WHY EVERYONE SHOULD MEDITATE

 

WHY MEDITATE?

Why should scientists - or anyone else - learn how to meditate? Answer: because one cannot describe what one has not experienced, and the only thing we experience directly is our own consciousness. As human beings, most of Reality is outside of the sphere of individual consciousness. Without direct experience of Reality, one can only imagine and hypothesize about what the nature of Reality might be. That’s why the world is awash in theories about what could be, and there is a great thirst for the Reality that is.

While theories about Reality may be good, and they may be partly true, they will never explain the Reality that actually exists. Fortunately, the universe exists primarily to offer possibilities for conscious beings to  experience Reality; but, before you can have a direct experience of anything, you must dissolve the blinding bubble of belief that you have created around yourself by your own ego identification. Dissolving that illusive bubble is what meditation is all about.

I was born as Edward Roy Close in 1936, and partly because I remembered past lives in Tibet, India, the Middle East, and Europe, I chose to be a scientist this time, earned degrees in mathematics, physics, and  environmental engineering, and studied the metaphysics behind the world’s major religions on the side, so that I could learn - and/or remember -how to meditate. Unfortunately, most mainstream scientists are too ego bound at present to even consider learning how to meditate, thereby missing the main point of being conscious by limiting their investigations to the dead-end belief system of materialism. Fortunately, a few of us are beginning to see beyond the cage of our physical limitations and may eventually escape into the greater Reality of Cosmic Consciousness. I am blessed to have met some who have.

Sri Daya Mata, the President and spiritual leader of Self-Realization Fellowship was one, and she initiated me into the practice of Kirya Yoga on September 17, 1960, in Los Angeles. In the 1960’s and 70’s, while I was working for the Department of Interior in Arlington Virginia as one of the seven charter members of the Government’s first Environmental Systems Group, I wrote and/or co-authored a number of papers on the mathematical modelling of environmental systems. I also completed the first year of my PhD program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore Maryland during that time, and I wrote my first book between 1969 and 1972.  At the same time, I  was meditating daily using the Kriya techniques, and serving as the Self-Realization Meditation Group Leader in Washington DC. I called the book I was writing “The Book of Atma”. It was published by Libra Publishers in New York in 1977. In it, I tried to describe some of what I had learned from my meditation experiences.

Chapter II of the Book of Atma was about Meditation. In it I pointed out the fact that the experience of meditation is more difficult to describe than the taste of a tree-ripened mango or the exhilaration of sky diving, and that one should not confuse meditation techniques with meditation consciousness. They are two different things. The Kriya techniques, designed to align body and mind with spirit, were passed down from an age of higher mental and spiritual virtue. See The Holy Science by Sri Yukteswar Giri and The Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahamsa Yogananda, for details.

In 1989, after spending a few years in the Middle East, and some time in India, I published my second book, Infinite Continuity, a book introducing the calculus of distinctions, which  reconciles relativity with quantum theory. Before it was published, I sent a  copy of the manuscript to Stephen Hawking, asking him to review it. Being an atheist, he didn’t like it and saw it as pantheism. Infinite Continuity has been out of print for more than thirty years now because of lack of interest.  Most scientists were not willing to invest the time and effort it takes to learn a new mathematical logic linking consciousness with relativity and quantum physics – or, for that matter, even to learn how to meditate.

In 1996 at the University of Arizona, during the Tucson II conference Toward a Science of Consciousness, I presented a short infinite-descent proof of the existence of non-quantum receptors in consciousness. That presentation, along with other things I had learned in meditation, became the basis of my third book, Transcendental Physics, ISBN 0-934426-78-3, Paradigm Press, 1997, and a later edition, ISBN  0-595-09175-X was published by iUniverse in 2001.

Between sessions of the week-long meeting in Tucson, I was able to meet many of the leading thinkers in consciousness studies from all around the world. During a brief encounter with one of them, who happened to be a Nobel-Prize winning physicist, I asked him if he had started meditating yet. He reacted as if I had suggested that he should try to contact space aliens with a Ouija board! I had read some of his work, so I knew that he wouldn’t be that open-minded; but I thought since he was presenting at this meeting, he might be interested in learning how to expand his consciousness to become more self-aware and less self-absorbed! Apparently not!

The meditation consciousness that can be experienced through the regular and prolonged practice of Kriya Yoga can include the ability to descend to the quantum level of physical reality and see electrons, quarks, protons, neutrons, and atoms. This ability is known by advanced yogis as a siddhi (mental virtue) called Anima in Sanskrit. Using it, you can see that the elementary objects that make up the physical universe are not particles, they are energy vortices in the substrate of Reality. 

