December 7, 2025 • 53 mins
Life in the Dangerous Middle....in the liminal zones are found both life and creativity, the space between light and dark, between order and chaos, between waking life and the world of dreams....join us to explore the secrets of dancing on that line...
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Hi there everyone, Brian Lee with Fools and Sages.
This episode is about liminal spaces.
Liminal spaces are in between spaces comes from the Latin word
Lehman, Lehman or Lyman LIMEN, which means threshold, and it's
an in between space. It turns out that in in nature,
(00:24):
these in between spaces are particularly filled with life.
There's a mystery in those in between places.
So we're going to explore those in between places, those liminal
places. And we're going to talk about a
little bird. We're going to talk about the
Infinibulum, which is, well, I'll explain that later in the
episode. Our episodes are always
(00:48):
typically dialogue, sometimes with without a guest, sometimes
it's just our hosts here. And it's always unscripted.
You never know where it's going to go.
So without further ado, the dance of the Plover and the
Chronos in classic Infundibulum.Enjoy.
(01:30):
Hey, Brian. How are you doing, Sir?
I'm doing all right. Well, I actually did kind of
have an idea for a topic today. Yeah, it's kind of curious
because, you know, we were goingto record yesterday and so I was
thinking about this yesterday and then we had some Internet
(01:50):
issues and so we're recording the next day.
And so I've had a chance to think about this because the
original idea came to me in a dream.
It's not that the the idea came entirely cooked in a dream, but
the thread came in a dream. A symbol of the idea for sure.
(02:12):
A symbol of the idea, right? And so then with some cooking of
it and some following of the threads I've sort of come up
with, I think I even know the title, The Dream of the Plover
and the Chronosynclastic Infundibulum.
(02:34):
Great. Right.
Almost wrote itself The dream ofthe Plover and the
Chronosynclastic Infinibulum. And so so so yeah, there it is.
I mean, I hardly need to explainit.
It pretty much speaks for itself.
(02:58):
That was a good episode. Thank you.
Yeah, good to see you. Yeah, good to see you too.
So. So how might this have happened,
you might ask? So I'm having this dream and
some at some point in the dream,someone tells me or presents to
me the word plover, PLOVER, plover.
(03:23):
And they're saying like, check this word out.
I didn't bring a lot back to my waking world apart from the
thought, oh, you should check out the word plover.
And honestly, when I thought about it, I had nothing.
(03:45):
I mean, and probably most of ourlisteners, unless you have a
particular or of an aficionado of shore birds, you might not
have any affiliation with the word plover at all.
I just know it's a shore bird. Shore bird.
Exactly. And I have some idea, I think
(04:06):
what it looks like, but but now I'm I'm assuming you went on an
etymological exploration. And a symbological it reminds.
Me of the dream I had about mangrove, I might have mentioned
it before, but are we talking about the the border between the
(04:29):
material and the emotional and the the plover bridging that?
The plover, Well, I said, what'sthe symbolic meaning of the
plover? Says The plover centers on
perseverance, vigilance, and adaptability.
In Japanese culture, the plovers, called chidori,
(04:53):
symbolize the perseverance, perseverance, and family safety
as they're known to brave harsh weather during migration.
They can also represent patience, mindfulness and a
connection to nature, acting as a spiritual guide to help
appreciate the present moment. And then it goes on to explain
(05:19):
these different qualities. This is all from my friend Al.
And but the thing that was significant there was this idea
of inhabiting that fringe area between the ocean and the land.
(05:41):
And of course, what he, what theplovers do.
I presume I haven't pursued, youknow, a lot of Plover watching,
but they're running back and forth as the tide goes in and
out, getting all the goodies andas I recall, not particularly
(06:03):
wanting to get their feet wet ifthey didn't have to.
But maybe I'm misremembering that.
I just remember these the going back and forth and going back
and forth, literally riding that, that wave line between the
the solid stable, not completelyunchanging, but certainly more
(06:27):
stable than the ocean between that and this ever chaotic.
And yet it's the ocean that's throwing up the food that's
keeping this thing alive, right?And and yet it has to do this
(06:47):
dance with it because it's changing every second.
And that's why it gets connectedwith mindfulness because it he's
got to pay attention and his whole deal is about paying
attention, right? And so in a lot of ways, this
sort of represents the role of the artist, because an artist
(07:14):
has to do this dance with chaos.And a lot of what we're trying
to do is we're trying to pull down this ever changing thing
that you get a glimpse of, but you never, it never freezes for
you so that you can translate it.
You have to do the freezing of it by catching it with your
(07:36):
mind, that image that whatever it is that you're trying to
evoke or capture or communicate.Can you say more about what you
mean by chaos? Because I assume that an artist
has a, you know, forms of visionor, or a vision comes to an
(07:59):
artist or, or whatever, and thenthe artist kind of transmuting
that image into reality is the genius of artistry.
But I, but I hadn't necessarily thought that any part of that
experience is necessarily chaos.But I'm, I'm kind of inferring
that you're saying the image originally comes out of like the
(08:20):
primordial soup, which is chaotic.
Is that what it is? It isn't just that if you, it's
not always a rule, but a great place to see it is if you look
at an artist's studio. Now this actually, what you see
behind me here is not in a stateof working studio.
(08:43):
It's way tamer. OK.
My wood shop looks a lot more like what a wood, what a working
studio looks like. Which is to say it's in a type
of a state of chaos and the productive flurry is a type of
chaos. And that, and that's one of the
(09:03):
things I've said, is that you don't just create something, but
you protect the thing you've created from destruction all the
way through the creative process.
Like if you're a jeweler, you'reusing torches and rapidly
spinning wheels. It could whip this thing across
the room or melt it or you know that it it.
(09:26):
Every creative process has thesecontrolled demolition aspects to
it, you know. The OR the avoidance thereof.
Right, right. Like we see the PA TA, but we
don't see all the destructive force that powdered all the
stone that wasn't the PA TA but happened to be stuck all up
(09:50):
around it until the PA TA was released from it.
So all the orderedness that you see in the Pieta was balanced by
a disorderedness or a chaos thatis represented by all the chips
and powder that the artists alsorendered in the creation of the,
(10:13):
you know, or the all the soiled rags and all the tools that were
destroyed and the, the chipped hammers and not to mention the
smashed fingers and the, and thewounds and the, all the
psychological turmoil that an artist brings to it.
(10:33):
Sometimes it's a personal chaos.Sometimes it's in spite of the
rest of their lives. And if we get glimpses of an
artist's studio, we'll see that.It leaps to mind for me was
glimpses of Picasso Studio or Basquiat.
(10:54):
There's a documentary about him,or I think you get to see him in
his studio. But a lot of artists, what do
you typically see? Paint everywhere.
If they're visual artists or if they're sculptors, there's tools
all around. And there's all sorts of things
that are, you know, the process is so destructive that when I
(11:15):
was trained as a Goldsmith, I was told, and this was like a
traditional thing when you're working repair on someone's
jewelry, you never let them see it in the process of being
repaired because they'll my grandmother what you, what you
(11:36):
just took a blowtorch to the I mean, like, you know, and
there's a truth to that because it, it's not until the end that
it comes out and it's pretty again.
And that, and a lot of that has to do with this battle with
chaos And, and a lot of the champ, the, the heroic aspects
(11:58):
of great artists is that they'vewon this battle with the
creative forces, right? And so, so yeah, there's a whole
dance there between chaos and order.
I, I wonder if we can follow that thread just a little
further and then and then we cancome back to the Plover when we
(12:19):
talked about the history of Western thought, you you talked
about the pre Socratic worldviewbeing one that defined the
universe in terms of chaos and order.
And I, and I wonder it it what I'm thinking about is how that
(12:43):
seems, along with a number of other dichotomies, to be a
useful way of viewing the world.Do you think that's still like
fundamental to how we understandthe universe to, to what's
really going on? Is this relationship between
(13:05):
chaos and order or the the way that we derive meaning has to do
with the relationship between chaos and order?
And I wonder if there's there's more to be said about that.
Well, now you're getting into the Chronosynclastic
(13:26):
Infundibulum. I was planning to OK.
OK, you worked your way towards it.
