Category Archives: Metaphysics

Physics of the Stoics by Samuel Sambursky

Posted on by
Physics of the Stoics by S. Sambursky

So I learned about Physics of the Stoics via a wikipedia footnote and hunted down a copy because the protagonist of one of the novels I’m writing (Scratch) is a Stoic, in the formal sense.

And as I read about Stoicism (sticking to translations of ancient texts, since my protag isn’t a herd guy; he consults the originals, not the burgeoning pile of Stoic pop-lit) I became curious about what the ancient Greek stoics meant when they talked about “nature.”

Example, from Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.

Don’t ever forget these things: The nature of the world. My nature. How I relate to the world. What proportion of it I make up. That you are a part of nature, and no one can prevent you from speaking and acting in harmony with it, always.

What, I wondered, would Aurelius have meant when he thought about “nature”?

Physics of the Stoics helped me get a bit closer to imagining an answer (whether it’s the right answer or not, who knows. hahahaha.)

For the ancient Stoics, reality was permeated by pneuma, which they in some cases defined (as translated) as a substance consisting of “air” and “fire.”

What I try to do as I consider these concepts, however, is to achieve a kind of mental elasticity.

As a modern human, I was taught that pre-modern scientific models were nonsense. The world is made of whirling electrons, not a mix of air, fire, water, and earth.

But perhaps that dismissal is a bit too pat and a bit too arrogant.

Full disclosure: Per a review of Bernardo Kastrup’s Meaning in Absurdity that I recently posted on Goodreads, I’m a philosophical idealist. Ergo I believe that reality is actually consciousness, not matter.

Therefore, I believe that the models we use to examine reality and explain it phenomenologically are just that: models. Insofar as they seem real, it’s because we are interacting with reality and our interaction collapses possibility into the seemingly-objective.

So in considering how the ancient Greeks understood the world, perhaps their model was as valid as anything we’ve dreamed up.

I mean “valid” quite literally. In “Meaning,” Kastrup discusses the work of Thomas Kuhn, a 20th century philosopher of science, who proposed that objective data “cannot be gathered and interpreted outside the context of a paradigm,” defined by Kastrup as the “basic assumptions, values, and beliefs held by scientists about how nature is put together.” Continues Kastrup:

…we cannot know for certain that the laws of physics are the same throughout space and across time…paradigms change over time, and along with them what science considers to be true or reasonable.

Kastrup is careful to add a strong caveat that this is not an argument for relativism. But for the purposes of my Ancient Stoics thought experiment, insofar as they developed a model that made complete sense and actually explained the world, absolutely it was “valid.”

So, to play along: pretend you were never taught anything about modern physics, but understood the world strictly on the basis of your own senses and mind.

Air is, essentially, nothingness: it’s undetectable by our senses. Yes, we can detect its movement but not air per se.

Warm air is nothingness with a quality associated with life (warmth) (movement is another quality that is associated with life, and fire is both warm and in constant motion).

So why not propose a model of reality where everything is permeated by “air” (a nothingness that is also a something); and where “nothingness” merges with other qualities to generate phenomena such as objects and living beings?

In addition to qualities like warmth and movement, other subjective qualities such as rationality are also self-evidently aspects of that nothingness; after all, they have to arise from something, right?

That is pneuma. It is cohesive; it is everywhere; it must be what holds everything together. It is the “field” from which everything else arises. It’s the logos of the Gospel of John: there from the beginning, that through which all things are made: the light of man, the Christ consciousness.

To be clear, I’m not rejecting modern physics. That would be stupid; it’s very useful and I am eternally grateful to have been born today instead of 2500 years ago. But as a way of penetrating the nature of reality by seeing it through fresh eyes? This book was a lot of fun :)

Note: links in this post are affiliate links. If you click one and buy, I get a small percentage. It doesn’t add anything to the price.

that time I maybe figured out the end of Faust

Posted on by

As some of you know, one of the novels I’ve been working on for some time, now, is a retelling of Goethe’s Faust.

Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by Walter Arndt.
Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by Walter Arndt.

