MUSINGS OF AN EVIL SKEPTIC

January 13, 2017January 14, 2017 / Ken Finton / Leave a comment

https://scriggler.com/StartClub/Post/preposterous_opinions/52435

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by Dmitry Selemir

Why I think Evil does not exist and why we should recognize this sooner rather than later

There is a good reason for using that word ‘musings’ in my title. To start, I don’t want this article to have a feel of an overly academic exercise. It wasn’t conceived nor was it constructed as such. Also, I am much more interested in the subsequent discussion and in the thought process it might stimulate rather than claim my stake on a unique piece of knowledge I supposedly put together for everyone’s benefit. Dear academics, if you are reading this, please forgive me for having a go at you, it is by no means done out of smugness or disrespect, I most certainly hold you in the highest regard possible.

But enough with the niceties, after all, we are talking about Evil.

In our modern society Evil is a pretty important concept and it became even more prominent in the academic circles in the last few decades as we are collectively trying to process the causes and consequences of major events of both the 20th and the 21st century (I will not insult your intelligence by bringing up specific examples). As far as Evil empires or axes (take your pick) are concerned — we have had a number of seemingly mutually exclusive accusations and what better place to start understanding what on Earth are they on about than understanding what they might mean by Evil?

While for most people Evil as a concept would be something primal, almost axiomatic, existing in its own right outside of our judgment, the reality is — it is relatively young. In fact, I would go as far as to state that Evil as a term made its debut, in today’s understanding of it at least, as a necessary attribute of a monotheistic belief system. Within that system, we have a supreme, perfect being, who creates the world, which we see as imperfect (i.e., there are things we don’t like or things that don’t make sense to us). The supposed imperfection of the world is a subject of a separate and a rather long discussion. I will only suggest here that, again, the reason we even talk about it today is because it is necessary for a belief system to instill the need to strive for a different way of life, dictated by one central authority. It is a fundamental feature of any organized religion, essential for both its survival and spread and that internal conflict between the desired and actual reality is key to its appeal.

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It is important for a successful religion to offer just the right blend of Love and Fear in its message in order to achieve maximum impact and the presence of that evil dark side and its consequences for non-believers and sinners is right on the money. It is not at the heart of the system, it exists at the fringes. Yet, it is ever present and it is enough to ensure you are always aware — if you deviate from the “right” path — there will be consequences.
While providing the ammunition for a successful spread of religion, it simultaneously creates a bit of a problem for the philosophers working within its paradigm — i.e., how can the world, created by the perfect being, be imperfect? Perhaps the most notable theory was suggested by Leibniz, who stated that the best possible world has the right balance between the Good and Evil and therefore in order to create the world God has to introduce both Good and Evil and that it’s all about the proportion (which, of course, God got exactly right, being the perfect being).

I am not here to challenge the understanding of Good vs. Evil relationship within the context of organized religion, however. I think the main problem is to do with the fact that it traveled into the post-religious world and is commonly used in a supposedly secular context having acquired that fundamental, universal property we attribute to it.

From a secular point of view, Evil is a purely human construct, created in order for us to classify and in a way measure events taking place around us. Moreover, I would argue that the concepts of good, bad, ugly, beautiful, moral or immoral etc., just like the concept of Evil, do not exist outside of human society. We pass our judgment on both physical phenomena like hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes (Evil in the broad sense if we use Kant’s classification) and the inter-species phenomena, i.e. actions of fellow humans or other animals (Evil in the narrow sense). We feel the need to classify the events taking place around us, this helps us arrive at the optimal mode of behavior within our environment and there is nothing wrong with it. However, extending it further and attributing a more independent and universal quality to it is a mistake, which can be rather costly as we make an erroneous assumption that everyone understands it in exactly the same way, or that there is this mysterious struggle between Good and Evil within us, influencing our decisions.

Let’s look at the broad and narrow definition separately.

The broad sense withstands no criticism. While ancient Greeks believed natural disasters happened because they displeased Gods in one way or the other, we should really know better. We know the nature and the causes of these phenomena and there is absolutely no need to give their analysis any kind of moral angle. Moreover, while the effects of these phenomena might be harmful to us, they can be absolutely vital to other species (forest fires is one example, with certain types of seeds unable to germinate without them) and even to the other members of our own species and the effect might end up being beneficial to us perhaps in a very long run, even if it is significantly longer than a lifetime. We can only give them that negative judgment in a very narrow sense — right now it is bad for me and therefore it is Evil, which makes it a purely emotional, minute construction. In fact even invoking the argument that something is Evil because it threatens our very existence is inherently flawed because our existence is only important to us. Period.

Let’s now turn to a more complex concept of Evil in the narrow sense — i.e., the moral/inter and intra-species evil, i.e., murder, theft, abuse etc.

As a species — we, humans, construct increasingly complex and theoretical concept of what constitutes good and bad, to the point that we have forgotten its origin and treat it as self-evident. As with any dogmatic concept, we inevitably find that our theoretical and idealized version fails to adequately serve the world around us. Let’s take the most fundamental and seemingly obvious one — murder. While I will concentrate on murder in my line of argument, exactly the same reasoning can be applied to any other such concept.

The first reaction is a resounding negative — murder is bad and murderers are evil, right?

Let’s have a look at it in more detail, though. Most of us have no problem with killing animals for food, those who do will have to accept that killing of animals by other animals (or fish, insects, viruses etc.) in nature is not only inevitable — it is absolutely necessary for a self-regulating biological system, not only ensuring their evolution and ability to adapt to and withstand natural disasters, but also their very survival as species. Predation is necessary for balance (and ability to process waste and avoid propagation of diseases).
If we look at our own species and killings among ourselves, we find another dilemma. For most of us not all killing is bad, otherwise, we would have never had any wars. If the cause appears fair (another peculiar concept) to us — it justifies the means and to a certain extent justifies both the killing of the enemy combatants and even the collateral damage. There are those who believe in the necessity of capital punishment. And, of course, not to be forgotten, there is the moral dilemma of euthanasia and abortion. In any case — many of us believe that some murders are justified (inviting the rather peculiar concept of necessary Evil). Note that I only lump all these together into one line of discussion, not in order to pass judgment on them, but simply because they all deal with a loss of life caused by or involving another individual.
While I am not arguing that murder is somehow good or in any way excusable — it is an inevitable feature of all societies we, as humans, managed to construct and its classification as bad and evil is also a feature of our society. In fact, we don’t have to go far back in history, even within the most “killing-averse” western society to find that the further back we go, the wider the circle of socially and morally acceptable killings becomes (take duels for example or honor killings).
One could argue that it is a natural phenomenon as it is one of the side effects of the evolutionary mechanisms built into all living things. Being highly evolved and being able to construct much more complex societal structures than any other species known to us, we strive to eradicate it. We see it as counterproductive in the long run; however, so far we have been unable to really tackle the problem. In part this is because as evolved we are as a species, we are still governed by the same instincts as our more primitive ancestors or relations in the animal kingdom. Killing a rival (or even rival’s offspring) is commonplace in nature and the reason we have departed from such practice is dictated by a more complex branch of evolution responsible for the social constructs within our society rather than a peculiar brain function. It certainly has nothing to do with the rules passed on to us from above — groups (and later tribes/villages/ countries) where the level of violence between its members has been reduced tended to be more successful, leading to their dominance and subsequent, much greater impact on our current societies.

Today, we look at most murders as purely individual undertakings — decisions made by an individual because that individual is Evil, or has more Evil than Good within his/her nature. While there is always a high degree of individual responsibility in each such action, it is also a by-product of our inability to effectively manage societies we construct. A concept of Evil is used to absolve society of all responsibility — putting all of the blame on the individual. In the process, we conveniently forget that each individual is a product of that society and in most cases interacts with that society constantly in the run-up to the fateful event itself. Perhaps this is my liberal side manifesting itself, but personally, I think attempting to always lay the blame squarely on the individual and only individual (for any type of offense) is a gross oversimplification.

It’s not all about finding who is to blame, however. This inability to understand the responsibility of societies every time something happens ensures we don’t take any steps towards eradicating the problem (or at least any significant improvement). In a way, we are always treating (and when I say treating — I mean cutting away) the symptoms only, because we seem to be unable or unwilling to study and understand the real causes. I am not suggesting that we are missing something simple here, though. Studying and understanding the causes can only be done with increased access to individual data — which means increased surveillance and redefinition of the relationship between the individual and society. This is an interesting problem in itself, however, this is outside of the scope of this particular discussion.

We also fail to understand how large groups of individuals — the whole societies can get lured into committing atrocities and we’ve had numerous examples of that happening in the 20th century. What we often forget is — most of the individuals involved actually believed they were acting against Evil, not the other way round. It’s the very understanding of the concept that was flawed.

In fact, this point deserves special attention. As a human construct the concept of Evil forms within a particular society and depends squarely on the fundamental principles taken as the basis of laws governing the relationships within these societies. The understanding of what constitutes Evil, therefore, changes from one society to another. To give one example — within the tribe which formed no concept of private property — theft (and associated with it the Evil label) simply does not exist. A person who grew up within that framework will struggle to understand why something they would do without a second thought might cause an offense.
These societies can overlap and fragments (as small as one individual in size) can exist within each other, more often than not without creating any conflicts. Unfortunately, this is not always possible. From time to time, we find ourselves clashing over specific examples when the two concepts end up producing opposite judgments. The biggest mistake we make is we always assert that our own concept is the right one and the other one is barbaric at best. It feels natural to do that, however, we often forget that the other side feels exactly the same way and the truth is — both are entirely justified within their own moral framework.
I would argue that the only way to avoid conflict is not by trying to impose our own rules on others, but by recognising the differences and limitations of our authority. This would pave the way towards agreeing on the applicability of these rules and ways of interpreting them in potential conflict situations.

