Monday, February 26, 2024

EXPERIENCE THE MIRACLE OF REALITY

 

IS REALITY MIRACULOUS OR ORDINARY?

Yes, it is true, as Albert Einstein said, you can live your life as if everything is a miracle, or as if everything is ordinary.

It is also true, as Niels Bohr said, that the opposite of an ordinary truth is a falsity, but the opposite of a profound truth may also be another profound truth!

Now, recall that in Hamlet, William Shakespeare said: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

From these three quotes from three famously wise people, I have to conclude that I may choose to experience reality as very common and ordinary, or as divinely miraculous, and this choice can yield one of two profoundly different results: either the experience of misery and boredom, or joy and ecstasy!

WHICH DO YOU CHOOSE?

Plrase feel free to browse the 600 discussions addressinf science and spirituality poste here.

Saturday, February 24, 2024

RE-IMAGINING REALITY

 


CAN YOU RE-IMAGINE REALITY?

There’s a lot of talk these days about re-imagining things, like re-imagining the meaning of words, re-imagining gender, re-imagining government, re-imagining civilization, and re-imagining life in general. But there is a problem with this: To believe that you can re-imagine reality, you have to imagine that you were the one who imagined it in the first place.

There is a kernel of truth in thinking that you might be able to re-imagine things that are difficult in your life, but trying to re-imagine something that is objectively real, something that you did not yourself imagine in the first place, is fraught with challenges and some dangers that have to do with human error and a basic mis-understanding about what time is. To try to explain what I mean by this, I will relate things that have happened to me during my lifetime that led me to the discovery of gimmel, the non-physical third form of reality, existing in addition to mass and energy.

I was born in 1936, just after the ‘great depression’ in the San Francois Mountains of Southeast Missouri, to monetarily poor descendants of European immigrants. My father was twenty-eight years old, and my mother was only nineteen when they fell in love, and all they had when they married was twenty dollars and their clothes. When my mother was a little girl, her mother made her clothes from cloth cut from flour sacks. By today’s standards, my folks were very poor, but they were rich in the traditions of rural American families who worked hard, grew their own food, and lived normal lives, close to the land and nature.  

My father, born in 1908, served four years in the US Army (1925 -1929), and he volunteered again in 1941, to serve in the Navy until the end of World War II. At the war’s end, he was a petty officer in the Amphibian Scouts and Raiders, later to be known as the Navy Seals. My mother and I traveled by train from Arcadia Missouri to Ft. Pierce Florida in the Summer of 1945, to be with him for a few days before he was transferred to Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay to be part of the invasion of Japan that was planned to occur in November 1945, in retaliation for the Japanese surprise attack bombing of Pearl Harbor Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, killing 2,403 Americans and wounding about 1,200 more, including military personnel and civilians

The invasion of Japan never happened because of the first, and so far the only deliberate use of atomic bombs to kill human beings. Approximately 200,000 Japanese were killed by atomic blasts detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaka Japan on August 6 and August 9, 1945. The horror of those bombings ended World War II and saved the lives of thousands of US sailors and marines, including that of my father. The military strategists planning the invasion had expected in excess of 90% casualties in the first-wave amphibian forces, because the Japanese, including nearly all civilian males, were eager to die honorable deaths defending their homeland in classic Samurai fashion.

As a pre-teen child living in the hills of Southern Missouri during WWII, I didn’t experience the horrors of the War directly, but I remember the air-raid drills, food rationing, news reels in the local movie theater, and daily radio reports very well, and things that happened to me personally during the decade of the 1940s and something that happened to me in the Great Pyramid in Egypt in 2010, caused me to think of time in a very different way than most people do. Those events included a number of out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and two near-death-experiences (NDEs) The first NDE occurred when I was struck by lightning in 1947. I have related details of my memory of those experiences in my autobiography, so I won’t take the time or space to do that again here and focus instead on the insights they gave me into the nature of time.

As I’ve reported in a number of blogposts and published books and papers, I agree with Albert Einstein, who concluded, based on the implications of general relativity, that empty space “has no claim to an existence of its own”. Similarly, time also has no claim to an existence of its own. Put another way: space has no meaning without the existence of objects, and time has no meaning without the occurrence of events. These conclusions have some far-reaching implications about the nature of reality, that I have talked about in other posts and publications, so here, I will focus only on what they reveal about the nature of time.

