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fridgepunk
In woo circles the soul is generally reimagined as being made of a substance called "EMF" ElectroMagnetic Fields. The problem, one among many at any rate, is that when you get right down to it EMF is just light according to science - we've no hope of gold, so we've put our souls at the end of rainbows where only leathery faced jeremy beadle wannabes can touch it.
But the reason why I think the idea of the soul being "EMF" captivates is because it answers that question that nags at the mind of the person who has thought about the soul or ghosts for any length of time - what the fuck are they made of?
During the reign of charlemange, back when there was only one word for dirt, a person who wondered what a soul was made of could get an answer; it's a numinous substance, both invisible and intangible, like the gossamer sperm of angels and that to an extent was enough - souls were made of soulstuff, and that was that because that's what the answer to everything was back then "Why is that guy king?" "because he's made of king stuff." "why's that man a priest?" "Because he's made of priest stuff." "why am I a peasant?" "Because you aren't made of the right stuff to be anything better."
The trouble is we now have hundreds of words just for mud - because a glay isn't made from the same stuff as a clay, and we've found reasons to care - and you've got to know hte difference between dirty and mud and rocks or else millions of people will fucking starve.
We can describe in literally microscopic detail what everything around us is made of - ignoring the occasional bits of invisible ejaculate the physicists keep insisting god creamed over everything during the big bang - and yet we've got no better answer for the question "what is the soul made of?" than we had back in Thatcher's school days.
EMF fills that gap, but where the people peddling it seem to chicken out is that they say "EMF", but mean "numinous angel pubes" all the same but in fancier words. Fuck that. Let's say the soul is EMF, let's say then that it is light, what the fuck does that mean?
Well for starters it changes what we're looking at through a kirlian lense - that's not an aura, hovering neatly a few inches from your skin like magnetic field lines, but a halo, like the one you see around the side of a flash light if you look directly into it. It's just an optical illusion caused by the scattering of the soul beam in the kirlian lenses.
But we still need kirlian lenses of course because light's doesn't work in merely 3 space-like dimensions - traditionally light can have three measurable quantities, two kinds of polarity and frequency, but in a universe with 2 space-like dimensions it would only have one possible kind of polarity and frequency, and in a universe with only 1 dimension worth of space you'd have no measurable polarity and only frequency would be noticeable.
So let's knock through a wall of the brane and start using more space-like dimensions than we use most days, let's assume there's a hyper-polarity that light can have. Now with normal light you can block light with seemingly transparent sheet by having the sheet block light of a certain polarity and then trying to beam pre-polarised light through it - the net result is that the polarised light can't get through the sheet that blocks light of a certain polarity - but use light polarised in the opposite plane and it'll pass through unchanged. The kirlian lense then acts as light polariser - both blocking light polarised in the two standard planes but letting through the hyper-polarised light, and then after the hyper-polarised light gets through that part of the filter it actively affects the hyper-polarised light so that it becomes visible to the cameras that only pick up the two normal polarities of light.
But this has what are known as "unintended consequences" as far as theology goes, because if the soul is just hyper-spatial light that we give off, then should we be burying dead lightbulbs? Are middle class people the world over affixing solar, or soul-ar panels to their roofs, to capture the stray spirits of ancient aliens and harvest them for power? Do the cat's eyes in the road have a curious flickering half-life all their own? Do CRTs become the prisons of dying rainbow coloured souls, as they glow faintly in dark after the box has being switched off?
Is the sun nothing but a giant soul ball that happens to glow in our puny 3 dimensional perception as well as its own?
And there's one more question that ultimately raises, because light behaves in a very particular fashion you see, as if you don't intercept and block light, it tends to just go on and on and radiate in as many directions as possible, so if our bodies are beaming out this pure soul all over the place, and our souls are going on and on, out and out, until they hit something and are absorbed and/or re-emitted by the blocking object.
But some of it has gone out there, not neccesarily a lot and it won't have got far yet, it's still just light, still bound by Einstein's rules.
But what of the souls of other things from the depths of deep time? How far a shadow does their light cast among the cosmos? What indeed would we see if we turned out kirlian lenses upwards, away from each other, up and up to the Cosmic Microwave Background at the edge of the universe?