Of course, it will be naive to suggest that getting rid of the concept of Evil will solve these problems. It wouldn’t stop conflicts, killings, it wouldn’t make us any kinder to each other. Yet, if we discredit the concept as an absolute, we remove this convenient excuse our leaders can fall back on — perhaps we can make it more difficult for them to justify their ill-advised actions and would force us to take a much more critical look at ourselves and encourage us to take more individual responsibility for the actions of societies we belong to. Perhaps it will also allow us to look at the world around us in a slightly different light and help prepare us for the challenges yet to come.

Up to now, we have mostly relied on either external factors (natural phenomena, like hurricanes, tsunamis, famines and diseases) or violent actions (wars, coups and revolutions) to achieve temporary balance. In other words, we have always waited until situation resolved itself. It is essentially equivalent to driving a car without the breaks because it’s bound to stop at some point by itself anyway.
While technological advances of the last two hundred years meant that the impact of the natural phenomena has decreased significantly — these same technological advances meant that the violent option became that much more devastating. Using my car analogy — the speeds are much higher now, so we are less likely to stall in the mud, but if we hit a wall — it’s game over.
With increased life expectancies, and continuing increases in population and inevitable strain on available resources we can not avoid reaching such singularity points — when resolution can not be achieved by itself. In fact — one could argue that we are in the process of dealing with one of such singularity points developing right now.

In order to develop a new mechanism for managing this process, arguably, we need a paradigm shift. Recognizing the limitations of some of these supposedly fundamental concepts could very well be the first step paving the way to a different, more effective principle on which we construct our societies and manage relationships between them.

– See more at: https://scriggler.com/DetailPost/Opinion/52435#sthash.WWKnqLTu.dpuf

DMITRY SELEMIR operates the great writer’s platform at Scriggler.com. His articles are found at https://scriggler.com/Profile/dmitry_selemir

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Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things

November 26, 2015November 26, 2015 / Ken Finton / Leave a comment

The Dark Fantastic: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

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After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as…

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Dialogue of the Nihilist and the Chaotician

June 15, 2015June 15, 2015 / Ken Finton / 3 Comments

by KD Rose

From Heavy Bags of Soul by KD Rose

Nihilist: I’ve lost faith in the Work.

Chaote: Good. What use is faith in the Work? The condition is complete continuity within complete discontinuity.

Nihilst: Yes, I know. And what good is that?

Chaote: Arbitrary perceptual intention combining with the determinism arising from absolute cause effect, creating the immensely entertaining experience of “will.”

Nihilist: That is not will. It is just arbitrary perceptions arising from environmental stimuli or cues that strike ones personal patterns, flaws, thoughts, ideas, etc that seem like patterns because they have a common perceiver.

Chaote: The things that were said to create the experience of will were not identified as will itself, you will notice. Rather, will itself seems to be best described as a bottomless self-iterating feedback loop of consciousness− the self of selflessness.

Nihilist: No, then you are saying the mere act of perceiving it is will.

Chaote: Yes.

Nihilist: That’s not true, perception is not will.

Chaote: So what is it?

Nihilist: Perception is perception, and it is false at that.

Chaote: But will is true?

Nihilist: Supposedly. I know nothing anymore.

Chaote: Seems safer that way, eh?

Nihilist: I don’t believe in anything anymore. There is nothing that one can put stake in as true. It’s not safer, it’s devastating. There is no reason to exist.

Chaote: What are you doing?

Nihilist: What do you mean?

Chaote: Now. Right now.

Nihilist: Wasting a body.

Chaote: Then what are you?

Nihilist: Nothing.

Chaote: Then how can you be wasting a body?

Nihilist: I don’t know what you mean. It doesn’t matter whether the body is illusion or not. There is some form of consciousness here. It is wasted.

Chaote: You are using your nihilism as a buffer from the actual shock of arbitrary randomness, from chaos. There is no standard for waste, or purpose. So you’re just making one up and denying it to save your sorry identity from something even more mind blowing.

Nihilist: Chaos is meaningless.

Chaote: Of course!

Nihilist: What is the standard I am supposedly making up and then denying?

Chaote: I don’t know but it must be something, otherwise the ideas of nothing and waste would seem as arbitrary and pointless to you as they do to me.

Nihilist: The standard is to have a purpose. That has been my standard. Different systems put their own words on it. My sorry identity has already perceived mind-blowing things. What else is there?

Chaote: You seem disappointed.

Nihilist: There is no reason to exist. That is rather disappointing, yes.

Chaote: You need one?

Nihilist: My current perception is that my current consciousness needs a purpose, yes.

Chaote: No wonder you’re disappointed.

Nihilist: There is connection to larger somethings, but I no longer believe in the purpose of any larger somethings either. Just more bullshit. The masturbation of the universe. Why, how do you see everything?

Chaote: As a continually self-iterating fractal, apparent order evolving out of apparent disorder, the extrapolation of arbitrary initial conditions spiraling through infinite reflections of its own shifting image.

Nihilist: Only sounds like hell to me. It feels otherwise to you?

Chaote: In order to have hell, you have to have something to compare it to.

Nihilist: Only imagination of otherwise, and imagination of a purpose to it all.

Chaote: There can be infinite purposes!

Nihilist: Infinite purposes is the same as arbitrary meaningless.

Chaote: Right on!

Nihilist: Man is ultimately only happy striving for something. And once having tossed away the material, emotional, power plays, and all the other layers of stuff to strive for, there is nothing else. Levels of attainment…enlightenment….all a sham. No ultimate thing to strive for. No purpose.

Chaote: And instead of being amused, you’re bored!

Nihilist: What do you want from your life?

Chaote: Nothing.

Nihilist: You don’t care? Do you enjoy it?

Chaote: Yes.

Nihilist: Are you saying you are Tao? Is that why?

Chaote: I am saying there is a probability that I could be anything at all.

Nihilist: But there are higher probabilities for this lifetime based on your particular situations and gifts, correct?

Chaote: Probably. Isn’t indeterminacy fun! Consciousness manifests indeterminacy. Cause effect is obviously absolute.

Nihilist: Um…. how do you say cause-effect is absolute?

Chaote: Everything is caused by something.

Nihilist: Really. And there is nothing self-created? The initial whatever must be self created, no?

Chaote: Doesn’t matter. That is just a masturbatory question.

Nihilist: Laughs

Chaote: If the initial conditions arise spontaneously, you could just as well say nothing created them.

Nihilist: I don’t wish to create an arbitrary purpose. I could, but it would be a lie. I could treat the world as a playground, but that would be just another form of lie. The only thing I can think of is that I like learning and exploring the unknown. But that would just be another game too− one that apparently has nothing at the end of it. Should I just get lost in humanness? Numb the consciousness with the veils of human life? Pretend I am not aware?

Chaote: You could start by reminding yourself that you really don’t have control of what’s happening to you.

Nihilist: What good would that do?

Chaote: Anything could potentially happen, so instead of arbitrarily identifying your awareness with this so called (non) truth of yours, just wait and see what does happen.

Nihilist: Should I look for burning bushes in the sky?

Chaote: You are hung up on this no meaning, no purpose awareness boredom repetition. It will pass.

Nihilist: Waiting for arbitrary happenings? What will it pass into next? The mouse will round the next corner of the endless maze and describe what it sees?

Chaote: Quite possibly.

Nihilist: One day, a mouse will figure out how to destroy all perception of the maze and mice. And what insights do you cast from your corner of the run? What phase, if any, are you in?

Chaote: Apparently the one where nothing actually matters and it is enjoyable.

Nihilist: Some would call that a final phase.

Chaote: I don’t know about anything being final. Out of infinite possibilities, initial conditions are chosen entirely at random. Any attempt at ultimate control is superfluous.

Nihilist: And you still say you seek nothing and just plan to enjoy arbitrary whatever?

Chaote: Yes.

Nihilist: Have you ever had communications with what people would label a higher being, or your higher self, or the universe, etc, type thing?

Chaote: Probably. Grins

Nihilist: Well how do you fit those into your paradigm of arbitrariness?

Chaote: They must have been caused by something which must be integrated into the pattern somehow, and the structure of the pattern is originated by arbitrariness.

Nihilist: So you are talking antecedents of determinism again. That would only be a theory, would it not? That the structure of the pattern is originated by arbitrariness?

Chaote: Yes, just a theory. But a meta-theory at that. The theory of theories.

Nihilist: Yes, yes, the map is not the territory, etc. But the very theory of arbitrariness would say, would it not, that the probability at some point would be that the origin would not be arbitrary.

Chaote: Yes, it would. In fact, the initial condition can never actually be observed so they might as well not exist. Pure chaos creates determinism from indeterminacy.

Nihilist: Well, that would be one name to give it. Others would be God, Self, Universe, Will, etc.

Chaote: Certainly.

Nihilist: Then the construct is just using the name chaos as another pose of the big dad in the sky, only one with no purpose.

Chaote: Except it would have no attributes in this case.

Nihilist: Oh, I don’t know. It ‘makes the origin of everything,’ ‘creates determinism from indeterminacy,’ ‘makes the structure of the pattern’…sounds like the big impartial dad of the universe to me.

Chaote: But there’s nothing actually there; it’s just a byword for a process.

Nihilist: And what is the fuel for this process?

Chaote: Information does not require fuel.

Nihilist: Information?

Chaote: Patterns.

Nihilist: Patterns and process imply movement, do they not? Or change. Otherwise there would be no patterns or determinism from indeterminacy. Movement or change implies fuel.

Chaote: That sounds Newtonian. Of course there is change, but not necessarily conversion of energy from one state to another.

