20 | June | 2014 | Samizdat

June 20, 2014

H. P. Lovecraft on Human Limitations.

From an article on Jason Colavito’s site.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midsts of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

-HP Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” Fiction, pg. 354. Quoted at:

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/lovecraft-and-scientology.html

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June 20, 2014

Law of Correspondence 2.

Throw a rock into the ocean.

Your rock causes ripples. Those ripples interact with waves and tides and currents and other ripples to create a symphony of effects, which are influenced in invisible ways by an infinitude of other disturbances.

Chaos is a cacophony, yet there is order.

Everything interacts with everything else. Until entropy.

The consequences of your rock cannot all be hung around your neck. We generate our own world, we throw rocks, but so does everyone and everything else.

Because we can only imagine the changed molecules of wavelets breaking on distant shores as a result of our rock, does not mean that our rock had no impact. It did.

The infinite interactions of the ripples of our rock with all of the other events in the ocean may be unknowable for us, but it does not mean that they are unknowable.

There is an ocean. There is a rock. There are laws of the universe.

Except that the universe is not an ocean, and actions and thoughts, which are indistinguishable from one another, are not rocks.

And the laws of the universe include the caveat that all laws have their neutralizing opposite.

Including the law that there are no laws.

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June 20, 2014

The Law of Correspondence.

I believe that serendipity is dictated by the law of correspondence.

Everything is connected to everything. There are no coincidences.

My therapist dismisses this as “magical thinking,” as though this is a criticism rather than an observation. I laugh at him.

Clark observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

O’Toole’s Corollary of Finagle’s Law posits that the perversity of the universe tends towards a maximum. For me, that about covers it.

Just because we subconsciously create the events of our lives does not mean that we are not responsible for them.

Dimly apprehending the implications of our experiences is just another revelation about the limitations of our thinking.

Because we create ourselves thinking about ourselves creating ourselves thinking about ourselves, we dance along a perpetual precipice.

What is vertigo, if not a glance into the abyss?

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June 20, 2014

Einstein on God.

“I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one?”

–Albert Einstein, Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931).

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein