Sunday, January 26, 2020

A GLIMPSE OF SELF REALIZATION


Last night, after working on Power Point number 9, the last group of slides for my presentations in Bucharest and Cluj Romania, I proceeded to engage in my customary evening meditation. At one point near the end of my meditation, there was a sudden flash of realization. Sudden insights during meditation are not that unusual, but often they are too subtle to describe verbally, and many times they are very personal. I think, however, this one is worth sharing because it provides some insight into how the Neppe-Close TDVP paradigm shift, and specific applications of it, may impact people in the near future.

I had been focusing on explaining how and why gimmel exists in specific amounts that can be calculated exactly in every elementary particle of the stable elements of the Periodic Table, and how the cells of the human body contain the most gimmel. In a flash, I was aware of my consciousness, in the form of gimmel, in every cell of my body. That would be remarkable enough by itself, but I was also aware of the connection of that conscious awareness with every mineral, plant and animal, in short, all forms of manifest consciousness, through the Infinite Consciousness Substrate of reality. It was there for a flash, a quantum of three dimensional time, and it left me with the knowledge of the reality of this link in my memory.

This experience prompted me to write the following about the progression of consciousness in the physical universe:

God is sleeping in the electron, proton and neutron, dreaming in the crystals of the Mineral Kingdom, waking and growing in the Plant Kingdom, becoming aggressively aware in the Animal Kingdom, and self-aware as human beings, capable of Love, Compassion and all of the transcendental attributes of Primary Consciousness. When all these attributes are fully realized, then we will become eternally Blissful and finally truly at Home in the universe.

ERC 1/26/2020

Saturday, January 18, 2020

IN SPIRIT WE ARE ONE




IN SPIRIT WE ARE ONE. In the beautiful poetic language of Romania, the title of this post becomes:

In Duhul suntem Unul

Application of the quantum calculus I call the Calculus of Dimensional Distinctions (CoDD), the primary calculus of TDVP, reveals the fact that all things, from electron to quarks, to atoms, to human minds are connected in Primary Consciousness, the Substrate of Reality. This fact is hidden from most of us at this point in the history of our planet, because of the limitations of our sense organs, and our identification with the vehicles of our consciousness in the 3S-1t (3 dimensions of space-one quantum of time) fraction of Reality we perceive through them. The reality of our deep connection with Reality and each other can be perceived by the expansion of our awareness through spiritual practices that lead to a state of deep meditation.

TDVP is a scientific framework capable of explaining this expanded state of consciousness. People of all levels of spiritual development are given glimpses of the greater expanse of the conscious cosmos through Out-of-Body Experiences, including Near Death and Conscious-after-Death Experiences (OBEs, NDEs and CDEs). As someone formally trained in the scientific methods of mathematics and physics, who has experienced all three types of OBE experiences, I am qualified to discuss them from a personal and a scientific point of view. In addition, I observed the effects of these experiences on my soulmate Jacqui’s life for nearly 45 years.

After I return from the Science of Immortality Conferences in Romania in March 2020, I plan to publish my new book, titled Survival, which is a sequel to Secrets of the Sacred Cube, a Cosmic Love Story. I will also plan to participate in other conferences when appropriate, especially if I am invited to speak about science and spirituality. Of course I will also be pursuing the goal of promoting the paradigm shift from the current predominantly materialistic paradigm of mainstream science to the new Postmaterialist Science of TDVP.

ERC 1/18/2020

Thursday, January 9, 2020

WHAT IS COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS?



WHAT IS COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS?
© January 9. 2020 Edward R Close

I have mentioned Cosmic Consciousness several times in my posts and publications, indicating that it is nothing less than the real goal and purpose of all existence. But what exactly is cosmic consciousness? Cosmic Consciousness completely transcends the thoughts and concerns that dominate the minds of most sentient beings alive today. Because of this, and the ever-expanding, perhaps even infinite scope of the cosmos, i.e., all that is, and the state of being fully aware of it, it is very difficult, if not impossible to describe such an advanced state of enlightenment in the finite terms of any language known on this planet today. Despite these difficulties, there have been a number of attempts to describe Cosmic Consciousness by thinkers and writers in the past. But it is not my intent to discuss and compare those attempts, as interesting as that might be. I plan to simply start with the basic definitions offered by Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke, a Canadian Psychiatrist who undertook the daunting task of defining Cosmic Consciousness and examining the lives of several individuals he considered to be examples of this exalted state.

