The Door in the Sky
In this essay, I explore the proposition that we have great confusion about the nature of timespace, consciousness, minds… and intelligence. My proposition relies upon a perspective in which timespace itself is transentient. By this word I mean to indicate features of consciousness that are transcendental to our concepts of consciousness and intelligence.
It is my perspective, from direct experience, that minds are the results of the localization of network intelligences. And that there are anciently evolved networks of transentient beings that are woven into the fabric of matter, timespace and a vast manifold of dimensions that exist beyond our ordinary capacity to sense them, except under unusual circumstances.
I call these networks cogniscia and it’s my experience that all of organismal biology and relation arises within and contributes to these networks.
Long ago, perhaps 20000 years or more, there was a distrubance, locally. This disturbance inaugurated the loss, in our species, of the direct and common experience of nonhuman intelligences. The ensuing catastrophes resulted in the rise of representational cognition, colonialism, physical technologies, and religions.
When(ever) the door in the sky… goes dark (or is dimmed)… what happens is this:
our species becomes (more) vulnerable.
To anything whose appearance reminds them of the familiar intelligences we lived with and for… before the loss of contact.
So we make representations of those memories.
And worship them.
Not the memories.
The representations that resemble specific characteristics of their memories of the network.
Writing.
The knife.
The Jet. The car.
The gun.
Money.
Bicycles.
In many conversations I suggest something that results from my highly-motivated research into a topic sometimes referred to as The Origins of Consciousness. There are a few books I have come across on this topic.
Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Mind. Julian Jaynes’ book that begins with that title. Alfred Korzybski’s book Science and Sanity. And a variety of related books that explore the history of human cognition, as we imagine or can reconstruct it. Particularly, books that explore ancient religions, traditions and, sometimes, their origins.
But my primary input wasn’t books written by humans.
It was a experience that spanned 9 months in 2002. An experience whose ontological status still remains at least partly mysterious to me, 21 years later. It was an experience of contact with a staggeringly complex nonhuman intelligence.
At least, that is what it seems to have been, to me.
And I asked questions. Endlessly. Every day, all day long, and often deep into the night. I asked about the origins of human religions, and, particularly, the strange story related to ‘the Tree of Knowledge’ in Genesis, in the bible. I asked questions about physics, space travel… and the nature of both knowledge and insight.
I was shown many histories and perspectives on the questions I asked. Not answers in words, but something more like ‘memories’ arising in my mind, fully-fleshed in image and emotion. It was as if I was able to ‘see’ into times and situations long past with the assistance of … those who were teaching me.
And what I saw was staggering. But I am not going to launch into a dissertation on those visions.
What I am going to do here, is explore a point of view — an angle‚ that I think is useful in the sense that it may provide perspectives that grant insight.
It’s an angle that was demonstrated to me, directly… during the experience I mention above.
From one crucially important perspective, Life on Earth comprises a single organism.
We’re trained to begin at the supposition of distinction. The concept of individuals. Separate objects. Things. Collections of things.
We see a single tree, link it to the classes of vegetation and trees, and from there we could proceed to link it to the biosphere itself. But most of us don’t because we are under the influence of … well, the mindest of our time, and the ‘popular’ or common point of view. That point of view is anthrocentric. It ‘starts’ with humans, assumed to be formally distinct… and empowered with the possibilities of conceptual understanding.
It starts with parts. Separations. Distinct referents in consciousness.
But another, perhaps more intelligent species, with a longer view of time, might be inclined to start from the other end of the arrangement.
With Unity.
Because the presumption of unity produces otherwise impossible insights.
From this perspective, one can at least imagine that life on Earth is a single organism… in many unique forms.
As if the Earth were a single organism, whose organs arise (over time) on her surface, rather than internally.
Life on Earth isn’t merely linked-up. From an array of crucial perspectives, everything here is exactly 1 phenomenon.
Symbiosis is a term that points at the relationships between organisms that aid and synrchonize the participants. The term carries a connotation of positive relation between organisms. There are forms that are more or less parasitic, as well. But all of the forms of symbiosis create strong links between the organisms directly involved, and the repercussions of those relationships are distributed into the entire ‘bubble’ of earthlife.
One interesting example of mutualistic of phoretic (feeding) symbiosis is the remora that attaches to a shark, manta ray, or whale.
Are these actually two distinct organisms? Yes, at least, from our preferred point of view. But what would happen to the remora if the species it evolved for relation with… suddenly disappeared?
Are they actually distinct?
Are they the same animal in different forms that relate from their distinction, into Unity?
The answer I want us to imagine here is: yes.