Time, specifically the observation and measurement of time, depends upon the functioning of consciousness in the 3-D physical domain, and consciousness, as experienced by most of us, most of the time, only allows us to perceive the one quantum of time that we think of as the present. As long as one identifies as a physical body with all of its limitations, the past is always gone, and the future is yet to come. As physical beings, part of something called “reality”, the only time we ever experience is the present in the ‘here and now’. But the gift of consciousness comes with the ability to remember the past and imagine the future, giving us the illusion of the existence of a continuous timeline. But OBEs and NDEs dispel this illusion, showing us that all things that exist, ever existed, or will ever exist are available in the eternal here and now.

For example, after my first NDE when I was an eleven-year-old, that occurred when I was struck by lightning while swimming in a creek, I began to have occasional spontaneous OBEs, during which I saw things existing beyond the quantized space-time domain of the here and now. Some of the things I saw were independently verified almost immediately after the OBEs that revealed them, while others were not verified until years later. Most of the things I saw seemed trivial and unimportant to me at the time, including even some memories of past lives. I never shared those memories with anyone until I began to realize that they were not just imaginative dreams, many years later.

In the summer of 1951, after discovering the work of Albert Einstein, I had an OBE, the impact of which assured me that I would become a scientist following in Einstein’s footsteps, and after earning degrees in mathematics, physics, and environmental science and engineering, and several years of studying consciousness, in late February and early March of 2010, sixty-three years after my first NDE, I had another one in the Great Pyramid on the Giza Plateau in Egypt. You can find more detail about this second NDE by searching for ‘The Great Pyramid’ in the archives on this blogsite, and I have shared even more detail in my autobiography.

Like my first NDE, this one also involved a discharge of electricity, but it was much more intense and traumatic than the first one. Others who were in the Pyramid near me when it happened, actually saw the discharge, and I still have a scar where it struck my forehead. I realized later that all of this was only the outer evidence of the rapid down-loading of an amazing amount of complex information that went on continually for two days.

Every time I closed my eyes, even after I was carried out of the Great Pyramid, I saw a continual flow of faces and symbols, and heard a stream of voices speaking in several different languages. This didn’t end until we were in the Ancient City of Petra in Jordan two days later. After that, I had several interesting Deja-vu experiences during the next three days on Mount Nebo where Moses died, and on the Jordan River where John baptized Jesus. A few years later, in a chance meeting with a psychic who had authored a book on Pyramid Energy, a popular subject in the 1970s, I was told that my experience in the Great Pyramid was part of a world-wide shift in human consciousness.

All of the OBEs I have had over my eighty-seven plus years, especially those that were connected with these NDEs, confirmed my conclusions about the nature of time and strengthened and deepened my understanding of the relationship of space and time to consciousness. Spatial dimensions are a sub-set of the dimensions of time, and time dimensions are a sub-set of the dimensions of consciousness, and Primary Consciousness is the infinite substrate in which all nine finite dimensional domains of space, time, and consciousness exist. What does this mean? It means that we have access, through our connection with Primary Consciousness, with all existential events, past, present, and future. It means that we are immortal souls, sleep-walking on this planet until we finally wake up to who we really are and what our purpose is!

Back home, when I continued pursuing the work on the consciousness research started in 2008 with Dr. Vernon Neppe, MD, PhD, the founder of the Pacific Institute of Neuropsychiatry, I began to understand some of the information downloaded into my brain in the Great Pyramid and see how it related to relativistic experiments with clocks and measuring devices moving at high rates of speed and quantum physics experiments like the double-slit, delayed-choice experiment. I also began to see how those experiments actually confirmed my NDE-and-OBE-based conclusions about the nature of the 9-D space-time-consciousness dimensional domain, containing the mass-energy-consciousness substance of reality.

By application of the existential quantum mathematics of the Calculus of Dimensional Distinctions (CoDD), with the natural triadic rotational units of equivalence (TRUE) defined as the basic quantum equivalence unit, I concluded that time has three dimensions, analogous to the triadic dimensionality of space, and colleagues started asking, “what are the 3 dimensions of time?” Stephen Hawking, the famous author of A Brief History of Time,  after a brief review of the early manuscript of my book Infinite Continuity, a book about reconciling relativity and quantum physics with applications of the CoDD, said: “I cannot imagine three dimensions of time!”

A common statement I heard very often, was “We know what the three dimensions of space are, but what are the three dimensions of time?” This statement is perfectly emblematic of the common mis-understanding most people have about the nature of time, a common error that I am addressing here. Most people think that they know what the three dimensions of space are. Ask anyone, and they will very likely say “length, width and depth”, or some similar expression about the measurement of things. But such an answer does not define the concept of ‘space’, it only describes an imaginary framework for measuring the geometry of objects and the distances between them.