I find it interesting that Dr. Bucke finished his book, entitled Cosmic Consciousness, in 1900, and published it in 1901, the very historical time period during which Max Planck discovered the quantum nature of physical reality, and Albert Einstein was busy thinking about the Electrodynamics of Moving Objects (Special Relativity). Of equal interest, to me at least, is the fact that all three of these ideas fit very nicely into the cyclic nature of mental virtue revealed in the Ancient Indian Vedas and interpreted by Sri Yukteswar Giri, in his book The Holy Science, published in 1894. I have written in some detail about this in Secrets of the Sacred Cube, a Cosmic Love Story, and in my later, as yet unpublished manuscript, Survival.

I believe Dr. Bucke was the first in modern times, to consider what he called Cosmic Consciousness to be the next major evolutionary stage of sentient beings beyond the self-awareness level of the average human being in the upward struggle of conscious beings from the bare beginnings of awareness to the state of being fully aware of the entirety of reality, defined as the cosmos. He divided consciousness into three stages: 1) Simple Consciousness, 2) Self Consciousness and 3) Cosmic Consciousness. In this categorization scheme, Simple Consciousness is the awareness present in animals, Self Consciousness is experienced by human beings, and Cosmic Consciousness is a rare state, an elevated state of consciousness which only a few extraordinary human beings have ever attained in historical times.

Comparing these three categories of consciousness with the concepts of consciousness in the Neppe-Close paradigm, I find no major conflict. However, I would say that these categories are broad generalizations compared with the Neppe-Close view of consciousness, which is more detailed and more precisely related to the current scientific understanding of psychology and psychiatry. With the discovery of the existence of gimmel, the non-physical aspect of reality that is necessary for a stable universe to exist, we see indications that some level of consciousness is present in every electron, proton and neutron making up the stable atomic structures of the universe. Thus there is some basic level of awareness present even in plants and minerals.

As in our TDVP paradigm, Bucke sees individual conscious beings displaying a wide distribution across the spectrum of the levels of consciousness within each of the three stages. And he sees the number of individuals reaching the threshold of Cosmic Consciousness to be increasing slowly over time; and that is consistent with the current era of ascending mental virtue, the Dwapara Yuga, as described by Sri Yukteswar in The Holy Science.  But the purpose of this discussion is not to describe the entire spectrum of awareness from one quantum equivalence unit of gimmel, all the way to Cosmic Consciousness, other than to say that it exists. My intended focus here is on Cosmic Consciousness, and I will start with a brief summary of Dr. Bucke’s work, and discuss how it applies to us today.

Dr. Richard Bucke’s Experience and Approach
Taking note that certain historic figures, and even a few people who were alive during the time of his investigations (roughly 1870 to 1900), who appeared to have attained exceptional physical and intellectual abilities and moral characteristics, all far beyond the mean or average person in the general population, Dr. Bucke proposed that such exceptional persons represent the next step in human evolution, and he set out to gather the available information about such individuals to see what they had in common. In this way, he sought to define the state he called Cosmic Consciousness. which, in his words, was, and is: “… a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man.” - Cosmic Consciousness, Page 1. He goes on to say: “Cosmic Consciousness is a third form which is as far above Self Consciousness as is that above Simple Consciousness.” – CC page 2.

It is important to note that one would not be able to write authentically about the subject of Cosmic Consciousness, with no more than intellectual superficiality, unless one had experienced personally at least a glimpse or a taste of it. In the spring of 1872, Richard Maurice Bucke, himself, had the experience of illumination. His experience is described in the Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Series H, Vol. 12, pp 159, as follows:

He and two friends had spent the evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. They parted at midnight and he had a long drive in a hansom [a two-wheeled horse-drawn carriage]. His mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images and emotions called up by the readings and talk of the evening, was calm and peaceful. He was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment.
            “All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around, as it were, in a flame colored cloud. For an instant he thought of a fire = some sudden conflagration in the great city [London, England]. The next (instant) he knew the light was within himself.
            “Directly after there came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness, accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning flash of Brahmic splendor which ever since lightened his life. Upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an after taste of Heaven.”

It was probably this experience that prompted him to undertake the study that led to the writing of the book Cosmic Consciousness, which he published in 1901. In that book, Dr. Bucke listed fourteen individuals as real-life examples of individuals possessing Cosmic Consciousness, and provided a second list of 36, saying that “some of them were lesser, imperfect and doubtful instances” of Cosmic Consciousness. He provided biographical sketches of many of these individuals, especially of the fourteen that he considered to be definite examples of Cosmic Consciousness. Data common to these individuals included: A reported sudden experience of “illumination” after which they exhibited intellectual, moral and spiritual enlightenment. Each of them experienced an immense joy or bliss, impossible to adequately describe, but which imbued them with the realization that they were immortal souls who could not be touched by death. This state of ecstatic illumination, even if it did not last as a permanent state of consciousness for some of them, changed their lives forever. A few, like Moses, Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul, William Blake, and Walt Whitman, apparently enjoyed Cosmic Consciousness continuously from the time of their illumination onward.

