This is a page from the third version of Technopagan Yearnings. There are some formatting differences. Originally published at www.neowayland.com/C692963707/E20081120081215

Ready for your homework assignment?

And now on to more pleasant stuff.

Mythworker, one of the Live Journals I follow, posted this link from a tweet. It's a popular science version of string theory and the anthropic principle.

Yes, some of my ideas resonate pretty strongly with this article. That's not surprising, I'm an avid science fiction fan and I like reading and thinking about weird science fact that is on the edge.

After you read the article, you might reread some of what I've written here and here. And yes, I need to do a Taproots entry on that too.

❝My WebTree path uses the ideas of orgone and wyrd. The names aren't important as the concepts. Orgone is shaped by thought and driven by passion. Sometimes it is matter, sometimes it is energy, sometimes it is both, and sometimes it is neither. It's not completely within our perceived reality, so sometimes it is not bound by time or space.

The wyrd is the weave of orgone that connects everything. The first time you think of something, you spin a strand of orgone between you and it. The more often and more passionately you think of it (and it thinks of you), the stronger the strand becomes. Stop thinking about it, and the strand stretches thinner and thinner. Collectively, these strands form the wyrd.

Today we have ways to touch each other and think of each other that we never had before. I can still read Plato and connect to him. But I can also go online and debate on a philosophy board. Maybe the connections aren't as deep as they would be if I found a bar filled with the faculty of the local university, but they exist nonetheless. Just as you can do things in person that you could never do online, you can do things online that you never could in person.❞

❝One of the principles of my particular version of magick is that it's all the same thing. Matter, time, space, passion, thought, imagination, life, death, really just different perspectives. I borrowed a concept, I call the pattern of existence the wyrd. The idea was inspired in part by a book by Brian Bates I read back in the early 90's called The Way of Wyrd. But it is also my own meditations and experiences.

The Web of Life, the Tree, the Labyrinth, it doesn't matter what you call it. It is all connected.

Wilhelm Reich had some interesting speculations about energy that he called orgone. He didn't quite make all the connections, neither have I for that matter. I played with it some though and came up with something that works.

Orgone, you see, is raw magick.

When ever you think of something, you send a little "blip" of orgone to that thing. If that thing is a person and thinks of you, when they think of you, there is another blip of orgone that flows back. The "blip" leaves a small trail, a filament between you and the other thing. The more you think about the thing, the bigger the filament becomes and the easier it is for orgone to flow between the two of you. There is some stuff about dimensional translations that I am going to leave aside here, let's just say that time and space aren't the barriers that they would be in "normal" space/time.

The more passionate your thought, the stronger the filament becomes. It's not for nothing that Reich derived "orgone" from "orgasm." For his work, the type of emotion wasn't nearly as important as the peak levels. Hate and lust can equally bind things together.

All those filaments together are the wyrd. It's formed out of our lives and thoughts.❞

Interesting implications, right?

The shape of the universe. Or maybe I should say shaping the universe.

Now go back and read this from the article I linked.

“And if we double the mass of the electron, life as we know it will disappear. If we change the strength of the interaction between protons and electrons, life will disappear. Why are there three space dimensions and one time dimension? If we had four space dimensions and one time dimension, then planetary systems would be unstable and our version of life would be impossible. If we had two space dimensions and one time dimension, we would not exist,” he says.

The idea that the universe was made just for us—known as the anthropic principle—debuted in 1973 when Brandon Carter, then a physicist at Cambridge University, spoke at a conference in Poland honoring Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer who said that the sun, not Earth, was the hub of the universe. Carter proposed that a purely random assortment of laws would have left the universe dead and dark, and that life limits the values that physical constants can have. By placing life in the cosmic spotlight—at a meeting dedicated to Copernicus, no less—Carter was flying in the face of a scientific worldview that began nearly 500 years ago when the Polish astronomer dislodged Earth and humanity from center stage in the grand scheme of things.

Carter proposed two interpretations of the anthropic principle. The “weak” anthropic principle simply says that we are living in a special time and place in the universe where life is possible. Life couldn’t have survived in the very early universe before stars formed, so the universe had to have reached a certain age and stage of evolution before life could arise.

The “strong” anthropic principle makes a much bolder statement. It asserts that the laws of physics themselves are biased toward life. To quote Freeman Dyson, a renowned physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the strong anthropic principle implies that “the universe knew we were coming.”

Or maybe we are the universe.

Just something to think about when you stare into the fire on a cold winter's night.

Posted: Thu - November 20, 2008 at 08:12 AM

Tags: 3rd Yearnings & anthropic principle & Brandon Carter & WebTree & orgone & wyrd & Web of Life & Tree of Life & labyrinth & Wilhelm Reich & orgasm