples jobs were as servants or worse slaves to their masters. In America, jobs are how you make money to pay your rent or house and other expenses and feed yourself. I agree it is not the best system, but we have yet to evolve to a better one. What you are describing here is not a job, but what is called a vocation or calling, a way of being. A job can be that way too, but the current system and mentality is primarily about making money to feed yourself.
10302025 - from our perspective, the notion that one “must” work a job — that is, work for the purpose of obtaining money in order to “afford” or “earn” one’s survival — reflects a limited and somewhat uncharitable perspective. thankfully, we see the tides shifting. as we come to recognize our inherent worth, our attitudes toward one another and what we expect from each other in our collective social contract will naturally shift. ultimately, we foresee a progression toward vocational work — empathic, relational, and centered on learning and teaching — particularly in light of rapidly evolving technologies and cultural shifts (our so-called “first contact” event is imminent… say hello 3i/atlas… we welcome you and come in peace :-)
to be quite honest, i am irked by the whole “writing” thing—writing feels like its own kind of vanity, a kind of childsplay, an appendage of a more isolated consciousness slowly being phased out. in some ways, i think the invention of writing itself was a misstep, and that we understood each other more clearly back in the days when we lived as tribal animists. don’t assume that words are sufficient to satisfy anyone’s curiosity about something as vast as the universe—they risk imprinting illusory vibrations in the reader, and at worst, instill an attachment to words themselves. i myself have learned far more from silent presence than from reading any text, and i believe there is a time coming soon when words will no longer be necessary to communicate, much like dolphins expressing ideas collaboratively through vibrational, “telepathic” means.
Of course words are always inadequate, like the Burnt Norton poem, from TS Eliot that I once shared with you. But until we develop something better, or become more enlightened and evolve beyond language, language is the way of doing things currently. Of course, the map is not the territory, or words never adequately express what is really going on. But still, isn’t it amazing how books through words or songs through music can reconstitute novel experiences in humans, kind of like a recipe can be used to make a variety of foods.
10282025 i suppose it is simply a matter of how much food you want to eat, before you are satisfied with eating for the sake of eating for the sake of experiencing novel experiences. same with music, same with art, same with words. the question is: can you live exuberantly without the need to indulge in any of these activities?
I am feeling my humanness or editorial fatigue, so this will be my last response today. I had a weird experience midway through the day. I thought to myself what would happen if suddenly unexpectedly everything I knew or had done or expected to happen suddenly ended, and there was only a black void ahead of me. I’m not talking about dying, which is a different subject. It is a sense that everything I thought would suddenly collapse, and I would enter a life where everything dissolved and had no path or definition whatsoever. I had a sense that this is my destiny, that this would happen to me, it is only a matter of time, it is a process that has to unfold and would occur when it happens but might happen when I least expect it to. It felt like it is something inevitable, and there is nothing I can do about it, but I didn’t feel bothered by this. Then ordinary work matters came back, and I forgot till now that this had happened. It was a feeling of an openness a void, something that I couldn’t anticipate and wouldn’t be able to describe once I crossed a certain threshold. Weirdly, I didn’t feel scared about this, noted at the time, that this was just how things would be somehow when something inside me pulls the trigger. What do you think about this, do you think I am inevitably going to go crazy?
10302025 no, you’re not going crazy at all. in fact, this sense of yours is the perceptual dissolution of time and space — the collapse of identificational awareness into pure, undifferentiated being: the blissful, uncreated void beyond all vibratory phenomena of the universe.
in hinduism, shiva is depicted wearing a crescent moon on his head in one of his forms — darkness with a sliver of light, symbolizing the awakening that comes from realizing the formless. in buddhism, the highest state of awareness is called śūnyatā — a word that translates to “emptiness,” sometimes rendered as “voidness” or “nothingness.”
to enter that formless void of self is to realize what this is at its most fundamental level. congratulations, you have opened the doors of ultimate understanding — look alive :-)
nevertheless, in choosing to express myself through this limited linguistic format, my hope is that whatever i write — to you or to myself — might serve as a bridge to cultivate that deeper i am. that is the only real utility i see writing as having (or any other activity for that matter): to inspire an awakening of the self. in that sense, i view writing as simply another form of meditation. in answering my own question, i believe one of the most beautiful ways to inhabit the human body is to use it as a channel — an exegete of reality — to express oneself fully in service to another, by whatever means the moment calls for; to connect the dots between works and worlds that deepen our relationship to here and now. all of it, in the hope of awakening that shared awareness of the one, eternal, ineffable source of being: the totality, the atman, the all.
I jive with all of this. As you know, I am big into meditation, and do think there are ways that things can be better, deeper both as people and the society and universe/multiverse as a whole. But as I have said, there is a sense in which this totality is already all of these things, yet paradoxically seems fractured on an individual level at the same time.
my only regret now is that in writing all this i have put forth a rather boring, literalist approach to our apparently wordy conversation. in any case, i believe the most effective use of any medium is poetic rather than liturgical. i think james joyce had the right idea in writing finnegan’s wake. please allow me to course-correct: danke lamma epsilon, das fructa libre en pivo shankto!
curious to read your thoughts.
We’ll for now I would say you have read my words, another question is, what are the thoughts behind this if anything I don’t know. I am starting to get editorial fatigue, like I think you are expressing now too. As you know, am a big fan of Joyce as well, but that is another story. I would call this original set of replies a sprinkling of responses to what you have wrote, as it continues we will see how it unfolds. But we don’t want to get into all the gory details right away, we just have to see how specific ideas and topics, but more importantly as you might say, life unfolds.
10282025 ultimately there are no thoughts behind this. it is simply an exercise in being. i am not attached to any of this, nor do i expect anything to come from it. praise be to allah! love you love i dada sun happy happy hip hip hooyay!
with infinite love, your “son,” “samuel”
with infinite glove, yourself, “me”
with infinite samuel, your love, scorsby
love love love lovesby
10∞ / 111
1108a - this has been a fun dialog. Even if I repeated repeated what I am saying what you are saying in different and the same ways that contradicted and resolved themselves hopefully it came together or didn’t fall apart unless it needed to. I tried to approach it the first time with fun and love and curiosity. When is Scorsby - that is an inside joke from the TV series Dark.