Nihilist: No, not conversion of energy. But the energy needed for the movement at all…or call it inertia− the energy needed for inertia.

Chaote: And what are energy and inertia?

Nihilist: Concepts…. devised to explain other concepts.

Chaote: Right, so the point is, in the realm of concepts, it is no use to appeal to other concepts to explain how concepts themselves work. Pure information cannot depend upon energy, which is just a term of information itself. Concepts + information.

Nihilist: Perhaps, but inertia would not be the same term as energy and pattern and information could be. Inertia would describe their existence. Insomuch as all words are concepts, nevertheless, inertia describes a property.

Chaote: The tendency not to change?

Nihilist: The tendency to remain in the state that one is in….this includes movement….to go on moving in the same way.

Chaote: Isn’t that just another way of referring to the deterministic character of self-propagating systems?

Nihilist: I see no determinism in inertia. Only continual movement.

Chaote: But there has to be a cause, does there not?

Nihilist: You said yourself that origins are unknown, therefore what do they matter. I don’t agree, but that was your statement.

Chaote: The point is that motion is determined. It is not the motion I am claiming to be arbitrary, but rather the origin of the motion.

Nihilist: If the origin of the motion is arbitrary, then the motion is also arbitrary!

Chaote: Good one.

Nihilist: The things to wait for in life, as you said− all arbitrary.

Chaote: Ultimately the motion would be arbitrary, but from inside it looks like a determined system.

Nihilist: From inside?

Chaote: When perceiving pattern as a part of it.

Nihilist: ‘Pattern’ meaning what?

Chaote: Information manifesting consciously.

Nihilist: Yes, but one knows now that it is not a determined system, regardless of perception.

Chaote: Probably. Grins

Nihilist: Back to square zero. Or should I say Ouroboros.

Chaote: Best of luck in your passionate attempt at negation.

Nihilist: Passionate attempts to negate are only monumental efforts to find that which cannot be negated. Best of luck with the butterflies.

Chaote: Oh, we’ve moved on to Minkowski seagulls.

K.D. Rose is a poet and author who currently has published “Heavy Bags of Soul”, “Inside Sorrow”, “I AM”, “Erasing: Shadows”, “Anger’s Children”, and “The Brevity of Twit.”

K.D. has an eclectic mind and loves language, physics, philosophy, photography, design, art, writing, symbolism, semiotics, spirituality, and Dr. Who. KD Rose is an avid supporter of music, the arts, cutting edge science, technology, and creativity in all forms that encourage us to expand and explore past the artificial limits we often set for ourselves in order to see the everyday connections that exist among all things.

K.D. is also a spoonie and prefers to think of herself as “a spoonie on the lam.”

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1899 INTERVIEW WITH NIKOLA TESLA

May 31, 2015 / Ken Finton / Leave a comment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian American inventor, electrical engineer,mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current electricity supply system. Born: July 10, 1856, Smiljan, Croatia Died: January 7, 1943, Manhattan, New York City, NY.

Tesla gained experience in telephony and electrical engineering before immigrating to the United States in 1884 to work for Thomas Edison in New York City. He soon struck out on his own with financial backers, setting up laboratories and companies to develop a range of electrical devices. His patented AC induction motor and transformer were licensed by George Westinghouse, who also hired Tesla for a short time as a consultant. His work in the formative years of electric power development was involved in a corporate alternating current/direct current “War of Currents” as well as various patent battles. Tesla went on to pursue his ideas of wireless lighting and electricity distribution in his high-voltage, high-frequency power experiments in New York and Colorado Springs and made early (1893) pronouncements on the possibility of wireless communication with his devices. He tried to put these ideas to practical use in his ill-fated attempt at intercontinental wireless transmission, which was his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project. In his lab he also conducted a range of experiments with mechanical oscillators/generators, electrical discharge tubes, and early X-ray imaging. He also built a wireless controlled boat, one of the first ever exhibited.

Tesla was renowned for his achievements and showmanship, eventually earning him a reputation in popular culture as an archetypal “mad scientist.”His patents earned him a considerable amount of money, much of which was used to finance his own projects with varying degrees of success. He lived most of his life in a series of New York hotels, through his retirement. He died on 7 January 1943. His work fell into relative obscurity after his death, but in 1960 the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the SI unit of magnetic flux density the teslain his honor. Tesla has experienced a resurgence in interest in popular culture since the 1990s.

Interview: 1899 Nikola Tesla and John Smith (From the American magazine “Immortality“)

JOURNALIST: Mr. Tesla, you have gained the glory of the man who got involved in the cosmic processes. Who are you, Mr. Tesla?

TESLA: It is a right question, Mr. Smith, and I will try to give you the right answer to it.

JOURNALIST: Some say you’re from the country of Croatia, from the area called Lika, where together with the people are growing trees, rocks and starry sky. They say that your home village is named after the mountain flowers, and that the house, where you were born, is next to the forest and the church.

TESLA: Really, all it true. I’m proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland.

JOURNALIST: Futurists say that the 20th-and 21st centuries were born in the head of Nikola Tesla.

They celebrate conversely magnetic field and sing hymns to the Induction engine.Their creator was called the hunter who caught the light in his net from the depths of the earth, and the warrior who captured fire from heaven. Father of alternating current will make the physics and chemistry dominate half the world. Industry will proclaim him as their supreme saint, a banker for the largest benefactors. In the laboratory of Nikola Tesla for the first time is broken atom. There is created a weapon that causes the earthquake vibrations. There are discovered black cosmic rays. Five races will pray to him in the Temple of the future, because they had taught a great secret that Empedocles elements can be watered with the life forces from the ethers.

TESLA: Yes, these are some of my most important discoveries. I’m a defeated man. I have not accomplished the greatest thing I could.

JOURNALIST: What is it, Mr. Tesla?

TESLA: I wanted to illuminate the whole earth. There is enough electricity to become a second sun. Light would appear around the equator, as a ring around Saturn. Mankind is not ready for the great and good. In Colorado Springs I soaked the earth by electricity. Also we can water the other energies, such as positive mental energy. They are in the music of Bach or Mozart, or in the verses of great poets. In the Earth’s interior, there ie energy of Joy, Peace and Love. Their expressions are a flower that grows from the Earth, the food we get out of her and everything that makes man’s homeland. I’ve spent years looking for the way that this energy could influence people. The beauty and the scent of roses can be used as a medicine and the sun rays as a food. Life has an infinite number of forms, and the duty of scientists is to find them in every form of matter. Three things are essential in this. All that I do is a search for them. I know I will not find them, but I will not give up on them.

JOURNALIST: What are these things?

TESLA: One issue is food. What a stellar or terrestrial energy to feed the hungry on Earth? With what wine watered all thirsty, so that they can cheer in their heart and understand that they are Gods?

Another thing is to destroy the power of evil and suffering in which man’s life passes! They sometimes occur as an epidemic in the depths of space. In this century, the disease had spread from Earth in the Universe.

The third thing is: Is there an excess Light in the Universe? I discovered a star that by all the astronomical and mathematical laws could disappear, and that nothing seems to be modified. This star is in this galaxy. Its light can occur in such density that fits into a sphere smaller than an apple, a heavier than our Solar System. Religions and philosophies teach that man can become the Christ, Buddha and Zoroaster. What I’m trying to prove is wilder, and almost unattainable. This is what to do in the Universe so every being is born as Christ, Buddha or Zoroaster.

I know that gravity is prone to everything you need to fly and my intention is not to make flying devices (aircraft or missiles), but teach individual to regain consciousness on his own wings … Further; I am trying to awake the energy contained in the air. There are the main sources of energy. What is considered as empty space is just a manifestation of matter that is not awakened. No empty space on this planet, nor in the Universe.. In black holes, what astronomers talk about, are the most powerful sources of energy and life.

JOURNALIST: On the window of your room in hotel “Valdorf-Astoria”, on the thirty-third floor, every morning, the birds arrive.

TESLA: A man must be sentimental towards the birds. This is because of their wings. Human had them once, the real and visible!

JOURNALIST: You have not stopped flying since those distant days in Smiljan!

TESLA: I wanted to fly from the roof and I fell. Children’s calculations could be wrong. Remember, the youth wings have everything in life!

JOURNALIST: Have you ever married? It is not known that you have affection for love or for a woman. Photos from the youth show you were handsome man.

TESLA: Yes. I did not. There are two views: a lot affection or not at all. The center serves to rejuvenate human race. Women for certain people nurtures and strengthen its vitality and spirit. Being single does the same to other people. I chose that second path.

JOURNALIST: Your admirers are complaining that you attacking relativity. The strange is your assertion that the matter has no energy. Everything is imbued with energy, where it is?

TESLA: First was energy, then matter.

JOURNALIST: Mr. Tesla, it’s like when you said that you were born by your father, and not on you.

TESLA: Exactly! What about the birth of the Universe? Matter is created from the original and eternal energy that we know as Light. It shone, and there have been appear star, the planets, man, and everything on the Earth and in the Universe. Matter is an expression of infinite forms of Light, because energy is older than it. There are four laws of Creation. The first is that the source of all the baffling, dark plot that the mind cannot conceive, or mathematics measure. In that plot fit the whole Universe. The second law is spreading a darkness, which is the true nature of Light, from the inexplicable and it’s transformed into the Light. The third law is the necessity of the Light to become a matter of Light. The fourth law is: no beginning and no end; three previous laws always take place and the Creation is eternal.

JOURNALIST: In the hostility to the theory of relativity you go so far, that you hold lectures against its Creator at your birthday parties.

TESLA: Remember, it is not curved space, but the human mind which cannot comprehend infinity and eternity! If relativity has been clearly understood by its Creator, he would gain immortality, even yet physically, if he is pleased.

