Money the taproot of all evil or fossil virus?

[araucaria]

Money the taproot of all evil or fossil virus?

Money is the possibly taproot of all evil. Evil has other roots as well such as monarchy or mainstream religion, but these are only sideroots that can be removed with no life-threatening damage to the organism. The world has largely discarded monarchy and it is rife with godlessness, but for as long as the god Mammon keeps a pound in our pockets, we shall remain safely in his (interesting name Mammon: so close to Mama). But it is no use talking about roots unless we identify the weed itself.

I’ve been clearing out some old New Scientists I’d stored away for a rainy day, which is what we’d been having when I started this a couple of weeks ago. (Why this has been so laborious a task is of course likely due to its subject matter.) In the 19 August 2000 issue two unconnected things caught my eye that I want to connect now in two separate posts (#1 and 2), with the benefit of a little hindsight. Actually, ‘connecting the unconnected’ is the process at play in both, so in a sense, they are already naturally linked before I even start
This is something I do all the time and, if synchronicity is a law of nature, I guess I am in law enforcement. But some ‘laws’ should never have been on the statute book in the first place.

New Scientist is a British popular science magazine, publishing sometimes quite detailed articles on current mainstream research. The comments I am going to make relate not to the research itself, with its restricted, mostly professional audience, but the reporting of it to the general public, including editorial content. The cover story of this particular issue was ‘Natural injustice: Why a law of numbers means the rich are here to stay’. The editorial is similarly tinged with fatalistic individualism, even hinting at the limited scope of any attempt at radical change. Its title? ‘It’s the law: Do we care if the rich are always here, as long as we get a bite at the cherry?’ Note: the term ‘econophysicists’ below refers to physicists transposing their work in the field of ‘condensed matter’ to the field of economics. Here are the salient quotes from the article itself, ‘That’s the Way the Money Goes’ by Mark Buchanan (p.22-6):

two Parisian econophysicists … Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and Marc Mézard [website still online at http://www3.unifr.ch/econophysics/] set out to explain why every country in the world has a few rich people and then a long tail of poorer and poorer people, distributed according to a simple and unvarying statistical rule. In much of the Western world, 20 per cent of the people always own 80 per cent of the wealth.

Stop right there: this rule has been applied to the above-mentioned editorial since we have passed seamlessly from ‘every country in the world’ to ‘much of the Western world’. Reading between the lines: this ‘unvarying statistical rule’ may be due to sloppy thinking and a blinkered view.

According to the physicists, it is all very simple. The distribution arises from the unpredictability of life … It’s not just a law of economics but a law of nature–the rich will always be with us …
Although the mathematical distribution of rich and poor might be a law of nature, nothing is said about who is going to be rich or poor. That remains dependent on the individual. …
Still feeling enraged that physics predicts the rich are an inescapable fact of life? If you are an idealist, look at it another way. If the rich will always be with us, so will the revolutionaries who want to terminate them with extreme prejudice. If a new class of rich inevitably emerges after every levelling, then so will a new class of malcontents to chop off their heads. If those French physicists have it right, they might one day be able to predict when the wheel will turn full circle and it is time to start sharpening the guillotine again. Danton would be proud of them.

The law in question is called the Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity), and states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

This 80-20 rule must been thrown out of the window at some stage, as it is by now well-known that wealth inequality is much more severe than that. Wikipedia is very shy on this subject, offering statistics no more recent than 2007:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_..._United_States

The reality is more like this, but even this is from 2012: two years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM

The UK is a particularly egregious example of such inequality, since it combines all the poorest areas in northern Europe and the one richest area: inner London:
http://i100.independent.co.uk/articl...am--xkbd96A5me

So, let’s see what the model, based on complete randomness, provides by way of explanation. It

implies that a more equal society could come from encouraging fairer and freer trade, exchange and competition ... If hot means vigorous trading and low volatility in investments, cold means restricted trading and highly irregular returns. [When this cold happens] the economy falls out of the Pareto phase into something much nastier. Now wealth becomes even less fairly distributed, condensing into the pockets of a handful of super-rich “robber barons”.

But of course, such things, we are also told, would only happen in ‘developing countries’ or ‘troubled nations’ such as ‘Mexico’ or ‘Russia’, and were more common in the past. Now, 14 years in these guys’ future, we in the West can safely confirm that we are living in regressing countries and extremely troubled nations. But there are a number of other conclusions to be drawn from this.

1) Conflating the monetary situation with a natural law is somewhat overhasty. We have had drummed into us that ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’. Apples grow on trees, and oranges grow on trees. You can compare apples and oranges as much as you like, but you cannot compare either with money: for starters (pun intended) you cannot eat money, as they say Natural laws can be temporarily overcome in certain artificial circumstances: for example, an earthling can escape gravity in a spacecraft or in parabolic flight in a ‘vomit comet’, or they can increase the value of gravity G to several G by undergoing intense acceleration. Such laws can also be simulated: an earthling in a spacecraft can simulate gravity by rotating the craft. Similarly, artificial monetary policy can be made to simulate Pareto’s law of nature (were it that), and just as easily to flout it.

2) If things as basic as gravity only remain natural laws until you start tinkering with them, it is to be expected that ones as little known as Pareto’s will quickly turn out to be pretty unnatural. And sure enough, its application here to economics – in a model that lacks realism since it calls for ‘more realistic models by moving away from the assumptions of complete randomness’ – merely hints at the effects of any intervention, suggesting that greater fairness can be ‘encouraged’. In this report, there is no agency mentioned that would be responsible for improvement, apart from ‘taxes’ – a deliberately very negative word to describe such a positive initiative. Still less is there any allusion to who might cause a worsening of the situation: open government or a hidden hand? And there is no suggestion of any leeway outside of the range extending from ‘very unfair’ current in 2000 to ‘something much nastier’ prevalent in 2014. All we are told is that West is best, dodgy countries much worse, with the implicit notion that ne’er the twain shall meet.

3) If you don’t like it, start a French Revolution; do a Danton: guillotine a few, then get yourself guillotined. There is no alternative alternative. Well, of course there is: a moneyless society. Unfortunately, any moneyless society in the world will have been overlooked for this research, as providing no data. Any such society would probably feel the introduction of money, like other alien Western values, as a life-threatening viral attack. A proper scientific study ought really to have set in place a moneyed group and a moneyless control group, in order to compare the effect of money on fair distribution. Yet even this flawed study, taking inequality as a given, establishes beyond reasonable doubt is that there is no hope for a truly fair society based on current western economics. However, current western economics are not a law of nature: they can be ditched. And so can ‘Pareto’s law’, which can be downgraded to a principle, or rather less than a principle: barely a rule of thumb, an effect or observation – or even less than that.
http://www.businessdictionary.com/de...principle.html

Hence, while the 80-20 rule has its uses (see http://betterexplained.com/articles/...the-8020-rule/ ), its slippage towards a hypothetical 90-10 rule (whereby we only use a tenth of our brain power), or a 95-5 rule (whereby the visible universe only accounts for 5%) and beyond to the famous 1% (the über-megarich) can only be described as unprincipled. In disseminating this nonsense, the mainstream popularization of mainstream science itself operates on such unprincipled lines, for it is showing the average reader only this tip of a sinking iceberg – and we all know how unnatural a sinking iceberg would be.

