Nope, not about neutrinos breaking the speed of light. As you can see from previous posts, while watching Fringe I noticed some books ideally belonging to William Bell that I recognized. Between these, there was “Gödel, Escher, Bach” and two of Castaneda’s books. Now, it’s Fringe writers that put these two together, because these books are ABSOLUTELY NOT RELATED. One is about math and logic, also having won the Pulitzer, the other is about spiritualism and considered by many a fraudulent anthropological study. It’s the TV show that took elements from both to build its own science fiction mythology. So, the two are unrelated in the “real world”.

Now, while reading some reviews of the GEB on a Italian internet book shop, I found one that said that the book was a fundamental read on the nature of knowledge to put right next to “Observing Systems”, by Heinz von Foerster, another must-read classic. Since I’m curious I went on to research this other guy and realized that his fundamental ideas were similar to Niklas Luhmann, that I studied and appreciated during university. So I put an order for that book.

Today I receive the book. I flip the first pages and I find an introduction written by some Italian guy. In the very first page Castaneda is mentioned.

That’s the sort of “coincidence”. Not coincidence as in supernatural “sign from above”. It simply means that the links I see between these ideas are not my own hallucinations. These themes have a lot to share and you’ll find often that they recall each other even when not consciously. In this case the link was repeated three times, each concretely unrelated. One by Fringe writers, one by me in the previous post (before receiving the book), and one by the book’s introduction.

This was a mention of Castaneda in relation to the GEB in a Italian Preface, so not directly part of the original text and its purpose. In a book I bought because it was mentioned in a random review on the internet that was on a completely different argument. So we have this relation repeated twice, where each instance of it is UNRELATED to the other. One instance is about Fringe writers that have their own ends to fill, and put the two works together (GEB and Castaneda) as their own personal creative effort in making a fictional TV show. The other instance is an Italian Preface to a von Foerster book mentioning Castaneda, whose (the book) link to the GEB was because it was recommended in a review.

The spurious element is von Foerster. It never entered the picture in the TV show, its mythology, or, likely, the writers’ mind. Yet it marks the link between fictional creative/speculative needs AND actual scientific studies.

And so the objective proof of the outward expansion of culture countered by the inward force that determines that ideas eventually “return home” and reveal the same origin. Or this, probably consolatory and delusional, idea of mine that all these are pieces of a puzzle that is up to me (or whoever else) to put together, to reveal the Grand Design.