A book of Egyptian plates, and The Chip

The sync theme of a round plate or book of plates, also called a “chip,” has recently resurfaced. Today, walking into a used bookstore for the first time in several weeks, I had a hunch that I might find something related to that theme, and such proved to be the case. I found these two books on the same shelf.

This is the first volume of A Description of Egypt — a volume consisting exclusively of “plates.” Both the golden plates and the brass plates were written in some form of “Egyptian.”

And just a few inches away on the shelf, a book titled simply The Chip.

Asking what the Kingdom and its Keys are

A couple of days ago, I listened to two videos by alt-Mormon YouTuber Adam Boyle, "Kingdom and Keys Pt 1 - the battleground" and "The Mystery of KEYS - Kingdom and Keys Pt 2." The first video begins thus:

Okay, we're going to spend a few videos, a series of videos, on the subject of the Kingdom of God and the Keys of the Kingdom, and the reason I need to talk about this is because I realize in talking to people that there is a big misunderstanding about what the Kingdom of God is, where it is, and what the Keys of the Kingdom are, who holds them, and what they're for.

So he makes it clear that he's going to be questioning the traditional Mormon and Catholic understanding of what the Keys of the Kingdom are. In the second video, he identifies the Keys not with priestly or institutional authority but with knowledge:

Our hypothesis is that the Word of God contains the Keys of the Kingdom, and by Keys of the Kingdom means it contains the way, the knowledge of the way to get into the Kingdom of God.

Today I checked the Orthosphere blog, of which I am not really a regular reader, and found a post by JMSmith called "What is the 'Kingdom of Heaven'? and What, Consequently, are its 'Keys'?" in which he also presents alternative interpretations of those concepts. Just as Adam identifies the Keys with knowledge, Smith repeatedly connects them with what he calls "the gnosis of the Gospel."

I'm not really interested in the question of "keys" (a concept absent from both the Fourth Gospel and the Book of Mormon) and don't have anything to say on the topic. I just note the coincidence.

O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool?

My last post, published at 12:00, dealt with a sync between an  old post of mine and a recent one of Galahad Eridanus’s. In both posts, one of the four faces of the Cherubim had been replaced with a turtle. In GE’s post, it was the lion that had been replaced. In my own, it was the man — so, exactly parallel situations, except for the lion/man difference. Furthermore, my post had to do with Alice in Wonderland, and specifically the Gryphon character. GE’s post was published under the name Gryphon.

At around 1:00, an hour after publishing that post, I went to a large outdoor sink near my house to wash something. Inside the sink, sitting perfectly still, was a very wet mouse. It was so unexpected that it took me a second to process it as a living creature. Mice generally run away, so one rarely gets such a close look at them. The level of detail I was able to see, enhanced by the wet fur clinging close to its body, reminded me of Jerry Pinkney’s detailed illustrations for Aesop’s fable of the Lion and the Mouse.

The mouse looked up at me for several seconds, motionless but for its breathing, and then commenced trying to scramble up the steep, slippery sides of the wet sink. “O Mouse,” I said to it mentally, quoting Alice, “do you know the way out of this pool?” It clearly didn’t, and I realized that I was going to save it just as the lion had spared the mouse in the fable — only I, instead of being a lion, was a man.

I managed to get the mouse safely out of the sink, and it scurried away, no doubt to dry itself off with a nice, dull lecture on the history of William the Conqueror.

The round plates of the Gospel of Luke -- with lobsters and turtlified cherubim

Note: I happened to publish this at exactly 12:00 midnight, and thus technically on Thursday. In the post, "today" means Wednesday.

We’re back in the sync-stream, boys.

This afternoon I was in my chapel doing my usual routine -- a five-decade Rosary followed by a meditation on a randomly selected Rider-Waite card.

I started praying the Luminous Mysteries and was nearly three decades in when I realized that today was Wednesday, not Thursday, and that I should have been praying the Glorious Mysteries instead (that being the standard Catholic schedule, which I have always followed). Since I'd already done over half of the Rosary, though, I decided to just keep going with the Luminous Mysteries and do the Glorious Mysteries tomorrow. To my knowledge, this is the first time I've ever accidentally prayed the "wrong" set of Mysteries.

After the Rosary, I drew a card to contemplate and got the Eight of Pentacles:

Although I'd never made the connection before, today the immediate association I made was with Tom Lovell's painting of Mormon engraving his golden plates, an image familiar to every Mormon.

