The chapter was originally written way back when I first tried a technique called VILD. At the end of the session, I heard the hypnagogic phrase "awesome possum," which I'm sure is not a precognitive reference to the video game that I'd never heard of till I googled the phrase. At the end of this chapter I will reveal what came of this phrase. But first:
The Moment only appears to be created by the collision of the past and the future in the form of the slippery escape artist we call "present time". I don't think the Moment is really a part of time itself. It seems to transcend time, while time itself seems to be a mental construct, just the 4th harmonic or awareness, which can be experienced in other ways than just the illusion of time.
Fourness is the 2nd harmonic of 2ness, the octave of 2ness. My 4ness dream body is a duplex body, it's twins. It's usually personified as brothers and/or work partners dressed for some certain job of work. Before I got familiar with them (which woke them up), they appeared as blobs on a couch, nightmarish couch potatos, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But once I got the practice in gear, they started appearing in dreams just preceding milestone experiences, for example workers building a fence (the Urumara) or doormen letting me through the Urumara directly through a double glass door in a glass wall at the foot of my astral bed. Early in my practice I named the 4ness body Nitpicker and Potwatcher. Fourness is reflected by time, and just today I realized what is timelike about them.
Nitpicker is obsessed with the past. Potwatcher is obsessed with the future. Or more succinctly, one aspect of 4ness is the future and one aspect of 4ness is the past. Yeah, but what about the present? Well the present is the only thing that exists. The past and the future--which we can't shake off, and neither of which actually exists--meet at the Moment, which is the only thing that does exist, but it's never there, because it won't stop moving! Changing our thoughts about the past and future affects what choices appear to us in the Moment. Deleting thoughts about the past and future would delete most of our thoughts, if not all of them, while thoughts about the present Moment can't keep up with the never-ending flux of that Moment.
Science got it wrong when they named time a "dimension". Threeness is the human form or physicality or what some people are calling "reality" as if reality could possibly be an exclusive club where members vote to decide what's real. Like all bigots, these Clubbers as I call them--or Typicals might be a better word--are just afraid of anyone who represents the unknown. So people who are obsessed with telling the truth don't live very long because Clubbers are a violent folk. This is because they're powerful--ever hear of "power in numbers"?--and they're powerful because they are connected to each other. We all create our own worlds, and Clubbers create consensus reality together, through their 3ness, their connection to each other. They agree the world into existence and we Outpost Scouts just live here like foreign war correspondents, bitten by stray bullets and whining as if we hadn't begged for the assignment. Well maybe we didn't. I often think that perhaps we just landed here... but then how could we have just landed here if we didn't resonate with the place in some way?
Fourness is actually the antidote to obsessive 3ness. While the bigoted apes who are still stuck in threeness throw their weight around, we slightly advanced mutants who are stuck in fourness are obsessed with values, control, righteousness, the best way to do things, systems, techniques, rules, and the myriad other reflections of 4ness including time. Time as a whole system is 4ness. Time is the sense we have of things happening in a certain order. Cause and effect is an ordering of events too, which is why white people have redefined karma to mean "reward and punishment" since they're more obsessed with time than are the brown people who first invented karma in reference to simply cause and effect.
Dimensionality is 3ness and time is not a dimension. Dimensionality refers to physical measurements, the evidence of solidity. There are obviously three dimensions, not four or ten or eleven. Two-dimensional images are not reflections of 2ness because 3ness is dimensionality itself. So 2D images are 3D images with a thickness or depth of zero. In the same way, time as a whole thing is 4ness. The past is not 2ness, it is 4ness. The future is not 5ness, it is 4ness. All of time, as a system for ordering our memories and expectations, is 4ness. The moment--
Wait a minute. What's the Moment doing sandwiched in between the dichotomous duo Nitpicker and Potwatcher, the bubble-headed boobies of time, the past and the future, the ghosts of a chance, the non-existent sub-things which we base most of our decisions on...
Boys and girls, the Moment is the only thing that exists. It is not a part of time. It is a unique reflection of Infinity that never stops changing. The Moment is not a part of time; time is a part of the Moment.
OK, so how does that work?
Each harmonic is folded into the harmonics above it. As far as I know, acoustical harmonics don't work this way, so I could be wrong about something somewhere along the line, but this is the theory. This is theoretically why people insist on seeing life as some sort of school from which we must graduate, because in order to do anything useful with 4ness you have to get a handle on twoness and threeness first. In order to not be incompetent as a wielder of 5ness, you have to get a grip on 4ness, and on like that all the way up the line. Eventually you arrive at the higher self or 9ness which is a situation of synthesis in which you have a new body of air, so to speak, which is the result of the harmonized interaction or balance of all the dream bodies or chakras. The 9ness body or the Miruvor or the future self knows what to do at all times in all realities because in order to get a saddle on 9ness, you must first have tamed 2ness through 8ness, i.e. learned how to use them as a tool not a toy, and learned how much energy each of them must have, no more and no less.
