Instant Karma Gonna Getcha!

This is my third attempt to rewrite this chapter for my final rewrite of the entire book. Its all recursive logic and figuring out what had to go in this particular chapter was extremely difficult because it has to summarize the rest of the book which I have yet to finish writing. Anyway, I had to add more physics and philosophy including nonlinear temporal dynamics which is a can of worms I wasn't ready to talk about much. Its related to the "Yin World" which is a complicated Taoist subject many Rainbow Family members may not know by that name, but is a subject they are sometimes familiar with and people tend to whisper about knowing outsiders could never understand. Its something that I need to cover in later chapters and is really more of the central subject for the sequel to this book.

Instant Karma Gonna Getcha!​

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As a child I wondered why cavemen were unable to invent the atom bomb and destroy the world a million years ago which, many think a somewhat odd question but, is related to the anthropic principle. Assuming there is no obvious divine intervention, then why does the universe appear to be so prearranged as to preclude even an intelligent species like humanity from wiping themselves out in short order? Why isn't it much easier to drive your own species to extinction or for humanity to become trapped in an endless dark age by our own mindless greed, violence, and sheer stupidity? Other than germ warfare, which our immune systems have always been able to adapt to, why do the laws of physics require enormous populations, vast industries, and advanced technology to produce weapons of mass destruction such as atomic bombs (instead of merely crude digging tools for example) and why has the development of technology continued to be so conducive to the rapid rise of civilization right up into the modern information age?

Throughout the ages myriad cultures have speculated upon exactly when God or humanity might destroy the species, while I've always wondered why they haven't done so already. Cavemen blowing up the entire world with atom bombs they cobble together out of clay and rocks or becoming trapped in an endless dark age by their own mad inventions are the kinds of nightmare Planet of the Apes scenarios I might expect to arise in any number of arbitrary universes, begging the question of how humanity's incredibly diverse and rapidly evolving technology has remained so remarkably conducive to our continuing advancement and survival. If the earth had been much smaller or any number of other parameters had been significantly different, humanity as we know it might never have survived to establish anything remotely like modern civilization.

The most plausible explanation I could think of was that "infinite echoes in infinity" would normalize one another, or even each other out, providing a sort of governor or regulator for existence itself that prevents the worst extremes. Decades later I discovered that, to varying degrees, half the planet shares my view and these "echoes in infinity" are what hippies refer to as instant karma which is synonymous with yin-yang dynamics. Instant karma is usually thought of as the belief that, for better or worse and in one form or another, whatever we put out into the universe can come back to either enrich our lives or haunt us with a trivial example being kicking something in frustration and stubbing our toe. However, contracting lung cancer after decades of smoking is another example because the "instant" in the name merely serves to distinguish the concept from traditional beliefs in reincarnation. Many have dismissed instant karma as a joke, just so much superstitious nonsense, or one of the oldest attempts to use meaningless bullshit to mess with people's heads, however, many of us have been keenly aware that the most interesting things can grow out of manure and we've been curious as to why it has taken so long to establish instant karma as a law of nature...

Whilst searching for a mathematical short-cut, the conservative German physicist Max Planck begged his colleges to please explain the joke complaining that a sense of humor was never amongst his list of job requirements. What he could not have known with any certainty, but must have suspected, was that this particular shortcut would haunt the modern sciences for the next century. In fact, for decades after his initial discovery a popular subject among physicists at cocktail parties was how to design experiments to discourage practical jokers. In his later years, Planck's friends noted that he had intentionally acquired a very agreeable sense of humor and, along with the enduring mystery of quantum mechanics, other physicists thought it prudent to do the same. Over half a century later a few bold physicists, whose reputations were otherwise beyond question, began cultivating an even more off-the-wall sense of humor with John Wheeler once famously declaring, "A black hole has no hair! Gravity without mass! Time is what prevents everything from happening at once! There is no law except the law there is no law!" To which Richard Feynman was quick to add, "Some say Wheeler's lost his mind in his later years, but he's always been that way."

More frequently Feynman is quoted as saying, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics you are wrong." The implied corollary joke being, of course, that if you believe you don't comprehend quantum mechanics then you most certainly do understand because it never made any sense to begin with! Once, someone frustrated with my arguments insisted that I don't know anything about quantum mechanics and should stop talking about it altogether, at which point, I was quick to reassure him that the minute I have anything intelligible to say on the subject I will. Over a century later, in the hallowed halls of academia the continuing howls of indignation over the discovery of what's missing from this picture are now beginning to spread to every branch of the sciences along with the slowly dawning realization that mother nature has a wicked sense of humor and an endless supply of zingers because, apparently, existence itself is paradoxical and instant karma is always gonna getcha baby!