The layout of the two pictures is just very similar, as are little details like the orange bench and the blue tunic. The pentacle the man is engraving -- a circular gold "plate" -- even leans against a wooden block with the same shape as Mormon's own plates. The pentacle in the lower right corner of the card is in the same position as Mormon's circular shield. One pentacle lies on the floor on the left side of the picture, and Mormon has put a document on the floor in the same place (the subject of my 2020 post "What book is Mormon trampling underfoot?")

Mormon's plates were rectangular, and other plates in Mormon lore -- the brass plates, the small plates, and the 24 Jaredite plates -- are typically pictured in that shape as well. However, the idea of round gold plates is something that has come up in my syncs quite a few times. Of these various round-plate references, the one that stuck in my mind as I contemplated the card was a 2020 dream that had featured a "round book," so after concluding my meditation, I searched my own blog for that phrase. The first hit that came back was not the dream itself ("How can these books not exist?") but a post from last summer called "The Gospel of Luke on lobsterback"). I was going to scroll past that to the post I was looking for, but my attention was arrested by a picture of a big red lobster.

This morning, I had been observing another teacher working with preschoolers. He had a dozen or so laminated cards ("plates" of a sort), each with a picture and an English word, and he had laid these out in front of him on a small rug in a way suggestive of a Tarot reader's spread. Most of these were extremely simple words -- dog, bag, red, that kind of thing -- and the one card that stood out as different, having a word that was both less common word and phonetically more complicated, was the one that said lobster and had a big red lobster on it. It struck me as vaguely significant at the time, and seeing the lobster in the Gospel of Luke post definitely felt like a sync-fairy calling card.

Reading that post, I found that my train of associations had taken me from "lobsterback:" to British soldiers to Britain as Another Planet, the title of one of the books in the "round book" dream. Then, incredibly, the post ends with this paragraph (emphasis added):

This idea that a "round book" of plates has something to do with the "Gospel of Luke" received minor but interesting synchronistic confirmation today. I was, for complex psychological reasons, praying the Rosary while lying supine on a tile floor. On Thursdays, one prays the Luminous Mysteries, or Mysteries of Light (Luke means "light"), and as I was doing the third of these five meditations (Luke is the third Gospel), a single copper coin fell out of my pocket and onto the floor -- a little metal disc.

Yes, the post specifically mentions that the Luminous Mysteries are to be prayed on Thursdays (not on Wednesdays, as I had inadvertently done today), and it connects the "round book of plates" with a coin. The suit called Pentacles in the Rider-Waite is in more traditional Tarots known as the suit of Coins. In fact, the picture of the Eight of Pentacles I used in this post was taken from the Wikipedia article "Eight of Coins." The coin fell out of my pocket during the third Luminous Mystery, which is also the one I was on today when I realized I was doing the “wrong” set.

I also realized that the suit of Coins or Pentacles corresponds to the Gospel of Luke. A longstanding Christian iconographic tradition identifies each of the four Evangelists with one of the four faces of the cherubim, which in turn correspond to the four fixed signs of the zodiac. Luke is associated with the bull, which is Taurus, which is Earth. In the Tarot, Coins or Pentacles is universally associated with that same element.

Now the plot thickens.

Last night, YouTube notified me that Galahad Eridanus had released a new video, after nearly a year and a half of silence. I watched the video but found it a bit underwhelming. A few things he said in the video, though, made it clear that he had been posting on Substack during the period of video silence. I went to his Substack, not expecting much, and read the most recent post, “The Puzzle Method.”

To illustrate the method of the title, Eridanus gave an example of a Jungian “active imagination” exercise he had done and how he had decoded its cryptic symbolism. In the exercise, he had seen a set of four images: a man’s head, a bulldozer, a bird, and a turtle. Noticing the “bull” in the word bulldozer, he identified this foursome as corresponding to the four faces of the cherubim -- with one puzzling exception:

Three out of four seemed to be clear allusions to the heads of a cherub. This did not seem accidental. But why the turtle where a lion should be?

The four heads of the cherub, except that one of them has been replaced with a turtle. This is such an extremely specific sync with one of my past posts here that it's hard to believe I didn't notice it immediately. I didn't, though. Not until that big red lobster entered the chat did I think of the Lobster Quadrille from Alice and my post last June, "Gryphon + Mock Turtle = Cherubim," about the illustration that accompanies it.

In that post, I wrote:

Mock turtle soup is traditionally made with a calf's head, and so the Mock Turtle in Alice is portrayed as a turtle with the head, tail, and back hooves of a calf. Its companion, the Gryphon, is of course part lion and part eagle.

