The Heart Sutra, Dinderblob/Darkinbad, and Zion

Rambling sync-posts are back!

I woke up Saturday morning with the name Dinderblob in my head for no apparent reason, perhaps the echo of a forgotten dream. I recognized it as the name of one of the gods imprisoned inside a mountain in The Tinleys and, seeing no relevance to anything, filed it away.

In the morning, I read a few sections of the Doctrine & Covenants, including Section 38. This bit piqued my interest:

And I [Jesus] have made the earth rich, and behold it is my footstool, wherefore, again I will stand upon it. And I hold forth and deign to give unto you greater riches, even a land of promise, a land flowing with milk and honey, upon which there shall be no curse when the Lord cometh; And I will give it unto you for the land of your inheritance, if you seek it with all your hearts (D&C 38:17-19).

I think the wording implies that this "land of promise" is not on earth.

When I came to the famous line, "I say unto you, be one; and if ye are not one ye are not mine" (D&C 38:27) it made me think of last year's syncs about the Ace of Hearts and the Mormon idea of Zion being "one heart and one mind," "the pure in heart."

In the afternoon, my wife and I had to run some errands together. She said she was going to put on some music in the car, so I braced myself for some Post Malone (her current kick), but I was pleasantly surprised when she instead put on something completely different, and completely new to me: a Chinese translation of the Heart Sutra chanted to a jazz piano accompaniment. I couldn't really follow the Chinese in any detail (Buddhist sutras are pretty far removed from everyday language), so I tried to recall how the sutra goes in English. It's been a decade or so since I've read it, though, and I kept getting tripped up and slipping into the language of the Book of Mormon -- thus noticing, for the first time, their similarity. Here's Lehi:

[R]ighteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility. Wherefore, it must needs have been created for a thing of naught (2 Ne. 2:11-12).

And here's Avalokiteshvara:

All things are by nature void

They are not born or destroyed

Nor are they stained or pure

Nor do they wax or wane

So, in emptiness, no form,

No feeling, thought, or choice,

Nor is there consciousness.

No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind;

No color, sound, smell, taste, touch,

Nor what the mind takes hold of,

Nor even act of sensing.

No ignorance or end to it,

Nor all that comes of ignorance;

No withering, no death,

No end to them.

Nor is there pain, or cause of pain,

Or end to pain, or noble path

To lead from pain;

Not even wisdom to attain!

Attainment too is emptiness.

Aside from the opposite value judgments -- what the prophet dismisses as meaningless is embraced by the bodhisattva as the highest truth. Lehi characterizes his version of the Heart Sutra's vision as "all things" being "a compound in one," "one body." This language ties in with the Mormon texts I had been thinking of earlier: "one heart and one mind," "if ye are not one ye are not mine."

Later in the day, Dinderblob was still floating around in my mind, so I looked up references to The Tinleys on this blog. In "Tin soldiers and griffins," I found this:

In the opening pages, [Thinley] Norbu mentions that the Buddha first taught Prajnaparamita "at Vulture's Peak" in northern India.

Noting that Vulture's Peak would have been named for the Himalayan griffon vulture, I tied that in with The Tinleys, where a griffin lives on Donchatryan Peak and has imprisoned Dinderblob and the other gods inside it.

That is -- or was until this post -- this blog's only use of the Buddhist term Prajnaparamita (sometimes translated "perfection of wisdom"). The full Sanskrit name of the Heart Sutra is Prajnaparamitahridaya -- "The Heart of Prajnaparamita."

Coming back to my earlier reading of D&C 38, I had connected "if ye are not one ye are not mine" with the "one heart and one mind" Ace of Hearts syncs. I noticed that that word mine tied in, as a pun, with one of those Ace of Hearts posts, "I've been a miner for a heart of gold." That post includes these lines from "With?"

And last of all comes Darkinbad,

Who is Brightdayler hight,

Who'll go down in the dark abyss

And bring all things to light.

The name Darkinbad has a similar feel to Dinderblob, I think.

If we interpret Darkinbad as Elvish (from darak "wolf" and bad "way, path"), it would be the equivalent for wulf-weg, which by all rights ought to be (but is apparently so far unattested as) a Norse or Anglo-Saxon kenning for the path the Sun ("Brightdayler") or Moon takes across the sky, each pursued by a wolf.

J. C. Dollman, The Wolves Pursuing Sol and Mani (1909)

Darkinbad going down into the dark abyss and bringing all things to light also ties in with Leo's recent thoughts on the Jaredites bringing light to the Inner Earth, and indeed creating there a new "sun" and "moon," in his post "Primeval Unlight."

Today I read D&C 84:

The Lord hath gathered all things in one.

The Lord hath brought down Zion from above.

The Lord hath brought up Zion from beneath (v. 100).

"All things in one" is the language of Lehi's Heart Sutra, and here it is explicitly tied in with the Zion "one heart and one mind" concept. The last of the three lines quoted also made me think of Leo's Inner Earth musings. "The Lord hath brought down Zion from above" clearly refers to the City of Enoch returning to earth. "The Lord hath brought up Zion from beneath" has traditionally been interpreted as the earthly city of Zion rising to meet Enoch's halfway -- "To meet the Lord and Enoch's band triumphant in the air," as Edward Partridge put it in a hymn. However, I think something leaving earth for heaven would be described, for us here on earth, as being "taken up" (as in Moses 7:21), not "brought up." I think it makes more sense to read this as a subterranean Zion (as in the Matrix movies) being brought up to the surface. Parley Pratt's hymn is perhaps more apropos than Partridge's:

Angels from heav’n and truth from earth

Have met, and both have record borne;

Thus Zion’s light is bursting forth,

Thus Zion’s light is bursting forth

To bring her ransomed children home.

To bring her ransomed children home.

Frankenstein nitpicking sync

I saw this today on Anglin's weekly meme dump.

How does this not end with Dan saying, "I think you mean so much fun"?

Later in the day, I for some reason thought of the famous author Chilled the Fresh and his two collaborators (all of whom have since been canceled by Amazon), and I looked up Steven Landsburg's 2009 post about them. One of the commenters there linked to an xkcd strip, which made me wonder idly whether xkcd was still around. I went to the site, clicked the Random button, and got this:

Dan: "Curses! Foiled again!"

Not a sync, but this Bee headline from a few years back was pretty good:

Nicotine, Mars, and the Secret Dojo

I've just concluded an experiment with what I guess is the ultimate form of "passive smoking" -- using nicotine only in my sleep. I'd put on a transdermal patch immediately before going to bed and remove it when I woke up, even if I woke up in the middle of the night. I did this a total of 21 times -- the first seven with 14-mg patches, and the remainder with 21-mg. Since the patch is designed to release the nicotine gradually over a 24-hour period, and since I only wore each patch for 8 hours max, the actual amount of nicotine I absorbed was considerably less than the dosage on the label. As a safeguard against addiction, I only used the patches two or three times a week, and never on two consecutive nights.

I was interested in the effect of nicotine on dreams. On approximately half of my trials, my dreams were unremarkable. The other half were unusually vivid but mostly still within the range of normal dreaming experience. Twice I experienced extraordinarily deep and detailed dreams which I think could be fairly described as "trips."

When I posted my first nicotine dreams, in "King Kong's limousine and other nicotine dreams," a reader calling himself Potato Salad left a comment saying my dreams had been unexpectedly peaceful given that nicotine "falls under Mars's jurisdiction" according to some unspecified system of "magical correspondences." I'm still not sure where he got that. Nicotine is a New World drug, so any attempt to understand it in terms of Western astrology would have to be of relatively recent date. The only system of astrological correspondences for controlled substances with which I have any familiarity is Crowley's Liber 777,  which I believe maps tobacco to the sign of Libra or something.

Anyway, my overall experience was consistent with nicotine being in some sense a "martial" drug. Many of the dreams involved fistfights and martial arts, and many featured intense feelings of anger and impatience. There was even one dream in which I was a Nazi soldier, although that particular dream didn't include any violence. The dreams also included quite a lot of sexual content, but I was strangely indifferent to it. The general feel reminded me of the cover of a Conan the Barbarian paperback: Conan may have a half-naked lady at his feet, but he's not thinking about sex; he's thinking about war.

Another thing I noticed was that there were a lot more animals than in my normal dreams. In one dream, I was staying in a hotel where some of the other rooms were occupied by lions, gorillas, and other large animals. In another, I tried to get on my motorcycle only to discover that it was actually a large tiger-like animal with brown fur. Two different dreams featured birds like owls or vultures, except that their "feathers" were actually fleshy flaps of skin.

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One dream in particular felt like a sort of revelation when it happened -- the Secret Dojo dream. I was walking down a busy street when I noticed what I somehow knew was a portal that led to the Secret Dojo. The portal wasn't always there, so I had to seize the opportunity. It was an opening made of carved wood, and it seemed much too small for me to squeeze through, but I just had to. I stuck the top half of my body into it and squeezed and wriggled and twisted until somehow, finally, I managed to pop out on the other side.

I found myself in a sort of underground city, and I started running, knowing instinctively which direction to go. I ran for hours and hours, never stopping or slowing or hesitating. This feeling of endlessly running, as all kinds of different scenery flew past, was the main sensation of the dream, and it was wonderfully exhilarating. I felt like Asahel pursuing Abner, as light of foot as a wild roe, turning not to the right hand nor to the left. I ran through a restaurant, vaulting the counter and running through the kitchen and out the back door. I ran through a warehouse. I ran through some sort of seraglio full of dancing girls. I ran through a Shakespearean theater, through the audience, then across the stage, then backstage and out. I ran through a very long, completely dark tunnel that sloped upward. I ran along a desert road under a bright tan sky, passing several gleaming statues of sharks the size of airliners. I ran up a wooded hill, through Triassic-looking vegetation, and finally to the gigantic caldera at the top that was the Secret Dojo.

It was night now, and the Dojo was empty, but the stars illuminated it clearly enough, and I could feel the energy of everyone who had ever fought there flowing into me. I spoke, for the first time in the dream, and said, "I've never felt such demonic power!" I instantly regretted my choice of words. Demonic made it sound evil, which wasn't what I had meant at all. I meant that it was a pagan spirit, not a satanic one -- the spirit of a Gilgamesh or an Achilles. I felt that my carelessly chosen word had perhaps revealed something I'd rather not have known -- that perhaps the power really was demonic, but I didn't want to face that. It was such a rush. I thought that I was "glorying" in the power, like the lions in the moonlight in Gilgamesh -- but then I realized that that word, too, might have satanic connotations: "And Cain said: Truly I am Mahan, . . .  and he gloried in his wickedness. . . . And Cain gloried in that which he had done, saying: I am free."

I left the Dojo and ran all the way back, running even faster with this new "demonic" energy. Outside the portal, I found my parents watching a martial arts performance. I immediately wanted to share the Secret Dojo with them, but I figured my mom wouldn't be able to handle the hours-long run, so I only invited my dad. "Are you watching this?" I said. "I know where you can see the real thing." He was game. He squeezed through the portal after me, and we ran through the restaurant and the seraglio and everything. As we were running up the sloping tunnel, I realized that I was running on all fours like a wolf, and that it felt very natural, but I wondered if my father would be able to keep up. I couldn't look back, though. Somehow, I just knew that was forbidden. To reach the Secret Dojo, you had to keep going forward, turning not to the right hand nor to the left. I began to worry that I might have left him behind without noticing, like Aeneas. I listened for sounds behind me. I could hear a few voices, but none of them sounded like his. I kept running, and the dark tunnel faded to white, and I was awake.

