Wormholes by metacoder at forex factory

We will send no further communiques to the press. We will work and study to strike the most crippling blows possible against the fascist monster. If you agree with us, do not seek to find us and join us. Do as we have done. Peace On Earth. Others claimed it was the work of an FBI agent provocateur. A few wondered if POE actually existed, and what it would do. POE stood for "purity of essence.

Ripper in the film Dr. Strangelove, who launches a nuclear war to protect "the purity of essence of our precious bodily fluids" against fluorides. POE honestly felt that sanity had failed to save the world and that only insanity remained as a viable alternative. Nor were they alone in this attitude. Ripper was needed to confront the growing chaos of the planet with some strong counterchaos. That was a pseudonym. They were all fervent Idealists too.

John Brown, motivated by Idealism, had set out to abolish slavery in Unistat in the nineteenth century. On one of his first raids he murdered a whole family of slave owners. An associate, who was less Idealistic, had suggested sparing the children, but John Brown refused. Idealists were like that. You were much safer falling into the hands of the Cynics. The Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt. The Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.

Since a person can die only once, historians have been at a loss to explain what the Unistaters expected to do with the surplus 1, bombs for each human being. Galactical primatologists inform us that similar irrational behavior has been observed among domesticated apes on several thousand planets. They had a simple, pragmatic outlook. People could be recognized because they all had six legs. Good people smelled right and were part of the same hive or colony.

Bad people smelled wrong and were not part of the hive; they should be eaten at once, or driven off. People had four legs. Some of the primates also recognized the dogs as being people. They went around talking about this genetic Intelligence and calling it "God" and telling everybody it was too smart to make mistakes and incidentally talking a lot of nonsense, also brought on by their excesses.

Another third of the primates who recognized consciousness wherever it existed were specially trained scientists, in fields like ethology, ecology, biophysics, and Neurologic. They all talked in specialized jargons and hardly anybody could understand them. Most of them couldn't even understand one another. The last third of the primates who had a sense of the genetic program behind evolution were folk who had eaten some strange chemicals or vegetables.

They were like the blind Denebian shell cats who suddenly encounter water for the first time by falling into an ocean. They knew something was happening to them, but they weren't sure what it was. POE theoretically had no leader. The real leader was, of course, an alpha male.

His name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt Stuart, and he was one of the smartest men in Unistat at that time. Stuart claimed that the purpose of POE was to accelerate the dialectical process of evolution toward the classless society where all would live in peace, prosperity, and socialist solidarity, and there would be no cops.

The real purpose of Stuart's activities was to get even. The other primates in Unistat had raped his mother and jailed his father and driven his brothers and sisters into street crime and junk and generally maltreated him all his life.

In addition they called him by an insulting name, which was nigger. She was even smarter than F. Stuart, but she deferred to him, despite her feminist orientation, because he was a true alpha male who was a Mean Motherfucker When Crossed and had even more rage in him than she did. To Sylvia, the purpose of POE, she said, was to create a world where all men and women, all races and all classes, all humanity, lived in loving harmony and ate uncooked fruits and vegetables.

Her real motive was also to get even. The other primates discriminated against her for being female, for being Jewish, for being highly verbal and a Teacher's Pet, for wearing glasses, for being an atheist, and for several dozen other reasons at least. They also called her by an insulting name, which was dyke. The third founding member was Mountbatten Babbit, who was a cyclical schizophrenic.

He wigged out once a year, on the average, and had learned how to medicate himself with phenothyazines to keep those periods of Bizarresville down to a few weeks each, ut during those dilations of ego he was likely to be anybody from Napoleon to a Vietnamese Buddhist.

The rest of the year he was a brilliant research chemist and computer expert, but it was hard for him to get a good job because of his several incarcerations in mental hospitals. Yeah, he wanted to get even too. The other primates called him a nut or a fruitcake. The other members of POE were equally brilliant and equally desperate.

Chancy detested the majority of primates because they called him Shorty or even more insulting names. Chancy, you see, was a midget, but he was no relative of the famous Chaneys of Hollywood. People did keep making jokes about that.