One primitive tribe in Africa believes anyone can talk to mother nature at any time as if she were just another venerated member of the tribe and they all like to say, "Mother Nature's love is irresistible, but she has a wicked sense of humor!" Donald Hoffman is a Game theorist who discovered this the hard way when, after studying the latest neurological findings and running one computer simulation after another, he was forced to conclude that, according to all the evidence, if the human and brain had ever resembled anything remotely like reality we would have already become extinct as a species. Which, of course, means that his own discovery can be considered just so much more self-contradictory nonsense along the same lines as quantum mechanics which, nevertheless, appears to be much more useful than anyone's naive ideas about reality.

In response to this unrelenting string of pies-in-the-face from their own research a few, like Stephen Hawking, have championed taking one upon the chin for queen, country, and tradition insisting that Einstein had to be right and God could never be so malicious as to leave us completely in the dark. Nevertheless, despite widely respected professionals everywhere objecting that they see little to laugh about under the circumstances, the evidence continues to mount that, assuming there is a God, apparently its impossible to know what he had in mind when he created the universe, much less, know with any certainty what fate yet awaits humanity. Without realizing that they had corroborated this, a group of mathematicians examining all of classical mathematics and causal physics concluded that any number of simple metaphors can be used to describe causality equally well.

According to the mathematical evidence nobody can ever prove you wrong if you insist on arguing that everything is merely composed of black holes, balls of string, bouncing springs, rubber bands, clockwork, wavy gravy, lime Jell-O, or lotions in motion on vibrating rubber sheets for all I know! Similarly, another mathematical study showed that, not only can you take your pick from among countless causal explanations, but only two dimensions are required as if, in reality, life itself were a cartoon. Like Planck, Hoffman, and others before them, what the mathematicians have just confirmed is that the hallowed halls of academia have traditionally relied upon what some of us prefer to call "Cartoon Logic", that is, the logic of small children who, without the slightest reservation, will adopt whatever explanation they can think up that conflicts less with reality as they know it or just happens to appeal to them more at the time.

At the height of his career Bob Hope employed no less than 32 writers, for his famous nonpartisan political jokes, which the grateful combat troops attending his USO shows appreciated a great deal more than anyone attempting to enlighten them as to the political realities of their situation. Unfortunately, academia has seldom knowingly chosen to invest in their own slapstick, quite the opposite, their very ability to thrive as institutions of higher learning has always depended upon their vigorously defending their reputations as no-nonsense workaholics fanatically dedicated to stamping out any bullshit among them. Yet, as I noted in the last chapter, when you can no longer identify that you have identified nothing you have personal bullshit to deal with and, for thousands of years in the name of objectivity and reason, academics have championed the belief that everything observable must be humanly comprehensible only to be confronted in the last century with evidence that they have merely transformed the art of denial into an exact science.

As a result, one of the more fascinating things to grow out of manure in recent years has been the establishment of the first quantifiable theory of humor based upon the simple observation that anything low in entropy can be considered funny. That's polite technobabble for the obvious fact that humor revolves around bullshit, or what's missing from this picture, which is why a cat isn't necessarily considered funny unless you were originally afraid it might be a cat burglar or whatever. Along with the more prestigious arts today, at long last, the "secrets" of Vaudeville are slowly yielding to the intense scrutiny of highly trained and dedicated researchers who can now earn their doctorates in stand-up comedy by spouting technobabble such as "low entropy" and quoting Dr Seuss as a reference. Many might assume that this latest development is merely some academic's sad attempt at humor along the lines of offering freshmen courses such as "Everything you need to know about nothing 101", however, giving pause to stand-up comedians everywhere the US government has just announced that they have classified a few jokes as "Vital to the National Defense" and hinted that congress is investigating and, of course, they have no comment.

Humor can be important in any number of professions, such as public relations or advertising, however academic institutions tend to be much more conservative and for one of their own to actively pursue a research grant to develop a logic based upon bullshit they would have to risk being summarily censored and promptly escorted to the nearest available rubber room. Thus, when the Oxford trained science writer Alastair Clark discovered that humor and pattern matching are able to explain how the human mind and brain work his subsequent attempts to explore the underlying systems logic it implied were deliberately as dry as a bone and he was careful to let it be widely known that he could not even begin to imagine who might be capable of accomplishing the same task less awkwardly. That's where I come in because, never belonging to any club that would have me as a member, I actually prefer bouncing off rubber walls to listening to the endless complaints, clamorous objections, and more insipid protracted arguments from, otherwise, supposedly dignified and intelligent objective scientists about how everything must always make sense. As I keep alluding to, nonsense just ain't nonsense anymore whenever it turns out to be outrageously more useful than anybody's stupid ideas about reality however, more importantly, it just so happens I know how to explore any applicable systems logic without, figuratively speaking, banging my head quite so hard against the nearest wall.