I am part of a light, and it is the music. The Light fills my six senses: I see it, hear, feel, smell, touch and think. Thinking of it means my sixth sense. Particles of Light are written note. A bolt of lightning can be an entire sonata. A thousand balls of lightning is a concert. For this concert I have created a Ball Lightning, which can be heard on the icy peaks of the Himalayas.

About Pythagoras and mathematics a scientist may not and must not infringe of these two. Numbers and equations are signs that mark the music of the spheres. If Einstein had heard these sounds, he would not create theories of relativity. These sounds are the messages to the mind that life has meaning, that the Universe exists in perfect harmony, and its beauty is the cause and effect of Creation. This music is the eternal cycle of stellar heavens. The smallest star has completed composition and also, part of the celestial symphony. The man’s heartbeats are part of the symphony on the Earth. Newton learned that the secret is in geometric arrangement and motion of celestial bodies. He recognized that the supreme law of harmony exists in the Universe. The curved space is chaos, chaos is not music. Einstein is the messenger of the time of sound and fury.

JOURNALIST: Mr. Tesla, do you hear that music?

TESLA: I hear it all the time. My spiritual ear is as big as the sky we see above us. My natural ear I increased by the radar. According to the Theory of Relativity, two parallel lines will meet in infinity. By that Einstein’s curved will straighten. Once created, the sound lasts forever. For a man it can vanish, but continues to exist in the silence that is man’s greatest power. No, I have nothing against Mr. Einstein. He is a kind person and has done many good things, some of which will become part of the music. I will write to him and try to explain that the ether exists, and that its particles are what keep the Universe in harmony, and the life in eternity.

JOURNALIST: Tell me, please, under what conditions angels can adapt on the Earth?

TESLA: I have ten of them. Keep good records vigilant.

JOURNALIST: I will document all your words, Dear Mr. Tesla.

TESLA: The first requirement is a high awareness of its mission and work to be done. It must, if only dimly, exist in the early days. Let us not be falsely modest; Oak knows that it is oak tree, a bush beside him being a bush. When I was twelve, I have been sure I will get to Niagara Falls. For most of my discoveries I knew in my childhood that I will achieve them, although not entirely apparent … The second condition to adapt is determination. All that I might, I finished.

JOURNALIST: What is the third condition of adjustment, Mr. Tesla?

TESLA: Guidance for all the vital and spiritual energies in labor. Therefore purification of the many effects and needs that man has. I therefore have not lost anything, but just gained.

So I enjoyed every day and night. Write down: Nikola Tesla was a happy man…

The fourth requirement is to adjust the physical assembly with a work.

JOURNALIST: What do you mean, Mr. Tesla?

TESLA: First, the maintenance of the assembly. Man’s body is a perfect machine. I know my circuit and what’s good for him. Food what nearly all people eat, to me it is harmful and dangerous. Sometimes I visualize that chefs in the world are all in conspiracy against me … Touch my hand.

JOURNALIST: It was cold.

TESLA: Yes. Bloodstream can be controlled, and many processes in and around us. Why are you frightened young man?

JOURNALIST: It’s a story that Mark Twain wrote a mysterious stranger, that wonderful book of Satan, inspired by you.

TESLA: The word “Lucifer” is more charming. Mr. Twain likes to joke. As a child I was healed once by reading his books. When we met here and told him about, he was so touched that he cried. We became friends and he often came to my lab. Once he requested to show him a machine that by vibration provokes a feeling of bliss. It was one of those inventions for entertainment, what I sometimes like to do. I warned Mr. Twain as not to remain under these vibrations. He did not listen and stayed longer. It ended by being, like a rocket, holding pants, darted into a certain room. It was a diabolically funny, but I kept the seriousness.

But, to adjust the physical circuit, in addition to food, dream is very important. From a long and exhausting work, which required superhuman effort, after one hour of sleep I’d be fully recovered. I gained the ability to manage sleep, to fell asleep and wake up in the time which I have designated. If I do something what I do not understand, I force myself to think about it in my dream, and thus find a solution.

The fifth condition of adjustment is memory. Perhaps in the most people, the brain is keeper of knowledge about the world and the knowledge gained through the life. My brain is engaged in more important things than remembering. It is picking what is required at a given moment. This is all around us. It should only be consumed. Everything that we once saw, hear, read and learn, accompanies us in the form of light particles. To me, these particles are obedient and faithful. Goethe’s Faust, my favorite book, I learned by heart in German as a student, and now I can recite it all. I held my inventions for years ‘in my head, ” and only then I realized them.

JOURNALIST: You often mentioned the power of visualization.

TESLA: I might have to thank to visualization for all that I invented. The events of my life and my inventions are real in front of my eyes, visible as each occurrence or the item. In my youth I was frightened of not knowing what it is, but later, I learned to use this power as an exceptional talent and gift. I nurtured it, and jealously guarded. I also made corrections by visualization on most of my inventions, and finish them that way, by visualization I mentally solve complex mathematical equations. For that gift I have, I will receive rank High Lama in Tibet.

My eyesight and hearing are perfect and, dare to say, stronger than other people. I hear the thunder of a hundred fifty miles away, and I see colors in the sky that others cannot see. This enlargement of vision and hearing, I had as a child. Later I consciously developed.

JOURNALIST: In youth you have several times been seriously ill. Is it a disease and a requirement to adapt?

TESLA: Yes. It is often the result of a lack of exhaustion or vital force, but often the purification of mind and body from the toxins that have accumulated. It is necessary that a man suffers from time to time. The source of most disease is in the spirit. Therefore the spirit and can cure most diseases. As a student I got sick of cholera which raged in the region of Lika.

I was cured because my father finally allowed me to study technology, which was my life. Illusion for me was not a disease, but the mind’s ability to penetrate beyond the three dimensions of the earth. I had them all my life, and I have received them as all other phenomena around us.

Once, in childhood, I was walking along the river with Uncle and I said: ”From the water will appear the trout. I’ll throw a stone and it is out.”

That’s what happened.

Frightened and amazed, my uncle cried: ”Bade retro Satan’s!”

He was an educated and he spoke in Latin …

I was in Paris when I saw my mother’s death. In the sky, full of light and music floated are wonderful creatures. One of them had a mother’s character, who was looking at me with infinite love. As the vision disappeared, I knew that my mother died.

JOURNALIST: What is the seventh adjustment, Mr. Tesla?

TESLA: The knowledge of how the mental and vital energy transform into what we want, and achieve control over all feelings. Hindus call it Kundalini Yoga. This knowledge can be learned, for what they need many years or is acquired by birth. The most of them I acquired by birth. They are in the closest connection with a sexual energy that is after the most widespread in the Universe. The woman is the biggest thief of that energy, and thus the spiritual power. I’ve always knew that and was alerted. Of myself I created what I wanted: a thoughtful and spiritual machine.

JOURNALIST: A ninth adjustment, Mr. Tesla?

TESLA: Do everything that any day, any moment, if possible, not to forget who we are and why we are on Earth. Extraordinary people who are struggling with illness, privation, or the society which hurts them with its stupidity, misunderstanding, persecution and other problems which the country is full of a swamps with insects, leaves behind unclaimed until the end of the work. There are many fallen angels on Earth.

JOURNALIST: What is the tenth adaptation?

TESLA: It is most important. Write that Mr. Tesla played. He played the whole of his life and enjoyed it.

JOURNALIST: Mr. Tesla! Whether it relates to your findings and your work? Is this a game?

TESLA: Yes, dear boy. I have so loved to play with electricity! I always cringe when I hear about the one also the Greek who stole fire. A terrible story about studding, and eagles peck at his liver. Did Zeus did not have enough lightning and thunder, and was damaged for one fervor? There is some misunderstanding … Lightning are the most beautiful toys that can be found. Do not forget that in your text stand out: Nikola Tesla was the first man who discovered lightning.

JOURNALIST: Mr. Tesla, you’re just talking about angels and their adaptation to the Earth.

TESLA: Am I? This is the same. You could write this: he dared to take upon himself the prerogatives of Indri, Zeus and Peron. Imagine one of these gods in a black evening suit, with the bowler hat and wearing white cotton gloves prepares lightning, fires and earthquakes to the New York City elite!

JOURNALIST: Readers love the humor of our paper. But you confuse me stating that your findings, which have immense benefits for the people, representing the game. Many will frown on it.

TESLA: Dear Mr. Smith, the trouble is that people are too serious. If they were not, they would be happier and much longer would have lived. Chinese proverb says that the seriousness reduces life. Visiting the inn Tai Pe guessed that he visits the Imperial Palace. But that the newspaper readers would not have frowned, let’s get back to things which they consider important.

JOURNALIST: They would love to hear what your philosophy is.

TESLA: Life is a rhythm that must be comprehended. I feel the rhythm and direct on it and pamper in it. It was very grateful and gave me the knowledge I have. Everything that lives is related to a deep and wonderful relationship: man and the stars, amoebas’ and the sun, the heart and the circulation of an infinite number of worlds. These ties are unbreakable, but they can be tame and to propitiate and begin to create new and different relationships in the world, and that does not violate the old. Knowledge comes from space; our vision is its most perfect set. We have two eyes: the earthly and spiritual. It is recommended that it become one eye. The Universe is alive in all its manifestations, like a thinking animal. Stone is a thinking and sentient being, such as plant, beast and a man. A star that shines asked to look at, and if we are not a sizeable self-absorbed we would understand its language and message. His breathing, his eyes and ears of the man must comply with breathing, eyes and ears of the Universe.

JOURNALIST: As you say this, it seems to me like I hear Buddhist texts, words or Taoist Parazulzusa.