My first thought upon waking was that I had truly experienced the spirit of Mars. The enthusiasm -- and the desire to run -- carried on into the waking world for several hours.

My other blogs, and blogs I read

In addition to this, my main blog, I maintain more specialized blogs -- on the Book of Mormon, the Fourth Gospel, the Tarot, and the works of Whitley Strieber -- which are updated much more irregularly. In the past, it has been my habit to post a notification here whenever anything new was posted to any of those blogs. Now, though, I've changed the right sidebar so that it shows the latest post on each of my other blogs, so you can easily check there to see if there's any new content you haven't read yet. I will therefore no longer be doing "see my other blog" posts.

The list of blogs I read in the sidebar is supposed to work on the same principle -- sorting the blogs according to most recent update and including information about the latest post. This seems to work fairly well, with some exceptions. Francis Berger's and WanderingGondola's blogs appear not to have usable feeds, and so they're unfortunately permanently at the bottom of the list, even though Frank at least posts pretty frequently.

Three other blogs -- Leo's, my brother Luther's, and Richard Arrowsmith's -- have a more puzzling situation: their feeds appear to have arbitrarily stopped updating at some point. It says Leo's last post was a month ago, Luther's was 4 months ago, and Richard's was 11 years ago, even though all three of them have continued to post after those respective points in time. If any of my more tech-inclined readers have any idea what might be causing this or how it might be rectified, do leave a comment.

Year of the Snake

On their way to work one morning, down the path along the lake,

Some cowherds and Lord Krishna met a monumental snake.

It lay there in their pathway, and its mouth it opened wide,

In likeness of a cavern, and invited them inside.

"Enter in, O gentle Krishna. Enter in, for heaven's sake.

"Enter in, O gentle Krishna," sighed the demon snake.

The cowherds, unsuspecting, marched right on into the "cave,"

Deceived by the impression the gigantic serpent gave.

The plan was working! -- but the snake was furious to find

The cowherds all had entered in, while Krishna stayed behind.

"Enter in, O gentle Krishna. Enter in, for heaven's sake.

"Enter in, O gentle Krishna," sighed the demon snake.

Lord Krishna knew the demon, but he knew himself a god,

And so, without a trace of fear, into the mouth he trod.

He marched right down the gullet of the demon serpent, and --

Without a word of warning, Krishna started to expand!

"Enter in, O gentle Krishna. Enter in, for heaven's sake.

"Enter in, O gentle Krishna," sighed the demon snake.

"I ate you," cried the serpent. "Now you're growing! Oh, accurst!

"You know you cannot be contained, and now I'm going to burst."

"Oh, shut up, silly reptile," said Lord Krishna with a grin.

"You knew damn well that I was God before you took me in."

Canada’s murder machine

I was of course aware of this in a general way but had no idea of the scale or the horrifying details. It’s absolutely satanic

Thanks to Andy Thomas, whoever you are and however I got on your mailing list, for sharing this with me.

Elves as Nephites

Having engaged so much over the past year or so with attempts to read Tolkien in the light of the Book of Mormon and vice versa, as pioneered by Daymon Smith and developed by Bill Wright (who has deleted his blog and disappeared) and Leo, I was interested to run across this video series by Josh Choate and Dustin Grady (who appear to be associated with the Phil Davis "Doctrine of Christ" movement), which links Tolkien with the Book of Mormon independently, and in a very different way.

The basic idea is that the Nephite ships of Hagoth ended up not in Polynesia (as current Brighamite tradition has it) but in Frisia, where they influenced Germanic and Anglo-Saxon culture and have come down in legend as the Elves. It is the third video that discusses the Tolkien angle, but it is probably best to listen to the first two as well to understand the background.

They get several details wrong, both about Tolkien and about European history and linguistics, but the overall concept is intriguing. They place the Nephites in North America, so their story can't be directly harmonized with the interstellar direction Bill and Leo have taken things, but I thought it was interesting to see someone else independently discover/invent a Mormon-Tolkien connection.

Thoughts on the return of God-Emperor Trump

Okay, I guess it's more of a "thought," singular.

The 613 senses

On Saturday night I read Laeth's latest batch of aphorisms, "Wee Wisdom (2)." One of these was:

i'm very grateful for and to my senses. i love all six hundred and thirteen of them.

When I read this, I recognized 613 as the traditional number of commandments in the Torah, according to Maimonides and others, but I couldn't understand what Laeth was getting at in making it the number of his senses. My tentative interpretation was that, while we always think of the Ten Commandments and the five senses, in each case those who really pay attention will discover that the true number is much larger. Or something.

The next morning, I happened to listen to podcast, "Reincarnation in Mormon Theology: Joseph Smith and Kabbalah." At around the 47-minute mark, it quotes this article on reincarnation in Kabbalah:

Kabbalah explains that the soul is comprised of 613 channels, which parallel the 248 limbs and 365 blood Vessels of the body. These 613 channels attain eternal elevation when all 613 Mitzvot are fulfilled by a soul in its earthly descent.

So I suppose it was these "613 channels" of the soul that Laeth had in mind, and not the Mitzvot themselves. My own engagement with the Kabbalah has been quite superficial, and I had never encountered this idea before. It was quite a coincidence running into it by chance just hours after reading Laeth's allusion.

Moths for the flame, jewels for the pigs

In the span of about 15 minutes, I finished a chapter in Denver Snuffer’s The Second Comforter, read two pages in Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan, and checked Synlogos.

In Snuffer, I read:

Putting jewelry on pigs is no more appropriate today than it was when Christ advised against it (p. 176).

This stuck out to me because what Jesus actually advised against was “casting pearls before swine.” The image of a pig actually wearing jewelry is not from Jesus but from the Old Testament:

As a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion (Prov. 11:22).

I then read this in Yuknavitch:

Everyone’s last wish turned out to be love: may I be consumed by the simplicity of a love story, any love . . . It was a wish like the moth’s wish for flame. It was a wish to fuck the sun. To be burned alive inside a story . . . (p. 15).

