Metaphysics

THOUGHT

/ Ken Finton / 9 Comments

by Kenneth Harper Finton ©2015

A UNIFIED THEORY OF BEING

“A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty…We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.” – Albert Einstein

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THOUGHTS

Unconscious thought needs no brain to advertise its presence.

Thought brings to light a spark, impulsive waves that creates space

and burns its way through time to start the clock of matter.

All matter thinks, as all movement is preceded by thought.

All life thinks, as life is thought made manifest in form.

All of nature thinks, as all of nature is ruled by physical laws.

We see it in the movement of the wind,

We see it in the birthing of desire,

We see it in the crackling of a fire.

Even the cosmos is a living, breathing being

that looks endlessly to propagate and create

and sifts through infinity itself to find its better half.

Our self-centered, self-reflecting species has come to believe that we are the only thing that thinks. Despite the fact that plants seek the sun and tendrils wind their way up and down, despite the fact that insects show intelligence and microbes show awareness, our limited definition of thought has hidden the truth of the world from us. We have equated our brains with our intelligence and our nervous system with our thoughts. It has not occurred to us that thought precedes essence, that the spark of thought ignited the entire big bang that we theorized made the universe itself.

All movement is preceded by thought. It is thought that causes movement. Without movement we can have no space nor time, nor existence. We can experience the truth of this statement within our own selves. In order to do something, we must first contemplate and think about it–even if the thought is unconscious thought.

What is thought?

The word thought comes from Old English þoht, or geþoht, from stem of þencan “to conceive of in the mind, consider.” [Harper, Douglas. “Etymology of Though.” Online Etymology Dictionary.]

Noesis (n.)

1820, from Greek noesis “intelligence, thought,” from noein “to have mental perception,” from noos “mind, thought.”

Mind (n.)

late 12c., from Old English gemynd “memory, remembrance, state of being remembered; thought, purpose; conscious mind, intellect, intention,” Proto-Germanic *ga-mundiz (cognates: Gothic muns “thought,” munan “to think;” Old Norse minni “mind;” German Minne (archaic) “love,” originally “memory, loving memory”), from PIE root *men- (1) “think, remember, have one’s mind aroused,” with derivatives referring to qualities of mind or states of thought (cognates: Sanskrit matih “thought,” munih “sage, seer;” Greek memona “I yearn,” mania “madness,” mantis “one who divines, prophet, seer;” Latin mens “mind, understanding, reason,” memini “I remember,” mentio “remembrance;” Lithuanian mintis “thought, idea,” Old Church Slavonic mineti “to believe, think,” Russian pamjat “memory”), meaning “mental faculty” is mid-14c. “Memory,” one of the oldest senses, now is almost obsolete except in old expressions such as bear in mind, call to mind. Mind’s eye “remembrance” is early 15c. Phrase time out of mind is attested from early 15c. To pay no mind “disregard” is recorded from 1916, American English dialect. To have half a mind to “to have one’s mind half made up to (do something)” is recorded from 1726. Mind-reading is from 1882.

Thought has been linked with the mind since the beginning of language and human communications. Consciousness is also related to the mind, as consciousness is the state of being aware of one’s own existence.

Our physicists envision a singular spot of infinitely dense particles with indescribable temperatures where all particle once congregated in unfathomable density before exploding in the big bang.

Have we failed to comprehend that it was the spark of thought that preceded the observed reality of existence and started the interconnected chains of experience that became our universe.

Experience

[ik-speer-ee-uh ns]

noun

1.   a particular instance of personally encountering or undergoing something:

2.   the process or fact of personally observing, encountering, or undergoing something:

3.    the observing, encountering, or undergoing of things generally as they occur in the course of time:

4.    knowledge or practical wisdom gained from what one has observed, encountered, or undergone:

5.    Philosophy. the totality of the cognitions given by perception; all that is perceived, understood, and remembered.

Prehension

[The term “prehension” indicates that the perceiver actually incorporates aspects of the perceived thing into itself. The term is meant to indicate a kind of perception that can be conscious or unconscious, applying to people as well as electrons.]