TESLA: That’s right! This means that there is general knowledge and truth that man has always possessed. In my feeling and experience, the Universe has only one substance and one supreme energy with an infinite number of manifestations of life. The best thing is that the discovery of a secret nature, reveals the other. One cannot hide, there are around us, but we are blind and deaf to them. If we emotionally tie ourselves to them, they come to us themselves. There are a lot of apples, but one Newton. He asked for just one apple that fell in front of him.

JOURNALIST: A question that might be set at the beginning of this conversation. What was Electricity for you, Dear Mr. Tesla?

TESLA: Everything is Electricity. First was the light, endless source from which points out material and distribute it in all forms that represent the Universe and the Earth with all its aspects of life. Black is the true face of Light, only we do not see this. It is remarkable grace to man and other creatures. One of its particles possesses light, thermal, nuclear, radiation, chemical, mechanical and an unidentified energy. It has the power to run the Earth with its orbit. It is true Archimedean lever.

JOURNALIST: Mr. Tesla, you’re too biased towards electricity.

TESLA: Electricity I am. Or, if you wish, I am the electricity in the human form. You are Electricity; too Mr. Smith, but you do not realize it.

JOURNALIST: Is it thus your ability to allow fails of electricity of one million volts trough your body?

TESLA: Imagine a gardener who is attacked by herbs. This would indeed be crazy. Man’s body and brain are made from a large amount energy; in me there is the majority of electricity. The energy that is different in everyone is what makes the human ”I” or ”soul”. For other creatures to their essence, “soul” of the plant is the “soul” of minerals and animals. Brain function and death is manifested in light. My eyes in youth were black, now blue, and as time goes on and strain the brain gets stronger, they are closer to white. White is the color of heaven. Through my window one morning, landed a white dove, which I fed. She wanted to bring me a word that she was dying. From her eyes the light jets were coming out. Never in the eyes of any creature had I not seen so much light, as in that pigeon.

JOURNALIST: Personnel in your lab speak about flashes of light, flames and lightning that occur if you are angry or into kind of risk.

TESLA: It is the psychic discharge or a warning to be alert. The light was always on my side. Do you know how I discovered the rotating magnetic field and induction motor, which made me became famous when I was twenty-six? One summer evening in Budapest, I watched with my friend the Sigetijem sunset. Thousands of fires were turning around in thousands of flaming colors. I remembered Faust and recited his verses and then, as in a fog, I saw spinning magnetic field, and induction motor. I saw them in the sun!

JOURNALIST: Hotel service telling that at the time of lightning you isolate into the room and talk to yourselves.

TESLA: I talk with lightning and thunder.

JOURNALIST: With them? What language, Mr.Tesla?

TESLA: Mostly my native language. It has the words and sounds, especially in poetry, what is suitable for it.

JOURNALIST: Readers of our magazine would be very grateful if you would interpret that.

TESLA: The sound does not exist only in the thunder and lightning, but, in transformation into the brightness and color. A color can be heard. Language is of the words, which means that it is from the sounds and colors. Every thunder and lightning are different and have their names. I call some of them by the names of those who were close in my life, or by those whom I admire. In the sky brightness and thunder live my mother, sister, brother Daniel, a poet. Jovan, Jovanovic Zmaj and other persons of Serbian history.

Names such AsIsaiah, Ezekiel, Leonardo, Beethoven, Goya, Faraday, Pushkin and all burning fires mark shoals and tangles of lightning and thunder, which does not stop all night bringing to the Earth precious rain and burning trees or villages. There is lightning and thunder, and they are the brightest and most powerful, that will not vanish. They are coming back and I recognize them among the thousands.

JOURNALIST: For you, science or poetry is the same?

TESLA: These are the two eyes of one person. William Blake was taught that the Universe was born from the imagination, that it maintains and it will exist as long as there is a last man on the Earth. With it was a wheel to which astronomers can collect the stars of all galaxies. It is the creative energy identical to the light energy.

JOURNALIST: Imagination is more real to you than life itself?

TESLA: It gives birth to the life. I have fed by my taught; I’ve learned to control emotions, dreams and visions. I have always cherished, as I nurtured my enthusiasm. All my long life I spent in ecstasy. That was the source of my happiness. It helped me during all these years to bear with work, which was enough for the five lives. The best is to work at night, because the stellar light, and close bond.

JOURNALIST: You said that I am, like every being, the Light. This flatter me, but I confess, I do not quite understand.

TESLA: Why would you need to understand, Mr. Smith? Suffice it to believe it. Everything is light. In one its ray is the fate of nations, each nation has its own ray in what great light source we see as the sun. And remember: no one who was there did not die. They transformed into the light, and as such exist still. The secret lies in the fact that the light particles restore their original state.

JOURNALIST: This is the resurrection!

TESLA: I prefer to call it: return to a previous energy. Christ and several others knew the secret. I am searching how to preserve human energy. It is forms of Light, sometimes straight like heavenly light. I have not looked for it for my own sake, but for the good of all. I believe that my discoveries make people’s lives easier and more bearable, and channel them to spirituality and morality.

JOURNALIST: Do you think that time can be abolished?

TESLA: Not quite, because the first feature of the energy is that it transforms. It is in perpetual transformation, as clouds of Taoists. But it is possible to leverage the fact that a man preserves consciousness after the earthly life. In every corner of the universe exist energy of life; one of them is immortality, whose origin is outside of man, waiting for him. The universe is spiritual; we are only half that way. The Universe is more moral than us, because we do not know his nature and how to harmonize our lives with it. I am not scientist, science is perhaps the most convenient way to find the answer to the question that always haunt me, and which my days and nights turned into fire.

JOURNALIST: What is matter?

TESLA: How are your eyes brightened! … What I wanted to know is: what happens to a falling star as the sun goes out? Stars fall like dust or seed in this or in other worlds, and the sun be scattered in our minds, in the lives of many beings, what will be reborn as a new light, or cosmic wind scattered in infinity. I understand that this is necessary included in the structure of the Universe. The thing is, though, is that one of these stars and one of these suns, even the smallest, preserves.

JOURNALIST: But, Mr. Tesla, you realize that this is necessary and is included in the constitution of the world!

TESLA: When a man becomes conscious, then his highest goal must be to run for a shooting star, and tries to capture it; shall understand that his life was given to him because of this and will be saved. Stars will eventually be capable to catch!

JOURNALIST: And what will happen then?

TESLA: The creator will laugh and say: ”It fall only that you chase her and grab her.”

JOURNALIST: Isn’t all of this contrary to the cosmic pain, which so often you mention in your writings? And what is it cosmic pain?

TESLA: No, because we are on Earth … It is an illness whose existence the vast majority of people are not aware of. Hence, many other illnesses, suffering, evil, misery, wars and everything else what makes human life an absurd and horrible condition. This disease cannot be completely cured, but awareness shall make it less complicated and hazardous. Whenever one of my close and dear people were hurt, I felt physical pain. This is because our bodies are made as of similar material, and our soul related with unbreakable strands. Incomprehensible sadness that overwhelmed us at times means that somewhere, on the other side on this planet, a child or generous man died. The entire Universe is in certain periods sick of itself, and of us. Disappearance of a star and the appearance of comets affect us more than we can imagine. Relationships among the creatures on the Earth are even stronger, because of our feelings and thoughts the flower will scent even more beautiful or will fall in silence. These truths we must learn in order to be healed. Remedy is in our hearts and evenly, in the heart of the animals that we call the Universe.

DOES THE UNIVERSE HAVE A BRAIN?

February 26, 2015November 12, 2015 / Ken Finton / 7 Comments

Is the universe itself a brain? They certainly have a similar look in these pictures. That might not prove that it is a brain nor that it has intelligence, yet everything we know about the workings of nature and the universe in general seems to have a masterly and thoughtful aspect about it.

Mathematics are human tools used to calculate facts and events in the natural world, but the math systems themselves seems to work because they uncover pre-existing patterns that follow universal laws and principles. Does that mean that mathematics came first and we humans simply discover the underlying equations? This does appear to be the case.

We view the world emotionally

How we view our world and the universe about us plays an important part in our emotional well being. It is impossible to envision a life without pain and suffering, as these things are natural tools essential to our survival. Without pain, we would not know what was bad for us. Without suffering and loss, we could not value happiness and gains properly.

To get to the actuality – I will not call is truth because we can only paint a local image of what we observe – to attempt to describe our world, we have to get beyond our emotional feelings and throw out the dogmas that our religions and limited visions of how the world really works have created.

Our emotional natures reflect upon our own demise and often creates negative emotions when we think about our temporal stays as existing beings.

I published an article in Helios about the near death experience of a young girl who was certain that she was about to die. She put if his way:

“… when a vision of absolute nothingness rises before my eyes with the sudden damning conviction that there is nothing after death and our life is but a tiny spark in the midst of eternal meaningless darkness. The thought of such insignificance and meaninglessness is so daunting, and the idea of the world carrying on irrespective of our existence so unbearable, that our mind hurries to close the idea up again, with the result that the vision or realization disappears as soon as it appeared, leaving only the cold clammy feeling of an uncertain dread in its place. The realization of our miniscule existence in the enormous scheme of things can’t fail to be accompanied by a lack of faith in the meaningfulness of our insignificant lives. It’s an idea probed time and again by writers and artists alike, yet it is one that can yield no answers. It causes us to question the nature of existence itself, and the justification behind its repetitive mundane pursuits.”

I remember being a child when Jehovah’s Witnesses came knocking on the door to spread their gospel according to their teachings. They said that “Millions now living will never die.” By this they meant that the world as we knew it was coming to an end and a new world where death was vanquished for the faithful believers was just around the corner.