I then checked Synlogos. I don’t normally read Vox Day’s Sigma Game blog, but the title made me click in spite of myself: “Pretty Moths Drawn to Hellfire.” It’s about Manic Pixie Dream Girls, and as in Yuknavitch, the flame they are drawn into is a “story.” The post warns others not to get sucked into “this contagiously story-driven passion.”

The first comment on Vox’s post, by someone called The Keeper of the Flame, includes this quote from the Bible:

"Like a gold ring in a pig's snout, is a beautiful woman without discretion." --Proverbs 11:22

Flying saucer cockpit

I had a dream last night which I hadn’t planned on posting about, but the sync fairies had other ideas.

In the dream, I had been attacked by an unseen aircraft while parasailing over a lake on “the eleventh” (the date was mentioned several times) and had gone back to the lake the next day (which would be the twelfth) to investigate. On this second visit I saw what I described in my dream notes as “a 1950s-vintage flying saucer, the kind with a dome-shaped cockpit on top.”

The afternoon after the dream, I found this in a weekly meme post:

That’s a saucer of the exact type I was trying to describe in my notes, accompanied by the number 12 and the word cockpit.

The saucer in the dream, by the way, turned out to be carrying perfectly ordinary-looking White people in their thirties, in business garb, who later came out of the saucer and chatted with one another about politics and fashion. They spoke with American accents but had odd word choice and always used were instead of was. For example, one woman commented on a man’s clothing by saying, “His garb were unsightly.” This same woman later apologized for not saying thee and thou more often, saying she found it a bit much, and it was my impression that they were making a deliberate effort to use archaic North-of-England speech patterns, though delivered in an American accent.

Classifying Silmarils, and the seven gospels

The night before last, as related in "Inanities with Elon," I dreamed about having to do a bizarre "worksheet" with Elon Musk and some of his employees, which combined extremely easy exercises with extremely confusing ones.

The very next night, I had another dream that took that theme to another level. I was in a church with my wife and a lot of other people when representatives of the Taiwanese government came in and distributed a questionnaire that they said everyone had to fill out. While Elon's worksheet had been a single page, this one was a War and Peace-sized tome which would obviously take a very long time to complete.

"Excuse me," I said. "Are we required by law to complete this?"

"This is for everyone to take. It's to determine who is qualified to become a pharmacist and so on."

"But if I don't do it, what will happen?"

"Someone will be sent to your house to discuss it with you."

"And?"

"And torture you."

As the dream progressed, I grew increasingly angry about being forced to do this questionnaire, and in the end decided that, torture or no torture, I just wasn't going to do it. I did finish a few of the questions, though, on the first page.

There was a simple line drawing of a bungalow and a short paragraph that said something like: "Imagine yourself in this situation. You live in this house in Yilan. You wake up one morning, look outside, and see that the weather is very nice."

There followed three questions. Here they are with the answers I gave. I was deliberately giving the simplest, stupidest answers I could think of as a form of passive resistance.

• What would you say in this situation? It's a nice day.
• Where would you say it? At home.
• Why would you say it? Because it's a nice day.

Those are the only questions I actually finished. After that, I just flipped through the book to see what else was in it. Here's what I remember:

One page had drawings of several different species of cicada and said, "Write the scientific names of these cicadas."

Another page said "Classify these Silmarils." It had drawings of several gems that all looked the same to me, and there was a table with different categories in which to put them. One of these categories was Isilmarils, and I don't remember the others, but I know the form of the names reminded me of the those used in the USDA soil taxonomy system. (In Tolkien, of course, there are only three Silmarils, so it would make no sense to "classify" them.)

Another question was, "Which would you rather watch -- a movie about humans killing and eating humans, or a movie about zombies killing and eating zombies?" Then, apparently concerned that this question wasn't clear enough, it added, "For example, these Aegeans?" -- under which was a very graphic picture of ancient Greek soldiers slaughtering one another -- "Or these zombies?" -- under which was a cartoony, AI-looking picture of a zombie biting another zombie's arm.

The page I spent the most time looking at said, "Complete these famous quotations," and then had a list of quotations with most of the content words blanked out. For example, it would give you "The _______ of _____ is not ________," and you would have to fill in "The quality of mercy is not strain'd." It was my impression that most of the quotations came from Shakespeare or the Bible.

One of these began, "Jesus, pondering the seven gospels, saith" -- followed by a series of blanks interspersed with prepositions and conjunctions and such. I didn't know what Jesus was supposed to have said as he pondered the seven gospels, but the whole thing struck me as ridiculous. Everyone knows there are four gospels, not seven, and that none of them had yet been written in the time of Jesus.

The next page had an illustration of Jesus pondering the seven gospels. Jesus was sitting cross-legged like a Buddha, and spread out in front of him, placed neatly side by side, were seven closed books. I thought this was very strange -- what's the point of having the books in front of you as you ponder them if they aren't open? A caption under the picture said, "From Christ to Cartomancy." I understood this to be suggesting that the cartomancer's practice of laying out a "spread" of cards side by side, face down, before turning them over one at a time somehow developed out of this story of Jesus contemplating a "spread" of closed books. I thought of my own habit of trying to perceive the face of a face-down card psychically before I turn it over, and I figured that if I could do that, maybe Jesus could read a closed book.

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The morning after this dream, I read a few more pages in Ian Stewart's Why Beauty Is Truth -- which I've been reading very slowly on account of reading lots of other things concurrently. On p. 216 (the second page I read today), I found this:

In 1926, [Wigner] was contacted by a crystallographer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute who wanted a research assistant. . . . The first major application of group theory to physics had been the classification of all 230 possible crystal structures.