The march of time and space begins with prehensions of attraction and repulsion as elemental waves and particles recognize themselves and react. The reality of our world is not made of fundamental bits of matter that exist independently of one another as many believe. Reality is composed of the intermingled and entangled chains of events that make up experience.

These prehensions are felt in the most elemental of particles and waves. Particles and waves are the palpable recorded experience of thought in different states of energy and organization.

Awareness: the basis of existence

noun: awareness; plural noun: awarenesses

  1. knowledge or perception of a situation or fact.

Awareness precedes perceptions or perceptions would not exist.

In order to have prehensions and conceptions, we must have an awareness that can recognize these senses. We prove this in our own existence. If we did not have a both a conscious and an unconscious mind, we would know nothing and be nothing.

per·cep·tion

pərˈsepSH(ə)n/

noun

noun: perception; plural noun: perceptions

  1. the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses.

It is that original awareness, the primal state, that creates the process of consciousness. If it were not be present, there would be no registry or history of existence at all. The process of consciousness is the history of existence. We continually concoct existence out of nothing in every frame of time that we create.

Awareness is the precursor of consciousness. Consciousness is not a thing, but a process of self-objectification that constantly creates the world anew each moment. Through thought, awareness becomes conscious and organizes matter into being.

noun: consciousness

  1. the state of being awake and aware of one’s surroundings.
  • the awareness or perception of something by a person.plural noun: consciousnesses
  • the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world.

When contemplating infinity and the universe, there is no way to escape the concept of God. That which existed before anything and after anything, even though it be nothing, is still another concept for God. Nothing is, of course, no thing. God is not a thing as well. An empty void has no existence without a world in which to place it. Even a spirit in a world outside of time and space would need a materialized world for any material form of reality to exist. God and the world not only co-exist, but they ARE one another.

Primal awareness can be termed God. Not the God-king or God-the-Father who in his divinity imposes his will and plans upon the world, but the creator of completely free and random conceptions and experiences of unlimited potentiality.

We can describe the world as not only a work-in-progress, but a record of historical events and experiences where thoughts were made manifest and tangible by actions, recorded by the bricks and mortar of matter, and re-interpreted by the mind to formulate experience from contiguous and entangled events.

This primal awareness dwells outside of time and space. It is of another dimension that has no beginning nor end. This awareness is infinite, yet responsible for the existence of the finite. It is beyond self, beyond time and space, yet produces not only the act of consciousness, but describes and brings to being a forever changing universe of unlimited potential.

Because they are in a dimension beyond time, elemental particles like quarks exist and do not exist simultaneously. That is why they can be entangled in different times and space.  They are not in time and space until matter is created from energy. Their duration in time is temporal but their essence is eternal. Matter is the temporal recording media of experience, where events are stored and formed into experiences.

Eternal awareness, through consciousness and thought, creates the world and all the experience held within. This awareness is within us as well as without us because it is the foundation of being and the source of all things present, past and future.

It is correct to say that the world is awareness and it is correct to say that awareness is the world.  It is correct to say that awareness is God and it is correct to say that God is awareness. It is correct to say that the world is God and it is correct to say that God is the world. It is correct to say that we are the world and it is correct to say that the world is us. It is correct to say God is us and it is correct to say that we are God.

With the awareness of motion come the prehensions that precede feelings. Although awareness is outside of all things, all things exist within it by necessity because it is the foundation of all things. Awareness only exists in the now because the now, being an eternal moment, is the only time that has ever existed. All of time and space exist in the now eternally.

Per·cep·tion

noun: perception; plural noun: perceptions

  1. the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses.

Perceptions are feelings that have come to consciousness and made self aware.

Feel·ing

noun

noun: feeling; plural noun: feelings

  1. the capacity to experience the sense of touch. The sensation of touching or being touched by a particular thing.