By the time the midget was fifteen, he had built up a detestation for ordinary mankind that dwarfed he hated that word the relative misanthropies of Paul of Tarsus, Clement of Alexandria, Swift of Dublin, or anybody in POE. Revenge, for sure, he would have. He would have revenge. It was in college U. He was from Chicago, his name was Mounty Babbit, and he was crazy even for Berkeley. So we get split in two, dig?

I hope Mr. Chaney won't be tormented by jokes about this for the rest of the semester, even if the related series of his appearances in class does seem part of a notably random process. In fact, his cuts were numerous, both in math and in other classes. There were times when he could not bear to be with the giants, but hid in his room. Pussycat centerfold open, masturbating and dreaming of millions and millions of nubile young women all built like Pussyettes, all throwing themselves passionately upon him.

Today, however, Pussycat would avail him not; he needed something raunchier. Damn "Prime" Time and damn the science of mathematics itself, the line, the square, the average, the measurable world that pronounced him subnormal. Once and for all, beyond fantasy, in the depth of his soul, he declared war on the statutory ape, on law and order, on predictability. He would be the random factor in every equation; from this day forward, unto death, it would be civil war: the midget versus the digits.

Let's have a Markoff Chain orgasm, just to start with, he thought savagely. What, he thought, are the poor girls supposed to pee in their panties if they can't find the superior? Years of school came back to him "Please, sir, may I leave the room, sir?

Not for nothing had he spent a semester in Professor "Sheets" Kelly's intensive course on textual analysis of modern poetry. The following Wednesday, the midget was back at Norton's and hiding in a coffee urn when the staff left and locked up. Markoff Chaney launched what he considered a reign of terror against the oversized idiots of the statistical majority. This proved to be bereft of amusement, except in small towns; denizens of New York, Chicago, and similar elephantine burgs, accustomed to nothing working properly, ignored the signs anyway.

Kennedy announced that the U. For his purposes, it was enough. Living in Spartan fashion, constantly crisscrossing the country by Greyhound he soon knew every graffito in every White Tower men's room by heart , dining often on a tin of sardines and a container of milk, Markoff left a train of anarchy in his wake.

He had a Vacation Schedule Form with him, to be run off on Xerox and distributed to each editor's desk. This form was his masterpiece; it was sure to provoke a nervous breakdown in anyone who tried to decipher and comply with all its directions, yet it was not much different, on the surface, from the hundreds of similar forms handed out in offices daily. Chaney was quite happy and quite impatient for the staff to leave so he could set about his cheerful task for the night. Two editors passed the coffee urn, talking.

You know, from Orgasm Research. More statistics and averages, more of the modern search for the norm that he could never be. And now the bastard who headed it, Dr. Chaney fumed. Orgasm Research moved from the middle of his shit list to the top, replacing his archenemy, Bell Telephone. The thought of Dr. Dashwood remained with him all night, as he ground out his surrealist vacation memo on the office Xerox.

Francis Dashwood, supervisor of orgasms, and now ready to dive headfirst into a barrel of Pussyettes: the midget suffered at the thought. But it was nearly 4 A. Tomorrow morning would be time to do something about Orgasm Research. In the morning he shuffled through his bogus letterhead file, looking for something appropriate for correspondence with Orgasm Research. Chaney always invited the recipients to come to the next Thuggee meeting and bring their wives and sisters.

Chaney reserved it for correspondence with President Lousewart. In a few moments Chaney produced a letter calculated to short a few circuits in Dr. Dashwood's computeroid cortex: Dear Dr. Dashwood: When you are up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember that you started out to drain the swamp.

Entropy requires no maintenance. That should make the bastard wonder a bit, he thought with satisfaction, stuffing the enigmatic epistle in an envelope and addressing it. Markoff Chaney loathed math because it contained the concept of the average. Chaney not only loathed, but hated, despised, abominated, detested, and couldn't stand the thought of Dr. Dashwood, not just because Dashwood's work involved statistics and averages, but because is was concerned with orgasms.

That was a tender subject to Chaney. He was a virgin. He adored the giantesses of the hateful oversized majority. He adored them, lusted after them, and was also terrified of them. He had tried building his courage with booze. They thought he was disgusting and chauvinistic and not even cute anymore. He tried weed. They thought he was cute again, and even hilarious, but even more absurd as a possible lover.

