I am diagnosed schizotypal personality disorder, at best, full blown schizophreic, hypo-manic, 'enjoys his delusions way too much', if I am doing what they call "acting out". This week I am a computer training consultant in Sacramento California, teaching 8 hours a day in front of a bunch of computer engineers. I go back to the hotel and I go OUTSIDE OF TIME - and because of this ability, through this device I've built, I can handle the temporal workload of NINE MEN! and have recently used this ability to excel at my job and freak out the management with my prolific writing and teaching and reading and making training videos, etc;

I think this is the most psychotic thing I've ever done - building the anti-time device. This is a threat against time.

I noticed people around the stage I'm at in life, start talking about their life 'goals', and whether or not they've accomplished them. I heard Dave Mustaine of Megadeth say he doesn't really have any more goals, he's done it all. I thought, 'that's not a good answer'; then I heard Robin Williams say he is still looking to do the perfect role, and that's his life goal, and I thought 'better answer'; then I realized I have goals too.

I always said I wanted to be magical. This was 15 to 20 years ago, and that was the only goal I had declared. I was being honest. I was studying shamanism, all the world religions, philosophies, had been hearing stories from the bible from the very beginning. I remember Satan was always my favorite character, 'cause he was always the most magical.

Now I am a shaman, and I think being magical has been accomplished; I go through life assuming my personality has magical powers, sometimes active and cultivated, sometimes merely latent, but I always feel they are at my disposal if I need them.

Later in life, I began declaring two other goals, a subset, really. I was the leader of the war against time and gravity. I remember whatever war I was talking about, people always said 'the war is in your head, charlie', so for instance when I got a little cut on my arm putting a server back together, sticking the SCSI cable way inside the case, I showed the scratch and said, 'ther, proof of the war I'm fighting', or when we took my friend's nephew to gymnastics class, and there was a poster on the wall that said 'the struggle is against gravity and time', so it's not just me who came up with this. Just me who got this crazy with it, though, maybe.

Gravity was vanquished, finally, last year. Since grade school when I saw the bowling ball and marble fall at the same rate, I knew there was something wrong. Kept working on my own ideas, integrating the best of the weirdest as they came along. Then last fall, the head of the department of physics for the university of sarajevo came out with a paper, and in it, there is no gravity. I integrated his ideas over the course of a few weeks, and now there's no gravity in my mental model. I am walking around in a non-ordinary model of the universe, one in which, rather than 'sucking', all matter is 'radiant', and pushing me upwards. All the other stuff in the "hyperclock" is pushing me downwards. Lucky I have this earth and sun here, or I'd be perfectly round, from the surrounding pressure, but with occasional mountains, from periodic rotations of the hyperclock.

I may have begun with these strange goals in an early childhood attempt to prove my mother wrong; she had told me, of course, 'you can do whatever you set your mind to', and I thought this was silly, and I'd prove it, by setting my mind to becomming magical. Joke was on me, I really did become magical. I have grandiose delusions of power, and strive to be 'inconditionate', like my two brothers, infinity and the absolute. But I noticed time was conditioning me.

I read Ge Hong, the fourth century taoist who compiled a book of 238 people who strived to escape death. This was the most extreme response to the phenomenon of death that our species had ever formulated. (The best of them made recipes of various minerals and poisons they found in the mountains, and then flew away to the sky 'in broad daylight'.)

So I set out against gravity and time. After gravity was vanquished, I was heartened and feeling more magical than ever, so I set out against the much harder obstacle, it turns out: time.

I remembered reading about Max Planck. He defined a tiny moment, I beleive, called the planck time, the time in between the moments. It was as if time, though apparently continuous in our macroscopic reality, was really just taking several periodic 'snapshots', and in between every two snapshots of the apparently -continuous reality, was the little moment of the Planck time. I remember speculating on this as if it was eternity, and in fact declaring 20 years ago that it turns out eternity is less than a second long, but it's in between all the other seconds.

