Just a short note to Caroline and me that during the late day on the last walk around the block, we stepped out and heard the first cicadas of the year. Half a block from there, we heard crickets for the first time in half a year. While the mercury rising over 100 degrees is a great signifier that summer has arrived in the desert, it is the sound of these insects that signals that the year’s hottest days are on their way. Soon, we’ll see billowing clouds on the horizon, meaning the monsoons are around the corner. There’s a particular kind of romantic notion as the blistering heat of the day and metallic orchestra of insects blend with the approaching winds and the distant roar of rolling thunder that is usually carrying the scent of wet earth and creosote our way. This is not the calm of winter, the golden palette of fall, or the vibrant greenery of spring, nor is it the calm recreational days of summer joining friends at the pool or BBQ. The monsoon is the violence of dust storms; it is the chance for deadly flash floods to sweep the inattentive away, electricity outages can arrive at the most inopportune times, and howling winds that fell trees and send palm fronds jettisoning across streets. Our summer deluges are aggressive reminders that we live in an inhospitable environment where those who are hardy enough will step out into the maelstrom to celebrate the return of the ferocity called monsoon.

The excitement returns with those clicking tymbals of the buzzing cicadas, putting smiles on our faces. Soon, the first raindrops of the summer storms will arrive, and we’ll be standing outside to meet them with our faces. With the temperature up near 110, the humidity will rise quickly to nearly 100%, and if we are lucky, the wind whipping through the falling water will dramatically cool the air until the rain passes and steam starts to rise off the searing hot streets. Those who claim to hate Arizona’s brutal summers have never learned what makes them so special. Then in just about 90 days, summer will be over once again, and those who survived it can count themselves among the fortunate that they were still alive for yet another opportunity to experience the extraordinary.

In the last 72 hours, the tensions of hundreds of years of social inequality and racial injustice finally boiled over, pulling people in from across the country to demonstrate. They are called thugs and rioters by our government and media, while people demonstrating in Libya, Hong Kong, Myanmar, Russia, Egypt, and Tunisia have been referred to as freedom fighters protesting oppressive regimes. Angry Americans reeling from a sudden rise in unemployment (41 million people were laid off or fired over the last eight weeks), along with the continuing blatant murders of black people by white officers, was the spark. Years of harassment, oppression, lack of opportunity, imprisonment, and radical marginalization have created this situation in Minneapolis, New York City, Louisville, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Seattle, Detroit, Des Moines, Phoenix, Oakland, Portland, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Dallas cars are burning, windows are being smashed, and the National Guard is starting to respond.

I’m watching between 10 and 12 live streams from across the country at any given moment, and things are continuing to devolve as afternoon gives way to evening. We have a president who is antagonizing his own citizens with tweets claiming, “The shooting will start when the looting starts,” and talking of unleashing the dogs on protestors, which is a direct reference to the dogs being unleashed on black Americans back during the civil rights movement. This is not a localized issue, but the news media, by and large, are showing their local areas only without mentioning that this appears to happen simultaneously in many other cities across the country. Maybe they fear that the greater the coverage the more people will join the mayhem so they can be part of a movement, but this also diminishes how the profound breadth of the current events.

Throughout history, pandemics leave great change in their wake and this one appears to be no different. Over the past years, I’ve often written about our shortcomings and how this will lead us to a moment where we’ll have to rethink how we do things. Instead of the selfish and fortunate few trying to change things for the better, it has been left to the mob, and when change happens at the hands of the mob, chaos is the most likely transition to some kind of new ordering of things. For those in control, they can probably be happy with this situation as there is no national leadership channeling the anger into something productive, they are just sitting back and hoping the crowd will run out of fuel. If this leads to martial law, the problems with self-isolation that were brewing will certainly start to boil over as a certain contingency of Americans will seethe in new hatred for those demonstrators who are threatening the very freedom that some believe is tenuous. Maybe we should ask ourselves if we are stoking the fires of civil unrest that start to push some into contemplating civil war.

I’m here, but I’ve been busy working in the past. Getting caught up with long-neglected projects is everyone’s dream for a staycation, right? Living in an apartment, there’s little to nothing we need or want to do, but our hobbies need constant care. So what exactly is it that I’m doing? I’m back in April 2013, dealing with five days out of nearly 30 that we spent in Europe. Somehow, those five days never made it into the blog. I was going through stuff and saw that I left notes that these were works in progress. Three of them are now done, starting with April 21st when we were in Eisenach and Weimar, Germany. The photo above is Caroline standing in the room where Martin Luther translated the bible into German back in 1521. From the Wartburg and Bach House, we headed up the road to Weimar, home to Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche for the end of his life, and Gropius, who gave us the Bauhaus.

Over to Dresden on April 22nd for a visit to the Frauenkirche, the Zwinger, and a couple of other stops for this brief moment in town. From this rebuilt city, we went on to Bautzen on our drive east. This wasn’t an intended stop, but we had left on a spontaneous getaway the day before with no other intention than to drive northeast. We stopped in Bautzen because the view from the road dragged us in for a brief stop there and then onward to Görlitz. This blog entry took me nearly 10 hours to write and finish prepping photos. I can tell you that writing from memories that are seven years old is no easy feat. Oh yeah, we spent a good part of the afternoon this day sitting next to a river in Poland with Germany on the other side while Caroline did some work for her company back in America.