The most elementary of things experiences the sense of touch or it would not react to or be influenced by another. Without a rudimentary sense of self, an object would never know or be influenced by another. This sense need not be intellectual, but as simple as gravitational attraction and repulsion.

All is of the mind.

Perceptions are coded into matter with chemical compounds made from elemental particles and waves, then stored, and organized into related conceptions by thought. This is the process of experience.

Thought is the eternal spark that interprets the electrical pulses and links chemical changes.

Actions are organized thoughts made manifest, as thought becomes material by recording temporal changes upon material particles and chemicals. It constantly changes the universe within us and around us.

It is all a part of an eternal process where fundamental awareness  creates and projects experience so that the world as we know it might exist and continue in this existential experience. Existence is a process, not a goal nor an end.

The external world is composed of sound and light, mediums that are in essence vibratory. The elements themselves are not solid, but composed of matter whose ultimate material nature is also vibratory.

In its purest state, virgin awareness is void of experience and thought. It is void of space and time and particles and waves. Thought is the spark that creates all matter and all space and all time. All existence is made of realized thoughts and unrealized thoughts that are the basis of future history.

Thought created the history of existence. Realized thoughts actually change the substance of matter. Matter itself is the record of thought having passed through points in space and time and imprinted the record of its passage on particles and elements, creating temporal events that become recorded experiences.

“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.” – Albert Einstein

Einstein also said:

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

 

NOTHING

THE PROBLEM WITH ENLIGHTENMENT

/ Ken Finton / 1 Comment

by Kenneth Harper Finton ©2017

meditating-dog

There is a problem with what people like to call ‘enlightenment’. No matter how much you think you might know the answers, you return to the familiar spot where you started. The world appears just as it did before. If you had a timeless experience through meditation or drugs or intellectual inquiry, then you begin to think that your timeless experience had no meaning at all and is perhaps just a function of your overtaxed nervous system. The universe and all its existential problems seem unchanged.

If you are like me with an abiding interest in cosmology and metaphysics, you check the TV shows and books about the newest particle colliders and listen closely to the latest theories that explain how the universe came into being. You check the Internet and find the links to The Standard Model [standard_model.html]. You try to comprehend what physicists are saying. You realize that they are talking about theories that are backed up with mathematical equations that are difficult to understand and almost impossible to express. The essence of the world itself remains unknowable.

Scientists look for material reasons for the world’s existence and often ignore the non-material basis of being. Until non-material awareness is recognized as the primary building block of material existence, we will not understand how our world comes into being. We see evidence of this in quantum mechanics when we find that observation is interaction and produces changes the positioning of primary particles.

We are used to equating awareness and consciousness to what we term as living things. We are not used to it being a property of elemental reactions as well. Yet, it takes awareness to even make a point. Without an awareness that is processed through interactions, there is no point at all. A primal awareness without form or mass is essential to the very birthing of the world, just as it was in our personal beginnings. Gravity, weak forces, strong forces, and magnetism are essentially like the sense of touch—pressures that are brought into being by interactions that are perceived by awareness.

Nothingness does not exist in time and space. Even a void cannot be known without awareness. This awareness is not material, but it is eternally present and is especially evident everywhere that time and space have been formed. It dwells in an unknowable dimension of zero time and zero space.

If we are fortunate enough to be healthy, well-adjusted people, then we love our lives and the identities we have chiseled out of the elements. We feel sympathy and love. We desire to bask in understanding. We feel disgust, pain, and rejection and either strike out against it or want to sleep through it. We are human and that is our lot. We live in a local universe of beginnings and endings. We muddle through change and aging, love and regret, sickness and health, joy, and sorrow.

We find that there are many myths designed to help us cope with our lot in life. All of them are illusions created by others—sometimes out of real concern, sometimes for profit and power over us. All of them are fabricated answers.

We can only take reason and logic so far. We can probe our minds and find that something is conscious. That is quite evident. We cannot be sure that this conscious and aware entity is even ourselves. We spin around the vortex in the whirlpool of time. We discover that we will never have a real answer because there is no real answer.