This comes very close to matching the four component creatures of the Cherubim. According to Ezekiel, the Cherubim had the faces of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle. In John’s adaptation of this imagery in Revelation, the ox actually becomes a calf. In the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, we have these same four -- except that the man is replaced with a turtle.

I went on to give some lame astrological justification for the turtle as a stand-in for the man, while Eridanus is more direct in identifying the turtle as simply wrong. He interprets this "faulty" representation of the cherubim as meaning that "the part of me that should be like a lion is currently more akin to a turtle" and that this fault must be rectified.

Anyway, it's an extremely specific and unlikely link. How many people in the whole history of the universe have come up with the idea of the four faces of the cherubim except that one is replaced with a turtle? Just us two?

Eridanus's turtle had nothing to do with the Mock Turtle or the Alice books. There is nevertheless another very specific link. Although he goes by Galahad Eridanus on YouTube, and his blog URL is galahaderidanus.substack.com, his username on Substack is actually Gryphon -- the same unusual spelling used by Lewis Carroll for the Mock Turtle's dance partner.

Arise from the dust and be men

Yesterday, I received an email that included this analogy for the experience of bipolar disorder:

I liken a bipolar episode to the tide coming in on a sandcastle -- you can see each succeeding wave getting closer and closer, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, and then the tide slowly eats away at the sandcastle bit by bit until there is nothing left but swirling water and blank sand. The tide always goes out again -- always-- but the sandcastle doesn’t just magically pop up again as soon as the coast is clear -- you are left with this expanse of blank sand that you then have to rebuild on from zero.

In this analogy, the destructive tide is an aspect of the self, of the same person who built the sandcastle in the first place. Rather than an external destructive force, it's a case of the manic-self or the depressed-self undoing what the normie-self has accomplished.

I realized that, while bipolar is an extreme case, all of us have experienced this to some degree: A particular aspect of the personality takes over and undoes the work of the aspect that was previously in control. In my childhood journals, there's a very funny sequence of two entries. The first lays out my future career plan in considerable detail -- I was going to do biological research in South America -- and insists with great earnestness that I am absolutely committed to this and that "it can and will be accomplished." The very next entry says simply, "Don't pay any attention to what I wrote yesterday. I don't know what got into me."

I was reminded of a quote from Ouspensky, which I looked up last night and pasted into a draft email, thinking I would perhaps reference it in my reply to the sandcastle email. This is the passage I copied:

Unless he attains inner unity man can have no ‘I,’ can have no will. The concept of “will” in relation to a man who has not attained inner unity is entirely artificial. The whole of life is composed of small things which we continually obey and serve. Our ‘I’ continually changes as in a kaleidoscope. Every external event which strikes us, every suddenly aroused emotion, becomes caliph for an hour, begins to build and govern, and is, in its turn, as unexpectedly deposed and replaced by something else. And the inner consciousness, without attempting to disperse the illusory designs created by the shaking of the kaleidoscope and without understanding that in reality the power that decides and acts is not itself, endorses everything and says about these moments of life in which different external forces are at work, “This is I, this is I.”

Also last night, I finished my latest rereading of the First Book of Nephi. Thus today I started the Second Book, where I read this, from Lehi's dying words to his wayward sons Laman and Lemuel:

And now that my soul might have joy in you, and that my heart might leave this world with gladness because of you, that I might not be brought down with grief and sorrow to the grave, arise from the dust, my sons, and be men, and be determined in one mind and in one heart, united in all things, that ye may not come down into captivity (2 Ne. 1:21).

"Arise from the dust, my sons, and be men." I'd always thought this basically meant to cowboy up, but a few months ago I read D. John Butler's In the Language of Adam, which proposes that Lehi's language is alluding to an ancient ceremony in which, as in the modern Mormon temple ritual, the initiate assumes the role of Adam or Eve. The ritual command "Arise from the dust and be a man!" would be a synthesis of the Genesis 1 creation account (where God creates by commanding things to come into being) and the Genesis 2 account (where God forms man out of dust).

Not until today did I connect this command with what immediately follows it in Lehi's speech -- "be determined in one mind and in one heart, united in all things." Back in July 2024, in "The brown emmets, the Ace of Hearts, and drinking absinthe with yaks," I discussed "one heart and one mind" language elsewhere in Mormon scripture and proposed an alternative interpretation:

"They were of one heart and one mind" -- that could be read to mean that all the people shared a single mind, a group or "hive" mind (like that of a colony of emmets), which does not sound desirable. Another reading, though, is that each of them had one heart and one mind -- that is, an integrated self, not one torn apart by conflicting motives. "Purify your hearts, ye double minded," says James (James 4:8).