Then, on the next day, April 23rd, we were in Prague, Czech Republic, running through Europe’s 13th biggest city. I can tell you that at least three days are needed to do justice to this historical location. Also, at this point, I’m already starting to burn out on finishing these blog posts with over 100 photos between them, not counting that I still have another 100 photos for the last two days, plus the required text. I’d like a break. But that last break seven years ago is why these were never finished and so I’ll continue after this intermission of just saying blah blah. One more thing: when I started writing these posts, I wondered what I might have to say as there were no notes to work from, but it turned out that between Caroline and me, there were a ton of memories to draw from. So many memories, as a matter of fact, that the three finished posts feature 8,591 words about the 30 Years War, Martin Luther, Bach, the Habsburgs, Wes Anderson, Black Ass Beer, and Chimney Cake.

Now it’s time to turn my attention back to writing about Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and although I thought I’d post this earlier, I was making good enough time writing that I waited until I was finished so I could include the link to the complete post. Just click this link above or any of the others, and you’ll magically travel back in time with us to some memories of John and Caroline.

I only have Strasbourg, France, left to write about, and everything I can ever say about this month-long trip to Europe will have been said. I’m guessing that most people who read this post will be clicking on it well after I finish the last day, which will be within 24 hours if I can drag more memories out of my weary brain.

This afternoon, I had the opportunity to meet and speak with an extraordinary young scientist who may be the emerging new voice for Protophysics. As I attempt to share a condensed version of how our discussion progressed and some of the topics we covered, there may be gaps where the depths of our talk swung beyond my comprehension. The scientist I’m referring to is Dr. Justin D. Aslinger.

It was a random moment at our local Starbucks where I bumped into Dr. Aslinger and noticed he was reading “Protophysics of Time: Constructive Foundation of History of Time Measurement” by Peter Janich. As I have an intense interest in the subject of time, I struck up a conversation. The doctor tried explaining the dilemma of protophysics, which attempts to ascribe an absolute background geometry to space-time without knowing the correct formula of geometry for measuring or describing space-time accurately, part of the reason why protophysics never gained traction with the scientific community.

He went on to describe his efforts in the field of explaining space-time to help guide humanity through the hurdles we face as we approach the year 2012. Two-thousand twelve is the window we will walk through to become aware of our inherent perdurantistic qualities, which means our currently disconnected temporal parts will awaken to the fourth-dimensional reality and thus will acknowledge our existence in a new measure of knowledge of time as a physical dimension similar to the microscopic world we have come to know through the sciences only in the last couple of hundred years. Currently, we are stuck in what the Mayans could have regarded as the Endurantistic age, only believing in the third dimension and disregarding any potential reality that might exist outside of our immediate observation. Although many people would say they believe in god and that god may have an impact upon their lives, they do not connect science, the physical world, and the spiritual realm into a continuum of reality and existence we could be consciously aligned with, but this is precisely where 2012 is taking us.

Dr. Aslinger is also trying to create a paradigm-shifting software tool to help society with this transition called Time Fire. T.I.M.E. F.I.R.E. is an acronym for Temporal Immersive Multidimensional Enlightenment For Intraspecific Rebirth Emergence – a mouthful for sure. What this means is that we, as the human population, must escape the boundaries of time and space limitations of our current set of senses to become cognizant of the multidimensional world in which we will peer across time through space and thus be reborn within our species as a newly enlightened sentient human with access to the fourth-dimensional world we actually exist in.

One of the first steps on this path will be the introduction to his new theory of time. In Dr. Aslinger’s conception, time is a particle that is dividing like cells in a human body. This division is an exponential process where one particle gives rise to 4 new particles, then the five collectively produce 20, becoming 25, followed by 125, 625, 3,125, 15,625, 78,125, 390,625, 1,953,125, 9,765,625, and so on until after 23 iterations we are now over three quadrillion particles of time and so on, again and again, moving forward with time – a hyper exponential model should be apparent to anyone at this point through this kind of mitosis theory of time. According to this model, time is divided in every instant, although the Dr. admits he does not know what that instant is or how yet it could be measured.

He also tried to explain space-time in relationship to infinity, saying that over the course of the life of the universe (approximately 14 billion years) that, time is all matter, including the more mysterious and as of yet unexplained dark matter. Dark Matter (which comprises 95% of the universe) is responsible for the gravitational effect on visible matter because, in reality, time is a physical phenomenon similar to an atom, and as we learn more of Aslinger’s theory of time, we will come to understand that time is the very building block of all matter, both visible and unseen in the universe. Anyway, what happens is that as time particles have been dividing over the previous 14 billion years, they have stretched the universe to what we understand as infinity. If we could build a spacecraft that could take us to the edge of the universe at the precipice of infinity, in that instant, we would recognize the edge of space-time, but the by then immensely exponential division that would occur in the next instant would again push the border of space-time to yet another immeasurable expansion of the universe.