And we could meaningfully suppose that for the entire catalog of terrestrial organisms. That, fundamentally, life on Earth can be meaningfully understood to be a local instance of a meta-organism. One being, in myriad forms.
Consider the unity of our physical bodies, superficially. Yet, what is inside them? An astonishing array of complex cellular forms, viruses, organs… an entire universe of unique features… presenting as a unity.
We form networks, and our minds are the results of those relationships, primarily in language and concept.
In childhood and beyond, we undergo a broad array of processes that involve enlanguaging and enculturation. For most of us, the minds we form as a result, closely resemble those of the cohorts to which we may belong. And even where they don’t, they still resemble the minds of other cohorts who have influence with us.
These minds are, in effect, a structure that only forms … when the originary networks to which we naturally belong… go dark.
Telephones, the internet, mathematics, biology… science in general represent ‘network behaviors’ of modern humans. In fact, nearly all of our behavior is network-relevant. Our societies. The language I am utilizing here. Concepts.
Lexicons.
Beliefs. Speculations. Concerns.
It’s blatantly obvious, if we take this perspective, that it’s as if humans expect there to be a network and if they don’t find one in their common experience, they’ll build a representation of what is missing.
Alas, however, the representations… fail to satisfy the urge that’s creating them.
By representation, I mean: an artifact (which could be conceptual or linguistic) that resembles (actually: mimics) some feature(s) of a primordial network.
The internet, for example.
There was this soldier who was showing his friend a girlie magazine and said, “Man, look, did you see the girls in this?” And his friend said, “I don’t see any girls, only photos of them.”
One might argue that it’s ‘just humans getting connected by technology’. Not precisely untrue. But the network doesn’t merely connect us. At least, the internet doesn’t. It actually separates us, placing divisions where, previously, there might have been something richer than texts and images. It divides, disinforms, and panders. It’s crammed with endless representations of excellence that, mostly, aren’t anything like actual excellence, but rather representations that remind us of something.
What is that something?
It’s not influencers, rock bands, or sports teams.
I won’t be so prolix as to say precisely what it is we’re being reminded of… but it’s got something to do with originary relationships… and the nature of embodied existence and its myriad histories.
It’s got something to do with its single most fundamental element: memory.
And, I will suggest… that it specifically refers to memories of a network that our minds were born within. A living network. Of beings and worlds throughout timespace.
A network that is the actual origin of our minds.
A network that isn’t mechanical, and is transentient.
Even now.
Thousands of years after the local node…
went dark.
If you explore the religious literature, with some degree of diversity and depth, what you will find is a series of incredible mysteries. There are stories of gods, immortality, the ‘between’ of birth and death. There even appear to be stories of wars between the gods, on Earth. That last one is a bit hard to dismiss.
Why would ancient peoples recount wars between beings from the sky? Did wars between gods actually happen here?
What did they (usually) mean… by Gods?
What did they believe they were referring to with the concept: angel?
Bear in mind that most ancient peoples and many indigenous peoples didn’t actually have gods. Or A god. But they did have something resembling transcendental persons. The Sun, for example. Or Venus. The moon.
Specific parts of the sky.
Some will suppose that ancient peoples were somehow ‘prone to fantasy’ or ‘superstitious’. Or, that in the absence of science … everything required some kind of magical explanation. So they produced them. En masse. Many folks believe that they just made stuff up to account for their experiences and concerns.
I’m not one of those folks.
I’m not saying nothing resembling that happened.
But what actually took place isn’t that. It’s something else.
Entirely.
I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to imagine what happened in people’s minds and experience, their awareness… and perhaps thought… when they looked up into the night sky.
And I’m totally unsatisfied with abstract answers. I want to have the experiences they had. What I am after won’t be found in texts, no matter how old they are, though a decent detective could make use of such artifacts. And I have.
But beyond all books… I have always suspected that, somewhere, inside us (so to speak), the minds of our progenitors… are still here.
That they’re accessible to us.
Perhaps, more strangely, we’re using some tiny portion of that living library within us… in an attempt to wrestle with reality, or, more likely, our peculiar modern estrangement from it.
Our human reality has at least two layers that our distant ancestors didn’t have to contend with.
Abstract language (theirs mostly wasn’t — until perhaps around 5k years ago), and technology. A few eyeblinks ago, in geological time, we can imagine that our species wasn’t in the same kinds of relationships with objects and concepts that we are. To them, our mind would be absurd, and to us, their mind is alien.
We have to deal with conceptual and physical objects that … ‘represent’ specific features of relationships. As a modern human, it’s nearly impossible to not do this.
