Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science

 

CONTINUING WITH THE ANALYSIS OF INFINITY AND TIME

© Copyright July 2022, Edward R Close

Resuming the Discussion After a Brief Pause

Dear Reader: Last Sunday I took a break from discussing the a priori assumptions underlying our beliefs about time and infinity to celebrate the anniversary of the launching of the Science and Spirituality YouTube Channel and this blog site ten years ago, and to honor the memory of my late beloved wife, Jacquelyn Ann Hill-Close, who was my greatest supporter and helpmate for more than forty years. I also mentioned the important work of my good friend and colleague Dr. Vernon Neppe, MD, PhD, who has contributed so much to the development and promotion of these ideas. My blogposts reflect some of the work we have done together that led to the formalization of the scientific paradigm shift we call TDVP, and the philosophy of unified monism. Several others have supported this research, including people reading these posts. I want you to know that I appreciate your interest, questions, and comments very much.

So now it is time to get back to the current discussion. Our latest findings require some radical changes in human beliefs about the nature of time and infinity, so I want to discuss what those changes are, how they necessitate re-assessing the basic assumptions about the nature of reality, and how those changes will affect the way we do science and the way we live our lives. A brief re-cap of the major points of the last few posts will help us get back on track.   

Reality is the ultimate logical system that all scientific theories seek to model as accurately as they can. Paradoxes arising in any system of logic are evidence of either incorrect or incomplete a priori (self-evident) assumptions. While applying the methods of TDVP to develop and test our model reality, we reached some conclusions that are consistent with statements made by physicists Albert Einstein and Max Planck, the architects of relativity and quantum physics, toward the end of their careers.

Max Planck said: “All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force … We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind.”

And Einstein agreed with Planck. He said: “Space and time can claim no existence of their own. … What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to a point of visibility. There is no matter.”

These statements about what is behind the appearances of the physical world are, in my opinion, more important than all of the technological advances their work has inspired because they actually link modern science with ancient wisdom. In brief, that is what my posts are about: putting together the pieces of the puzzle of existence that are left over from the last high point in the natural cycles of human mental and spiritual virtue that barely survived destruction during the dark ages of materialism that lasted about 2,400 years, reaching its lowest point around 500 A.D.    

While investigating assumptions and determining how conclusions consistent with the quotes from Einstein and Planck conflict with current common beliefs, we uncovered two very interesting conflicts: The “Mind of God” paradox, described in the July 7 post, and the “Expanding Universe” paradox, in the July 16 post. Niels Bohr, another important physicist in the paradigm shift of the last century, observed that paradoxes in scientific theories are not game stoppers; they are actually wonderful opportunities to advance, because the paradoxes are only in our theories, not in reality, and paradoxes in theories can be resolved by making appropriate changes in the a priori assumptions of the system of logic supporting the theories and expanding the area of research accordingly. That is the process I am trying to articulate in these posts. The first step in this process is examination of the assumptions behind what most people believe about consciousness and the nature of reality.

In my preliminary analysis, I identified the a priori assumptions relevant to the mind of God paradox to be assumptions about the nature of time and infinity. The a priori assumptions about time and infinity are relevant because the mind of God is generally assumed to be infinite and perfect, and time is generally assumed to be flowing from past to present, to future, uniformly throughout the universe. The statements by Einstein and Planck, based on their research, as well as results of our TDVP analyses, directly contradict these assumptions.  

I began the analysis by identifying the set of axioms related to the existence and nature of infinity first, in the July 7 post. The analysis of the axioms related to infinity revealed the mind of God paradox. The relevant assumptions that led to this contradiction were identified as 1) the assumption that the perfection of the primary form of consciousness, i.e., the mind of God, the ultimate logical system, is infinite, and 2) the assumption that God is perfect. These two assumptions may both be true, but the problem that gives rise to the paradox, is a third assumption: the assumption that perfection is marred by incompleteness, i.e., that infinite perfection must be complete by definition.