If we take this latter reading of "one mind and one heart," then it is clear how it ties in with the imagery of Adam being commanded to create himself out of the dust. Dust is in essence a collection of unconnected particles which do not cohere in any way to form a single thing -- ""the dust of the earth moveth hither and thither, to the dividing asunder" (Hel. 12:8), like the particles of glass in Ouspensky's kaleidoscope. Kaleidoscopic man "has not attained inner unity" -- has not yet become "of dust a living soul" (Moses 6:59). To do that, he who was dust must cohere "in one mind and in one heart, united" -- an integrated man, with a single will rather than Ouspensky's succession of caliphs-for-an-hour. Laman and Lemuel -- trying to murder Nephi one minute, ready to worship him the next; always repenting but never getting any better -- certainly seem to be the playthings of such a revolving-door caliphate.

The "one heart and one mind" language is usually understood to mean being one with others, not being one within ourselves, but according to James the one type of unity depends on the other: "From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?" (James 4:1). Interpersonal conflict stems from intrapersonal conflict.

Tree of Life syncs

I went on a random walk this morning. In the past, I have done truly random walks, with the destination chosen by a computer program using a random number generator, but this time it was just "random" in the informal sense. I went to an unfamiliar part of town and just started walking, turning left or right whenever moved to do so by whim.

Synchronicity, after a prolonged period of great intensity, has for the most part returned to baseline levels in my life. These random walks, though, always seem to bring syncs. The first thing that caught my eye was a cell phone accessory shop with two big signs that said "L.D.S."

This apparently represented the three syllables of the shop's name, Ladesign, but of course the usual meaning of LDS is Latter-day Saints, a.k.a. Mormons.

Two minutes later, I passed a shop with a sign that said "D&C: Path to A Healthy Life."

Seeing this right after "L.D.S.," I naturally thought of the Mormon meaning of D&C -- The Doctrine and Covenants, a volume of scripture used along with the Bible and the Book of Mormon.

Two is a coincidence, but three is a pattern, so I began wondering whether a third Mormon-related shop sign would turn up soon. Three minutes later (these time periods are exact, based on timestamps on the photos I took), I found this:

The Mormon connection may not be immediately obvious here, but that logo shows a large building next to a tree bearing white fruit. This corresponds to the Book of Mormon's most iconic image: Lehi's vision of the Tree of Life. In this vision, the Tree bears fruit which is "most sweet, above all that I ever before tasted" and "white, to exceed all the whiteness that I had ever seen" (1 Ne. 8:11). Nearby, across the river from the Tree, is "a great and spacious building" (1 Ne. 8:26).

Recall that the second Mormon-looking sign I had seen said "Path to A Healthy Life." Another important element in Lehi's vision was "the path which led to the tree" (1 Ne. 8:22). Since the tree in question is the Tree of Life, the path could be called the Path to Life.

The sign with the tree bearing white fruit and the great and spacious building said "apple 203 brunch." I thought that the number could be read as a scripture reference -- either 20:3 (chapter 20, verse 3) or 2:03 (chapter 2, verse 3) -- and wondered if any verses with such references were relevant. Searching the Bible for the word apple, I found this:

As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste (Song of Solomon 2:3).

"His fruit was sweet to my taste" is very close to the language of Lehi's vision.

Besides the white tree and the building, the sign also features a hamburger the bun of which is an apple. The apple has been cut in half and now serves as "bread." This ties in with another 203 scripture:

And it came to pass that he brake bread again and blessed it, and gave to the disciples to eat (3 Ne. 20:3).

This is Jesus, and he later states that the bread represents himself: "He that eateth this bread eateth of my body" (3 Ne. 20:8). When Nephi sees his own version of the Tree of Life vision, it is strongly implied that the Tree represents Mary and the fruit is Jesus. (See 1 Ne. 11:20-21.) Jesus is both the Fruit of Life and the Bread of Life, so the fruit serving as bread on the sign makes sense.

Update: Almost exactly two days after taking the photo above with the white apples -- 47 hours and 41 minutes later, to be precise -- I ran across another sign with a white apple on it:

Neither aliens nor animals are biological robots, and we shouldn’t be, either.