The Silmarils were crystalline jewels, so this reference to classifying crystal structures seemed to tie right in with the "Classify these Silmarils" exercise in the dream. On a hunch that the date might also be relevant, I ran a search for tolkien 1926 and found that, according to Wikipedia,

The first complete version of The Silmarillion was the "Sketch of the Mythology" written in 1926.

Having had that dream brought back to mind in this way, I decided to search for "seven gospels" just to see what would come up. I was expecting something about non-canonical gospels maybe, or perhaps some New-Agey stuff. Instead, I found that most of the search results were for this book:

I had no idea that such a book existed prior to my dream. What are the odds that it would be about the Book of Mormon? I've read the BoM a time or two, and it doesn't contain seven or any other number of gospels. Not having read the book, I can only assumes Seven Gospels refers to some of the BoM's brief descriptions of the life and work of Jesus, most of which (in Nephi's vision, for example) would be prophecies, written before Christ and thus in principle available for Jesus to ponder.

[Update: A preview on Amazon shows that the "seven gospels" are found in 1 Nephi 11, Mosiah 3 and 15, Alma 7 and 19, Helaman 14, and Ether 3 -- all before Christ.]

The authors are Adam S. Miller and Rosalynde F. Welch. The first thing I noticed about these names, due to the dream's juxtaposition of "seven gospels" with Shakespeare, was that Rosalind is a Shakespearean name, the main character in As You Like It, and that that play also includes a character named Adam. Then I realized that the name Rosalynde Welch was vaguely familiar. Wasn't she someone from the early "Bloggernacle" Mormon blogs back when those were a thing? Which one was she with? Times and Seasons? Is Times and Seasons even still around?

I checked and found that not only is it still around, but it's most recent post is quite synchronistically interesting:

The difference between Joseph and Brigham

Joseph Smith spoke with God face to face.

Brigham Young didn't know him from Adam.

Inanities with Elon

I dreamed that I was for some reason spending the day with Elon Musk. We stopped by a field where ridiculously low-tech “rockets” were being tested, and my impression was that all of his employees were weird, grossly incompetent, and just not very smart. Elon went to elaborate lengths to play not-very-funny practical jokes, often involving the cooperation of dozens of his employees, and I wondered how they ever got anything accomplished. When Elon wondered aloud why his crew hadn’t yet reached the level of NASA in its heyday, I tactfully declined to comment.

In my conversation with Elon, we both pretended to be acquainted with former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, even though Elon got his name wrong and referred to him as Doug Christie or something like that until I corrected him. We both held forth at some length about Mr. Christie's character and told unflattering (and completely made-up) anecdotes about him. I characterized him as a blowhard, while Elon criticized his habit of trying to seduce every woman he met with an extremely stupid pickup line which I unfortunately no longer remember. I think we both knew we were both talking complete bullshit, but I just accepted that this was the way small talk was done in Elon's circle.

Later I was with Elon and about 40 of his goofy employees on some form of transportation, perhaps a bus or a boat. As soon as everyone had taken a seat, each person was given a photocopied worksheet in a plastic sheet protector. In order that the transportation time not be wasted, everyone was to spend the journey completing the worksheet as a way of keeping the old cognitive apparatus limber. Elon had to do one, too, to show that he was just one of the lads, nor was I as a guest exempt.

Some of the exercises on the worksheet were so extremely easy that I did a double take. I remember one of these was just the word rectangle with a couple of the letters omitted, and you had to fill in the blanks to complete the word.

Pointing to the rectangle exercise, I said, "Uh, Elon, what exactly is the point of this?"

He answered with a single word of Chinese: 循例. This is not actually part of my productive vocabulary, but I can understand it in context. Without context, I had to look it up after the dream. It means something like following rules or conventions, sometimes with the connotation of a meaningless perfunctory performance. As he said the second syllable, I had a mental image of the homophonous character 力, which means force or power. 循力 isn't normal Chinese, but it might be understood to mean "following power," with the same syntactic ambiguity as in English. I had the idea in the dream that he might actually have meant 流力, which is not pronounced the same and is also not standard Chinese, but which I understood to mean the "power" of acting quickly and automatically, without engaging conscious thought. In other words, the value of this sort of exercise was just that it was extremely easy and could thus be done quickly without thinking.

(Side note: According to my post-dream research, Elon Musk does in fact speak fluent Chinese. I hadn't known that before.)

Some of the other exercises were newspaper comic strips (mostly Calvin and Hobbes, I think) with some of the speech balloons blanked out, and you had to fill in appropriate things for the characters to say in the context given. Some of these were badly photocopied so that the top part of the strip was cut off by the edge of the page. I found these perplexing and didn't know what to write.

Others were complete one-panel comics that didn't make any sense. You were supposed to read them and try to "get" them, and if you couldn't, you could look down at a footnote that explained the joke. One of these showed a man walking through the woods with a smartphone, being confronted by an angry anthropomorphic deer. The deer said, "Hey, who said you could use my Wi-Fi?" to which the man replied, "Why don't you read your own sign?*" If you looked down at the asterisk at the bottom of the page, it said: "No hu-nt-in-g witho-u-t [i.e., you have] a pass" -- printed just like that, with the boldface, italics, and brackets as I have reproduced them. The joke -- and it's a real knee-slapper! -- was that the deer had put up a sign (not pictured in the comic) that said "No hunting without a pass," but in the man's clever interpretation, the string ntin meant "Net in" and referred to getting "in" to the Internet, while the letter u in the word without implied that "without a pass" actually meant "you have a pass." Thus the deer had unwittingly put up a sign that meant "You have permission to use my Wi-Fi to access the Internet." Haha, hoist on his own petard!

⁂

My first thought upon waking was that this dream had made me stupider.

My second thought was that it symbolized some of the pitfalls of religion: talking confidently about Christ when you've never actually met him; doing easy mindless things and calling it "the power of obedience"; looking at fragments of text in isolation and extracting meanings completely unrelated to anything the author intended.

Let him who is without any of these sins cast the first stone.