There is a reason for that. Logic has not really abandoned us. If our own logic and observations cannot solve the problems of existence, then nothing can.

Our only and best recourse is to trust in the logical powers of our wisdom and minds. We know there appears to be an inside and an outside to everything. If we are the inside, then the world is the outside and we have to take that necessary leap of faith to believe in its actuality. We perceive the world around us with the same tools that we perceive ourselves.

When we delve deep inside we come to realize that there is a spirit in us that is beyond time and space. It does not matter what we call it. We can call it God, Soul, Void, or any other name we might devise. When we realize that time is truly relative and the now is an instant that always exists, we begin to get an idea of what our universe is about.

There is a way to wrap up the dichotomy of being and to solve the problem of why we exist. There is a real world about us. When we come to the realization that we are here for the experience of being and this experience is formed by interactions, we should get the bigger picture.

We know experience within ourselves. We need no outside proof of the fact that we are experiencing the world. That is our greatest gift and the way to a more peaceful life without nearly so much angst and sorrow. We can reach this understanding any time we wish to do so. When we sleep or enter into an unconscious state, the ultimate nature of the universe is revealed to us.

We are all made of the same stuff. That is obvious enough. Science tells us we are shaped by elements created by the explosions of ancient stars. We achieve uniqueness and variety by being in a place where we perceive space and time. It is a dimensional experience. It is all appearance. It appears to appear, so it exists. It is that simple.

Giant centrifuges are built to recreate conditions at the birth of the universe. This is not a useless thing. We might learn to harness physical forces and profit from this kind of research. After all, we profit from harnessing the energy released by converting matter to energy, not only in atomic energy but simple things like making fires, breathing, and moving about. All life consumes and utilizes energy. Higher sciences are quite useful and can have many positive values that create warmth and comfort and ease of living.

In one sense, this understanding makes gods of us all. Not the father-mother-holy-and-divine God that almost all religions profess to believe, but an eternal—without beginning, without ending—awareness that brings experience into the world. Each one of us is a part of that experience. It is even possible that experience repeats itself in the infinity that we devise when we take our place in time and space. Information, some physicists tell  us, is stored digitally on the boundaries between the universe and that nothingness that is on the outside.  The consciousness of our persona can forget itself and beget itself again and again. We do this every night when we sleep. Awareness can perhaps take a symbolic breather and not be aware. When time and space itself is a product of dimensional viewpoints, there is no need to become emotionally upset with what is just an appearance. There is no need to take ourselves seriously if we are but bits of information like actors in a cosmic play.

We are now back where we started. Our lives are the same. The experience that we now experience continues and the problems we had yesterday continue today. The only good such understanding can do is help is to make better decisions, be more tolerant and less judgmental. It can change our hormonal balance and make us feel better in the now.

We the people of the world are the ones that place value and judgment on the valueless facts that appear in nature. We create a communal mind and a social structure that feeds and nourishes us. Perfecting that structure is what we do with our time. The universe leaves us with a billion unanswered questions. It gives us something useful to do with our limited time. Be kind. It is better than being cruel. We deem this to be so. Be proud of your spiritual awareness. Perfect the social aspect of your existence. Our time in this sector of space is short. Cherish it.

Be kind. It is better than being cruel. We deem this to be so. Be proud of your spiritual awareness. Perfect the social aspect of your existence. Our time in this sector of space is short. Cherish it.