In one form or another, that is the message of most of the world’s religions. They offer either a heaven or an altered state of consciousness where death is no longer something to fear or fret about. Because people want to believe this, such religious dogmas take root and are used by organized religion to control the minds, emotions and lives of the believers. The masses want a God of understanding and love who will want to keep their experiences in living memory. They want heaven for continued experience and Nirvana to be more than a rock group.

The question then, is there anything else that can give solace in our emotional quest for everlasting life? Would we even be pleased with an eternal life from which there is no escape from the essential suffering and loss that is built into existence itself?

Is it necessary for our life experience to be recorded infinitely or continue eternally for the soul to be happy with its lot? Probably not. We humans forget many things and our memories are often faulty. Some mundane events do not seem to be worth the remembering. Our own experiences disappear into memory and we lose track of the mundane details. In order to save our better experiences for later times we developed writing and drawing pictures and photography.

Is the physical matter that exists and in our world a record of events and actions that have occurred in time and space? It seems obvious that this is so. We reconstruct our history from past events and experiences that left a mark on time and space.

We can experience the reality of this ourselves. Our movements and actions make changes in the outside world that are recorded in memory as events and experience. Actions are recorded in the world outside ourselves as well, as we change our world physically every moment. We ourselves change physically from moment to moment.

A CONTINUING PROCESS OF CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS THOUGHT

We can with a minimum of effort reduce and simplify the world enough to show that we exist in a continuing process of conscious and unconscious awareness. This too is obvious by nature of our minds and status as Homo Sapiens. That this is true of all of nature is my best educated guess.

Giving the attribute of awareness to inanimate and non-living chemicals is a stretch for some people. We equate awareness to higher forms of life and intelligence to those mammals with brains and nervous systems. Yet, most processes are not what we would call conscious processes, but unconscious processes.

Underneath, the unconscious goes about creating process independently of our intellectual understanding. There is a difference between that we consciously know and that which is unconscious process that keeps the intellectual consciousness alive and builds the world itself.

We need to redefine that which we term to be the mind. If the unconscious mind was actually non-conscious or unaware, it could not function with the degree of precision that we observe.

Transmissions of information and transformations of matter into energy and back again take place in the smallest of events from chemical bonding to electromagnetic attractions. To my way of thinking, this can and should be defined as being a mental process, something controlled and actuated by a mind that is obviously different from the human brain. In other words, nature itself thinks and creates without need for the self-awareness. Nature is constantly experimenting with new forms and redesigning the old. Nature itself is still learning, as there is an infinite amount to learn. The urge to unite and compound, to create new elements for more advanced compounds is nurtured by nature. The instinctive and unconscious desire to be more than we can be by ourselves alone is the driving force behind evolutionary change. This is obvious through the very fact the nature has been producing matter and life for billions of years, long before self-consciousness arose in the form of the human species. Our self-reflective species did not cause the universe to exist. Time and space arrived before human cognition.

The Unconscious Mind

The unconscious mind is much more powerful and capable than our conscious awareness. Procedural knowledge is a set of procedures, instructions, algorithms, and patterns that are capable of being implemented, but these processes are difficult to describe. The world remains very mysterious because of the sheer volume of information that is present in procedural action at any given moment of time.

In more technical terms, waking consciousness must process information serially, while the unconscious brain circuits can process many streams of information in parallel. The unconscious mind handles many tasks simultaneously.

People act in goal-directed and skilled ways without even being aware that they are doing so. Unconscious forms of perceiving and learning had to precede the first steps in human evolution.

Cognitive research has revealed that automatically, and clearly outside of conscious awareness, individuals register and acquire more information than what they can experience through their conscious thoughts. (See Augusto, 2010, for a recent comprehensive survey.)

To me this means that the universe does have a mind. It is a part of the process of conscious awareness that has produced us. I am calling that mind the Infinite for several reasons:

1) We cannot have the finite without an Infinite because something has to have no beginning and no ending, even would it ultimately be a void of nothingness.

2) That within this void of nothingness the world has become actual and finite.

3) That from the beginning of the appearance of time and space, mathematical laws and principles, geometry and rudimentary emotions in the form of prehensions of energy and mass governed the emergence of process including the conscious process. The laws of nature precede nature by necessity. They cannot develop or evolve gradually over time. They are an abstraction that pre-existed before nature. These mathematical laws, principles and geometries preceded the appearance of matter and energy because the elements followed the laws dictating the geometry and physics of the universe. Therefore, these physical laws must have existed first in in a dimension that has no time nor space, no beginnings and no endings because that is the only way they could be made manifest independently. This is the 1st dimension. It is a singularity that must immediately be doubled by its counterpart, the 2nd dimension, to be made manifest. This creates the dual nature of the world.

4) The materials that build the universe, the matter that exists in our physical world, holds a record of events and actions that have occurred in time and space. Our movements and actions make changes in the outside world and are recorded as events and experience. We change our world physically every moment. It is recorded on objects and entities outside our personal selves as well, as we know from moving something or breaking something, or influencing the world about us.

5) Vibrating patterns makes up events and changes from energy to matter leaves a record of its temporal being. Though these events are temporal, they can potentially last eternally because time is a mirage. Frequencies are in time and space, measured wave lengths that vibrate in certain patterns. Though they are manifest in time, time itself is still a mirage. Time and space are dimensions that appear within manifested natures. Manifest nature is the record of thought made actual.

All events and objects have frequencies, as they are vibratory in nature. These frequencies are well named, as they are repetitive motions in waves in a particular time and space. Having entered into time and space, they paint not only a temporal event, but perhaps an Infinite event as well because one is the other.

Infinity is in a dimension without time and space, but time and space are recorded within it. You and I are living proof of that. We can be certain that all time is recorded and stored in the infinite dimension, since infinity has room for all probabilities and is the source of the actualities. The material world shares a common source in the infinite

Particles and waves, the building blocks of matter, are informational packets that only exist in actuality while being in relation to other particles. They must relate to one another to share in the material world.

The information in these packets passes into the unconscious mind working to organize and record experience. It is stored in material actualizations before the advent of life forms, as awareness forms conscious entities with different levels of awareness. Among these conscious forms of awareness are the intellectually self-aware forms that we call our ‘personal realities’.

Thought is information connected by electronic impulses. It is sourced and ultimately originates in that dimension where Infinity dwells. This can be called the zero dimension. From zero dimension, there need be no passing of information as it is all contained there eternally. It is the mind and thought that organizes what is brought into being, as particles are not needed to understand the highest dimension (which is also the lowest, being non-dimensional). This is the place from which all information originally springs.

What does this mean and how can it effect our emotional lives? Does any of this impact our fear of death and change?

Perhaps we have lost the idea of heaven but gained the concept of eternity. At any given moment we can learn to manipulate our negative emotions and ease our sense of loss and helplessness by realizing that we live in a pseudo-reality common to all things living and non-living. Our thoughts are neither positive nor negative. We are the ones who give them value by arbitrarily assigning them value. At any moment, we can invoke and still our thoughts to quiet the duality of our existence and peek into the eternal dimension where all of nature is one and divisions are non-existent.

The world of ideas and thoughts is infinite. All things exist in a field of probability that contains all possible actualities. Like a hologram, all pieces of the big picture are contained in the smallest part of the picture. When an action is made, that field of probability collapses upon itself to become an actuality. That actuality is made manifest in nature and the record of it is nothing but a vibrational mirage that is can be observed from infinite points in space and time.

In this manner experience is born in a timeless dimension and brought into the world by interconnected series of events that continue to experience being long before and long after our temporal existences became evident and actual. Ultimately, we are the experience and the experience is eternal.

Memory is a tool of awareness, a process that continually blinks in and out of existence with observation and relationship to other temporal events. Our world and universe is the physical counterpart of an infinite experience that never began and will never end.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-dimensional_space#mediaviewer/File:Clifford-torus.gif

THOUGHT

February 12, 2015February 18, 2016 / 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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

CRITICAL THEORY, HUMAN EXTINCTION AND ORIGINAL SIN

February 9, 2015February 9, 2015 / Ken Finton / 1 Comment

by Katherine

http://zebraturnedtiger.com/2015/02/09/critical-theory-human-extinction-and-original-sin/

Who the hell starts a serious reflection on critical theory with a quote from a Mel Gibson movie? Why, that would be me! Read on, if you dare:

“And a Man sat alone, drenched deep in sadness. And all the animals drew near to him and said, “We do not like to see you so sad. Ask us for whatever you wish and you shall have it.” The Man said, “I want to have good sight.” The vulture replied, “You shall have mine.” The Man said, “I want to be strong.” The jaguar said, “You shall be strong like me.” Then the Man said, “I long to know the secrets of the earth.” The serpent replied, “I will show them to you.” And so it went with all the animals. And when the Man had all the gifts that they could give, he left. Then the owl said to the other animals, “Now the Man knows much, he’ll be able to do many things. Suddenly I am afraid.” The deer said, “The Man has all that he needs. Now his sadness will stop.” But the owl replied, “No. I saw a hole in the Man, deep like a hunger he will never fill. It is what makes him sad and what makes him want. He will go on taking and taking, until one day the World will say, ‘I am no more and I have nothing left to give.”

-Tribal Elder in Apocalypto

In my short and painful lifetime, I’ve seen far more than my share of the death and destruction that Man’s “hole” has wrought upon the animals and the planet. So when I hear academic philosophers turning their attention to the possible extinction of humanity…see, for example, Claire Colebrook’s “Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction,” I feel like I have something to say. Even though I’m not academically “qualified,” I am more than personally qualified, after losing my family to various terminal illnesses, and struggling with my own. I know what it feels like to question whether human existence is worthwhile, and that should be qualification enough.