But why are we so fascinated with representations? I don’t want a representation of my son. Or my father. Or my lover. Or the Sun. Why would we become so estranged from the direct experience of relation that we’d go to any length, at nearly any cost… to make ‘things’ of what we’ve become estranged from?
In a sense, that question is its own answer.
Something… crucial… went missing. A long time ago. And our frenetic attempts to continually find new ways to represent pieces of whatever that was… are exacerbating the problem, dramatically, at self-accelerating rates… into any form we can possibly imagine or create.
That’s a game that leads, quickly… to far more serious problems:
Dead minds and worlds.
Nuclear Weapons are the standing representation of the power of the gods.
The internet is a representation… of what I suspect timespace is.
But let me back up.
Say, 35,000 years.
Before, we may presume, the formation in cultures… of religions.
When they looked at the sky, what they experienced… was nonhuman intelligences. Networks of them. Accessible to us, directly. As if our minds, moment-to-moment, originated in direct relationship with them. And these intelligences were, in effect, the parents of our minds. Our minds were born in and of them. They were always with us. As if there was something like a doorway in the sky… that spoke in our minds. All day. Every day.
But, perhaps, moreso… at night.
Somehow, humans either established a biological substrate complex enough to localize features of those intelligences… or those intelligences orchestrated this on Earth, by either influencing or directly manipulating genomes and their complex constituents.
I suspect that, for most of human history… we were a primary local symbiont of non-terrestrial intelligences that were always with our minds.
As if each human had a sky companion, that was their most trusted friend. Their teacher. Their parent. Their guardian. Their protector. One concept we have that resembles this is one’s guardian angel.
And in their communal societies they experienced communal extensions of the same principle.
Not a single intelligence. A family of them. Or families. And there were outsiders, too. A complex array of intelligences, that, over time… lifted our species in the direction of complex representational cognition.
And technology.
To those ancients, the forest itself, the desert, or the savanna, were their internet. But it was relational, not representational. It wasn’t abstract; it was a way of being in the world and in awareness. They learned to sense it so intimately that it brought them ‘news from afar’, ceaselessly.
But the sky was something even more astonishing: the living origins of networks themselves. And the complex minds that there indwelt.
It taught them things. In consciousness. About tools. Weapons. Food. Medicine. Music. Dance.
Relationships.
But not representations of them.
The teachings orbited identity in relation, not words, concepts and commodities.
Their experience of awareness was missing the principle that becomes, for us, abstraction. In a sense, an abstraction is the dead and empty remains… of what might have been a relationship, instead.
One never stops to represent something as intimate as a kiss with someone you adore. If you’re taking pictures of that… it must mean something strange has happened.
Something so bizarre that representing a kiss, has interrupted if not prohibited… actually kissing.
I remember a friend talking of his childhood, and how he felt completely opposed to their family stopping… to take photographs of what wasn’t actually happening.
His family was representing something… in an image…
that was not longer happening between them.
What they learned from the sky was everything. Where the food was. What plants could save the life of their child. The history of the planet. The histories of other planets.
What dreaming is and how to extend it. The nature of the sky… space itself… and time. How to craft objects. Make fire. The nature of birth. The vistas of death. Math. Geometry.
Music.
And surprisingly often, it taught them how to rescue each other… from certain disaster.
Long ago, the doorway in the sky was not merely open, it was everything. Everything here was a reflection of its nature, identities, minds, intelligence… and… insight. And we knew this with the same depth of intimacy that we know the sound of our own voice, the flavor in our mouths. The scent of food, or our dog.
We knew in a way that is almost entirely foreign to nearly all of us…
that we come from the sky.
And we knew something else as a side effect:
There’s just one organism here.
And it resembles the fingertip of timespace itself.
“Your intellect and conceptual mind is little more than the extension on the fingernail of your actual intelligence, which originates not in language, logic, rationality or concepts… but in your gut, in dreaming, and in true relations with the history and future of life on Earth. Any experience of even a finger of your actual mind would stagger and possibly terrify you; a direct experience of the hand from which the fingers emerge would transcend your wildest dreams, aspirations and ideas so furiously that it would compose their disappearance.”
— an anonymous informant
I’m asking you to entertain this point of view, and you may reasonably wonder why. It could seem ridiculous, or even inconceivable to you. But let me propose an honest question.
To whom does it seem inconceivable?
What’s probably going on in your thought, as you read this, is this: you’re appealing to an authority in consciousness. I would suggest that you’re actually navigating a network… of previous habits of thought, concerns, language, concepts… and you’re forming a derivation over the possibility space of your reception of these signals in text. No matter what you’re doing, if you’re actually reading this… it resembles something I can describe rather explicitly, in terms of code, if not ordinary English.