But what is actually going on here? Either we see it as less than a hard-and-fast rule, as in the last-quoted article:

Also recognize that the numbers don’t have to be “20%” and “80%” exactly. The key point is that most things in life (effort, reward, output) are not distributed evenly – some contribute more than others.

Alternatively, we may see it on the contrary as a rigorous recurring rule which is being endlessly applied to itself. We get the message from the horse’s mouth as it were: Forbes at http://www.forbes.com/sites/davelavi...your-business/

Pareto Principle: How To Use It To Dramatically Grow Your Business
…Here’s how Perry Marshall has taken the Pareto Principle to the next level. He found that the Pareto Principle is exponential! Let me explain. We already know that 20% of your customers represent 80% of your revenues. What Marshall found is that, within that initial 20%, the 80/20 rule also exists. Meaning that the top 20% of the top 20% of your customers (or the top 4% overall) represent 64% of your sales (calculated as 80% times 80%). …

We see where this is going: way past the current elite of 1%, past their New World Order, we are heading towards all resources being in the possession of a single entity, call it Satan, the Demiurge, what you will. And we see how it is being done: individualistic growth is the pseudo-positive that you get from the universal negative of global withering. The overall picture is nonetheless the absolute opposite of the advertised growth. Which is why not only do we have a string of failed governments, but every potential candidate for election promising this sort of growth is doomed to fail for the same reason.

It is equally clear that this is all based on a parody of a real law of nature that governs true expansive growth. This is of course the 38/62 rule, phi the golden mean (1.618) as expressed in the Fibonacci sequence. Here growth is also exponential, but to the benefit of everybody, and everybody is itself growing exponentially. And it is truly an unbending rule. Whatever the scale you rise to, the ratio of 1.618:1 remains very precisely the same. This is in stark contrast with trademark Satanism offering a pale copy back to front.

So we understand why we want no more Dantons wheeling out their guillotines against this hundred-headed monster. No more elections changing the people supposedly in charge, no more reformers seeking a fairer (perhaps 38/62) distribution of wealth; at this stage we probably cannot even say that the entire monetary economic system has to be turned around whereby, instead of money being debt, it would be credit. Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.

It is too early to be talking of what has to be done to replace the current system. No doubt at some higher level contingency plans are in place, but here in the field we are in an emergency situation where such lofty considerations are not appropriate. If your house is on fire from a gas leak, you don’t worry over how you are going to heat the place or cook tomorrow’s dinner: your priority is to try and turn off the gas before there is an explosion. Similarly, disaster relief means getting basic necessities to those in need of them as quickly as possible with no time to worry about paying for them. This is where we are at right now here on the ground.

From the human perspective, there will be absolutely no winners in this so-called 80/20 scenario. But we are going to stop it. How? By getting the 1% to understand that ‘the rich will always be with us’ is utter BS: by the time the divide reaches 99.9/0.1, nearly all of them will be with the rest of us have-nots – like it or not, they are on our side – heading for the end point when humanity is approximately 100% united and separated from the ‘alien’ ‘beast’, which can then be dealt with, with no further danger to its human shield, save the obstinate few. By the time the Devil has collected all his promissory notes, they will no longer be legal tender, and their bearer will have no further claim on humanity. This is what I mean by cutting off our ‘gas supply’, which, interestingly, is what Russia has literally been doing to Ukraine.

As I said at the outset, there is in this same issue of New Scientist a second article on a seemingly totally unrelated subject: what is seen as ‘a critical design flaw’ in human biology, causing autoimmune diseases. I shall address this article ‘The Enemy Within’ in the next post. Meanwhile, here is a quote from to whet your appetite:

Now a few biologists are starting to point the finger at alien invaders that have been trapped inside our cells for millions of years.

[araucaria]

The idea of intertwining two articles from the same issue of New Scientist came to me on rereading them one after the other, which may seem a rather strange thing to be doing. Certainly there is nothing scientific about it. However, I have since found another pair of seemingly totally unrelated articles in another issue of this magazine where the process will appear much more obvious – the one dated 1 July 2000, just six months prior.

On pages 20-24, “Just a Normal Town…” by Ian Sample is a piece about the weaponization of microwaves to produce an electromagnetic bomb or e-bomb to fry the circuitry of an entire city either in war or in a terrorist attack. The article quotes a military source understandably wary about disclosing too much. And it ends on a surprisingly conspiratorial note:

The next time your computer crashes, don’t automatically blame Bill Gates. Just wander over to the window and look out for that unmarked van that sometimes parks across the street. Could there be someone inside sending a blast of microwaves your way?

One of the web sources for this article is still online at http://www.infowar.com (not infowars).

However, this proves to be something of a dead end or red herring since, leafing back just a couple of pages (to page 16), there is a shorter piece on the Sun’s activity, illustrated by one of those SOHO images, and accompanied by an explanation of CMEs (coronal mass ejections) and “how to forecast storms from space”. The missing link, the unmentioned effect of joining these two dots, is of course to envisage the Sun as the ‘terrorist’ e-bomber. One the one hand, you have the mechanism of an earthbound CME, on the other you have the fried electronics. But there is no mention in either article of a possible Carrington-type event whereby that mechanism might produce those results, on a massively larger scale. That is what we were not being told, although exactly why is irrelevant here. It may be simply that, 15 months ahead of 911, a terrorist attack on a big city was on people’s minds to the exclusion of other things, and CMEs only became a concern later on. As evidence of this, the 30 June 2001 issue of the same popular science magazine ran a story on hurricanes illustrated by a photo of the New York City skyline with its prominent twin towers, and captioned ‘ANGST IN THE CITY: insurers are worried about a hurricane devastating New York’. As it happens, there was indeed a hurricane off New York on 911, although no one had much to say about it (see Judy Woods, Where Did the Towers Go?).

But all that is beside the point; the point here is that the connection is easy to make. I am merely submitting a less obvious instance, with the second article I spotted in the same 19 August 2000 issue of New Scientist as the economic piece analyzed above. ‘The Enemy Within’ by Bryan Furlow (p. 38-41) is on the subject of retroviruses and autoimmune disease, and bears the following subtitle:

Trapped among your own genes are those of ancient viral invaders that plagued our ancestors. Could these fossil viruses be to blame when our immune system turns traitor?