If the mind of God is a consistent logical system, which it must be for science to be possible, then application of the incompleteness theorem implies that the mind of God is incomplete. This conclusion is consistent with the empirical evidence that the universe is expanding, but a 3-D universe cannot expand indefinitely unless it is expanding into absolute nothingness. But the statements of Einstein and Planck, as well as the conclusions of TDVP, imply that there is no such thing as empty space, which is the actual definition of nothingness. This is the second paradox, which I have called the expanding universe paradox. Incidentally, I touched on this paradox when I applied the primary calculus to the Olber’s paradox in my second book, Infinite Continuity published in 1990 (now out of print).

In the July 16 post, I suggested that the expanding universe paradox will not be resolved quite as easily as the Mind of God paradox because it involves expanding the axiomatic basis of the scientific model of reality to the extent where we can understand why the speed of light is the upper limit of relative motion, why there have to be extra dimensions existing beyond the three dimensions of space and one of time, and why time and space, like mass and energy, must also be quantized. This is why I referred to the resolution of the mind of God paradox, by proving that infinity is incomplete, as a potential resolution, pending the analysis of the assumptions underlying the common understanding of time. In that post, I also suggested that expansion of one’s personal consciousness to encompass the understanding of new a priori assumptions about time and infinity has interesting practical applications.

Before I can finish the analysis of the concept of time and connect the dots of the logic that leads to practical applications and resolves both of these paradoxes, I need to describe the metaphysical framework of the TDVP unified monism that became clear to us (Dr. Neppe and me) as a result of the discovery of gimmel, the empirically measurable link between the realities of spiritual consciousness and infinity to the zero-point quantum field of the physical universe.

If the structures of individual consciousness (like yours and mine), the visible finite universe, and the entire cosmos, are all subsets of the logical structures of the infinite mind of God, then a consistent unified metaphysical basis for explaining all of the conscious experiences of reality emerges, in which the infinite cosmos is perceived as identical with the mind of God, and all things that exist within the expanding universe are thoughts in the mind of God, thoughts that appear to us to be finite physical objects, materialized in the 4-D domain of spacetime.

In this philosophical and metaphysical framework, the on-going expansion of the universe is evidence of the long-term purpose of existence, which can be characterized as the opportunity for the progression of conscious beings toward physical, mental, and spiritual perfection. But for finite conscious individuals, infinite perfection in three dimensions is a forever moving target. An attainable goal, however, is the actualization of finite living organisms of mass, energy, and gimmel serving as vehicles for consciousness expansion in the nine-dimensional self-referential cosmos. These entities are expanding consciously into the nine-dimensional domain of space-time-consciousness in relatively perfect physical, astral, and causal bodies.

Spiritual Implications, Yoga Siddhis, and Remote Viewing

Quantum-level phenomena exist far below the threshold of visibility for the sense organs of human beings, but they are visible to us in astral, causal, and spiritual perception by means of the latent innate abilities of consciousness in its more advanced states. These abilities are called siddhis in the Sanskrit writings that survived from the ages of higher mental and spiritual virtue before the dark ages of materialism. At this point in the current cycle of planetary time, the average individual conscious being has not reached the level of excellence in physical, mental, and spiritual development to be able to use enhanced capabilities of advanced forms of consciousness. We may, however, have momentary glimpses of quantum and/or cosmic reality when these abilities surface in OBEs or NDEs, either spontaneously, or in meditation-induced states of altered consciousness. References to these abilities can be found in all of the ancient scriptures of the world, described as spiritual gifts in English, or as siddhis (Sanskrit), ruach menachot (Hebrew), geistige gaben (German), dons spirituels (French), daruri spirituale (Romanian), etc.

 

It should be noted that states of consciousness expansion with enhanced perception can sometimes be accessed temporarily by the ingestion of hallucinogenic substances. But this approach is NOT recommended and should be strictly avoided by most people because without proper precautions, it can lead to uncontrollable negative states of mind with serious psychological problems, even long-term debilitating mental illness. At this point in time, individuals who have succeeded in advancing permanently by interrupting the natural progress of their spiritual evolution with drugs are extremely rare. I know of only a few, and they were already significantly advanced spiritually before they used mind-altering hallucinogens.