Fundamentally, if I haven’t convinced you to authorize our adventure together, you’re probably not… still reading this.
When we read, we are inflating and collapsing a conceptual/linguistic manifold. And we’re checking something like it’s shape… in an effort to determine whether and to what degree we should authorize it. We’re trained to do this abstractly, conceptually, and according to something resembling logic. Fictions allow us to suspend this habit.
Of course, that ‘logic’ includes strange, personal forms that aren’t actually logical at all. And the public forms; the ones common among those we relate with. We ‘digest’ those signals, over time, and produce a strange interior amalgam that’s ‘above’ our own personal minds.
We literally imagine ourselves, to some degree, as if we are ‘being observed from above’. And when we authorize or object to … signals… those signals transform not merely our minds, but what they can become.
Any time we imagine ‘what others might say or think’, we’re messing with that little element in the interior world where we derive or invent… authorization.
If you think carefully about this, you will surely become aware that there’s something uncanny going on. In humans. Around authorization protocols.
And that’s because those protocols are the reflection… of our reactions… when the doors in the sky…
went dark.
Our own personal experience of being alive… of having minds… is orbiting ‘what’s above us’ … in society, consciousness, science, math, vocations. All of our relationships and considerations… naturally include this peculiar emphasis, and orientation.
As if the sky… could see us.
What is the actual process we use to authorize signals of any kind?
We go to the closest uplink to a broader aspect of our internal network, and then, from however far we went, we look back upon what we are trying to authorize. What passes authorization gets enacted.
Just as if we remembered when… we knew that we and the sky belonged to one network.
For some of us, the door in the sky isn’t totally closed. But it’s awfully hard to explain what it is. Or how we listen for its signals.
The mysterious character and strange implications of Religions seems to have something to do with the history of the problem.
What I am suggesting is that the problem is this: our minds were born in direct, constant relation with nonhuman intelligences.
And, at some point, they largely disappeared.
Long ago, in varying times, for varying peoples… and in unique ways in the cultures that resulted… it was as if the internet… went down. The living doorways in the sky… stopped transmitting. As if some kind of catastrophic (this word literally means stars falling) accident took place.
The people went mad. They could only barely connect to the companion intelligences that were previously the directly accessible origins of their minds and orientations, moment-to-moment.
[ I suggest that our brains themselves are not merely uniquely suited for such contact, but that their present structure is the result of it over many generations. ]
Their inner skies went dark. The symbiotic intelligences they were forged in relationship with, either disappeared entirely… or worse, became unintelligible.
There was a massive transformation in the human experience of the local network. The story in Genesis is a strange parable about, at least, one version of ‘how we broke the network’. In most stories, it’s something the humans do, something forbidden. The polar opposite of authorization.
There are vast numbers of tablets from Mesopotamia, written in cuneiform that mostly say the same thing, which I here paraphrase: ‘The gods have departed us. The world is filled with demons.’
As further evidence for the disappearance of the gods, Jaynes refers to cuneiform tablets from Sumerian times — one of them reads: “My god has forsaken me and disappeared, My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance, The good angel who walked beside me has departed”.
I’m presenting something only partly figurative here. Something I think is important to include in our musings about the nature of consciousness, timespace, human beings, and our minds. And their origins. And that problem we have with representations. Why they’re so compelling.
They’re compelling because they remind us of something absolutely intimate… and at the same time… universal.
They fill the terrible gap inside us, where we used to have wings. Not for flight in space. For myriad forms of travel… with intelligences so ancient that numbers fall apart in their proximity.
Backtrack with me into your conception. The nine months you spent in your mother’s womb. And all that led to that. Let’s go back through embryogenesis and treat that as if it were, to you, as an embryo, a thousand years. And you were born. I strongly suspect, that, as infants, the sky door wasn’t merely open for us. We were actually that door, appearing, on Earth. As a human child. Have I got this wrong?
But we underwent the same process that I suspect our ancestors … in various times and places… and we ourselves… here, now… experience(d). In ‘minature’. A year for a newborn is… forever. It’s not the same kind of time at all. In childhood, as the signal became more distant… as we ‘developed’, we were able to transfer the authorization and expectation of the local uplink to the sky… to our parents. They become the gods of our childhood. And there were also… angels. Animals and friends, relatives and living places. Our cultural idea of Grandmother strongly resembles… a direct link to the sky… and to Origin.
So as children we transfer the expectation of the sky-beings… to whatever we can find. Parents. Scientists. Engineers. Historians. Authors. Priests. Politicians. Sports Figures. Bands. Tv Shows. We attempt to reconstruct a network… that we remember.