Yesterday I bought and started reading the Kindle edition of Whitley Strieber’s latest book, The Fourth Mind. On page 47, he criticizes those who think of Grays as biological robots:

When we call them names like “biorobots” what we are really saying is that we don’t think that it’s necessary, or even possible, to understand them. We must not continue with this, because if we don’t understand them and they are hostile, then they will prevail. If they are not hostile, it is even more important that we attempt to achieve a meaningful understanding of them.

Today, something I was looking up in connection with the Book of Mormon (I no longer remember what specifically) led me to a blog called Science Is True and the Church Is Too, and I clicked around a bit through some of the posts, eventually ending up at one called “Animal Intelligence 2019.” This quotation was prominently featured there, in a large font on a shaded background:

“Animals are biological robots. Very good robots because God programmed them. As with good robots they have the limited ability to adapt.”–Unnamed Ken Ham follower

This of course reminded me of what I had read in Strieber, so I went to look it up. I first put in a bookmark so I wouldn’t lose my place and then ran a search for biorobot. Two hits came back, the first of which was the reference I was looking for. The second one I hadn’t gotten to yet in my reading.

After finding the biorobot reference on p. 47, I tapped to get back to my bookmark, which was on p. 57. At first I thought the bookmark hadn’t worked, because the biorobot passage was still on the screen. Then I realized that the second biorobot reference, the one I hadn’t read yet, was actually on p. 57, precisely where I had put my bookmark! What are the odds? Here’s the second and last use of the word:

When we say the word “biorobot,” we assume something simple, a kind of basic creature there only to do the bidding of its controllers. But that cannot be the case here, the reason being those larger brains. The idea, therefore, that they are simple robots must be approached with caution. They are not simple, and while they are fabricated, they may not be robots in the same sense that we mean the term.

After experiencing these biorobot coincidences, I checked Bruce Charlton’s blog and found a new post titled “The lesson of so-called AI: Most of Man's ‘thinking’ is just ‘thinking-about’, like the abstract symbolic token-juggling of Artificial Intelligence.” The post doesn’t use the word robot, but the point it is making is that most people most of the time (and many people all of the time) are limited to a sort of “thinking” that is essentially no different from what a machine could do. Bruce, too, is talking about “biological robots.” The point he is making is a very Gurdjieffian one, which is another link back to Strieber.

I will restore all things that were put in the dish

For the past week or so, my dreams have had a peculiar character. Each night, a single sentence (different each night, I think) is repeated again and again, with an accompanying visual display that is not participatory like an ordinary dream, While dreaming, I understand that the sentence is something I have to learn, and that it is being repeated so that I will remember it -- but nevertheless all memory of its content evaporates within a few seconds of waking. So I know that I have had dreams of this kind for the past six or seven nights, but I have no idea what the repeated sentences were.

This morning, though, I acted quickly enough, immediately scribbling down last night's repeated sentence before it had had time to evanesce. The sentence was:

I will restore all things that were put in the dish.

Well! Not quite as obviously profound as one might have hoped. My first association was with this bit in Dr. Seuss's One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish:

Ish is just the Hebrew word for "man." Ish's wish dish is a flat plate (a golden plate, in fact), so the fish appear on it rather than in it. A dish to put things in would have to be deeper, more like a bowl or cup than a plate. And that reminded me of something.

Yesterday morning, I had drawn a Tarot card at random and spent about 15 minutes contemplating it. This is something I do from time to time. It's not a "reading," really, since I don't pose a question or anything. I just get a card and meditate on its symbolism for a bit. Yesterday, this was the card I drew:

Waite's explanation of this image in the Pictorial Key is that the man "contemplates a fish rising from a cup to look at him. It is the pictures of the mind taking form." The pictures of the mind take form. What is imagined materializes. I wish for fish, and I get fish right on my dish.

Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? (Matt. 7:7-10)

This idea of getting what you wish for is associated with the idea of restoration in the Book of Mormon:

And it is requisite with the justice of God that men should be judged according to their works; and if their works were good in this life, and the desires of their hearts were good, that they should also, at the last day, be restored unto that which is good.

And if their works are evil they shall be restored unto them for evil. Therefore, all things shall be restored to their proper order, every thing to its natural frame—mortality raised to immortality, corruption to incorruption—raised to endless happiness to inherit the kingdom of God, or to endless misery to inherit the kingdom of the devil, the one on one hand, the other on the other—

The one raised to happiness according to his desires of happiness, or good according to his desires of good; and the other to evil according to his desires of evil; for as he has desired to do evil all the day long even so shall he have his reward of evil when the night cometh (Alma 41:3-5).

Whatever you "put in the dish" by wishing for it, it will be restored to you.

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.

⁂

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.