Starting as oneness or pure awareness or infinity, there's nothing wrong with this pure experience of being, but it's an infinite dance of undescribable chaos and randomness, so in order to make itself navigable, oneness becomes aware of parts of itself. That's the first step, the first overtone of awareness or the second harmonic of awareness, separation itself. Twoness graduates us from pure awareness and its random bouncing from Nowhere to Nowhere, advancing us to awareness of an identity--"me"--which then becomes an obsession; being the only thing one has, early on, it's something one must protect.
From identity or 2ness we graduate to 3ness or connection so we can accumulate memories. If you've ever wondered why some people remember being born and some people remember nothing before their 13th birthday, it has to do with when they developed a certain control in the use of 3ness which allows the individual to form attachments and chains of memories. The Clubbers remain at this layer of learning, conveniently enough, since might is right in the physical world... and do yourself a favor: don't set out to prove that might is wrong. That is the mistake of the 4ness-obsessed perfectionist who is an expert on how people should treat each other. I shudder to think of how many times my obsession with 4ness has almost gotten me beaten to a pulp. Not that being right is bad. It's just dangerous to your health, because membership in the Collective Average is not about educating the primates, but about slipping and sliding through their extremely weird pecking-orderish herd mentality--a rudimentary attempt at adopting 4ness or order--and we want to slip through thus, without being noticed whenever possible.
This is because the gate out of this place is the gate out of this place, which is the opposite of the meddlesome act of digging yourself in deeper. So here's what you do. You stand inside the locked gate acting innocent. Some official comes huffing and puffing along on official business and opens the gate with his special Clubber key, distracted by his official concerns. You casually tip your hat and say thanks in a half-bored tone of voice like you were supposed to go through the gate, as if you were allowed to come and go, and you slip out unnoticed and no one ever misses you. That's what getting unworlded is like. You don't get out by being popular or by being right, either one. You get out by making yourself smaller, by slimming down the Me-ness that addicts us to the physical format.
Time or 4ness is an ordering or evaluation or systemization or prioritization or structure imposed on something that was already there: associated events or 3ness. We wonder how increasingly idiotic nimwits can keep getting elected to office, and it's simple: power gets stuck at 3ness. Politics is a popularity contest, not an intelligence test. Politicians hire and bribe smart people to do the work they've taken on, which they have no intention or ability to do themselves. To the Clubber, life is about making friends and making money. Money and status is all they know about 4ness since they have no actual thoughts. In general, smart people are too busy trying to educate Clubbers to notice that they themselves have no friends. Clubbers, on the other hand, being Clubbers, do notice that the wanna-be educators of the world--who are stuck at 4ness--don't have much influence on other people because other people think they're creeps. The end result is that the pretty, shiny people live in bigger houses than the smart, perceptive people. This is how the animalistic human world is supposed to work. Not remaining stuck at 4ness involves overcoming self-righteousness which boils down to self-importance and the nagging insistence of an inner voice that's always trying to catalog the flaws and inconsistencies of others and the wholly irrelevant evidence of the unfairness of life. Hey, Mr. Smarty Pants, this is a mental institution! We're here for a reason, all of us. If you're so smart, let's see you get out of here, not deeper and deeper entangled.
The past and the future--which in my personal dream map I characterize as Nitpicker and Potwatcher--are vehicles for the obsessive abuse of 4ness. Neither the past nor the future exists. They are not in the same class with the Moment. While time or obsession with 4ness is a rigid, hyper-evaluative, hierarchical structure based mostly on fears about the past and future, the Moment doesn't sit still long enough to participate in all this incompetence. The Moment never got anyone stuck anywhere.
So we who are addicted to physical life do our level best to ignore the Moment, or "present time," not that the present is time at all.
Yeah but, if the present isn't part of time, then why does it keep changing?
Brothers and sisters, I am here to tell you that the Moment is the only thing about what we perceive to be time that isn't rigid and brittle to the point of shattering at the slightest wrong move on our parts. The answer is that the Moment is not Time but it includes the notion of time. So it has to be a higher harmonic than 4ness. In the past, I've thought that the Moment, due to its obviously basic nature--since it's the only thing that seems to actually exist--is another reflection of oneness like awareness and infinity and existence itself. But after I started to rewrite this old draft of a chapter, it suddenly occurred to me that the Moment--the be-all and end-all of our existence--is actually 9ness. The higher self. The place we hope to end up when graduation ceremonies are over and it's time to move on to the real unknown. The vehicle to freedom that can go anywhere at will. The harmonized synthesis of all the chakras.
