The Rapture that wasn't

It is sad that people emptied out their bank accounts to help the "false rapture prophet" advertise his findings.  On the other hand, what they did was to try their best to tell everybody about what they believed was important to know.

Harold Camping is maybe delusional, possibly onto something with the numerological interpretation, seemingly a "false prophet" in the Revelations sense, but he's certainly, absolutely made a huge blunder. 

I think at least some of his problem is his vehemence against other denominations. One of the biggest things that is supposed to happen prior to the Second Coming is the unification of all the churches, which in his writing he indicates are wholly subverted by the forces of evil. They are clearly not perfect, the recent abundant lawsuits relating to child abuse/molestation illustrating that, but at the very least he is using the documentation and teaching they've preserved for centuries to make his predictions and this should count for something.

He certainly seemed to apply some whiz-bang numerology, it is interesting. But there are things that make this year auspicious other than numerology. For one, the Orthodox and Western  church calendars are in sync regarding key dates (a "unification" of sorts).

My thought is that if there is to be some divine event around this time, it would happen on or after 6/2, which is the day of Ascension, or 6/12. which is the first day of Pentecost. Because it makes a wonderful poetic sense for a return on these days vis a vis the church calendar.

But as to the exact hour, as it's written: an unkown.

More about neutrinos, some independent research that intersects with my intuition

This intrigues me: a presentation regarding neutrinos and time and also the notions of "extra dimensions" and sterile neutrinos, which are even more weakly interacting than other neutrinos.

Now, I do not understand all of this, but the assertion is that string theory supports the concept of sterile neutrinos being able to travel extra-dimensionally. The presentation is a bit tongue in cheek, and mostly centered around the possibility of time travel, but it is interesting. It also makes me wonder if "sterile neutrinos" could account for the solar neutrinos that appear to be "missing" (the solar neutrino problem) but there are other theories about that.

But my wonder about neutrinos was not so much about the nature of them vis a vis the spacetime continuum, but more about whether or not brains were affected by them. It is a notion that I cannot prove, but the thought is that because we are basically swimming in a neutrino shower, that the stream of neutrinos might be useful for something with respect to life.

I'm wondering if neutrinos passing through our electrical brains might assist brain function in a useful way. The weak force has a very limited reach so it's effects are contained to very small particles within a very small range, and our brains are intricate bio-electric organs having many structures whose exact purpose has not yet been deterimined. Anyway, I am learning more and more about neutrinos by wondering about this, it might be completely silly and weirdly speculative, but the afore-linked presentation indicates that other far more educated actual physicists are not above being at least a little bit silly and weirdly speculative.

They of course propose an experiment to determine their hypothesis, I really can't propose an experiment to determine if naturally abundant neutrinos have an effect on the electricity brain just yet. I'm wondering if they have any affect on electricity at all, if there is some way to prove that. It might be something to consider if there is a sort of material or mechanism that somehow is both a conductor and a "neutrino sponge", whereby one could run an electrical current through that special type of conductor and a control conductor, to see if there are differences.

A prophetic calculation based on biblical scripture and MIDI to DMX

This http://www.ebiblefellowship.com/outreach/tracts/may21/ online pamphlet is interesting in both its premise and brevity.

This is actually pulls together some very good research regarding the nature of the dates and the mapping to our modern calendar in a concise manner. If true, it is not particulary happy news for those on the material plane, but we'll know in a week.

I was contacted by someone who I haven't heard from in a long while, who needed some information about controlling lights via MIDI, in order to synch them with music. This requires a way to send MIDI out from the thing creating the music (in this caseAbleton Live http:///www.ableton.com ) and then to convert that into DMX control messages which you you can do with this. There is a trick in knowing what MIDI messages will do which things, but this is all very interesting.

oddly reminded of something funny...

Somebody tweeted something about a fax, and it reminded me of something that happened a long time ago...

A young man was hired by a company I worked for as an intern. He was in college, he was from a wealthy family in another country (somewhere in Central or South America).

