Nailing Jello to a Tree,
Ozmic Process,
and the Cultural Significance of
the Nasca Lines
S.Roof Jan 2001
The wizard of Oz was just a man behind the
curtain pulling strings. The man behind the curtain was just a
figment of Dorothy's dream while she was unconscious. Dorothy was
just a character in a movie. The movie was just a creation of a
film director. The film director was just a man I never knew. I
am an autopoietic process born of DNA strands replicating their
own particular version of the Universe Movie. It's all ozmic, self-similar, self-referential,
meta-level recursive process. Each step has a second-hand reality.
Each step is just a representation within a greater reality. Such
is the nature of abstractions. Science attempts to define the
ultimate realities in which our representations are embedded, but
it is like 'nailing jello to a tree', to use Deric's terminology.
See ON SEMIOTICS -
Beyond the Psi*Phi Event Horizon by Deric.
At the very heart of the modern physicist's view lies zero-point vacuum energy, virtual particles, and imaginary quantum waves - very abstract and slippery concepts which are supposed to define the most basic essential material forces of physical nature. The last thing a physicist wants to be is metaphysical, but well, there you go. This can be very disturbing if you want to 'reach out and touch someone', but perhaps it is a process which we should accept in all our finitude as something so reliably true and universal as to need no explanation. Perhaps then we can roll with the flow and use our insight into Ozmic Process as a conceptual looking glass that can illuminate any particular mystery we focus on. The mysterious lines on the mountain plateaus of Peru make just such an interesting case to look at. A popular belief is that they were somehow associated with exterrestial space beings. An extarordinary phenomenon must surely have an extrordinary origin. Maybe so, but perhaps there are more satisfying paths of thought. I will walk one such path and use some ozmic jargon along the way.
I particularly like Deric's interpretation of Goedel's Theorem - "Put simply, any self-consistent system of abstraction (e.g. mathematics, English, DNA) can never fully contain its own definition" . Another way of looking at it is 'The map is not the territory, but the map is part of the territory.' An essential feature that makes 'nailing jello' so difficult is time itself. Being embedded within a higher dimensional manifold means that we can only experience a map or piece of the territory in a temporal context. Time binding is an expression for how we tie these pieces together into a semiotic and coherent whole. This is a moving target, however, and part of the very same recursive process it is embedded in. I believe nature herself is 'time binding'. This is what we mean when Deric and I say "emergent order accretes to attractors by synchrony". Let me give an example.
The nascent universe enfolds its origin in a singularity beyond space and time - a total hyperbolic hole in the whole. A nano second after no seconds there is a really big bang and the whole shebang expanded out into a space-time chaos which coalesced a nano later into light(energy) and darkness(matter). Now something mysterious happened at this point. In order for gravitational attraction to manifest, there has to be some asymmetry. A perfectly uniform universe of matter and light would have mass attracting mass equally in all directions with no net effect, hence no gravity or light force either. No force - no action - no change - no time. This stymied physicists. Somehow a perturbation enabled variations of distribution and the whole epic was under way. Attractors were born.
Order emerged as temporal process. What do I mean by temporal process? Once a center of mass attraction (gravity well) has emerged, other masses are attracted and move toward it. Their movement causes an assymetrical shift in their locale producing another attraction etc. etc. Recursive process has been born. The speed limit of light however establishes a 'law of the clock' which such processes must obey, creating event horizons. Mass in motion must drag a time frame (event horizon) with it. This frame dragging distortion causes the motion vectors to be slightly askew and the original assymetry in space propagates multifurcatively throughout the all. I believe that's what time really is - the multifurcative limit of a symmetry breaking crack (negation) in the cosmic egg. The end result is that angular momentum emerges as mass motion vectors close in on mass attractors, just missing direct connect. Orbital trajectories begin sweeping out periodic localities of space-time. Temporal order has emerged. The 'law of the clock' has manifest as clock cycles. The multifurcative skew, however, does not dimensionally tile space-time in a periodic or even quasi-periodic fashion at all scales so orbits must interact as further multifurcative recursions on a theme. Some interactions coalesce as acretions to a larger attractor in which they are embedded. Others splay out into chaos. Synchrony is the temporal defintion of locale. The above example is actually just a macroscale metaphor for the abstract universal processes at work from mathematical equations to virtual particles to galaxies.
