…Also the idea of distributed identity, that a collection of subjective perceivers can share an identity, is a misunderstanding of personal identity to me. Most likely a product of biting the wrong bullet.
From one point of view, your inner eye sees merely plane images. In order to perceive solid structures in voluminous space, you must move around the subject under observation and fuse an indefinite number of aspects from all sides. A cone, for illustration, is seen as a circle in plan view, a triangle in elevation, and various angles subtended by various arcs in all other views. The solid structure of a cone is conceived only after fusing all images in the mind. If your mind were not able to construct this gestalt, you would be unable to recognize the triangular aspect of the cone as having the same identity as the circular aspect.
The ability to fuse an indefinite number of plane images into a solid image in the mind is usually achieved during childhood as we master language, so no one is aware of common aberrations. As an example, few people saw the view from the top until everyone traveled by air. Without flight experience, you don't learn to fuse plan views of the landscape with the familiar elevations; therefore, aerial photographs remain unintelligible to most people. You would be surprised by the number of people who cannot read blueprints because of their inability to fuse all sectional drawings into a dynamic tridimensional gestalt. Cubism is four-dimensional perspective; the art of Cubism makes no sense to people who cannot analyze plural perspectives and recombine them mentally to form a hyperspacial image of the pictorial subject.
Cognitive dissonance is produced by harmonic discord among the vibrations defining ideas, images, and sounds. All differences produce cognitive dissonance until discordant phases are cancelled and the remaining vibrations are resolved into a harmonically integrated gestalt in a higher dimension, like a musical chord. Wave cancellation is the physical basis of the concept of psychological repression established by Freud; these wave mechanics also produce karma.
Interference between (mental) waves transforms them into other frequencies so that objects are not perceived as they really are, if they are not rendered altogether invisible as a consequence of cognitive dissonance. Therefore, each person sees and hears truly only those signals that are congruent with the conceptual patterns already defining one's own mental structure; all other perceptions are distorted and repressed, occulted behind the Veils of Maja. At the bottom line, intereference produces a pair of predominant patterns separated by 180o of phase. As a result, reality is perceived to be polarized between good and evil, black and white, strong and weak, male and female, etc.
Just as only one side of a solid structure can be seen at a time, without a mirror, only one phase of a hyperspacial structure can be perceived directly at one time. It is natural, therefore, to assign a unique identity to different phases that exceed the observer's capacity for resolution into a single gestalt. Virtue is not recognized as the front of vice, no light is seen in darkness, and you have to know your tao to find strength in compliance. Union of complementary opposites transforms them both into a structure of higher dimension.
Assigning different identities to different aspects of the same structure is most commonly experienced in interpersonal relationships. During the initial rush of love, all perceptions that trouble the purity of the relationship is repressed. Admonitions from friends and family to watch where you are giving your heart are ignored as utterly irrelevant to the paragon identified with all the virtues of true love, and none of the vices. When dissonant aspects of the loved one appear from behind the Veils of Maja, they are perceived to belong to another person, a stranger in your home and a devil in your bed.
Unable to conceive that pleasure and pain can come from the same parent, infants perceive a good true-parent and a wicked step- parent. Most people still cannot identify God with the devil, nor can they perceive that Heaven and hell are complementary aspects of one real world.
Male and female mentalities are imprinted with different concepts making it physically impossible for the opposite sex to receive the same message that is sent. Communication between sexes is like communication between different species. No matter how many times arguments are settled, the very next argument is the very same argument. Acquiescence is not agreement, but resignation and tolerance of the incomprehensible.
If Freud studied physics before medicine, he wouldn't have invented a square wheel in his theory of sexual determinism. Psychology and psychiatry would be radically different if a grounding in elementary physics were prerequisite. These professions will soon be demolished and reconstructed by the hard science of Artificial Intelligence.
The soft sciences are not soft by their very nature, but because soft ideas attract people incapable of comprehending hard, mathematical concepts, and once soft-heads populate a profession, hard-heads move out of the neighborhood. As a consequence, the soft sciences degenerate into nonsense until they become too impractical to hold their customers. If astrology were not so soft-headed, actuaries would be calculating horoscopes instead of statistics.
The essential difference between the hard-head and the soft- head is concentration of mental focus. Whereas the hard-head defines particulars, the soft-head senses the overview. Both heads are half-wits if they cannot vary the scope of their focus to integrate particulars with wholes to comprehend both at once in a higher dimension of Consciousness.
The confusion produced by the Necker cube is due to seeing the inside and the outside of a box at the same time. When seen as a plane image, a transparent cube presents a different structure from every point of view, and except when seen in a plan or elevation, no aspect resembles the shape of an opaque box. This is an object lesson in the difference between the structure of an entity in hyperspace and the form it presents in a lower dimensional space.