He tried est. The second day they built him up and convinced him he could control his space as well as any other mammal. He was flying when he came out. He went at once to a singles bar and sidled up to the most attractive blonde in the place. When Chaney slunk back to his YMCA room and his pornographic Tarot, he vowed more vehemently than ever that he would be the meanest fuck on the planet.

Nobody would ever call him a friendly little fuck again. He still adored the giantesses and feared them, but now he hated them too; in short, he was really stuck on them. He knew their cunts were hairy and hot and moist, etc. Muss es sein? Es muss sein. Lousewart V was a man born into the right time; his book perfectly reflected all the foreboding of the late s. Its thesis was simply that everything science does is wrong, that scientists are very nasty people, and that we need to go back to a simpler, more natural way of life.

The message was perfect for the time; it was simply Hitler's National Socialism redone, with only a few minor changes. Where Hitler wrote "Jew," for instance, Lousewart wrote "scientist. And Hitler's Wagnerian primitivism was altogether too Teutonic for young America in the s, so Lousewart replaced it with a chic blend of Taoist and Amerindian primitivism.

It didn't matter that scholars pointed out that all of Lousewart's arguments were illogical and incoherent his followers despised logic and coherence on principle , and it didn't even matter that he had brazenly lifted most of his notions right out of Roszak's Where the Wasteland Ends and Von Daniken's Gold of the Gods.

With the collapse of the Republican Party after Nixon and Ford, there was a void in national politics; somebody had to organize a force to challenge the Democrats, and the People's Ecology Party moved quickly to capture the turf. In short, he had the instincts of a politician. The Lousewart philosophy of asceticism, medievalism, and despair was officially called the Revolution of Lowered Expectations. The Revolution of Lowered Expectations was based on the idea that there wasn't enough energy to provide for the rising expectations of the masses.

Year after year the message was broadcast: There Isn't Enough. The masses were taught that Terra was a closed system, that entropy was increasing, that life was a losing proposition all around, and that the majority were doomed to poverty, starvation, disease, misery, and stupidity. Most of the people who still had rising expectations were scientists.

The scientists were an ideal scapegoat group because they all spoke in specialized languages and hardly anybody could understand them. The Jews had served this function in earlier ages because they spoke Yiddish. The scientists spoke Mathematics. Simon Moon, a creature with almost as much hair as Bigfoot, planted the louses in Case's semantic preconscious. To make matters even more surrealistic, that intolerable bore Blake Williams was lecturing on the Birth of Cosmic Humanity to anyone who would listen, and several other conversations were going on simultaneously.

Nonetheless, Moon had a manuscript with him, and a few listeners, and Case couldn't help absorbing part of what the mad Beastman was reading. What the hell was that? His eyes did seem auld glowery. He did not like people throwing scenes at his parties. Well," the drunk decided majestically, "fuck you too. And the horse you rode in on, as they say in Texas. In fact, only now, at this point in history, is humanity about to be born. He thought this was a illiant decision on his part, and wondered how to begin implementing it.

He had no idea that every male hominid, and many other male primates, immediately had that idea when looking at Carol. This way the Humpytheatre. In perspective to the cosmos. The shrill fife of Josephine Malik, Case's editor, was heard: "Moon. They say he works for the Beast. Walking nostalgia. And taking the Euclidean parameters of that gestation as the norm.

Her blond head leaned forward in doubtful inquiry. Leaving Earth is literally rebirth. There's nothing metaphoric about it. Case began to feel that he had had perhaps too much hash. Let me tell you about the Committee to Nuke the Whales. But Moon was shrilling like a banshee now: "Wet with garrison statements, oswilde shores, daily blazers, tochus culbook depositories, middlesexed villains and fumes.

The most unkennedest carp of all. His bruttus gypper. Lovecraft story, and do you want to know what I think it was? A publisher and his lawyer had just figured out a new way to screw one of their writers. Eerie cries from the scalped nations! This the oval orefice sends the plumbers fur de spills. Lust of the walkregans. White harse devoted. Wit ars devoided. And Cagliostro the Great. Nonetheless, he was among the lucky few who were treated by the Sister Kenny method at a time the early s when the American Medical Association was denouncing that method as quackery and forbidding experiment thereon by its members.

He was walking again, with only a slight limp, when he entered grade school in The real luck occurred twelve years later, in , when he was eighteen; the limp and the dead muscles in his lower calves disqualified him for military service.