This idea of the dance between order and chaos, right?
Just came to me symbolically. From where?
(13:53):
The dream world and I my conscious me that woke up it
only woke up with check out thisword, these 6 letters and when I
and when I looked at that I assumed that the bird was named
after some other word which it's.
(14:16):
The etymology between with a plover has to do with pluvia,
which is rain. So there's not any obvious that
that thread didn't didn't reallypan out to the to to the
interpretive faculty of pulling meaning right ordering, seeing
(14:37):
the order in this thing that just came out of I mean, what's
more turbulent and chaotic than a dream, right?
So and that and that has to do with the chronosynclastic
infinibulum of that part almost,you know, says itself right now.
(15:01):
Chrono is time. Chrono is time.
And what's the next piece? Synchrastic.
Synchlastic. So so sin is is same right and
classic? Yeah.
I don't have a good etymology for classic and infinibulums got
(15:22):
to be like both infinite and bone.
Yeah, no. Good, good start, good start.
You lost focus at the end there.So, so something that is seen
classic is basically at the easiest way to describe it is
(15:43):
something that's bowl shaped. And a a bowl shape is an example
of a synclastic shape because all the curves they all curve
into the same place. OK, so like a plastic?
Roughly means curves that all curve into the same place like
(16:05):
that. Like how a parabolic reflector,
no matter where the the sun hitson it, it'll bounce to the focal
point. Right.
Right now, whether bouncing counts or whether it has to be a
curve to be synclastic, that's adetail that's I don't know.
But to make something Chronosyn classic and then it's almost a
(16:27):
little redundant to say to call it an infinibulum because what
an infinibulum is, is they'll just the Latin word for a
funnel. And what a funnel does, of
course, is it takes everything from one place and it sucks it
all down into one. I mean Infinity bone was not
(16:51):
that far off. It's a, it's a big shot, but
it'll work in there, you know. So now what's interesting, one
of the fun things about the Chronosynclastic Infinibulum is
that it, it was originated in the year of my birth.
So it's not an ancient idea. This is not Plato, just there's
not a dialogue about the Chronosynclastic Infinibulum,
(17:15):
you know, or if there was, it was lost.
And so it was actually this termwas created by Kurt Vonnegut.
Of course. In the 1959 novel The Sirens of
Titan. Oh, that's a great one.
I don't remember that. Yeah, it's probably been 20
(17:37):
years since I read that. But love Vonnegut, OK.
Yeah. And and and so it turns out that
the in that setting, the chronosynclastic Infinibulum is
a kind of a problem. But but the idea of what is a
chronosynclastic Infinibulum is an interesting one because it's
sort of echoes ideas of the eschaton, which is another thing
(18:00):
that we don't it's not in commonparlance or for those of us who
are conversant in TR de Chardin,he wrote a book about the Omega
Point, right? Or this Hindu idea that all of
creation is one day of Brahma isit?
(18:25):
And that when that that day ends, all of the the
multifarious aspects of creationall just suck back into God and
that, and that's one day of Brahma.
And so that God just plays this game spreading itself out into
(18:49):
infinitesimal, unselfconscious, unself aware particles and then
plays the slow, time consuming infinite spatial game of letting
it all come back into it would be the idea of the opposite of
(19:10):
The Big Bang, right? The big sucking in of everything
back into you know, and loud say, you know, he talks about
the Dow at one point saying it'sfar reaching and far reaching
returning. So again, it has that idea of a
diastol and a sistol, but like the big diastol sistol and so so
(19:31):
but the idea is that this is where and what what you relating
to what you were saying. This is where everything
collapses in into one awareness,where all contradictory truths
are seen at once, Where all time.
(19:52):
I should get Al to give me his definition of the of the Chronos
Incline Chronosynclastic Infinibulum A.
Chronosynclastic Infinibulum is a fictional concept from the
Sirens of Titan, where differenttruths and realities coexist.
It's a funnel shaped space and entering one lets you see all
(20:14):
possible timelines. So you enter that funnel shaped
space, you can see all possible timelines.
I don't know if we could hear her reading that but but.
It's good that you repeated thatlast part.
Yeah, a fictional phenomenon from Kurt Vonnegut's novel The
Sirens of Titan. Described as a place in space
where quote all the different kinds of truths fit together.
(20:40):
A funnel shaped space where different truths, perceptions of
times and realities can coexist simultaneously and entering.
Entering one allows a person to perceive all possible timelines.
All truths are reconciled. Time becomes non linear.
(21:02):
This a space-time portal, but instead of transporting it
scatters them across multiple times and location
simultaneously. So, so yeah, there you go about
the idea is that there is this higher reality.
And when people talk about, and some of the folks that we've
(21:23):
spoken with have talked about teleology and teleology
philosophically is related to the Greek word telos, which
means an end, the Omega point idea, because Omega is the last
letter of the Greek alphabet. Jesus in the Gospels, I am the
(21:44):
alpha and the Omega, I'm the beginning and the end, right.
Well, that plugs into the Upanishads and all these others
saying, you know, that it startswith it's all God and no
differentiator that expands out into the universe.
And then, and then we don't see God because then God hides
himself with himself. This is the Quran said.
(22:07):
And then it all comes back together as God again.
And that's this idea that all ofus, when we talk about, we're
all walking each other home while we're all kind of coming
back together as the idea in this universal expanded
consciousness, in this chronosynclastic infinibulum
where all truths make sense because all everything's seen
(22:28):
from what Spinoza called subspecies eternitatus from an
eternal viewpoint. And it's interesting because
they they reference that time shift where all timelines exist
simultaneously. Well, that's this idea of
eternity where all things make acosmic sense that is beyond the
(22:51):
contingent world of conditions that cause things to arise, and
then those conditions dissipate and those things dissipate.
So. So yeah, there's a lot there.
Well, it's, it's funny because the, the episode just before we
started recording, I said, I have an idea for an episode, but
it's not time sensitive. And I'll, you know it, I've been
(23:14):
thinking about it for a couple of weeks and it's relevant, of
course. And it's trying to answer when,
when we had Michael Wolff on, hekind of made a maybe a shorthand
proof for why the universe is a dream or an illusion.
(23:40):
And and the proof was essentially if we can have
synchronicity in dreams, then how is life not not a dream like
synchronicity? If synchronicity exists, then
then this must be illusion because a material world could
not contain synchronicity. Twonza questioned the same topic
(24:05):
about the butterfly. And, and I really, I, I told, I
told Michael I, I, I don't thinkthat cuts it for me.
But I can't tell you, I can't make an argument in this moment.
You know when you you got a likephilosophy professor who spends
all of his time thinking about this stuff, you don't want to
just throw out the first thing that comes to mind.
(24:26):
Like a weekend. Yeah, yeah.
But what I've been thinking about relative to that is the
coexistence of dream and material world or the the
Buddhists saying that life is like an illusion, but they're
(24:47):
still getting hit with a stick and there's still like a a
material reality that we experience.
Or is there a lot of people? Or is there a lot of folks
claiming it's a simulation rightabout now?
Sure, sure. But I but I don't think it is.
(25:08):
I think it's like a simulation and I think that the
synchronicity and symbols and this information about the
plover or you know, the clue to to follow the plover or in my
case, the mangrove, which is kind of a similar symbol, which
(25:29):
is interesting, come from layersof consciousness that aren't
don't obviate material reality. They only imply that material
(25:55):
reality has some form to it has some.
I don't understand quantum physics, but it's just us here.
So I'll say quantum potential implies this also that in that
that reality doesn't have to exist from one moment to the
(26:17):
next, but it tends to and that that it is reality that is
tending to exist and, and it's coming right before reality
exists is the potential for reality where all truths, all
symbols, all emotions, all, you know, whatever layer of, of
(26:41):
reality that you can perceive ornot, the potential for that
exists concurrently or, or post currently.
And, and so, so I, I think we have synchronicity and material
reality. We often don't pick up on it
(27:01):
and, and it comes from all things being interconnected, but
that doesn't negate the fact that, that a good number of
things are also material. And, and for me, that connects
to this kind of proposition thatthat you're talking about
(27:25):
relative to the, the expansion into all of the things and
recontraction into the one thingwhere in the all of the things
category, there are all of the material things and all of the
illusory things, not necessarilyone or the other.
