From Up On Frederick's Stone

The following is a retranslation of some famous biblical passages into the language of popular subtext.

1 Corinthians 13

Original — by St. Paul
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love,
I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have faith that moves mountains, but have not love,
I am nothing.
If I give away all I have and give up my body
to be burned, but do not have love,
I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud or rude.
It does not insist on its own way;
it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.
But as for prophecies, they will pass away;
as for tongues, they will cease;
as for knowledge, it will pass away. 
For we know in part and we prophesy in part,
but when the perfect comes,
the partial will disappear.
When I was a child,
I spoke like a child, I thought like a child,
I reasoned like a child. When I became a man,
I gave up childish ways. For now
we see in a mirror dimly;
but then we shall see face-to-face. Now I know in part;
then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
So now abide these three: faith, hope and love;
but the greatest of these is love.


Subtextified — by Me

Don’t say anything unusual or incoherent, because talking normally
is how people decide to pay attention to you.
Don’t think so much, don’t think for yourself, don’t believe anything odd,
don’t stand up and be bold—because if you have a strong personality,
You are not worth loving.
Even if you do absolutely everything for God, resenting everything you own and your body,
but you don’t do it sweetly enough to please everyone,
God and everyone watching will resent you.
Love hides emotions, love is saccharine.
It has no desires, it has no individuality,
it speaks lowly of itself and lives to be courteous,
hidden in fear and shame.
Love never speaks up, it turns a blind eye, it never talks back to those above it.
Love judges how you feel about things you don’t like.
Love requires you be perfect: so never let go of anything.
If you end your shame, no one will love you.
But as for science, it doesn’t matter;
open hearts fall flat;
knowledge is selfish.
For we will not tolerate being stretched uncomfortably—
for we are too meager to try to be anything;
when we’re finally dead, we will ascend to our fantasies,
our Disneyland. When I was a child,
I was free and brave and creative,
I saw everything with authenticity. When I became an adult,
I gave up hope and calcified into a shadow.
Don’t make me reflect on myself!
The meaning of life is to be used.
I’ll find true love by detaching from everything real, living my life waiting to die.
So now I bind myself to these three: idealism, apathy and shame;
but the greatest of these is shame.



I will say that I love most of this passage—for its flowing language, its poetry, the truths it expresses. I do not love what is tacitly inferred according to crude principles. I might even disagree with Paul in some points. I definitely don’t like how easily it lends itself to soppy Hallmark cards. If I am right in intramurally identifying un-Christlike Christian interpretations, then that means that the passage means something else. Who am I to say what Paul actually meant? Isn’t that the whole point during our life, to discover, not to know fully; to love, not to own? I must admit that this passage is so resonant with me that it was hard to slander poor interpretations with an embarrassing rendering. At some points, my heart was filled with bright feelings, and I wished not to say anything negative. But there have been far too many brainwarped Christians, and I want to share what I have learned, so that the passage may sparkle brightly for itself. Whether the sparkling comes from gems or dog piss is yours to decide.


October 20, 2020
Arroyo Grande

So, first, a passing note. I think that the title “Physics and Consciousness” is so encompassing that I could literally write about anything and the title would remain appropriate. So my title is not very helpful. Oh bother. Nevertheless, I think that it’s a good theme to spin ideas off of.

Secondly, a summary of what today’s post will be about. I think I’m going to write about how God does (and does not) appear, how we would go about beginning to verify the reality or unreality of the objects of faith. I defuse the fate/free-will debate, and there is also a nice tangent about how predatory animals attack their prey. To begin, I recommend a read of the following article: click this!

This morning I read a brilliantly simple exposition of the main narrative of Roger Penrose’s case for consciousness being a phenomenon of quantum mechanics. See this link. Between consciousness and physics is by no means a clearcut discipline, and its implications on human meaning and human spirituality are enormous. For in the fuzzy domain of quantum physics, conventional causality is transcended, or at least scientists utterly fail to offer an account of quantum mechanics by means of conventional causality. In this deep realm abounding with paradoxes and mysteries, spirituality becomes normative to scientific understanding. The real world, at a certain level, is not itself predictable or discernable. A naked understanding cannot on the one hand tout empirical studies of quantum mechanics and then seriously scoff at the wild (or schizoid) world of religious and spiritual people. We have reached a point where scientific secularity and spirituality can publicly embrace. They aren’t that different after all.

Hello dear fans, companions, readers—I would like to tell you that some new things are happening on fromuponfrederickstone.com.

Entropy is not the same thing as chaos. Entropy is a measure of system equilibrium. Chaos is a subjective experience of when something acts against or without regard to a normal set of conditions. Chaos is the decay of reality from expectations of an ideal.

From what I recall, the storyline of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone was really rather obtuse. In fact, I barely remembered it when I looked up the SparkNotes for it a few months ago. It was boring and insignificant. Even in conversation today, years after reading it hastily for high school’s weekly English assignments (which I still dream about to this day, just last week actually), the plot still strikes me as irrelevant, Hellenic spuming (spit-fuming), meaningless aged-garb that perhaps captivated Greek audiences then for reasons I do not discern. I mentioned it in a discussion with my friend Wyatt over phone today. He wholeheartedly agreed that Antigone exists as a memory drably arrayed upon the chronology of high school and as nothing more than that.

Buddhist philosophy branched off from Hindu philosophy about 400 years before Christ and continued to develop for centuries thereafter. It begins on the doctrine that the self is an illusion produced by our will to survive, and as such is the source of suffering. The self is an individuated unit which pervades our consciousness and produces all sorts of striving. All greed, malevolence, folly, etc. are produced through this selfhood we believe we have, but in reality, we are not a self. For there are two major problems: (1) we can only know things through our consciousness, and (2) everything is impermanent.

There is a funny problem in spirituality which is very hard to unravel. It goes like this. The self is greedy and wants to control things. We cannot be happy or help others when we let ourselves be in control. What are we to do with this? Five approaches appear to me.

(This is a continuation of the previous piece, “Holy Saturday 2020 Thoughts”)

     Last Saturday, on the Holy Saturday of the Western Church, I undermined common notions of Christian absolutes. I pointed out the fissure that exists in the religious psyche, namely that a reductive mindset is inherent with bad character, the main consequence of this being that the common understanding of objective reality is problematic. I started out with describing what the poet does, and I ended with questions of the blackness Jesus entered upon his death. Today, on Eastern Orthodox Easter, I will return to the notion of the poet’s task in conclusion.

     As a poet, I understand that the goal of writing is to tinker with viewpoints, to present things in a particular way. As knowing subjects, we all experience reality more or less differently, and the poet utilizes this truth to create new avenues of experience. And this doesn’t have to be a threatening, dangerous, or evil thing. After all, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, i.e., there’s more than one way to solve a problem. The fact that you can solve a problem does not hinge upon there being only one way to solve it. The only problems that have one unique solution are in pure mathematics—and even those have proofs that can be said in different ways. You might point out that if a problem can be solved, then in a more abstract sense there is only one way, of sorts; this is a rather keen insight and is really better suited with more delicate language, like, “There is only one set of ways that a problem can be solved.” I would go so far to say as this is where Christianity has really missed the boat. Rather, it’s not so much that the Christians have missed the boat, it’s that there is a ferry that takes people on the hour, every hour, and the Christians are standing by the lines of travellers waiting to board, preaching to them, “All of you need to use my ticket to get on. Our Lord has indeed spoken, ‘All must have a ticket to board the ship. Behold, I leave ye, my disciples, the ticket to heaven: I am the ticket of life.’ Repent, and use this ticket!” And the Christians are wagging their tickets at the passengers, even though most of them already have one in their pocket.