Barbenheimer Week is now behind us.
Writer Barbie: Wait…I DID write a book. It’s like I’ve been in a dream where I was somehow really invested in the Zack Snyder Cut of Justice League. What what you said broke me out of it, really, yeah.
OG: Interesting. I also wrote a book. It was soaked in gender issues. And you’re a character in a movie about gender issues. To boot, I too have been emotionally invested in the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League. And what you just said made sure nothing will ever break me out of it.
In the end, Oppenheimer was the better movie. It was made by a Batman director, and those guys know the deal. It also made telling references to Prometheus.
Yours truly,
OG
General Manager
Promethean Fire LLC
So an interesting concept has been cropping up in my life lately that I want to talk about. It has to do with quantum mechanics. This field of science has been used by those with knowledge to make great advances in the area of theoretical physics that have now trickled into the area of computing to tangible benefit to humanity while also providing a trove of contemplative conjecture in the areas of spirituality and philosophy that do not achieve the same beneficial effect. Quantum mechanics has ultimately turned out to be a field of mathematics that relies on estimations, statistics, probabilities, and potentialities to produce an array of equations that accurately predict the behavior of physical matter and energy, but those equations give rise to interpretation.
I am no mathematician, but I have put considerable effort into understanding the subject.
I actually made it to chapter two, section 11 of this textbook on quantum mechanics before I realized that I was going to have to devote years to understanding it. With every section I would have to spend days coming to terms with the meaning of what it was saying. I can’t say that I ultimately understand quantum nechanics to any competent level, and I’ve already forgotten most of what I learned. I came away with it, though, with the perspective that learning quantum mechanics involves going down a very specific path of training. And training is not possible without indoctrination.
The reigning interpretation of quantum mechanics is called the Copenhagen interpretation. Under this umbrella we find the various explanations of the equations from Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. As an aside, I’ve felt a certain kinship with the name Heisenberg ever since Breaking Bad. Heisenberg is most famous for the Uncertainty Principle, which states that you can’t precisely locate a particle in both space and time. Those guys did a LOT more than just that, however, and along with them was a certain Robert Oppenheimer, who was the subject of the recent film by Christopher Nolan mentioned above.
The equations of quantum mechanics depend on matrices and ideas from statistics to determine probability, but they accurately tell you what is actually going on, yet you are left with all of these mind-boggling situations that come to mind when you try to make rational sense out of the equations that really challenge the notion of causation itself as well as the relationship of consciousness to reality. There are a few illustrations of this that have made their way into the popular sphere that many are familiar with. Examples are Schroedinger’s cat (an example of superpositional collapse) and quantum entanglement.
Shroedinger’s cat is an illustration that states, in simplest terms, that a cat in a box can be both alive and dead until you open the box and look at it. Quantum entanglement states that two particles can define each others’ behavior without having any physical interaction with each other. Einstein really hated that one, calling it “spooky action at a distance.” Ideas such as this contradict what logicians call the laws of thought, which are derived from Aristotle and form the basic of human logic. These laws are:
- The law of identity – a thing is what it is. A is A. A is not B.
- The law of non-contradiction – a statement cannot be both true and false at the same time and in the same sense.
- The law of the excluded middle – there is no state between a thing and its negation. Or, a statement must be either true or false. There is nothing between true and false. Or, stated differently, a thing is either white or not white. There is nothing in between white and not white, for example.
These laws are actually irrefutable. I have spent years in my basement dweller days arguing them with people who try to invoke “fuzzy logic,” in quotes because it is actually a term of art from computer science, and modal logic and other disciplines within philosophy to try to negate them, but all these other concepts do is modify them and supplement them in specific contexts. They actually don’t negate them in their intended understanding.