Unlike academics who have a serious conflict of interest in studying comedy, I'm a master of the Tao Te Ching which is widely recognized as either the deepest philosophical well on the planet or the deepest pile of manure ever written. Due to instant karma ruling the universe, it is both and I don't have a problem myself with what people consider logic and bullshit, philosophy and comedy, beauty and humor simply being context dependent, however, the trick is to be able to provide a nontrivial, self-consistent, and demonstrable proof that even academics with stunted senses of humor can easily recognize and acknowledge and the sooner the better in my opinion. Once an academic asked me what can be done to save the human race, to which I replied, that if institutions of higher learning were not so diligently teaching anyone who wants to know exactly how to destroy the ecology and kill one another in the process we wouldn't be having this conversation. Like the Three Stooges constantly blaming one another for all of their problems, they all seem to share the same widespread belief that humanity is somehow trapped in a dysfunctional relationship and dependent upon it for their very survival even as they kill one another in ever larger numbers and devestate the entire planet. In recent years, the jokes have gotten so bad that a few have even grimly suggested that technology is now the only way left to preserve our humanity and, I'm afraid, if someone doesn't provide compelling proof soon that academics need to work on their sense of humor and elevate their slapstick a notch or two the earth itself may not survive their tireless efforts to save us from ourselves.

Rainbow Warrior poetry, such as I write, is among the more off-the-wall comedic extrapolations from the Tao Te Ching and compares the deeply venerated academic obsession with searching for an explanation for life, the universe, and everything to meditating upon the Sublime Lime Jell-O, Doctor Strangelove, and an unnatural infatuation with a seven foot inflatable Barbie doll. As irreverent as it is, it can also treat every word as a variable with no intrinsic meaning or value making it amenable to mathematical analysis and capable of providing just the sort of rigorous proof that academics demand. That's easier said than done because the Tao Te Ching from which the poetry is extrapolated expresses a complex multifractal equation of a Fractal Dragon within a broader Mandelbrot pattern and, in over two thousand years, the best anyone has ever managed is to write roughly 150 or so of the 430 poems required for such a proof. Thankfully, two computer systems have already been constructed which produce better than average jokes and, within two decades at most, even conventional computers should be capable of exposing the mathematical foundations of the poetry and humor. Rejoice all you adorable clowns! Comedy is about to get the high tech treatment and neither Vaudeville, academia, nor the rest of the world will ever be the same again.

In spite of over a century of quantum mechanics and normally conservative institutions suddenly showing more interest than usual in their own slapstick, by and large, the physics community still takes umbrage at the slightest suggestion that there's anything funny about logic, causality, and physics, not to mention, their jobs. Once a physicist accused me of being a mystic, which is a huge insult for many of them, at which point I felt compelled to inform him that if he cannot distinguish humor from mysticism its an occupational hazard as far as I'm concerned. Another time someone rudely interrupted a conversation I was having demanding an explanation for classical mechanics to which I responded, "What? A Barbie Doll?" And he replied, "No! The Classical Motion!" And, of course, I immediately inquired, "A seven foot inflatable Barbie?" Sometimes you would swear Moby Dick is on your line and Vaudeville awaits but, most of the time, to quote Rodney Dangerfield, "I just can't get no respect!" In either case, the jokes are so bad I've come to sympathize with the Taoist mystics who usually prefer to just remain silent and refrain from contributing to any lowbrow slapstick.

What jokes, quantum mechanics, and the concept of instant karma all share in common is their obvious context dependence due to their contents being so extremely humble. Black holes provide another dramatic example because their contents are so humble they don't even possess a surface and can act like any other lifeless rock cast adrift in the vast empty regions of space or, perversely, as if they were the bottomless pit from hell capable of swallowing and vaporizing anyone or anything unlucky enough to get caught in their gravity well. Modern electronics display these same yin-yang dynamics, or two faces of Janus, frequently prompting engineers to shake their heads in resignation whenever forced to discuss electron holes moving about without their electrons. As I mentioned in the last chapter, we are using nature to study nature, while the void laughs back in our faces without the slightest compassion for all of our hard work, sacrifices, deeply held beliefs, good intentions, and thousands of years of growth, progress, and proud traditions. Which is why, I assume, every engineer I've offered to explain the effect to has turned me down flat and, just like Mr Spock on Star Trek, even the more polite academic philosophers and physicists have almost universally dismissed me as some sort of gad fly or complete nut case and insisted with a straight face that they fail to see any humor in the situation.

