Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form

From Robert Anton Wilson's preface to his book Cosmic Trigger, volume 1:

Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, "My current model" -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- "contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised." In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.

Wilson was the first author to turn me on to the concept of Model Agnosticism. I consider the revelation of relativity to be one of the most significant gifts ever received. It allows for play and exploration of heretical worldviews without becoming ensnared by the trappings of Belief.

Just yesterday I received an email from my father, a french man who identifies with leftist intellectual Jewish atheism, but whose early childhood was peppered with Parisian love of apocalyptic prophecy (See: Nostradamus). Despite his denial of Higher Reality, he confesses a private appreciation for the interpretive art of quatrain and psychic navigation of future possibilities.

My father's email came out of left field. I was shocked to discover the contents of the message. He appears to be genuinely concerned that Nostradamus' prophecy about the End Times is beginning to come true, as evidenced by poetic passages seemingly alluding to the nuclear meltdown in Japan and the insane political violence taking place in the middle east. The next location to get hit, according to those who interpret Nostra's quatrains, will be the West Coast of the United States. I currently live in Oregon, and my father's email expressed concern that I might be in danger here on the west coast.

According to my father's sources, the end of the world began just two days ago, on 4/11/11. I wonder whether my father recognizes the encoded numerical implications of this date, where the latter four numbers (11/11) add up to 4, represented by the month of April. Thus 4/11/11 suggests the unfolding of 4 into the division of 11/11.

Considering his atheistic perspective, I can't help but suspect that there is some indwelling human need to arrange seemingly disconnected forms, such as the day of the year and the simultaneous occurrence of disaster somewhere in the world, as both a form of play and a way to confront the imminence of death.

It is not enough to simply speak the words "I am going to die some day." An excerpt from the book Illuminating the Path, by Khenchen Palden Sherab and Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal, speaks to the necessity for human beings to contemplate the nature of death and emptiness:

Just simply sitting there and saying "It is all empty," is like putting a little cup upside down - the little space in the cup becomes a narrow, limited emptiness. It is essential to understand the heart of the matter.

By analogy, it is not enough to simply know that the world is in a phase of transformation. As human beings, we have a deep indwelling desire to track the inevitable disintegration of order, that we may sink into the deeper levels of reality. Yet to track political and natural disasters alone will not satiate this desire. By tracing world events in a non-linear and irrational fashion, such as numerology or poetic quatrains or whatever else, we bypass the small-cup-emptiness of Consensus Reality's doom and gloom. Engaging a non-consensus-reality meta-narrative allows us to experience the world in a way that feels more private, sacred, and personal.

I have chosen to illustrate one method of NCR mapping in the following image.

I begin by selecting a section of the world. In this case, Central America. There are 8 countries in this section of the world. For the sake of simplifying the work, I have chosen to focus on the three six-letter country names. 666 is the number of the beast, an appropriate sequence to invoke for the purposes of radical prophecy and divination.

The three six letter words (Mexico Panama Belize) are divided into two isosceles triangles, one upright and the other inverted. Interestingly, all three of these names divided perfectly into vowels and consonants, respectively. Whether we choose to interpret this as coincidence, conspiracy, divine synchronicity or something else altogether will depend upon a pre-existing map of reality.

I have chosen to identify the alphanumeric correspondences applicable to each letter. This could be described as one branch of the Science of Non-Consensus-Reality. There is a precise method whereby we escape from our minds and into the ephemeral world of empty forms. These empty forms, or letters divorced from their initial significance (names of countries), are being systematically twisted by a series of processes in order to reach an apotheosis of Higher Significance. However, the capacity for enjoyment of this process depends on the practitioner (occultist), and likewise, the final meaning at which he or she arrives typically depends on a pre-existing bias of some sort, be it apocalyptic or otherwise.

The simple arithmetic of this process reveals a higher order of alpha-numeric correspondence. We have now arrived at what the occultist would be inclined to call magickal formulae for deriving further meaning. The numbers 15 and 40 are imbued with divine significance, tying the names of these three six-letter names of countries to an abstract sequence of alphanumeric correspondence.

On and on spins the merry-go-round of my interpretive process. The numbers 40 and 15 may be applied to an infinite number of different world events, from times of the day to quantities of objects to age of significant persons, all with the final result of escaping from the linear modes of relating to the cosmos.

When our data has become so totally abstracted from Consensus Reality that the resulting information can only be said to exist as phantoms of our imagination, we then stand at a critical point. The insane mystic makes the error of trying to drag his imaginal work back into Consensus Reality and prophesize future events. If he suffers from paranoia, his interpretations will be apocalyptic. If his human needs are taken care of (food, shelter, clothing, social life) then he may be inclined to see these synchronistic data points as evidence of the compassion of the Universe.

As quantum physics has demonstrated, we are the observers who affect the experiment. All form is perceived by the mind, and may therefor be dubbed imaginary. In realizing the emptiness of form, and simultaneously, realizing that emptiness can be perceived only through the study of interrelated forms, we are illuminated!