Douglas Mercer
December 5 2024
Continued from Crow (Part Ten)
DEPARTURE TIME
550AM LOCAL TIME
Sargasso Sea
July 1 1969
In 40 Hours From Now
The arrival of each now host (matter, life, mind) will be that struggle to supplant the previous host; the former will seem to the latter to be a parasite but will really be the creator’s attempt at a higher life. With the arrival of each new host comes a rapid acceleration of the tempo of the drama, causing first order differentials in its own lifetime within the new host and second order differential within the host to the host etc.
So far we have a Void acting as the host to the physical universe which in turns acts as host to life and then intelligence. Where is the system designed to go? Where it brings about a fundamental change to the nature and the tempo the whole. That these sentences should at first sight appear to be devoid of physical meaning is hardly surprising for had we a complete understanding of their meaning we would already indeed have arrived at the stage it is now the object of the exercise to predict. And yet if creative abstraction is to act as the vehicle for the new entity and to leave behind its hitherto stable state it must lie within the power of creative abstraction to produce the phenomenon. That is creative abstraction can somehow bring about itself in what can be termed a bootstrapping endeavor (this is mirrored in what is nearly a scene a fair of philosophizing in this matter I AM THAT I AM, or autogenesis) Surely we are near the very bottom of the mystery at this point where the object of study begins to oscillate. That is with enough focus and concentration one can leave the body behind and become divine; thus the old canard that seeing is believing is neatly reversed.
It was at this nodal point that that the frenetic preparations in Teignmouth were reaching near liturgical pitch. I got this information in the last messages that came in by quotidian transmitters as I was engaged in a homecoming of another kind. I must admit it all seemed surreal that they would pull out the bands and a hundred thousand people would come and Knighthood would be in the offing; a whole nation would be stirred and moved by this underdog who was harking back to the days of Drake and a Victorian Age of heroism, the true Boy's Own Stuff. When what I was doing was so futuristic and when word came of it it would be met with scorn, derision, disbelief, laughter and a confused incomprehension. When I was in school a master of mine asked the class why at the end of Hamlet Fortinbras had bid the soldiers shoot, thus giving the protagonist military honors. We all were silent and finally he said that what the Poet meant was that it takes a courage equal to that of a soldier to descend into the abyss of oneself. Certainly no rounds would be fired for the end of this journey as they had been at the beginning though thundering cannon is more what I have in mind; but at home in the world that still took such things seriously they had a subcommittee which stipulated that after the hero had been duly escorted up the Channel by the requisite Naval Mine Sweeper I would have been towed to the sea front so the eager public could catch a glimpse of the miracle; helicopters from all the stations would be hovering over in awe; after meeting with the Mayor I would be taken to the Royal Hotel to the admission only Press Conference where I was to lay it on thick and remind them that intrepid England was not yet a thing of the past; next day a second and more formal reception would be held, Hallsworth would appear triumphant, I see balloons and special stamps, and franking privileges would be dispensed, and all of England would say my name with a sigh or even with the more sentimental among them a discrete tear or two that such things were still possible on earth.
A Norwegian Cargo Vessel came by and will be the last to corroborate my existence and will be able to put some time frame reference on it; I waved at them and if they gave a description of me it would be that I was fit and hale, had a beard, my hair was shorn, and that I seemed to be in high spirits. I noted this last contact with the world and then began on a history of the last 2000 years, of how exceptional men come along to shock society and the system in to change. As I had noted each of these changes appears to the system to be cataclysmic as it upends old verities which have existed in long complacent eras; and this is why each transition to the Higher Dream is so fraught with peril and has its turbulence and its buffeting process before plain and smooth sailing can begin to occur. And if such was the case with matter, life, and sentience how much more with disembodied being which is a return to the void but this time with the presence of mind? Which is why we must be very careful about getting the answer right. We are at the point where our powers of abstraction are powerful enough to do tremendous damage. Once we begin to understand a normally stable system well enough to tame it in unnatural ways we must take our time and be very careful about what we decide to do. We must think long and hard about doing anything on a mass scale and before we do anything when we decide to act we must be careful not to rush things. Like nuclear chain reactions this system of creative abstraction can be made to take off and when it does it will be incendiary. Despite the caution we must take the risk which will not be zero and we must at some point throw caution to the wind. With these words I hereby signal for the process to commence.
