Art Movements

Don't get me started on Economics.  Over the years it has been one of the topics I have invented my own integrated, multi-dimensional systems to describe and explain.  I am a solitary, introverted person who spends most of my time in my head thinking.  I have very little to do with the rest of the world, these outings to the Theatre are quite a recent development, and actually writing my ideas is too time-consuming, tedious and pointless.

[Written to 45 Downstairs]

Frankly, I think you should make it free.  The problem is evening out attendance on the night, so people would need to book, which implies booking costs.  Public Transport should be free.  Museums found out years ago that if they were free they would have more people, and everyone spends more in the gift shop and food hall than they saved in entry-fee.  It is the same as the amount drunk at a function is less if it is free than if there are bar prices.
 
There have been many 'Art Movements' that were based on the concept of Art not being a commercial commodity, including fabricating 'Art Objects' that have a Capital Value as an Investment Asset, not that there is anything wrong with that because it does increase the market for 'Art', but it is not the meaning of what 'Art' is.  Giving people an opportunity to add a donation to their ticket is something that some Arts Organisations already do.  I am convinced that if the ticket was free with no booking fee, but there were options to add a booking fee and a donation, the end result would be more revenue, not less. 

Here is a prediction.  We are Astrologically nearly through the Cusp from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius, when we will live in a genuinely 'Free Society'; there are already signs of it.  

Living in our 4-D world.

Living in our 4-D world.

When we look around us, we see a 2-D projection of our visual field, through circuits that criss-cross our brains, onto our visual cortex, which provides us with the cyclorama in which we behave.  Our vision of the world is always like a flat picture, but one with depth because of our binary vision.

When we close our eyes, we are not limited to seeing (with our mind’s eye) what is in front of us, but we can, in our minds, see all around us.

When we look at a flat picture, we are looking at it from outside of it.  If our point of view was in the picture, we would only see the immediate surrounding pixels, because we would be within a pixel, using computer jargon.  This concept has been well described in literature.

When we imagine the world around us while not observing it, we may imagine ourselves immersed in it.  The new immersive, ‘virtual’, binocular perceptual inventions are based on this principle.  When we put on the headset, we are presented with a construction of what we would see in a picture of the direction of view, that gives the illusion of existing within the imaginary reality.  It is constructed mathematically using rays and vectors and whatever based on the idea that the observer is within the scene.

We are deemed to exist within a single pixel, or perhaps a pair of close pixels, so we are similarly only able to see the surrounding pixels.  However, because most (where the air is) are transparent, we can see a lot of structure all around.

Some people are probably better at this than others.  It is part of our psycho-physiological development that we learn to navigate the 3-D world of which our bodies are part.  How well we conceptualise ourselves as existing within spatial dimensions must vary.  Reading literature is recommended to develop this.

It is also possible to imagine the world around oneself without being inside it, but as an outside observer of the space one inhabits.  One would see one’s physical body from all sides as existing within the world, but one wold not be seeing the world from within that body.  It would be an ‘out of body experience’.  Many people have reported such experiences, for example swimmers who see themselves from above while they swim up and down in the pool below.  The ‘near death experience’ includes this sort of perception. 

It must be possible for our brains to construct this sort of perception if it occurs spontaneously for some people in specific, usually extreme circumstances.  Then, it may be possible to develop the ability to see the world that way at will.  Perhaps some Religious, meditative and concentration techniques induce this perception giving rise to the belief that we each have a ‘soul’ that is somehow outside or beyond the physical universe.  (There are other concepts of ‘soul’ that are not negated by this argument.)

To recap: We look at a picture from outside the frame, in a totally different dimension.  Even a 3-D picture is viewed from outside the picture and in front of it.  Our perception of the world is of a circular or spherical projection all around us of a picture of what our eyes perceive but a picture that has depth.  We as observers are outside the picture.