The translation I purchased when I first got the idea for the novel is the Norton Critical Edition, translated by Walter Arndt. (And if you would like a copy, shoot me a note, because I own two and would gladly give one away.) (Why do I own two, you ask? Because last time I moved, I couldn’t put my hands on my copy and bought another, and of course precisely one nanosecond after copy #2 arrived in the mail, I spotted copy #1 on my shelf, because nothing on this planet makes sense. But I digress.)

With regard to my novel, first let’s get one thing out of the way. I am in no way up to the task of retelling Goethe’s Faust. It’s ridiculous for me to even type the words. I should be ashamed of myself for even thinking the words.

But nothing on this planet makes sense. So: onward.

As I planned the novel — the title is Scratch, in case you’re wondering — I read and re-read my edition of Faust.

Have you ever read it? The whole thing?

It is … not an easy piece of literature.

I knew Act 1 from college. Somewhere, along the line, some professor assigned it and I read it.

You probably know the storyline as well. The devil (Mephistopheles) makes a bet with God that he can trick Faust into surrendering his soul. He then appears to Faust and strikes a deal with him: if he can deliver a certain type of experience to Faust, he can have Faust’s soul.

The experience Mephisto promises is one of total fulfillment. He’ll set things up so that Faust finds something happening to him so marvelous and engaging that he never wants it to end. And if Mephisto can do that, the devil wins his bet.

Faust agrees to the terms.

Mephisto spends the rest of Act 1 trundling out the usual experiences. He makes Faust young again, and rich. Faust falls in love with Gretchen, a sweet young virgin, and Mephisto arranges for them to become lovers, thinking that will be Faust’s ultimate experience. It doesn’t work. Sex with Gretchen is nice but doesn’t quell Faust’s hunger to keep striving for Something Else, Something More. Gretchen’s life, however, is utterly ruined. She becomes pregnant and, in her shame at being an unwed mother, kills her child and is sentenced to death herself. She dies in prison before the execution is performed.

This portion of the play is fairly easy to follow. Pact with the devil, ruined woman, isn’t it awful that out-of-wedlock pregnancy was once considered to be so sinful that it would drive women to commit atrocities.

Marguerite's shadow appearing to Faust), Faust, Lithograph print made by Eugene Delacroix
Marguerite’s shadow appearing to Faust, Lithograph print, Eugene Delacroix

The next four Acts, on the other hand, are complex and often surreal. They are laden with allegorical characters and events that in some cases are comments on contemporaneous European and German politics, on the tension between Romanticism and Classicism, on fiscal policy, on urbanization. The settings are at times “reality” but at times fantastical places — imaginary realms.

And then comes the final bit, where Faust dies. He’s in the process, during this last act, of reclaiming land from the sea and using it to build out a planned community — an urban utopia. He is also struck blind by Care, an event that is associated in the drama with Faust’s cold-hearted theft of land from an elderly couple (Faust wants the land as part of his urban development project; he asks Mephisto to get it for him; Mephisto murders the couple).

Because he’s blind, Faust doesn’t realize that the digging he hears at the end of the play isn’t workers, laboring at his urbanization project. It is demons, digging Faust’s grave.

Faust proclaims he’s so pleased with the idea that people will benefit forever from his reclamation project and the community he’s designing, that he would gladly tarry in that moment forever. He falls over and dies.

Bingo. The devil wins, right?

Not so fast. Angels intervene, distract Mephistopheles, crowd him away from Faust’s body, take possession of Faust’s soul, and whisk him away to heaven.

And ever since, people have been arguing about those last few plot twists. What, exactly, was Goethe trying to say?

On the face of it, it seems like Mephisto won the bet, and then heaven essentially cheated. Pulled a fast one. He certainly believed he was cheated. “Where do I sue now as complainer? … This thing was wretchedly mishandled.”

Or maybe not. Maybe the devil didn’t win the bet. Mephisto himself says, right after Faust dies:

So it is over! How to read this clause?

All over is as good as never was,

And yet it whirls about as if it were.

The Eternal-Empty is what I prefer.

