BERKELEY SPOOKS COPERNICUS

Here is a literary essay because it too paranormal to be philosophical and too philosophical to be paranormal, and to call it literary is a stretch, but let’s put it there. The ecumenical would find it scandalous. And it is theoretical, possibly not even true. Stay with me, somebody.

Nicolaus Copernicus discovering in the sixteenth century that planets in the solar system circle the sun, was world changing. However he was not in the same league with George Berkeley, after whom the city in California was named, who in the eighteenth decreed that it was all in the head anyway. Actually the latter was right owing to the impossibility of infinity, and few today in the twenty-first realize this. The fact that we are sending vehicles into outer space is a mockery, saying that we have bought into what Martin Heidegger debunked in the twentieth.

What we have here is a nomological situation, there is no explanation for it. Not to wax biblical yet but a Trinity of sorts does preside. One of the three would be Jean-Paul Sartre`s Nothingness which perhaps he coined from Plato. A synonym for it is consciousness, pent up and wanting legs. Ordinarily it cannot have them though because there is no such thing as physicality. However consciousness creates an illusion of it. Now this is a tricky business so let’s give philosopher Gottfried Leibniz who lived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, credit for it finding a way of escape. He had it that if an object is exactly identical to another, one will disappear and the two will become one. Generally speaking, such is not doable since the degree of precision needed is currently out of the question.

Futuristically, teleportation is of this order where you step into a booth and pull a lever in Baltimore and step out in San Francisco, the respective booth having brought the appropriate synchronicity. But give consciousness enough mental holograms that two do become of this exactitude. The one thus manufactured gives way to Being, the second entity of a Trinity.

However this is not necessary as we can simply say that consciousness thinks Being. Call this a transmogrification or change in a surprising manner, at any rate the sham of Being is at hand. Stuff seems to be here, it is Werner Heisenberg`s uncertainty principle that the momentum and position of a particle cannot be ascertained at the same time. This is stating bluntly that really there is nothing present while there seems to be. Life at its lowest stage has begun, the lowly bacteria or whatever. What has to be out there is a part of it, in other words all that we can ever find is tied up in it to begin with. Essentially evolution is at hand but it is merely underwriting what is heralded to be there anyway. What it is not is a minute speck on Earth that is circling the sun Copernicus-style. In fact, it is he who puts it there with his so-called discovery.

Consciousness then arrives in every critter, or be it fish, fowl, mammal, or even insects and plants. Lifeforms are under the impression that they are in a world finding things, if they are not and are making it all up as they go along. Biocentrist Robert Lanza has one who leaves the kitchen to go into the bedroom, lose the kitchen once he has gone out of it. On return to the kitchen the bedroom is lost and the kitchen is there again; it is the same dictum of the tree falling in the forest and not making any noise if no one is there to hear it.

Dinosaurs experienced a good bit of terrain as do other flat-earthers who succeeded them, and it is humans who become the most dumbfounded along with other creatures, we buying into even galaxies and black holes. If we press against a hard wall we think it is solid but that is so due to our feeling dense ourselves. Once an illusion is believed in, it is opaque unto itself. Comes the Roman Empire, Visigoths, the Battle of Hastings; not to mention World War II, Shakespeare, and the Katzenjammer Kids.

For sure, comics are alive as is anything produced by a human or the acorn that monkey uncovered.

Add in the pyramids for good measure, and consciousness starts to get excited. The Trinity deserves its capitalization for God, as that is what consciousness is, and Being, stand by for, well nothing. Looked at from a distance, and we take liberties here as God has no space in-house, there is no interest in culture, society, literature, history, music, or civilization. Label this the Holy Ghost and we have the Trinity, that is to say along with the Father (God), and the son Jesus Christ, if Christianity is the venue. Secular remains the name of the game however and the Ghost is only holy via association, and a weak one at that.

God has God`s problems, not to get into gender here. In the case of Earth global warming is set to spring and fish are left to eating plastic in the oceans, elephants killed as trophies. Old cars sit rusting away among other exploited metals. The menace of nuclear warfare is the worse disaster clearly and all life is wiped out. Had it been only humans some geography would remain but the catastrophe is such that oceans dry up and arctic snow melts. Butterflies dying out early in the twenty-first century become as nothing when mosquitoes down to bacterium are gone. All life is vanished but a trouble-ridden Earth does not lie vanquished. No, life put it all here in the first place so none of the above rot is left in existence.

Accordingly another transmogrification is due but it is not like this is the second one, nor is this another in a series. It cannot be said that they have been going on forever either as that would be the same as infinity. No, they appear one after another resembling a sexual act in their takeoff, in a way. Slightly different are they each time until every attainable variation has occurred. Does this mean a hair out of place in one is a no no? Hardly, when talking extremities the likes of these, Leibniz’s edict is achieved in a commonsense manner, but the fact remains that no number can accommodate them.

Willpower is unavailable to them and they are immoral in the face of God who is moral, and the Holy Ghost amoral. We could quibble and say it takes willpower to be immoral but this is inline with the out-of-place hair.