Once one has perfected the ability to perceive one’s surrounding environment from outside it, then one can start to explore the geometry of this extra-dimensional reality.  Our almost universal, cubical Architecture lends itself to this sort of exploration.  If we see ourselves in a room with a door in each wall, as well as a door in the ceiling and the floor, we can easily imagine ourselves going through that door into the room beyond.  Each room has six doors to the six surrounding rooms. 

Because it is all in the mind, we are not bound to imagine it as the animators present it, with the rooms forming an endless grid, with door on opposite sides opening onto room after room in every direction.  If we return to our 2-D heuristic simplification, we can imagine ourselves in the picture, which we now know is not continuous in every direction but is square.  We can move around within the flat surface and when we reach an edge, we can find a door to the next square.

Squares can repeat endlessly on a flat surface, or they can be wrapped round the sides of a cube.  Six squares form a cube.  If we were in one face, we could reach an edge, and stay on the cube by going through the door at the same time as shifting direction into another dimension, so that we are still in a flat, 2-D space, but within a plane at right angles to where we were.

Returning to 3-D, when we open a door at one side of our room, we can also imagine ourselves changing into another dimension, so that our room is somehow at right angles to the room we left, even though each appears to us, looking down on it, as a normal square room.  Because we have changed direction while we exit/enter a door, the rooms do not extend for ever, but wrap around a tesseract, just as the squares wrap around a cube.  Eight cubes form a tesseract.

It is therefore quite easy to see oneself within the rooms, one by one that wrap round each other.  It has to be done with eyes closed, because as soon as one looks around oneself at the real world, the other dimension collapses and we return to our pseudo-3D perception (2-D with depth) that looks real.  When the sense of changing direction when moving from room to room is perfected, it is possible to dispense with the walls of the room, and see everyone at once.  This is the equivalent of having not a cube with picture-sides, but a transparent cube that one can see inside. 

Higher dimension mathematics tends to describe shapes like the tesseract in terms of their surfaces, edges and points instead of considering the space within.  Architects design the structure, but it is the space within that we inhabit, just as we look at pictures from outside the surface.

Bubbles and stuff

We live in a polarised society.  Within the big bubble of the whole community, people live in social bubbles with invisible boundaries.  These bubbles intersect, and everyone lives in a lot of social bubbles.

New Whig exists in the interstices between the bubbles. Society is like a great foam, full of Social Bubbles.  We are all surrounded by Energy-Fields.  Energy is little understood by Science and even less by most people.  Just as objects of Mass in close contact and moving in unison are equivalent to a single Mass, so people who are socially joined combine their personal Energy Fields.  All Energy is subject to the irrational Wave/Particle Duality, and while we usually think of our Energy being located in a particular spot, namely within our physical bodies, our interactions with other people and with our Social Groups, our Social Bubbles, can only be explained in terms of Energy Fields that exist like bubbles round groups of people.

Foam is the most common structure in the universe.  Indeed, on a large scale, the Universe is a foam, just like the top of frothy, soapy water or where waves break on a sloping beach.  When Astronomers map the zillions of Galaxies that have become visible with orbiting telescopes and whose distance can be quite accurately estimated, we find that it is not an even, grainy distribution, but maps onto huge bubbles, many hundreds of times larger than any galaxy, and while these bubbles appear to be utterly empty, the galaxies we do see are all located in the interstices between the galaxies.  The structure of human cells is very similar: figure and ground.

Where a few bubbles meet there is a multi-filamented nucleus-like blob, and it is within these interstices that galaxy clusters form.  Galaxies can also form along the filaments that exist between three bubbles, some of which are like long tubes, and reach eventually to another blob where another galaxy cluster will form.  How large this foam might be is impossible to say, as our perception is limited to the range in which light can travel before the size of the foam reaches a scale where the foam-expansion exceeds the speed of light.  For indeed, the celestial foam is expanding.  It is like shining a spotlight on a small area of soap foam, counting the zillions of bubbles and then wondering how far the foam extends beyond the light.  We might well imagine that the foam is vastly extensive on a scale that we cannot imaging, and that it, itself is but a speck on the footstool of something yet vastly greater still.   So, Foam is universal.