If all, in the end, is nothing, then Faust’s proclamation that he would tarry forever in the feeling of building his new community is also “nothing.” So did Mephisto, in making this statement, essentially void his own bet?

Another observation. Blind Faust may have thought he was experiencing the building of his community. But he was not. He was experiencing the digging of his own grave.

It was a trick. So was the bet won not fairly but by cheating? And did that negate it?

The Prince of Lies cannot resist lying. It is his nature. Did he undo his own success by founding it on a lie?

Another possibility is something along the lines of theological determinism. Heaven and its beings are outside of time and space and are not, therefore, subject to the same laws as we humans are; outcomes of our actions are pre-determined. Any wager made on Earthy may seem valid to us, but its terms can’t necessarily be applied in heaven, because in heaven, redemption and damnation are decided on completely different terms. Whether we are to be redeemed or not has already been decided, and can’t be changed just because we cut a bad deal with the devil while we’re incarnate.

Redemption, from our perspective, is therefore inexplicable, irrational, and probably undeserved. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

Faust is a metaphysical work. Its roots are in Medieval morality plays, which are as straightforward as a child’s story. The devil is evil. To do evil is to enter into a pact with the devil, and the price you will pay is your eternal soul.

But in Goethe’s world, things aren’t so straightforward. His Faust is no saint, but is beloved by God for all his shortcomings (“Though now he serves me but in clouded ways,” God says in the play’s prologue, “Soon I shall guide him so his spirit clears … Man ever errs the while he strives.”)

Perhaps, in Goethe’s drama, the omniscient God is unworried about his wager with the devil because He knows from the beginning that Mephisto will fail, partly because of the devil’s own nature, but perhaps also because of the nature of redemption itself.

And so, Faust was mistaken when he thought that what he heard, in his last day on Earth, was loyal laborers, busily working on his project. “Man ever errs the while he strives.” Add to that intercession — Gretchen, in heaven, prays for Faust — and you have everything you need to overrule Mephisto’s trickery. As the angels say while they’re carrying Faust’s immortal essence up to the highest heavens:

Pure spirits’ peer, from evil coil

He was vouchsafed exemption;

“Whoever strives in ceaseless toil,

Him we may grant redemption.”

And when on high, transfigured love

Has added intercession,

The blest will throng to him above

With welcoming compassion.

Missing time, folklore templates, and my Marion Flarey WIP

Posted on by

On Twitter, Midnight Myth Podcast (podcast can be found here) shared a Japanese story for yesterday’s #Fairytaletuesday.

Urashima Taro returned from the underwater Dragon Palace to find centuries had passed.

I was struck by the beauty of the illustration, of course, but also by the fact that missing time crops up in so many folklore traditions, across so many cultures.

But wait! There’s more.

What if fairy tales like this one actually encode powerful secrets?

What if stories like this one are more than “just stories”?

You may be aware, for instance, that missing time crops up outside of folklore. People literally experience missing time when they stumble into certain kinds of paranormal phenomena — they have subjective experiences of time that don’t match up to the linear passage of time in “the real world.” Missing time is an almost universal aspect of UFO abductions, for example.

After a ferocious mental struggle, during which she literally tried to crawl out of the house as she could no longer walk, all went dark. When she woke up, it was hours later. She never found out what happened to her during that missing time.

— The Super Natural: Why the Unexplained is Real, Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal

Which brings me to a question I’ve been tussling with for over a year now, as I build out my Marion Flarey books — a three-novel collection that will debut when I publish Once Upon a Flarey Tale in a month or so. [UPDATE: it’s out and you can get your copy here!]

What if fairy tales hold clues to the nature of reality — and how to manipulate it?

What if they are actually templates that — in the right hands — can be used to harness and direct emotional and spiritual energy in ways that shape reality itself?

Marion Flarey seems to think so. She detects a power in fairy tales that nobody else seems to “get” (well — almost nobody!) — but that also tends to blow up in her face when she tries to wield it. :)

And here’s where — to me at least — it gets interesting.

I think she’s right.