Now the Copenhagen interpretation is just that. An interpretation. But it is assumed fact for the majority of quantum mechanics professionals. Superpositions are actually the basis of quantum computing, which is really coming into its own in practical technological senses. I’ve only ever been able to talk to one guy who really knew the ins and outs of this stuff at the top levels of understanding. A Messianic Jewish guy in Netanya, Israel. I brought my concerns about the implications of these interpretations on popular philosophy and theology, and asked him if he was interested in deriving explanations that did did not fly in the face of classical logical understanding of reality, and he wasn’t interested! He had more important things to do, apparently. I won’t say his name because I am trying not to dime people out these days. He was a real gentle guy, soft spoken, but did incredible athletic races and feats in his advanced age. A good guy, but I am still flabbergasted that in all of my encounters with these ideas over the years, the one guy I knew who could defend classical determinism, objective truth, and effectively normative theism along with that just wasn’t interested. I’ve never even heard of anybody else doing any such thing. You see, if looking at a cat makes it alive or dead, then the guy looking at the cat making it alive or dead is effectively God. So I’d say these equations need some further looking at and translation into common parlance in another way.
But there was one thing that I wasn’t aware of way back then. If it was in my quantum mechanics textbook, it was in a chapter that I didn’t get to before I quit studying it. This would be the pilot wave theory of David Bohm. Bohm was working with equations that had been developing for years prior via Louis de Broglie and others. I just threw Bohm’s name out as a point of reference for anyone who wants to look into the development of the theory.
See, the illustration of the cat that is alive and dead at the same time pertains to various equations that describe the phenomenon, verified experimentally, that light and other forms of energy seem to behave both as particles and waves. Now this is a huge simplification, and really at the top of my understanding of the subject, to say that de Broglie and Bohm and those working with the pilot wave understanding were saying that particles have waves accompanying them, and the particle and the wave are each affecting reality in their own way. It’s a kind of a way of getting around some of the puzzling conclusions that we get when we try to interpret the equations that give rise to the Copenhagen interpretation. The pilot wave theory also has the handy effect of easily preserving our understanding of classical logic. You don’t have to trifle with the laws of causation and thought anymore. And you don’t wind up with the idea that humans make reality what it is by looking at it. Such a thing would constitute nothing less than the scientific validation of what has been called “magic” or “sorcery” for thousands of years.
So do you know where I did hear first about pilot wave theory? I already said it wasn’t in my actual studies of quantum mechanics. It also wasn’t in my years of debating physics and philosophy online. It was from a freaking movie production company. It was from the movie production company of Gal Gadot and her husband Yaron Varsano. I started looking at those guys when I was losing my mind in Amman, Jordan, and they have played no small part in my decision to come to Los Angeles to participate in the incredible phenomenon of the Justice League trilogy, its fans, its filmmakers, and the movies of the “Snyderverse” themselves, those made and unmade.
I can’t say where Gal and Yaron got the idea to call their company the pilot wave. I had the idea that maybe they understood Gal to be the particle, the packet of energy that everybody sees, while Yaron is the wave, the unseen and nebulous force that gets her where she is going. I like that idea. For all my rants about problems with women, I am a sucker for a good romance, and I find that an exceptionally romantic and supercool notion. However, it could also be that their company is the wave that finds media talent out there, whether writers, actors, or other sources of film art. That would be slightly less romantic, but it would mean that maybe they could find a use for an ex-military Jungian kabbalist New Testament Jew convert ex-monk meth-head PTSD prophet on a bicycle trying to write blogs and books while surviving the traumas of college girls, making me a particle for their wave. Frankly I’d like to ask them where they got the idea for their company one day.
Regardless, being a sucker for synchronistic correspondence between various symbols and events, I thought it interesting that Wonder Woman’s production company actually hearkens to an advanced scientific statement about the validity of classical truth, the fundament of human thought, logic, and reason. It’s an interesting fact that the second Wonder Woman movie, Wonder Woman 1984, was about accepting truth versus living in a fantasy. The importance of truth may just have been following Gal and Yaron around for a while. While the Barbie Movie was about living in a fantasy that was mucked up by bastardized perversion of the truth but then successfully returned to a confused version of that same fantasy.