So the article is about a then ‘unlikely’ view of the cause of autoimmune diseases: ‘ancient viruses stuck in the human genome, known as endogenous retroviruses or ERVs’. Again I quote the meat of the article:

Outlandish as it sounds, we are the genetic descendants of viruses as well as primates. The viral ancestors of ERVs invaded the cells of our forebears during infections millions of years ago and liked it so much they decided to stay. Happily integrated into their new home, ERVs have become part of our own genome, passed down through the generations. In fact, virologists have spotted ERVs in the genome of every mammal they have checked. Repeated invasions over more than 30 million years have left a surprisingly large viral legacy. “Up to 1 percent of the human genome is represented by human ERVs and their fragments,” says Eugene Sverdlov, a geneticist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow.

ERVs are relatively simple creatures, genetically speaking. Like wild retroviruses–which include HIV–they have a few genes coding for enzymes and structural proteins. These are sandwiched between long terminal repeat sequences (LTRs), which act like on-off switches, regulating the production of viral genes. They are called retroviruses because their genes are encoded in RNA rather than DNA and they infiltrate the host genome by creating DNA copies of themselves. Infected cells may then be tricked into duplicating the viral genes as though they were merely instructions for one of the body’s own cellular proteins.
Sverdlov calls ERVs “the perpetually mobile footprints of ancient infections”. Many of the resident aliens’ genes have been broken up by mutations, but at least a few are still intact and able to make viral proteins. ERVs also have a nasty habit of hopping around the genome, duplicating as they go. …
When an ERV’s regulatory instructions (its LTR) land near a host regulatory sequence, the viral on-off switch can be mistaken for the host’s own genetic gadgetry, with disastrous results. The ERV can enhance or modify the expression of adjacent genes, says [Klaus] Badenhoop [of Frankfurt University, Germany]. …

[Graham] Boyd [emeritus professor of medicine in the University of Tasmania in Hobart] sees viruses and the hosts they live in as opposing teams in a dynamic co-evolutionary arms race. Like exotic species settling in new ecosystems–rats on an island, for example–ERVs can be disruptive when they first arrive. But like the rats’ descendants, the viral lineages eventually tend to become better adapted to their surroundings. Once an ERV is integrated into another genome, its survival is hitched to that of its host. … [This leads to a kind of truce which] even goes as far as allowing ERVs to play a major role in our evolution … [in one case] the viral on-off switches are found near normal versions of a gene, suggesting they may provide some protection against autoimmune disease. ERVs can also help defend hosts against wild viruses in other ways. … [but their] unwillingness to disarm, Boyd believes, may set the stage for autoimmune disease. ERVs that retain their protein-producing potential are more like tenuously tamed wolves than loyal puppy dogs. Every once in a while these ERVs awake from the civilised slumber and begin pumping out viral proteins.

Of all my many areas of incompetence, mainstream medicine is at the top of the list, with economics not far behind; so I want to make it clear I am not going to play to my weakness. Just as the fact that economics is as dry as sticks to most people makes it something of a no-go area, the complexities of human biology can also place it off limits for the likes of myself. But the layman needs to understand as much as s/he can, and that is what popular science magazines are all about. However, it is a narrative genre like any other prone to misrepresent its subject matter, whether innocently or deliberately is not the issue here. I am more qualified to study the narrative, by offering a structural analysis of these two articles, taken as texts like any other. Just as an analysis of two fairytales will reveal a common deep structure, there is a commonality underlying these two, whereby monetary activity may be seen as being viral in nature, and endogenous retroviruses as playing a role within the genome similar to money in society. This commonality, I will go on to suggest, may be seen in terms of the archontic influence first described in recent times by John Lash.

One main characteristic of viruses is their everlastingness. They seem to have always been with us, and instead of dying, they mutate. Presumably they cannot die (or ‘respond’ to antibiotics) because they are not endowed with life in the first place, beyond the life they take on vicariously when parasitizing a living organism. They can lie dormant for long periods, but they remain potentially dangerous.

[quote]Opinions differ on whether viruses are a form of life, or organic structures that interact with living organisms. They have been described as "organisms at the edge of life",[8] since they resemble organisms in that they possess genes and evolve by natural selection,[57] and reproduce by creating multiple copies of themselves through self-assembly. Although they have genes, they do not have a cellular structure, which is often seen as the basic unit of life. Viruses do not have their own metabolism, and require a host cell to make new products. They therefore cannot naturally reproduce outside a host cell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus

My suggestion then is that money, which has accompanied civilization from the outset with the Sumerians – Joseph Farrell’s ‘Babylon’s Banksters’ – operates on similar lines to the ERV, as a ‘resident alien’. Just as the ERV infiltrates the genome to produce fake DNA and make multiple copies of it, so money is a parasitic intruder that is taken as natural in human transactions. ‘Phoney/funny money’ is an oxymoron: it is all a passable copy of something else. That something is the essential commodities – life’s necessities, such as food, materials to build shelters etc. – that people exchanged, or rather provided each other. The notion of exchange is already a bookkeeper’s subtle addition to the process. It introduces inequality or poverty through the back door – via the notion of equality, i.e. each receives according to what they can give, no longer according to their needs. Equality here sounds like the opposite of quality. You could work your socks off producing essential commodities, but without understanding that pseudo-commodity money, you would never achieve wealth – meaning the possession of more than you need and then some, i.e. the possession of more money than you can possibly need. Money has then been a permanent feature of society. Nowadays, very few can do without it to survive, many workers need bank accounts to collect their wages, credit cards are two a penny, and there is even talk of using human implants to run the system.

What I am suggesting is that money is an ersatz for something already in our genes, and instead of implanting the one, we should be thinking of removing the other.

Analogies come in various grades. The very rough ones break down very quickly, others not so quickly, and still others keep on going until they are no longer analogies at all, but another way of talking about the same thing – dots joined to form the bigger picture. So the next step after making an initial analogy and then finding it can be taken further is to see whether we are not dealing with an alternative expression of the same underlying structure. In the case at issue, if we have an endogenous virus that has taken over our DNA, whereby it acts on two levels – increasing and multiplying within a host individual to the point of creating disease, but also spreading to increase and multiply within a host species to the point of creating epidemics – then, to the extent that the brain is also inevitably involved, this physical effect may well have a mental component too, creating diseases and epidemics of the mind from addiction and mass addiction to psychosis and mass psychosis. Indeed addiction is by definition the succumbing to such increasing and multiplying of an imaginary need.

