The Dreamtime Collective

At a recent gathering of scientists, mystics, and willworkers, I was describing the Library of Babel sub-project and how it contains every written truth (and falsehood). My conversational partner was quick to ask, "Does your Library have unwritten truths?"

Which is a good question, of course. Knowledge isn't always written down. Some knowledge is spoken, sung, danced, and drawn. Even further, not all knowledge is expressible. Embodied knowledge. Visceral knowledge. Experiential knowledge. Ancestral knowledge. If one relies solely on words, one misses vast regions of the knowable.

The multivalent nature of knowledge/knowing is precisely why the Virtual Alexandria Project is hosted in the Umbra. Umbral frameworks are very permissive compared to the frameworks in more calcified places in the Tellurian. Further, ephemera can encode unexpressable truths.

Today, the most detailed "stack" within the Library committed to unwritable truths is a project called The Dreamtime Collective. This vibrant intersection of knowing draws together collective experience across time and space. Contributors to the Dreamtime Collective teach and inscribe their sundry wisdom on the unconscious palate of the universe, while students of the Collective meditate and learn and delve into what it means to become what you know.

Sounds pretty mystical and juju, right? Well, in part, it is. That's why we call it the Dreamtime Collective. The Dreamtime is term created by European anthropologists to describe the aboriginal Australian concept alcheringa. Ignore for a second that it looks like it has something to do with dreams, as that is mostly a result of a mistranslation. The core of the idea is this: The way that the world is is a result of the way the world knows itself, and that the self knowledge of the world exists in a timeless time. The way the world happens to be particularly in any given now-moment is due to the ventures of mythic heroes forging their way across a formless land during the Dreamtime. Their paths left/are leaving/will leave songlines that resonate resonant in the Dreamtime, and by following these paths we in this world can know alongside our ancestors and descendants in time beyond. Maybe that makes sense...

#howthefuckdoyouprogramthat?

It turns out it isn't that hard. All sorts of programmable things exist outside of time. Equations, for instance, can be thought of as simultaneous accomplishments. More to the point, 3D-modeled maps can be rendered out of time. That's how the shamans did it. The songlines form a map that is inscribed along  the intersection of the timed and the timeless. So you just gotta hack a few dozen satellites, filter all space, crossref a few dusty turtle shells and the strange tattoos of chosen one children, and you have a map. Boom. A secret map that you can use to trace paths in the world in order to fray a linear continuity of time and touch eternal. So one last step: upload that clever widget into the broader Library database and know alongside forever. Easy.

How 'bout massive system crash instead.

Any guesses as to why? Why would a map that 3D models timeless time be a problem for a VA database?

Took me a while to debug it. So I'll let you ponder.

The Library is Virtual Adept design, and if you've been on the internet since like '93, you've probably heard of the Correspondence Point. We teach that spatial relations are data relations, and that the only thing that even approaches a thing like space in the actual universe is a single point where all things simultaneously exist. What most folks think of as space is really a virtual array, one possible experience of a arrayed bits.

So when you take a 3D modeling program that maps timeless time and try to boot that shit on a server that is based on a spaceless metaframe... you don't get the tenth sphere, lemme just say that. (Unless the tenth sphere is Titanic Collapse due to Being a Fucking Idiot. Which is not actually completely impossible, given a conversation I recently had with a Hollow One postmodernist. But I digress). You can't rely on a 3D render to collapse time and then collapse the 3D render within time. We call that, folks, a paradox.

So... stuck. No Dreamtime map for TOPHAT. No way to touch the infinite unconscious mind that exists beyond linear expressions of time.

And that would be the end of the story. But we keep this guy around the Library who digs in dank places and stinks. He reads the books other people find revolting. We think he's a bit mad. But, he wanders up muttering after the system crashed. "What if," the Delver of Dark Secrets asks, "the thing collapsing isn't the problem? What if, instead, the problem is the thing collapsing?"

I do confess I have a secret love of koans.

It's a poser, but this is what the nut really meant: The fact that the model collapses isn't that's the problem. The fact that it's a model collapsing is the problem. I have to build something else then let it collapse.

What can be built that can express space but also be mathemetized but also not have the entirety of its essence undone via collapse? Sometimes in life, the teacher accidentally gives you the answer by the way the question is worded.

What can be built? Buildings. Or more precisely, architecture. Architecture has collapse as a core component of it's timeline. Better still, architecture has long resonated with human knowing and is a place of abiding, which is sort of a bonus, since abiding is a corner stone of spiritual realities (which is where we are trying to get to eventually anyway, remember?). Best of all, architecture is basically geometry with emotions, and we have long known that tessellated geometry can recursively fold into the Correspondence Point.

Translation: If one can design recursive architectural representations of the Dreamtime songlines, that same hypothetical person can load that program on a server that doesn't exist in space and know in ways that are neither enspaced or entimed.

So that's what we did.

In practice, it means that we help people share knowledge beyond time and space. That's what the shamanistic vision of knowledge always was. To draw on past lives. To speak to the heart of the earth. To look at the world from its beginning or its end, or beyond beginning and end.

What does that actually do? Yes, Neo, we can teach you kung fu very quickly. Wherever you are, irrespective of your physical training. You can draw on the collective knowledge of future and past selves and allies. The Dreamtime Collaborative is the most potent and expeditious mechanism for disseminating knowledge. We can use it to blend past lives together, help unschooled dreamers learn from their dreams, create databases of lived experiences, tap into the Akashic Record, and yes, download skills, knowledge, and abilities straight into your being.

And that's how you make library with unwritable truths.