The next man drafted, in his place, had both testicles bloodily blown off in Korea. Williams, of course, never knew about this patriotic gelding, but he was well aware that various boys his age were having various portions of their anatomy blown off in Korea; being somewhat philosophical, he often reflected on the paradox that the polio which had been, when it occurred, a physical agony to him and a psychological agony to his parents had preserved him from such mutilations.

This was a decided encouragement toward an optimistic attitude toward the seemingly evil and made him wonder if the universe were not benevolent after all. The guy who lost his balls in Williams's place, on the other hand, became a pronounced pessimist and cynic. Between Korea and Vietnam, while Blake was acquiring first an M.

He had wandered far to the west in a mood of suicidal gloom, such as young male primates often think they should experience after losing a sexual partner. Somehow, he wandered onto Vandivoort Street and found himself at the Vandivoort Street incinerator. What helped him in the past may hinder another in the future.

Yet since the Master is pledged to serve, he may take up that service on these simple lines. Since all thoughts are veils of this Light, he may advise the destruction of all thoughts, and to that end teach those practices which are clearly conductive to such destruction.

These practices have now fortunately been set down in clear language by order of the A. In these instructions the relativity and limitation of each practice is clearly taught, and all dogmatic interpretations are carefully avoided. Each practice is in itself a demon which must be destroyed; but to be destroyed it must first be evoked. Shame upon that Master who shirks any one of these practices, however distasteful or useless it may be to him! For in the detailed knowledge of it, which experience alone can give him, may lie his opportunity for crucial assistance to a pupil.

However dull the drudgery, it should be undergone. And we are not told that NEMO might have used other things than those which he actually does use; it seems possible that if he had not the acid or the knife, or the fire, or the oil, he might miss tending just that one flower which was to be NEMO after him! We know that it is fairly easy for the ordinary educated mind to think without much distraction on a subject in which it is much interested. We have the popular phrase, "revolving a thing in the mind"; and as long as the subject is sufficiently complex, as long as thoughts pass freely, there is no great difficulty.

So long as a gyroscope is in motion, it remains motionless relatively to its support, and even resists attempts to distract it; when it stops it falls from that position. If the earth ceased to spin round the sun, it would at once fall into the sun. The moment then that the student takes a simple subject - or rather a simple object - and imagines it or visualizes it, he will find that it is not so much his creature as he supposed.

Other thoughts will invade the mind, so that the object is altogether forgotten, perhaps for whole minutes at a time; and at other times the object itself will begin to play all sorts of tricks. Suppose you have chosen a white cross. It will move its bar up and down, elongate the bar, turn the bar oblique, get its arms unequal, turn upside down, grow branches, get a crack around it or a figure upon it, change its shape altogether like an Amoeba, change its size and distance as a whole, change the degree of its illumination, and at the same time change its colour.

It will get splotchy and blotchy, grow patterns, rise, fall, twist and turn; clouds will pass over its face. There is no conceivable change of which it is incapable. Not to mention its total disappearance, and replacement by something altogether different!

Any one to whom this experience does not occur need not imagine that he is meditating. It shows merely that he is incapable of concentrating his mind in the very smallest degree. Perhaps a student may go for several days before discovering that he is not meditating. When he does, the obstinacy of the object will infuriate him; and it is only now that his real troubles will begin, only now that Will comes really into play, only now that his manhood is tested.

If it were not for the Will-development which he got in the conquest of Asana, he would probably give up. As it is, the mere physical agony which he underwent is the veriest trifle compared with the horrible tedium of Dharana. For the first week it may seem rather amusing, and you may even imagine you are progressing; but as the practice teaches you what you are doing, you will apparently get worse and worse.

Please understand that in doing this practice you are supposed to be seated in Asana, and to have note-book and pencil by your side, and a watch in front of you. You are not to practise at first for more than ten minutes at a time, so as to avoid risk of overtiring the brain. In fact you will probably find that the whole of your willpower is not equal to keeping to a subject at all for so long as three minutes, or even apparently concentrating on it for so long as three seconds, or three-fifths of one second.