In no small part due to their enormous success, academic institutions tend to be in complete denial that there is more in heaven and earth than dreamt of in all their philosophies and, like ants climbing the Empire State building, they refuse to accept on principle that they can never grasp the reality of their situation by merely climbing higher. Yet the self-evident truth remains, nonetheless, that the worst possible tragedy is to become afraid of the light, the worst possible tyranny is to deny the evidence of our own senses and sensibilities, and the worst possible failure is losing faith in our own personal journey. To become aware we must first acknowledge our ignorance, to have a friend we must first desire to be a friend, to feel forgiven we must first be willing to accept any forgiveness, to appreciate more of the humor and beauty in life we must first nurture them in ourselves, and in order to truly live we must first embrace life more fully. For no man is an island nor can he be the measure of all things lest he first embrace virtue as its own reward and wonder as the beginning of wisdom. Which is why, to this very day, so many of us still insist that, win or lose, Yogi Berra always knew how to play the game: For what profit it a man if he gains the world, but loses his soul?

In addition to supplying invaluable insights into humanity's slapstick down through the ages, everything being context dependent provides a simple explanation for countless otherwise vexing mysteries such as why its impossible to create a perfect vacuum, obtain absolute zero temperature, or achieve the speed of light. For example, if the speed of light were not a limit a black hole would have a smaller diameter and the tiniest grain of sand falling into it would become equal in mass and energy to that of the entire universe. Meaning, it would become possible to create a rock so heavy that even God could never pick it up and, rather than such inconceivable extremes, what we observe is the collective synergy of a black hole's contents diminishing their own existence until they become so normalized they vanish altogether and the black hole starts to evaporate. In doing so they obey the principle that every lesser truth will inevitably appear to exchange identities with their own greater truth or context with the concentrated contents of a black hole being steadily transformed into energy and scattered throughout the universe.

As dramatic as black holes are, a more pedestrian example of this same effect is that from the ground the earth can look infinitely flat as if it goes on forever, from orbit it looks round, from far away a dimensionless point, while from the other side of the universe its as if the earth had never existed. Aliens traveling towards us in a spaceship would see the earth appear as if from out of nowhere and slowly acquire a more distinctive identity the closer they approach, which, also happens to be what is observed in quantum mechanics where virtual particles which can only be detected indirectly will appear out of nowhere and progressively transform into more distinctive particles that can be directly observed and measured. Normally we tend to think of such things as merely an effect of scale, however, everything blurs into an enigma with both quantum mechanics and Relativity implying that, in extreme situations on any scale, nothing makes any sense because the context and content inevitably become conflated and appear to exchange identities. In technobabble, rather than an absolute frame of reference such as absolute size or distance, everything displays scalar effects of magnitude and juxtaposition where even what we consider big and small, near and far, are like the directions of up and down and merely changing the context can make them meaningless. For example, an astronaut in orbit doesn't feel the effects of gravity and can randomly pick whatever directions they prefer for up and down or even decide to think of every direction as up simply because thinking of any direction as down makes them space sick!

Both quantum indeterminacy and the Simultaneity Paradox of Relativity ensure that, in extreme situations, everything becomes more conspicuously context dependent including what exists and doesn't exist, what is the past and future, and what is synergy or normalization. The Simultaneity Paradox is that, due to the constancy of the speed of light, two observers at vastly different removes from the same series of events will witness them occurring at different times, meaning, that the two observers can argue forever whether the chicken or the egg came first. Similarly, the Unruh Effect of Quantum Field Theory asserts that, at Relativistic speeds, even the vacuum of space itself should steadily transform into an impenetrable wall of raw energy and a recent mathematical examination of Relativity concluded that, assuming indeterminacy rules the universe, then the unimaginably tiny effects of gravitational time dilation should be enough to explain the collapse of the wave-function. Whether faster, slower, larger, smaller, weaker, stronger, or whatever, the more extreme the situation becomes the less sense anything starts to make until, invariably, their identity becomes indeterminate and they will transform into their complimentary-opposite as the greater context and its contents exchange identities. Within a few years it should be possible to test these last two effects and, eventually, establish statistically that the overall context appears to be determining its own contents in every way imaginable causing the law of identity to progressively vanish down the nearest convenient rabbit hole or toilet of your personal preference, or what can also be described as a universal recursion in the law of identity.