Or put another ways: these books are fiction, but they are also true. I am not writing “paranormal.” I’m writing reality — or let’s call it quantum reality :D

Here’s what I mean, using the missing time template as an example.

If you study the template, you can feel the energy behind it. Quite a lot of energy, some negative (anxiety) and some positive (time pressure can be a powerful motivator).

In some stories, like the one Midnight Podcast shared, the energy is partly sexual. It’s about the power of sexual love-matches to make us completely forget — completely abandon — other loyalties and ties.

The handsome they like, and the good dancers. And if they get a boy amongst them, the first to touch him, he belongs to her.

— Mr. Saggarton, as told to Lady Gregory, Visions and Beliefs v. 1

The missing time template also warns us to be conscious about the trade-offs we make when we decide to take a particular life-path.

You can’t take two paths at the same time. Once you have invested time exploring one path, you can never get that time back. It’s gone forever.

She hastened homewards, wondering however, as she went, to see that the leaves, which were yesterday so fresh and green, were now falling dry and yellow around her. The cottage too seemed changed, and, when she went in, there sat her father looking some years older than when she saw him last; and her mother, whom she hardly knew, was by his side …

— The Elfin Grove, from The Big Book of Stories from Grimm, ed. by Herbert Strang

There’s a profound emotional poignancy, here. When we leave our birth homes, those we loved when we were children will, in our absence, grow and age and eventually die. And we’ll miss that, because we were elsewhere — we were Away.

Because of the poignancy of this trade-off, missing time is also related to death, naturally (what isn’t?): whether we permit ourselves to be aware of it consciously or not, we are all on some level keenly aware that our time on this planet is finite. Sooner or later, Mr. Death is going to knock on the door and whatever we are working on at that moment will remain forever unfinished.

The Good Man at the Hour of Death, from the British Museum Image Library. After Francis Hayman, print made by Thomas A E Chambars, 1783
The good man at the hour of death, print, London, British Museum image library

It’s scary, right? Because life isn’t fair and and the trade-offs we make, when we decide how to spend our time, are often downright cruel.

But there is one small comfort in this rather ugly mess: we have the ability to consciously shape our personal stories — the stories that, in turn, become the channels through which our lives flow.

In other words, we don’t have to be carried passively toward the inevitable penalties of Lost Time. We can recognize those penalties in advance; we can accept them with open eyes as the price we pay for a choice we consciously make.

Will this make those penalties less painful?

Rip’s heart died away, at hearing of these sad changes in his home and friends, and finding himself thus alone in the world. Every answer puzzled him too, by treating of such enormous lapses of time, and of matters which he could not understand: war—Congress–Stony–Point;—he had no courage to ask after any more friends, but cried out in despair, “Does nobody here know Rip Van Winkle?”

— Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving

Nope. Still gonna hurt.

But it will make the experience of suffering those penalties one of conscious choice. We can therefore consciously acknowledge the richness of life’s tapestry, which is woven not only of beauty and joy and pleasure, but also of ugliness and loss and pain. And that’s something. It’s quite a lot, in fact …

This is what Marion is trying to do.

It’s hard for her, just like it’s hard for us.

It’s also absurd, and confusing, and funny, and has a tendency to backfire :)

But ultimately it’s as rewarding for Marion as it can be for you and I.

Because the better we get at shaping our stories consciously, the more aligned we become with our own sense of place, and our own sense of destiny.

And what could be a better HEA than that?

UPDATE: My first Marion Flarey novel is now out!

Once Upon a Flarey Tale by Kirsten Mortensen

“Once Upon a Flarey Tale” is available on Amazon for print or Kindle, or click here to browse other e-formats.

Is it not absurder still …

Posted on by

“Is it not absurder still to refuse to listen to these voices from afar, because they come stammering and wandering as in a dream confusedly instead of with a trumpet’s call? Because spirits that bending to earth may undergo perhaps an earthly bewilderment and suffer unknown limitations, and half remember and half forget?”

Lady Gregory, Visions and Beliefs

Johnny Appleseed preached Swedenborg????