In other words, the connection I am making adding this mental component to the activity of an ERV. This mental component acts upon our unconscious behaviour, until it is brought to consciousness, which is what I am seeking to do here.

Who, then, is playing the role of genetic bank(st)ers? Given that in medicine generally, you can sit on ethics committees till the cows come home, but anything that can be done is still going to be done by some rogue element (if it hasn’t already), there are a few genetic engineers out there who are playing this role. Most geneticists are good people doing a good job, but there is a tiny minority of ‘traitors’ working for ‘The Enemy Within’, i.e. working against the human genome by furthering the parasitical virus family that has genes of its own but can only dream of having a full cellular structure.

Thus one hears of geneticists reconstituting the Spanish flu virus that killed millions a century ago, or creating new laboratory-produced diseases: just two examples. How such activities are supposed to help humanity is far from obvious, but it is perfectly clear that they would further the cause of the viruses. These people are themselves behaving like a virus afflicting their profession. They are rabid in the circular literal-metaphorical-literal sense of the word. The Latin word ‘rabies’ means ‘savageness, ferocity’ in animals, hence ‘madness’: a rabid dog is a mad/savage dog – notably one afflicted with the eponymous virus; the human form of rabies, still in Latin, is a ‘prophetic frenzy, possession, enthusiasm’, or an ‘uncontrolled emotion, passion, frenzy, madness, mad passion’ (Oxford Latin Dictionary). Hence a rabid fanatic is one who behaves like a mad dog and – let’s complete the description – notably a dog with rabies. And let’s complete the analysis: because he is also under viral attack. Such a rabid human then is one completely won over to the viral cause, in other words the human incarnation of the virus. There is currently an epidemic of such cases that, unlike canine rabies, is not being dealt with.

[gardener2]

I just want you to know I am very grateful for all the work you have put into this and I appreciate all your time and effort. also I would truly like to know about the law of synchronicity I am very fond of C G Jung and I only can grasp parts of his talks on synchronicity, I would so appreciate if you could help me hope that is not too much to ask, anyway I am so grateful for what you have shared. Thank you Gardener x

[araucaria]

Posted by gardener2 (here)
I just want you to know I am very grateful for all the work you have put into this and I appreciate all your time and effort. also I would truly like to know about the law of synchronicity I am very fond of C G Jung and I only can grasp parts of his talks on synchronicity, I would so appreciate if you could help me hope that is not too much to ask, anyway I am so grateful for what you have shared. Thank you Gardener x

Thank you, Gardener, for your kind words. You are absolutely correct to raise the issue of synchronicity. It’s a good while since I last read Jung’s Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, but on opening the book I see he starts with natural law too, a neat…. synchronicity. Let me quote the passage:

The discoveries of modern physics have, as we know, brought about a significant change in our scientific picture of the world, in that they have shattered the absolute validity of natural law and made it relative. Natural laws are statistical truths, which means that they are completely valid only when we are dealing with macrophysical quantities. In the realm of very small quantities prediction becomes uncertain, if not impossible, because very small quantities no longer behave in accordance with the known natural laws.
The philosophical principle that underlies our conception of natural law is causality. But if the connection between cause and effect turns out to be only statistically valid and only relatively true, then the causal principle is only of relative use for explaining natural processes and therefore presupposes the existence of one or more other factors which would be necessary for an explanation. This is as much as to say that the connection of events may in certain circumstances be other than causal, and requires another principle of explanation.
We shall naturally look round in vain in the macrophysical world for acausal events, for the simple reason that we cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causalexplanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist. Their existence–or at least their possibility–follows logically from the premise of statistical truth.
The experimental method of inquiry aims at establishing regular events which can be repeated. Consequently, unique or rare events are ruled out of account. Moreover, the experiment imposes limiting conditions on nature, for its aim is to force her to give answers to questions devised by man. Every answer of nature is therefore more or less influenced by the kind of question asked, and the result is always a hybrid product. The so-called “scientific view of the world” based on this can hardly be anything more than a psychologically biased partial view which misses out all those by no means unimportant aspects that cannot be grasped statistically.

He goes on to discuss “meaningful cross-connections” beyond chance, including series of coincidences – I would say because, given that you multiply probabilities, the coincidence of several somewhat unlikely events rapidly becomes highly improbable – events ‘connected so meaningfully that their “chance” concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure’. What Jung means by “meaningful” is “archetypal” or “numinous”:

The numinosity of a series of chance happenings grows in proportion to the number of its terms. Unconscious–probably archetypal–contents are thereby constellated, which then give rise to the impression that the series has been “caused” by these contents. Since we cannot conceive how this could be possible without recourse to positively magical categories, we generally let it go at the bare impression.

In other words, the real coincidence is between an external event and an internal, psychic state–as within, so without:

Synchronicity therefore means the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state–and in certain cases, vice versa.

He goes on to cite his well-known example of the rare scarab beetle knocking at his window when he is about to explain its symbolism in a patient’s dream.

To continue in my own words, where acausality and causality would meet is at some ultimate stage of ‘the interconnectedness of all things’. This is like getting round Occam’s razor (you must introduce as few unknowns as possible) by introducing just one, very powerful unknown such as an intelligent designer). Or like a card game where you get round the randomness of the shuffled pack by playing either the ace of trumps or the highest remaining trump not in your own hand.

This trump card in the present discussion is the alien viral component of our DNA. Since I am postulating that it has an effect on the psychic states of all its possessors, that would include a bunch of editors putting together a magazine. If DNA itself is a ‘hybrid product’, then it will understandably leave its signature on any inevitably hybrid products that it/we create – which is why Jung can rightly state that scientific endeavor is no exception.Endogenous retroviruses become something of a natural law and, like gravity, tend to hold us back. When I said this thread was particularly laborious for me, I meant that this effect was taking its toll on my own writing more than usual when addressing the issue head-on. This being the case, I would venture to say that synchronicities, which also tend to increase and multiply, do so as a kind of autoimmune response to these attacks. This is why Jung gets into the paranormal in connection with synchronicity: such things as levitation, defying the law of gravity, will eventually overcome these ‘natural’ laws altogether and themselves become what Rupert Sheldrake prefers to call ‘natural habits’.

I will give a more personal account ofsynchronicity in another post.

[araucaria]

…What is not being dealt with is the assumption that viruses are ultimately a Good Thing. We find the same thing in economics. While we discuss endlessly how the monetary system can be tweaked into producing fairer shares for all, we forget to raise the issue of the desirability of having any monetary system at all. If it goes without saying that money is ultimately a Good Thing, then the battle has been lost without ever being fought. Similarly, genetic engineers find viruses useful, maybe not directly for humanity, but they are certainly very useful for… genetic engineering. Viruses self-replicate, and so do genetic engineers (likewise politicians etc. etc.). Service to self disguised as service to all.