This was the first tack I took to get outside of time.

Later in life I learned of red-shift space, farther away than outer space, so far away it is in the past. Far away in red shift space, things spread out. It struck me that someday, our world will be 'red shift space' to some observer millions of years in the future. Our world will be way spread out by then, too. I imagined that each moment, by then, could be separated by years and years, and the time in between these moments of the then-past would just spread out like a thinning mist.

Granted these are just imaginative thought experiments, with no basis in reality. however, because I have been doing these thought experiments actively, often, and for decades, I think I may be modifying the way I think, so that I can actually be in between the moments.

Reading alot of Taoism all those years too, I learned to see everything as one. I really do see it that way, all through my waking day, and the only confusing thing is that we LOOK LIKE we're separate.

And this is when I started getting serious about being anti-time. I followed the track of Taosim to its logical conclusion. Monotheism, which I studied first as I was born inot it, taught me to 'worship' god. but polytheism taught me to 'become' a god. So I did.

I moved to the center of the universe. And in the ecstasy of godhood, I wanted to give a gift back to humanity, because I had come from there. but what to give? First, I thought: make them happy. But that is a mistake, always a mistake, in beginner shamanism, so I thought, OK, how about: make them 'perfect'. Again, an even bigger beginning shamanism mistake. Why don't I just declare world war three and start all kind of ethnic cleansing campaings? I'm German, I know what it's like to wake up in the morning, the first thing I want to do in the morning is invade France. But then I remind myself that this never works out, and I go on about my day without antagonizing the French.

Then it came to me - how to reward the humans, after all their accomplishments: reverse time. Time was the problem, all along. without time, none of our problems would have occurred. Seeing all as one, everything would simply make more sense, if we looked like we were one. If there was only a general mist, not a world of separate elements, separate bodies, etc. I wanted to reverse the flow of time, back past the three generations of stars. They say all the elements on the periodic table, except for one and two, come from the stars that created them in their furnace (alright, except for element three, lithium, which can also be created by the spellation or blasting by stars of H or He.) We have currently Population I of the stars, but further back in time - the 14 billion year history of the universe - there are Poulation II and Population III stars, the first stars that lit up.

I wanted to reverse time to before that first population of stars, pop III, showed up and started creating things, like carbon, that could ultimately become different things. Then we would all still be one, but wouldn't have ll these confusing questions, and wouldn't have any history, we would just be what we really are.

This is still my goal, and I like to tell people, go ahead, live your lives, and live 'em well, but if I'm successful, none of this will ever have happned.

I was close to accomplishing it, but there was a setback. I don't really know what direction to move the project in next, but even if it doesn't move forward, I'm left with an artifact for myself that seems to have real power, or is atleast quite the aid to ecstatic contemplation, and creates visions for me, if not outright escape from time. Here is how I conceived of and built this device, last Christmas vacation.

Christmas vacation last year had me sitting alone kind of bored, the humans occupied with their families and traditions, so I came up with this idea to go all out against time.

I had read that time 'piles up' near a black hole. I've been speculating on the inside of black holes for a long time, too.
And I had just gotten hold of a great astrophysics article, and map. It was a cluster of galaxies, across various levels of time. This is another piece of evidence for me that time is ultimately quantum, and not continuous, as it appears to humans. There has been a phenomenon appearing more and more clearly in various maps of quasar's 'fields' that a quasar sits at the center, at a certain 'redshift', or point in time, then there are a pair of galaxies surrounding it, but at a closer redhift, or time. then again, andother pair, one unit or so closer to us, and another, and another, and so on. I have collected several clusters like this. The one I had just grabbed last Christmas was a big one, PKS-2126-158, I have several diagrams I made where I mapped each pair's distance and plotted the 'pairs of galaxies at successive redshifts. It's quite a phenomemnon and I have several more examples I am compiling - there is no explanation yet in physics for this phenomenon.