SOLVING THE ULTIMATE PUZZLE

 

SOLVING THE PUZZLE OF LIFE

© Copyright August 2022, Edward R Close

“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” – Niels Bohr

 

Introduction

What’s it all about? Well, actually, it is in fact, about YOU! But don’t misunderstand; it’s not about the little egoistic you, sometimes feeling befuddled, struggling like a hapless worm to survive in a hostile environment. It’s not about any of the fake personas that we have created over the course of many lifetimes to cover up the horrible fear of oblivion that grips every emerging conscious lifeform, and from which every ego so desperately desires to escape. No, not any of that nonsense. The real reason that this planet, our solar system, and the billions upon billions of galaxies and stars of the physical universe, expanding into the cosmic majesty of Infinity, and all of the experiences that are available in life, death, and beyond, exist at all, is for the sole purpose of providing you, me, and every soul in existence with opportunities for the real “I Am” to emerge from the muddy darkness of material existence into the Eternal Light of Spiritual Reality, with the full realization of our true nature as bright-shining Immortal Spiritual Beings, filled with the Love and Light of God.

In previous posts, I have taken great pains to point out that the real geniuses of science, the paradigm breakers, Albert Einstein, and Max Planck, have actually agreed with the transcendent realized masters of spirituality and believers in the perennial philosophy, when they 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 “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. …Time and space are not conditions of existence, spacetime is a model we have developed for thinking.”

 

In this post, I will carry this line of thought further, going beyond the limits of the binary thinking of contemporary science, into the tertiary quantum logic of  the Triadic Dimensional Vortical Paradigm (TDVP) and the Calculus of Dimensional Distinctions (CoDD). It is high time for humanity to break out of the materialistic binary thinking of dimensions of space and time, common for the past 3,000 years, and expand into the three, six, and nine dimensions of the quantized reality of Space, time, and consciousness in which we actually exist.

 

Let’s think about this for a minute: When we realize that science is just beginning to emerge from a period of time that included the very lowest point of mental and spiritual virtue on this planet during the last 24,000 years, as explained in The Holy Science by Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, it becomes apparent that binary thinking is a natural mode of thought and communication for the citizens of the planet when the ability to see any deeper into reality is lacking in the consciousness of human beings in general. As thought began to progress beyond the basic requirements for physical survival, and spoken language was slowly developing again for person-to-person communication, drawing, and marking on clay tablets, wood and stone was a natural way to record and supplement memory, which was unreliable and often distorted. Even up to the present time, communication is mostly two-dimensional, whether displayed on the printed page or the screen of a computer. But binary thinking and two-dimensional visualization leave a lot to be desired.

 

The low point in the current planetary time cycle of Planet Earth occurred in 499 AD, but some of the knowledge from the highest point of mental and spiritual virtue in this cycle, which occurred in 11,501 BC, was preserved in stone monuments and recorded in multi-dimensional forms of communication, the remnants of which barely survived in ancient libraries to be interpreted by a few advanced souls who reincarnated for that purpose during the darkest period of planetary time from about 700 BC to 1700 AD. Binary logic is sufficient for mechanical calculations dealing with the concepts of mathematical singularities, one-dimensional, and two-dimensional conceptual domains, but it is woefully inadequate for dealing with the realities of three or more dimensions. The science of the future will have to operate on the basis of tertiary logic and the most basic fundamental operations of arithmetic, i.e., addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, that we are taught as children, will have to be redefined for consistency with the multi-dimensional relativistic quantum calculus that is needed to describe the quantized reality in which we exist.

 

This transition to tertiary thinking is never easy in any time cycle, but it will have widespread application in logic, mathematics, and every field of science. It will also prove to be a necessary transformation in the thinking of the average citizen of human society before we can move beyond identity politics, tribalism, and bloody warfare. Current materialistic binary thinking is not only holding scientists back from even realizing that there is a need for a fundamental change in thinking, but it is also threatening to divide us in a way that could set civilization back, at least temporarily. all the way back to the stone age.

 

Fundamentally, we have to get beyond the barrier created by Bertrand Russell when he broke away from the deeper spiritual thinking of his mentor, Alfred North Whitehead, and promoted binary logic in the theory of types, with the axiom that a statement had to be either true, false, or meaningless. Ironically, the theory of types, even though it identified three types of statements, actually locked us into binary thinking because the third type was discarded as ‘meaningless’. The British logician George Spencer Brown corrected this error and published it in his book Laws of Form in the 1960s. He introduced the fourth type of statement, reflecting the self-referential imaginary numbers of pure mathematics. He described the situation as follows:

 

“In ordinary algebra, complex values (which include real numbers and the square root of minus one) are accepted as a matter of course and the more advanced techniques (of science and engineering) would be impossible without them. In Boolean algebra (and thus in all our reasoning processes) we disallow them. … At the present moment we are constrained, in our reasoning processes, to do it the way it was done in Aristotle’s day.” Brown included complex values as fundamental in the development of his calculus of indications and showed how complicated logic problems could be solved much more easily with application of the primary calculus he developed, than with contemporary binary thinking.

