Every day on the streets, as we brush past each other, we drift through two conterminous worlds; one waking, the other just below the surface—the world of the unwaking. This is the pale of the felt but unseen, which functions as the gargantuan body of the iceberg whose tip is merely the conscious, phenomenal world—the world of the lie.
The brain is embodied, not separated from the human body. Without that body, the brain would be completely unmoored and deeply damaged while also experiencing endless agony from the severed inputs. An example is of amputees feeling pain in their severed limbs, now multiply that by a thousand. We sense ourselves to reside just behind our eyes because that is literarily from where we see the world. The body can survive without the cerebral cortex (as seen with lobotomies), the opposite is not true. This piece is repeating the error that the seemingly autistic Descartes made. Consciousness is a mirage to hide the fact that we are not one, but a menagerie of organs and biochemistry acting together in a way honed over billions of years. Our feelings include those generated by the "brain" matter in our digestive system.
I don't think the neurological or computer models like Y. N. Harari work. The best metaphor for mind that I can think of is HARP, a phased array which produces holographic sensations of pleasure and pain as well as thinking. These holographic feelings and sensation are are projected on Consciousness, which proves to be ultimately to be One.
Really good until it started on skyfather notions. And Byzantine rituals. It’s weird how Aboriginal concepts of spirituality are interesting but God as spirit which is what I as a Catholic understand, is “control”. A deep misunderstanding and modern interpretation. But to me as a Catholic God isn’t control or a sky man. God is spirit. And I can see a ton of analogies I can draw within my faith to Dreamtime prayer Eden and spiritual existence and all the energy of thought. Most of which comes to me without science at all but simply fascinated by our existence and being and existing in a state of prayer. Pray as though you have it already in Mark is a stark reminder of manifestation and manifestation is the understanding that we are all somehow connected to energy and able to think ourselves into something. No more or less wild a theory than Dreams and pre existence to birth.
In this present world there is a 'governor' placed on our ability to bring things into being - our thoughts must conform to the 'laws' of time/space and physics.
In the next world whatever we Intend will come into being instantaneously.
The 'next world' is everywhere present. For those who have eyes let them hear...
I have not lived a cautious life and it could be said that I'm lucky I've lasted these 69 years. In three of those brushes with death I made complex decisions which manifest maneuvers which could be said to have saved my life and it was all unconscious, the decisions and actions occurred in hiatus in my awareness. It's not amnesia, I have the memory of my awareness ending and then resuming and when awareness returned, I was aware that I'd been unaware. I estimate that the longest of those hiatus was 3 seconds. The events were: riding a motorcycle into the right headlight of an Alfa Romeo turning left in front of me after noticing the problem just about upon entering the intersection downhill at 45mph; taking control of a person threatening me with a shotgun; controlling a glider, as a student glider pilot, through a nasty bit of invisible turbulence which swept the tow plane away from the runway to the left seconds after liftoff.
In that last case I became aware again noticing my left hand darting for the tow release deciding that release would not be necessary as the tow plane was on his way back to the runway center line. This last case is also the only one where I was not aware of any danger prior to losing my awareness. I was not aware of seeing the tow plane upset, but I MUST have seen it as that is the only explanation for how I was able to maintain my position over the runway as the tow plane was about 2 seconds ahead of me. My instructor behind me was watching the control stick and his experience of the upset was the violent motions I made to maintain my position. The other thing I noticed as my awareness returned was him saying "I HAVE THE CONTROLS! … but I don't know why". What I must have done with the stick is full back-right followed immediately with full forward-left with amazingly good timing. I ended the maneuver a bit higher than the tow plane, maybe 10 feet and maybe 25 over the runway (it's hard to estimate but it was LOW, comparable to the wing spans of the airplanes), and just prior to the upset the tow plane must have been just a bit higher than me. When my awareness returned I was in straight, level, stable flight which, I think, explains the instructor's "but I don't know why".
We live three lives - one in our dreams at night, our waking life and our 'afterlife' which is the life of the world to come.
Each of these lives has different characteristics.