 

On the negative side, I have personal experience with at least a dozen cases of serious psychological disorders resulting from the use of hallucinogenic substances. I was able to study two of them in some detail, and in those cases, their spiritual progress was actually reversed. Their lives were so negatively impacted that one spent the rest of his life in a mental institution, and the other died. Very sad and tragic results underlining the dangers of drug use.      

 

Remote viewing is another form of heightened extra-sensory perception worth mentioning because considerable scientific evidence is available documenting the practice of remote viewing, especially in applications developed for military surveillance (See e.g., the publications of Stepan Schwartz), and also for police investigation of difficult missing persons and murder cases. In addition, there is important new scientific evidence documenting remote quantal viewing coinciding quite well with some scriptural descriptions of spiritual powers or gifts. For more information on this, see the published report on the scientific analysis of the Besant-Leadbeater meditation viewing of atomic structure:

 

https://www.pni.org/groundbreaking/Neppe-Pokharna-Close-BESANT-IQNJ-11-3-2019-190901.pdf

 

There is evidence of people who were born with extra-sensory abilities, or who have developed them as side-effects of states of expanded consciousness achieved by practicing certain types of meditation techniques, surfacing now in popular books, as well as in scientific studies by pioneers in the fields of bio-psychophysics and other post-materialist sciences. See the website at: https://www.aapsglobal.com/

 

The Discovery of Gimmel and Verification of the TDVP Model

As explained in previous posts, gimmel, the link between physical and non-physical reality, was discovered while applying the calculus of dimensional distinctions (CoDD) and TRUE analysis within the metaphysical framework of the TDVP, in the mathematical application I call dimensional extrapolation, to determine why the proton is so stable. (TRUE is the acronym for triadic rotational units of equivalence, also called quantum equivalence units in some of our publications.)

 

Detailed TRUE analyses of various combinations of sub-atomic quantal energy vortices, - called elementary ‘particles’ in mainstream physics - have also yielded resolutions and explanations of more than fifty paradoxes, problems, and previously poorly explained processes in particle physics and quantum mechanics, with results matching experimental data. The details of some of these cases have been documented by Neppe and Close, peer-reviewed, and published. Thus, TDVP escapes the common criticism leveled at multi-dimensional theories like the ever-popular physicalist string theories that are internally consistent but produce no new information that can be tested against the empirical evidence of observation and experimental data. The proof of the existence of gimmel also improves the advantage of TDVP over other theories by providing the practical applications that I am discussing here for the first time.

 

TRUE Analysis and the Speed of Light

With many decades of training in, and practice of consciousness-expanding techniques as a Kriyaban yogi (I was initiated by Sri Daya Mata, President of Self-Realization Fellowship, and direct disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda on September 17, 1960), I have personally combined methods of practicing inner objectivity combined with the external objectivity of the scientific method to investigate reality at the quantum level. Because of this training and practice, it came as no surprise to me that there was an extremely high level of correlation between the results of the Besant-Leadbeater atomic clairvoyance experiments carried out in England between 1895 and 1932 and recent TDVP TRUE analytical results. (The Pearson-r correlation coefficient was 0.9996, with the probability of occurring by chance of less than one in a trillion.)

 

Using the yoga siddhi of making anything appear as large or small as needed, and the quantum calculus of TDVP with TRUE, to investigate the relativistic speed of light limit on acceleration, I saw how to prove the fact that, not just mass and energy, but also space and time are quantized at the quantum level of objective reality. Here is the multi-dimensional CoDD logic of the proof, reduced to contemporary mathematical notation:

 

The speed of electromagnetic radiation (light) is given by c = ∆s/∆t = 1, where ∆s and ∆t are quantum equivalence units of space and time, respectively. As we descend to the quantum level, we see that because the speed of light is constant with regard to any observer, regardless of relative motion, ∆s/∆t is equal to 1 at every level of measurement. This means that, as the observer perspective is reduced to magnify quantum phenomena, and the measures of ∆s and ∆t become smaller and smaller, they cannot shrink to zero, because the end result, 0/0 is not equal to 1. As any high school math student knows, it is mathematically undefined. Therefore, the smallest value ∆s and ∆t can reach, preserving the constancy of light speed, is one quantum equivalence unit, where one TRUE of space divided by one TRUE of time equals one: 1/1 = 1. Therefore, space and time cannot be infinitely divisible as most people assume, they are quantized at the quantum level, just like mass and energy.