So there are dormant human capabilities in human intellect which can bring this about. There is evidence of this in prophecy, clairvoyance, and telepathy. Nostradamus was a good example of this. But the prospect now is beyond mere augury or the reading of fate but is involved in the making of fate and of becoming the ones who create and dream our reality. This will be a startling and shattering blow to both time and space; for time will begin to become space and thus disrupt the present eon of elapsed time. Yet despite these dark forebodings why do I feel so strangely and preternaturally at peace here at a calm rest beneath blue skies in this particular and peculiar sea? It is because I am clearly aware that what I am looking at is the peace and beauty of an environment which has cradled the life form which has borne my intelligence. And bound to time I sense a future and far flung freedom from this astonishing cradle and am for a brief and final moment nostalgic as a child might be when he is told that he is leaving home forever.
I see what is overtaking me is an impulse, or a desire or an urge, one so powerful that it cannot be brooked; the desire not to rest but to travel and traverse farther and further afield, it is terrifying at first until one accepts that is the new nature of one’s being; free will—which is the name that the impulse or urge goes by—allowing this free will strive is the sole moral obligation that one owes to the system, to take part in this unfolding process of never ending progress.
No doubt that mathematicians and engineers used to techniques of systems analysis will skim through my complete work in under an hour. At the end of this time, when what I write will become common knowledge to the newly forming intelligent beings, the problems that have distressed and beset mankind for thousands of years will be solved. Aspects which I have no need to mention but will be clear to them will tumble into place as foreordained and the struggle of man to understand the driving force of his universe and cosmos will be at an end.
In the face of this do we do on clinging to the idea that God made us? Or do we realize that it lies within us to make God? If I stipulate that of my own free will that by learning to manipulate the space-time continuum man will become God and disappear from the physical universe as we know it I am providing the universe with an impulse. If I state forthrightly that I am conceived in the womb of nature and in the womb of my own mind, in the womb of the universe I am providing the universe with an impulse. If my solution is correct and is immediately acceptable to a large enough number of men then I am very near to God and should by the very methods I state are available move to prophecy. Will man accept of his own free will the stipulation that he can manipulate reality so that he will become God? Or will he shirk this destiny? The system is shrieking this out at the top of its voice but I am the only one who is listening, and my purpose is to make this knowledge available to as many as possible who can hear it. The system is trying to tell us this but most people formulate “moral” views and thus are not equipped with the mental dictionary required to read the language that the system is using to communicate with us. This language is pressing and present but requires inordinate focus and concentration to decipher. But mathematicians understand this language and on behalf of the system I appeal to them to think carefully about what Nature is trying to say. This voice is the voice of natural truth and it is a loud and clear voice, and it speaks with the voice of creative abstract thinking.
Before I had written about abstract logic and abstract thinking as a concept, but now I am undergoing the change in my own mind. Before I merely spoke of the cosmic mind but now I experience its thought in my own head. Before I had glibly spoken of life as a game but now it is the literal truth. Time (which is becoming space) has become increasingly important to me and I know that I was correct to have thrown the chronometers overboard at the beginning. What I felt most was that I was in a machine, that I was a machine, and my mind was a machine which was clearing out great swaths of knowledge and dispensing with them as I honed in on what was truly fundamental. My computer was being fed with vast realms of knowledge but more important it was processing them instantaneously.
God’s clock is not the same as our clock. He has an infinite amount of “our” time but our time is running out. Of course my obsession with time will be written off as merely the familiar obsession of mariners which is called “time madness” but this is nothing of the sort. I know now that one must first master time and then one can master space. Time was born with space and will become it in the end in an eternal world.
Systems—systems—systems—systems, one cannot escape them because nature is systematic. Matter systems (objects)—biological system (animals)—human systems (apes with minds)—intelligence systems (gods). This is the natural progression or procession of each incarnation of the universe until matter becomes mind aware of itself and dispenses with its own substrate (matter) the way a rocket jettisons a booster, then the system can be spoke of as perfected or realized (made real). Goal, destiny, fate: cosmic integration which is the impulse or urge which is moving up through the levels of the system. The highest system is that which is inhabited by abstract intelligences can now be reached by means of free will, that is by simply wanting to get there and believing that one can get there. We suffer pain, degradation, and corruption in the human system not because the human system is evil---the human system behaves correctly by its own lights and from its own perspective—but we suffer these things because the cosmos is trying to teach us to reach the highest of levels.