A little clarification on my use of the term “synergy” is called for at this point. Publishers tend to print whatever people will buy and in over ten years of my routinely asking for opinions I discovered that half the people I was talking to online were suspicious of the common dictionary and, sometimes, preferred to make up their own definitions despite almost none of them being aware that, for the most part, dictionaries merely contain popular definitions. When informed of this, few showed any real interest in the revelation preferring to keep right on arguing for their own personal definitions for words. Their strong suspicions and lack of interest in hearing the truth or sharing the definitions for words with the public at large reflects their contentious popular culture where, like the Three Stooges, people frequently argue over the definition of stupid and who is the best example without ever realizing they all provide great examples because, regardless of how many arguments anybody might win, the truth always speaks louder than anyone's words and never requires anyone to defend it. Anyway, on rare occasions publishers will change the definition of a word just to appease some of the more vocal minorities who might buy the damned things and in recent decades business people, academics, and others have been lobbying for a new definition of synergy that suits their needs and discourages others from using the word. Again, like the Three Stooges, they seem to believe that the truth is less important than the squeaky wheel getting the grease or whoever happens to be the highest bidder. I assume that's why the publishers resist such attempts knowing that, although it might make a little more money, its a fight that nobody can actually win and the last thing they want to do is get caught in the middle.

Common dictionaries generally list the most popular definitions of words in the order of how frequently people actually use them, but the publishers finally caved in to the demands of these dissenting minorities to redefine synergy and, often, do away with the already existing popular definition altogether. Anyway, the newer definitions all essentially define synergy as, “Organizations, agents, or substances producing results greater than the sum of their parts” which is deliberately useless for expressing context dependence. While their definition is great for describing a business venture, a chemical reaction, or any number of things in clinical causal terms it happens to be horrible for expressing context dependent subjects, such as quantum mechanics, or even for writing poetry or philosophy. Which is why I prefer to stick with the time honored and still wildly popular definition of synergy as simply "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts" and just ignore contentious idiots futilely attempting to redefine the truth and the English language for everyone else.

Russian nesting dolls provide an example of how everything ultimately being context dependent requires the use of vague as well as explicit definitions because the observer must decide for themselves which is the greater context or its contents, what is synergy or normalization, the truth or bullshit. The dolls are crude representations of people and the largest doll can be considered normalized content until you open it, at which point, it becomes the greater synergistic context that lends more meaning to the, otherwise, even more humble doll hidden inside. The smaller the dolls become the rounder, less distinctive, and more humble in general and if you were to make them infinitely small it would become extremely difficult to distinguish any content from its immediate context or to tell what the hell they are. Its the same effect observed in quantum mechanics however, as I said, it isn't merely a question of size, but how humble or complex we perceive anything to be with shadows providing an everyday macroscopic example.

Thanks to the greater context being every bit as important as any content in determining the identity of anything, what we might considered a shadow in a room in the daytime can become a faint area of light at night even though its contents remain essentially identical. Rather than size or even just our personal awareness, the context itself is determining how humble or complex its own contents appear to be with this same effect being observed in a shielded vacuum chamber which, past a certain point, will refuse to empty any further and will fill with virtual particles that appear as if out of nowhere. The greater context is providing its own content because a context without any significant content and any content without a greater context are both physically and conceptually impossible contradictions ensuring that extremes in either how humble or complex anything becomes will always ensure they transform into their complimentary-opposites.

The same dark room that might keep a child awake at night can help an adult fall asleep and the observer must decide for themselves whether the darkness is humble or complex, productive or counterproductive, self-evident or mysterious, comforting or disturbing. However, there are limits to how much the observer can decide this on their own precisely because the greater context inevitably determining its own content is what people commonly refer to as reality or the truth. An adult may be annoyed by a faint light in a room keeping them awake until they suddenly feel an urge to go to the bathroom and become grateful to be able to see where they are going. At least as much as any of our personal beliefs and feelings, it is reality or the greater context which determines who we become.

In more abstract terms, it means there are many lesser truths and, then, there is One Greater Truth that applies to everything which Socrates described as the memory of God that none can remember in all its glory. The greatest truth of them all being the unchanging eternal truth, which is never mere content to be to be debated, but always the greater self-evident context which justifies itself and determines the identity of everything else. Statistics, for example, can be considered a lesser truth which can be perceived as either a context in which we might perform meaningful calculations or merely content as in "a statistic of one" where the context of "one" transforms the identity of statistics into the contents of an oxymoron. The whole may only become greater than the sum of its parts at the cost of diminishing their individual truth and, the other way around, the truth of any individual part may only increase at the cost of diminishing their collective truth as the context and its contents constantly exchange identities. An oxymoron remains a truth in that any joke can prove to be useful in countless ways, such as my using it here to illustrate a lesser truth, and understanding how lesser truths are created and destroyed, promoted and suppressed, revealed and obscured, can be as humorous as it is invaluable.