(27:48):
Why? Why should we choose one or the
other? I guess that's where it clicked
back together for me. So I'm curious to hear your
thoughts about that. Well, I, I guess you know where
it shows up to me is or, or whatleft to mind in there was that
we have this tendency to make separations where there aren't
(28:13):
separations. And like I was listening to
Bernardo Castro, who I think is an analytical, what did he call
it? I should, I should.
I thought I would remember, but basically it's his picture of
(28:36):
things is that there is no difference between the bird, the
plover and the meaning of a plover.
It's just that the meaning of a plover.
When it shows up at this dimension, it looks like a bird.
(28:58):
That's a plover. Yeah, you're saying dimension
and I'm saying plane, but it's the same thing.
The same idea that they're not really different things.
Or or that they both exist that well.
I think he's saying that they'reactually inter somehow, which is
they're. Interrelated, yeah.
(29:20):
But it but here it isn't a relation of two separate things.
It's actually like a you can take a picture of a thing in 2D
or you can take a video walking around it, you know, So it's
just different dimensions of a oneness.
Yeah. And with.
(29:41):
Planes, but dimensions works too.
Yeah, yeah. And so, so in that sense, we
are, we are a development in both directions in the
development of a brain that can,you know, can translate.
(30:04):
It can be is the counterpart of a higher meaning and grokking
potential for the universe, which we've talked about before
and from a number of different angles.
And but so the other interestingelement about this, just a kind
(30:25):
of related to the Plover was I heard a thing, and I think it
was a Peterson, Jordan Peterson,who was talking about the yin
Yang symbol. And he was talking about the S
shaped line in the middle and saying that what that S shaped
(30:46):
line represented was that on oneside was chaos and on the other
side was order. And our job is to sort of walk
along that line. And sometimes we're pointed
towards chaos and sometimes we're pointed towards order, but
really we're balancing between the two.
And when I first heard that, it's sort of offended my
sensibilities because I've been thinking and associating with
(31:14):
the yin Yang idea machine for solong and from so many different
directions. And I'd never thought of yin as
chaos per SE or as young as order per SE.
But I started to re reconjimitate that if.
You replace order with form and.And logos.
(31:37):
Yeah, and and and chaos with potential then then I think it
adds up. Or disorganized matter,
uncatalyzed matter, the unpolished mirror of of the
ultimate of the real for even Alor ABI, then it does sort of I
(32:01):
can I can certainly hear the argument and then that idea of
the path. Well, that is, you know, at
first it struck me as kind of cheesy.
But now when I think of it in terms of the Plover and the fact
that the ultimate message to thePlover into that dance with
(32:22):
chaos translates to be here now because it's in it's, it's, it's
that change ability and our our movement with that change
ability. That is that quality that the
Plover manifests adaptability, resilience, persistence and
mindfulness of that ever presentchange.
(32:45):
You know, when the Potter is working on the wheel, they, they
have to see what their hands just did to be able to do the
next thing to end up where they want.
So there's again a feedback loopwith reality and, or what's
happening now with what my intent is.
And there's another circle there.
(33:08):
Maybe there's a part in coherence.
What I'm doing now is a part related to the coherence of the
vision of the finished pot that I'm trying to do.
Or maybe I don't know what the pots going to look like.
And it's my feedback with my hands and the clay as I do it
that creates the final piece. But at but at any point
(33:29):
mindfulness or this type of consciousness seems to be what's
required to you know, and I'm not, I'm sure there's people
that are going to say, no, we just tape a banana to a wall and
you're good. But I'm working maybe in a
little more of this interactiveness in the process
(33:50):
maybe. Yeah, I like I've I've heard
some psychological interpretations of why we create
chaos in our lives. Like like I've I've heard, and
this is a little pop psychology,so you know, with a grain of
salt, but we if we have a messy car or a messy desk, we're sub
(34:12):
subconsciously trying to keep people away from us.
We're trying to create, we're trying to expand our internal
space in into our external spaceand push those boundaries
further out like it's, it's chaos in here, so it's going to
be chaos in the cartoon, etcetera.
And. Interesting.
(34:33):
After I heard that on some levelit resonates with me and, and
I've kept my car neat for the last few years.
Not like it's still full of dog hair and all that stuff, but not
full of like, you know, the receipt from the grocery store
and the coffee cup and all that.So, so like I take that stuff
out with me everyday and I have a different sense in the car
(34:58):
than I used to. And when I, I'm terrible at
keeping my desk neat, but when Ido have a neat desk, I have a
different sense also. And I think there's a that's
like a different, maybe that's adifferent level of argument
about chaos and order because that's less about how the, the
(35:19):
maybe meaning making is about the integration of those and
walking that, that line. I always thought of that line,
by the way, as the encroachment of each on the other as opposed
to the line representing us, youknow, kind of needing to walk
the path between them. Push and pull.
(35:40):
Yeah, yeah, it's got. It's like the tide.
And now, of course, it leaps to mind for me narcissist and
Goldmund by Hermann Hessup, which is, you know, 1 is an
artist and 1 is a scholar. One leads an ordered life and 1
is out there tearing it up and that there and there's what the
(36:02):
Dionysian and and the Apollonianpersonalities was a popular
dichotomy. I'll put in the show notes where
that one comes from. And there's another one Ariman
and that I think Steiner talks about, Rudolf Steiner talks
(36:25):
about. But there are the, there are
definitely these different tendencies and different ways of
making friends with order and chaos.
You know, I feel like, again, the shaman is someone that's
it's on that line between order and chaos, and that's so.
Much about being in the present moment.
Absolutely, yeah. And so.
(36:47):
And I've never called a plover in a ceremony, but there's
something to think about there maybe.
Yeah, yeah. And so, so, so yeah.
I thought, you know, it's interesting.
And I don't remember where the chronos and classic
infundibulums washed up on the beach in the time that I was
thinking about the Plover, but Iinitially thought of them as
(37:12):
separate topics. And then I started to query
myself, are these two related and you're just not getting it?
And I came to the conclusion that they are related in the
fact that the way the Plover came up on the beach, that the
that relationship from the dreamworld to the world of conscious,
(37:35):
trackable, rational reason, thatthat was the effect of the
infundibulum. That it was that that was
funneling. That, that, that dance between
things that just happened and the meaning that it gets
extracted from them. That that's part of that
(37:57):
funneling of the great cosmic funneling of all things towards
meaning towards the point of allmeaning towards the, the Omega
point or the opening of the eye of Shiva or any of that where
all meaning converges in one point.
(38:18):
And we just have doing it littleby little and little pieces and
little pieces. But the force of that
infinibulum is with us. May the infinibulum be with you.
That is my my argument for for Michael basically that that the
dream world and synchronicity and symbols and all of that
(38:41):
stuff shoots up into the funnel along with the material world in
the billiard balls bouncing intoeach other and they interrelate
or they are two dimensions of a multi dimensional reality that
we we don't fully perceive. The DAO and the Duh.
How is he going to refute that? Because I'm sure he's thought
(39:04):
about this a lot more than I have.
Well, if you hit him with the Chronosynclastic Infinibulum
right off, he'll be reeling. So it goes.
And so then you'll get a couple,win a good couple points before
he's got his feet under him again.
That would be my advice. I think that's what Vonnegut
(39:25):
would say. Maybe I don't.
I don't know. And that would be the great
value of asking him, I think. Yeah, I think that's why we try
to get these folks that have really devoted their lives to
asking very particular questionsin very particular fields, which
is something that I don't have. And maybe that's because they're
(39:49):
more in the gold month and or what who which was which I think
the artist was gold month, right.
So I'm a little more in that realm and the scholars are more
than Narcissus. And so which is not to no
implications of narcissism there.
These are just the two names in the book, right?
But the one was a scholastic andacademic.
(40:12):
And the other was the artist. And so maybe there is that
dichotomy. I hadn't thought of that before,
but that is interesting. And it's in making that dialogue
fruitful, which is kind of what we're doing here, because all
the themes return. Yeah.