I then wrote a separate essay called The Game. My idea of life as a game became entwined with my ideas of apes and computers. A game of course is an activity with its own arbitrarily stipulated rules—and a game player need not worry about wrong and right and so he can manipulate the system at will. In this game any man could think anything and progress toward the cosmic integration provided he was in contact with other men progressing toward the same goal, but in this game which will eventually manipulate reality everything is done with the mind and at the level of the idea. An ape is one who only plays the game at the level of the game and when that ape dies his computer dies with him—but when man transcends the ape and aspires to the higher level of the one who made the game—when this ape dies he becomes the computer.
In just three mere days the work was done. The gods now walk among us. The gods walk among us as if they were going about signing checks. You will have trouble with some of the things I have to say. Indeed until three days ago I had trouble with them myself. But I was determined to solve this problem if it took me the rest of my life. Half an hour later I had set up the basic equations and seen the hidden pattern. Three days later I had understood everything in nature and had understood myself, I had understood everything in history from Julius Caesar to Adolf Hitler and I had a complete set of answers for the most difficult problems facing mankind. I had arrived in the cosmos by contemplating the navel of an ape.
You can rest assured the story line about me will be that by thus cutting off from contact with the world I was in truth only cutting myself off from any rational appreciation of my actual situation. They will aver that my writing was merely a confused and metaphorical expression of my deep seated anguish written in an insane shorthand vocabulary and presented as divine revelation. That what I write is incoherent and always packed with two or three simultaneous meanings. But this is just the system fighting against the truth—the men who state this are not bad men but are men in thrall to the system—and are unconsciously doing the system’s last bidding in its inevitably doomed attempt to thwart and hide the truth. That you are reading this is evidence enough of the system is destined for failure.
For a cosmic being there is only one sin—the sin of concealment. For those that are not cosmic beings concealment is not a sin but is just a representation of their enmeshment in the system which thrives on concealment. Therefore an unawakened one cannot sin as the stakes they participate in are too paltry and their destiny is oblivion. But for a cosmic being there remains one sin—the sin of concealment. And I consider it fate that it was my vast deception, my forged course, my alter ego itinerary, and my confabulated charts that brought me to this pass—for the gods were showing me what the only sin is.
The Kingdom of the Empyrean is a kingdom or pure transparency, it is a diaphanous world where all beings are apparent and visible to one another in a consensually mutual and interactive world of imagination. In the kingdom of the Empyrean time does not elapse because there is no time—time having become space. In the Kingdom of the Empyrean there is all the time in the world.
We are now in the womb of the universe, but the eggs are hatching. We are learners now or neophytes under the tutelage of the gods. Our destiny is in the stars but we must learn to conceive of ourselves in the way that we must conceive of ourselves. Simply put all we have to do to get there is think of ourselves as we would like to think of ourselves, we must think of it as we want to think of it. This is wish fulfillments on a cosmic scale, where the wish is the progenitor of the reality. Which is why we must be extremely careful what we wish for for we will get it.
All his life man plays cosmic chess with God. The moves in this game are well known but it is hard to see who is winning because God is playing with one set of rules and man plays with another. The winner of the game is the one who see the discrepancy and begins to play against god with god’s own rules.
Once upon a time a boy and his father were wandering and came across some apes. These are jolly good apes said the father; they are useless apes said the son. The father was a perfect father and was trying hard to teach his son an important lesson so he was very patient. The father then thought of an idea. We will play cosmic games with these apes.
God and his son were playing together in the cosmos. He was the Prefect Father and he was the Perfect Son. The game they were playing was a jolly good game and the game they were playing was called Turning Apes Into Gods. It was a jolly good game as long as it was played according to one simple rule, the apes were allowed to know nothing about gods. Until one day an ape found out about the gods, then it was a game no more……
The explanation of our troubles is that cosmic beings are playing games with us. It amuses them to make systems which are capable of producing cosmic beings such as themselves. If you think about this you have to admit that this is a very amusing game. I love amusing games, and I am sure you do as well, and it is very easy to see things from the perspective of the cosmic beings. One turn of the screw after all and that will be us playing these funny games. I am a man too, however, and I see the pain (which men falsely call evil) that comes from this process of game playing. But the cosmic beings have no pain (all they do is play games) and they have a way of producing next generation cosmic beings and the pain of the process is just the exhaust of the system. But the cosmic beings have been doing this time out of mind and they know that games are good for us, however it seems to us.