Since God is an Entity of utmost dimensional extent, no man can look at a complete image of It in this lifetime and that is the reason for the religious prohibition against graven images. In order to preclude any manifestation of The God That Is All That Is from being worshipped as the One Big I, The First Commandment is engraved, "Thou shalt not hold any god before Me." Anything less than God is the very devil, and the devil grows more diabolical as it grows more Godly; the devil is the Brightest Angel of them all.
The mind is able to fuse two visual images only when there is practically no difference between them. Fusion of visual images into a stereo gestalt becomes impossible if the two perspectives differ by more than the interocular distance. In other words, there is a limit to the amount of difference that can be resolved without producing an identity crisis.
To illustrate, if your views of a cone were limited to the extremes of plan and elevation, only extraordinary conditions and mathematical calculation would enable you to realize that the two mutually incommensurable figures were aspects of the same identity in a higher dimension of space. Ordinarily, you are able to relate one extreme view to the other extreme by innumerable other viewing angles revealing the gradual transformation of the circle into the triangle. Even after identifying the circle as an allotropic aspect of the triangle, you would still be unable to form the concept of a solid cone unless your mental space were large enough to comprehend three dimensions; you would believe that the conical structure alternates between a circle and a triangle according to the viewing angle; it would be the wave-particle paradox all over again.
On the atomic scale, hyperspacial rotations occur at such speed that transition phases between extreme views cannot be resolved within the temporal precision of the experiment. The wave-particle dichotomy is refractory to scientific comprehension not only because an electron flips between its two phases faster than the instruments can follow, but also because both wave packets and particles are three-dimensional concepts. Mentally unable to comprehend ultratridimensional entities, physicists identify different projections of one subatomic particle as several new discoveries, and that is why there is no end to the number of elementary particles.
The science of physics is actually the physics of perception. Your mind is a house of many mansions. Most people never see the doors in the walls of their nurseries; they spend their entire spiritual lives confined in the crib where they were born, while they can only wonder about the sounds of family activity that transpire dimly into their windowless compartments. Once you realize that the barriers limiting your experience are merely partitions, you will open the doors of your mind to explore the manifold halls of self-knowledge. You may even leave your father's house to make your way as a grown person in the big hyperworld outside. Of course, it is dangerous out there, and not all who venture return sound and successful, but that is what real life is all about when play school is left behind.
The limits of identity provide a universally practical principle for getting what you want out of life -- especially if you have to get what you want out of other people. To wit, it is impossible to change anyone's mind except by nicely graduated argument that slowly turns the others point of view to your direction; if you argue too strongly, you only provoke rage, denial, and repression of everything you say. The tao teaches that the battle does not go to the strong, nor the race to the swift, but to the gentle and the patient; this is the true meaning of Jesus' promise that the meek will inherit the Earth. Beggars, flatterers, and cheaters take more than workers, racers, and robbers.
Fusing disparate images depends upon the development of a faculty for ignoring differences. The mind learns to ignore differences by subsuming them to a common feature, such as association of time, place, utility, or physical property. The subsumption of ideas into abstract classifications is produced by wave interference; and so, particular, individual differences are repressed to the Unconscious as the mind grows from perceptions limited to tangible sense data to comprehend abstract concepts.
Plato wrote the original hyperspacial theory explaining that each of the material bodies in this world is a manifestation of an Ideal Form in Heaven. In modern mathematical terms, Plato can be paraphrased to say that each individual structure is a unique cross- section (or projection) of an entity existing in a space of more than three dimensions, intersecting with our tridimensional world. Plato conceived his concept of Universal Form by the mental process of verbal abstraction, and then with true philosophic backasswardness he declared that the particular is derived from the abstract, instead of the other way 'round; nevertheless, Plato is right.
Since Plato explained that all individual differences are unique aspects of the ideal, and since wave interference is proven to be the physical mechanism that subsumes differences within the gestalt, the technical means for revealing a tangible manifestation of the Ideal Form is self-evident. By superimposing an indefinitely large number of individual images of the same class of tangible manifestations, the individual wave-forms arrange themselves according to the principle of the Conservation of Energy into a single, harmonically integrated structure. Photographers will recognize this process as the way to make a hologram. A hologram, therefore, is a tangible hyperspacial structure.
A special kind of holographic portrait of the Christ can be produced by superimposing an indefinite number of life-size photographs of people. This technical photography has actually been done. In this process, the superimposed waves do not produce a vortex; instead, the wave interference pattern is manifest like the superimposition of musical notes to produce a predominant key tone. The image resulting from this extraordinary holographic process reveals an ineffably beautiful human body of exquisitely perfect proportions. Christ is quite simply the One Perfect Human Being from Whom all mortals are imperfectly projected.