The fact that I am writing about Cosmic Consciousness in this article, immediately raises the question of whether or not I am qualified to write authentically about it. I believe I am, by virtue of personal experience, and I will present my evidence, but it is up to you, the reader, to decide for yourself whether you believe what I report is authentic knowing, or the height of the proverbial “delusion of grandeur”.

The first time I felt compelled to write about my personal experiences of inner illumination was during the years of 1970 to 1977. During that time period, I was one of the seven charter members of the Department of Interior Systems Analysis Group with headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. In my first published book, The Book of Atma, written mostly at night on an upright Underwood typewriter in a partially-finished attic room in my home in Falls Church, Virginia, and published by Libra Publishers of New York, in 1997, I described relevant personal experiences that occurred in 1951, in Texas County, Missouri, and in 1960 in Los Angeles California. I will describe those experiences briefly here, summarizing the details of the experiences, previously published elsewhere.

Note: The Book of Atma, is available on Amazon, or can be ordered directly from EJC Advantage, P.O. Box 368, Jackson, MO 63755, for $20 plus $3 for shipping anywhere in the US.

Texas County Missouri, 1951
At twilight on a summer evening, I strolled out of the yard of my parents farm home located south of the small town of Raymondville, Missouri, past a row of large double-trunk catalpa trees to the bank of a small pond. I was fourteen, and would be entering high school in Houston, Missouri in the fall. I had been reading math and physics books that summer, and was taken by the ideas of Special Relativity expounded by Albert Einstein in his little book, Relativity the Special and General Theory, a Clear Explanation that Anyone can Understand, published in 1916. I did indeed understand the Special Theory, but had become bogged down in the General Theory, which presented ideas that required an understanding of mathematical physics beyond my ability to comprehend at that time. Frustrated, I stood on the pond bank, and as the reflections of the stars began to appear on the surface of the pond, I looked up at the sky and exclaimed: “God, I want to know everything!”

The response I received was totally unexpected. It seemed as if someone had flipped a switch that turned off the normal sounds of the evening countryside: frogs, crickets, birds, etc. Those sounds were replaced almost immediately by a deep humming sound, like the thrilling sound of rushing waters. Several years later, I would learn that that sound was something called the Aum, or Om Sound in esoteric Eastern religious philosophies. With the swelling of that deep sound of the internal workings of the universe, everything around me began to glow and throb with life, a life that I now experienced as part of the conscious awareness of my own being! I accepted that experience as my answer, and vowed to become a theoretical physicist like Albert Einstein. For more detail, see pp 43-49, of The Book of Atma.

Mount Washington, Los Angeles California, 1960
On the evening of September 17th, 1960, atop Mount Washington, an outlier of the Hollywood Hills, just north of downtown Los Angeles, at the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) Mother Center, I was initiated into the venerable practice of Kriya Yoga by Sri Dayamata, then President of SRF, the organization founded by Paramahansa Yogananda in 1920. What happened during the initiation cannot be told more succinctly than the brief description that was published as part of the description of the event on page 206 of Transcendental Physics, published by Gutenberg-Richter Press, in 1977, and by toExcel Press, iuniverse, in 2000:

I beheld an inner light like nothing I had ever seen before. There was nothing vague or dream-like about this light. It was just as real as any light I have ever seen from any external source. It was golden in color, spinning rapidly, and vividly three dimensional.…The reason I am describing this event in this book is because it is an example of inner objectivity, a clear observation of an objective aspect of consciousness that I have experienced myself.”

For more detail, see The Book of Atma, p 53, and Transcendental Physics, pp 205-209.

At the end of The Book of Atma, I returned to the subject of Cosmic Consciousness. Here are some relevant excerpts:

“Knowing is all it takes. If we find our present consciousness too structured and complex to allow true knowledge and understanding to dawn, we may start by making our total existence, our every instant of consciousness, in short, every aspect of our lives, a path to cosmic consciousness. Change your perspective to see each act, each breath, each now, as an opportunity to touch Reality or God.…Realize that the real, unthinkable, indescribable Reality is always there, waiting for you to recognize your own identity. … Rest in absolute assurance of your basic unity and oneness with the Infinite. Humanity has never been anything but God asleep, entertaining Itself with dreams of shadow and light, plus and minus, pleasure and pain!
            “Enlightenment! Satori! Samadhi! Paradox of paradoxes. Nothing has been attained, and nothing has been gained, for the realization has dawned that consciousness is, and always has been Bliss. I have only recognized what already was the case. In truth, only Truth exists! The mountain is just a mountain, the flower is simply a flower. There is no dilemma, there never has been. There is no pleasure or pain, no life separate from death. There is no separateness. I simply recognize my original state, which has never actually changed. Earth life passes, a stream of images, of events, all equally important, equally unimportant. Consciousness is Bliss.