 

This discussion of ancient wisdom and modern science will continue in the next post. ERC – 7/23/2022

Sri Daya Mata

NEW APPROACH PART FIFTEEN

 

FIFTEEN: TIME AFTER TIME

 Copyright 2022, Edward R. Close, PhD

My last blogpost was entitled “Messages from Reality”. The main point of the post was to say that your life, your personal reality, whether it consists predominantly of the fulfillment of hopes and dreams, or failures and disappointments, is the result of your day-to-day interaction with the world of human drama that has been going on for centuries within the space-time structure of the eternally expanding universe. That on-going world of human drama, with all of its joys and sorrows, treasures and rewards, dangers, and discomforts, may be happy and uplifting one day, and distressing and depressing the next, but, make no mistake about it, you, yourself have played the major role in making your life what it is. Your actions in the past are the cause of your present experience of life, and your actions in the present are the cause of your future state of being. You are the architect of the fate of your soul.

Sometimes, you might believe that you are an innocent victim of cruel, random circumstances, but there is no such thing as an innocent human being. The Apostle Paul spoke about this in the first century AD, when he said: “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God…” - Romans 3:21-23. “All have sinned …”  What about an infant who dies a horrible death? What about those who suffer and/or die as unavoidable collateral damage from war or other violence, in which they are not active participants? Why are some people born into poverty, disease, and depravity, while others are born into lives of health, wealth, and happiness?  The answer to questions like these is the very best kept secret of the world of human travail; but the answer is obvious once you see it: We are immortal spiritual beings who evolve spiritually over long periods of time with a modicum of free will.

Do you imagine that you were created out of nothing just a few years ago, when your mother gave birth to you? If so, then you might also imagine that you will just cease to exist when your body is no longer able to function. But that would be a miracle of the first order, since it would violate every bit of empirical evidence attesting to the general truth of the conservation of everything that exists in some form. You may ask: if consciousness is immortal, then why do most of us not consciously remember everything we have experienced in the past? The blocking of the memories of birth and death, and other traumatic experiences is simply a forgetfulness of convenience. Your subconscious mind has devised a way for your ego to protect itself from being confronted with the painful memories of past horrific experiences and regrettable actions that would overwhelm.

To resolve this paradox, we must discover the hidden history of the endless cycles of planetary time. The timeless Masters of Spiritual Consciousness have preserved the truth about the relative cycles of planetary time for us through the darkest ages of this planet and have revealed it to those who have ears to hear and eyes to see; and now science is beginning once again to uncover the subtle clues hinting at the true nature of reality, as the average mental virtue slowly increases. We, you and I, dear reader, are living in a time when science and spirituality are beginning to converge again. A wonderful time to be alive!

Humanity as a whole, however, is still a long way from the optimum point of physical, mental, and spiritual enlightenment, and the road ahead is not easy. The evil side of duality does not give up easily. Jesus underlined this sad, unfortunate truth of his time and ours, when, in the Sermon on the Mount, he advised us:

"Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

Another way of saying this is: Worrying about what might happen tomorrow is a waste of time. Not only that, wasting your valuable time and attention by thinking about an evil that you believe is likely to happen based on the facts at hand, will make it even more likely to happen, because the evil of the world is like the consciousness of a vicious animal, it senses your fear as weakness and is emboldened to attack. Focusing on the potential for good, on the other hand, however remote it may seem, repels the forces of evil. We also find this theme in the book of Job:

“For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.” Job 3:25

Evil and suffering are things we must deal with as part of the dualistic reality of human experience on this planet in order to grow spiritually, and the story of Job is a stark example of how we are tested by it. In this story, Job represents human consciousness, the concept of God represents the ultimately good purpose of reality, and the fallen angel Satan represents the evil that can befall us. Even though Job cursed the day he was born, when good allowed evil to bring pain and suffering into his life, he would not denounce the ultimate good purpose of life, and because of that, in the end, he was blessed. The moral of the story is: No matter how horrible the pain and suffering that you must endure in this life may be, never lose sight of the ultimate good and the unfathomably wonderful purpose and goal of existence and your life.