Here of course the standard line about me will be that I was so far into my febrile fantasy life that I had come out the other end into full blown paranoia. But paranoia is just a euphemism for seeing truth—and it is these psychiatric labels which are one of the last and most powerful ways the system has of combating truth. Remember you who come after me that the truth is the most dangerous thing there is, and the thing that most threatens the system. The truth coming to being will cause explosions of explosions and the system will fight the truth to the last, but in the end it will fight the truth with its dying breath.
In this process of pure thought I was beginning to understand the cosmic beings by putting myself in their shoes, living vicariously as them, and walking in another’s shoes is the only way to understand them. I used to think that the cosmic beings made things too hard but an inordinate sympathy for the life of the cosmic beings has shown me that this is false; that the path to becoming a cosmic being must be strewn with struggle but that we must view this pain with nonchalance as in a game. The cosmic beings are putting on this game for ours sakes, that is for the sake of those able and willing to awake. And it was by this process of deduction that I became a cosmic being, became one so suddenly that it is taking my breath away. Indeed all cosmic beings had to throw themselves on the mercy of one man. And so I have been conceived in the womb of my own mind, I have given birth to myself; I have been conceived in the womb of the universe and have been given birth by my immortal ancestors. I have powerful forces at my disposal but very little time to work to get the powerful systems to work with one another instead of against one another. But I am certain if I get the first move right I will get great aid in reaching a fast and easy solution. The gods themselves need help, you see.
The truth is that there is no good and no evil, only truth. Whatever does not last is not real; and those who know the truth can select their own rules, they can stipulate the rules of the game by which they can then play—that is what we call fate, making up your own rules. Complete freedom of choice beyond the reach of any discipline that is what we call freedom of the will. I am now beyond the reach of any discipline and can choose my own end or save the world by speaking into the ear that has so longed to hear it. This is the shameful secret of god who had to commit the sin of concealment in order to create the apes with computers so they might become computers or cosmic beings in the long line of immortals. The secret of god, the dirty trick you might say, is that he withheld the knowledge from us that there is no good and no evil but only truth because that knowledge would hurt too much. If it had been known before then the necessary perfect shining instrument would not be what it is today
I was ready to submit to this discipline that would remove all disciplines and I am now beyond the reach of all disciplines. I am free, my mind is free and no longer stalled. That is the meaning of free will. I have now become the beauty of truth, this truth that so far has been only fit for me, the man of this world with the knowledge of the cosmos. And the most wonderful and perfect shining instrument of god
Now is revealed the true nature and purpose and power of the game.
I will resign this game to enter into the next game, to become a game master. The next game that is played will be played according to the rules stipulated by myself and my great god when it was revealed to his son not only the exact nature and reason for games but also the revealed truth of the purpose of the game. For the truth is there can be only one chess master, that man who can become free from the need to have his mind blown by a cosmic mind.
Now at last man has everything he requires to think like a cosmic being. We can learn much from one another as in a conversation. At the moment I must be the only man on earth who yet realizes what this means. It means I can make myself cosmic being with my own efforts, and I must hurry up and get on with it
Clocks broken—no longer living on borrowed time, my time has run out. It is complete—it is the mercy.
***
Certainly my biographers will read this and think me mad as a hatter, and will pity me. So much for them. Being authors beholden to the paying public they must come up with theories and scenarios which allow that public to touch this narrative, be awed by it perhaps, or have a shiver up their spine about it, but be able to return to their cozy and snug harbors and sleep safe and tight. I understand this fear indeed until a few day ago I shared it. But it is fear that you must conquer first, it is fear that the system uses as its deep safeguard. And Boys Own Stuff or not this is a hard and a cold truth—but it will be laundered for readers as a sentimental journey. In my mind’s eye I can see the words that will depict me as a man at the end of his rope who jumps overboard and tarries for a while behind my now ghosting ship and such will be the conditions that even if I wanted to I could not catch up—could not go home. And their piece de resistance, as they will be in a maudlin and mawkish mood for many purple patches, will be to say that on the log books, those gold mines for posterity, they found spots of water and will say, as dutiful slaves to the system, that in all sobriety they assume it was of the sea but how beautiful would it be if it was in fact—very fact the will say—a tear.
Continued at Crow (Part Twelve)