That's tidy. Yeah, yeah.
(40:37):
And it's interesting for bodies of water for me in dreams, you
know, there's kind of like a shorthand that I use for dream
interpretation. And it's like stuff that I don't
know what a symbol is, but this is going to get me down a path
and then maybe the insight follows.
So, so water I tend to associatewith emotion.
(41:02):
Like astrologically, water signshave have more to do with
intuition and emotion and you know, non rational
consciousness, right? Just like a, a car you can
shorthand as or, or any vehicle you can shorthand as vocation.
(41:25):
And then, you know, you might get more specific or you might
say, well, it's not vocation in this case.
It's it, I mean, it's something else, but it's like how you're
moving forward in the physical world.
Yeah, and a lot of these things reveal themselves once they're
way in the rearview mirror. Sure.
Yeah. You know, particularly, you
know, like my I've had some significant water dreams that
(41:47):
showed up at certain chapter changes that.
Where's the whole thing about breathing in in water or being
unable to breathe? Being.
Able to hold your breath for a long time.
Then there's trying to breathe and water gets in your lungs and
it wakes you up. And then there's being able to
breathe underwater. And there's like a whole
progression that happens that relates, I think, generically to
(42:12):
your ability to walk this line between order and chaos or
emotional plane, rational plane,or however you want to look at.
That Yeah, yeah. No, I my, my in in my
significant water dream, which happened when I was in the early
process of becoming my own person.
(42:33):
I was walking in the woods on a trail behind a bunch of
significant people in my life that had been like, you know,
relatives and teachers and all. It's like, it was weird because
what would all these people be doing here?
Because that isn't where they showed it.
You know, they showed up and allthese different things, but I'm
walking behind them somehow and I'm like, really thirsty.
(42:58):
But I, I don't have any water. I can't get any water.
But there's this little stream that's kind of going along near
the path, and I would bend down and try to get, fill my hands
with water so that I could drink.
And every time I would do it, somebody walking ahead in the
path ahead of me would step in such a way that the water would
(43:22):
just disappear and soak into theweeds.
And I went damned enchanters, you know, or something like
that. And so, so this goes on a couple
times in my, my frustration builds until finally I jump off
of the trail that we're all walking on.
(43:42):
And I jump into the middle of the stream of water, which has
gotten larger now so that I'm straddling the deepest section
and I'm up to my mid calves on both sides of it.
No way anybody upstream here is going to be able to change that,
you know? And I dip my hands into it and I
(44:06):
finally get my hands into the water.
And as soon as I touch the water, I'm not thirsty anymore.
And then I lift my hand, my cupped hands up out of the
water. And there's this artifact in my
hands. And what it looked like was like
it looked like a hay hook. If you know what a hay hook is,
(44:29):
it's a handle with a big hook onit that you grab a Bale of hay
with to muscle it around. Except the handle wasn't at
right angle to the hook. It was on the same plane as the
hook, and the whole thing was tiny and it looked like it had
been in the water a long time. So it looked kind of also like
the Blue Öyster Cult symbol. Another rock'n'roll reference.
(44:54):
And then I didn't in the dream, late.
And the question is, what? What is this?
What does this mean? What's this about?
This was somehow the point of all the jumping in the water and
everything, and clearly it was old and clearly I didn't know
what it meant. And then somehow I had another
dream reference to an old museumthat had a bunch of these things
(45:18):
are similar, like different variations of this thing on an
old board for to had them all side by side.
But somehow I didn't come away with what it was.
But you know, the whole thing could easily fit in my hands, my
cupped hands, which a hay hook would not, but just but the
shape, you know. So anyway, looking back in the
(45:41):
what that chapter was in my life, you know, I definitely
jumped off the path and I definitely went knee deep in
stuff that was not on the path that was not have like none of
the people that were on that path.
Would that have made any sense to it all?
So I think the. Blue Öyster Cult connection is
(46:02):
actually important. Yeah, interesting.
The. Oyster, you know, having having
pearls in it. Pearls.
There we go. I mean, there's like a that's
rich. And then the word cult also
because not, not not necessarilywith the negative connotation,
but but with the, the implications of the like in, in
(46:30):
a way, I guess we're always in acult, right?
We're, we're in the cult of the,the way we make meaning now.
And so so that doesn't have any negative.
Even if it's a cult of one, Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Lowercase C, Right. It's just like we're short for
(46:53):
culture, right? We, we're, we're in a, we are A
culture. We associate meaning in a
certain way. We associate belonging in a
certain way, all the things thatwe talked about, right?
And and so so Blue Öyster Cult actually means a lot to me as
that symbol. And that jumping into the water
(47:13):
was kind of an on your feet or on your knees moment.
Another rock'n'roll reference, Blue Öyster Cult.
So, yeah, so, so no, there, there, there was some, some
interesting things there. And, and I, as I mentioned
before, my relationship with thedream world has been changing
(47:36):
and it's I'm having a little more direction.
And so, yeah, a little more lucidity here and there.
Not every time, you know, it's still, it's still infrequent,
but way more frequent than any of my younger days.
And so that's kind of interesting.
And, and there is this whole topic, you know, Carl Jung, you
(47:59):
did a whole thing with guided meditations.
We might have talked about once.There was a book I also
reference called The Inner GuideMeditation, which tries to
follow Jung's lead. And you know, Freud and and
those guys, they used hypnosis for a lot of those same purposes
with the idea that they're they're there is meaning that
(48:23):
can be mined out of that that chaotic and free.
Association even with. The World and free Association.
I mean the the yeah, the way psychoanalysis works.
Rorschach. Just say whatever comes to mind
and it's the analyst's job to kind of try to connect the dots
(48:43):
and and it's weird how well it works sometimes.
It can be, yeah, yeah. It, it, it has to do with that.
The essentially mysterical relationship.
Mystical and yeah. And mysterious.
(49:04):
Hysterical. Yeah, mystical and mysterious
relationship between listening and speaking, particularly, you
know, in a live setting. Yeah, and meaning and, you know,
and meaning wanting to manifest somehow and us being just the
(49:26):
the meet where is just the meet where of the meaning.
And, and again then, you know, we in just one of the past few
episodes we referenced this ideathat who we are in our
particularity, our contingent self kind of amounts to our
(49:47):
interpretation of life, the universe and everything.
And this sort of. Live is our philosophy, not what
we think. That's what you.
And that ultimately that is in aprocess of evolution that will
get ultimately sucked down by the synclastic infundibulum.
(50:11):
That that, that. That's what expanding awareness
is, is being able to bridge to more meanings, more dimensions,
more timelines, more human experiences, more others,
something like that, to mix a lot of our metaphors.
(50:32):
Well, that might be too tough ofa spelling project for, for a
title, but but I think we can incorporate elements of it and
cool, that was it. That was a good topic.
I enjoyed it and I I like the connection to this Michael Wolff
question and to I, I I was meaning to come back to that
(50:57):
order and disorder question too about the pre Socratic
philosophers too. So not surprisingly, a few dots
were connected. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's, it's, that's one of the fascinating things I think
about the explication of this cognitive model is that it's
(51:19):
like a city map that you can getfrom anywhere to anywhere if you
know the streets. And, and there's some very
interesting traffic jams here and there and, and bringing in
some people to, you know, to help us with traffic controls,
kind of an interesting thing here and there, people that have
(51:42):
more refined version maps of certain parts of the town, you
know, with that comparison. And that's, that's, I think
that's been really fruitful and it's been fun to fun to watch
and be a part of. Yeah, for sure.
Yeah. And I, I actually did notice
some comments. I don't always get to go back
(52:04):
because we have so many episodesthat I don't always get to go
back and see all the comments. But I did want to give a shout
out to the folks that that have dropped us some comments and we
really appreciate it. And yeah, please recommend us.
And if you can drop a like it does spread us out because, you
(52:24):
know, there's so much other stuff out there on the
interwebs, YouTube that if you, you know, take a second and give
us a like, it helps push us up against all the cat videos and
stuff. And you know, so it, it, it, we
appreciate it. And the Chronosyn Classic
Infundibulum will appreciate it,I think.
(52:46):
Yeah, it could always use more subscribers.