The nature of reality in this elementary school we call life on Earth, is a repetitive pattern of suffering in spacetime that seems endless. The good news is that things are slowly improving, and the fact that there is a way to transcend the patterns of planetary time all together, through the expansion of consciousness by intent, is even better news. Understanding this will help us to see the value of persevering through the pain and suffering of physical life, as Job did. To this end, a brief review of the ancient concept of planetary time cycles should be helpful.

The illusion that the progression of time is linear is an illusion of locality. It is created by the fact that the average human lifetime, whether one month, or one hundred years, is very short relative to the slow spiral of planetary time within galactic time. Like the illusion of locality of the flat earth, it is dispelled only by an expansion of consciousness, and the average awareness of human consciousness rises and falls in cycles of 24,000 years: 12,000 rising, and 12,000 falling. We are presently still 10,477 years from the next peak of human virtue, and only 1,523 years past the last lowest point in this cycle. For more detail concerning the determination of the world’s position in the cycles of planetary time, see The Holy Science, written by Sri Yukteswar Giri in 1894. The Eighth edition of this book (1990) is available from Self-Realization Fellowship. Also see Secrets of the Sacred Cube, A Cosmic Love Story, Part X, Cycles of Consciousness and Time, pages 364 – 382, Close, E.R. and J.A., 2019.

Fleeting glimpses of memories of past lives, future lives, and between lives, seen in dreams, meditation, and prayer, are products of consciousness expansion, and the increasing number of reports of near-death out-of-body experiences, heralds the beginning of the awakening of humanity to the larger reality within which the physical universe exists. And finally, the discovery of gimmel, the non-physical part of reality in the scientific framework of the TDVP quantum mathematical model, presages the expansion of science beyond the dead end of the mis-guided doctrine of materialism.

ERC – 3/17/2022 

ON THE EDGE OF INFINIY

SRF Mother Center

 

ON THE THRESHOLD

Have you ever found yourself in that curious state of consciousness existing somewhere between sleeping and waking, when you suddenly realize that you have the one and only key to the mystery of life; you have found the answer that makes perfect sense and makes everything fit together … only to have it fade away as you awaken again to the less-than-perfect world that you know as your life? If so, then perhaps you have, from the third state of consciousness, the dream state, between waking and sleeping, glimpsed the magical fourth state of consciousness, called Turiya, or Pure Consciousness.

When coming back from a deep sleep, there is a moment when you are neither here nor there, not yet awake, but not asleep either. You are lingering on the threshold. Being on a threshold is like being in a doorway. It could be between two rooms, or between inside and outside. But being on the threshold between sleeping and waking is like being between worlds. you are actually between states of consciousness. A threshold could be an entrance or an exit, depending on which way you are going. But if you stop on this threshold, and look around, you find yourself not between two worlds, but four worlds! You are at the crossroads between four states of consciousness: waking, sleeping, dreaming, and Turiya, or Pure Consciousness. This is an extremely interesting place to be!

In my last post, I mentioned that the first distinction we draw as conscious beings is the distinction between “in here” and “out there”. This awareness is with us from the beginning. But most of the time, we are only vaguely aware of being “in here”. We are almost totally focused on what’s going on “out there”. There are some very important reasons for this: One reason is simple bodily survival. With a new body, there is a necessary process of training new brain cells, forming effective neural paths that enable the body to react instinctively to threats that would result in suffering physical harm or death. And you become almost completely fascinated with what is going on “out there” because the spark of Pure Consciousness, which is the real you, has an innate desire to learn and grow, and the new brain has a lot of capacity for learning. A deeper reason for the focus on the world  “out there”, is that the embodiment of spirit to form an individual mind and soul is how Pure Consciousness experiences itself outside of itself in the distinction between self and other.