Within Societies, people (and social creatures including ants and bees) are like the particles in the wave/particle duality, and we all see ourselves that way, but in the real world, there are Energy Fields that interact.  Social Bubbles are made up of groups of linked individuals.  Families are the paradigm. Australia is currently updating its Social Definition of a Family, with some adherents to the Ancient Traditions trying to enclose everyone within their social bubble, while fearing they will either be excluded from what used to be an almost universal social bubble or they will be forced to include within ‘their’ social bubble some elements that are presently outside the impervious barrier.

[Editor’s Note: I came up with this heuristic, mental model of Society decades ago, but it sat on my virtual shelf of un-written books.  It is far too complex to describe in full here, and I suppose my use of some terms has put everyone off. Naum Tered]

The difference between Social Bubbles and soap foam is that the people are within the bubbles.  However, if mathematically we replace all the people, who might be like the non-dimensional, dot ‘centres of gravity’ with the fields they represent, then we have something like the big, open bubbles that make up the universe just like the unseen bubbles in bread and cake. 

Because we all belong to many different bubbles, it is hard to imagine them if they are all transparent, but assigning colour to the bubbles means it is possible to imagine them intersecting with each other.  A two-dimensional version is often used to illustrate Sets and for other organisational reasons and sometimes called Venn Diagrams.  If we want to be really clever we can imagine these bubbles existing in four dimensions where it is possible for otherwise impossible connections to exist, though in some perceptions, seven dimensions is more meaningful.

Politics is like a big balance, where the Social Bubbles on each side weigh up against each other.  Boundaries between the bubbles are not smooth but fractal, and individuals from each side move into the domains of each other, perhaps due to their participation in some other Social Bubble all together, so that they form tendrils that spiral about each other on the boundary. 

3 CR Radiothon

Hi 'Radio for Change',

Today I made a donation to your radiothon of $240-00.

The program that I wish to support of 'Beyond the Barricades' 'Save Albert Park' that has been broadcast at 6pm Mondays for two decades - and still the race usurps a Public Park at great expense, fudged attendance statistics and with administrative secrecy.

I do not agree with all the programs on 3CR, particularly the racist, Jew-hating, anti-Semitic, fake and false Palestinian 'cause' that denies Israel's right to exist and reverse the re-unification of Jerusalem.  Only Israel wants a two-state solution, that the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected when offered.  Israel unilaterally left Gaza, but instead of gratitude leading to a similar withdrawal from the West Bank, Israel received thousands of deadly missiles from Gaza as well as most of the International Aid to Gaza building tunnels to invade Israel instead of helping the people of Gaza.  I have been to Gaza myself and want an end to the way the people there are kept in poverty by the anti-Zionist Arabs, along with the fourth generation so-called 'refugees' in Jordan and elsewhere, with the claim that it is just a matter of time before all the Jews are pushed into the sea, Israel is wiped of the maps (it already is missing from Arab school atlases) and everyone can finish Hitler's 'final solution'.

There are other programs as well that I consider of dubious worth, but I also believe that people should have the right to speak out and express opinions, even if they differ from my opinion!!