The reality of the genius famine

In 1998, a mysterious stranger with no name (though there are some who call him Tim) told Whitley Strieber that the man who “would have unlocked the secret of gravity” was never born because the couple who would have been his parents were murdered by the Nazis. I posted about this three years ago on my Strieber blog. Just yesterday, a_probst left a comment on that old post saying this hypothetical never-born genius “might have been a boomer,” which “would rankle with a certain subsequent generation.”

This observation stopped me dead in my tracks with the realization that neither the Boomers nor any subsequent generation has produced a single world-historical scientist. Not one.

The greatest living scientist is unquestionably James Watson. Runners-up might include Roger Penrose, Alan Guth and, using “scientist” in a broader sense, Rupert Sheldrake and Noam Chomsky. If we include the recently deceased, we can throw in Stephen Hawking and Francis Crick. All were born before the postwar baby boom. Online top-tens of the Greatest Living Scientists pad out the list with the likes of Tim Berners-Lee (a Boomer), Jane Goodall (pre-boom), and a bunch of people who changed the world so much that I’d literally never heard of them.

During the War, on the other hand, we had Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Fermi, Feynman, Salk, Turing, Tesla, Fleming, von Neumann, and — lest we forget — George Washington Carver. I could easily make the list longer.

That’s not a gradual petering-out of genius. It’s a sudden cataclysmic extinction.

I’m not sure how best to explain this fact, but one hypothesis that springs readily to mind is that the wrath of God rests upon us.

Blue butterflies are literally everywhere

So apparently the sync fairies are doing their own version of this meme now:

The other day I ran across a post on 4chan somewhere that said something like “YouTube is allowing straight-up softcore pr0n now. Just put in [this search term], and you’ll see.”

Wait, so you mean if you search for it, you can find pornography on the Internet? Stop the presses!

Nevertheless, being kind of stupid and reactive at times, I proceeded to go straight to YouTube and put in the search term given, I suppose with some vague excuse that I was doing it in the name of science. You know, just keeping up to date on the latest developments about what YouTube is and isn’t allowing, as any responsible citizen must.

At the very beginning of the very first video that came up, I found this:

That confounded blue butterfly again! There’s just no escape from it. And, I’m happy to report, it was just as effective as that bust of Trajan, making me snap out of it and realize that scholarly research into YouTube’s censorship or lack thereof is temporary, but the mysteries of synchronicity are forever.

Cat and mouse

From Jerry Pinkney's illustrations for Aesop's  fable of the Lion and the Mouse:

From a children's book I found today, telling the story of the Chinese zodiac:

Are lions and cats really interchangeable, though? As it happens, I also ran across this meme today:

Time travel dream, and a "tasty local butterfly joint" in Moab

I dreamed that I was temporarily living in a large house owned by someone else, who also lived there. One day I came downstairs and found a box of hand-painted 15th-century Italian Tarot cards sitting on the kitchen counter. It looked exactly like a box of such cards I owned and kept in a room on the fifth floor, so I wasn't sure if my housemate had found them and brought them downstairs or if he had bought a similar set of cards of his own.

I decided to go up to the fifth floor and check if my cards were still there. I hadn't been up there in ages, and it was totally dark on the upper floors. Before I had reached the fifth floor, I became too scared of the dark to continue, and I came back down.

I found my housemate there with the box of cards. He was outraged that he had found such a thing in his house. He had also found a bag of potpourri (which he thought was "incense") and a set of swizzle sticks made to look like ancient Chinese polearms. (None of this is anything I own in real life) I tried to explain why none of this stuff was dangerous or offensive, but he insisted he was going to throw it all out.

"Look," I said, "do you realize that these are some of the oldest surviving Tarot cards in the world? You can't just throw away a historical treasure like that. Anyway, they're my property. If you want me to get them out of your house, fine, but you can't just  confiscate them."

He reluctantly agreed to this compromise. I decided I would take them to my school and store them somewhere there, and my main concern was whether I had enough time to take them there before my first class of the morning, which was at a different school.

I got the cards and the other offending items and went outside, but it was so dark outside I wasn't sure I could find my car. Then suddenly, it was daylight, having changed so instantaneously that it left me disoriented, with a sense of "missing time."

I decided that since the weather was nice, I would ride my motorcycle instead of driving. I now had the idea that I was going to take the cards to Moab, Utah, rather than to my school, and I would need GPS to get there. I took out my phone, only to find that it was a non-"smart" model from some 20 years ago and didn't have any of the functions I needed.

"What happened to my phone?" I said. "It looks ancient, like it's from 2005 or something."

One of the neighbors heard me and said sarcastically, "Wow, last year's model. So ancient!"

I immediately understood that I had somehow gone back to 2006, probably at the moment the night had suddenly become daylight. I accepted this readily, with no sense that it was unbelievable, and the others around me were equally ready to accept that I was from 2025. I hurriedly began filling them in on what was going to happen in the next two decades, mentioning the election of Trump in 2016 (someone responded with "Donald Trump, baby! I knew it!") and describing the 2020 hysteria and fraud in vague and indirect terms, almost as if I were still in the 2020s, trying to avoid getting dinged for hatespeak. Everyone accepted what I said with mild interest, without showing any particular curiosity or incredulity.

I asked my housemate if he had GPS so I could find my way to Moab. He said he didn't, but he knew the way without it and could drive me there in his dune buggy. He didn't seem angry at all, presumably because we were back in 2006 now, well before he had discovered the offensive cards, potpourri, and swizzle sticks.

He drove his dune buggy and towed me behind him in a smaller dune buggy. He turned on the radio, and it was playing the B-52s song "Love Shack," except that "love shack" and certain key words had been replaced with Moab. I particularly remember the lines "I'm headin' down that old Moab highway" and the refrain "Moab is a little old place were / We can get together."

I'm not sure where it fit into the rest of the dream in terms of chronology, but at some point I went to sleep and had a dream-within-a-dream in which I found some little kittens that had been adopted by a tortoise, which they considered to be their mother. Then, after I "woke up" (but was in fact still dreaming), I encountered a real tortoise that had adopted a litter of kittens and commented on how the dream had been precognitive.

After waking up for real, I found that the dream had left me unexpectedly "homesick" for Moab, where I lived for five months back in 1998, when I had just started as a Mormon missionary. I found myself wondering whether a little diner there called Milt's Stop-N-Eat was still around. I ran a Google search, and -- well, it seems I still can't escape from butterflies!

"Tasty local butterfly joint"? I thought this might be some sort of slang I wasn't familiar with, but scouring the Internet only confirmed what I already thought: that butterfly joint refers only to an actual joint used in woodworking and would never be used to refer to a diner. I did find one café in San Francisco called the Butterfly Joint, but it's called that because it's also a woodworking studio, and the logo is a joiner's butterfly joint. So that's clearly a woodworking pun, not an example of butterfly joint being used in a non-woodworking sense. A Google search for "local butterfly joint" returns zero results.

My best guess is that the reviewer meant to write burger joint, and that some sort of autocorrect/autosuggest software is responsible for the butterfly error. Even that's a little strange, though. R and G are both adjacent to T on a keyboard, so mistyping burger as something like butter is certainly possible. Wouldn't the software just go with butter, though, especially coming so soon after the word tasty? Butterfly joint still seems like a very low-probability error.

("What the hey?" is Moab. "Oh my heck!" is Utah Valley.)

Lions (and a Pterodactylus) in the temple

This image was briefly shown in a Michelle Stone podcast, in a context that made it clear it was the interior of a Mormon temple:

Since I had just posted on two lions in a library, and Leo had followed up with a post of his own on the same topic, this got my attention.

What temple is that, though? I figured it would have to be one of the older Utah temples, since it appears to be a Creation Room. I served my mission in Utah and have been to several of those temples, but I didn't recognize the lion mural, and no amount of Googling Mormon temple murals enabled me to track it down.

I did find a couple of interesting things in the course of my searching, though. One was this picture of St. Jerome with his lion, reading a big red Bible, by Scott Gustafson:

I had mentioned Dürer's picture of Jerome and his lion in my last post, and Leo's post on lions in a library had mentioned the Red Book. I found the picture by searching for lds temple lions, so a picture of Jerome -- not recognized as a saint by Mormons, who consider the Church to have been in apostasy in his day -- was a pretty unlikely result.

The other interesting thing I found was an article called "The Surprising True Story Behind the Dinosaur Mural in the Manti Utah Temple." It shows this picture from that temple:

It said the picture was directly influenced by this illustration by Édouard Riou:

If that looks familiar, it may be because you've seen essentially the same picture before, in "A Pterodactylus and a globe of light," where I had a not-quite-vision of this thing:

Aesop's fable of the Lion, the Mouse, and the Blue Butterfly

On December 22, I posted "Happy 85th birthday, Jerry Pinkney," a post which was occasioned by my discovery of that artist's version of Aesop's fable of the Lion and the Mouse. This was in the middle of a flurry of blue-butterfly syncs, which began on December 1 -- see "Synchronicity, symmetry, and Menelaus blue morpho (and blue Mormon) butterflies" -- and is still going strong.

This morning I was asked to read an English story to children at a local preschool. The school would provide the book. When I arrived, I found that it was Aesop's fable of the Lion and the Mouse. In this version of the story, the lion spends most of his time on the plains but sometimes goes to his cave in the jungle to sleep. The mouse explores the cave at a time when he thinks the lion will be out on the plains, but the lion returns earlier than expected and catches him.

The page that introduces the lion's cave prominently features a blue butterfly -- not biologically accurate enough to be any particular species, I think, but certainly suggestive of a morpho.

In addition to the fable itself and the blue butterfly, the cave got my attention. Back in June of last year, as recounted in "Étude brute?," I had a vision in which I was in a cavern with the Holy Family and then passed into a larger cavern that was full of books. In a second post the same day, "This episode is brought to you by the letters G and L," I linked this vision with the L page in Graeme Base's Animalia, which has two lions in a library, since my vision had also featured two large golden animals and a "library" in the form of a cave full of books.

I had actually just been revisiting that vision just hours before reading the story to the preschoolers. I've just started reading Denver Snuffer's book The Second Comforter, which is supposed to be a sort of how-to manual for receiving a personal visitation from Jesus Christ in the flesh. On p. 4, Snuffer writes:

This involves having the heavens open to you, just as they have opened to others before you. It is the culminating part of Christ's Gospel, in which Christ ministers to you as He has ministered to others before.

That "heavens open" was a major red flag for me, a suggestion that the "visitation" might not be as literal as advertised. In my July 14 post "Visions as irruptions of dreaming consciousness into waking life," inspired largely by my cave vision of the month before, I had written:

The language about the heavens opening and closing never had any specific meaning for me before, but now I recognize it as a very natural way of describing visions like my own. There is a sense that the visual field "opens up," as if one is seeing behind a backdrop, and when I read Smith and Cowdery's language [in D&C 110] about a veil being taken away and the heavens opening, it seemed to me that they had to be describing the same kind of experience.

In other words, I was recognizing that Smith and Cowdery were reporting a vision, not a literal visitation by Elijah and company. I concluded the post with this:

I'm not discounting dreams and visions, of course, but vision is not reality. I mean, I myself have had a vision of the Holy Family, but I would never presume to say that I have seen Jesus Christ with my own eyes or anything like that.

Visions need to be clearly distinguished from actual events. Visions are symbolic. 

So Snuffer's language about "having the heavens open" made me suspect that he had after all just had a vision of Jesus, perhaps not qualitatively different from my own. Of course I'll keep reading and see if that suspicion if borne out. Anyway, the point is that his language had brought back the memory of that cave vision.