Since the antidote to getting stuck in 4ness (order, time, value, system, structure) is 5ness (change, flow, movement, Intent), I've often wondered, especially while watching a basketball game, since what those guys are doing is obviously impossible, whether the Moment is really 5ness. Maybe in a sense, but I think there's more to it than that. Because 9ness--the new suspect when it comes to pinning the Moment down within the Synfonemia description--9ness incorporates all the harmonics including 5ness. The 9ness dream body or the Miruvor capably wields 2ness, 3ness, 4ness, 5ness, 6ness, 7ness and 8ness. In this way, 9ness is not so much a dream body or a chakra as it is a return to oneness with just enough of the randomness and chaos tamed in order to make a tool or vehicle of that synthesis of chakralicious abilities. Nineness is the merging of all the harmonics into harmony itself.
In the spirit of paradox, a thing we cannot escape from in the unverses that I've encountered, the Moment is, I now realize, another word for the Miruvor. The individual with memories and a sense of time and the ability to change things and enjoy life and know what's going on and relax no matter what. While the Moment even now in our lostness and our confusion never stops pestering us, the nature of moving into freedom, I see now, has something to do with adopting the Moment as the vehicle of freedom. As opposed to what we humans try to do by getting entangled in the Seven Obsessions of the Human Form.
As hinted at above, some of the mechanisms used to steer this vehicle of infinite abilities, the Moment, are paying Attention and learning how to make decisions on the fly.
Now getting back to those unhumble beginnings, our lower chakras, it seems we tend to place the notions of thought and emotion into the basics category, but in terms of Synfonemia, what is the difference between them? Which came first, the carefully-worked-out stupid idea or the emotionalistic rant?
Thoughts and emotions... Just this week I realized that while I already knew that emotions are twoness, because they are comparisons of should vs. is, thus dualistic phenomena, thoughts are fourness. (I used to think that thoughts are 3ness). Thoughts are literally reflected reflections, feelings about our feelings, duality upon duality. A duplex or twinning, twining phenomenon, the double helix, the snaky-snake-snakes. Since thoughts are emotions played back to resonate and/or cancel each other out, and since thoughts are 4ness, then thoughts and time are the same thing.
Ah, I knew this ROTE was going somewhere. I don't always know what I believe until I read it off this page. Fortunately there were no personal computers when I was a wee lad spouting crappy ROTEs thirty to fifty years ago. My notes and ROTES from them times have gone to a better place.
The 3rd chakra, also known as the 3rd overtone of awareness, also known as the 4th harmonic of awareness or just "4ness", is the duplex dream body we experience as thoughts, which we also experience as time.
Meditate on that one, and you will see that I am right. Well you better, or else I will send the Thought Police to re-educate your vote.
How do you stop the world? How do you stop time? Stop thinking.
What do most of our thoughts consist of? Fears about the past and the future. Which become reflected and complexified as thoughts about the past and the future. Ask anyone who meditates, if you're not going to do your own meditating, and they will confirm that our thoughts are built upon our fears. Which is why people who meditate are calmer and more likely to find themselves functioning well in the Unworld, than people who walk around thinking and emoting unabated, waiting for "negs" to jump out at them.
So, simply put, the past and the future are our thoughts.
I hope you don't mind my clearing that up.
And I just realized what "awesome possum" refers to.
The 2-3-4 Mind/Body/World cannot fit through the Urumara in its typical 2-3-4-saturated waking state; it must slim itself down to do it. For thought-like non-REM dreams (those that take place pre-Urumara in the Tunnel with sketchy visual content), a modicum of slimming takes place, but to really make it into the Unworld where the good stuff lies--the vivid, detailed unworldings--the 2-3-4 generally turns 4ness off entirely and goes through the orifice without comprehension, without the ability to think. Without experiencing time. Because, you see, if you are suffering for any reason, it's time that makes suffering suck so very, very much. Right? If there was no time, we would just be 3-D reflections with zero depth, appearing to be images. But as imbibers of time, suffering can really get to us. Or, as they say, if you want time to fly, don't watch the clock.
Once through the Urumara, a slimmed-down 2-3-4 needs to get some of its 2ness or identity back in order to be Officially Lucid, to remember who he/she is. Experience doesn't feel right to us humans without some sense of time. Tall lucidity does include 4ness, to make things timelike, systematic, useful, and relevant. Able to think... as a tool of lucidity. When the unworlder makes it through the Urumara and then re-merges with 4ness and becomes lucid, he is an Awesome Possum.
And you can take that to the bank.
PS: I had planned to come back to this chapter and remove the phrase "awesome possum" even though it came to me in a dream, because it's kinda too cutesy so it doesn't really fit my New Age Rootin' Tootin' Cowboy image. Then last night I saw an awesome possum in a dream and it made me lucid, so I better keep it. Who really knows what fits my image, anyway?