 

Russell acknowledged Brown’s discovery, but unfortunately, the scientific community was not ready to accept it yet, and  Brown suffered a fate somewhat similar to that of Georg Cantor, mentioned in my last post. The fact that people like Ram Das, Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, Charles Tart, and Ed Close were interested in what Brown had to say in the 1960s and 70s, caused most mainstream mathematicians and scientists of the day to shy away from his monumental work as “too esoteric” to be considered seriously. I have relied on Brown’s brilliant work and acknowledged his influence many times, from around 1980 until the present. When my research partner, Dr. Vernon Neppe tried to contact Brown to explain how we were using and extending his work in 2013 or so, he was uninterested. He was busy watching the Wimbledon tennis finals at the time, and asked in an irritated tone; “How did you get this number?” I decided to try to contact him later, in 2016, only to learn that he had passed away in August of 2015, at the age of 93.

 

I need to point out that Laws of Form did not deal with the physics of extra dimensions, even though the similarity of ‘the Form’ to atomic structure was noted, and it was suggested toward the end of the book, that leaving and reentering the form at deeper levels of dimensionality might open the door to a deeper understanding of the nature of reality. But an even more important implication of the quantum calculus of TDVP based partly on Brown’s calculus of indications, with the discovery of gimmel, is the way every conscious being may understand the mystery of life and his or her place in it. The link below will take you to a YouTube video of me talking about gimmel, “The Mysterious Component of Reality” on New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWN0rM88bUg. Click on it here or copy and paste on your browser to watch at your leisure.

 

The Puzzle of Life

In one of his most popular songs, John Denver sang a catchy line that goes like this: “Up in the morning, I’m as fit as a fiddle; coffee’s in the pot and cakes on the griddle. Life ain’t nothin’ but a funny, funny riddle! Thank God I’m a country boy!” That expresses one attitude toward life, but of course there are other possibilities. But I submit to you that this is what life is all about: solving the riddle of life and existence. What does it mean to ‘solve this puzzle’? It means resolving the paradoxes and the many polar opposites presented to us by reality, like existence and non-existence, the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small, consciousness and oblivion, stupidity and enlightenment, and life and death.

 

At some point, we have to realize that solving the puzzle of life is what we are here for, and clearly a single lifetime is insufficient for anyone to accomplish this. Many well-known people, and millions of ordinary folks, have memories of past lives that have been verified, I have memories of several, myself, but, despite the fact that the majority of the human beings on this planet profess belief in the transmigration of souls in some form, Western Civilization labors under the delusion that we are given only one life. While it is true that while portraying a specific role scripted by the DNA in the bodies we currently occupy, we have this one life to live, our souls are immortal. This truth was contained in many ancient records that survived the dark ages in the form of what we now call gnostic religious scriptures, but the Roman Emperor Justinian I forced the Bishops of the Catholic Church to remove all explicit references to the immortality of the soul from their teachings under the threat of death, for purely political reasons in his Anathemas against Origen in 553 AD. I have written about this in some detail, partly from past-life memories of that time, in Secrets of the Sacred Cube, a Cosmic Love Story, published in 2019.

 

As most of my readers know, I began my academic career as a student of the basic science of physics at the age of fourteen, inspired by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. I found the undeniable utter simplicity and experimental validation of physics totally captivating. Fortunately, as Einstein and Planck did, toward the ends of their lives, I outgrew that fascination with physicality very early in this life, realizing that there is much more to the reality we experience than matter, energy, space, and time. About a decade ago, a vocal critic of my work developing the mathematics underlying the simplicity of physics, because he was impressed with the way I applied the principles of relativity to the dynamic physical characteristics of the electron, declared that “You may have been a physicist once, but you are no longer a physicist!” Of course, he did not mean it as a compliment, but he was right. I had moved beyond the simplicity of materialism in my thinking, long ago.

 

“A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself.” – Niels Bohr

 

Laws of Form, Mathematics of Consciousness, and the Calculus of Dimensional Distinctions

The way I expanded my thinking about science and life in general, already many years ago, was by embracing the logical paradoxes and contradictions of mathematics and resolving the epitome of the opposites listed a few paragraphs above: “existence and non-existence, the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small, consciousness and oblivion, stupidity and enlightenment, life and death.” The logical method of the resolution of opposites is something I wish to convey to you in this blogpost. In other words, I would say that in order to solve the puzzle of life and existence, one must adopt the attitude of the Danish Quantum physicist Niels Bohr, who said:

 

“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.” He also said: “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”

 