Einstein protested that the speed of light is an absolute limit and adamantly refused to accept the evidence of quantum mechanics that, for all practical purposes, quanta can be considered utterly random implying the only limit is that there are no limits. As far as quanta are concerned, Murphy could have been just another optimistic happy idiot who had no clue as to what he was actually saying when he proudly proclaimed his greatest insight to the world, "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong!" Murphy's Law can be said to rule quantum mechanics because the minute you believe you know the answer or don't know the answer you are wrong and, therefore, a paradoxical version of Occam's Razor applies where every answer is always both correct and incorrect making the simplest answer all that much more attractive and, therefore, all the more frequently either extremely productive or counterproductive. Once again, shadows provide a good example with it remaining debatable whether a shadow is actually a photon when which we happen to observe just depends upon the context and the more accurately we attempt to measure one the more obviously we create the other.

Like the particle-wave duality of quantum mechanics shadows are confined to a limited area while, so long as it never bumps into anything, a photon can keep going in any arbitrary direction forever. In fact, theoretically a photon could travel from the Big Bang all the way to the Big Crunch only to repeat the journey all over again, but undetectable energy that merely goes in random circles for one eternity after another never accomplishing a damned thing is a contradiction in terms and another extreme situation that the yin-yang dynamics of instant karma would exclude. Mathematically speaking, photons experience isomorphic space-time and don't make any distinctions between forward and backwards in either space or time just as we might say that shadows don't distinguish between space or time. Photons are also believed to be instantly emitted and absorbed conveying their energy and information with perfect fidelity just as a shadow can be said to be instantaneously created and destroyed and convey any lack of energy and information with perfect fidelity. Apparently, the humble anonymity of photons and shadows becomes synonymous with humble efficiency in extreme contexts. The notable exception is when photons become so energetic they destroy whatever they encounter or can even convert their energy into mass, but each instance still reflects the Conservation of Creativity and Efficiency.

Rocks and any old crap rolling downhill illustrates this same principle where the less individuality that anything expresses the more efficient it becomes and the more surprisingly it can transform into greater creative complexity. Over the eons, as the rocks roll downhill they become smaller, rounder, less distinctive, and more humble in general even pushing some of the rocks that are less humble out of the path of their collective flow until those remaining can support the kind of extremely efficient flow dynamics that can cause an avalanche to transform everything in an instant. Collectively, they form a self-organizing system reflecting the four fold supersymmetry in a recursion in the law of identity, or what I like to call the Four Faces of God, which is similar to staring off into infinity and seeing the same four rudimentary patterns repeating until they become indistinguishable. Geometrically these patterns are the void, symmetry, geometry, and time while their behavior can appear random, fated, self-organizing, or self-contradictory just to keep everyone guessing what the hell is going on.

At times, the synergy of the collective efficiency of humble rocks rolling downhill is transformed into greater creative output and, for example, within the soil smaller rocks can convey water and heat efficiently enough to support life as we know it. Efficiency and creativity, the humble and complex, are themselves revealed as indivisible complimentary-opposites and, thanks to the recursion in the law of identity, everything that exists resembles both the initial creative impetus of the Big Bang and the inescapable efficiency of a Big Crunch. As I already mentioned, according to the mathematicians we can adopt any causal explanation we might prefer even for the origin and final demise of life, the universe, and everything. Notably, both a black hole and the neurons in our brains are the most efficient for anything their size at redistributing any mass, energy, and information and the human eye is so efficient it can detect a single photon ensuring that nobody is ever left completely in the dark and that, at least once in a great while, the light bulb must come on.

A small child attached to their favorite toy is a good example of how synergy becomes self-limiting in extreme contexts. No matter how hard the child may struggle to nurture and retain their love for their toy, nonetheless, their attachment will inevitably fade and become lost like a drop of water in the ocean as they steadily acquire new thoughts and feelings all synergistically vying for their attention. To some degree, the process works in reverse as well empowering older adults to nurture their childhood feelings in order to recapture them and see life once again through the wonderment of a child. Who is the observer and what is being observed becomes context dependent which is the reason why the smallest pond can remain the busiest place that sheds invaluable light upon the Big Picture and how what has become a vague abstraction for us can, yet again, become much more real. As Allan Watts said, "God is playing peek-a-boo" and without faith in ourselves and our personal journey we become a statistic of one which is just flat out impossible because every context must have significant content.