So what are we doing here in time? Time is the substrate used by the brain much like a train traveling down a rail, allowing the brain to act as a temporal imaginative mapping edifice translating dimensional morphogenetic transitions (changing or interpreting an ever-changing moving forward reality). Time is the universe the brain rides upon, the brain is an interpreter of time, all things are time, made of time, in time, and everything, and all things are manifestations of time as all things exist within time, made of the very fabric of time. We are surfing or swimming within the particle soup of time. As time moves forward, we, too, are being thrust forward with every instant that comes into existence from times march forward.

Interestingly, I start to surmise that if time is moving forward and it is a physical presence, then due to the ever-increasing abundance of time from its exponential division, isn’t it also possible that with all of the previous time particles that are now abundant throughout the universe that we should be able to travel upon that rail of time, forward and backward? After all, isn’t the Hubble telescope photographing light that has traveled across time, showing us that for us at this moment, the past is right before our eyes? Sorry about my naivety regarding relativity and probably a basic law or two of physics, but I am but a layperson trying to tread water in Dr. Aslinger’s world.

In a previous paragraph, I referenced people’s belief in God and the spiritual realm. This area was also of particular interest to me, and I asked Dr. Aslinger to expound his thoughts in this regard, to which he obliged. He believes we have a multi-dimensional soul, a soul that extends beyond the physical boundaries of our bodies, and that this idea of the soul is, as of yet, an undiscovered energy, fractal energy. This new energy is a mechanism of communication and existence for entities beyond our perception who live in that substance of time in a spectrum of light and energy invisible to us humans due to our blindness to the fourth dimension. Our souls are actually energy fields that radiate beyond ourselves (some see this as auras) and, through the grid of time, influence and accept influence from other waves of fractal (soul) energy. Our karma plays a pivotal role in how the shape, form, and frequency of our energy are manifested. This manifestation is best described within chaos theory and strange attractors, where chaotic motion gives rise to these strange attractors that vary in detail and complexity. So, as our soul and karma are forming during our lifetimes, our actions help shape the soul, detailing how complex and intricate our energy or soul should appear as it matures. Conversely, this shape also acts as a strange repelled, keeping those of bad karma or soul away from our personal space. This doesn’t always hold true, though, as chaos and fractal energies are pulsing, flowing, influencing, and changing with the expansion of time.

Other souls without organic beings are ethereal bodies whose shape arises from taking a dimensional form built upon and encased within time (as we are) organized by a coalescing of fractal energies (just as our bodies utilize plant and animal matter in the generation of energy that drives our nervous systems and generates heat within our organic shell). From this plane of existence, which some scientists see as the multiverse or parallel universes, higher energy (older) souls travel the surface of multidimensional reality and, on occasion, collide with our plane of thought. The multiverse and its individual iterations are possibly other planes or frequencies of higher-order time. Higher-order time may be an ascent that the soul climbs over time on its way to true enlightenment or nirvana, culminating in Godhead. This might explain divine inspiration, communing with the dead, artistic and scientific inspiration that appears to arise out of the blue as this spiritual energy collides with our world and our souls.

How does one influence the shape of their soul to make the transition to 2012? We must work to improve our soul health. Love, nature, and experiential growth come together to show us beauty, which inspires confidence for the growth of maturity. We must embrace these cornerstones and recognize how we impact the natural order of things via this shared quantumspace (the simultaneous space occupied by the energy of all things occurring in the same moment of time). When we improve our soul shape and good karma directs us towards love and beauty, we are also improving life in the universe, the universe that we will move into as we give up our organic form. In 2012 we may begin to see into this world, into this quantumspace and then we will begin to understand how our negativity, war, feuding, and fear retards our souls’ growth and its impact upon the ethereal bodies who are trying to elevate our collective knowledge so that upon our new birth into what some will call heaven we will enter a universe of life that is being painted by the very experiences we share through our fortuitous moments as an organic being collecting images being created by imagination and our constant transfiguration of reality, art, and nature.

Through fear and an inability to embrace new experiences, we drain the energy of soul growth needed to transcend our current physical/organic being. Living in repetition, watching television reruns, listening to the same 1000 songs we’ve listened to since childhood, when the world has a collection of over 3 million songs, going to the same place for vacation year after year, watching one more iteration of men throwing a ball down a field instead of playing the game themselves, limiting our diet to the foods we already know, and not waiting to learn about, foster, nurture, and embrace love – our soul stagnates. We must love ourselves, life, and others. We must love animals and plants, water and sky, mountains and deserts, our imagination, and our human potential. We must throw off the voices that instill fear, consumption for the sake of finding identity, and your fear of the unknown. We ultimately enter a great unknown where time is infinite, and your new experiences may be infinite too, but it will be our soul growth and maturity of spirit that will dictate how that human energy bestowed upon us will transition to the fractal energy universe of time that is building a home in space for those of us whose souls are equipped and ready for the shock of seeing reality for what it may really be.