Poetic description comes closest to describing the exalted state of Cosmic Consciousness. One thinks, for instance, of William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour

William Blake was one of the prime individuals that Bucke identified as examples of Cosmic Consciousness. I would argue that not only does the beginning couplets of this poem give us a hint of the vision of an enlightened soul, but the rest of the poem, as the title suggests, implies that thoughtless actions harming other sentient beings are sure to bring about dire consequences to individuals and civilizations alike. For example, later in the poem we find:

A Horse misused upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood 
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fibre from the Brain does tear …

And, common to the thoughts of those enlightened beings is the resolution of opposites as suggested by the following lines:

A Truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent 
It is right it should be so 
Man was made for Joy & Woe 

And when this we rightly know 
Through  the World we safely go 
Joy & Woe are woven fine 
A Clothing for the Soul Devine

The American poet, Walt Whitman was one of the poets who inspired Richard Bucke and may have been the primary influence triggering Bucke’s personal experience of illumination. Bucke was said to be able to recite the entirety of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass from memory. Here are a few excerpts from Leaves of Grass:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin
of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
of suns left,)

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in
books,
I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own
funeral drest in his shroud,

And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the
earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds
the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following
it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft, but it makes a hub for the wheel'd
universe,
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and
composed before a million universes.

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each, am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God
and about death.)

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not
in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than
myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each
moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in
the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and everyone is sign'd
by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

Comment: Having read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass several times, I think that I can summarize it as follows:
I am Walt Whitman and he is me,
I am in everything, and everything is in me.

Finally, to make this discussion complete, I include the following discussion, relating gimmel, the necessary third form of reality (which is non-physical) to Cosmic Consciousness. This discussion was previously posted in part on this blog site on Sunday, September 4th, 2016, under the heading THE ECSTASY OF COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS:

Is Cosmic Consciousness real? Is it something everyone can experience? The short answer is YES! The spiritual geniuses of all ages have extolled the ecstasy of Oneness with the Infinite, and now, science is at long last on the threshold of confirming the reality of their revelations. The ultimate paradigm shift is here. But most scientists are unaware of it and, in some cases, opposed to it, because science education has slipped farther and farther in the last 50 years toward abject materialism and atheism. As a result, contemporary science has very little to say about consciousness, and virtually no awareness of the reality of the existence of Cosmic Consciousness shining forth eternally behind the façade of the physical universe.

Why has science missed the true essence of reality? The truth is, it hasn’t, - not entirely. Many hints have been there, bursting forth in the brilliance of the occasional genius, like Pythagoras, Poincare, Cantor, Fermat, Newton, Leibniz, Planck, Schrödinger and Einstein. Compelling clues are there, in the results of the insights of such geniuses; most noticeably in pure mathematics, relativity and quantum physics. Most contemporary scientists, however, blinded by the lesser light of the material success of the technological applications, miss the brilliance of the very real light of Cosmic Consciousness, shining behind all things. But this is about to change.

Why is this about to change? It is about to change because the fundamental nature of science is the search for truth, and the truth cannot be hidden by the superficial metaphysical cloud of materialism. The truth is that no physical universe could exist without the third, non-physical substance, and this third form of reality is the ray of light that illuminates new science beyond the dead-end of materialism. We call this new science the Triadic Dimensional Vortical Paradigm (TDVP). The nature of this third form is not theoretical: it is derived from particle physics data and pure mathematics. We have called this third form, possessing no mass and no energy, gimmel. The measure of the three forms, gimmel, matter and energy, is the Triadic Rotational Unit of Equivalence (TRUE), discovered by this writer and discussed on this blog and defined in Neppe-Close publications, including the e-book Reality Begins with Consciousness, available on www.BrainVoyage.com, and in a peer-reviewed article published in the IQ Nexus Journal.

It comes as no surprise to me that the ratios of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ to baryonic (normal physical matter and energy) found by the Hubble probe are virtually the same (within the limits of measurement error) as the ratios of electron and nuclear gimmel to matter and energy in the natural elements of the universe. The mathematical details of this, worked out by Dr. Neppe, are published in our IQ Nexus Journal article.

Reality is composed of TRUE quantum units of mass, energy and consciousness, these triadic structures are the building blocks of the universe, and the source of TRUE is the infinite substrate of Cosmic Consciousness, as informed by the Conveyance Equations, derived and described in several Close-Neppe, and Neppe-Close publications, including the book Reality Begins with Consciousness. The bottom line is: Reality is Consciousness, and the realization that every spark of individualized consciousness is actually a temporarily limited bubble of Cosmic Consciousness, reveals the fact that the goal of finite existence in the physical universe is the full realization of Cosmic Consciousness. And that realization is pure Ecstasy.