Generally, I agree with the underlying premise of Community Radio of empowering the Community and all individual, ordinary people.  While I am more in favour of individual freedom that some of the Totalitarians I hear on 3CR, and cannot foresee an actual end to the Free Enterprise Economic System, but I agree with all your presenters that we need adequate regulation and supervision.  My own view on Economics is that most people do not understand 'money', which I see as a form of Energy (not yet recognised by Physicists) that is created as the balance to debt, in the same way Positive and Negative Electricity and Magnetism balance each other.  The problem is Interest.  It is no coincidence that all the major religions prohibit interest.  Energy is not like goods and services that can have a price put on it; the 'price of money' that is interest, is a fabrication that leads to problems.  The Chinese a couple of decades ago hit on how they can create interest free debt between Government and Government owned Banks and hence create an unlimited amount of money with which to buy up the rest of the world.  Greece as well as Australia suffers from the limitation ob the Creation of Debt by Central Banks because they have interest added that just grows exponentially as Governments keep having to borrow more to service the loans.  It limits the money supply and is a bottomless pit of unproductive debt.  Fees for setting up loans are a different sort of cost, and are legitimate for banks, but any so called Socialist economic system that still incorporates usury is doomed to fail.

Well there is my rant, to get my money's worth out of my donation.  I would love to have the chance to say it on air, if anyone wanted to phone me any time on 0414 766 825 to chat.

I am also very keen on Reconciliation and applaud the recent Uluru Statement.  Australia still has unresolved guilt, and it is my opinion that this is the cause of the futile and divisive campaign to become a Republic.  Despite its faults that should be addressed individually, our Constitution is excellent and the result of hundreds of years of revolution and dispute. We should be pleased to remain a Monarchy, and instead of attempting Republicanism by Stealth, we should take full advantage of the opportunities that we ignore.  I would love to discuss this too.  The Uluru Statement progresses from Mabo to acknowledge than not only is there continuing Real-Estate ownership, but there is joint-Sovereignty in Australia sharing the Traditions of Country with our British Rule of Law.  Still, most Australians are in denial of one or the other, and few embrace both.  (I received a High Distinction in Aboriginal Cultures through the David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education, but I cannot claim direct ancestry, though I was conceived and born in Wurundjeri Country.)

I would like to see Albert Park and other Melbourne Parks as well as all our ludicrously named 'Nature Strips' permitted to return to natural, endemic bushland, which happens at no cost if you just leave land alone.  'Save Albert Park' is a bourgeois organisation run by middle-class lefties who want a traditional British-style park with lawns and cultivated shrubs, like they want mowed nature strips.  Of all Melbourne' Major Events, the Grand Prix could be a genuine 'working class' celebration, which might justify taking over a People's Park for a few months, but it remains an Elite Sport.  I still support the basic principles of 'Save Albert Park'/'Beyond the Barricades', especially opposition to the secretive way it was imposed, and have not expressed these reservations about the campaign that I think saves the wrong sort of park and excludes the right sort of people.

Cheers,
Naum Tered

A Big J Story

There was the time when Big J suggested I join a Service Club, and suggested Apex.  I had heard of it but knew nothing of Service Clubs.  I agreed, with some enthusiasm.  And went to my first meeting, one early evening, I think from memory.

As soon as I walked in, someone recognised me and called everyone's attention to who my Father was.  He praised Big J for a long time, listing  a few of the many things he had done for the Community in his three decades as a Civic Councillor, and Olympic Sportsman and a Captain of Industry.

Then, he turned to me and said something like, 'Welcome! We're expecting a lot from you.'

I heard calls from a few of the faces that were all turned towards me of, 'Have a drink,' but all I could do was depart immediately and silently, never to return.

I wasn't me, whoever I was.  Instead I was the son of Big J.  I don't know how other people cope.  Well, some live up to expectations, but then, they weren't dropped on their heads by their Big Whatevers when they were three, and blamed for being a malingerer for suffering because everyone was in denial that there had been an accident or I had been hurt at all.  

Now I think about it.  I don't think he told my mother what had happened, but instead carried my unconscious body to my bed and said I had a chill, or something.  My Grandfather had died of Pneumonia a year before I was born, so it was a genuine concern.

I woke up and didn't know/remember anything.  I had retrograde amnesia, but three year-olds aren't expected to remember much anyway.  I know I had forgotten, because I remember three years later going with my Brother to the Kindergarten that I had attended myself and not remembering anything about it at all.   