I don’t think I’m the only one in this boat. It seems these days that everyone who pays attention to the world outside their immediate personal circles has a feeling that something is going to happen… something vaguely apprehended, something yet to be decided…something maybe apocalyptic or tragic, something maybe transcendental and defining. But our guts are screaming that business as usual is not forever.

We humans are the first instantaneously, globally interconnected species in the history of the planet. And we instinctively know that this is an incredibly brief instant, even though it feels deceptively like an eternity. We live in a limbo of global industrial capital overlaid with exotic virtual realities of all species–“social” media, financial ghost gamblers, MMORPGs and the celebrity theater.

And we fear its inevitable demise, yet we also dread its continuation.

Many of us secretly wish our treadmill-grinding homeostasis would end in some glamorous apocalypse and relieve us of our ennui (or is “limbo” a better word)? Yet we equally fear the apocalypse because, how much does it hurt just to lose our smartphones for a day, much less to lose safe water supplies, shelter or a life-sustaining prescription?

The thorn of industrial civilization is in our hearts, not our sides. The system can’t continue as it is–it must either mutate and accelerate or collapse–yet either option feels intolerable: a sense of existential horror, in the case of acceleration, or terror, for collapse.

Never before, even as hunter-gatherers, have we Homo Sapiens been so directly confronted with our unclothed nature. For postmodern man, stripped by efficient communication of the fedoras and greatcoats that covered his animal body, there is no more speculation…

Communism doesn’t work.

Living like sages and fools in the streets of San Francisco gave us drug addiction and sex scandals, not peace love and freedom.

And even freedom itself is likely an illusion generated by our brains, if we take neuroscience seriously.

There is absolutely no ideology, institution, or infrastructure untainted by the tragic evolutionary imperative to survive, procreate, and eliminate the competition at all costs. And the most expensive cost: the blood sacrifice of our own descendants and our own future selves.

Most disturbing in all this is that despite our very real human beauty, famously described by Robert Ardrey as “risen apes,” our unique self-awareness lets us look upon our defects and aspire to change them. The basic law of nature rules that those non-risen apes among us (also known as psychopaths) are certain to rise to power in the Psychopathocene Age, leaving us in a game-theory nightmare from which there is no escape, or at least no intentional exit.

If we humans escape our predicament in good health, it will likely be some tragic stroke of luck, an accidental deluge of death and suffering for many people and communities; a painful “market correction,” literally or figuratively, in the near term future.

And in the midst of this, which we all know consciously or otherwise, academia’s credentialed experts stand up and try to tell us how we should feel and think about ourselves.

Humanism

This intellectual disease called “critical theory” probably began much earlier, but let’s for convenience sake start with humanism, the doctrine that replaced Nietzsche’s dead God. Humans, said the humanists, are what is most important. We must define our own meaning, said Camus and Sartre, in an indifferent universe; or with Beckett, we must carry on heroically to our inevitable tragic end. (I actually have a weakness for Beckett; for a magnificently indescribable cinematic take on his approach to life, see Hungarian director Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse.)

In either case, for the humanist it is our lived, individual experience, and not our lives’ socially ascribed or linguistically constructed “meaning,” that matters. Each human being is uniquely responsible for her decisions, and possesses an inalienable set of dignities that define her as human: free will, rights, the social contract, and ethics.

Antihumanism

But humanism, like theism before it, fell under the weight of its own contradictions. After the failure of the global “isms” that our grandparents trusted to deliver humanity to its Edenic potential–communism, fascism, nationalism, capitalism–we reluctantly accepted that there would always be sexism, racism, classism, misery and poverty. Once we failed to lift minorities out of their disenfranchisement, we realized that no individual is self-determining, but instead a product of both nature and nurture, and most of all, he is not even really an “individual.” We are inextricable and even indistinguishable from our contexts and the systemic defects of our societies.

And we also saw, as scandals beset every single institution we could possibly hope to exemplify the virtues of humanity–first capitalism, next government and the media, then medicine, then religion, and now even science and academia–that there are no human virtues left–at least not in human institutions.

So in reaction, the new crop of theorist-priests, the postmodernists, turned to antihumanism. Antihumanism promised to do for humanism what humanism did for theism. It acknowledged that humanity is flawed, contingent and contextual, not self-defining and individually sovereign. It learned from the insights of the animal rights and civil rights movement, and the discipline of ethology, that there was and never could be any set of virtues by which one could define “humanity.” More problematically, by my assessment, antihumanism proposed that lived experience could not be the primary site of critical engagement, because experience is always already constructed through theory.

But what of critical theory, and philosophy as a whole? If we can’t trust any institution, can we trust academic humans’ ability to self-assess? Strange things have come to pass after antihumanism. They are strange because they are so unexpectedly familiar.

Beyond Antihumanism

A new crop of “post-antihumanists” like Colebrook are extending the genealogy of the humanists and antihumanists before them. They realize that antihumanism is deluded by hidden anthropocentrism. The diverse, context-bound world of both human and non-human actors that antihumanists imagine is yet still determined by a human-bounded theoretical or cognitive structure. Antihumanists still project of human values–illusions of unity, connection, stability, subjectivity–onto the nonhuman universe.

Belief in Original Sin as the Motivation for Critical Theory

So yet again, like Adam and Eve, we fall, except we fall not from a garden, but down giant stairs.

Our book of original sins writes itself page after page into an all-too-short eternity as trees are cut down for its printing. Philosophers and theorists have changed their job description from the “lovers of truth” to the atheist theologians of original sin, each one vying to find the Sin of Life more original, more necessary or inevitable than the theorist before.

We fell from theism, to humanism, to antihumanism, and now to post-antihumanism. What of it? Can this end? Should it? Should anyone even care about critical theory, philosophy, or any of the humanities at all? Maybe we should just lose ourselves, damn our progeny, in the ancient frenzy to strive and survive?

My feeble attempt to answer this seemingly intractable question hinges on the crucial issues of lived experience, self-perception, and the human desire for change.

Before I turn to these three issues, I’ll make a short point about the problem of anthropocentrism: it’s not as simple as it seems. The problem is not only these antihumanist thinkers who inappropriately project “human” qualities to nonhuman entities. There is also the opposite and more complicated problem that humans assume that such projected qualities are, in fact, uniquely human. What I am suggesting is that anthropocentrism may be a different animal than we suspected. Ask a respected ethologist such as Robert Sapolsky and you will find that these “human” qualities which we “mistakenly” project onto animals are in fact not unique to humans. We’re not so special after all–not even in a bad way.

“Humanity” is likely to be a continuum, not a discrete state.

As to what we should substitute for critical theory, I suggest an ethos based on the findings of neuroscience, and most crucially, a basic compassion for *consciousness*, rather than “life,” in any form (which I will address in a different essay.)

The Hope That Feeds Extinction

Returning again to the issues of lived experience, self-determination and the desire for change, it may be that the endless book of original sin may only stop writing itself once we move beyond “subverting,” “retheorizing” or “criticizing” our biases, and return instead to lived experience.

But as Heraclitus said, we cannot step in the same river twice. I don’t propose we resurrect the old cry of “Lived, Unmediated Experience”–we should not forget the original insight that lived experience is inevitably intertwined with ideology. But instead of responding by “working on” that ideology to approach some “correct” configuration, I suggest that we recognize, counterintuitively, that it is the desire for change itself, whether ideological or experiential, which traps humans on the one-way down elevator into Godless original sin, and feeds our endless self-condemnation. How can we ever be free of Yahweh if we insist on sitting in judgment of ourselves?

More ironically, if we were to admit that there is something “fallen” about humans, our brains or behavior, or if we were to propose something apely about us that is not adequately risen, then whatever it is, it must have also arisen from the human desire for change, just as the endless self-condemnation of critical theory arose from our desire for change.

Our original sin is not our desire for knowledge, but our dissatisfaction with what we learn.

This brings us back to lived experience. Our neocortex guarantees that lived human experience will almost invariably be metaphorically mediated. Yet it is hard to deny that this mediation lies on a continuum, just as humanity lies on a continuum between humans, monkeys and dogs. An intellectually disabled adult who can only comprehend basic survival has more unmediated experiences than a crusader for a cause who is willing to defy his bodily drive for survival in service of ideology.

I would make an educated guess that the more neocortically mediated our lived experience, the more we desire change. And is it not exactly the self-aware critical theorists, who recognize this mediation most, who most desire change?

So instead of blindly accepting the neocortical mediation and seeking to work with it (ie, change it to some ideal configuration), maybe we should simply give up, and overthrow the tyranny of the prefrontal cortex. Academics laugh at saints and sages like Ramana Maharshi, who told us to simply surrender, and surrender completely: “Surrender is complete only when you reach the stage ‘‘Thou art all’ and ‘Thy will be done’”

In practice, this would mean that we construct Taoism from the Cartesian and Kantian blocks of Western logic: that we do philosophy, as Wittgenstein suggested, to free ourselves from philosophy. But let us not make Wittgenstein’s mistake and limit ourselves to language. Change-hungry philosophy hides in images, in relationships, in desire, and its greatest concentration is in hope, our hope for change.

One charge against this approach is that it could open us to a morally indefensible inaction. This is a valid criticism on the individual, specific level–but activists, this is not a message to stop fighting! If we must act, and we must, to relieve suffering is paramount.

But on the existential and civilizational level, if we truly understand that we never had a choice, and if we wake up, look at the big picture, and see that it was only ever *action*, never *inaction*, that got us into this global human predicament in the first place, then things look very different.

My White Flag is Raised

So, as a personal veteran of death, existential horror, and extreme trauma, I propose a different change… the rejection of change. The one thing we heirs of the Western mind have never tried, since first Pandora spoke–the rejection of hope. I hope to write non-theory that gives our overloaded brains a break. We must allow ourselves to at last stop hoping and fighting, stop making sense, stop comparing, calculating and integrating, and surrender unreservedly to what appears. To accept death.