FOR FURTHER READING:

https://heliosliterature.com/2014/12/10/whoarewe/

https://heliosliterature.com/2015/02/26/does-the-universe-have-a-brain/

https://heliosliterature.com/2015/11/13/channeling-our-world/

https://heliosliterature.com/2014/12/21/much-ado-about-nothing/

https://heliosliterature.com/2014/12/26/the-perpetua-lsearcyh-for-truth/

https://heliosliterature.com/2015/01/03/of-god-man-nature-and-zero-dimension/

https://heliosliterature.com/2015/01/05/metaphysics/

https://heliosliterature.com/2014/12/21/much-ado-about-nothing/

https://heliosliterature.com/2015/02/12/thought/

https://heliosliterature.com/2015/03/20/god-infinity-and-the-mobius-universe/

METAPHYSICS

/ Ken Finton / 6 Comments

By Kenneth Harper Finton ©2015

Adding the element of time to light passing stars forms a mesmerizing image of a funnel rhtough time as star trails paint the night sky.

Adding the element of time to light, passing stars forms a mesmerizing image of a funnel through time as star trails paint the night sky.

METAPHYSICS

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being in the world. The word comes from the Greek metá, meaning beyond and physiká, meaning physics. Metaphysics is concerned with that which is beyond physics. As such, it is not easily defined or put into words.

A metaphysician tries to clarify the fundamental ways that people can understand the world and the universe about them. They are concerned with existence, objects that are brought forth by existence, space and time, cause and effect and the possibilities that understanding these concepts can raise.

Metaphysics attempts to clarify two basic questions that have bothered thinkers since man became self-aware: 1) what is existence, what is really there, and 2) what is this ultimate existence like.

The central branch of metaphysics is called ontology. Ontology tries to determine the nature of being itself. It asks questions such as, “What does exist? What are things? What are events? What is the meaning of being? And how may being itself be classified?”

Metaphysics predates both physics and science. Originally the term science meant knowledge, but came to be seen as empirical knowledge, a learning that can be deduced from outside sources such as experiments and whose results can be duplicated. Empirical knowledge is different from rational knowledge where reason alone is considered evidence. Empirical knowledge takes an idea, a hypothesis, and performs experiments to prove the idea, reviews those experiments with others (peer review that includes adversarial opinions), then published these findings so that others may duplicate the results.

One would think that the scientific and empirical method of seeking answers is the most correct method, but some questions and ideas cannot be subject to experience and data. These are called a prori, meaning “from the earlier.” Findings based on experimentation and the scientific methods are called a posteriori, meaning “from the later.”

AWARENESS AND THE SENSES

The senses are the source or our information about objects and ourselves. This sensory input is calculated and organized to form the basis of conception. Conception itself precedes or is conceived simultaneously by consciousness, or there would be nothing of which to be cognizant.

Let us define consciousness. It is the state or quality of being aware of an external object––something other than the self. Consciousness is the ability to experience and be affected by an outer force other than the self.

The above is an apriori statement. It is not dependent upon scientific experiments or methods, but on reason and logic alone. One cannot prove consciousness. It is inferred by itself and made obvious by its own presence.

This idea has mighty implications. It places awareness before or simultaneous to the material aspect of ‘things’, acknowledges that awareness existed before or at the same time that things appeared, and places the senses as the method for interpreting the being of the object. At that moment, being is conceptualized, and thereby exists.

We may, I believe, assume that this happens at  the very birth of existence itself. We can deduce that the world is physically composed of repetItive geometric patterns that have mathematical properties. These patterns of birthing repeat continually through nature and the universe. It occurs in the most primitive levels of elemental attraction to the most significant birthing of organisms. This birthing from nothing into a physical being has happened to each of us as we gradually became aware of the world outside ourselves. We know a priori within ourselves this world that comes rushing in at our birth.

See:  https://heliosliterature.com/2014/11/15/the-world-came-roaring-in

Gnosis

Gnosis is the Greek noun for knowledge, from which we developed the English word ‘know’. It is the word ancient Greeks used for the personal knowledge that we can deduce and come to know within ourselves, rather than intellectual knowledge that comes from learning from the exterior, that outside our being. We can deduce this because it has occurred within each of us. We are aware and conscious; of this we are certain. That this gnosis (this knowledge of the self) exists in every existent thing can be assumed. In fact, we have no choice but to deduce and assume this, as we are the only existent things that we can prove to be actual. We know that gnosis is within us on a personal level. We should then deduce that this awareness it must also occur everywhere because we cannot logically prove there is anything but our own awareness and consciousness. This is where logic takes us.