Our dream life seems 'real' to us while we are dreaming but is less limited than our 'waking' life.
Our 'waking' life seems 'real' to us but is usually much more constrained than our dreams by time/space and the laws of physics.
The 'afterlife' will be totally unconstrained by those laws.
Of these three lives, our waking life is in many ways the most significant.
Although it is temporary and extremely limited, it has lasting consequences which determine the quality of both, our dreams at night and our afterlife.
Our thoughts determine our lives.
Thought is real - 'physical' is the illusion.
In our dreams, everything seems 'physical' even when they change rapidly or transform in unusual ways, until we 'wake up' and realize 'it was just a dream'.
In our 'waking life', the 'physical' is particularly convincing but in reality has no more solidity, substance or permanence than in our dreams.
Don't believe me? Ask a Quantum Physicist.
In the next world it will be just as 'physical' but no longer subject to time/space or the laws of physics except as the loosest of frameworks where we so desire.
Again: Our waking life is the most significant in that the choices we make in this life determine the quality of both, our dreams and, especially and in particular, our afterlife.
And our thoughts determine our lives in all three. The thoughts we entertain in this life determine the quality of each of our lives.
Here lies the root of the problem.
First of all, we have been conditioned to see things entirely backwards, to pay attention to what goes on in the 'outer' world and consider that to be the ultimate cause of everything that takes place in our lives, when in fact, our 'outer' life is a symbolic representation of what goes on in our thoughts.
In many ways, our 'outer' life is an illusion, a mirage that has no more reality in and of itself than do our dreams.
It's not until we 'repent', which literally means 'to turn around' and begin to pay attention to our thoughts, that we begin to see how our thoughts MAKE the worlds we then experience and take for reality.
So, that's the first problem, we take the mirage for 'reality' and disregard our thoughts as the real source of our subsequent reality.
The next problem is our lack of discernment of which thoughts we freely choose to accept and entertain.
The third problem is that we are not entirely free to choose which thoughts we will accept and entertain. We have been conditioned and, even moreso, intentionally brainwashed to accept and entertain only a very narrow spectrum of thoughts, the largest percentage of which do not have our best interests in mind for us.
The fourth problem is that, not only our conscious mind, but our sub-conscious and unconscious mind also contribute to the worlds that we create and they are often at odds with each other and are filled with a 'Pandora's Box' of things we have inherited from our ancestors and acquired throughout our own personal history which do not necessarily have our best interests in mind.
In many ways we have been trained to become 'self-destruct Mynah Birds' who have been taught to go through our lives saying, "Here kitty kitty, here kitty kitty..."
These are just some of the more glaring problems with our thoughts which a genuine Spiritual Life is specifically designed to address and rectify.
This life, our 'waking life', is the place of the work. It is the place which determines the quality of our dreams, the substance of our present life and our ultimate fate outside of time/space and the laws of physics in the next world.
To mistake the 'outer' world for any sort of ultimate reality, to take it for the 'be all and end all' of life and to live accordingly is to miss the point of this life altogether and to risk our only opportunity to determine the quality of our next life which will be unlimited and last forever.
P.S. Not only our own thoughts, but we live in the midst of a 'noosphere' or, 'a sea of each other's thoughts' which all work together and contribute to the world we then experience.
And, of course, the biggest problem with our thoughts that we are faced with is the fact that we have become estranged from the 'Larger Consciousness' of God, which is everywhere present and fills all things, which would afford us an intimate means of knowing and doing all things in complete balance and harmony with All-That-Is.
This symbiotic relationship with God's Consciousness is our Birthright and the source and substance of our natural state that we have lost touch with and ought to be our primary concern!
This world is meant to be a 'stepping off place' into another kind of reality altogether where whatever we Intend comes into being instantaneously.
Our thoughts determine our lives.
In this present world there is a 'governor' placed on our ability to bring things into being - our thoughts must conform to the 'laws' of time/space and physics.
In the next world whatever we Intend will come into being instantaneously.
The 'next world' is everywhere present. For those who have eyes let them hear...
"You are in prison. If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realize that you are in prison. If you think you are free, you can't escape."
