Wednesday, February 28, 2018

THE WORLD AS I SEE IT




Several years ago, when I was teaching mathematics, a young man in one of my classes told me that his sister, who was also a student at the school, said that she had seen me walking across the campus and thought I was handsome, - until she saw me close-up!

This got me to thinking: Maybe much of what we see is not part of reality at all, but what we project from our own minds. From a distance, I probably looked like someone she thought of as handsome, perhaps a movie star.

More than likely, this projection from mind applies not just to seeing, but to hearing and feeling as well, and all the other means we have of perceiving what’s around us. Maybe we don’t realize that what we have taken to be real is mostly, or even sometimes totally a projection of our own thinking.

For example, if we see someone we don’t know, who reminds us of someone who was stupid, we may automatically think of the new person as stupid. If you see someone who looks like Hitler, do you automatically think he must be evil? A little child, feeling the love of the man who is her father will see him as wonderful, even if he looks exactly like Hitler. Are we programmed by stereotypes we see in the news or in movies?

Are our sense organs and brains doing us a disservice by misidentifying what we experience? Perhaps this is why Jesus said: "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3) Maybe the glory of God is all around us, but we fail to see it because of the prejudices arising from our own thinking.

If you can stop the programmed prejudging of your thought processes, and become like a little child, how different will the world you experience be? If you can stop the  chattering of your mind, for even a moment, and just be aware of what is really there, can you be totally present and totally aware? If so, you will experience the everyday world, and your life, as the miracles, the gifts of God, that they truly are!
,

Monday, February 26, 2018

CONVERSATION WITH AN ATHEIST

The Atheist


THE CONVERSATION:


If someone walks up and announces: “I’m an atheist!” Perhaps the best answer is: “Is that all? Unless you’ve got something more interesting than that to say, go away, I’m busy.”

Declaring that you are an ‘atheist’ just tells me that you are a person who doesn’t believe in something. You might as well say ‘I don’t believe in Lawn Faeries, or space aliens; or I don’t believe in bullfrogs’. Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t exist.

Being an atheist has everything to do with your ego, and nothing at all to do with God. There are as many definitions of God as there are people who believe in Him. Which one is it you don’t believe in? We could go on discussing the many things that people might say God is, all day. Instead of what you don’t believe in, I’d rather hear about what you do believe in. Do you believe in anything besides yourself?

“Yes, of course!” Answered the atheist. “I believe in logic and science. And there’s absolutely no scientific evidence that there’s a god.”

OK, then do you think that means that there is scientific evidence that there is no God?

“Well, no, because you can’t prove a negative.”

Actually, you can. But, if you want to discuss this with me, first, you’ve going to have to tell me exactly what it is you don’t believe in.

“I don’t believe in a god with a long white beard sitting on a throne up in the heavens somewhere.”

OK, I don’t believe in that either. But, that doesn’t mean there is no intelligence greater than yours or mine.

“No, but I don’t believe there’s a god of any kind.”

There you go again, we could discuss that all day long, and never come to any conclusion, because first, you’ve got to define what you mean by ‘a god’. And I’ve got better things to do. - Go away.

But the atheist persisted:

“A god is a supernatural being who has the power to override the laws of nature.”

You said you believe in logic, but you’ve got a logical disconnect here: Either there is a God, or there’s not a God. You can’t have it both ways! If there is a God, then everything he creates is natural. So, if He creates something new, then it is natural also. So supernatural is a meaningless term. If there is no god, then talking about what he can or can’t do is a waste of time. In either case, it’s nonsense. Go away.

“But, belief in god has resulted in more innocent deaths than anything else on the earth!”

You are a bit confused; but that’s not surprising since you don’t seem to know what it is that you don’t believe in. But, let me clear this up for you: It is organized social institutions claiming to believe in a god or gods that you are talking about, organizations that distort the teachings of enlightened beings to gain power and control of the masses. They have left the spiritual teachings of their founders far behind and they have little or nothing to do with God. So, you are anti-organized religion, not anti-god. In short, you’re not really an atheist, because, as we’ve established, you don’t know who or what God is. In fact, I’m pretty sure He’s not any of the things that you don’t believe in.
 
“You’re twisting my words! I belong to (he named an organization) an organization that’s doing a lot of good in the world!”

I’m glad you’re doing something, not just being against something you know nothing about. But, name something good that you ‘atheists’ have done.

“Well, ” He seemed to be having a little trouble coming up with something concrete. “We’re teaching people to think for themselves.”

That’s good, but don’t do it by trying to get them to not believe what you don’t believe. That’s just trading belief for disbelief, something positive for something negative. If atheism is so great, name for me one world-renowned atheist who has done some major good for humanity. And don’t tell me it was Marx or Engels, because their followers created social organizations that slaughtered more innocent people than all the religious organizations you seem to condemn put together.

“There are lots of scientists who have contributed to our knowledge of the nature of things who were and are atheists,” He declared.

Name one.

“Albert Einstein!”

Well, it’s obvious you don’t know much about Albert Einstein. It’s true he wasn’t a Christian, but he wasn’t an atheist, either, he said:

 “I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.

And, he also said: “The Lord God is clever, but he’s not malicious!”

Do these sound like the words of an atheist?

“OK, but what about Richard Dawkins? He is a biologist.”

I’ll give you that one. Richard Dawkins was trained as a scientist, although I can’t see that he has contributed much to our knowledge of the nature of reality. His ideas about biology are at odds with about half of his contemporary biologists. He is more of a “professional atheist” than a scientist. He is clearly an intelligent man and a good writer. He has written some interesting books. He creates ‘god’ in his own image, and then proceeds to prove what he thinks others believe God is cannot be God. Intelligence and cleverness doesn’t make one right. There are many intelligent people who are wrong.

“I believe most real scientists are atheists.”

That may be your definition of a real scientist, but it’s not mine. Disbelief without proof is not the hallmark of an open mind. Many scientists are agnostics, but, don’t confuse agnosticism with atheism. Agnostics are skeptics, which is what a scientist should be. It’s one thing to say “personally, I have seen no proof that God exists” and quite another thing to say: “I don’t believe there is a God.”
Come to think of it, I’m skeptical about your statement that you are an atheist. You may just be agnostic.

“Don’t tell me what I am. I know what I am, I’m an atheist!” He was getting a little annoyed with me!

OK, you’re against something, but, you can’t tell me what it is you’re against.

“Alright, how’s this: whatever you believe god is, I’m against that!”

Sorry, that won’t work either. I don’t believe god exists, I know God exists.

“You can’t know god exists,” he snorted, “because you can’t prove he exists.”

Yes, I can, and I have. Go to my Transcendental Physics blog and type: ‘Proof of the existence of God’ into the search box. Now there is not only the personal proof that many have experienced directly, there is mathematical, empirical, scientific proof. Read my posts that contain the proof. Then, if you want, come back and maybe we’ll talk.


For those who may have missed it, here's the poem I posted yesterday on Face Book:


THE GIFT
The battle hard, the Peace to win,
Is not out there -  it is within.

Celestial spheres are not perverse,
‘Tis you and not the universe

That must adjust and must align
To enter and become Divine.

The earth, the moon, the sun shall spin
Again, again, again, again ….

Until someday, the wheel you’ll break.
Awake, my soul, my soul AWAKE

Should be the chant within your heart
Until the clouds of gloom depart,

That in the Light, your soul can see
The Gift of God’s Eternity!

ERC February 25, 2018






Saturday, February 24, 2018

THE SACRED GEOMETRY OF THE CUBE





The Nine-Dimensional Doorway to Infinity
Solving the Mysteries of Mind, Matter, Life, and the Universe

©Edward R. Close 2018  


The Cube
The Rubik’s Cube® has 9 rotatable planes or tiers, 3 in each of 3 orthogonal dimensions. This book shows how a simple cube can be used to model everything from electrons and atoms to solar systems and galaxies. The cube even mirrors the development of physical, mental and spiritual health, and teaches how to develop intuition, focus and concentration, - skills that are needed to solve the problems of life. In the process, you can also learn how to ‘solve’ the cube.
This book is divided into seven parts:

1          KNOWING YOUR CUBE

II         SOLVING THE MYSTERIES OF QUANTUM REALITY

III        SOLVING THE MYSTERIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND LIFE

IV        SOLVING THE MYSTERIES OF THE COSMOS

V         THE ULTIMATE SOLUTION

VI        PATTERNS OF GOOD AND EVIL

VII      SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

Each of these parts are designed to stand alone, but three threads of alignment, intuition and synchronicity, run through and connect them all. I’m hoping that you will find reading this book to be an interesting mental, physical and spiritual adventure involving the cube, geometry spirituality and life. This book summarizes my philosophy of life developed during the eighty-plus years I’ve spent as a human being named Edward Roy Close. Any journey, even the journey of a lifetime, begins with a single step, and the adventure of reading an enjoyable book begins with the first page. My blessings to all who read on.

Friday, February 23, 2018

THE WAY OUT OF THE CRISIS OF BELIEF




THE WORLD-WIDE CRISIS

Is it any wonder that we are in moral crisis now, when for many years, mainstream scientists in our major universities have been professing atheism and teaching their students that being an atheist is a necessary part of being a scientist? Presenting themselves as the voice of reason, and authorities on everything, they are priests of a new religion, rapidly replacing traditional faiths with the dead-end belief in scientific materialism. In their tunnel vision, a predictable result of academic specialization, they have lost touch with the infinite and divine potential of human consciousness.

When people accept the theory of absolute materialism as the truth, and they begin to believe that their bodies are nothing more than organic machines, their brains nothing more than warm, wet computers, then they will believe that when the electro-chemical synapses in the brain go out, nothing is left. This impoverished theory of reality is an intellectual trap that robs the believer of hope. Why strive for excellence, love and compassion, if in the end, it means nothing? If leading mainstream scientists are telling us that the more they know about reality, the more meaningless it becomes, then why be concerned with anything other than getting your piece of the reality pie while you can, without regard for anyone else or the future, a future of which you will have no knowledge because you will be gone as if you never existed?

Following are some excerpts from the manuscript of my new “Cube Book”:

We have seen how gimmel, the finite, measurable manifestation of Primary Consciousness in the physical universe, shapes reality from the quantum level to the cosmic level, and how experimental data and the known laws of dimensional mathematics and physics reveal the existence of gimmel, and our connection with infinite Primary Consciousness. In the process of learning who and what we really are, we become aware of all our memories and our connection with Primary Consciousness. Achieving this level of individual awareness is called cosmic consciousness. Cosmic consciousness is the real purpose of finite reality, the physical universe, life, and the consciousness manifested in it, and the driving force behind all evolution.

The discovery and proof of the existence of gimmel eliminates materialism as a viable basis for science, philosophy and human understanding in general. Spiritual evolution is the driving force behind the universe, not some random meaningless explosion, the conclusion of reductionist materialistic science. Reality does not exist and cannot exist without consciousness.

The question of whether reality has existed, or can exist, without consciousness, sounds like a question that science should be able to answer, but, in a logically structured reality, it is in fact, an utterly meaningless question. It certainly is not a scientific question, because a scientific hypothesis must be a question that is testable. Science, as it currently exists, like a half- awakened  giant, presupposes the existence of consciousness in the form of conscious beings, thinkers and observers who can play the parts of all sorts of characters in this on-going drama, developing hypotheses about reality. But, no hypothesis is possible without conscious thought, and no hypothesis can be tested without a conscious observer. Thus, the question of whether the universe could exist without consciousness is a truly nonsensical question, because a universe without an observer cannot be observed.

Theory and Belief Versus Knowledge
Many people approach life haphazardly, as if there were no universal laws, no meaning, no purpose, making random choices without thinking much about goals or consequences. With this approach to life, the road to final enlightenment is long and uncertain. So, how are we to proceed? Institutionalized religions offer ways that require little or no thinking. Just accept the doctrine and follow the rules, which they may claim were laid down hundreds or thousands of years ago by an enlightened being. But, the teachings of enlightened beings are often distorted by lesser beings who fail to understand, or even worse, who choose to use religious doctrine to gain power and control over people and nations. In such cases, religion becomes a form of political machination and the true spiritual nature of religious practice is lost.

During the past 100 years or so, simple physical science has exposed the dogma of many religious beliefs to be false, and because of this, some people have concluded that all religion must be false. Not realizing that mainstream science has ignored the fact that there is an unspoken metaphysical basis underlying any system of thought, they have simply traded belief in a religion for belief in materialism. In effect, science has become the new religion. But belief in materialism is not really science. It is materialism, not science, that has become the new religion for many, and mainstream materialistic scientists are their priesthood, but, materialism is not science. In fact, the assumption of materialism is not a valid scientific hypothesis.