Individuals possessing features approximating the human average manifest some of Christ's Divine Beauty, and that is why all us mortals who deviate from the average are moved to adore these paragons of pulchritude. Unhappily, the instinct to deify the norm has the necessary consequence of abhorring deviation as the very devil.
The great truth revealed by this photographic demonstration is not that good looks are as good as God; the image of the Perfect Human Being is composed of every one of the ugliest and most deviant among us, as well as the most beautiful freaks. Beauty without ugliness is less than the whole platonic Human Being, and anything less than perfect is diabolical to the degree that wholeness is lacking.
The youthful, female form divine tends toward the average human proportions; the elderly, male form is the ugly deviant. Mortals who have seen the Christ Spirit testify that His counten-nance is like an unmarked youth with compassion that is learned only through eons of suffering; His ugliness radiates beauty.
The closer a nearly holy creature approaches perfection, the greater is its power for evil, and that is why Satan is the Brightest Angel of them all, second only to the Creator, Itself; the buck private's mistakes will kill him, but the general's mistakes kill everyone. Before damning the practically good, execrating the almost true, and abominating the compellingly beautiful as Temptation, always remember and bear in mind that Money is not Evil; it is the worship of Money that possesses one's soul. We are given beauty to enjoy while it lasts; the mortal sin is worshipping beauty --- or any other god that does not incorporate its proper devil.
Words are ultraspacial structures created by abstracting common features of significance while ignoring unique features. Words amplify similarities and eliminate differences by wave interference. Words are the product of fusing all the unique images of several structures into an ultraspacial gestalt.
The gestalt represented by its abstract noun is not visible to the material eye because it is a ultratridimensional physical structure that is manifest to our Consciousness only as a form of what we conceive to be mental energy, more rarified than electromagnetic substance. A word is an image of an ultraspatial mental Form; words are the very Ideas that Plato talked about.
The tridimensional material eye can see only a unique, material example of the gestalt at any one time. In other words, a gestalt exists as an extension of its material manifestations in the form of a trajectory through time and space; to wit, a mental concept extends through no fewer than four dimensions. The minds comprehends the dimensions of time; this is why intelligence is identified with the sense of time. Abstract verbal concepts are understood only as they can be comprehended within the temporal dimensions of one's mind; a mind is perceived to grow to the extent that it perceives precedents and consequences. Athena is merely the god of intellect; the ruler of consciousness is Kronus, the Overlord of Time and Change.
The nemesis of abstraction is that the symbol becomes the reality, and the individual differences in the real world are occulted behind the Veils of Maja. As the focus of the mind shifts from the immediately tangible world to verbal concepts, the mind becomes separated from the body and both lose their health. Paradise is a myth about a preverbal Consciousness, before men created words and subsequently mistook the symbol (idol) for reality (God); the Fall of Man and his Expulsion is the consequence of worshipping verbally fashioned images. Philosophers pretend to lead us back to reality on ways paved with more words of higher abstraction, like devils promising to lead us to Heaven. If the devil is the Father of Lies, words are surely the Mother.
Conscious mind is a creation of words. Therefore, no one in his socially defined, right-thinking, right-handed mind can perceive anything not previously defined by words. Experiments have found that people lacking the words to describe subtle colours are also unable to distinguish fine differences in hues, but as soon as they are given the words to define the differences between crimson, scarlet, and vermillion, for example, they no longer see all reds as red. Poets expand the common Consciousness by giving new meanings to old words and by coining new words.
Words referring to abstract concepts are projections of spiritual structures from hyperspace into our mental space. We are unable to know the higher dimensions of the hyperspacial universe we live in because our culture lacks the verbal concepts for our minds to perceive what our eyes plainly see.
Scientific knowledge is nothing but verbal knowledge, and knowledge is the key to power; humanity is ruled by words. The physical and mathematical principles that explain the material world of three dimensions also control the manifestations of hyperspacial energies; e.g., e=mc^2 opens the way to the high- dimensional energies of the atom. Furthermore, the very forms in which higher-dimensional energies are represented serve as a handle for wielding the power. This is what magic, idols, charms, amulets, spells, incantations, hexes, and prayers are all about.
Artists, scientists, and mystics who glimpse spirits dimly through the Veils of Maja limn a projection of the eternal entities into the human dimensions of literature, theatre, music, dance, architecture, engineering, philosophy, mathematics, justice, politics, morality --- in a word, culture. Like pictorial art, all cultural artifacts compress hyperspacial structures into fewer dimensions so that ideas are represented in more or less tangible forms. The form is the specialized language of its poet and the meaning of the form is the essence of the myth.