Geneticists often use viruses as vectors to introduce genes into cells that they are studying. This is useful for making the cell produce a foreign substance, or to study the effect of introducing a new gene into the genome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus

Just to nip the racist argument in the bud: there is nothing wrong per se with introducing a ‘foreign substance’, or even alien material. Given that the human genome is clearly not the finished article, some such enhancement from outside is in fact highly desirable, as in society as a whole; but it mustn’t be aggressively invasive. Here the invasiveness is not only in the manner, but also in the force of numbers: it turns out that endogenous retroviruses, estimated at 1% in the New Scientist article back in 2000, actually make up ‘5-8% of the human genome’ according to this more recent Wikipedia article:

Retroviridae is a family of enveloped viruses that replicate in a host cell through the process of reverse transcription. A retrovirus is a single-stranded RNA virus that stores its nucleic acid in the form of an mRNA genome (including the 5' cap and 3' PolyA tail) and targets a host cell as an obligate parasite. Once inside the host cell cytoplasm, the virus uses its own reverse transcriptase enzyme to produce DNA from its RNA genome, the reverse of the usual pattern, thus retro (backwards). This new DNA is then incorporated into the host cell genome by an integrase enzyme, at which point the retroviral DNA is referred to as a provirus. The host cell then treats the viral DNA as part of its own genome, translating and transcribing the viral genes along with the cell's own genes, producing the proteins required to assemble new copies of the virus. It is difficult to detect the virus until it has infected the host. At that point, the infection will persist indefinitely.

When retroviruses have integrated their own genome into the germ line, their genome is passed on to a following generation. These endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), contrasted with exogenous ones, now make up 5-8% of the human genome.[5] Most insertions have no known function and are often referred to as "junk DNA". However, many endogenous retroviruses play important roles in host biology, such as control of gene transcription, cell fusion during placental development in the course of the germination of an embryo, and resistance to exogenous retroviral infection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrovirus

We note in passing how the ‘1%’ of ERVs rising to nearly 10% neatly reverses the numerical progress of the ultrarich. Of course, the rise is only in our perceptions, but the main perception here is that the concentration of wealth and the spread of retroviruses are together increasingly becoming issues of great concern.

‘Retro-‘ does not just mean backwards spatially or logically. It also means backwards in time. The cover of the 21 July 2001 issue of New Scientist bears the headline: ‘Rewinding Evolution: How to turn a chicken into a dinosaur’, announcing the article ‘Monsters in our midst’ by Philip Cohen on pp. 31-33. This is genetic ‘tinkering’ (not my word) on a Jurassic Park scale. Of course, there is no unadulterated ‘rewinding’ going on: there are only new monsters at the end of this road, because it involves more than simply ‘unplugging (circuits) added during evolution’:

Too many details have been lost along the way to faithfully recreate a particular species. And soft details such as skin colour and behaviour, long lost in the fossil record, would essentially have to be invented. But perhaps with enough tinkering–to stretch out claws, elongate necks or increase body size–it may eventually be possible to create “dinosaurs” realistic enough for anyone’s dream or nightmare.

One can only wonder what this would ever be attempted for: do we need real live dinosaurs, for example? I don’t think so. It is not even necessary in order to produce a Hollywood blockbuster movie, which is supposed to be fiction. My answer is that the unacknowledged purpose is… the furtherance of ERVs. To understand this, recall something I quoted earlier:

When an ERV’s regulatory instructions (its LTR) land near a host regulatory sequence, the viral on-off switch can be mistaken for the host’s own genetic gadgetry, with disastrous results. The ERV can enhance or modify the expression of adjacent genes

Now apply the above to this quote from ‘Monsters in our midst’:

Identifying the developmental genes is probably the easy part, though. Much tougher will be finding all the various sequences that turn them on and off at the right times and places in the developing embryo. In theory, you should be able to reconstruct these regulatory switches in the same way as the genes themselves. But because regulatory regions are often buried in apparently non-functional or “junk” DNA, biologists have a hard time just finding them, let alone deciphering their effect.

That is the theory. In practice, the stated ‘effect’ is that ‘the viral on-off switch can be mistaken for the host’s own genetic gadgetry, with disastrous results’. My conclusion is again, as earlier with ineffectual ethics committees, or with ineffectual governments of every hue, the theory is the sweetener to accompany the deliberate practice, which is disastrous from a human standpoint only.

From the standpoint of the ERV, on the other hand, it has been a success story for a very long time. According to Sitchin’s interpretation of the Sumerian tablets, the Annunaki leaders Enki and his wife were geneticists who engineered mankind. This much at least of their own version of events we can take at face value. Their claim to be creator gods is clearly as ridiculous as it would be if a scientist claimed such status with respect to IVF children. Since their genetic tinkering (they produced all kinds of monsters before achieving their goal, indicating a degree of trial and error) did not have the good of humanity in mind (they were avowedly looking to produce a slave race), whether by mistake or by design, the introduction or revival of ERVs would have been the inevitable outcome of their inadequately expert intervention. Indeed, if deliberate, this may actually be what was meant by ‘in our own image and likeness’. Either way, you have ERVs infecting the human genome around the very time, long ago, when genetic engineering was already going on. The ‘rats on an island’ have since become acclimatized; but they are still rats, and they are still where they shouldn’t be.

The ‘dinosaur in the living-room’ is of course that, as we see a great willingness to unplug all kinds of circuitry, to my knowledge there is an equally great reluctance even to consider unplugging one, some, or all of these ERVs. I am not in a position to voice an opinion on the desirability or feasibility of such a move. However, I am very suspicious that it doesn’t seem to be on the table at all. Or maybe it is? If so, I’d be delighted to know.

We are indeed talking about a dinosaur in the living-room as opposed to an elephant, i.e. something older than our own species:
[quote]viruses are recognised as ancient and to have origins that pre-date the divergence of life into the three domains http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_viruses[/quote]

This leads us to the archontic connection, which I have yet to explore in this regard. The term archon (see John Lash, Not in His Image) comes from the Greek word archo, archein, meaning to begin, or to rule – in other words, translating the double meaning, to ‘come first’, to ‘have priority’, to ‘take precedence’. More on this huge topic later.

[Redstar Kachina]

..........