Materialism is based on the belief that reality is nothing more than matter and energy interacting and evolving in space and time, that we are nothing more than an accidental combination of debris flying away from a big bang explosion. But, this does not meet the criteria of a scientific hypothesis. Materialism is not science. By rejecting religion entirely, materialists have thrown the baby out with the bath water. They have thrown Jesus, Buddha, and all enlightened beings out with the organized institutions that have distorted their teachings! Eager to purge their model of reality of false doctrines, they have thrown the truth out with the dross.

So, if the dogma of religious institutions are false, and mainstream science is unscientific, where do we turn for answers? There are an astounding number of people out there in the world today who style themselves as “life coaches” or experts of some sort, who believe it is their mission to enlighten you with their clever advice, for which they believe you will pay a lot of your hard-earned cash. Avoid most of these people; especially if you can see that their personal lives do not reflect alignment and harmony with natural law.

Real science must include all real experience, and the experience of spiritual reality, which makes up about 95% of all reality, cannot be excluded. By putting consciousness into the equations of science, we proved the necessary existence of consciousness in every quark, elementary particle and atom of the universe. This brings science out of the dark age of materialism at last, and changes everything!"

Tuesday, February 6, 2018

APOLOGY


APOLOGY TO JOE
Twenty-some years ago, at a Heartland Writer’s Guide get-together, I made fun of something an intelligent acquaintance named Joe said. He was remarking how amazing a simple coincidence related to certain letters in words of the English language was. I heartlessly said: “It doesn’t take much to amuse you, does it?” Well, I am lot older, and maybe a little wiser now, and I realize that I owe Joe an apology. It is the simplest things that are the most amazing. Take, for example, breathing.

Because of a slap on your bottom by someone, it didn’t even have to be a doctor, you pulled the first breath of air into a shivering spasm of protoplasm that became your vehicle for this life. That first gasp started a process that might well continue, almost machine-like, for up to 70 years or more. You don’t even have to think about it. It just goes on, pumping life-giving air into you and allowing you to be conscious of this universe. If that’s not amazing, nothing is.

Books have been written about how amazingly fine-tuned this universe is for the thriving of conscious organic life forms. But we take it for granted, not realizing how many statistically improbable miracles are involved. It’s not hard to prove mathematically that such an amazing set of circumstances is not just very, very highly improbable, it’s impossible without intelligent design. Put simply: There is a Divine Intelligence just behind all the appearances of this universe, an infinite intelligence, playfully hiding in the murmurs of a mountain stream, smiling in the lotus and the rose. Daring you to find him/her. I’ve posted such proof. But that’s not what this post is about. It’s about the miracle of breath.

Think about it. Each cycle of inhalation and exhalation is a microcosm of life and death. Inhale, and the tension of life increases, exhale and the calmness of death approaches, and it approaches oh, so very closely! If the next breath is not drawn, your body will experience the spasms of death very soon. Between the first breath and the last, your physical life exists like a fragile flower, budding, and growing with great exuberance, eventually to wilt and fade away.

Contemplating such a simple thing as breath, something we take for granted every minute of every day, experiencing and analyzing it deeply, brings a realization of the miracle that life is. Become one with the exuberance of inhalation, and you will understand life; become one with the deep calm that comes with complete exhalation, and you will not fear death, because you exist with both and with neither. You are the I Am, the witness, the consciousness that experiences everything. You are a miracle.

Joe, I owe you a deep apology. It is the small things, the simple things, that really count.


Ed Close, February 6, 2018


Sunday, February 4, 2018

A POEM FOR JACQUI



A POEM FOR JACQUI

The blackest black of deepest space
Is gone when sparks one flash of light.

The blue and green of Earth do grace
The fleeting dreams of inner light.

Call up Akashic memories
Of all the histories of Earth,

The dance of all Realities
Both of sadness and of mirth.

The Light that glows behind your eyes,
The Love that burns within your heart,

Did they not know the ancient skies?
Did they not always play their part?

Imagined differences we see
Of me and you, of you and me,

Like rivers flowing to the Sea,
They merge as One eternally!



ERC Sunday, February 4, 2018