Matter

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/

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