Now this pilot wave theory is itself an interpretation of a unique set of equations developed within quantum mechanics, and it too has various ramifications within popular, layman understandings of consciousness and its relationship to the reality that surrounds it. See, I have long used a medieval language of personal spirits that dominated the writing of various scriptures such as the New Testament, the Talmud, the Quran, and even the Vedas and sutras the world over. I talk kind of like the pope about Satan as a specific dude with horns and tail or whatever, at times acknowledging a cheeky and literary tone in my writings, while at other times being absolutely literally cold stone serious about what I am saying. I’ve made much about the fact that Satan represents both an actual personal conscious being, a fallen angel or jinn or whatever, but also that Satan represents opposition itself, a tendency or pattern. That is, Satan and the demons can be understood both as particles in some senses, and waves in other senses.
I gained a lot of familiarity with this during my Jungian Redbook experience. I actually didn’t write about very much of what I experienced out there. I only wrote about, first, what I was able to understand at the time, and moreso, what made sense within the context of a dude riding a bicycle to the Holy Land and experiencing absolute violations of the law of probability as well as lessons in devastating personal failure on the one hand and the comprehension of personal psychological deficits on the other. I could write many, many more things about what happened on that trip, and I will be wrapping my head around much of what I experienced for a long, long time.
I find it interesting that much of modern occultism is actually based on the musings of Carl Jung. Have you ever heard a psychic talk about “shadow work”? That comes straight from Jung. Or maybe they have mentioned something about “the collective”? That is Jung too.
Furthermore, going further back, a tremendous wealth of occult symbolism relies on European theosophy, and theosophy draws tremendous influence from kabbalah. Now I don’t want to specifically trash those disciplines for those who are repulsed by occultism in favor of classic Abrahamic theism. For one, the majority of my personal experience with kabbalah is of the Chassidic variety based on a work called the Tanya, a book that I am still impressed with to this day. I don’t embrace the totality of kabbalah, which to some is simply a term representing the totality of Jewish esoteric philosophy. But I won’t throw it all out either. It’s just too broad of an area pass judgment on.
Concerning Jung, let’s take a look at a video.
I think after all the psychonautic adventures I have been through, I am fairly confident to say that I have seen more or less everything that guy has, and I’ve come to the same conclusion. Not to blow my own horn. While I am trying to say that I have a pretty broad range of experience that has allowed me to come at these issues from a unique perspective, I can’t claim to have any explicable revelations that are going to change the world just by my uttering them. As far as being a prophet is concerned, I can’t even predict whether The Flash would bomb at the box office or blow the doors off of it. I was sure that film would be fantastic and break a billion, but it was average to slightly above average and was the most spectacular financial bomb DC Films has ever had.
It would seem to me that the biblical and Abrahamic concept of spirituality is deeply connected to special revelation. The Sinai event, prophets having visions of God, etc, with the general message being that one should try to do as best they can while waiting for history to unfold and for God to take care of everything in the end. Eastern, shamanic, and psychological traditions, though, not having the benefit of the appearance of angels with lists of commandments to follow and mighty miracle workers with enigmatic parables for us to decipher, took matters into their own hands and did everything at their disposal to wrest the secrets of the universe from the clutches of the unknown. They breathed, chanted, danced, and took every drug they could find to alter their consciousness from the human baseline norm, and made whatever sense they could out of what they experienced personally.
It’s this sort of thing that my Jungian adventure, just a few years after my Scottsdale meth benders with Satan, gave me some insight into. I wrote in my Wilson Saga about the violation of the laws of probability, encountering an impossible amount of difficulty in trying to accomplish a relatively simple task: enter Israel and take a language course. The result proffered innumerable lessons from the divine if analyzed allegorically as if my experience were a story written for me by the Almighty, but also quite obviously provided a lesson in my own psychology: that of a dude who has historically had problems finishing things in general and getting to where he is going. All in all, it was a vindication of the famous line from Anais Nin: “we don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are.” But even more than just a matter of personal perception and perspective, it seemed that the universe itself was reflecting this pattern to the degree that the law of probability went completely out the window. And that, friends, is something that can only happen if things are predetermined by omniscient intelligence.