By the way, from a semiotic viewpoint it is appropriate to think of synchrony or simultaneity as a logical 'AND'. Something happens if and only if A AND B happen together. A logical 'AND' gate in a computer chip expresses this as a sort of 'synchrony' detector. It all happens within a certain locale and temporal orbit period or 'no cigar'. Conversely there is the Exclusion Principle modeled by the logical 'EXCLUSIVE OR' gate. In this case, one can have A or one can have B, but not both together. The Pauli Exclusion Principle of physics prevents two particles existing in the same space-time-phase-state. I believe along with the negation function that is all there is required to have fully functional Universal Turing model of Universe. It occurs to me also that synchrony must have something essential to do with the strong nuclear force, while the Pauli Exclusion Principle must tie in with electro-magnetic force. Gravity and expansion of space must relate to the negation principle. Negation in fact must be the original fracture in the symmetry of being, allowing conciousness to awaken as the interface bewteen matter and energy.
Anyway, excuse my lapse of thread here. The point above was to give a view into how nature herself is time-binding. Now I want to get back to the semiotics of time binding Ozmic process as applied to the Nasca Indians and their fabulous lines and drawings. These immense features on the high dessert plateaus of Peru are amazing for their sheer size, number, and precision. It has been recently discovered that places where many of the lines converge to a radial center, almost invariably have archaeological artifacts like pottery etc surrounding dry springs where water must have once emerged from below. It is speculated that the lines are maps the people used to navigate to the local water holes.
Here is my time-binding scenario.
People who have moved from the jungle to life at high altitude must adapt to walking long distances as efficiently as possible. The plains at Nasca are vast flat terrains with little or no vegetation or other distinguishing landmarks. Edvidence exists that the Nasca Indians endured a climate change to drought that probably ended in their demise but most assuredly influenced their behavior for hundreds of years. In times of drought, traveling long distances across flat land to get water is best done in a straight line, single file, and carrying a light load. Even animals have evolved to travel in lines.
Herd animals during migration have evolved entrainment behaviour. One leads and the others follow. It's easier to just watch the rear of the one in front of you and let him do the navigating. Also a path once worn tends to get used more because it is easier to travel. This behaviour leads to single file streams of animals who merge into larger streams that string out into a long migration to some other place at which point they then break rank from and disperse out into independent streams which finally end up in group milling again. The whole show from the air looks like the memetic hourglass model or a tree with the roots converging on a linear trunk and branching outward at the top end (see MUMU). This is the compressive valving universe equation at work( see the H.O.G. Papers). Rivers do it, trees do it, animals do it, and people do it. It is time binding entrainment. Paths are time binding because their use makes them straighter, deeper, and cleaner so they are more likely to be used in the future. Migration behaviour becomes instinct and self-organizing entrainment as offspring learn to follow paths their ancestors did. This time binding is metalevel recursive and shapes future evolution.
The Nascas had a more enlightened form of time binding - cultural ritual and keen observation. It is easy to cross great flat distances accurately if one can find two landmarks to sight along. By walking with the two landmarks always lined up, one can maintain a very straight line. It has been discovered that many of the waterhole convergence places also have mounds shaped like distant mountains in the distance. Was this a scale model and sighting device? Scaling self similarity? Convergence of a meme?
The lines are formed by the apparent clearing of pebbles along the path and placing them along the edges. Were there rituals for doing so or a natural tendency for people walking single file along paths? Perhaps they were aware that the mountains were the source of the water springs via underground seepage. To this day, Peruvian indians have rituals where they lay their hands on the shoulder of the person ahead of them and walk single file. Time binding?
The drawings are another part of this ozmic process. Clans typically associate or name themselves after plants or animals important to them as food for survival or some other factor. The hummingbird clan for example might have evolved from people who were honey and fruit eaters. They probably evolved stylized images to pass on their identity across time to their descendants.
Most ancient peoples were deeply obsessed with time keeping. The regular cycles of sun, moon, stars and seasons had great import for planning hunts, migrations, avoiding seasonal floods, etc. Ritual chanting, dancing, and pictograms were methods they bound time into useful codecs of behaviour. The spiral is a universal symbol of temporal process. A circle denotes completion and fullness as in the cycles of the moon, but only a spiral adequately conveys in a two dimensional image the way things cycle and return almost to the way they were but still different, as in an open ended ongoing process that goes on forever. Many of the Nasca drawings have very large spirals. Even the other drawings appear to be a continuous line meant to be walked along the outside leading inward and then following itself back out again as in a distorted spiral, never crossing itself. A long line of people marching single file would tend to produce such complex paths. Ritual clan territorial markings? or cerimonies for renewing time binding intent? or prayers to the gods?
No matter how one looks at it, the Nasca lines demonstrate abstract representation and recursive time binding - Ozmic Process. The scale is immense because the territory is immense. Recursive spiral walking would tend to enlarge figures over time also as would population growth. They are meant to be viewed from high places like mountain peaks. To me, the whole process seems natural and in keeping with ozmic process throughout nature.
A further speculation would be why the people ended up in such an extreme territory to begin with. I believe it was the extreme of enviroment that led to the extreme scale and complexity of design, but what led them there to begin with?