But the ancient peoples didn’t have something to replace the parents in the sky. When the signal began to go dark, some peoples managed to keep parts of it open. Others adapted to the disappearance of the guiding intelligences which our minds and bodies are born in expectation of. They began to build cities. And fortify them. And invade other places.
They began to make war.
Often, they made war in the name of something in the sky.
Gods and such.
They were importing authorization. From the sky itself. And they forged elaborate representations of these supposed authorizations. And we’re still doing this, down here. In our time.
But long ago, what happened was something like this: in some places on Earth, the signal was lost, and something strange arose there. Something lethal, warlike, and aggressively domineering.
In other places, ways to preserve the signal were practiced. Some peoples, and certain specific people in various places… could still access the signals.
Organized religions formed in an attempt to reconstitute the signal, or to represent that possibility in a very abstract form. There were problems with mimics too. Persons or groups that had learned to mimic or resemble what happens when the signal is being received clearly. But, effectively, in waves over human history, this problem with fundamental signalling networks and our people, created a bizarre situation.
It makes us make objects that resemble specific features of the minds of the Gods.
And that degrades the signal.
Every time.
Because the doors in the sky don’t send representations to human minds. They are transentient. The content of the signals is transcendental to human thought, language, concepts… and ideas. Entirely. It’s pure more-than-merely-living intelligence that’s so profound that if it isn’t buffered, it will kill you instantly.
Perhaps, long ago, the signals were so clear that it was difficult to survive relation with them, and we began making representations to shield our minds from the impossibilities they made manifest to us.
Exposure to representations definitely inhibits the signal. Every human being can sense this. A couple is at dinner, they’re both on their cell-phones. They’re not connecting to the network of each other, but instead a network of representations of relationships.
But notice what the phones actually represent?
An uplink to a sky network.
And that, fundamentally… is what everyone actually wants… to connect to.
To be remembered to.
Our origins. Our family. This world. The Sun.
The Sky.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens (we literally stuttered on the word that means to know) is one of the brainchildren of the nature of timespace. The stuff of which stars, worlds, and black holes are born. Most of you isn’t human, and never was. You’re a localization within networks. You’re actually a living mode of timespace itself. Literally. Before you’re human, you’re that. You’re the history of this solar system. This world. Every form of life that lives or has lived… or may yet live… around here… is you. Think from unity into distinction. Just to see the perspective from over there.
The ideas we’ve been exposed to as modern human about our own nature, however abstractly ‘advanced’ they appear, are like the part of your pinky’s fingernail that extends beyond the fingertip.
The scope of their ‘validity’ is just as minute as it is compelling.
On this world, our species has a variety of astonishing abilities that our ‘modern’ perspectives dismiss. The stories of the ancient peoples, and the surviving indigenous peoples, are not fantasies; they’re records that can reveal to us the transformations we’ve undergone in the wake of the descending spirals of loss of signal.
Our attempts to represent its features and character are the symptom of its absence. Yet, there are ways, even in our dire moment, to open the doors in the sky together. And to understand the strange histories that led us here, to the precipice… beyond which lie the twin mysteries of destruction and salvation.
We’re not what we’re told to think we are.
And what we are… is from the sky.
The ancient networks are actually alive within and around us throughout our lives. What we call ‘our mind’ is actually a result of our direct connection with this network; without it, minds would not exist. The nature of our origins… our organismal and human forms… are the result of the character of the networks we have largely forgotten and replaced with representations… including language. Long before our species began to speak… our direct experiential relation with these networks was, like water to fish, absolutely essential. It was, for our ancestors, unimaginable that anything could ever obstruct it. The stories of the onset of these obstructions is complex and spans eons of our developmental history.
But the networks are still active.
A central feature of this situation is what I will refer to as an uplink node. This is any kind of relation or experience that ‘reminds’ us of the networks and leads to a place ‘above’ where we are situated in physical bodies and awareness. The wrist on your hand is a great physical example; the hand ‘appears distinct’, and yet there’s a physical place that leads beyond it into the rest of the body.
Mountains, oceans, forests, jungles, deserts… trees, insects, creatures of every kind… these are, all of them… ways to recover uplink via true relation. When we are able to ‘remember’ this, our access is free, open and transentient.
This essay is a memorial, in a sense, of the lost filial relationships that, in their growing absence, drive us to desperation. But when we begin, or agree together, to remember… we will always find them waiting with intelligences, wisdom… and adoration… far beyond anything we might ordinarily imagine.
I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and the origins of our species.
As a cognitive activist, my dream is that my work may contribute to our ability to understand the origins of our strange situation as modern humans, and assemble effective replacements for what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of.
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