The same attitude was expressed  by G. Spencer Brown, a British author and logician while discussing his book Laws of Form and his calculus of indications at a meeting in the Esalen Institute in Big Sur California in 1973. He explained to a small group of people on the leading edge of modern thought at the time that the major theme of his work was that the imaginary numbers of Boolean algebra are not really imaginary. Instead, the square root of minus one is a mathematical paradox that expresses the self-referential nature of reality and provides a way to formally expand logic beyond the limitations of simplistic binary thinking. One of the people privileged to attend that meeting, Cliff Barney, pointed out the fact that the square root of minus one is a paradox similar to the self-contradictory statement “This statement is false”. He explained it this way:

 

“The square root of minus 1 is a logical paradox; if the "1" is negative, it can't be a square, and if it's a square, it can't be negative. Nevertheless, designers use √-1 in equations while building space ships that real men then fly in. Brown, in his days as a computer engineer, used the imaginary Boolean values to devise a safety system for British Railways that operates by counting and uncounting the number of wheels passing a given point. Real trains use this system, big wheels run by faith and little wheels run by the grace of God.”

 

For more about this meeting of minds, or confusion of minds, depending on how you look at it, can be found on line by clicking on the links below.

https://www.kurtvonmeier.com/the-aum-conference and https://www.kurtvonmeier.com/who-is-g-spencer-brown-and-where-is-that-marvelous-music-coming-from

 

To be clear, the Calculus of Dimensional Distinctions, the mathematical heart of the TDVP of Close and Neppe, is the logical completion of the transformation from binary thinking to tertiary consciousness, that was started by G. Spencer Brown in Laws of Form. The triadic connection between physics, conceptual modeling, and consciousness was completed when the mathematics and physics creating the stability of the proton and the development of the TRUE quantum equivalence unit based on the mass and volume of the electron led to the discovery of the quantifiable existence of consciousness in the form of a new form of reality that is neither mass nor energy, that we call gimmel. Consciousness, at long last, has been included in the equations describing the reality. Let’s look at what this means in regard to the experience of life and death and the existence of individual conscious beings like you and me.

 

There are three ways, at this time, that individual conscious beings are reacting to being alive: 1) Some assume that life is an accidental by-product of material evolution, and that consciousness is just a temporary freak of nature. Believing this, they try to get through life with as little pain and suffering as possible and welcome the oblivion of death when it comes. 2) Some accept life as a strange, undecipherable puzzle that can’t be solved. Their mantra is: just accept it and enjoy it as much as you can whenever you can. 3) Others see life as having meaning and purpose and as an opportunity to learn and expand consciousness through the experiences of physical existence. If you’ve been reading and understanding my posts, you will know which attitude is the correct one.

    

Once we realize that the sole purpose of everything that exists, from the smallest quantum of mass and energy to the wholeness of the entire cosmos is for the spiritual development of consciousness from the bare awareness of being to the complete enlightenment of Cosmic Unity, the way we look at existence, non-existence, matter, energy, space, time, consciousness, and our own life and death, changes forever. The logical paradoxes, including the paradoxes discussed earlier, and the mathematical paradox of the square root of minus one, when resolved by growing and expanding consciousness, become doorways to the additional dimensions of reality.

 

Solving the Puzzle

When I first read Niels Bohr’s statement quoted at the beginning of this post (“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”), I couldn’t think of a single truth, profound or otherwise, that had an opposite that was also true. But once I accepted his statement that paradoxes are opportunities for progress in the expansion of consciousness and began to resolve the paradoxes of contemporary physics and mathematics, examples of what he was talking about popped up like flashes of gold nuggets in the black sand at the bottom of a prospector’s pan. For example, resolving the expanding universe paradox and the God paradox (See my July 16 and July 27 posts.) revealed the fact that the finite mind of an individual could be expanded into the bounded infinite series of the uncountable infinity of infinities of the mind of God. This meant that consciousness, in contrast with the quantized nature of physical matter and energy, is infinitely continuous. That, in turn, implies that, as conscious beings, we are all connected through the infinite continuity of spirit. Thus, the profound truth that in Spirit, we are all one and the same, and the opposite of that profound truth, the fact that every soul is unique (in terms of where that soul is on the journey from minimal awareness to Cosmic Consciousness) is also true!

 

Finally, if we adopt the attitudes of Niels Bohr and G. Spencer Brown, that logical paradox is the doorway to an expanded awareness of reality: accept the conclusions of Max Planck and Albert Einstein that matter, energy, space, and time are human ways of thinking about reality, not reality itself and that the conscious intelligent mind of God is the reality behind it all; and consistently adopt approach number 3, based on the knowledge that life has meaning and purpose as an opportunity to learn and expand your immortal consciousness through the experiences of physical existence, then, with focus, concentration, and will power, you can expand your awareness of reality by resolving the opposites of every logical paradox as they arise, see beyond the limitations of matter, energy, space, and time, and move forward during this lifetime on your own unique path to Cosmic Consciousness.

 

ERC – 8/14/2022

Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri

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.