What is relative and absolute, random and fated, knowledge and ignorance, forever remain context dependent providing a simple explanation for the varied and often unpredictable, yet, also orderly deterministic world we normally perceive all around us. Instead of a totally random universe, as quantum mechanics suggests, or a fated mono-block universe, as Relativity strongly implies, space without time, the random without the orderly, the truth without bullshit, or any kind of mystical, metaphysical, objective, or subjective extreme is always excluded by instant karma ensuring they all remain not only indivisible but, ultimately, meaningless and unimaginable without one another. In each case, in order to identify anything we must rely upon the greater context to determine the identity of its own contents which also provides a simple explanation for why we normally perceive the steady march of time ever onward and forward.

Despite quanta being commonly referred to as utterly random and even formless, at the very least they always display the predictable geometry and behavior of particle-wave duality and despite mathematicians and physicists constantly playing around with higher dimensions, they are lucky if they can even conceive of what the simplest four dimensional objects might actually look like. Equally, the arrow of time can be thought as reflecting the fact our minds just don't work backwards and a movie played backwards can make almost no sense whatsoever. Everything being context dependent provides a simple explanation for not only the deterministic world we experience but, also, the Quantum Zeno Effect where a watched pot of entangled quanta will never boil, for the Simultaneity Paradox of Relativity where two observers can witness the same events occurring at different times, and for the latest revelation that the smaller anything becomes the more frequently its entropy will decrease violating the second law of thermodynamics.

Theoretically, on macroscopic scales at the event horizon of a black hole, we can also observe time coming to a complete standstill because size isn't the issue, so much as, how humble the observer perceives anything to be relative to its context. Two observers have to be extremely far apart in order to witness the same events occurring at noticeably different times and, similarly, a black hole's incredible gravity contrasts with its diminutive size because the two extremes express the two face of Janus, the drama and the comedy, humble anonymity and humble efficiency being dramatically transformed into greater creativity in the form of virtual particles radiating out into the cosmos. Something like the micron sized silica bead observed decreasing in entropy suggests that it may even be possible to watch Humpty Dumpty put himself back together again because entropy decreasing is time flowing backwards and size merely represents one way the two faces of Janus can be exaggerated.

Extremes of any kind being excluded by the two faces of Janus always being expressed means a Goldilocks Principle applies to everything ensuring nothing is ever too hot or too cold, too fast or too slow, too big or too small, too one dimensional or too multi-dimensional, too unified or too divided, etc. because they always transform into one another. Among other things it explains why quantum mechanics insist that nothing can occur faster than roughly 10^-27s or be smaller than 10^-33cm without leaving our universe altogether and why neither physicists nor mathematicians can establish exactly how many dimensions we might actually inhabit. Similarly, just as the past synergistically contributes to the future, the future can be described as simultaneously normalizing the past to ensure everything works out just right in the present moment, at least, for the universe as a whole if not for ourselves.

This was confirmed in the first simulation of a Mott Transition of a system from quantum mechanical to classical which, of course, defied the predictions of the classical causal mathematics commonly used to formulate quantum mechanics and, additionally, provides a simple explanation for how Feynman diagrams work and how to expand upon them which I explain in greater detail in later chapters. If anything, our world appears to be simultaneously united and divided, random and orderly, constrained and unrestrained with mother nature's loving truth and beauty only being rivaled by her wicked sense of humor. Electrons have been studied extensively and provide one of the better examples of the applicable metaphorical scalar architecture of a universal recursion in the law of identity with their particle-like aspect being considered to have no constituent parts making electrons indivisible, yet, their wave-like aspect has recently proven to be infinitely divisible.

These two faces of Janus should show up throughout nature and illustrate how everything being context dependent can casually crush both calculus and Zeno's paradoxes into indeterminate mush. For example, another examination of a Mott transition, from a conducting to a non-conducting state in graphene, indicated that long range forces are just as important as short range ones for determining any phase transition. A pot of boiling water is a phase transition from more orderly water molecules into random steam, while superconductivity is a more obvious manifestation of electrons and the medium they travel through expressing greater unity as different characteristics become synonymous and what is random or orderly becomes more context dependent. Exactly what the hell anything might ultimately be composed of or what the hell is going on in the grand scheme of things remains anyone's guess and, due to the recursion, it should prove impossible to determine if everything isn't merely composed of holographic Swiss cheese or blue smoke and mirrors or whether the universe isn't merely a simulation of some sort. Whether life has any sort of reality or is merely a dream should prove impossible for modern science to determine.