What manner of gods play there still, their CRT glow captured for all eternity when someone switched off the big bang?
good night, and turn out the lights.
But the reason why I think the idea of the soul being "EMF" captivates is because it answers that question that nags at the mind of the person who has thought about the soul or ghosts for any length of time - what the fuck are they made of?
During the reign of charlemange, back when there was only one word for dirt, a person who wondered what a soul was made of could get an answer; it's a numinous substance, both invisible and intangible, like the gossamer sperm of angels and that to an extent was enough - souls were made of soulstuff, and that was that because that's what the answer to everything was back then "Why is that guy king?" "because he's made of king stuff." "why's that man a priest?" "Because he's made of priest stuff." "why am I a peasant?" "Because you aren't made of the right stuff to be anything better."
The trouble is we now have hundreds of words just for mud - because a glay isn't made from the same stuff as a clay, and we've found reasons to care - and you've got to know hte difference between dirty and mud and rocks or else millions of people will fucking starve.
We can describe in literally microscopic detail what everything around us is made of - ignoring the occasional bits of invisible ejaculate the physicists keep insisting god creamed over everything during the big bang - and yet we've got no better answer for the question "what is the soul made of?" than we had back in Thatcher's school days.
EMF fills that gap, but where the people peddling it seem to chicken out is that they say "EMF", but mean "numinous angel pubes" all the same but in fancier words. Fuck that. Let's say the soul is EMF, let's say then that it is light, what the fuck does that mean?
Well for starters it changes what we're looking at through a kirlian lense - that's not an aura, hovering neatly a few inches from your skin like magnetic field lines, but a halo, like the one you see around the side of a flash light if you look directly into it. It's just an optical illusion caused by the scattering of the soul beam in the kirlian lenses.
But we still need kirlian lenses of course because light's doesn't work in merely 3 space-like dimensions - traditionally light can have three measurable quantities, two kinds of polarity and frequency, but in a universe with 2 space-like dimensions it would only have one possible kind of polarity and frequency, and in a universe with only 1 dimension worth of space you'd have no measurable polarity and only frequency would be noticeable.
So let's knock through a wall of the brane and start using more space-like dimensions than we use most days, let's assume there's a hyper-polarity that light can have. Now with normal light you can block light with seemingly transparent sheet by having the sheet block light of a certain polarity and then trying to beam pre-polarised light through it - the net result is that the polarised light can't get through the sheet that blocks light of a certain polarity - but use light polarised in the opposite plane and it'll pass through unchanged. The kirlian lense then acts as light polariser - both blocking light polarised in the two standard planes but letting through the hyper-polarised light, and then after the hyper-polarised light gets through that part of the filter it actively affects the hyper-polarised light so that it becomes visible to the cameras that only pick up the two normal polarities of light.
But this has what are known as "unintended consequences" as far as theology goes, because if the soul is just hyper-spatial light that we give off, then should we be burying dead lightbulbs? Are middle class people the world over affixing solar, or soul-ar panels to their roofs, to capture the stray spirits of ancient aliens and harvest them for power? Do the cat's eyes in the road have a curious flickering half-life all their own? Do CRTs become the prisons of dying rainbow coloured souls, as they glow faintly in dark after the box has being switched off?
Is the sun nothing but a giant soul ball that happens to glow in our puny 3 dimensional perception as well as its own?
And there's one more question that ultimately raises, because light behaves in a very particular fashion you see, as if you don't intercept and block light, it tends to just go on and on and radiate in as many directions as possible, so if our bodies are beaming out this pure soul all over the place, and our souls are going on and on, out and out, until they hit something and are absorbed and/or re-emitted by the blocking object.
But some of it has gone out there, not neccesarily a lot and it won't have got far yet, it's still just light, still bound by Einstein's rules.
But what of the souls of other things from the depths of deep time? How far a shadow does their light cast among the cosmos? What indeed would we see if we turned out kirlian lenses upwards, away from each other, up and up to the Cosmic Microwave Background at the edge of the universe?
What manner of gods play there still, their CRT glow captured for all eternity when someone switched off the big bang?
good night, and turn out the lights.