He was handsome and had that kind of "I'm destined to be your boss" sort of air, and he may well have been. I recall some general guidance that was dispensed by someone in the know, to the effect of him being easily insulted or slighted, and to work with him patiently. He would only be working there for a short while.

At some point I found myself helping him in a task that involved driving him to a bank. He had some questions about some of the equipment at the office, in particular the fax machine.

"How does it work?" he asked.

Having taken some courses in digital technology, I was semi-confident in my explanation, which went something like this, "Well, I'm not an expert, but in general it scans the image it is going to send, detects where the dark and light areas are, and then a scan-line at a time, makes 1s or 0s to indicate light or dark. Then it sends that string of encoded information through the phone line to a receiving machine, that reproduces the scanned lines using that same infomation to drive something that marks the paper accordingly."

I thought that was a pretty fair explanation, and explaining it also kind of clarified my own understanding of some things about encoding and decoding.

"Ah, ok... But how does it send the paper?"

Some thoughts about God ("Sci-Fi Primary Deity")

Artists and people interested in art talk about expression and expressing things, and I think ideally that "expression" means that they are exuding some thing from (hopefully) some deep inner place common to all humans, and that is what makes "ideal art" of "great art" timeless and/or more than the sum of its parts (more than the medium and methods/techniques and material form of its execution). They also talk about "creativity" and "creation" thereby raising the notion that the activity associated with producing art brings something out of nothing, or at least something new of of something existing but as yet "un-expressed:", which (again) in the best sense is something timeless and over-archingly universal to human experience before, now or henceforth.

I preface this by saying I was once an avid science fiction reader. I still like science fiction a great deal, and think it is a great way to illustrate a lot of concepts and pass a lot of allegorical information, but don't have as much time to read it, unfortunately. So I use some science fiction here.

So here is where it gets a little convoluted but... there are theosophists who have talked about "information" being "encoded" into art, and things like the "DaVinci Code", where it is suggested that some conscious, semi-conscious or "channeled" conscious effort or agency inserts messages in to art.

Gurdjieff talks about "objective art", that art which "creates itself": Gurdjieff talks about "objective art" which contains a message that is 'encoded' into the work: "The difference between objective art and subjective art is that in objective art the artist really does 'create,' that is he makes what he intended, he puts into his work whatever ideas and feelings he wants to put into it. And the action of this work upon men is absolutely definite; they will, of course each according to his own level, receive the same ideas and the same feelings that the artist wanted to transmit to them. There can be nothing accidental either in the creation or in the impressions of objective art."

Now, Gurdjieff was very interested in art and the execution of art as it was applied to the control or extension of humans, seemed less so interested in the actual nature of the source of creation, and he talks about the more pure nature of his concept of "objective art" to some extent in a way which is indicative but maybe inaccurate (music having an "inner octave", a subtle structural complexity that can be sensed on a different level, citing the music of a snake charmer, which may or may not be the actual mechanism by which the snake is "charmed".).

C.G. Jung says"The essence of a work of art is not to be found in the personal idiosyncrasies that creep into it—indeed, the more there are of them, the less it is a work of art—but in its rising above the personal and speaking from the mind and heart of the artist to the mind and heart of mankind". He theorizes about a "collective unconscious" that all humans (in fact, all life forms with nervous systems) share. We can postulate that the act of creating "objective art:" somehow causes that collective unconscious to permeate the artist's creative state in a way such that it finds its way through the artist and then into the art:

Then, the whole 'creation' thing leads us to consider its antithesis, destruction, which leads us to physics (can't destroy anything, can just transform it into something else) into metaphysics (what are we actually creating/destroying and why, is all "creation" of the same "spirit" or "essence"-- that is, is everything that is created done in the same way and/or at the same behest that EVERYTHING was created, indeed if we "transform" something through destruction are we acting in the same spirit-- and is it true "we" are really doing the creating/destroying anyway?).