Well, I had to explain that, and this next fact, to explain what I was doing over Christmas vacation with that block of wood and the wood burner and the paints.

I had just read about the Yellow Register, a taoist festival or mabe the word is occult behavior or ceremony or something, but it was a big festival, everybody in the town has to pay to go, but then they create a ritual area in the park, they encircle it, this goes on for days, but in the middle, all the people can summon their dead realtives into the ritual area! It becomes a block party for your dead relatives! This phenomenon went on for centuries, and the Yellow Register is the list of how to do it. (I came in and asked my boss if he wanted my to conjure his ancestors into a ritual area, but he told me 'pleaase don't!')

And as various rituals went into this powerful "Yellow Register", some older, some brand new, I wondered where they were getting this stuff from. As I later read Ge Hong, and his 238 wild crazy magical people who flew away from death ("cultivated "deathlessness"!), each one had made his own ritual, some were similar but no two were alike. Some adepts were more powerful than others, possibly as a result of more or less powerful rituals. There was a key debate, about whether you had to follow someone else's ritual, or if it was better to come up with your own. Some held that only certain behaviors or rituals had 'come down' from somewhere or other, and so only those were valid. But the opposite view seemed more common: that anyone can come up with a ritual - what makes it better or worse than others was: LOFTINESS AND CLEVERNESS of the ritual.

So over Christmas, I decided to come up with something as 'lofty and clever' as the Yellow Register, designed to reverse the flow of time. I had been thinking about black holes, and though astrophysics doesn't speculate inside the things, I do. A lay person knows if the sun is up or down, might even say the sun 'rises in the east and sets in the west.' An astronomer looks at the sun through a telescope, knows the sun's 'weather', the sunspots. The Astrophysicist speculates on the turbulent 'cells' under thesurface of the sun, and their effect on the sun's external weather, also speculate on the nuclear furnace at the center of the sun, developing elements up to iron on the periodic table, through the process of astration. But a taoist goes to the center of the sun and sits down with the king and queen of the sun and drinks its luminescence in a tea party. As a taoist with access to 21st century astrophysics stories, I go to the center of alot of stuff, drink alot of luminescence (or 'chi'), but anyway....

One more thing. I had just looked up the word 'asterism'. Apparently the taoists would take a 'constellation', such as the big dipper (their favorite), and personify the whole constellation as a god. Then they would call the god down into themselves, and work the magic that needed to be worked (for instance by standing outside the residence of some crazed person, calling up a giant turtle or fish out of the local lake, and saying, 'there you go, that was your proble, giant demon hanging around, but now it's gone, so you're ok'); I thought right away that if Ancient Taoists could personify an asterism, or a small bunch of stars in our own galaxy, then how much more powerful if I could personify the whole CLUSTER OF GALAXIES, with a QUASAR at the center, and then call down THIS whole god. Well, that's what I did, and I was surprised of the actual powers (or, I'm crazy now).

I decided it was to begin on Feb 2, this past Feb, and to end on March 3rd. Marchi 3rd was a full moon / total lunar elcipse. Feb 2 was a full moon. the calendar was 60 days. I bought a plank of wood, actually a big 'chopping block' at the grocery store, and carved not 60 bu 69 hexagons into it. I then isolated the central 9 hexagons, and painted them black. I wood burned the hexagon lines that separated the days. The central 9 stood for the central quasar in PKS2126. Then I took 10 of the remaining 60 hexagons, which represented the days. I made 5 pairs, mapped out on the board about where they mapped out in the cluster, and painted each pair a different orage/red/yellowish shade. I hoped this way to make the block instantly recognizable for someone familiar with this cluster; The ritual - as lofty as z=2.5 in red shift space, and pretty clever, I think - was that, on the days indicated by the 10 hexagons, to do a ritual, go on a journey to that galaxy, with my shamanism drum tape, and light a different type of insence depending on which of the 5 pairs it was. That was it - just travel outside my body to the right galaxy on the right evening, light insence, stay a little while, then leave, that simple.