[araucaria]

As one might expect, there is an ancient Greek myth, which may originally come from Sumeria and is both relevant to the virus scenario and to its expression in terms of gold (money); it tells the story of the Satyr Marsyas, who has a musical contest playing the flute (actually a stag’s thighbone) against the god Apollo playing the lyre. He loses when told to play it upside down and sing at the same time, as Apollo can do on his lyre. He is punished by being flayed alive, and his skin is fastened to a tree, where according to Nonnus it acts as a windbag, making posthumous music in the breeze. This, to me at least, epitomizes the status of the dubious life form: Marsyas is himself a wind instrument, both in life and in death; he has come under viral attack, destroying the host and leaving just his music, which in modern jargon ‘goes viral’ – broadcast to the four winds – see Robert Graves, The Greek Myths and http://www.theoi.com/Georgikos/SatyrosMarsyas.html

A second contest at which Apollo defeated Pan was presided over by King Midas, who was given ass’s ears when he dissented from the verdict. His barber told his secret to a hole in the ground, where a reed grew and whispered it to passersby. The moral of the story seems to be that there is no such thing as absolute secrecy; there will always be a reed, its roots extending down the rabbithole registering what can then be broadcast above ground. Also, the link between the reed and Marsyas gives the lie to the ideas that ‘dead men tell no tales’. In other words, in modern parlance, Marsyas the ‘flautist’ is tortured and killed for being literally… a whistle-blower – one whose disclosure continues after him. The implication then would be that he only has one tune, as opposed to Apollo’s doing one thing and saying (singing) another, with no reversal of meaning possible.

Midas, it will be remembered, was rewarded by Dionysus with the requested ‘Midas Touch’ whereby everything he touched was turned into gold, including his food and drink, until he nearly died of hunger and thirst, for you cannot eat gold. The reward was for entertaining Dionysus’s former pedagogue Silenus for five days and nights, and listening to his drunken stories about Atlantis. One extremely interesting part of his tale describes two streams near a ‘frightful whirlpool’:

Two streams flow close by, and trees growing on the banks of the first bear fruit that causes those who eat it to weep and groan and pine away. But fruit growing by the other stream renews the youth even of the very aged: in fact, after passing backwards through middle age, young manhood, and adolescence, they become children again, then infants – and finally disappear! (Robert Graves, The Greek Myths).

This seems to be a very good description of a virus, and a sort of retrovirus. Whether pining away, or disappearing in the opposite direction (another reversal Satanism is so fond of), there is no indication of death, or of a reversed birth. Notice also the Sumerian connection, with the story of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life.

Midas was ‘enchanted by Silenus’s fictions’ (he was known for seeing into the future as well as the past), and his lust for gold was likely inspired by them. As Graves points out, ‘Silenus’ is a similar name to Solon, the wise man of Athens who originally reported the Atlantis story, so we appear to have two parallel narratives here. Here is Robert Graves’s commentary, referring to ‘three incidents reported by Plutarch (Life of Solon 25-9)’:

The first is that Solon travelled extensively in Asia Minor and Egypt; the second, that he believed the story of Atlantis and turned it into an epic poem; the third, that he quarrelled with Thespis the dramatist who, in his plays about Dionysus, put ludicrous speeches, apparently full of topical allusions, into the mouths of Satyrs. Solon asked: ‘Are you not alarmed, Thespis, to tell so many lies to so large an audience?’ When Thespis answered: ‘What does it matter when the whole play is a joke?’ Solon struck the ground violently with his staff: ‘Encourage such jokes in our theatre, and they will soon creep into our contracts and treaties!’ Aelian, who quotes Theopompus as his authority, seems to have access at second or third hand to a comedy by Thespis, or his pupil Pratinas, ridiculing Solon for the Utopian lies told in the epic poem, and presenting him as Silenus, wandering footloose about Egypt and Asia. (Robert Graves, The Greek Myths).

Thespis was the first actor (or ‘thespian’) and seems to have been the equivalent of Hollywood, disseminating disinfo to a mainstream audience. This tale is too fragmentary to provide any definite leads, but Graves adds this tantalizing detail:

Solon seems also to have heard geographers discussing the possible existence of an Atlantic continent: Erasthosthenes, Mela, Cicero, and Strabo speculated on it, and Seneca foretold its discovery in the second act of his Medea – a passage which is said to have made a deep impression on the young Columbus.

The passage in question is as follows:

There will come an age in the far-off years when Ocean shall unloose the bonds of things, when the whole broad earth shall be revealed, when Tethys shall disclose new worlds and Thule not be the limit of the lands.

Remember, Medea used her magic to help Jason, who sailed in the Argo to win the Golden Fleece. That too must made a deep impression on the young Columbus, who maybe had more reliable sources as well, before giving a whole new meaning to the ‘Golden Fleece’ in the new world. So these are only very small clues, but enough to make a leap forward in time across four millennia.

One final step takes us to 19th century America, where Edgar Allan Poe plays on the infectious quality of money in his tale ‘The Gold Bug’ - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold-Bug
The bug is of course both the itch to find treasure (a gold rush) and a scarab beetle, taking us all the way back to Egypt, and to Jung’s best-known synchronicity.

[araucaria]

Here is a little synchronicity. Just now, I have a leaky toilet; I need to change the gasket between the cistern and the bowl. A cistern and bowl are separate units unless and until they are properly connected to form a single convenience. Only then does the water in the one become the water in the other, with no spillage on the floor.

This is an external event that exactly reflects the psychic state expressed in what I am doing here by assembling two separate units (articles) into a functional larger unit (a subset of the issue of a magazine). There is nothing mysterious or magical about the process, any more that it is to take together different chapters of a single narrative – or for that matter adding a further chapter of one’s own, whether commentary or otherwise. Nor is it any more mysterious or magical than doing the opposite: chopping up any segment into smaller units for analytical purposes. We are all writing this narrative together. So here is a little analytical narrative of mine – i.e. a fable: I’ll call it ‘The Cat and the Dog’.

My background is in language, literature, literary theory and creative writing. One notion that loomed large was described by a term borrowed from Freud: overdetermination. I shall save for another post my analysis of how Freud fits in with Jung, and how synchronicitygrows out ofoverdetermination. For now I will focus on ‘textual overdetermination’, remembering that while the word is borrowed from psychoanalysis, we are talking about a concept specific to the written word.

Textual overdetermination means that in a piece of writing, any segment is there for more than one reason. Its presence is governed by, but not limited to, the ‘horizontal’, linear determination of its place in a sentence. There is always at least one, but potentially a great many, ‘vertical’ (non-linear) determinations as well. The word ‘text’ means a tissue or fabric forming a grid of cross-connections. This can be seen as adding extra dimensions: a one-dimensional thread turned into two-dimensional cloth – and beyond. With two or more strands, I would suggest it functions like DNA.