Wouldn’t it be beautiful if we could forget original sin and learn to celebrate destruction as well as creation? What would be so wrong if we let humanity grow old gracefully in peace and nostalgic reflection, rather than drown in extinction anxiety and disappointed self-castigation? If Oswald Spengler was right to compare civilizations to organisms, then the death of a civilization–or even the death of humanity itself–is not shameful or sinful. It is no more tragic than the death of a great king. Let us die with a dignity that befits our achievements. Doom without gloom.

Let’s Learn from our Ancestors

An elder of a hunter-gatherer tribe would not curse herself for dying. Unlike us moderns, she would not frantically search to stave off her death; instead she would rest, accept and remember. Maybe we, as a species, can do the same. After all, we had no real say in our destiny.

As for me, I say yes! I will remember fondly, rest and celebrate, free from guilt, sin, or judgment. I will celebrate and bear witness to the wondrous story of both risen and non-risen apes, of mammals and reptiles, plants and even the bacteria that made me sick, and I will witness the witnessing stars that always shined above us and will continue to shine long after we are gone.

I will tend the last crowning blossom of the sinless risen ape, the one that shall only appear when it has confronted its own mortality. This is what Hegel meant when he wrote, “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” Only in death do we earn the freedom to theorize without criticism. As a dying man returns to infancy, I will return humanity, in my blind human brain, to that universal mythological time before humans’ hearts became sucking voids of sin.

And how? It’s very simple and peaceful. It happened only after I’d lost all existential hope: as soon as I abandoned the fight for hope, life’s magic returned. Maybe the same is true for us on a broader level: once we abandon hope, all the other demons of Pandora’s box will return to their proper place and we will be at last free of original sin and the critic who assigned it to us, whether he be of godly, human or cosmological origin.

THE PROBLEM WITH ENLIGHTENMENT

January 16, 2015June 20, 2020 / Ken Finton / 1 Comment

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

January 5, 2015November 8, 2015 / Ken Finton / 6 Comments

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/

OF GOD, MAN, NATURE AND ZERO DIMENSION

January 3, 2015April 4, 2017 / Ken Finton / 5 Comments

Since the dawn of time and certainly since the rise of self-awareness in the human race, people have contemplated the nature of the universe about them. The deepest thinkers among them have come up with many answers and visions from the same basic facts that underlie the material universe. The cave dwellers—writing on the walls—expressed in primitive drawings not only the facts of life that they saw about them but their thoughts about the geometry of existence itself.

A certain unity of vision is capable of being expressed in numerous ways by simple contemplation itself. When one attempts to divide the world into its basic elements or contemplate the very nature of existence itself, thought runs smack up against the dualistic paradox of life.

Democritus, a Greek philosopher developed the idea of an atom around 460 B.C. He asked: “If you break a piece of matter in half, then break it in half again, how many breaks will you have to make before you can break it no farther?” This smallest basic piece of matter he called atoms more than two thousand years ago.

1. The Atoms and Cosmology (adopted in part at least from the doctrines of Leucippus, though the relations between the two are hopelessly obscure). While agreeing with the Eleatics as to the eternal sameness of Being (nothing can arise out of nothing; nothing can be reduced to nothing), Democritus followed the physicists in denying its oneness and immobility. Movement and plurality being necessary to explain the phenomena of the universe and impossible without space (not-Being), he asserted that the latter had an equal right with Being to be considered existent. Being is the Full (plenum); not-Being is the Void (vacuum), the infinite space in which moved the infinite number of atoms into which the single Being of the Eleatics was broken up. These atoms are eternal and invisible; absolutely small, so small that their size cannot be diminished; absolutely full and incompressible, they are without pores and entirely fill the space they occupy; homogeneous, differing only in figure (as A from N), arrangement (as AN from NA), position (as N is Z on its side), magnitude (and consequently in weight, although some authorities dispute this). But while the atoms thus differ in quantity, their differences of quality are only apparent, due to the impressions caused on our senses by different configurations and combinations of atoms. A thing is only hot or cold, sweet or bitter, hard or soft by convention; the only things that exist in reality are the atoms and the void. http://www.nndb.com/people/790/000087529/

Democritus lived in a time when the earliest writing had been devised, so we knew what he thought.

From symbols seen in cave paintings and pictographs, it would seem the cave dwellers from many thousands of years ago had already seen the symbolism of geometric shapes, as they drew them on walls and incorporated geometric patterns in their drawing and figures.

Perhaps these geometric shapes are the foundations of existence itself, the first principles of being that existed everywhere at once––a quantum universe. Awareness came upon itself and recognized its own twin. It created time and space by devising an orbit.

Thoughts of geometric forms are expressed on the walls of a many a cave and cliffside from many thousands of years ago. I see no reason why primitive man could not have come to a similar conclusion. Circles, points, and triangles are two-dimensional representations of mathematical principles that were the first ingredient of being, thus becoming the first experiences.

Democritus tried to imagine the smallest pieces of matter, but later scientists found that atoms are broken into even smaller and smaller pieces.

democritus-1-sized Democritus’ theories were dismissed by Aristotle and were forgotten for two thousand years due to of the great stature that Aristotle held over his mimicking followers until the time of Newton. [For a concise history of atomic discovery from Democritus to quantum theory, see: http://www.nobeliefs.com/atom.htm.]

When one attempts to contemplate the beginnings of all things and the endings of all things, paradox comes into being. What was there before this world and this universe existed? What will there be after this universe ends?

The answer, of course, is nothing. Yet, duality is an integral part of existence itself. The thought that nothing exists, shows that something exists in its very essence. The nothing the forms the basis of the world about us, we discover, is the soul of our world and without essence. It is the zero dimension.

Such thoughts sometimes lead us to a spiritual definition of nothingness that from even the most primitive times has been recognized as God or the Void, a unification of all that exists and a recognition that existence is, in its essence, non-material or spiritual. For some, as thought explodes and stills, the elusive basis of reality shines forth in the minds of those who contemplate. If nothing exists, then all is nothing and nothing is everything. If God is a spirit without form or essence, then God is present in every aspect of everything that exists.

This is where contemplation leads us. It is how we interpret this emotionally that gives rise to our moral values and our feelings about ourselves and the world about us.

PARADOX

There is something in us that cannot tolerate paradox.

If nothing exists, then that must mean that God does not exist. That leads to a denial of the zero dimension that forms the basis for existence itself. It is obvious that all came from nothing. It is so in our own lives and it is so in the universe and perhaps the multi-verses that surround us. We have no recollection before our awareness formed. We were in zero dimension. We pass through life and return to zero dimension. We spend eternity in zero dimension, yet the only thing we know of it is what we learn and experience in our lifetimes––our identities and lives.

NOTHING MATTERS

Negative thoughts can lead to a sense of forlorn isolation where nothing matters but the smaller self that we call our individual identity. We become the only thing that matters. These thoughts can lead to self-indulgence and greed. Much of the brutal history of the world was written by people who thought in this manner.

When the zero dimension is accepted by the mind, then something similar to God not only exists—if we desire it to be so—but everything is God and everything is nothing at the same moment. It is everywhere and in everyone.

Our physical basis is 99.99% space, which is a dimension, and .01% flowing electrical energy whose basis is one-dimensional, ever changing and drawn from the zero dimension where time is not a factor. It is everywhere at once and nowhere at the same instant because it has a single dimension.

OF GOOD AND EVIL

This in itself does not make existence any less problematic. Nature is not only gentle but violent. Mythologies are constructed to explain what we see as evil and good in the essence of the world about us. Because we, as humans, name and value things, we force nature into shapes and patterns that we can comprehend and create a world of good and bad. No wonder we live in a world of black and white with many shades of gray. We have created such a vision from placing values on limited experiences and emotional reactions to these experiences.

The universe was formed without human values. The image of the universe that we create is born with the dawn of self-awareness, but self-awareness properly extends to basic forces of nature and the unconscious growth of awareness that has resulted in a form of self-awareness that we regard as the human experience. The urge to be more than we are within ourselves is the driving force of evolution.

Experience itself may be the reason for existence, though existence needs no reason to exist. This might seem to be a strange and idea to some. Many people rebel against this reasoning. Many want to believe that there is a spiritual nature that is essentially good––even divine––and something went astray in the world that produced the terrible things that we experience and see around us. That is the way we escape taking responsibility for what we see as evil in the world.

Is there no other way to view this dichotomy?

If we are all spirit in essence, then we would all be God and the world would be like Heaven on Earth. Yet, it is not. Does this prove that we are not all God? Does this not prove that we are not, in essence, a spirit?

When we look deeper into this, we can see that good and evil is simply another pattern of opposites that form the basis for existence and experience itself. Change is built into the world by time and space and the forming of structures that are never permanent by both design and necessity. Change imposes a beginning and an ending. Both are temporal. Place a value on change—call it life and death, good and evil––it is still temporal. Reality ‘dwells’ in zero dimension. All time and space are contained within an infinity of zero dimension.

The only actual time is now and all things are present and exist in the now. Many things we thought we knew about this world are false. If zero dimension is the basis for the universe about us, then because we live and experience the world, this experience of ours is the reason for our being.

It is not that we must deny the idea of a past, as change itself leaves traces of the previous states that were experienced by material things that are no longer actual and existent. It is not that we cannot plan a future, as the future is created from the probabilities that are inherent in the now and have not yet been experienced. It is the experience that drives the zero dimension to produce an actuality that we know as our lives, our history and our universe. The world is still what we make it out to be.

Previous parts:

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

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

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

NOTHING

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OF GOD, MAN, NATURE AND ZERO DIMENSION