In a dramatic demonstration of this, Finnish researchers recently constructed the first autonomous version of Maxwell's Demon. Its as if they had merely waved a magic wand and shouted "Abracadabra!" over their otherwise quite ordinary humble nanoscopic copper transistor empowering it to somehow convince electrons to sort out their own differences and make themselves more useful without anyone else having to expend any energy or effort in the process. Their transistor doesn't violate the conservation of energy and, while that might sound like merely another laboratory curiosity, of particular significance is that a wave and an amplifier are considered synonymous in physics with any wave being capable of amplifying or normalizing another wave and their experiment implying even information can sometimes be thought of as amplifying energy. Researchers have since determined that it may be possible to entangle quanta and have a generator in one location supply energy in the form of entangled information to a distant receiver inside your refrigerator, car, or whatever where it can be converted back into useful energy.

Even more intriguing, NASA and other labs around the world have confirmed a reactionless or inertialless drive appears to work inside a vacuum chamber and tests in space have already been planned. Without radiating anything or spitting any propellant out the back the thing somehow magically produces thrust with the physicists still arguing over how it could possibly work. The humorous thing is the drive is essentially a microwave oven that just bounces microwaves around inside a chamber and, if anything might be considered magic to primitives, its the fact a microwave oven can cook a complete turkey in under 40 minutes. Soon enough, we may have cheap satellites or rocket ships that can achieve the speed of light producing continuous reactionless thrust without relying upon any onboard power supply or anyone obviously beaming energy or anything to them, which, can also just so happen to cook a turkey in record time while, for those of us still on earth, it would seem to take forever to cook due to Relativistic time dilation.

Nature's seemingly mindless sense of humor can be compared to that of the smallest toddlers, but also covers more complex existentialist comedy ranging from Yogi Berra to Yoda to Stephen Wright, or what I like to call adult potty humor, where the jokes can become so dumb they are smart and can make everyone in the room groan, go cross-eyed, shake their heads, and laugh all at the same time. To this day many claim that Yogi Berra was from another planet, but nature's peek-a-boo complicates life by ensuring that even whether space and time are real or illusory and how many dimensions or planets or whatever our universe might happen to possess will always remain debatable. Western civilization may have been shocked by the revelations of Relativity and quantum mechanics that time is not just some sort of windup clock, untouchable ethereal backdrop, or merely an illusion as Zeno suggested, however, much of the rest of the world has taken this for granted since before the invention of agriculture and has always considered time to be much more organic.

In fact, on occasion, my friends and I have pointed out to each other when the passage of time appears to be flowing more organically than usual just as you might casually point out a double rainbow or any other interesting natural phenomenon. That might sound like so much whack-a-mole insanity or a popular drug induced hallucination but, as I said, at least half the planet seems to share these delusions which also happen to agree with the observations of quantum mechanics and Relativity. Among physicists, the second law of thermodynamics was the last hold-out for many still insisting causality must ultimately rule the universe, but aspects of life being apparently acausal doesn't make everything merely random either and, as I keep saying, the random and orderly define one another making calling something utterly random utterly meaningless outside of an orderly context.

For most of my life all this deep philosophical do-do, abstract metaphorical scalar physics, outrageous academic slapstick, and even my own personal observations of weird things like time appearing to be passing in unusual ways had all remained mere intellectual curiosities for me which I had always assumed were way over my head and that someone more qualified than I would write about one day, but they never did. I was prepared to just let it go at that until, one day, my mother asked me about "A friend of hers" who heard an echo from the future on the telephone. My mother is extremely conservative and, other than suspecting it was instant karma, I had no clue what to tell her and merely replied that I had no idea what could possibly cause such a thing. However, a few years later the Chinese government banned the use of time travel as a plot device in their mass media and, sometime afterwards, I experienced the same phenomenon myself using instant messaging online. While my belief in instant karma might sound exotic, I've been a skeptic and an agnostic all my life, but suddenly found myself having to acknowledge that I was no longer in Kansas anymore, the entire world was about to change in unpredictable ways and if I didn't write this book it might be a long time indeed before anybody else wrote something similar.



The Pale Buddha is famous for saying, "The past is only a memory, the future is only a dream" but life as we know it would be impossible without both memories and dreams. Bereft memories there's nothing to discuss and nothing to be done about it with, at best, everything being deja vu all over again while, without any awareness, there's still nothing to discuss and nothing to be done about and you may as well be talking to the nearest wall or arguing with a recording. As far as I'm concerned, reality without dreams is just somebody's nightmare, while dreams without reality is someone's else's fantasy with instant karma ensuring reality always catches up to us in our dreams and, likewise, our dreams and nightmares will eventually catch up with reality. Stay awake long enough and anyone will hallucinate because reality and dreams, memories and awareness, the past and the future, are like up and down and cannot ultimately be distinguished from one another in a recursion of the law of identity where our authenticity itself and living our dreams always depends upon our making fewer distinctions between who we are and what we are doing when instant karma is gonna getcha baby!