Take the childishly simple example of the sentence ‘The cat sat on the mat’. In addition to the linear sequence of subject, object and predicate, you have the non-linear set of words that can be placed in a column of rhyming words. (This is just one example: if you wrote say ‘The black cat sat on the brown mat’, you would have a second column of colour words, and so on.) So you have the makings of some rules, with potential for growth. You might then go on to write in the same vein, ‘The rat shat on the hat’. In the process, you have done three things: a) you have possibly kept to, and so reinforced, the colour rule (you could either change this to ‘black rat… brown hat’ or you could reverse the colours to ‘brown rat… black hat’); b) by beginning a set of animal words you have spawned an additional rule (with a possible subdivision of pets and pests); but c) you have broken another rule that was beginning to form: a ‘words of three letters’ rule. This incident opens up several possibilities. You might want to keep it and make it part of a subset of a broader rule of three, which would also include groups of three rhyming words. Alternatively you might bend the rule to include words of three sounds (sh, a, t). Or thirdly (a rule of three is catching on here as well!), you can always accept and build upon the intrusive material in ways that link elements together, rather like my toilet gasket. So in this instance it produces a repetition of the sequence h-a-t, and also opens up an interesting possible variation, ‘The rat spat on the hat’ (a little nastiness creeping in).


The possibilities are endless. The sky is not the limit: you can explore the cosmos beyond to a planet called Mat in the Cat constellation: ‘Mat sat in the Cat’. And Mat has a satellite: ‘the Mat sat scanned the Cat’. In bringing them to life like this, shuffling letters such as c-a-t begins to sound like DNA sequencing. Jung mentions the word ‘constellated’ (see above, post #4). Locating the narrative in a constellation would therefore be an early sign of consciousness, of self-awareness: the narrative is describing itself. Why do a CAT scan? Because there is a danger of cataclysm, meaning a catastrophe for cats. Closer to home, you might have a parliamentarian trying to pick up his mail, but the cat sat on the mat and prevented him from picking up an Act of Parliament, and so the Act sat on the mat along with two other letters, underneath the cat. Hence the cat sat on the Act, symbolizing two things. If the Act is the law or rules governing the narrative, then sitting on it amounts both to keeping the law and exposing it to its ass – hence the law risks becoming an ass. Enter the dog.

‘The dog sat on the mat’ introduces an alien hybrid rogue element. ‘Dog’ has the required three letters, but it does not respect the rhyming constraint; it is a gatecrasher. Dog chases away cat and chews on the cat-act, thereby changing the letter of the law, by repealing those parts that put it on a leash. Dog becomes a god, turning what was good into gold, a Rottweiler on a killing spree and bringing down a plague of frogs on fallen logs in bogs – this is the cat-aclysm. In terms of the DNA analogy, this dog is of course the endogenous retrovirus or ERV.

However, this is all a fiction. By fiction, I do not mean a category of books in a library; I mean a linguistic entity as opposed to a real-life entity. The cat’s position on the mat is obviously governed by language (the rhyme). In real life, if you have a cat at all, it is probably sitting on the keyboard, with the mouse on the mat. But such real-life things as cats and mats and sitting positions are what language is intended to denote, which is notably why science fiction is inevitably closer to contemporary earth society than it will ever be to extraterrestrial realities. Language is the DNA of fiction, and what makes all writing to some extent fiction is the self-replicating viral element that is the leaky gasket part of that DNA.

You then have three options. You can go for a neat piece of idealistic fiction that works smoothly on its own terms, i.e. in a controlled (policed) way), but is divorced from ‘reality’ inasmuch as it achieves this by having all cats and no snarling dogs. Or you can go on being blissfully (or disingenuously) unaware that your messy fictional narrative adequately equates with that reality, being fully a part thereof. Or finally, since this reality is not to your liking anyway, you can reverse the entire relationship. This means working consciously at moulding your narrative in order to create a new reality instead of reflecting the present.

We hear of DNA upgrades, of extra DNA strands added to the genome. I have seen no evidence so far of that happening in the outside world. For example, I have heard of no crime suspect acquitted because he had an extra strand of DNA. On the other hand, I do see a forum like Avalon weaving a richer tapestry, one that will certainly produce a better reality: the necessary changes will surely follow.

Perhaps rather surprisingly for some, the concept of ‘textual overdetermination’ I have outlined here is set within a broader Marxist philosophy whereby writing is seen as a process of production of something new, as opposed to the expression of something already existing. This philosophy involves a self-imposed brake that we need to release in order to press the accelerator. What I am suggesting is that the controlled materialistic aspect of production be allowed to spill over into the spiritual aspect of creation – in other words, synchronicitygrowing out ofoverdetermination.

[araucaria]

@Samwise https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post875165
Thank you Samwise, I’m glad to have given you this opportunity to express yourself more fully. This subject is more on topic here.
Let’s start where you finish: ‘You are your own master’, you say. I am merely applying that axiom to the situation of language. Language is a grassroots phenomenon and any esoteric (I might say ultrareactionary) little games being played on it by a tiny elitist minority have absolutely no chance of success, especially if we ignore them and do our own thing. Recall the tale of King Canute, who reportedly tried to stop the tide from coming in. We are talking here about a veritable tsunami. If they are playing little games like seeing ‘evil’ as a reversal of ‘live’, good luck to them. In that case, we can always stop using one particular word. I’m telling you that words are mass produced and there will inevitably one or two little accidents of this kind that can be used. The more preoccupying thing is actually the way the antonym opposite of evil, love (a near reversal) is being turned into its opposite. Your negatively esoteric use of language is basically a form of double-speak.

The opposite of double-speak is synchronicity. Synchronicity is the co-incidence of a psychic state and an external event. Often when I am writing a word, I hear that very same word if I am also listening to someone speaking. (I am just hearing a poet talking about the earthiness of poetry which people see as ethereal!) When we tune our thoughts to truth, the words follow. Ultimately, our language should become totally synchronistic, and we would all become telepathic – no need for language at all. Until then, when I say words are mass produced, I am not speaking only exoterically, I am also speaking synchronistically. Language changes as groups interact with each other, and less with other groups, creating a regional accent. When a vowel sound or a stress pattern changes, it does so for a whole group of words, not just the odd word that a sorcerer’s apprentice might be interested in. Individual words can be ousted by new words that take hold; they may be popular slang or striking images first made by some poet. My point is that even esoterically speaking, language is a bottom up affair, and I believe it is a mistake to pass on the view that the tail is wagging the dog.

Other words may disappear, not because they spell evil magic, but because the evil magic itself is no longer current. So for example, supposing the word government to carry the connotations you suggest, what we are seeing is the collapse of the thing itself. To stick to countries close to my home, Belgium went for a long period without a government, and now both France and the UK have just about run out of options. Here in France we have a prime minister who polled just 5% of his own party members in the presidential primary in 2012, and he last lost a minister within days of appointing him. So, while the word government is still with us, the spell has been broken, the thing itself is already broken beyond repair.