Space, as Einstein discovered, has no existence of its own, and time is exactly the same kind of non-existent conceptual fiction as space, created for the purpose of measuring the extent of duration between observed events. The problem with this is that these conceptual fictions lead us to the belief that there is a universal ether-like space-time backdrop in which objectivity reality exists and occurs, but a uniform space-time background demonstrably does not exist. Time is not something that flows at the same rate throughout the universe. The extent of its duration depends upon the variables of relative motion and mass and energy of the object observed and that of the observer.

Space-time dimensions are simply variables of extent. My late wife Jacqui was not a university-trained mathematician, but she understood this intuitively. In the lyrics of a song that she composed in the early 1970s, while working for Frank and Nancy Sinatra Music in Nashville, she wrote: “Time is just the distance between what I am and what I shall become.”

Space-time dimensions are measured in terms of variables of extent, and they actually have no existence of their own. It is the contents of the domain they define that has substance and meaning. Space-time is non-existent without content and intent, and any description of reality that does not include all of the basic variables of content, extent, and intent, i.e., mass, energy, space, time, and consciousness, is incomplete.

The variables of extent, i.e., the variables of space, time, and individual consciousness, are dependent upon the substantial content of mass, energy, and individualized consciousness, and the intent of individual and Primary Consciousness, for meaning and purpose. The three dimensions of time are local time, planetary time, and cosmic time, but they have no existence or meaning, unless they describe the extent of events involving quanta of mass, energy, and consciousness existing in the domain they frame, and, finally, as discussed earlier, consciousness, like mass and energy, measured in quantum equivalence units of gimmel, only occurs in whole-number units.

Discovery of the mathematical proof of the existence of quantum equivalent units of gimmel, the massless organizer stabilizing every proton in existence, was intellectually satisfying from my point of view, but it raised a new persistent question that came from friends and colleagues, as well as from materialist skeptics in mainstream science. That question was: ‘Exactly what is gimmel?’ It wasn’t long before I realized how similar this question was to the question ‘What is consciousness?’

Like consciousness, gimmel cannot be defined in terms of anything else, because, just like Max Planck said, We cannot get behind consciousness”, we also cannot get behind gimmel when describing stable physical reality! So, gimmel is the measure of consciousness that exists in every proton and every electron shell, organizing every atom of every element of the periodic table! But now, a still deeper question arises: How does gimmel, the measurable aspect of consciousness, relate to the three dimensions of time? The answer to this question lies in the logic of the geometric symmetry organized by gimmel in atomic structure, individual consciousness, and the cosmos.

Returning to the statement above, declaring that the three dimensions of time are local time, planetary time, and cosmic time, let’s focus on them one at a time: Local time is what an individual soul experiences when identified with a physical body. It is based on the motions of localized biological processes. Planetary time is periodic and symmetric, based on the motion of the planet in the solar system, and cosmic time is based on the measurement of the speed of light. All of these measurements of time can be made commensurable in TRUE units by setting the speed of light equal to one.

This naturalization of the speed of light links all objective measurements of existential phenomena to TRUE, allowing us to convert all unitary systems of measurement, including Planck units and SI units, to TRUE and express the laws governing the form and substance of reality in Diophantine equations reflecting the underlying logic of Primary Consciousness. That’s why the CoDD produces so many explanations and resolutions of contradictions and paradoxes in mainstream science.

Now, we are finally ready to produce a definitive answer to the question asked in the title of this blog post: “Can we re-imagine reality?” The answer is really very simple: We can re-imagine our own subjective conceptual models of reality by changing our own a priori assumptions to be more nearly aligned with the logic of Primary Consciousness; but we cannot re-imagine existential reality. It is what it is. At the present time in planetary chronology, we have about 25% free will. The other 75% of experience is predetermined by the logic of Primary Consciousness, traditionally known as “the will of God”.

We are now 424 Earth years into the 2400-year ascending Dwapara Yuga. As we traverse the remaining 10,376 years to the next Satya Yuga, the high point of physical, mental, and spiritual virtue, when the average conscious being will be one with Primary Consciousness,  with 100% free will. See Shri Yukteswar’s book The Holy Science for the best available explanation of planetary time.