Yep, Yep. Cool.
Thanks, Brian. Great to see you.
Yep, good to see you too, Sir. Ciao.
Hi there everyone, Brian Lee with Fools and Sages.
This episode is about liminal spaces.
Liminal spaces are in between spaces comes from the Latin word
Lehman, Lehman or Lyman LIMEN, which means threshold, and it's
an in between space. It turns out that in in nature,
(00:24):
these in between spaces are particularly filled with life.
There's a mystery in those in between places.
So we're going to explore those in between places, those liminal
places. And we're going to talk about a
little bird. We're going to talk about the
Infinibulum, which is, well, I'll explain that later in the
episode. Our episodes are always
(00:48):
typically dialogue, sometimes with without a guest, sometimes
it's just our hosts here. And it's always unscripted.
You never know where it's going to go.
So without further ado, the dance of the Plover and the
Chronos in classic Infundibulum.Enjoy.
(01:30):
Hey, Brian. How are you doing, Sir?
I'm doing all right. Well, I actually did kind of
have an idea for a topic today. Yeah, it's kind of curious
because, you know, we were goingto record yesterday and so I was
thinking about this yesterday and then we had some Internet
(01:50):
issues and so we're recording the next day.
And so I've had a chance to think about this because the
original idea came to me in a dream.
It's not that the the idea came entirely cooked in a dream, but
the thread came in a dream. A symbol of the idea for sure.
(02:12):
A symbol of the idea, right? And so then with some cooking of
it and some following of the threads I've sort of come up
with, I think I even know the title, The Dream of the Plover
and the Chronosynclastic Infundibulum.
(02:34):
Great. Right.
Almost wrote itself The dream ofthe Plover and the
Chronosynclastic Infinibulum. And so so so yeah, there it is.
I mean, I hardly need to explainit.
It pretty much speaks for itself.
(02:58):
That was a good episode. Thank you.
Yeah, good to see you. Yeah, good to see you too.
So. So how might this have happened,
you might ask? So I'm having this dream and
some at some point in the dream,someone tells me or presents to
me the word plover, PLOVER, plover.
(03:23):
And they're saying like, check this word out.
I didn't bring a lot back to my waking world apart from the
thought, oh, you should check out the word plover.
And honestly, when I thought about it, I had nothing.
(03:45):
I mean, and probably most of ourlisteners, unless you have a
particular or of an aficionado of shore birds, you might not
have any affiliation with the word plover at all.
I just know it's a shore bird. Shore bird.
Exactly. And I have some idea, I think
(04:06):
what it looks like, but but now I'm I'm assuming you went on an
etymological exploration. And a symbological it reminds.
Me of the dream I had about mangrove, I might have mentioned
it before, but are we talking about the the border between the
(04:29):
material and the emotional and the the plover bridging that?
The plover, Well, I said, what'sthe symbolic meaning of the
plover? Says The plover centers on
perseverance, vigilance, and adaptability.
In Japanese culture, the plovers, called chidori,
(04:53):
symbolize the perseverance, perseverance, and family safety
as they're known to brave harsh weather during migration.
They can also represent patience, mindfulness and a
connection to nature, acting as a spiritual guide to help
appreciate the present moment. And then it goes on to explain
(05:19):
these different qualities. This is all from my friend Al.
And but the thing that was significant there was this idea
of inhabiting that fringe area between the ocean and the land.
(05:41):
And of course, what he, what theplovers do.
I presume I haven't pursued, youknow, a lot of Plover watching,
but they're running back and forth as the tide goes in and
out, getting all the goodies andas I recall, not particularly
(06:03):
wanting to get their feet wet ifthey didn't have to.
But maybe I'm misremembering that.
I just remember these the going back and forth and going back
and forth, literally riding that, that wave line between the
the solid stable, not completelyunchanging, but certainly more
(06:27):
stable than the ocean between that and this ever chaotic.
And yet it's the ocean that's throwing up the food that's
keeping this thing alive, right?And and yet it has to do this
(06:47):
dance with it because it's changing every second.
And that's why it gets connectedwith mindfulness because it he's
got to pay attention and his whole deal is about paying
attention, right? And so in a lot of ways, this
sort of represents the role of the artist, because an artist
(07:14):
has to do this dance with chaos.And a lot of what we're trying
to do is we're trying to pull down this ever changing thing
that you get a glimpse of, but you never, it never freezes for
you so that you can translate it.
You have to do the freezing of it by catching it with your
(07:36):
mind, that image that whatever it is that you're trying to
evoke or capture or communicate.Can you say more about what you
mean by chaos? Because I assume that an artist
has a, you know, forms of visionor, or a vision comes to an
(07:59):
artist or, or whatever, and thenthe artist kind of transmuting
that image into reality is the genius of artistry.
But I, but I hadn't necessarily thought that any part of that
experience is necessarily chaos.But I'm, I'm kind of inferring
that you're saying the image originally comes out of like the
(08:20):
primordial soup, which is chaotic.
Is that what it is? It isn't just that if you, it's
not always a rule, but a great place to see it is if you look
at an artist's studio. Now this actually, what you see
behind me here is not in a stateof working studio.
(08:43):
It's way tamer. OK.
My wood shop looks a lot more like what a wood, what a working
studio looks like. Which is to say it's in a type
of a state of chaos and the productive flurry is a type of
chaos. And that, and that's one of the
(09:03):
things I've said, is that you don't just create something, but
you protect the thing you've created from destruction all the
way through the creative process.
Like if you're a jeweler, you'reusing torches and rapidly
spinning wheels. It could whip this thing across
the room or melt it or you know that it it.
(09:26):
Every creative process has thesecontrolled demolition aspects to
it, you know. The OR the avoidance thereof.
Right, right. Like we see the PA TA, but we
don't see all the destructive force that powdered all the
stone that wasn't the PA TA but happened to be stuck all up
(09:50):
around it until the PA TA was released from it.
So all the orderedness that you see in the Pieta was balanced by
a disorderedness or a chaos thatis represented by all the chips
and powder that the artists alsorendered in the creation of the,
(10:13):
you know, or the all the soiled rags and all the tools that were
destroyed and the, the chipped hammers and not to mention the
smashed fingers and the, and thewounds and the, all the
psychological turmoil that an artist brings to it.
(10:33):
Sometimes it's a personal chaos.Sometimes it's in spite of the
rest of their lives. And if we get glimpses of an
artist's studio, we'll see that.It leaps to mind for me was
glimpses of Picasso Studio or Basquiat.
(10:54):
There's a documentary about him,or I think you get to see him in
his studio. But a lot of artists, what do
you typically see? Paint everywhere.
If they're visual artists or if they're sculptors, there's tools
all around. And there's all sorts of things
that are, you know, the process is so destructive that when I
(11:15):
was trained as a Goldsmith, I was told, and this was like a
traditional thing when you're working repair on someone's
jewelry, you never let them see it in the process of being
repaired because they'll my grandmother what you, what you
(11:36):
just took a blowtorch to the I mean, like, you know, and
there's a truth to that because it, it's not until the end that
it comes out and it's pretty again.
And that, and a lot of that has to do with this battle with
chaos And, and a lot of the champ, the, the heroic aspects
(11:58):
of great artists is that they'vewon this battle with the
creative forces, right? And so, so yeah, there's a whole
dance there between chaos and order.
I, I wonder if we can follow that thread just a little
further and then and then we cancome back to the Plover when we
(12:19):
talked about the history of Western thought, you you talked
about the pre Socratic worldviewbeing one that defined the
universe in terms of chaos and order.
And I, and I wonder it it what I'm thinking about is how that
(12:43):
seems, along with a number of other dichotomies, to be a
useful way of viewing the world.Do you think that's still like
fundamental to how we understandthe universe to, to what's
really going on? Is this relationship between
(13:05):
chaos and order or the the way that we derive meaning has to do
with the relationship between chaos and order?
And I wonder if there's there's more to be said about that.
Well, now you're getting into the Chronosynclastic
(13:26):
Infundibulum. I was planning to OK.
OK, you worked your way towards it.
This idea of the dance between order and chaos, right?
Just came to me symbolically. From where?