By "keeping to it at all" is meant the mere attempt to keep to it. The mind becomes so fatigued, and the object so incredibly loathsome, that it is useless to continue for the time being. In Frater P. Hence to will anything but the supreme thing, is to wander still further from it - any will but that to give up the self to the Beloved is Black Magick - yet this surrender is so simple an act that to our complex minds it is the most difficult of all acts; and hence training is necessary.

Further, the Self surrendered must not be less than the All-Self; one must not come before the altar of the Most High with an impure or an imperfect offering. Thus it is not "a priori" obvious why a billiard player should need a file. Since, then, we may want "anything," let us see to it that our will is strong enough to obtain anything we want without loss of time.

It is therefore necessary to develop the will to its highest point, even though the last task but one is the total surrender of this will. Partial surrender of an imperfect will is of no account in Magick. The will being a lever, a fulcrum is necessary; this fulcrum is the main aspiration of the student to attain.

All wills which are not dependent upon this principal will are so many leakages; they are like fat to the athlete. The majority of the people in this world are ataxic; they cannot coordinate their mental muscles to make a purposed movement.

They have no real will, only a set of wishes, many of which contradict others. The victim wobbles from one to the other and it is no less wobbling because the movements may occasionally be very violent and at the end of life the movements cancel each other out. Nothing has been achieved; except the one thing of which the victim is not conscious: the destruction of his own character, the confirming of indecision. Such an one is torn limb from limb by Choronzon. How then is the will to be trained?

All these wishes, whims, caprices, inclinations, tendencies, appetites, must be detected, examined, judged by the standard of whether they help or hinder the main purpose, and treated accordingly. Vigilance and courage are obviously required.

I was about to add self-denial, in deference to conventional speech; but how could I call that self-denial which is merely denial of those things which hamper the self? It is not suicide to kill the germs of malaria in one's blood. Now there are very great difficulties to be overcome in the training of the mind.

Perhaps the greatest is forgetfulness, which is probably the worst form of what the Buddhists call ignorance. Special practices for training the memory may be of some use as a preliminary for persons whose memory is naturally poor. In any case the Magical Record prescribed for Probationers of the A. Above all the practices of Liber III must be done again and again, for these practices develop not only vigilance but those inhibiting centres in the brain which are, according to some psychologists, the mainspring of the mechanism by which civilized man has raised himself above the savage.

So far it has been spoken, as it were, in the negative. Aaron's rod has become a serpent, and swallowed the serpents of the other Magicians; it is now necessary to turn it once more into a rod. The previous practices, Asana, Pranayama, Yama, and Niyama, are all acts of the body, while mantra is connected with speech: Pratyahara is purely mental. And what is Pratyahara? This word is used by different authors in different senses. The same word is employed to designate both the practice and the result.

It means for our present purpose a process rather strategical than practical; it is introspection, a sort of general examination of the contents of the mind which we wish to control: Asana having been mastered, all immediate exciting causes have been removed, and we are free to think what we are thinking about.

A very similar experience to that of Asana is in store for us. At first we shall very likely flatter ourselves that our minds are pretty calm; this is a defect of observation. Just as the European standing for the first time on the edge of the desert will see nothing there, while his Arab can tell him the family history of each of the fifty persons in view, because he has learnt how to look, so with practice the thoughts will become more numerous and more insistent.

As soon as the body was accurately observed it was found to be terribly restless and painful; now that we observe the mind it is seen to be more restless and painful still. See diagram opposite. A similar curve might be plotted for the real and apparent painfulness of Asana. Conscious of this fact, we begin to try to control it: "Not quite so many thoughts, please!

The attempt to repress has the effect of exciting. When the unsuspecting pupil first approaches his holy but wily Guru, and demands magical powers, that Wise One replies that he will confer them, points out with much caution and secrecy some particular spot on the pupil's body which has never previously attracted his attention, and says: "In order to obtain this magical power which you seek, all that is necessary is to wash seven times in the Ganges during seven days, being particularly careful to avoid thinking of that one spot.

It is positively amazing with what persistence a thought, even a whole train of thoughts, returns again and again to the charge. It becomes a positive nightmare. It is intensely annoying, too, to find that one does not become conscious that one has got on to the forbidden subject until one has gone right through with it. However, one continues day after day investigating thoughts and trying to check them; and sooner or later one proceeds to the next stage, Dharana, the attempt to restrain the mind to a single object.