Chinese New Year came during the calendar. The day was perfectly positioned between two red hexagons. I hadn't planned that.

On the final night, March 3rd, during the lunar eclipse, I was going to stand on a mountian and set the wood on fire, starting from the center, the 9 black hexagons. the middle 9 hexagons represented the quasar, with a central black hole, a place where time can't 'go'.

It had become my psychosis that time was here to kill us. Einstein said it is appropriate to think of time as separate from matter and energy. I read a story where ther is a big beast, sleeping. the demons come along and see ti has no eyes or nose or anything, so they begin boring holes in it. One hole, then another, It gets senses, it wakes up, but then, one more bore hole, and it DIES! This was a taoist parable saying that the senses don't do us any good, better to be healthy than to see, hear, etc. But whatever, what I was thinking as I read the story was that matter/energy was the beast with no eyes, and time was the demon who came along boring holes! Maybe he's gonna kill us! Every other sage in history says it's gonna be ok, let time happen, but maybe it's trying to kill us, and I - most powerful shaman of all time, containing all matter and energy inside myself - I have to do something about it! (how about that for a savior psychosis ?!?)

But it had also become my psychosis that time can't see everything. It can't get to the center of the black holes. That's the place where I go for refuge from time. That's what I attempted to conjure with my painted block of wood - 9 days in the center of the 60 that time just has no access to. And the plan was to cause a 'time-quake' (though I think the plan was alos to end time), but the timequake would spread from the central 9 hexagons to the other 60 days through the burnt lines, which represent the midnights of the 60 days, the borders between them.

So it was a few days away, I was prepared to end the world, I had myself worked up to believe something was gonna happen, though friends just kept pointing out they didn't believe in my psychosis. I went to the San Francisco zoo a few days ahead, to see my spiritual leader, the tapir, Goober, who works there. I told him what I was up to.

Goober urged me not to do it. He pleaded with me. Most magical creature on the planet, ad he WAS believing my psychosis. He said please, please, do not end time. continue to live inside of time, slowly and calmly, as I do, because time is a demon, and we tapirs are demon eaters, as are you, charlie, and time, digested properly is GRACE! '

And I thought about what he said, and it was over my head, but I have alot of respect for the tapir's wisdom. And so we let time happen.

But I was not prepared for the experience I had at home with the anti-time device. I am a shaman, I travel outsside my body, to the upper, lower, and middle (this) worlds. But now all of a sudden there was a nother dimension, separate from those others. I went right in the first day, and it was like a little park, but shockingly, had no dimensions, not up, down, east or west, just "OUT" and "BACK IN". The second day, I thought I had come "BACK OUT" and gone to work all day, but when I got home, I saw myself, still "IN", and way crazy.

"IN" continued to grow, from a small park, to something maybe like Yosemite national park. Still no light, and still one direction - IN. But in there, I build a monastery. It's called "Provision Fragrance Monastery", and it's the center for the war on time. I invited various Taoist immortals in there, and we were just sitting around, mad at time, but just hiding from it, not fighting it.

Then I read a book by Mario Cuomo about Abe Lincoln, and I invited Abe in. He got the war going, we marched straight outta there. We went and found the four horsemen of the apocalype (on my new megadeth CD), we waited till they were asleep, we stole the red horse, and took him back into the monastary. We killed the horse, set him on the roof, and roasted him, feet pointing upward.

That moment a huge vision rose up, from the roof of the monastery, from the horses hooves. the vision was full of brilliant colors, and to this day remains the only time any form of light has ever occurred in there.

Long story, I know. My anti-time technology. I know it sounds silly, but it really is something for me. It is a psychosis, maybe it's more than that, maybe it's a threat, against time.

I don't know where it goes from here. I imagine one day it'll be just me, sitting at a chair at an all night diner, and he will walk in and sit down with me - time - and we will talk, work out an agreement, and then each of us will fly back to where we came from.

-(w)onderdonk(ey)