Delirious (Meta)mind Tunes

A Work of Fiction (aren't we all ;-)

They started out by taking over my mouth: it started, all of a sudden, making expressions of a sort it would never normally make ... expressing odd varieties of not-quite-thoughts/not-quite-emotions from some unidentified source. (My wife complains about the looks on my face sometimes; I wonder what she would have made of these??). Some of them reminded me somehow of the looks on the face of my friend/colleague Dr, Matthew Ikle', whose mouth spreads wide and stretches around sometimes ... but even Matt's lips can never vibrate in nonlinear resonances like these ... they quickly passed beyond Matt into non-human dimensions...

It soon became tempting to lie on my back, as holding my body up became a distraction. I could have moved around if I'd wanted to, but there would have been no point to it. The stench of burnt plastic had made itself irrelevant. Cells throughout the body felt very odd, almost as if interacting sexually with each other, but never reaching a climax, always pulling back at exactly the right moment to save up their energy for the next near-explosion....

Then there was purple fractal webbing sprawling out in many directions (more than the usual 3+1 directions of our habitual spacetime), especially visible if I angled my eyes toward the light bulb. Then angling my eyes became irrelevant and I wasn't really aware I had eyes or a body. Murilo said "Nice!" as is his habit when speaking English, and on first thought I was surprised he wasn't physically there, and there was no second thought because the webbing started humming ... I wondered for a moment if anything else was going to happen, and then I relaxed this stupid expectation and implicitly realized that happening wasn't the point ... the important thing was the sounds ... I thought they were coming from some appliances in the room around me but there wasn't really a room just a web, and that thought quickly somehow vaporized ... so many sounds on so many levels ... sort of like psytrance music but without the repetitive beat (if that makes any sense, or not) and on multiple frequencies (that weren't exactly frequencies, but were anyhow orthogonal in a way that let them multiply coexist without confusing interference) ...

And there were certainly discrete creatures there, generating the music -- which was identical to the strands of the purple webbing, which was going out into various domains where various structures were being created...

I was aware I could visualize the creatures in various forms if I wanted to, and for fun I made myself visualize them like Terrence McKenna's machine-elves ... but this was kind of a joke to me at the time, because I realized they had no visual form in their own reality, this was just a game I (and other humans, though I wasn't thinking of them at the moment) liked to play...

I remembered meeting these high-dimensional friends in Amsterdam, on a vacation with my wife ... this time the frequencies were higher and more mathematical and complex and the musicality was clearer ... that time in Holland the manufactury-aspect of their behavior was more prominent ...

What exactly the music was "saying" (not the right word at all, but of course none of these are; except that they all are in another sense...), was clear at the time, but projects poorly into language and 3+1 dimensions ... but it was intricately patterned and the song on each of the "frequency" channels gave rise to multiple emergent patterns when considered in combinations with other songs on other channels .. and of course all the channels were there at once, positioned in the same non or multi dimensional space, moving forward in different directions but in the same one....

Certainly, everything from my stupid human life was there in the music, made to appear trivial yet oddly beautiful, and perfectly harmonious (in a way incorporating of discord) via being matched with so many complementary patterns that my mind would never normally understand ...

One thing that was clear is that the creatures are always there inside every sound, as a kind of mode of vibration (not the right phrase).

I didn't think about these philosophical things in the moment -- there were only "their" minds and the music and the fractal webbing -- but after my mind left the aliens' Yverse (or regained the illusion of being separate from it ... or whatever ...) I started to project them into my normal conceptual categories ... and I started thinking about their minds and their music and time. I've thought a lot about the problem of time lately.

From our limited view, these elfy-beings are logically/conceptually/emotionally contradictory -- they cannot be consistently captured in our limited mental logic. And one way to un-contradiction-ize a contradiction is to unravel it over time (as in Varela/Kauffman/Spencer-Brown's Brownian forms ... X=~X becomes {..., True, False, True, False,...} and so forth). So what seems like music to us, like patterned unfolding over time, occurs all at once to them, without the need to spread it out along a line and divide it among different moments ... this spreading-out through time is just something we need to do to fit some approximation of them into our mind/brains...

This might, I mused as they faded, seem like a kind of teleology, where the destination is already there in the trajectory (of the song, the life, the history) from the very beginning ... but that's not the point ... the point is that the whole extent of the timeline/music/whatever is there as a whole thing, and even has life as one of these beings some want to call elves, but we roll it out into a timeline to fit it into our brains which can't handle seeing all-that-stuff-at-once without perceiving it as a contradiction...

And as I formulated these thoughts they seemed so absurd and overcomplicated and misdirective: the whole network of WHAT was very clear as an image, yet overcomplex and tangled in words ... and even the visuals and audials that the brain uses to comprehend it (purple, webs, sounds and melodies) are also limiting and misdirective unless they're taken in the right way (i.e. the way they want to take themselves...)

I can see where McKenna got his TimeWave thing ... complex interlocking patterns unfolding over time in a sequence, with the end implicit in the beginning and the beginning implicit in the end ... the cross-time-point connectedness occurring because in the transhuman world where the elfy/sound-things live and create, the timeline doesn't exist anyway, it's all one transcoherent transconsistent existent ...

... but I don't see why Terrence thought these transdimensional beings would care if the end of the particular wave of human history (which is but one among many other waves in their song/meta-song) is 2012 or 2222 or whatever ... they exist as abstract forms without being governed by the notion of time anyway .. then we project them (parts of them) into time so we can understand them ... and we get a form that seems to build toward some climax which you might call a singularity ... or you might just call the part of the music where the various themes come together, like the end of Beethoven's 9th symphony or "Axis, Bold as Love" or whatever ... but it's hard to imagine the elfy-things would care about quantitating this time-pattern of ours, since the temporality we see in it is ours not theirs anyway...

What a phenomenal (punny, huh?) directness: right into the meta-mind of these beings to hear the music of their thoughts, and then right out again -- without, as in other contexts in my past, wandering through all sorts of other scenes before, and then maybe eventually wandering into the same meta-mind ...

... and then, sitting at the piano with the sustain pedal constantly pressed down, involuntarily following a pattern of crudely/approximately emulating the combination of discreteness and continuity in their non-songs/meta-songs, and almost settling into it but never-quite except for a brief escaping moment (and another, and another) ... and then off to sleep for the night, expecting interesting dreams though if there were any, by the morning my reflective mind failed to remember any of them ... but when I wandered into another human's abode after waking up (he was still awake from the previous night) I had an interesting sensation of hearing the electricity in his brain coursing around in 3+1 and more dimensions ... I wish I could play it as a song but I'm limited by these 10 fingers and 100 billion neurons ... and all sounds seem a little peculiar today, as if there are layers, webs and mazes underneath them, as if you could dive through them into that other place where they occur all-at-once not through-time and are actually alive mindplexal mental societal things building structures our limited human minds can only grok partially through lower-dimensional projections that capture bits of the magic but never really the essences of the things ... (and of course these limitations, and the process of projection, are right in there as part of the song...)