Before we go on to this, however, we must consider what is meant by success in Pratyahara. This is a very extensive subject, and different authors take widely divergent views. One writer means an analysis so acute that every thought is resolved into a number of elements see "The Psychology of Hashish," Section V, in Equinox II. Others take the view that success in the practice is something like the experience which Sir Humphrey Davy had as a result of taking nitrous oxide, in which he exclaimed: "The universe is composed exclusively of ideas.

However, the main point is to acquire some sort of inhibitory power over the thoughts. Fortunately there is an unfailing method of acquiring this power. It is given in Liber III. If Sections 1 and 2 are practised if necessary with the assistance of another person to aid your vigilance you will soon be able to master the final section.

Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and had better come first. Purity means singleness. God is one. The wand is not a wand if it has something sticking to it which is not an essential part of itself. If you wish to invoke Venus, you do not succeed if there are traces of Saturn mixed up with it. That is a mere logical commonplace: in magick one must go much farther than this.

One finds one's analogy in electricity. If insulation is imperfect, the whole current goes back to earth. It is useless to plead that in all those miles of wire there is only one-hundredth of an inch unprotected. It is no good building a ship if the water can enter, through however small a hole. That first task of the Magician in every ceremony is therefore to render his Circle absolutely impregnable.

If one littlest thought intrude upon the mind of the Mystic, his concentration is absolutely destroyed; and his consciousness remains on exactly the same level as the Stockbroker's. Even the smallest baby is incompatible with the virginity of its mother. If you leave even a single spirit within the circle, the effect of the conjuration will be entirely absorbed by it. Ancient Magicians recommended a preliminary purification of from three days to many months.

During this period of training they took the utmost pains with diet. They avoided animal food, lest the elemental spirit of the animal should get into their atmosphere. They practised sexual abstinence, lest they should be influenced in any way by the spirit of the wife.

They fasted, so that the body itself might destroy anything extraneous to the bare necessity of its existence. They purified the mind by special prayers and conservations. They avoided the contamination of social intercourse, especially the conjugal kind; and their servitors were disciples specially chosen and consecrated for the work. In modern times our superior understanding of the essentials of this process enables us to dispense to some extent with its external rigours; but the internal purification must be even more carefully performed.

We may eat meat, provided that in doing so we affirm that we eat it in order to strengthen us for the special purpose of our proposed invocation. We have understood the saying: "To the pure all things are pure", and we have learnt how to act up to it. We can analyse the mind far more acutely than could the ancients, and we can therefore distinguish the real and right feeling from its imitations.

A man may eat meat from self-indulgence, or in order to avoid the dangers of asceticism. We must constantly examine ourselves, and assure ourselves that every action is really subservient to the One Purpose. It is ceremonially desirable to seal and affirm this mental purity by Ritual, and accordingly the first operation in any actual ceremony is bathing and robing, with appropriate words.

The bath signifies the removal of all things extraneous to antagonistic to the one thought. The putting on of the robe is the positive side of the same operation. It is the assumption of the fame of mind suitable to that one thought. A similar operation takes place in the preparation of every instrument, as has been seen in the Chapter devoted to that subject. In the preparation of theplace of working, the same considerations apply.

During many days we occupy ourselves in this process of cleansing and consecration; and this again is confirmed in the actual ceremony. The cleansed and consecrated Magician takes his cleansed and consecrated instruments into that cleansed and consecrated place, and there proceeds to repeat that double ceremony in the ceremony itself, which has these same two main parts. The first part of every ceremony is the banishing; the second, the invoking. The same formula is repeated even in the ceremony of banishing itself, for in the banishing ritual of the pentagram we not only command the demons to depart, but invoke the Archangels and their hosts to act as guardians of the Circle during our pre-occupation with the ceremony proper.

In more elaborate ceremonies it is usual to banish everything by name. Each element, each planet, and each sign, perhaps even the Sephiroth themselves; all are removed, including the very one which we wished to invoke, for that force How very sensible of you, though I admit somewhat exacting! You write-Will you tell me exactly why I should devote so much of my valuable time to subjects like Magick and Yoga. That is all very well. But you ask me to put it in syllogistic form.