G.I. Gurdjieff
"We are luminous beings. We are perceivers. We are an awareness; we are not objects; we have no solidity. We are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description that was created to help us. We, or rather our reason, forget that the description is only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in our lifetime."
(Tales of Power)
The world we are familiar with is composed of a number of subatomic particles which are continually being created/destroyed and recreated over and over again from microsecond to microsecond...
The Hindu's consider our life in this world to be Maya, an illusion.
The Buddhists, Samsara.
It has been compared to a mirage that we are in danger of taking for reality and being mislead by.
Since we live in a 'post-Matrix' world, it is often popular to compare our life in this world to living in a Virtual Reality Computer Simulation.
This is an apt analogy although, it is perhaps more accurate to say that a computer simulation is a caricature of the world we live in.
A VR computer simulation is based on rules that are programmed into it's software in the same way that our temporary, limited life in this world is based on certain 'Laws' which are programmed into our psyche by our conditioning.
By rewriting the programming, those laws can be bent or broken entirely:
The world that we have become familiar with is a mirage and that the key to being able to 'see through' the mirage and begin to act from the real world that exists beneath the mirage, is Prayer.
The first act of a teacher is to introduce the idea that the world we think we see is only a view, a description of the world.
Accepting that seems to be one of the hardest things one can do; we are complacently caught in our particular view of the world, which compels us to feel and act as if we know everything about the world.
The secret of all this is one's attention. All of this exists only because of our attention.
The world that we have become familiar with only exists because we have been conditioned to give our attention to it in the form of the world as we have come to know it.
This limited framework with its very strict laws makes our passage through life recognizable but becomes a trap for our attention turning what is merely a useful description into a prison.
Had we been properly educated we would have learned by now that this description of the world is much more fluid and flexible than what we have been led to believe; that this world is meant to be a 'stepping off place' into another kind of reality altogether where whatever we Intend comes into being instantaneously.
As usual you wrote a long and thoughtful article. I'm unfamiliar with your sources and theories. Nonetheless I've pondered much of what you and they wrote. I've thought much about religion, tribal beliefs and prior existence/present existence/existence after life on Earth.
You wrote about the Australian Aboriginal People and their beliefs. What you wrote about grateful reverence is my belief. I no longer believe in the vengeful demanding Father Creator. A missing piece of the puzzle I worked on my entire life was found when I discovered a quote by Seneca the Younger who wrote, "Religion is believed by the common people, not believed by the wise and considered useful by rulers.".
A neurologist did a presentation where he stated we all hallucinate all the time and the hallucinations we agreed on are reality.
Thanks for your interesting post. Although I'm not a paying subscriber here, I am to Simplicius the Thinker.
I think the biggest misconception that science has not come to terms with, is time.
As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the present moving past to future. It is the basis of human culture and civilization, as narrative. Physics codifies it as measures of duration.
The reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential, actual, residual. Duration is the present, as the events coalesce and dissolve.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect. No time traveling around the fabric of spacetime, with the right portions of mathematical faerie dust.
Energy is "conserved," because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't mistake them for extensions of space, even though they are as foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, as sequence is to thought.
Different clocks can run at different rates, simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism. Nature is so diverse and yet integrated, because everything doesn't march to the beat of the same drummer. We only assume there should be some universal, Newtonian flow of time, because the function of culture is to get everyone on the same page, using the same languages, rules and measures. Organisms synchronize, ecosystems harmonize.
The energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it is the digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the information and the circulation system is feedback in the middle.
So consciousness has this love/hate relationship with order, knowledge, structure, because it is constantly building it up and breaking it down. The idea that we are most conscious when our minds have built the tightest boxes, is obvious nonsense.
Galaxies are also energy radiating out, while structure coalesces in.