After that, I was genuinely sick, with every cold and flu that came our way, and measles and chicken pox.  It was nearly always in mid-summer when everyone else was playing on the beach.

Even when I was well, I was confined to bed in a room without ventilation and overheated.  I was over-fed starchy food.  The best thing would have been for me to lie in the sun and bathe in the sea, but even when we rented a house by the beach near where cousins had also rented, and where my cousins, of whom there were many, played together, I was prevented from going out, and no one would visit me because they all thought I was a malingerer who was too timid to play sports.  

I recall lying in bed at another time in the new house, and hearing children playing outside.  I think I went once to meet up with them, on a rare occasion when I was deemed 'well', the weather was warm and dry, and I had all the right clothes on.  They were going down the hill on a billy cart.  I may have had the opportunity to try it, but declined, because I was timid.  I often fell over because I was clumsy, having grown up sick in bed, and I usually hurt myself.  I still wonder how sportspeople can dive for balls or tackle each other without injury.  

A couple of times I was invited to a neighbor's party.  One time, being in the early fifties when they were still playing war music and movies, and the lady of the house, the mother of the child I barely knew, who lived at the end of my street, asked me what my Father did in the war.  I was totally confused, as I didn't know what anyone did in the War.  My Mother's young brother was killed in the RAAF just before the end of the war, after seeing me once just after I was born, but of course that memory was wiped by the bump on the head.

A lot of it came back to me when I was knocked unconscious in a Motor Bike Accident. (Instead of going where the sign pointed, I rode into the sign, something a lot of people do metaphorically according to the Buddhist analogy, but I did literally.)  I had retrograde amnesia, and completely lost the preceding six weeks.  It was very strange as I had not long before moved into a bramble-covered cottage in the Adelaide Hills on the edge of the forest and had met lots of wonderful people.  Later I kept running into people I didn't know who claimed they knew me.  Eventually I started asking when I had met them, and it was always within that six weeks, so I could apologise and explain.  Even my earlier life was initially forgotten, but gradually came back to me, as if drifting in from a distance, but included with the returning memories were some from the first time I was knocked unconscious.  I have seen this in a couple of movies, films and videos where it can be used to comic effect or to propel the story with something remembered, but it is based on fact, because I have experienced it.

Those Apex people might have had high expectations, but none more so than my own dear Father.  Big J had made it on his own, despite great adversity, or perhaps because of it. He expected me to do the same, without his help.  Unless, you call throwing me into the lion's den like that Apex meeting 'help'.  He was forever criticising me for not doing things that I hadn't known he expected.  If he told me in advance I might have tried, but when I complained he said I had no initiative. 

The more I think about it, the more I am sure he kept it a secret that he had dropped me on my head doing gymnastics in the bathroom.  I must have heard some people talking about it, perhaps him and a Medico, because years later, when I was in my twenties, I asked him about it.  He was a bit surprised I knew and remembered, but agreed that it had happened, but quickly added, 'It was lucky nothing permanent happened.'  He was in total denial.  We never spoke of it again, as we continued to have too much else to argue about.  We used to shout at each other all the time.  Perhaps he thought it was like verbal fencing, because I had been too feeble to learn to fence so we couldn't actually face up to each other.  Pity!  The arguing was very destructive and made me very depressed.  If he did it deliberately, he did me a great wrong, because it totally destroyed any belief that anything I did or said could be right or worthwhile, as he argued against everything.  Often he would say, 'Don't be stupid!' so I grew up thinking I was stupid, and was surprised when I was about forty to discover that I was actually vastly more intelligent than most other people and the reason I couldn't understand other people was not because I was stupid but because they all were - by comparison.  I was a fool to not know, but what hope did I have? 

After I did some Psychodramas I was able to stop him calling me 'Stupid!' and we became good friends for the last few years of his life till he very suddenly got sick and died.  But that is a different story.