{"id":378,"date":"2007-03-05T11:25:24","date_gmt":"2007-03-05T19:25:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=378"},"modified":"2007-03-05T13:29:51","modified_gmt":"2007-03-05T21:29:51","slug":"teleportation-via-regret-doubt-and-fear-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/05\/teleportation-via-regret-doubt-and-fear-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Teleportation Via Regret, Doubt, and Fear (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

I wrote about \u201cTelportation via Fear and Doubt<\/a>\u201d\u009d a week or two ago, and got into a comment thread <\/a>with \u201cAl<\/a>\u201d\u009d who, by the way takes really interesting gnarly photos, like the one above. Rather than answering his latest comment in the thread, I\u2019m making a post out of my answer.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

For the sake of an interesting story, doubt and fear seem like good emotions for basing teleportation upon \u2014 exactly <\/em>because they are normally viewed as negative things we want to get rid of. I think it\u2019s kind of pleasing to have the powers come from familiar negative emotions rather than positive emotions or from intellectual feats. This way, there\u2019s a reversal of expectations.<\/p>\n

Something I learned from Sheckley is to have my characters be as fallible and screwed-up and neurotic and human as I know myself to be. If you\u2019re not familiar with Sheckley, you might think of him as being a writer a little like Woody Allen. I\u2019ve never liked the bombastic superhero kind of SF where the characters are conventionally heroic. I like my characters to be more realistically flawed, more human, or, as I often say, more transreal \u2014 see my \u201cTransrealist Manifesto\u201d\u009d off my writing <\/a>page.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Given that the Sheck-man is the master, my first impulse was simply to make things easy for myself and copy him with no further thought. But, okay, with all this said, let me think a bit more deeply about the questions Al raises. After all, when I post these ideas of mine, I\u2019m asking for suggestions, so I need to open my mind enough to actually think about intelligent responses. As opposed to reacting with defensiveness and blind fury (always my default response!) It\u2019s painful work to actually listen to another mind\u2026<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s see \u2014 my underlying scientific idea is that the ability to teleport results from a heightened ability to imagine other realities. Which emotions in fact involve this? Hmmm.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Regret <\/em>involves imagining alternate pasts (like one where I attended or worked at Stanford!) If you want to flip this to a positive emotion, you might think of gratitude <\/em>that things came out the way they did instead of in some other way. Like the gratitude you might have over that you were able to raise your children fairly well. You might even speak of this as pride, like a quiet pride in a job well done. But pride easily curdles into a negative, after all it\u2019s a Deadly Sin.<\/p>\n

Doubt <\/em>involves imagining alternate present times and locations. In doubt, you wonder if everything you believe is wrong and the world is different than you imagined. Flipping to a positive, we could speak of humans have curiosity <\/em>or adventurousness or enterprise. <\/p>\n

Fear <\/em>involves imagining bad alternate futures. Hope <\/em>and yearning and longing are about positive futures. This said, yearning can be a negative in that it saps your appreciation of the present.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s subtly funny to have teleportation arise from what we (perhaps mistakenly) consider \u201cbad\u201d\u009d things about human personality. Regret about the past Doubt regarding the present, Fear regarding the future.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m well aware that these aren\u2019t pleasant feelings. Meditation often involves trying not to think about the future, about the outer world, and about the past, that is, to stay away from regret, doubt, and fear. But it\u2019s also true that, when meditating, you can learn to accept these negative emotions as an inevitable part of your psyche \u2014 but without letting them take over the driver\u2019s seat.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

If we wanted to speak only in terms of positive emotions, we might say that the ability to teleport arises from gratitude, curiosity, and hope. Instead of saying it comes from regret, doubt, and fear. To me the positive version seems duller to read about, too self-congratulatory. The quirkier, more perverse, negative formulation jolts you up and makes you think\u2014the rah-rah \u201cuplifting\u201d\u009d version sound soporific, like a platitude, and may even provoke resentment, as in: \u201cWhy don\u2019t I have all those good feelings?\u201d\u009d Everyone <\/em>can relate to negative feelings; they\u2019re in some way more universal.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As I mentioned, I\u2019m seeing a kind of transreal equivalence between teleportation and writing. And I\u2019m thinking that if all I had were positive pleasant emotions, I probably wouldn\u2019t be taking the trouble to write. It\u2019s the negatives that get me moving.<\/p>\n

A completely different positive emotional complex that I\u2019m bringing into play here involves compassion, empathy, pity and love, all of which involve imagining the minds of other beings in the present. I may yet use these emotions in the book, but for some other superpower. Maybe I\u2019ll use love to enable people to jump out of cosmos and into the land of the actual infinites, possibly to be featured in a PS3 <\/em>called Transfinite<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Just for the sake of systemizing completeness, what might be the lower-order animal versions of the paired human past-present-future complexes of (Human negative) regret-doubt-fear or (Human positive) gratitude-curiosity-hope?<\/p>\n

(Animal regret\/gratitude.) <\/em>Negative and positive versions of this that animals might share could simply be discontentment and contentment.<\/p>\n

(Animal doubt\/curiosity). <\/em>With animal doubt, I\u2019m thinking of an animal compulsively looking out of the burrow to see if an enemy is coming. And animal curiosity is inquisitiveness, like in restless foraging behavior and searching for mates.<\/p>\n

(Animal fear\/hope). <\/em>I think maybe this is where greed fits in. Greed is a low-level desire relating to the future. Greed is a both a positive and negative, I think, depending on hard you push it. Greed bores me, it\u2019s so first chakra, so, so … Wall Street.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Today’s pictures are mostly from a Big Basin hike, with a few from Stanford campus, where I was happy to see my first book for sale. Good old Dover Books. Usually they just publish dead people who are in the public domain, so when I wrote this first book, I used a somewhat old-timey-sounding form of my full name, “Rudolf v. B. Rucker.” A Dover editor stopped by our house in Geneseo, in upstate New York to have a look at me — imagine her surprise to find a twenty-nine-year-old hippie with hair down to his shoulders!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One more link, just for fun: psychic Ellie Crystal’s “Crystalinks” site advises how to develop telekinesis<\/a>, that is, the ability to move objects other than yourself!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wrote about \u201cTelportation via Fear and Doubt\u201d\u009d a week or two ago, and got into a comment thread with \u201cAl\u201d\u009d who, by the way takes really interesting gnarly photos, like the one above. Rather than answering his latest comment in the thread, I\u2019m making a post out of my answer. For the sake of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}