Posted on by

That wasn’t in the Disney version! John Chapman (Appleseed’s real name)

kept Swedenborg’s “Heaven and Hell” with the Bible in his cookpot hat. Arriving at a house on one of his walkabouts, he would greet the inhabitants: “Will you have some fresh news right from Heaven?” The answer didn’t matter—he was already reaching for the cookpot. Chapman’s “religious intensity,” not his apple planting, was “the driving force of his life,” Mr. Means says.

Guess what else. The apples that grew from his trees weren’t the big luscious bake-into-a-pie sort you find in the supermarket today.

Nope. They were little sour things — that people grew to make hard cider.

LOL

Easy to ridicule . . . yeah. I know.

Posted on by

white-flowersFor the past several days, I’ve been mulling an op-ed piece that ran in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal titled If I Don’t See It, It’s Not There.

The piece is written by Steve Salerno, a former Men’s Health editor who wrote a book in 2005 about how the self-help industry is not really all that helpful.

Salerno’s target this time is the “talking heads” who contributed to the DVD version of The Secret, which — in case you spent 2007 dozing in the ol’ armchair — was a blockbuster addition in the robust tradition of “positive thinking” literature we Americans have been devouring en masse since the days of Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale.

Salerno takes The Secret crowd to task for the way they’re reacting to the recession — which, truth to tell, isn’t always very, erm, nuanced. For example, he includes a quote from one Nan Akasha who says she chooses not to believe in the recession. The implication being that one can make unpleasantness go away by squeezing one’s eyes shut or something.

But here’s the thing. As seductive as Salerno’s mockery is, open that same paper’s Tuesday May 5 edition and on page A12 there’s a piece about the latest research on quantum physics. The research confirms what quantum physicists have been theorizing for quite some time: first, that particles can somehow stay connected with one another across space (non-locality); and second, that the act of observation is itself somehow involved in defining a quantum particle’s characteristics.

Some people would dismiss this as pertaining only to sub-atomic phenomena. In the big-particle world of paychecks and golf balls and stubbed toes (they would say) quantum spookiness doesn’t apply.

But what if our minds operate on a quantum level?

What if our thoughts are sensitive to quantum-level energy patterns?

What if thought itself is a quantum-level activity?

jesterEven more radical: what if our minds function in some respects like a lens that causes quantum-level particles to resolve and literally come into being as a prelude to perceiving them en aggregate with our physical senses?

And, furthermore, what if the demarcation between our minds, as individuals, isn’t as well-defined as we might suppose?

Think about it. The electromagnetic waves emitting from my brain don’t stop at the edge of my skull.

Is it possible that your brain might start resonating with mine if we stood near each other, or vice versa?

And if so, might there be on a collective level a kind of mass entrainment involving the synchronization of our individual energy fields, that might in turn exert some sort of effect on what we describe as physical phenomenon?

If so, then maybe recessions and pandemics — as well as prosperity and cures — really are influenced by our minds. Not created — this isn’t cartoon magic — but resolved out of a kind of soupy pool of potential events or phenomenon — then fixed into place because we take collective notice.

Personally, I suspect something like this does occur. But its mechanics are not only too subtle to be discerned by our physical senses, they are also too subtle to be described, let alone manipulated in terms as childish as “if I don’t believe in the recession, it won’t have happened.”

Salerno’s mockery isn’t entirely misplaced. I’m reminded of a funeral I attended not long ago, where the preacher assured us that the deceased was sitting on a cloud, watching us. Yes, he meant that literally. Presumably Salerno would guffaw as loudly at that solemn Christian as he does at Bob Procter and Joe Vitale.

Which is too bad, because he’s missing something important — something that might mark a turning point for mankind. Quantum physics attempts to peer into a dimension where space and time don’t exist in the way our senses would conscribe them — where death isn’t really death, and where life really is a kind of dream . . . it would be a shame to miss it just because, stated simplistically, it sounds too fantastic to be true.

So who is driving the bus? Really?