(13:53):
The dream world and I my conscious me that woke up it
only woke up with check out thisword, these 6 letters and when I
and when I looked at that I assumed that the bird was named
after some other word which it's.
(14:16):
The etymology between with a plover has to do with pluvia,
which is rain. So there's not any obvious that
that thread didn't didn't reallypan out to the to to the
interpretive faculty of pulling meaning right ordering, seeing
(14:37):
the order in this thing that just came out of I mean, what's
more turbulent and chaotic than a dream, right?
So and that and that has to do with the chronosynclastic
infinibulum of that part almost,you know, says itself right now.
(15:01):
Chrono is time. Chrono is time.
And what's the next piece? Synchrastic.
Synchlastic. So so sin is is same right and
classic? Yeah.
I don't have a good etymology for classic and infinibulums got
(15:22):
to be like both infinite and bone.
Yeah, no. Good, good start, good start.
You lost focus at the end there.So, so something that is seen
classic is basically at the easiest way to describe it is
(15:43):
something that's bowl shaped. And a a bowl shape is an example
of a synclastic shape because all the curves they all curve
into the same place. OK, so like a plastic?
Roughly means curves that all curve into the same place like
(16:05):
that. Like how a parabolic reflector,
no matter where the the sun hitson it, it'll bounce to the focal
point. Right.
Right now, whether bouncing counts or whether it has to be a
curve to be synclastic, that's adetail that's I don't know.
But to make something Chronosyn classic and then it's almost a
(16:27):
little redundant to say to call it an infinibulum because what
an infinibulum is, is they'll just the Latin word for a
funnel. And what a funnel does, of
course, is it takes everything from one place and it sucks it
all down into one. I mean Infinity bone was not
(16:51):
that far off. It's a, it's a big shot, but
it'll work in there, you know. So now what's interesting, one
of the fun things about the Chronosynclastic Infinibulum is
that it, it was originated in the year of my birth.
So it's not an ancient idea. This is not Plato, just there's
not a dialogue about the Chronosynclastic Infinibulum,
(17:15):
you know, or if there was, it was lost.
And so it was actually this termwas created by Kurt Vonnegut.
Of course. In the 1959 novel The Sirens of
Titan. Oh, that's a great one.
I don't remember that. Yeah, it's probably been 20
(17:37):
years since I read that. But love Vonnegut, OK.
Yeah. And and and so it turns out that
the in that setting, the chronosynclastic Infinibulum is
a kind of a problem. But but the idea of what is a
chronosynclastic Infinibulum is an interesting one because it's
sort of echoes ideas of the eschaton, which is another thing
(18:00):
that we don't it's not in commonparlance or for those of us who
are conversant in TR de Chardin,he wrote a book about the Omega
Point, right? Or this Hindu idea that all of
creation is one day of Brahma isit?
(18:25):
And that when that that day ends, all of the the
multifarious aspects of creationall just suck back into God and
that, and that's one day of Brahma.
And so that God just plays this game spreading itself out into
(18:49):
infinitesimal, unselfconscious, unself aware particles and then
plays the slow, time consuming infinite spatial game of letting
it all come back into it would be the idea of the opposite of
(19:10):
The Big Bang, right? The big sucking in of everything
back into you know, and loud say, you know, he talks about
the Dow at one point saying it'sfar reaching and far reaching
returning. So again, it has that idea of a
diastol and a sistol, but like the big diastol sistol and so so
(19:31):
but the idea is that this is where and what what you relating
to what you were saying. This is where everything
collapses in into one awareness,where all contradictory truths
are seen at once, Where all time.
(19:52):
I should get Al to give me his definition of the of the Chronos
Incline Chronosynclastic Infinibulum A.
Chronosynclastic Infinibulum is a fictional concept from the
Sirens of Titan, where differenttruths and realities coexist.
It's a funnel shaped space and entering one lets you see all
(20:14):
possible timelines. So you enter that funnel shaped
space, you can see all possible timelines.
I don't know if we could hear her reading that but but.
It's good that you repeated thatlast part.
Yeah, a fictional phenomenon from Kurt Vonnegut's novel The
Sirens of Titan. Described as a place in space
where quote all the different kinds of truths fit together.
(20:40):
A funnel shaped space where different truths, perceptions of
times and realities can coexist simultaneously and entering.
Entering one allows a person to perceive all possible timelines.
All truths are reconciled. Time becomes non linear.
(21:02):
This a space-time portal, but instead of transporting it
scatters them across multiple times and location
simultaneously. So, so yeah, there you go about
the idea is that there is this higher reality.
And when people talk about, and some of the folks that we've
(21:23):
spoken with have talked about teleology and teleology
philosophically is related to the Greek word telos, which
means an end, the Omega point idea, because Omega is the last
letter of the Greek alphabet. Jesus in the Gospels, I am the
(21:44):
alpha and the Omega, I'm the beginning and the end, right.
Well, that plugs into the Upanishads and all these others
saying, you know, that it startswith it's all God and no
differentiator that expands out into the universe.
And then, and then we don't see God because then God hides
himself with himself. This is the Quran said.
(22:07):
And then it all comes back together as God again.
And that's this idea that all ofus, when we talk about, we're
all walking each other home while we're all kind of coming
back together as the idea in this universal expanded
consciousness, in this chronosynclastic infinibulum
where all truths make sense because all everything's seen
(22:28):
from what Spinoza called subspecies eternitatus from an
eternal viewpoint. And it's interesting because
they they reference that time shift where all timelines exist
simultaneously. Well, that's this idea of
eternity where all things make acosmic sense that is beyond the
(22:51):
contingent world of conditions that cause things to arise, and
then those conditions dissipate and those things dissipate.
So. So yeah, there's a lot there.
Well, it's, it's funny because the, the episode just before we
started recording, I said, I have an idea for an episode, but
it's not time sensitive. And I'll, you know it, I've been
(23:14):
thinking about it for a couple of weeks and it's relevant, of
course. And it's trying to answer when,
when we had Michael Wolff on, hekind of made a maybe a shorthand
proof for why the universe is a dream or an illusion.
(23:40):
And and the proof was essentially if we can have
synchronicity in dreams, then how is life not not a dream like
synchronicity? If synchronicity exists, then
then this must be illusion because a material world could
not contain synchronicity. Twonza questioned the same topic
(24:05):
about the butterfly. And, and I really, I, I told, I
told Michael I, I, I don't thinkthat cuts it for me.
But I can't tell you, I can't make an argument in this moment.
You know when you you got a likephilosophy professor who spends
all of his time thinking about this stuff, you don't want to
just throw out the first thing that comes to mind.
(24:26):
Like a weekend. Yeah, yeah.
But what I've been thinking about relative to that is the
coexistence of dream and material world or the the
Buddhists saying that life is like an illusion, but they're
(24:47):
still getting hit with a stick and there's still like a a
material reality that we experience.
Or is there a lot of people? Or is there a lot of folks
claiming it's a simulation rightabout now?
Sure, sure. But I but I don't think it is.
(25:08):
I think it's like a simulation and I think that the
synchronicity and symbols and this information about the
plover or you know, the clue to to follow the plover or in my
case, the mangrove, which is kind of a similar symbol, which
(25:29):
is interesting, come from layersof consciousness that aren't
don't obviate material reality. They only imply that material
(25:55):
reality has some form to it has some.
I don't understand quantum physics, but it's just us here.
So I'll say quantum potential implies this also that in that
that reality doesn't have to exist from one moment to the
(26:17):
next, but it tends to and that that it is reality that is
tending to exist and, and it's coming right before reality
exists is the potential for reality where all truths, all
symbols, all emotions, all, you know, whatever layer of, of
(26:41):
reality that you can perceive ornot, the potential for that
exists concurrently or, or post currently.
And, and so, so I, I think we have synchronicity and material
reality. We often don't pick up on it
(27:01):
and, and it comes from all things being interconnected, but
that doesn't negate the fact that, that a good number of
things are also material. And, and for me, that connects
to this kind of proposition thatthat you're talking about
(27:25):
relative to the, the expansion into all of the things and
recontraction into the one thingwhere in the all of the things
category, there are all of the material things and all of the
illusory things, not necessarilyone or the other.