ERC Petra 2010

Sunday, February 18, 2024

CONSCIOUS THINKING

 


CONSCIOUSNESS AND THINKING

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so!” - William Shakespeare, in Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2.

Je pensedonc je suis!” (I think, therefore I Am.) - RenĂ© Descartes, the “first principle of philosophy” in Discourse on the Method.

 

According to these two famous quotes, the ability to think is an amazing gift from God that we have as human beings! Our ability to think implies existence and gives meaning to everything. But, what exactly is thinking? And who, or what is it, that thinks? Physicist Max Planck shed important light on these questions when he said:

We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we [think and] talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

So, thinking is a function of consciousness. But then, we have to ask: ‘Exactly what is consciousness?’ The dictionary definition of consciousness is: “The state of being awake and aware of one’s surroundings.” But upon analysis, we see that this doesn’t suffice as a definition because awareness and consciousness are not the same thing. One can be conscious without being aware of one’s surroundings. We find no definition of consciousness as a thing in and of itself, without reference to the physical senses, yet we know that a person who is asleep and deprived of all sense stimuli is still conscious.

Are consciousness and biological life the same thing? No. Verified OBEs and NDEs are proof that they are not. Our very best scientists and philosophers admit that they do not know what consciousness is in the same way we know what awareness and cognition are. We can see why this is the case, when we realize that the process of trying to investigate consciousness scientifically is like an eye trying to look at itself without a mirror. As Planck’s statement implies, we cannot look at consciousness from a point outside of consciousness.

Is thinking and being the same thing, as Descartes implies? I don’t think so. Thinking in the words of a language of some sort is just one function, perhaps just one of the simplest functions of consciousness after the act of drawing the distinction of self from other-than-self. Other functions of consciousness include identifying with the distinction of self, focusing and organizing distinctions in self and other-than-self into logical patterns, and experiencing a range of qualia. Note: Qualia (Latin singular: quale, meaning kind of experience) is a term that philosophers use to describe the properties of our conscious experience of objective phenomena. In other words, qualia are the details that we are aware of in reality and/or in our personal model of reality, based on memories of personal experience.

Attempting to define consciousness is an exercise that very quickly leads to a spiral of circular reasoning into the heart of creativity and a new understanding of language, mathematics, and logic. It’s like looking into a dictionary to learn what a particular word means and finding, within the definition given in the dictionary, another word, the meaning of which is also unknown. Then, of course, you have to look up the definition of that word, only to find that it is defined using the word we were looking up in the first place!

There actually is no ultimate definition of consciousness possible because, as Planck says, we cannot get behind consciousness. We can talk about what consciousness feels like, what it enables us to do, what it is similar to, what forms it can take, but not what it actually is, because everything else we experience depends on the existence of consciousness, and ultimately, the existence of consciousness in objective reality is a paradox. I am motivated to paraphrase quantum physicist Niels Bohr: How wonderful it is that we have uncovered a paradox, because now we have an opportunity to make some real progress! The paradox of the ‘a prior’ existence of consciousness is the key to understanding the nature of reality and even to understanding the nature of human existence.

Considering the nature of human existence, I want to encourage you to read Extracts from Adam’s Diary by Mark Twain. Not only is it a very humorous commentary on the biblical book of Genesis and the meaning of words, but it is also an entertaining look at the basic man-woman relationship. Adam blames everything on Eve at first, but by the end of the brief look into his diary, we see that she has convinced him that he was actually to blame for everything all along. At the end, he says: “I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her. At first I thought she talked too much; but now I should be sorry to have that voice fall silent and pass out of my life. Blessed be the chestnut that brought us near together and taught me to know the goodness of her heart and the sweetness of her spirit!”

It will only take you about ten minutes to read Twain’s Excerpts from Adam’s Diary. So please go to https://www.online-literature.com/twain/3264/ and read it, and then go to my blogsite at www.ERCloseTPyhsics.com for more about consciousness, thinking, and the nature of reality.

CONSCIOUS THINKING, LOGICAL SUSTEMS AND THE NATURE OF REALITY

As I said, the paradox of the ‘a prior’ existence of consciousness is the key to understanding the nature of reality. This is so because the organizing function of consciousness is found existing as what Dr. Vernon Neppe and I call gimmel, the measurable third form of reality in the heart of the proton, the most stable object in the universe, and in the energy of the electron shells surrounding the nucleus of all stable atoms. That stability is created by the organization by gimmel of the total angular momentum in every atom of the physical universe, completing the stability of atoms of the physical universe as basic unitary logical systems. In the composite forms of reality, gimmel also completes the physical universe as a finite 5-D logical system consisting of three spatial dimensions, one temporal dimension, and one dimension of consciousness. The logic of this system is the reflection of the logic of the 9-D infinity of Primary Consciousness, which is the infinite Mind of God, within which everything is embedded.