I saw things that could no longer be explained simply in terms of horned demons and winged angels sitting on everyone’s right and left shoulders. I seemed to shift back and forth between one kind of universe and another. For some, they never get stuck in traffic, and the traffic lights are mostly green on the way home from work, if not entirely so, day after day, week after week. Others hit every red light and traffic jam imaginable. Every time. Every day. I’ve been in both of those worlds.
Yet the presence of personal spirits is something I have seen for a long time now. So with this sort of contradictory explanation of the nature of spiritual reality in front of me, I can’t help but notice that the pilot wave theory gives a good analogy of how these two ways of looking at things can coexist. That is, human thought and consciousness, as well as the consciousnesses of local, personal spiritual presences, do indeed affect reality, but that the activity of individual consciousness is mirrored by broad trends and patterns that occur which are beyond the capacity of any consciousness or group of consciousnesses to organize.
For example, the political right has long chanted the mantra that “Hollywood is out to destroy the human male.” We have seen men and women all over California wear pink in a kind of trend frenzy for weeks now, and wouldn’t you know it, the Barbie Movie has crushed the box office and the pulpits of the critics alike, while every pastor from Birmingham, Alabama to Boisie, Idaho can’t stop crying about it. However, the movie itself is the product of hundreds of people, and while there may have been only one screenwriter, the director has chosen which scenes make it into the movie, modified the script, and then everything has had to pass by corporate before hitting theaters.
Likewise, I have, am, do, and will continue to preach that Zack Snyder’s Justice League movies mimic to a very high degree innumerable points of biblical theology, though no church or religious group endorsed the movies, and none of the prominent filmmakers involved were ideologically committed to the Bible. And then, wouldn’t you know it, just to make the contrast between these two movies crystal clear, the Barbie Movie just wouldn’t have been complete without the snub of the Justice League trilogy with the line mentioned at the opening of this post.
Shortly after arriving in Los Angeles I ran into a Christian dude, Ryland, who gave a poignant term to describe this kind of pattern: broadforce. The context of the conversation was the guilt or the innocence of those participating in these trends that seem to be operating against God. To be guilty, the individuals involved have to know what’s going on. The guy quipped at one point in the conversation that his decades of experience in media had him convinced that 25% of Hollywood had indeed signed contracts with Mephistopheles, but the vast majority are simply being swept up by whatever broadforce has them without really knowing what is going on. In other words, they are particles that are being driven to where they are going by this or that pilot wave, and there is a sense in which the particles determine the wave, but there is also a sense that the wave determines the particles.
The last point I want to make with this post gives a kind of practical application of all of this thinking about individual conscious activity (particles) and its relationship to organized trends (broadforces or pilot waves). At this point it’s looking like any Bailey Blog Post just wouldn’t be complete without a reference to the apocalypse. In my last post it was mentioned that there is a distinction in the New Testament and also in the literature of the Talmud between the kingdom of the Messiah that occurs at the end of human history and a perfect world that comes after human history.
Why is it necessary for such a thing to take place? There are basically three things that biblical theology tells us about the way things will end up. First, we each have an end. We go to heaven, or gan Eden, or Abraham’s bosom, or paradise when we die. Then there is the Messianic Kingdom at the end of history. And then there is עולם הבא (olam haba), the coming world, or the new heaven and the new earth, that comes after human history. Why the distinction between the last two?
There are a number of reason for this. A few can be found expounded in the theological literature. There is one that I haven’t seen out there that I would like to put down on paper.
Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, 3 and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while.