I have no doubt this can be done, though the task seems somewhat complicated. I think I will leave it to you to construct your series of syllogisms yourself from the arguments of this letter. In your main question the operative word is "valuable. Why, I ask, in my turn, should you consider your time valuable? It certainly is not valuable unless the universe has a meaning, and what is more, unless you know what that meaning is-at least roughly-it is millions to one that you will find yourself barking up the wrong tree.

First of all let us consider this question of the meaning of the universe. It is its own evidence to design, and that design intelligent design. There is no question of any moral significance-"one man's meat is another man's poison" and so on. But there can be no possible doubt about the existence of some kind of intelligence, and that kind is far superior to anything of which we know as human. How then are we to explore, and finally to interpret this intelligence?

It seems to me that there are two ways and only two. Imagine for a moment that you are an orphan in charge of a guardian, inconceivably learned from your point of view. Suppose therefore that you are puzzled by some problem suitable to your childish nature, your obvious and most simple way is to approach your guardian and ask him to enlighten you. It is clearly part of his function as guardian to do his best to help you. Very good, that is the first method, and close parallel with what we understand by the word Magick.

We are bothered by some difficulty about one of the elements-say Fire-it is therefore natural to evoke a Salamander to instruct you on the difficult point. But you must remember that your Holy Guardian Angel is not only far more fully instructed than yourself on every point that you can conceive, but you may go so far as to say that it is definitely his work, or part of his work; remembering always that he inhabits a sphere or plane which is entirely different from anything of which you are normally aware.

To attain to the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel is consequently without doubt by far the simplest way by which you can yourself approach that higher order of being. That, then, is a clearly intelligible method of procedure. We call it Magick. It is of course possible to strengthen the link between him and yourself so that in course of time you became capable of moving and, generally speaking, operating on that plane which is his natural habitat.

There is however one other way, and one only, as far as I can see, of reaching this state. It is at least theoretically possible to exalt the whole of your own consciousness until it becomes as free to move on that exalted plane as it is for him. You should note, by the way, that in this case the postulation of another being is not necessary. There is no way of refuting the solipsism if you feel like that. Personally I cannot accede to its axiom.

The evidence for an external universe appears to me perfectly adequate. Still there is no extra charge for thinking on those lines if you so wish. I have paid a great deal of attention in the course of my life to the method of exalting the human consciousness in this way; and it is really quite legitimate to identify my teaching with that of the Yogis.

I must however point out that in the course of my instruction I have given continual warnings as to the dangers of this line of research. For one thing there is no means of checking your results in the ordinary scientific sense. It is always perfectly easy to find a subjective explanation of any phenomenon; and when one considers that the greatest of all the dangers in any line of research arise from egocentric vanity, I do not think I have exceeded my duty in anything that I have said to deter students from undertaking so dangerous a course as Yoga.

It is, of course, much safer if you are in a position to pursue in the Indian Jungles, provided that your health will stand the climate and also, I must say, unless you have a really sound teacher on whom you can safely rely. But then, if we once introduce a teacher, why not go to the Fountain-head and press towards the Knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel?

In any case your Indian teacher will ultimately direct you to seek guidance from that source, so it seems to me that you have gone to a great deal of extra trouble and incurred a great deal of unnecessary danger by not leaving yourself in the first place in the hands of the Holy Guardian Angel. In any case there are the two methods which stand as alternatives. I do not know of any third one which can be of any use whatever.

Logically, since you have asked me to be logical, there is certainly no third way; there is the external way of Magick, and the internal way of Yoga: there you have your alternatives, and there they cease. Love is the law, love under will.

To play this game, you simply "astrally project" into the Magic Room. Do not ask what "astral projection" means, and do not assume it is metaphysical and therefore either impossible, if you are a materialist, or very difficult, if you are a mystic. Just assume this is a gedankenexperiment, a "mind game. You do not need any knowledge of programming to handle this astral computer.

It exists early in the next century; you are getting to use it by a species of time-travel, if that metaphor is amusing and helpful to you. It is so built that it responds immediately to human brain-waves, "reading" them and decoding their meaning.

Crude prototypes of such computers already exist. So, when you are in this magic room, you can ask this Computer anything, just by thinking of what you want to know.

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Lastly, the wormholes themselves would be unstable. A single photon, or particle of light, passing through the wormhole tunnel would introduce so much energy to the system that the tunnel would snap apart, destroying the wormhole, according to the European Southern Observatory opens in new tab. In the s, however, physicists worked out the math needed to make a stable, or "traversable," wormhole, according to University of California, Santa Barbara physicist Diandian Wang opens in new tab.