Posted on by

More evidence that our rational self isn’t really the self that’s in charge: as described in a piece by Robert Lee Hotz in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, research suggests that when we “decide” to do something, we’re not really deciding. What we’re really doing is becoming aware of a decision that’s already been made.

In one study, researchers led by John-Dylan Haynes in Berlin monitored “neural currents” in volunteers’ brains (using magnetic resonance imaging) as the volunteers pushed buttons using either their left and right hands. The researchers discovered that they could predict which hand the subjects would use by the neural activity that preceded the button-pushing.

The foundation of this research is the work of
the late Benjamin Libet, who came to similar conclusions.

One way a lot of people respond to these sort of findings is to question whether humans have “free will.” But if you accept the assumption that there is an aspect of the Self that operates more or less independently of the Self with which we generally identify, none of this is the least bit surprising. Of course “Self 2” causes ripples in the brain’s electromagnetic field. They just happen to be ripples beneath the surface of conscious awareness. It doesn’t mean we don’t have “free will.” It may, however, mean that “free will” is a meaningless concept.

In the WSJ piece, Hotz goes on to report other research that suggests that we make better “consumer decisions” (e.g. what car to buy) when we’re distracted.

See? It’s not just about swinging a golf club ;-)

Seeing is believing

Posted on by

me sixth grade

At some point in fifth grade, I noticed the blackboard in Mrs. Marshman’s math class was blurry. I mentioned it to my parents, and within a few weeks had been fitted with my first pair of glasses.

I didn’t submit to the experience wholeheartedly, by any means. Most troubling was the sense that I was now damaged in some way. Poor eyesight is a mild disability for sure, generally more a nuisance than a crippler. Still, the finality of it weighed on me. It also complicated things. My eyeglass lenses were constantly in need of cleaning, the frames would get knocked about and no longer fit, and then, of course, came puberty, and to my other insecurities came the added burden of a reputation for braini-slash-nerdiness — of which my glasses were an obvious sign.

college photoThe body is always in a state of flux, of course, and once pointed in the direction of poor vision dutifully explores that trajectory; the silver lining was that as my eyesight worsened I swapped the hornrims for gold wire rims, and later contact lenses. Not quite so homely.

But I still hated them.

Then I learned about William Bates, an early 20th Century physician who had made the astonishing claim that poor eyesight is learned — and can be unlearned.

I read his book, Better Eyesight Without Glasses, tossed my contacts aside, and began muddling about the world without my visual crutch.

I was encouraged at first. With my eyes freed to function more naturally, my vision improved quite a bit right away; my right eye (the “weaker” of the two) went from 20/180 to 20/80 or so.

But 20/20 vision eluded me. I could induce it for short periods — I’ve passed vision tests, twice, for my driver’s license — but much of the time my world was still blurry. I didn’t put my glasses back on. But sometimes I wondered if the received wisdom wasn’t correct, after all. It seemed that perhaps poor eyesight is inescapable, a curse bestowed by our genes or the modern necessity of being tethered to close-up work, reading, computers.

Now I know differently.

The clues I needed were in another book, Relearning to See, by Thomas Quackenbush. I won’t bore you with the minutiae of my discovery, but the upshot is that I needed to relax and stop trying to see. By trying to see, I was distorting either the shape or the alignment of my eyeballs. When I relax, breath, and stop trying to see, the world around clears.

This isn’t a purely physical change. On the contrary, Candace Pert is right on when she says the body is the subconscious mind. Granted, straining to see has a measurable effect on the physical body (this image

myopia

is one Quackenbush reprinted from Bates’ Perfect Sight Without Glasses; the woman had perfect vision at the time the leftmost photo was taken. In the middle photo she has myopia — see how her eyes look different? And on the right, she’s furrowing her brow as she tries to see) — but it is first and foremost a condition of being. Put another way: my vision began to blur when I was a child not because my eyes were failing but because as I transitioned from early childhood into social awareness — when I began valuing how others viewed me — a kind of habitual anxiety that defined my relationship to myself hardened into fact. Little wonder the world around me went dim.

