When contemplating infinity and the universe, there is no way to escape the concept of God. Most cultures have had gods since the beginning of civilization. Something in us wants to give a name to that which existed before the universe came to be and will continue after the universe has ended.
That which existed before anything and after anything, even though it be nothing or Void, is still another concept for God in the minds of many. Nothing is, of course, no thing. God is not a thing as well. There is a parallel here, but God is not nothing.
An empty void has no existence without a world in which to place it. We cannot see nothing because it is not there. If it is not there, then it logically does not exist.
We live in a universe of complementary states. We have bad and we have good. We have right, we have left. We have up, we have down. We cannot have a subject without an object. One needs the other like a child needs a mother.
Quickly, picture a place without time and space where even thought has melted into a pool of possibility–a seemingly endless ocean of events and experiences that have not yet occurred. All is still for the briefest of instants because when time stops, existence ceases and the one is no longer measured as being separate from the other. Measurement occurs in spacial dimensions, but not in primary dimensions where only points, lines, and possibilities exist.
Physical changes are what create an experience. Experience creates events. In order to have experience, we need the perception of an event. In order to perceive anything, we need awareness. It is the mental world of awareness that comes before all else. In the remote past, it was simply primal awareness, the ability to differentiate one from another.
Primal awareness could be called ‘God’ by some, but there is a great social danger in calling anything holy and above natural law. Creation is a process and an act, not an unexplained miracle. The act of creation spreads knowledge and organization across the universe.
Most of us have outgrown the God-king or God-the-Father who in his divinity imposes his will and plans upon the world. We see religious thought for what it for what it is, a pattern of social development.
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 entangled events.
Awareness is the cause of time and space, though it forever dwells outside of time and space. It is of another dimension that has no beginning nor end. This awareness is potentially infinite, yet responsible for the existence of the finite. It is beyond self, yet produces not only the act of consciousness but describes and brings to being a forever-changing universe of unlimited potential.
Consciousness creates the idea of time, then measures the duration as well. We should understand that the realization of our world is both a mental conception and a physical reality. The world around us has myriads of viewpoints that change as our consciousness moves through the now. The person I call myself is but a collection of memories, hereditary information, experiences, learning, emotions, and patterns of thinking. We are here in the now because this is the only place for us to be. We cannot be in the past or the future except in mental processes. The physicality of our existence changes as the mental universe changes. Being in the now is a conscious mental state.
This is quite a confusing concept for some. Many corollary dilemmas spring from accepting the mental and physical universe as two aspects of the same universal state. An entire stand-alone universe outside of my person exists and contains all these things separate from me.
Knowledge and experience form our four-dimensional viewpoints. Modern viewpoints revolve around the physical aspects of the mind. These scientific interpretations often hold that the mind is roughly identical to the brain and is reducible to physical phenomena such as the firing of neurons and the chemical encodings of memory. Yet, we did not always think in this manner.
Throughout the age of human reasoning, the mind has been connected to the psyche. The term “soul” is often used synonymously with the psyche—which includes the totality of the human mind, both the conscious and unconscious elements. The soul has long been thought to be the immortal aspect of the human condition, a ghostly spirit where the personality and moral compass resides.
Carl Jung used the words ‘soul’ and ‘psyche’ as they are the same word in the German language. Of this he wrote: “I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche, I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a “personality”. (Jung, 1971: Def. 48 par. 797).
In a universe paired with a mental aspect and a physical aspect, the dimensional realities in each pair would be different. The first dimension of the one point would be the same in both, but the second dimension of two points forming a line would be different. It is through this difference that they come to be independent entities. If one point is infinite and the other is temporal, then the world line of the second dimension would be a straight line to infinity in the mental state while the world line of the other would curve and eventually return to its own starting point, creating an orbit—a geometric figure. It would be temporal and physical because it had a beginning and an ending.
Infinity is not one thing. Even infinity must be paired with its opposite, the finite. Infinity simply has no beginning nor end. There can be many infinities in a larger infinity because small infinities, like endless numbers, take up no space at all and are not in time.
Objects exist beyond my personal awareness—such as the place I dwell, the people I know, and the universe I inhabit. They too have being in the now. They are a product of consciousness, but they cannot be of my consciousness alone. They are in the consciousness of all. We all have a similar basic vision of the world about us. A common sharing of conscious knowledge between existing entities and objects obviously occurs, though much of nature works through an unconscious mental process. Our conceptions reside in the mental state and deal directly with the infinite process of energy transformation and electrical connections. This mental state has to be of universal proportion—just as the physical state is of universal proportion.