From the moment the first flicker of life in your mother’s womb attracts your spark of consciousness to inhabit a new body, until that body is fully formed and ready to survive on its own, you are very comfortable. But the moment the body is forced to draw its first breath, - your first breath as the unique new human being that you are becoming – you are on the threshold; and even then, it is the threshold between the four worlds. One: The world of bodily life, in finite physical existence; Two: The world of unconsciousness, deep sleep, and death, when body and mind are either dormant or disintegrating, Three: The dream world, when the mind is active and the body is dormant; and Four: The world of pure, infinitely continuous consciousness (Turiya) where you are aware of who and what you really are, absent both mind and body.

This new body has the somatic memory of your parents’ ancestors imprinted in its physical DNA, corresponding with your spiritual DNA, being developed through the experiences of many lives and between lives, as you continue to be drawn back into physical existence again and again to be confronted with opportunities to learn and grow spiritually. This is a process of cause and effect. The purpose is to expand your consciousness and accumulate mental, physical, and spiritual virtue. But, because you are in the process of being created in the image of Pure Consciousness, as you advance, you have an increasing amount of free will to choose between actions that will take you toward the goal of Cosmic Consciousness, allow you to linger, or even to regress back to lower levels of unconsciousness and drama.

I am not just regurgitating theories that I read in a book, or things that I heard from someone else. I remember a number of my own past lives. I wrote about several of them in The Book of Atma, published in 1977, and I have learned of several more since then. I don’t remember a great many details about many of them, and I only know the names and places in three or four. Could these memories be just somatic memories coming from my DNA, embellished by reading about the lives of others, instead of being lives I actually lived? You can decide what you choose to believe, but, actually, these memory sources are not mutually exclusive. Both could be true.

Can I prove the authenticity of my memories? Well, I do have corroborating evidence verifying some of them, but I will not use the time or space to discuss such proof here because, with the training and experience in research and analysis I’ve had in this and several past lives, I know how difficult it is to rule out all feasible alternative explanations. In order to keep this post as short and to the point as possible, I will keep relevant personal history to a minimum and focus of the subject at hand, namely the recognition of the existence and importance of a real threshold between states of consciousness that we experience on the spiritual journey, and hope that anyone reading this will see what I have to say as, at least, a convincing feasibility argument. For a more thorough discussion for and against reincarnation, see my latest book, Secrets of the Sacred Cube, a Cosmic Love Story.

I was born October 7, 1936, in a small iron mining town in the San Francois Mountains of Southern Missouri. As a child, I had an excellent memory of events all the way back to my birth and even of a few events before birth. I remember a brief meeting with a group of spiritual guides on the threshold of entering this life, and several early life experiences are still vivid in my mind. The birth process is often traumatic for both mother and child. Mine was no different in this respect, and there was some confusion during the first year of this life because of the lingering memories of several different languages, among them, dialects of  German, Latin, Greek, and ancient Egyptian, but my mother reports that I was speaking in short sentences by the age of nine months. My maternal grandmother worried about me as a baby, because, in her words: “He is too smart to live!”

I wrote poems and began to study German and Spanish while in grade school. I had a number of out-of-body experiences (OBEs) by the age of ten and discovered Einstein’s special theory of relativity at the age of fourteen. I began my formal academic career in physics and mathematics in 1955 and eventually became the first member on either side of my family, as far as I know, to earn a PhD.

In 1960, I moved to Los Angeles California and landed a job as an actuarial mathematician and Univac computer programmer. But my real motive for moving to California was to study the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda. In July of 1960, I drove from Southern Missouri straight to Los Angeles and directly to the Self-Realization Fellowship Mother Center on Mount Washington, just north of downtown LA. There I met and came to know several of the direct disciples of Swami Yogananda. On the day I drove onto the SRF grounds on San Rafael Blvd, I met with Brahmachari Mack, who had been my roommate in college, and Brahmachari Marcel, a French-speaking Swiss disciple of Swami Yogananda. Two years later, Br. Marcel took his Sannyas vows and became known as Brother Turiyananda (Joy in Pure Consciousness). Later that year, Brother Anandamoy, who was to become my spiritual counselor for many years, taught me the basic Yoga meditation techniques, and on September 17, 1960, I received my first Kriya initiation from Sri Dayamata, then President of SRF. I am sharing this brief personal history here because it is relevant to the subject of the threshold of the four states of consciousness.