Governments, as executive and regulatory function, are the nervous system of the social organism, while money and banking serve as blood and the circulation system. Currently we are at a stage of development where we realize government is a public utility, but yet to realize that banking needs to be as well. The unfortunate consequence is the banks rule, given they control the flow of energy around the community, but since government is the decision making function, hollowing it out and leaving a bunch of prostitutes to the banks in charge, whose only real use is creating the debt the banks need, the effect is to reduce the strategic, long term aptitude of society to a dish of bacteria, where any communal structural necessities, conservation or long term reasoning cannot stand in the way of monetizing everything. Profitability over quality.
As for the nonsense that our motor functions not being directly controlled by our cerebral processes, as proof of lack of "free will," must mean that flies have far more of this property called "free will," than people. The function of the thought process is to sort through our experiences, so our future reactions are better informed. Obviously scientists don't do much athletics.
What is will to be free of, anyway? Isn't the premise of will to affect and if there is no cause, how can there be effect?
The reality is that the act of determination can only occur as the present, but our scientists are a long way from understanding that.
Try telling a theoretical physicist that time is not part of some four dimensional matrix, if you want to be called a crackpot.
Remember epicycles were brilliant math, as a model of our view of the skies. Just that the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation.
Believe it or not, but science gets things wrong on occasion. Trial and error.
Just a random comment, but I love the way you write. When I was young I loved reading H.P. Lovecraft not only for the prose but also for the usage of words I had never before encountered. Your writing is similar and you write about thoughts and topics that are deep and integral to us. Keep up the great work.
The brain is embodied, not separated from the human body. Without that body, the brain would be completely unmoored and deeply damaged while also experiencing endless agony from the severed inputs. An example is of amputees feeling pain in their severed limbs, now multiply that by a thousand. We sense ourselves to reside just behind our eyes because that is literarily from where we see the world. The body can survive without the cerebral cortex (as seen with lobotomies), the opposite is not true. This piece is repeating the error that the seemingly autistic Descartes made. Consciousness is a mirage to hide the fact that we are not one, but a menagerie of organs and biochemistry acting together in a way honed over billions of years. Our feelings include those generated by the "brain" matter in our digestive system.
I don't think the neurological or computer models like Y. N. Harari work. The best metaphor for mind that I can think of is HARP, a phased array which produces holographic sensations of pleasure and pain as well as thinking. These holographic feelings and sensation are are projected on Consciousness, which proves to be ultimately to be One.
"I" am a very democratic organisms, even "my" gut bacteria (biome) get a vote...
If "they" dont like what's been eaten "they" protest, go on strike (= a gut ache)...
Often times "our" mind is so crowded by thoughts "I" drink heavily - to shut "them" up...
And "I" am sure it's "them" who're buggerizing around in "my" dreams...
The function of a motile organism is to be the center of the universe.
There's no use to motility but to enhance the center of the universe.
There's no way the organism can enhance the center of the universe
without a cartoon of the universe.
For the most primitive of motile organisms this cartoon is complete out
of the box, but for more advanced organisms it continues to develop as
part of the process of enhancing the center of the universe. In some
humans development of the cartoon of the universe continues as long as
the brain functions well enough to support that development.
The cartoon is necessary for language because it is the cartoon that
is the basis of communication, the thing communicated about. Language
promotes the transfer of bits of cartoon, sub-cartoons, between similar
cartoons, i.e. the mutual enhancement of sets of cartoons. Language is
part of the process of cartooning.
The meaning of life is dealing with the 8 billion other shitheads on the
planet. This is manifest as culture. It is the primary motivation and
influence on development of the cartoon of the universe for advanced,
motile, social organisms.
Without the meaning of life there is no use for language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-onDWTzj69w
The Great Work… continues 🧡🔥🧡
Really good until it started on skyfather notions. And Byzantine rituals. It’s weird how Aboriginal concepts of spirituality are interesting but God as spirit which is what I as a Catholic understand, is “control”. A deep misunderstanding and modern interpretation. But to me as a Catholic God isn’t control or a sky man. God is spirit. And I can see a ton of analogies I can draw within my faith to Dreamtime prayer Eden and spiritual existence and all the energy of thought. Most of which comes to me without science at all but simply fascinated by our existence and being and existing in a state of prayer. Pray as though you have it already in Mark is a stark reminder of manifestation and manifestation is the understanding that we are all somehow connected to energy and able to think ourselves into something. No more or less wild a theory than Dreams and pre existence to birth.