So that is some shit to be saying in parentheses, but there it is.

Now, there are theologies (metaphysical systems) that indicate that various forces (light and dark) vie for control of the universe and as such manifest themselves through "bad" and "good" actions. There is an interesting Theosophical motto that reads "There is no religion higher than truth" which of course cannot be argued with, [edit] certainly a most true religion is the "righter" religion, and a religion found to be "mostly untrue" is undeniably flawed.

[edit] What is "THE" most true? I think it does have a lot to do with what resonates best with the "truth seeker in question", because you won't apply the effort into divining the truth from something that is too obscure or too hard to understand or with too much weird baggage. That is only opinion/speculation, because I can only speak for myself from my own experience.

Then, there is "true" "True Enough", and "True", and also of course when you get into this area words start to fail--  suffice that"True Enough" is a subset of "True", but does not lead indefatigably to "True". In general, a religion can relate inaccuracies with regard to certain aspects that are peripheral to its core thrust and still be "True Enough" and "True". 

For example, that the Bible may or may not describe the precise mechanisms of creation exactly actually does not pertain to its validity in respect to its description of God's relationship to man, any more than a book of microwave recipies need provide an in-depth explanation and schematic of the components of a microwave oven or the methods for its manufacture.

Also, I think now that "True Enough" and "True" are sometimes outweighed by "Startlingly Insightful". It is Startlingly Insightful that the Bible indicates creation as happening in stages, almost identical to the stages of evolution and even astrophysical phenomenon as put forth in science, given that it precedes this science by thousands of years.

But, latching on to those things that are "Startlingly Insightful" can also be dangerous, because they can be red herrings-- they appeal to us emotionally, but in the overal scheme of Truth they are illustrative yet not always substantive. To arrive at real Truth, Pathos and Logos must work in accord, in the way an argument in court employs both rhetorical appeals and reason based on evidence.

Something that is reassuring is when a religion also promotes those tools that arrive at the truth as part and parcel of its teaching. Conversely, we have to consider that a religion that does not include these tools is counter to Truth.

So I've read some things about God and also about Jesus, because of course the Startling thing about Jesus is that he returns from the dead. Not only does he "manifest" himself, but he manifests himself in the physical form that he had when he was killed. So, after the resurrection, he walks among his followers but cannot be Biologically Functional. That is to say, if Bones McCoy was to hook Him up to the sick back apparatus, He might not not read as being humanly alive.

Why do I say this? Well it could be true because his body was not in a condition to be functioning. He was not only badly beaten, pierced, cut and crucified in a way that caused his key biological systems to fail, but was stabbed with a spear so that "water and blood poured forth". Not trickled, but poured.

So even  if Jesus were "divinely defribillated", His biological body wouldn't seem like it could continue to function without significant surgical repair and blood transfusions. However, the account indicates the wounds in limbs and side still extant, so no such repair occurred. But also these are details, the mechanical point is not so important.

What is important is that God (if god is God, the True God) is able to rewind, edit and fast forward time, and overlay, co-locate, and otherwise manipulate space and matter. There are lots of historical dumb arguments by intelligent people, arguments that had people calling one another heretics because of details based primarily on *sequential* thinking, and which caused torturing and killing and so on that completely miss this.

But, if like in a science fiction book, you give your Primary Deity character the power to do these things, operating in multiple dimensions, then everything happening in a subset of dimensions becomes very easy to explain. Maybe harder to explain in a science fiction frame of mind is why such a powerful being would even bother with us? Science fiction beings are always out for power or conquest. There is the "saving the world" theme, but from whom? Who could even pose a threat to such a powerful sciene fiction being?  You get into "why do bad things happen" etc. at some point, but maybe the most exciting parts of the sceince fiction story would be how the Primary Deity exercises His power to influence all the things that do happen and hoping for a really happy ending (or, if that sounds too doom-laden,  a really exciting set of unending sequels).