How this happens is notably due to the language specialists we call poets putting their considerable weight behind the popular movement (Tolkien being a poet in this respect). They form an alternative leadership to cast out the ancient spells. The Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé carries this use of poetry to new heights of refinement, through the very imperfections of languages which ‘are several, with no supreme one’. In the words of Jacques Derrida, ‘Mallarmé was forever hunting significance wherever meaning evaporated’ (in Literary Debates, p.236). Derrida again:

Undecidability has ceased to depend on multiplicity of meaning, metaphorical richness, or a system of correspondences. Something has arisen here, something positive or negative as you will, in any case a certain angle of view, which blocks the polysemic horizon: the unity, the totality, the coalescence of meaning. For example, the sign blanc (white), with all that can to one degree or another be associated with it, is a vast reservoir of meaning (snow, cold, death, marble, and so on; swan, wing, fan, and so on; virginity, purity, hymen, and so on; canvas, veil, gauze, milk, semen, Milky Way, star, and so on). Omnipresent in Mallarmé’s text, it exerts a sort of symbolic magnetism. And yet whiteness also marks, by way of the white page, the place where these “whites” are written. And above all the spacing between different meanings (that of white among others), espacement de la lecture (spaces in/of reading). The ‘blanks’ [les blancs] in fact take on importance”. The white space has no determinate meaning; it is not simply subsumed by the plurivalence of all the other whites. Whether as an addition or a subtraction from the polysemic series, whether as a gain or loss of meaning, it folds the text back on itself, continually indicating its place (“where nothing will have taken place… but place”), the condition, the work, the rhythm. It will never be possible to decide whether “white” means something, or only, or also, the space of writing, the page folding back on itself.

.

We have a blank sheet of paper to work with. In other words, ‘you are your own master’. Let me also quote this passage with reference to verbal alchemy, beyond denotation and beyond connotation:

Is not Mallarmé’s theme the idealizing power of words to make the existence of an object appear or disappear simply by stating its name? Reread:
“I say: a flower! and beyond the oblivion to which my voice relegates any shape, as something beyond just calyxes, musically arises, idea itself and sweetly fragrant, what is missing from every bouquet.”
Production and annihilation of the thing by the name; and above all creation, by the verse or the play of rhyme, of the name itself:
“The verse, which out of several syllables recreates a whole new world, new, foreign to the language and seemingly incantatory, completes this isolation of speech.”

.

I think you’ll find all this transposable to Tolkein. Substitute ‘white’ for ‘Ring’: the Ring is at once everything, and a mere circle signifying nothing. So if Frodo ‘steals’ the Ring, he actually steals nothing. Likewise, he cannot destroy nothing. It takes a Gollum/golem to destroy both it and himself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gollum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem

I shall post separately about a couple more ‘poets’ and about something Jung has to say on the subject of meaning and nothing.

[araucaria]

Just to show how I am not working from a rational Western perspective, here is what Jung has to say in Synchronicity on the subject of meaning and nothing:

In Chinese philosophy one of the oldest and most central ideas is that of Tao, which the Jesuits translate as “God.” But that is correct only for the Western way of thinking. … Richard Wilhelm brilliantly interprets it as “meaning”. The concept of Tao pervades the whole philosophical thought of China. Causality occupies this paramount position with us…
Lao-tzu gives the following description of Tao in his celebrated Tao Teh Ching:

There is something formless yet complete
That existed before heaven and earth.
How still! How empty!
Dependent on nothing, unchanging,
All pervading, unfailing.
On e may think of it as the mother of all things under heaven.
I do not know its name,
But I call it “Meaning.”
If I had to give it a name, I should call it “The Great.”

Tao “covers the ten thousand things like a garment but does not claim to be master over them” (Ch. XXXIV). Lao-tzu describes it as “Nothing,” by which he means, says Wilhelm, only its “contrast with the world of reality.” Lao-tzu describes its nature as follows:

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the wheel depends.
We turn clay to make a vessel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the vessel depends.
We pierce doors and windows to make a house;
And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the utility of the house depends.
Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the utility of what is not. [Ch. XI.]

“Nothing” is evidently “meaning” or “purpose”, and it is only called Nothing because it does not appear in the world of the senses, but is only its organizer…..

Wilhelm describes it as “a borderline conception lying at the extreme edge of the world of appearances.” In it, the opposites “cancel out in non-discrimination,” but are still potentially present. (Synchronicity, p.70-1)

It is my contention that evil is a rogue form of this nothing that is truly nothing, i.e. absence of meaning or purpose. I suggest that it is the endogenous retrovirus that occupies “the space where there is nothing” in our DNA (junk DNA) and “it is on the space where there is nothing” that the efficacy of the ERV depends. How do we get rid of it? According to Tolkein, we let it get rid of itself. When a semblance of someone achieves its goal of re-merging with a semblance of power, they both disappear, and all similar semblances as well.

Nothingness by definition cannot exist, except as an illusion, until it is dissipated. Tom van Flandern describes this in astronomical terms: a total vacuum cannot exist, since particles would behave exactly as if it did not exist, i.e. move instantly and seamlessly from one non-vacuum to the next. In other words, the universe is all that is, and – theoretically at least – nothing that isn’t. Likewise, evil doesn’t exist, unless you buy into the illusion.

[araucaria]

An example of the morphing of Pareto's law into something rather different:

Posted by araucaria (here)
What overpopulation really means to the überrich elite. It has nothing to do with the health of the planet or the people, and everything to do with the loss of their outrageous supremacy. A banker’s sob story: ‘Asians eating our lunch and dinner’. ‘The 80:20 rule is going to be a 35:65 rule, and that puts a challenge of dramatic proportions to anybody who’s at a business school today or graduating.’

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mOwZwkhFemQ

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mOwZwkhFemQ

[Curt]

Thanks for this Araucaria. I'm looking forward to further development of the ideas in this thread.

The idea that an endogenous virus nested in the human genome could be responsible for manifesting the money system as a means of serving its own evolutionary 'non-agenda' is an intriguing one.

It would be interesting to know whether this virus can be said to have nearly run its course in our species.

If that is the case, and we're about to break our collective 'fever', then what's next for us?

And somewhat relatedly: I've noticed that those with lots of money tend to hate those without it. They tend to have cruel attitudes about how they've ended up being poor, or homeless. They have all sorts of theories about how to deal with them- including shipping them off places, letting them die, or wanting to devise ways to keep them from breeding. Most striking, they feel it's their right to direct the course of their lives.

Do these super-rich have a worse case of the virus, in other words?