Great article . I wonder if you've read anything by Stephen Buhner or John Michael greer?
Our thoughts determine our lives.
In this present world there is a 'governor' placed on our ability to bring things into being - our thoughts must conform to the 'laws' of time/space and physics.
In the next world whatever we Intend will come into being instantaneously.
The 'next world' is everywhere present. For those who have eyes let them hear...
I have not lived a cautious life and it could be said that I'm lucky I've lasted these 69 years. In three of those brushes with death I made complex decisions which manifest maneuvers which could be said to have saved my life and it was all unconscious, the decisions and actions occurred in hiatus in my awareness. It's not amnesia, I have the memory of my awareness ending and then resuming and when awareness returned, I was aware that I'd been unaware. I estimate that the longest of those hiatus was 3 seconds. The events were: riding a motorcycle into the right headlight of an Alfa Romeo turning left in front of me after noticing the problem just about upon entering the intersection downhill at 45mph; taking control of a person threatening me with a shotgun; controlling a glider, as a student glider pilot, through a nasty bit of invisible turbulence which swept the tow plane away from the runway to the left seconds after liftoff.
In that last case I became aware again noticing my left hand darting for the tow release deciding that release would not be necessary as the tow plane was on his way back to the runway center line. This last case is also the only one where I was not aware of any danger prior to losing my awareness. I was not aware of seeing the tow plane upset, but I MUST have seen it as that is the only explanation for how I was able to maintain my position over the runway as the tow plane was about 2 seconds ahead of me. My instructor behind me was watching the control stick and his experience of the upset was the violent motions I made to maintain my position. The other thing I noticed as my awareness returned was him saying "I HAVE THE CONTROLS! … but I don't know why". What I must have done with the stick is full back-right followed immediately with full forward-left with amazingly good timing. I ended the maneuver a bit higher than the tow plane, maybe 10 feet and maybe 25 over the runway (it's hard to estimate but it was LOW, comparable to the wing spans of the airplanes), and just prior to the upset the tow plane must have been just a bit higher than me. When my awareness returned I was in straight, level, stable flight which, I think, explains the instructor's "but I don't know why".
We live three lives - one in our dreams at night, our waking life and our 'afterlife' which is the life of the world to come.
Each of these lives has different characteristics.
Our dream life seems 'real' to us while we are dreaming but is less limited than our 'waking' life.
Our 'waking' life seems 'real' to us but is usually much more constrained than our dreams by time/space and the laws of physics.
The 'afterlife' will be totally unconstrained by those laws.
Of these three lives, our waking life is in many ways the most significant.
Although it is temporary and extremely limited, it has lasting consequences which determine the quality of both, our dreams at night and our afterlife.
Our thoughts determine our lives.
Thought is real - 'physical' is the illusion.
In our dreams, everything seems 'physical' even when they change rapidly or transform in unusual ways, until we 'wake up' and realize 'it was just a dream'.
In our 'waking life', the 'physical' is particularly convincing but in reality has no more solidity, substance or permanence than in our dreams.
Don't believe me? Ask a Quantum Physicist.
In the next world it will be just as 'physical' but no longer subject to time/space or the laws of physics except as the loosest of frameworks where we so desire.
Again: Our waking life is the most significant in that the choices we make in this life determine the quality of both, our dreams and, especially and in particular, our afterlife.
And our thoughts determine our lives in all three. The thoughts we entertain in this life determine the quality of each of our lives.
Here lies the root of the problem.
First of all, we have been conditioned to see things entirely backwards, to pay attention to what goes on in the 'outer' world and consider that to be the ultimate cause of everything that takes place in our lives, when in fact, our 'outer' life is a symbolic representation of what goes on in our thoughts.
In many ways, our 'outer' life is an illusion, a mirage that has no more reality in and of itself than do our dreams.
It's not until we 'repent', which literally means 'to turn around' and begin to pay attention to our thoughts, that we begin to see how our thoughts MAKE the worlds we then experience and take for reality.