The idea makes us expand the idea of the self. The awareness that created our idea of self exists in every existent thing because it is one dimensional, an element in the basic building of existence that is everywhere at all times. One dimensional existence is but a single point that is everywhere at all times by definition.

Logic and pure mathematics are a priori. They do not depend upon empirical facts to exist. Mathematics and logic exist outside of the perceived and provable methods of scientific experimentation.This does not mean that logic and mathematics are inferior to scientifically objective findings. Both are used to point to findings that scientific methods cannot probe. The two methods operate in their own distinct realms, as different from one another as the sense of sight from the sense of touch. The eye can see an object, but it cannot feel it.

Matter  must  be observed to have a placement in actuality. This should be the lesson learned in quantum mechanics. Objects are observed through the senses, especially the sense of feel, and are pulled together by gravitational and electro-magnetic fields.

From this we can deduce that the first elementary particles that took shape in time and space were made existent by awareness. The experience of awareness and is also an a priori statement that needs not be and cannot be deduced through scientific findings to be correct and true.

FOR FURTHER READING:

It does not take a brain to conceptualize an object and actualize its being, nor does awareness need a brain. See: https://heliosliterature.com/2014/10/11/what-is-in-the-mind-of-god/

WHAT IS IN THE MIND OF GOD?

/ Ken Finton / 1 Comment

Clifford-torus

by Kenneth Harper Finton ©2014

People often say, when they do not know the answer,  “Who knows what is in the mind of God?”

People say that “God knows all.”

Take the common conception of God as a divine being that creates and governs the universe. Then take all the people here on Earth – what they all are thinking, what they all have been, and what they all will be.

Imagine that God knows all that.

Then add all the other conscious forms of life on Earth, the history of the planet and solar system.

Imagine that God knows that as well.

Then realize that the Earth is a small speck of dust in a commonplace galaxy. Remember that there are trillions of stars and billions of galaxies and uncounted billions of planets.

Try to imagine a mind that knows all this.

What would it be like? One thing is certain. It would not be like the human mind. It would be more like consciousness itself.

But would God even have a Self? Is God self-aware?

What need would God have for self awareness?

Humans have self-awareness. Some animals have been shown to have self-awareness. Self-awareness is a curse and a blessing.

It creates loneliness. It creates unhappiness.

If God were self-aware, God would be lonely.

Does God get lonely?

The self only exists when there is another that exists outside. It can only be aware of the self by knowing that there is another outside that is not the self.

If God is everything then what would exist outside God for God to be self-aware?

If God isn’t everything then what is this thing outside that is not God?

What is a mind? What are the makings of a mind? Neural synapses? Connections? Electrical impulses? Fields of energy?

Some would call it a brain, but what use would a brain be for God?

A brain is far too small to hold everything unless it is an infinitely large brain. If God is everything, then God is a brain.

Perhaps we have used the wrong image. Perhaps we should use membrane instead of brain.

Could God be the membrane that binds the electrical impulses––fused, united, linked, and bound together to create thought?

And then the thought creates action?

What is this membrane made of? Electrical fields, atomic and subatomic particles?Quarks and electrons that only have a place in time and space when they are observed?

Are they only mere observations?

If so, then the observation is everything. Observation is what causes the universe to come into being. Observations are the history, the present and the future of all.

Who says that this which observes must be self-aware?

The observer does not need to be consciously self-aware. The world existed before self-awareness. The observer has no need to be self-aware.

So, as far as we can tell––and surely we know little––the universe has only had conscious self-awareness for a minute fraction of an eternal epoch. The universe has gotten along quite well for billions of years without self-awareness.

So do we live in a fraction of an eon when the mud stands up and sees that there are others outside themselves?

And does that matter at all to the mind of God that has no self and no need for a self?