The trick is to move the entrance of the wormhole tunnel beyond the event horizon of the black hole and to stabilize the tunnel itself so that matter passing through doesn't cause immediate catastrophic collapse. The key ingredient for stabilizing wormholes is so-called exotic matter, or some form of matter that has negative mass.

Unfortunately for such wormholes, scientists have never found evidence for negative mass, and it would violate conservation of momentum , which states that the momentum should remain constant if no force is applied; a negative-mass object placed next to a positive-mass object would immediately accelerate, with no source of energy.

What do wormholes look like? If such a wormhole did exist, it would look very strange. The entrance would be a sphere, like the surface of a planet. If you looked into it, you would see light coming in from the other side. The wormhole tunnel could be any length, and while traveling down the tunnel, you would see distorted views of the region of the universe you came from and the region you were traveling to. Wormholes and time travel In theory, a wormhole could also act as a time machine.

Special relativity dictates that moving clocks run slowly. In other words, someone racing around at nearly the speed of light would not advance into their own future as quickly as someone standing still. If scientists could somehow construct a wormhole, initially the two ends would be synchronized in time. But if one end were then accelerated to nearly the speed of light, that end would start to lag behind the other end. The two entrances could then be brought together, but then one of the entrances would be in the past of the other, according to MIT physicist Andrew Friedman opens in new tab.

To travel back in time, you'd simply walk through one end. When you exited the wormhole, you would be in your own past. How do wormholes form? Wormholes might occur naturally at microscopic scales in the quantum foam. Image credit: Shutterstock opens in new tab There is currently no known way to construct a wormhole, and wormholes are purely hypothetical.

Although exotic matter is unlikely to exist, there may be another way to stabilize wormholes: negative energy. The vacuum of space-time is filled with quantum fields, the fundamental quantum building blocks that give rise to the forces and particles that we experience, and these quantum fields have an intrinsic amount of energy.

It's possible to construct scenarios in which the quantum energy in a particular region is lower than its surroundings, making that energy negative at a local level. Such negative energy exists in the real world in the form of the Casimir effect, in which the negative quantum energies between two parallel metal plates cause the plates to attract, according to University of California, Riverside mathematician John Baez opens in new tab.

Many databases have unique taxonomy formats with differing types of taxonomic information. The taxonomic structure and nomenclature used can be unique to the database or reference another database such as GenBank [ 10 ]. Rather than creating a parser for each data format, metacoder provides a single function to parse any format definable by regular expressions that contains taxonomic information Fig 1.

This makes it easier to use multiple data sources with the same downstream analysis. The user supplies a regular expression with capture groups parentheses and a corresponding key to define what parts of the input can provide classification information. Examples for each database are provided in the user manuals [ 15 ]. Intuitive manipulation of taxonomic data Metacoder makes it easy to subset and sample large data sets composed of thousands of observations e. This allows for exploration and analysis of manageable subsets of a large data set.

Taxonomies are inherently hierarchical, making them difficult to subset and sample intuitively compared with typical tabular data. Subsetting either the taxonomy or the associated observations, depending on the goal, might require subsetting both to keep them in sync. For example, if a set of taxa are removed or left out of a random subsample, should the subtaxa and associated observations also be removed, left as is, or reassigned to a supertaxon? If observations are removed, should the taxa they were assigned to also be removed?

The functions provided by metacoder gives the user control over these details and simplifies their implementation. Metacoder allows users to intuitively and efficiently subset complex hierarchical data sets using a cohesive set of functions inspired by the popular dplyr data-manipulation philosophy. Dplyr is an R package for providing a conceptually consistent set of operations for manipulating tabular information [ 16 ].

For each major dplyr function there are two analogous metacoder functions: one that manipulates the taxon table and one that manipulates the observations table. The functions take into account the relationship between the two tables and can modify both depending on parameterization, allowing for operations on taxa to affect their corresponding observations and vice versa. They also take into account the hierarchical nature of the taxon table. Metacoder also provides functions for random sampling of taxa and corresponding observations.

Taxa with too few sequences are excluded and taxa with too many are randomly subsampled.