When I relax, breath, and stop trying to see, I feel something that affects more than my eyes. It’s like sinking back into a comfortable chair, a state of being in which I am letting go instead of struggling. The clarity of my vision is ancillary: a function of a different vantage point rather than a different way to hold the muscles of my eyes.

Quackenbush touches on this as well in his book, writing:

The individual with blurred vision is interfering with the normal, relaxed way of using the mind and body.

Plenty has been said about the way we modern folk are so stressed; how we react to non-physical stimuli with the same fight/flight response our forebears depended upon to escape saber toothed tigers. But how many of us realize that this response literally distorts our experience? It’s a perversion of our ability to think abstractly: we wrap ourselves in a kind of continual low-grade nightmare, little realizing that our anxiety defines what we can touch and know.

“Cultivate a habit of relaxation.” It’s the first New Year’s resolution on my list, because I’ve begun to understand that everything else flows from it . . .

The body electric

Posted on by

I expected something different from Candace Pert’s latest book, Everything You Need to Know to Feel Go(o)d. For starters, the title’s a bit of a bait to the text’s switch. You aren’t going to find that promised Everything here. In fact, you aren’t going to find much, if any self helpy advicey stuff.

Everything You Need to Know to Feel Go(o)d Candace Pert

What you’re going to find, instead, are two other books. The one that takes up the most room is an autobiographical account of Pert’s efforts to deal with personal “issues” she’s realized have sabotaged her efforts to realize her vision of an AIDS cure. Pert and her husband, Michael Ruff, have pioneered research on peptides that block the receptors that permit the AIDS virus to enter cells (Pert’s a recognized experts in peptides and peptide receptors; as a graduate student in the 1970s, she proved the existence of opiate receptors). The original research they did was funded by the National Institute of Health; the two have been fighting for years, now, to wrest control of it from others who, for various reasons, have either quashed it or tried to leverage it for other, less compelling causes. This content is no doubt of interest to Pert’s fans, and will no doubt be a useful model to people struggling through parallel difficulties, but it’s not what I was looking for when I bought the book.

The other book got me excited. Unfortunately, it’s on the thin side: bits scattered here and there, primarily as summaries of presentations Pert has given over the last couple of years during her many public appearances.

The first bit peeks out at us right away, when Pert tells us she believes in something even more radical than “mind over matter. ” She believes that “mind becomes matter” — and that there is “real science” to support that assertion.

By sorting out the autobiographical diary-of-a-seeker stuff, one is able to find hints of that science. A big piece of it is that James Oschman (with whom Pert has collaborated on another book) has proposed “a physical structure in the body composed primarily of collagenous fibers, the kind that make up your connective tissue.” This structure, which Oschman calls “the matrix,” connects and penetrates every cell of the body, “a new understanding that flies in the face of the classical view of cells as empty little bags whose interior isn’t hooked up to existing structures.”

The significance of this structure, Pert writes, is that it’s “actually a semiconductor, a substance capable of supporting fast-paced, electrical activity . . . [I]n many ways, it’s like a giant liquid crystal.”

Apparently peptides — some of which we recognize as neurotransmitters that affect mood, e.g. serotonin — cause our cells to give off electrical signals which are transmitted by/across this structure. In other words, when we resonate with an emotion, we really are resonating. Furthermore, others around us can be affected by this resonance, rather like a tuning fork, rung, can cause another tuning fork to vibrate. You know the old quandary about how could a flock of birds sitting in a tree suddenly take off at once, as if they were one organism? Well, based on Pert seems to be saying, they are one organism: they are matrices within a greater matrix . As are the crowds of people at a concert or sporting event or political rally or church service.

Our body can also store charges — i.e., past emotional charges can be recorded by or imprinted in our bodies, causing us to essentially “lock in” to certain habitual ways of feeling or responding emotionally.

There are some other bits as well about the frequencies of music, color, and brain waves sharing identical wavelengths. Put it together and there’s the suggestion that, for example, our emotional response to music can be attributed the way the tones stimulate our cells’ neurotransmitter receptors. Wild. Wish there was more of that kind of stuff in the book.