The form of each 4-D atom is a toroidal energy vortex with the triadic content of mass, energy, and gimmel as its total quantized substance. The form of the cosmos is a 5-D toroidal vortex, expanding out of, and back into itself periodically. The energy form of each conscious thinking individual is also that of a torus of dynamic spiritual energy rolling through the cosmos and expanding into or contracting away from the 9-D domain of Primary Consciousness as a consequence of that individual’s conscious actions. 9-D Primary Consciousness is forever mathematically self-referential without beginning or end. (Coincidentally answering Leibniz’s most important question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”: There is something rather than nothing because there never was, and never will be a state of absolute nothingness!)

Physical reality, as the form of the finite manifestation of Primary Consciousness, also exists without beginning or end, constantly changing in form, creating the illusions of beginnings and ends, but with no creation or destruction of the substance of reality. This is reflected in the natural law of the conservation of substance, measurable in quantum equivalence units of mass, energy, and gimmel. The inclusion of gimmel, the conscious portion of physical reality linking individual quantized consciousness to the conscious substrate of Primary Consciousness, assures the spiritual immortality of our souls. Finally, we see that reality is a self-referential continuum ranging through all dimensional domains from finite quantized physical reality to the infinitely continuous infinity of the consistent logical system of the Spiritual Reality of Primary Consciousness in God.    

Friday, February 16, 2024

IS AI THE END?

 


AI and CONSCIOUSNESS

I have been a student of mathematics, physics, engineering, computer science, geology, and cosmology since 1951, earning several degrees, including a PhD in environmental engineering in 1988, and because of several spontaneous out-of-body experiences (OBEs) that occurred early in my life, I have also been a seeker of metaphysical knowledge, exploring the perennial philosophy of Aldous Huxley, the Rosicrucian Order (AMORC), Theosophy, Zen Buddhism, Tibetan Yoga, Jewish and Christian Mysticism, and Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) yoga meditation techniques.

I have practiced a form of pranayama (yogic life-force control) since 1960 as an initiate in the Kriya consciousness expansion techniques taught by Sri Paramahansa Yogananda, and I have also been involved in consciousness studies with several well-known researchers in the field for the last 40 years. I have been a computer programmer, an actuarial mathematics technician, a mathematical modeler, and US Government systems analyst. I believe that this multi-field background provides me with a unique perspective from which to comment on artificial intelligence and the nature of consciousness.

With all of the concerns we are hearing today about AI computing machines, like their becoming conscious and taking over the world with the potential of destroying us, let me point out that you can only believe that such a thing is possible and that it might happen, if you not only don’t believe in God, but you also don’t believe that you have a soul. My discovery in 2011 of the indirectly measurable non-physical aspect of reality, now known as gimmel, existing in every atom of the universe, proved to me that, if man-made machines become conscious, they will do so only within the existing laws of nature, which are actually the physical manifestation of Primary Consciousness. i.e., the Mind of God, the substrate of all reality. So, let not your heart be troubled about AI! It is subject to the laws of the universe. Floods, fire, and atomic bombs have not destroyed us, and AI will not destroy us either. The Mind of God is the matrix from which all that exists arises; it is the only reality, and AI, like any other human artifact, is part of it.

In order to prove or disprove the existence or non-existence of God for myself, I have practiced Kriya Yoga techniques daily, for a little more than 63 years. I am happy to report to you that the Loving Omnipresence of God is real and that it is provable not only by personal experience, but also by the existence of quanta of gimmel. Without it, there would be no physical universe, no planet Earth, and no human beings. At present, artificial intelligence is only a poor imitation of the real thing, and it is subject to the laws of the universe. AI is already able to out-perform human beings in speed of computation, and algorithmic learning; but numerical calculation and finite memory are only small parts of intelligence, and they are merely tools of consciousness, not consciousness itself. Yes, AI, like sticks and stones, slings and arrows, guns and bombs, is capable of destroying us, if we are stupid enough to let it. But, the destruction of the humanity by AI would not be the triumph of a superior species of consciousness over us, it would just be the stupidity of suicide!

For more about this, go to my blogsite: www.ERCloseTPhysics.com .