So, that's the first problem, we take the mirage for 'reality' and disregard our thoughts as the real source of our subsequent reality.
The next problem is our lack of discernment of which thoughts we freely choose to accept and entertain.
The third problem is that we are not entirely free to choose which thoughts we will accept and entertain. We have been conditioned and, even moreso, intentionally brainwashed to accept and entertain only a very narrow spectrum of thoughts, the largest percentage of which do not have our best interests in mind for us.
The fourth problem is that, not only our conscious mind, but our sub-conscious and unconscious mind also contribute to the worlds that we create and they are often at odds with each other and are filled with a 'Pandora's Box' of things we have inherited from our ancestors and acquired throughout our own personal history which do not necessarily have our best interests in mind.
In many ways we have been trained to become 'self-destruct Mynah Birds' who have been taught to go through our lives saying, "Here kitty kitty, here kitty kitty..."
These are just some of the more glaring problems with our thoughts which a genuine Spiritual Life is specifically designed to address and rectify.
This life, our 'waking life', is the place of the work. It is the place which determines the quality of our dreams, the substance of our present life and our ultimate fate outside of time/space and the laws of physics in the next world.
To mistake the 'outer' world for any sort of ultimate reality, to take it for the 'be all and end all' of life and to live accordingly is to miss the point of this life altogether and to risk our only opportunity to determine the quality of our next life which will be unlimited and last forever.
P.S. Not only our own thoughts, but we live in the midst of a 'noosphere' or, 'a sea of each other's thoughts' which all work together and contribute to the world we then experience.
And, of course, the biggest problem with our thoughts that we are faced with is the fact that we have become estranged from the 'Larger Consciousness' of God, which is everywhere present and fills all things, which would afford us an intimate means of knowing and doing all things in complete balance and harmony with All-That-Is.
This symbiotic relationship with God's Consciousness is our Birthright and the source and substance of our natural state that we have lost touch with and ought to be our primary concern!
This world is meant to be a 'stepping off place' into another kind of reality altogether where whatever we Intend comes into being instantaneously.
Our thoughts determine our lives.
In this present world there is a 'governor' placed on our ability to bring things into being - our thoughts must conform to the 'laws' of time/space and physics.
In the next world whatever we Intend will come into being instantaneously.
The 'next world' is everywhere present. For those who have eyes let them hear...
"You are in prison. If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realize that you are in prison. If you think you are free, you can't escape."
G.I. Gurdjieff
"We are luminous beings. We are perceivers. We are an awareness; we are not objects; we have no solidity. We are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description that was created to help us. We, or rather our reason, forget that the description is only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in our lifetime."
(Tales of Power)
The world we are familiar with is composed of a number of subatomic particles which are continually being created/destroyed and recreated over and over again from microsecond to microsecond...
The Hindu's consider our life in this world to be Maya, an illusion.
The Buddhists, Samsara.
It has been compared to a mirage that we are in danger of taking for reality and being mislead by.
Since we live in a 'post-Matrix' world, it is often popular to compare our life in this world to living in a Virtual Reality Computer Simulation.
This is an apt analogy although, it is perhaps more accurate to say that a computer simulation is a caricature of the world we live in.
A VR computer simulation is based on rules that are programmed into it's software in the same way that our temporary, limited life in this world is based on certain 'Laws' which are programmed into our psyche by our conditioning.
By rewriting the programming, those laws can be bent or broken entirely:
youthu.be/9xc00Agx8Q8
youtu.be/-bLyjGH4ZAE
The world that we have become familiar with is a mirage and that the key to being able to 'see through' the mirage and begin to act from the real world that exists beneath the mirage, is Prayer.
The first act of a teacher is to introduce the idea that the world we think we see is only a view, a description of the world.
Accepting that seems to be one of the hardest things one can do; we are complacently caught in our particular view of the world, which compels us to feel and act as if we know everything about the world.
The secret of all this is one's attention. All of this exists only because of our attention.
The world that we have become familiar with only exists because we have been conditioned to give our attention to it in the form of the world as we have come to know it.