At the end of the Kriya initiation that beautiful September evening on Mount Washington, after practicing the Kriya technique for the first time in this life, suddenly, I found myself  on the threshold between states of consciousness. The lights of the chakras (energy centers usually felt or seen in the spine) merged to form a ball of golden light, spinning, and vibrating in front of me, inviting me into Turiya, the fourth state of consciousness. At once I understood the meaning of being born again, and the promise of “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” And my life was changed forever.

After Infinite Continuity was published, I gave a copy to Brother Anandamoy, and he passed it on to Brother Turiyananda. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, and I received a call from Brother Turiyananda, who was in residence at Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades, asking me to come there to pick up the copy. Jacqui and I had been married in a Yogic fire ceremony at Lake Shrine thirty years before, so the Lake with the Windmill Chapel was a very special place to us. When we arrived, Brother Turiyananda met us in the parking lot and led us to some seats overlooking the lake where we could sit and talk. In his usual enthusiasm and endearing heavy French accent, he asked me some questions about three-dimensional time, and we discussed the Turiya state of consciousness and other subjects of mutual interest.

At the end of our visit, as we stood up to leave, Brother Turiyananda made a surprising statement. He said: “When I reincarnate, I would like to have you as my father!” He was ten years my senior, and sixty-four at that time, but two weeks later, we attended his memorial service at the Forest Lawn Memorial-Park in Glendale, California. The 800-seat auditorium, the Hall of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection was filled to standing room only. Sitting among SRF devotees with a sprinkling of Hollywood celebrities, I realized that Brother had known he was about to cross the threshold for the final time in this life, that afternoon at Lake Shrine.

Everyone experiences three states of consciousness: waking, sleeping, and dreaming. In general, twice per day, every morning, and every night, while going to sleep or waking from sleep, every human being on this planet passes through the threshold where the fourth state beckons, but we rarely notice. It’s easy to miss that brief flash of light and remain comfortably in the well-worn path of habit, choosing to move quickly from waking to sleep and sleep to waking, again and again. Twice in each life, we pause there a bit more, just before the trauma of birth and death.

Practical Tip

A few years ago, a Nobel Prize Laurate in physics, while reviewing some of my work, said: “Reading your writing is more like reading a magician than a mathematician. You seem to see some deeper meaning behind every equation! Mathematics just isn’t like that.” This was like an echo from a few years earlier when Stephen Hawking took a look at my manuscript for Infinite Continuity, a Theory Unifying Relativity and Quantum Physics, before it was published in 1990, and said: “I can’t imagine three dimensions of time.” At the time, I didn’t try to answer either comment. But I’ve learned a lot since then. Here’s a practical tip for anyone who wants to think on the edge: If you don’t sense something deeper behind even the most mundane thing in your life, you are not in touch with reality; you are living in a dream world of your own making. You are conflating the map with the territory. Remember, the model of reality constructed by your mind in your physical brain is never 100% consistent with reality. It can’t be, because the brain is finite, while reality is infinite.

 

Infinity, God, if you like, is behind even the most mundane thing you can see. An ant crawling across a rock, a fly on the windowsill, a tree, a cloud, a sunset … anything! The threshold, once you realize it’s there, is everywhere. Your consciousness is your doorway, and the gap between the dreaming of your finite physical life, and the dreaming of your body while asleep, is where all four worlds are momentarily available. There, on the four-fold threshold within your consciousness, if you can pause for a bit, the Light of Reality shines into your consciousness from the Kingdom of Heaven.

 

ERC- 12/03/2021

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 17^th, 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 4^th, 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.