Revelation 20:1-3
I do not know if this verse from the New Testament is paralleled or contradicted in the Jewish literature. I’ve been in LA for two months and still haven’t been able to settle in to a synagogue. It’s going to take a hell of a synagogue to be a comfortable place to study this kind of thing. Frankly, Israel would have been a great place to do so. All of the resources are there. But before I drift into a whiny, tearful rant, I’ll go ahead and say what I think the significance of this verse is.
Why would Satan be bound up for the duration of the Messiah’s kingdom, and why would he be let out at the end of it for a little while, only to be defeated again? Well, I think during the Messianic kingdom the evil particles will be taken out of the universe, and we will see what the evil broadforces do without them, and those evil pilot waves that no longer have any evil particles to accompany them and define them will be shaped into good ones over the course of that thousand years. And then the evil particles will be reintroduced, so that at the end of the entire thousand year long exercise, the relationship of individual consciousness to the broad trends that it creates and is created by will be clearly catalogued and defined. In short, everyone will see what Carl Jung and I have seen, but don’t really completely understand, and certainly can’t adequately explain. Everyone will understand it. Everyone will have the perfect explanations for what is going on.
And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD.
Jeremiah 31:34
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
1 Corinthians 13:12
So having made all of the points I intended to make with this post, I do have one little observation to make concerning Jungian synchronicity. I’ve recently moved to Los Angeles and now live in a cooperative living complex in Venice Beach. I moved in after I lost contact with Chloe, X-23 in my writings, a very, very dear friend of mine who I have always thought of as a kind of non-biological daughter or niece. She is a very beautiful Korean-American girl who was friends with my daughter all of their lives until a short while ago.
When I moved into the co-op, I moved into a house absolutely filled with young Asian people including three very beautiful young Asian women in my particular building alone, with more in the adjacent buildings of the complex. Now in this world of nearly eight billion people, the majority of them are Asian, so this sort of thing might not seem unexpected on its own. The cities of the California coast are known to have very high concentrations of Asians among their populations. California is particularly known for having a large number of Latinos, however, but in the entire complex of over fifty people, I have only thus far run into one, single, solitary Latin American. That would be a bit odd, don’t you think? Would it strike you as a little more odd if I told you that the single Latina in the complex is a Jew from Mexico City? Do you think a Spanish-speaking Jew wannabe like me would make particular note of that? But beyond this, I also note that in this world of eight billion people there are only ten million Israelis. But in my complex I have run into two. And one of them is an exceptionally beautiful young Israeli woman named Liraz with hair of spun honey. I’ve written a few poems about a young Israeli of Dutch birth with golden hair of exactly the same shade. But what’s more, what do you think this young Israeli is doing in the USA? She is getting a bachelor’s degree in aeronautics. She is a pilot. She flew Grob G 120s in the Israeli Defense Force and Piper PA44 Seminoles and Cessna 172s afterward. I’ve been thinking about the significance of Bohm’s pilot wave theory by way of an Israeli Wonder Woman’s production company, and I live next to a young, beautiful Israeli pilot with the hair of an Electrochemical Girl. Her name, in Hebrew לירז, means “my secret.”
A long time ago, I told Vidal the Maestro a line now recorded in my book: “Jonathan Bailey is a combination of a desire to serve God and problems with women.” It would seem that the racial make-up of the young women in my co-op complex is mirroring everything that is important to me psychologically. I wrote a book about spiritual matters that was set against the backdrop of gender issues. The biggest blockbuster of the year has been a movie about gender issues. The writer in the movie made a quip about Zack Snyder’s Justice league. I’ve come to Los Angeles to write about Zack Snyder’s Justice League.
That same weekend, the other most memorable movie of the year was released, Oppenheimer, a movie about a guy who lead a team to enable humanity to accomplish a nuclear apocalypse. My thinking for the last few years has been focused on the biblical apocalypse. The movie compares Robert Oppenheimer to Prometheus, and the company I created to manage my intellectual property is called Promethean Fire LLC.
So I have to ask, what pilot wave is inspiring me? What broadforce am I inspiring? What would Carl Jung be able to tell me about that? Anything at all? These things are not easy to explain.
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