(27:48):
Why? Why should we choose one or the
other? I guess that's where it clicked
back together for me. So I'm curious to hear your
thoughts about that. Well, I, I guess you know where
it shows up to me is or, or whatleft to mind in there was that
we have this tendency to make separations where there aren't
(28:13):
separations. And like I was listening to
Bernardo Castro, who I think is an analytical, what did he call
it? I should, I should.
I thought I would remember, but basically it's his picture of
(28:36):
things is that there is no difference between the bird, the
plover and the meaning of a plover.
It's just that the meaning of a plover.
When it shows up at this dimension, it looks like a bird.
(28:58):
That's a plover. Yeah, you're saying dimension
and I'm saying plane, but it's the same thing.
The same idea that they're not really different things.
Or or that they both exist that well.
I think he's saying that they'reactually inter somehow, which is
they're. Interrelated, yeah.
(29:20):
But it but here it isn't a relation of two separate things.
It's actually like a you can take a picture of a thing in 2D
or you can take a video walking around it, you know, So it's
just different dimensions of a oneness.
Yeah. And with.
(29:41):
Planes, but dimensions works too.
Yeah, yeah. And so, so in that sense, we
are, we are a development in both directions in the
development of a brain that can,you know, can translate.
(30:04):
It can be is the counterpart of a higher meaning and grokking
potential for the universe, which we've talked about before
and from a number of different angles.
And but so the other interestingelement about this, just a kind
(30:25):
of related to the Plover was I heard a thing, and I think it
was a Peterson, Jordan Peterson,who was talking about the yin
Yang symbol. And he was talking about the S
shaped line in the middle and saying that what that S shaped
(30:46):
line represented was that on oneside was chaos and on the other
side was order. And our job is to sort of walk
along that line. And sometimes we're pointed
towards chaos and sometimes we're pointed towards order, but
really we're balancing between the two.
And when I first heard that, it's sort of offended my
sensibilities because I've been thinking and associating with
(31:14):
the yin Yang idea machine for solong and from so many different
directions. And I'd never thought of yin as
chaos per SE or as young as order per SE.
But I started to re reconjimitate that if.
You replace order with form and.And logos.
(31:37):
Yeah, and and and chaos with potential then then I think it
adds up. Or disorganized matter,
uncatalyzed matter, the unpolished mirror of of the
ultimate of the real for even Alor ABI, then it does sort of I
(32:01):
can I can certainly hear the argument and then that idea of
the path. Well, that is, you know, at
first it struck me as kind of cheesy.
But now when I think of it in terms of the Plover and the fact
that the ultimate message to thePlover into that dance with
(32:22):
chaos translates to be here now because it's in it's, it's, it's
that change ability and our our movement with that change
ability. That is that quality that the
Plover manifests adaptability, resilience, persistence and
mindfulness of that ever presentchange.
(32:45):
You know, when the Potter is working on the wheel, they, they
have to see what their hands just did to be able to do the
next thing to end up where they want.
So there's again a feedback loopwith reality and, or what's
happening now with what my intent is.
And there's another circle there.
(33:08):
Maybe there's a part in coherence.
What I'm doing now is a part related to the coherence of the
vision of the finished pot that I'm trying to do.
Or maybe I don't know what the pots going to look like.
And it's my feedback with my hands and the clay as I do it
that creates the final piece. But at but at any point
(33:29):
mindfulness or this type of consciousness seems to be what's
required to you know, and I'm not, I'm sure there's people
that are going to say, no, we just tape a banana to a wall and
you're good. But I'm working maybe in a
little more of this interactiveness in the process
(33:50):
maybe. Yeah, I like I've I've heard
some psychological interpretations of why we create
chaos in our lives. Like like I've I've heard, and
this is a little pop psychology,so you know, with a grain of
salt, but we if we have a messy car or a messy desk, we're sub
(34:12):
subconsciously trying to keep people away from us.
We're trying to create, we're trying to expand our internal
space in into our external spaceand push those boundaries
further out like it's, it's chaos in here, so it's going to
be chaos in the cartoon, etcetera.
And. Interesting.
(34:33):
After I heard that on some levelit resonates with me and, and
I've kept my car neat for the last few years.
Not like it's still full of dog hair and all that stuff, but not
full of like, you know, the receipt from the grocery store
and the coffee cup and all that.So, so like I take that stuff
out with me everyday and I have a different sense in the car
(34:58):
than I used to. And when I, I'm terrible at
keeping my desk neat, but when Ido have a neat desk, I have a
different sense also. And I think there's a that's
like a different, maybe that's adifferent level of argument
about chaos and order because that's less about how the, the
(35:19):
maybe meaning making is about the integration of those and
walking that, that line. I always thought of that line,
by the way, as the encroachment of each on the other as opposed
to the line representing us, youknow, kind of needing to walk
the path between them. Push and pull.
(35:40):
Yeah, yeah, it's got. It's like the tide.
And now, of course, it leaps to mind for me narcissist and
Goldmund by Hermann Hessup, which is, you know, 1 is an
artist and 1 is a scholar. One leads an ordered life and 1
is out there tearing it up and that there and there's what the
(36:02):
Dionysian and and the Apollonianpersonalities was a popular
dichotomy. I'll put in the show notes where
that one comes from. And there's another one Ariman
and that I think Steiner talks about, Rudolf Steiner talks
(36:25):
about. But there are the, there are
definitely these different tendencies and different ways of
making friends with order and chaos.
You know, I feel like, again, the shaman is someone that's
it's on that line between order and chaos, and that's so.
Much about being in the present moment.
Absolutely, yeah. And so.
(36:47):
And I've never called a plover in a ceremony, but there's
something to think about there maybe.
Yeah, yeah. And so, so, so yeah.
I thought, you know, it's interesting.
And I don't remember where the chronos and classic
infundibulums washed up on the beach in the time that I was
thinking about the Plover, but Iinitially thought of them as
(37:12):
separate topics. And then I started to query
myself, are these two related and you're just not getting it?
And I came to the conclusion that they are related in the
fact that the way the Plover came up on the beach, that the
that relationship from the dreamworld to the world of conscious,
(37:35):
trackable, rational reason, thatthat was the effect of the
infundibulum. That it was that that was
funneling. That, that, that dance between
things that just happened and the meaning that it gets
extracted from them. That that's part of that
(37:57):
funneling of the great cosmic funneling of all things towards
meaning towards the point of allmeaning towards the, the Omega
point or the opening of the eye of Shiva or any of that where
all meaning converges in one point.
(38:18):
And we just have doing it littleby little and little pieces and
little pieces. But the force of that
infinibulum is with us. May the infinibulum be with you.
That is my my argument for for Michael basically that that the
dream world and synchronicity and symbols and all of that
(38:41):
stuff shoots up into the funnel along with the material world in
the billiard balls bouncing intoeach other and they interrelate
or they are two dimensions of a multi dimensional reality that
we we don't fully perceive. The DAO and the Duh.
How is he going to refute that? Because I'm sure he's thought
(39:04):
about this a lot more than I have.
Well, if you hit him with the Chronosynclastic Infinibulum
right off, he'll be reeling. So it goes.
And so then you'll get a couple,win a good couple points before
he's got his feet under him again.
That would be my advice. I think that's what Vonnegut
(39:25):
would say. Maybe I don't.
I don't know. And that would be the great
value of asking him, I think. Yeah, I think that's why we try
to get these folks that have really devoted their lives to
asking very particular questionsin very particular fields, which
is something that I don't have. And maybe that's because they're
(39:49):
more in the gold month and or what who which was which I think
the artist was gold month, right.
So I'm a little more in that realm and the scholars are more
than Narcissus. And so which is not to no
implications of narcissism there.
These are just the two names in the book, right?
But the one was a scholastic andacademic.
(40:12):
And the other was the artist. And so maybe there is that
dichotomy. I hadn't thought of that before,
but that is interesting. And it's in making that dialogue
fruitful, which is kind of what we're doing here, because all
the themes return. Yeah.
That's tidy. Yeah, yeah.
