Science is the religion of our day. Like any other religion, it demands... expects... and punishes the absence of... good-old-fashioned blind faith. We could argue the ins and outs and ups and downs of this point till hell freezes over but, speaking of eons...
Science hasn't got a handle on time at all. Science hasn't got a handle on a moment, a year, a century, a thousand years, a billion years, none of it. We are being asked to believe conjecture about the distant past, the distant future, and related conjecture about unimaginable physical distances involving time and relativity... never mind! Hasn't anyone noticed that hundred-year-old science is already getting moldy and thousand-year-old science is the laughing stock of the reality mongers? It's all a big scam, because scientists need to eat too, same as priests, reverends, pastors, and medicine men.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you... the truth about time. There is only the Moment. And that's all there ever was, and that's all there ever will be. And guess what? The Moment has nothing to do with time. Time is an artificial division into the real and the unreal, with the unreal split up artificially into the past and the future, and the real changing faster than we can figure it out. So time exists only because we wish to describe infinity, an impossible task.
Why do I call the human form by a pet name, "the Earthville Mental Institution"? What's insane about the human race? I mean, besides all the obvious stuff. Never mind the details; what's behind the insanity?
An absolutely panic-stricken, incoherent, out-of-control, drooling obsession with time, money, status, and other useless, irrelevant reflections of 4ness.
This is the 4ness trap, and that is where humanity is stuck right now. You can trace history back and see where we were once stuck at 3ness, and before that at 2ness. Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind works into it somewhere. So does The Holographic Universe.
I can't speak for eras and epochs and ages that don't actually exist, assuming they ever did exist, but as for our current predicament, we are lost in timespace, giving it all our energy, and until we get unstuck from the 4ness whirlpool, well hell's bells, boys and girls, we're all bozos on this bus. But I detect the need for a practical example of what the heck I could possibly be talking about.
One or two simple examples should suffice.
We have the mental ability, thanks to the 4th harmonic of awareness, to design computers that operate spaceships that go to Mars and send usable information back to the earth. While 2ness is emotional reflex, 4ness is organized thought.
And we use this incredible, astounding, amazing mental ability to tailgate some jerk on the road because he cut us off on the way to the convenience store where we were headed to buy a candy bar, some potato chips, and a six pack. Or we use the incredibly agile human thought machine to pick a fight with some co-worker or loved one over some finer point of nothing, knowing it will ruin someone's day, if not our own.
Is that a simple enough example of how knowing what's going on and knowing who's right get us less than absolutely nowhere?
Fourness is the ability to put an order on things, so we use 4ness to sort turds into crap categories. To get to the bottom of this, let's look at self importance.
Fourness is hierarchy. So is the notion of relative importance. They're the same thing. Thanks to twoness, we have a self and we have its setting. Thanks to the same 2ness, we have a body and a mind. A me and a you. An up and a down, a back and a forth, good/bad, ugly/beautiful, give-a-shit and never mind.
That's a list of reflections of twoness, in case I'm losing you. Fourness is the octave of twoness. It is literally twoness magically reflected back onto itself (2 plus 2 equals 2 times 2, right?) Fourness is the identity of identity. And that works out to be an ordering, systematizing, structuring of the pieces that would flit around chaotically if not for 3ness relating them to each other and 4ness putting it all into some kind of framework.
And there we stick like glue, me and you, a fine how-do-ya-do, there's nothing new, because we're scared out of our minds about taking the next step. Fourness is the current addiction of the afflicted human spirit. "Give me liberty or give me death" inspires us, but that bad, bad, thing that someone certainly done to us is what's really worth ruining one's day over, along with sacrificing one's hope of getting any actual internal liberty anytime soon, in favor of being right about something that doesn't amount to a hill of pre-digested beans. Which is fine. I'm not criticizing the notion of taking forever to get over oneself. It's just an innocent example.
Self-importance is the emotionalistic default setting of 4ness, for anyone at any time who does not have the wherewithall to do something useful with 4ness. Utility is the domain of 4ness, and boy do we use it. Use and abuse, just add water and stir. Self-importance is a bottomless pit for energy devoted to 4ness wastefully, feeding the whirlpool so we can remain trapped at this stage of development and never learn to become fluid, never escape to the next level, which is 5ness, the mastery of change, Intent. With self-importance hogging all the energy, there's nothing tool-like left that's capable of prioritizing the details of life in a useful way. Self-importance is kinda like taking the whole entire notion of "usefulness" and spitting on it, stomping on it, puking on it, because the petty emotions of identity and self-reflection do beat all for generating that spiky adrenalin fix, do they not?