I read the "heavens open" reference last night. Then just this morning, before going to the preschool, I read this on p. 28 of Snuffer's book:

In contrast with those who have seen God through their obedience to Him, there is no example of anyone who has used their reasoning to bring them face to face with God. Since no one has returned from the library and reported they met God there, we won't attempt that course.

This made me smile, since my own vision -- which I had already hypothesized might be the same sort of thing Snuffer is writing about -- had involved a "library" in a cave and had also taken place, in terms of real-world location, in my own personal study, or library.

And really, Denver, don't be so quick to assume where people can and cannot come face to face with God! Maybe read some Edna St. Vincent Millay sometime.

There were no lions in my vision, but I had almost immediately associated it with Base's "lions lounging in a library," and so the lion in the cave seemed significant, especially when accompanied by the syncs of the Aesop fable and the blue butterfly.

I went and got my copy of Animalia, intending to look at the L picture again, but I didn't get past the cover. The front cover, which I have already posted about in "The horrible hairy homeward-hurrying hogs of Hieronymus" (which also features Dürer's picture of St. Jerome, Jerry to his friends), has lots of different animals on it, but the lion is by far the most prominent:

And what's that by the lion's right front paw?

I'd never specially noticed the back cover of Animalia before, but it sure got my attention today:

Many things are indeed "of a kind," but I think I lost track of the score long ago.

This is what the Internet was created for

Long live John Lennon and chicks with blue hair.

Wait, hear me out:

The impossible coincidence of “Shawn McCray”

I was helping a junior high student with his English homework. In an exercise to practice superlative adjectives, he had to answer questions about who he thought was the funniest actor, the greatest athlete, etc. He understood the grammar but needed help spelling the names of some of the specific people he had chosen. The problem was that his pronunciation was so garbled that half the time I couldn’t understand who he meant. For example, his favorite actor sounded something like “Asho Spin” — an American, allegedly! — but I never did figure out who that was. He couldn’t remember any of the movies “Asho Spin” had been in, either, which didn’t help.

The greatest athlete, in this student’s opinion, was “Shawn McCray,” which at least sounded more like a real name. I started putting the name as I had heard it into Google, and it suggested “Shawn McCraney.” That turned out not to be an athlete, though, but — of all things — a born-again ex-Mormon who was interviewed by John Dehlin ages ago. (I watched the interview later out of curiosity.)

The student said the “Shawn McCray” we were looking for played basketball for the Memphis Grizzlies, so I looked up that team’s roster, but none of the names were remotely similar to “Shawn McCray.” Finally I just showed the student photos of all the Grizzlies, and he pointed to the one he had had in mind: Ja Morant. I would never in a million years have guessed that that was what he was trying to say!

Here comes the impossible part. Tonight, after listening to the Shawn McCraney interview, I wondered what I’d get if I ignored Google’s suggestion and searched for what I had actually heard: Shawn McCray. The first result that came up was some rando’s Instagram.

Do you see it? There, with the caption “Shawn McCray,” is a photo of a basketball player in a Memphis jersey. My first thought was that there actually is a Shawn McCray on that team, and I’d somehow missed it. In fact, if I’d done this search with my student, I would have told him to write that Shawn McCray was the greatest athlete ever and been none the wiser.

That’s not Shawn McCray, though. It’s an Instagram post by a Shawn McCray about none other than Ja Morant.

The only reason I was searching for Shawn McCray was because that was how I had heard the student’s terrible pronunciation of Ja Morant. Then, just by chance, one of the very first search results for Shawn McCray is a photo of Ja Morant. Absolutely impossible.

Update: I actually listened to two videos about Shawn McCraney. Before the Dehlin interview, I listened to "The Shawn McCraney Collapse & C.U.L.T.," by some Christian bros who are deebly goncerned about Mr. McCraney's "damnable heresy of full preterism" and other such tedious bs. Anyway, at around the 24-minute mark, they show a clip of McCraney's show in which someone says, "I had one foot inside the brick-and-mortar church and one foot outside of it."

It turns out that Shawn McCray -- the random dude who just happened to post about Ja Morant on Instagram -- is the author of an autobiography called One Foot In One Foot Out.

Google no longer even pretends to offer millions of search results

Back in 2022, I documented how, though Google will tell you it has millions of results for your search string, it never actually lets you see more than 500.

If you try using Google now, you’ll find it still never gives you more than 500 results, but at least they’ve stopped lying about it. All fraudulent claims to have millions of results have quietly been removed.

So, uh, good job? Google: now marginally less dishonest.

Anyway, the functionality remains the same. The exact figures will vary depending on what you search for, but on average Google delivers 0.0001% search results and 99.9999% censorship. You think those numbers are exaggerated, but they’re not.

The Internet is no longer meaningfully searchable. It’s time to start relying more on serendipity and word of mouth.

That's us, blue butterfly!

As readers may remember for my May 16 post "'Come buy, come buy,' was still their cry," I have a spreadsheet that shows how many times each English word occurs in my students' textbooks, and on which pages. In that post, sorting the words on a particular page by how many times they had previously occurred in the book led to the serendipitous appearance of "come buy" (call the goblins hobbling down the glen) and the suggestion of a much longer mostly-coherent utterence.

I was recently using the equivalent spreadsheet for a different book. In this sheet, it color-codes each row according to frequency, so that words (or, rather, word-sense mappings) that appear more than 25 but fewer than 50 times in the book have an amber background. (I coded all this months ago, before "amber" had become synchronistically relevant). On Wednesday, having sorted all the words in the book by total occurrences, I noticed this:

Anything with a blue butterfly catches my eye these days, but the sync is more specific than that. In my December 7 post "The lighter and darker Morpho menelaus butterflies," I posted this image:

This features two blue morpho butterflies and the name Amber on a blue background. The spreadsheet has "blue butterfly," with the word blue on an amber background.