This limited framework with its very strict laws makes our passage through life recognizable but becomes a trap for our attention turning what is merely a useful description into a prison.
Had we been properly educated we would have learned by now that this description of the world is much more fluid and flexible than what we have been led to believe; that this world is meant to be a 'stepping off place' into another kind of reality altogether where whatever we Intend comes into being instantaneously.
As usual you wrote a long and thoughtful article. I'm unfamiliar with your sources and theories. Nonetheless I've pondered much of what you and they wrote. I've thought much about religion, tribal beliefs and prior existence/present existence/existence after life on Earth.
You wrote about the Australian Aboriginal People and their beliefs. What you wrote about grateful reverence is my belief. I no longer believe in the vengeful demanding Father Creator. A missing piece of the puzzle I worked on my entire life was found when I discovered a quote by Seneca the Younger who wrote, "Religion is believed by the common people, not believed by the wise and considered useful by rulers.".
A neurologist did a presentation where he stated we all hallucinate all the time and the hallucinations we agreed on are reality.
Thanks for your interesting post. Although I'm not a paying subscriber here, I am to Simplicius the Thinker.
I think the biggest misconception that science has not come to terms with, is time.
As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the present moving past to future. It is the basis of human culture and civilization, as narrative. Physics codifies it as measures of duration.
The reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential, actual, residual. Duration is the present, as the events coalesce and dissolve.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect. No time traveling around the fabric of spacetime, with the right portions of mathematical faerie dust.
Energy is "conserved," because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't mistake them for extensions of space, even though they are as foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, as sequence is to thought.
Different clocks can run at different rates, simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism. Nature is so diverse and yet integrated, because everything doesn't march to the beat of the same drummer. We only assume there should be some universal, Newtonian flow of time, because the function of culture is to get everyone on the same page, using the same languages, rules and measures. Organisms synchronize, ecosystems harmonize.
The energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it is the digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the information and the circulation system is feedback in the middle.
So consciousness has this love/hate relationship with order, knowledge, structure, because it is constantly building it up and breaking it down. The idea that we are most conscious when our minds have built the tightest boxes, is obvious nonsense.
Galaxies are also energy radiating out, while structure coalesces in.
Governments, as executive and regulatory function, are the nervous system of the social organism, while money and banking serve as blood and the circulation system. Currently we are at a stage of development where we realize government is a public utility, but yet to realize that banking needs to be as well. The unfortunate consequence is the banks rule, given they control the flow of energy around the community, but since government is the decision making function, hollowing it out and leaving a bunch of prostitutes to the banks in charge, whose only real use is creating the debt the banks need, the effect is to reduce the strategic, long term aptitude of society to a dish of bacteria, where any communal structural necessities, conservation or long term reasoning cannot stand in the way of monetizing everything. Profitability over quality.
As for the nonsense that our motor functions not being directly controlled by our cerebral processes, as proof of lack of "free will," must mean that flies have far more of this property called "free will," than people. The function of the thought process is to sort through our experiences, so our future reactions are better informed. Obviously scientists don't do much athletics.
What is will to be free of, anyway? Isn't the premise of will to affect and if there is no cause, how can there be effect?
The reality is that the act of determination can only occur as the present, but our scientists are a long way from understanding that.
Try telling a theoretical physicist that time is not part of some four dimensional matrix, if you want to be called a crackpot.
Remember epicycles were brilliant math, as a model of our view of the skies. Just that the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation.
Believe it or not, but science gets things wrong on occasion. Trial and error.
As a great fish swims between the banks of a river as it likes,
So does the shining Self move between states of dreaming and waking.
As an eagle, weary after soaring in the sky,
Folds its wings and flies down to rest in its nest,
So the shining Self enter the state of dreamless sleep,
Where on is free of all desires. Forest Upanishad
Just a random comment, but I love the way you write. When I was young I loved reading H.P. Lovecraft not only for the prose but also for the usage of words I had never before encountered. Your writing is similar and you write about thoughts and topics that are deep and integral to us. Keep up the great work.