Indeed, every creature no matter its size, is collectively God if in the singular it is not. We love ourselves: a husband does not love his wife and vice versa, neither do children their parents or parents their children. But they cannot live with one another unless they pretend otherwise. God is close at hand in all this as God is next to Being, using freewill to answer prayer by choosing among the dimensions and applying variations of them to individuals, motivated since God is one and the same with us. There is one problem: individual personalities die before the subsequent transmogrification but they have been exposed to Being, meaning they must somehow be processed, not an easy matter overall.

Deceased homo sapiens normally arrive in disarray, whales for example even if having lived long lives but having less acumen, more easily dissipate. Cats and dogs do this if quicker. We though are expecting something so have us line up in a park-like atmosphere as if to be judged, if that be our discretion. No one sits around doing anything if like God, we do borrow a modicum of time and space from Being for this. Yet some will undergo showy presentations to the arriving dead in a pretense of a life there, or elaborate on their late term as an earthly monk. Others think they are doing useful work and bow down for God passing through. A swishy affair it is. Haunting structures is a popular method of fading away. Reincarnation is a myth. God`s inspiration is chiefly to get rid of us and may have a Saint Peter in the wings to help the process along; Saint Peter had best watch his step too.

Side issues haunt, excuse the pun, the foregoing spooky agenda. Humanistic dying can accompany synchronistic and retrocognitive events. The dying inventor of the smoke alarm has caused one to go off as a fireman was arriving to check them; an aunt biting the dust prompted her niece to enter a bar of patrons long dead; a phantom carriage passed in recent times instigated by a Virginia governor’s wife having died in quicksand, having fallen from the carriage during the colonial period. Non-lethal oddities consist of a sofa levitating inches off the floor; and a renter on entering his apartment hearing a male voice quote meaningful bible verses at large.

Holy Ghost scans the bunch of it with scorn, after all, it is purely nomological. It is as if a pile of brush were thrown down an incline, it has certain characteristics which must be disposed of. People think of themselves as the cats pajamas, and they are not. Still look at what is tripping along here, a dimension lasts an exceedingly long time and with the differentials at play in each, the digits in their number would extend to the moon, were there one. Our dreams interact with Locales as out-of-body virtuoso Robert Monroe would call them, that is to say the land of the dead and the dimensions occupying Locales II and III respectively. A happening during the day may insert us into a particular dream which is really the everyday life of those enjoying a different history. Ironically these citizens in their dreams may invade our own lives in settings where we think we are perfectly alone. Actually during the day we do not think of ourselves as being in a dream yet we are, as surely as being in the dream itself. Our daily actions affect the night`s dream, it in turn prescribing the next day. While we cannot make something happen within the course of a day, the dream the night before does.

The day proceeds until we get tired at night, at which time we go to sleep and dream. The dream depends on what we have done during the day and it will continue until we get tired and go to sleep at night. It does not matter that we get only a few hours of that person’s day, it extends on until going to sleep at night. Something that happens in that dream ushers in what will occur in our next day. Such takes place day after day and night after night, each person dreaming a different dream each night. We perceive ourselves to be in a different one each night and yet on awakening there is the sensation that we are in the same life while dreaming differently each night.

Always there has been the belief that our brain creates the dream, but what it needs is some increment from the day before. That increment has in it the makings of a day no matter where it falls during the day, be it from awakening until falling asleep. The whole content of each day is built into whatever sets off the night’s dream. It is the same principe as evolution which has all existence cooked in. As stated, it does not take much to depict in the dream the entire days activities, leaving time for traversing the land of the dead. When one dies entry is automatic to that domain and it does not matter if they are in the day dream or the night one, they have come upon a garbage heap of sorts as identified above, which is a mode of disposition for them.

New meaning is given to the nineteenth century song, Merrily merrily merrily merrily, gently down the stream, life is such a dream.

Into this mix God using an adjacency to Being answers certain of our supplications. Such is well and good for the churchy congregations, meanwhile the profane lean into their enthusiasms with gusto, no matter the Locale. To be sure, these salutations altogether give the Holy Ghost a case of the blahs. It does hold together this assortment of trivia where God uses intelligence personified by the Son to broker what is suitable. Lifeforms are appeased by this continuum but when all is said and done the very input that went into making it a drama, constitutes an inertia. The Holy Ghost is fain to oversee such a junkyard but has no choice. Berkeley as a bishop in spooking Copernicus outdid himself.

Palmer Fitzgerald is retired from the navy where he was stationed at duty stations Kodiak, Alaska; Keflavik, Iceland; and Norfolk, Virginia. At sea he served on destroyers and aircraft carriers, participating in the Cuban Missile Crisis. He graduated in philosophy from Christopher Newport College (now University) at Newport News. Virginia. A native of Mississippi, he writes as a hobby and is an avid handgun enthusiast. Currently he lives in Eden, North Carolina.