(40:37):
And it's interesting for bodies of water for me in dreams, you
know, there's kind of like a shorthand that I use for dream
interpretation. And it's like stuff that I don't
know what a symbol is, but this is going to get me down a path
and then maybe the insight follows.
So, so water I tend to associatewith emotion.
(41:02):
Like astrologically, water signshave have more to do with
intuition and emotion and you know, non rational
consciousness, right? Just like a, a car you can
shorthand as or, or any vehicle you can shorthand as vocation.
(41:25):
And then, you know, you might get more specific or you might
say, well, it's not vocation in this case.
It's it, I mean, it's something else, but it's like how you're
moving forward in the physical world.
Yeah, and a lot of these things reveal themselves once they're
way in the rearview mirror. Sure.
Yeah. You know, particularly, you
know, like my I've had some significant water dreams that
(41:47):
showed up at certain chapter changes that.
Where's the whole thing about breathing in in water or being
unable to breathe? Being.
Able to hold your breath for a long time.
Then there's trying to breathe and water gets in your lungs and
it wakes you up. And then there's being able to
breathe underwater. And there's like a whole
progression that happens that relates, I think, generically to
(42:12):
your ability to walk this line between order and chaos or
emotional plane, rational plane,or however you want to look at.
That Yeah, yeah. No, I my, my in in my
significant water dream, which happened when I was in the early
process of becoming my own person.
(42:33):
I was walking in the woods on a trail behind a bunch of
significant people in my life that had been like, you know,
relatives and teachers and all. It's like, it was weird because
what would all these people be doing here?
Because that isn't where they showed it.
You know, they showed up and allthese different things, but I'm
walking behind them somehow and I'm like, really thirsty.
(42:58):
But I, I don't have any water. I can't get any water.
But there's this little stream that's kind of going along near
the path, and I would bend down and try to get, fill my hands
with water so that I could drink.
And every time I would do it, somebody walking ahead in the
path ahead of me would step in such a way that the water would
(43:22):
just disappear and soak into theweeds.
And I went damned enchanters, you know, or something like
that. And so, so this goes on a couple
times in my, my frustration builds until finally I jump off
of the trail that we're all walking on.
(43:42):
And I jump into the middle of the stream of water, which has
gotten larger now so that I'm straddling the deepest section
and I'm up to my mid calves on both sides of it.
No way anybody upstream here is going to be able to change that,
you know? And I dip my hands into it and I
(44:06):
finally get my hands into the water.
And as soon as I touch the water, I'm not thirsty anymore.
And then I lift my hand, my cupped hands up out of the
water. And there's this artifact in my
hands. And what it looked like was like
it looked like a hay hook. If you know what a hay hook is,
(44:29):
it's a handle with a big hook onit that you grab a Bale of hay
with to muscle it around. Except the handle wasn't at
right angle to the hook. It was on the same plane as the
hook, and the whole thing was tiny and it looked like it had
been in the water a long time. So it looked kind of also like
the Blue Öyster Cult symbol. Another rock'n'roll reference.
(44:54):
And then I didn't in the dream, late.
And the question is, what? What is this?
What does this mean? What's this about?
This was somehow the point of all the jumping in the water and
everything, and clearly it was old and clearly I didn't know
what it meant. And then somehow I had another
dream reference to an old museumthat had a bunch of these things
(45:18):
are similar, like different variations of this thing on an
old board for to had them all side by side.
But somehow I didn't come away with what it was.
But you know, the whole thing could easily fit in my hands, my
cupped hands, which a hay hook would not, but just but the
shape, you know. So anyway, looking back in the
(45:41):
what that chapter was in my life, you know, I definitely
jumped off the path and I definitely went knee deep in
stuff that was not on the path that was not have like none of
the people that were on that path.
Would that have made any sense to it all?
So I think the. Blue Öyster Cult connection is
(46:02):
actually important. Yeah, interesting.
The. Oyster, you know, having having
pearls in it. Pearls.
There we go. I mean, there's like a that's
rich. And then the word cult also
because not, not not necessarilywith the negative connotation,
but but with the, the implications of the like in, in
(46:30):
a way, I guess we're always in acult, right?
We're, we're in the cult of the,the way we make meaning now.
And so so that doesn't have any negative.
Even if it's a cult of one, Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Lowercase C, Right. It's just like we're short for
(46:53):
culture, right? We, we're, we're in a, we are A
culture. We associate meaning in a
certain way. We associate belonging in a
certain way, all the things thatwe talked about, right?
And and so so Blue Öyster Cult actually means a lot to me as
that symbol. And that jumping into the water
(47:13):
was kind of an on your feet or on your knees moment.
Another rock'n'roll reference, Blue Öyster Cult.
So, yeah, so, so no, there, there, there was some, some
interesting things there. And, and I, as I mentioned
before, my relationship with thedream world has been changing
(47:36):
and it's I'm having a little more direction.
And so, yeah, a little more lucidity here and there.
Not every time, you know, it's still, it's still infrequent,
but way more frequent than any of my younger days.
And so that's kind of interesting.
And, and there is this whole topic, you know, Carl Jung, you
(47:59):
did a whole thing with guided meditations.
We might have talked about once.There was a book I also
reference called The Inner GuideMeditation, which tries to
follow Jung's lead. And you know, Freud and and
those guys, they used hypnosis for a lot of those same purposes
with the idea that they're they're there is meaning that
(48:23):
can be mined out of that that chaotic and free.
Association even with. The World and free Association.
I mean the the yeah, the way psychoanalysis works.
Rorschach. Just say whatever comes to mind
and it's the analyst's job to kind of try to connect the dots
(48:43):
and and it's weird how well it works sometimes.
It can be, yeah, yeah. It, it, it has to do with that.
The essentially mysterical relationship.
Mystical and yeah. And mysterious.
(49:04):
Hysterical. Yeah, mystical and mysterious
relationship between listening and speaking, particularly, you
know, in a live setting. Yeah, and meaning and, you know,
and meaning wanting to manifest somehow and us being just the
(49:26):
the meet where is just the meet where of the meaning.
And, and again then, you know, we in just one of the past few
episodes we referenced this ideathat who we are in our
particularity, our contingent self kind of amounts to our
(49:47):
interpretation of life, the universe and everything.
And this sort of. Live is our philosophy, not what
we think. That's what you.
And that ultimately that is in aprocess of evolution that will
get ultimately sucked down by the synclastic infundibulum.
(50:11):
That that, that. That's what expanding awareness
is, is being able to bridge to more meanings, more dimensions,
more timelines, more human experiences, more others,
something like that, to mix a lot of our metaphors.
(50:32):
Well, that might be too tough ofa spelling project for, for a
title, but but I think we can incorporate elements of it and
cool, that was it. That was a good topic.
I enjoyed it and I I like the connection to this Michael Wolff
question and to I, I I was meaning to come back to that
(50:57):
order and disorder question too about the pre Socratic
philosophers too. So not surprisingly, a few dots
were connected. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's, it's, that's one of the fascinating things I think
about the explication of this cognitive model is that it's
(51:19):
like a city map that you can getfrom anywhere to anywhere if you
know the streets. And, and there's some very
interesting traffic jams here and there and, and bringing in
some people to, you know, to help us with traffic controls,
kind of an interesting thing here and there, people that have
(51:42):
more refined version maps of certain parts of the town, you
know, with that comparison. And that's, that's, I think
that's been really fruitful and it's been fun to fun to watch
and be a part of. Yeah, for sure.
Yeah. And I, I actually did notice
some comments. I don't always get to go back
(52:04):
because we have so many episodesthat I don't always get to go
back and see all the comments. But I did want to give a shout
out to the folks that that have dropped us some comments and we
really appreciate it. And yeah, please recommend us.
And if you can drop a like it does spread us out because, you
(52:24):
know, there's so much other stuff out there on the
interwebs, YouTube that if you, you know, take a second and give
us a like, it helps push us up against all the cat videos and
stuff. And you know, so it, it, it, we
appreciate it. And the Chronosyn Classic
Infundibulum will appreciate it,I think.
(52:46):
Yeah, it could always use more subscribers.
Yep, Yep. Cool.
Thanks, Brian. Great to see you.
Yep, good to see you too, Sir. Ciao.
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