Is this mental state of the universe God? If so, it surely is not an Abrahamic God that rules the universe. Is the physical state of the universe more valuable to us than the mental state, or are they equal? If they are both equal, are they the same?
Unconscious thought needs no brain to advertise its presence.
Thought brings to light a spark, impulsive waves that create space
and burns their way through time to start the clock of matter.
Living movements are 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, or 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? We must define the words to be clear:
The word thought comes from Old English þoht, or geþoht, from the 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”). The meaning of “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 particles 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 both a conscious and an unconscious mind, we would know nothing and be nothing.
per·cep·tion
pərˈsepSH(ə)n/
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 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.
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.
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.
The most elementary of things experience the sense of touch. If it did not, it would not react to or be influenced by another object. 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 remembrance 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.
Perhaps in its purest state, virgin awareness is void of experience and thought. That is easy to picture if we try to remember the time before we were born. 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 began as realized thoughts as the one reflected upon the other and objects were born.
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.
Albert Einstein did not believe in an Abrahamic God but assented to the laws of nature in the way Spinoza had done centuries before. He believed that order, not chaos, was the rule of the universe.
He once said that he did not believe that God played dice with the universe.
“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.”
“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.”
My friend Tim believes that the universe is infinite. If you could travel in a straight line forever, you would see nothing but stars and dust with galaxies, clusters, and planets so far beyond our sense’s ability to perceive that we could never find an end. It keeps on going forever. Even if matter is not present, Tim believes that space goes on forever. That is his picture of an infinite universe.
The problem with this image is that it is impossible to know. If energy cannot be newly created or destroyed (according to the 1st Law of Thermodynamics), then energy simply changes form. There would not be enough room in eternity to have infinite matter unless the universe is also infinite. Objects like the universe have a place in space and time. Therefore, both space and the universe must be finite. When the universe expands, everything is bigger and farther apart. In an eternity, the whole of finite matter that composes all objects would be so large as to be totally separated from one another.
So what is the universe expanding into?
That which is beyond the boundary of the universe is often called “voidness”. It is not anything. It is not in time and space. Voidness can be infinite because there is nothing there at all. You cannot travel there because it is not there. You cannot see it because it is invisible. Voidness is not simply the stillness of quantum fields without movement. Voidness is the infinity of nothingness, the original state of non-existence.
But is there something that can be eternally held in the nothingness of the void? Can the void hold potentiality? Potentiality is not something real––not something that exists. It has no definite time and occupies no space. In this case, potentiality is the invisible seed of something that can possibly exist.
If the void is capable of holding potentiality (as I assume must be the case), then it must have the ability to store both the potentiality of energy and the potentiality of alertness and awareness. Both are essential components of world formation. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines potential as “existing in possibility, capable of development into actuality.” See https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/potential.
Potentiality is not actuality. It need not be in time and space. It can, like the void, be infinite. From the beginning, in order to start the unveiling of a universe, potential energy must exist within the void. This potentiality of the void would take up no time nor occupy any space because neither space nor time exists in the non-dimensional. Further, if the void can hold potential energy, then it can hold potential awareness and the potential intellect of the natural mind. The void’s potential information can serve as a two-dimensional blueprint for the unveiling of a universe.
We must then suspect that awareness and energy have their origin in the void. They do not exist there, but the potential to exist must be harbored in the void.
There are three fundamental necessities for the universe to exist––energy, awareness, and information. All are invisible and all are infinite––without form or body.
With these three fundamentals, the void has the ability to bring the universe into existence. In modern terms, an excitation of a cosmic thought in the potential eternal energy of the void creates the zero-dimension, a dimension similar to the void––in that it is outside space and time––but unlike the void in that the newly-released energy becomes kinetic instead of potential and is perceived by the potential for awareness in the void. Movement, like the released energy that creates a thought, creates a zero-dimension that is infinite and unique in that it sprang from the void by actuating the void’s potentiality.
Is it any wonder then, that this voidness would be interpreted as God by our ancestors, both remote and recent? The void has the property of holding the potential to activate nature itself with the potential energy and awareness that is somehow stored within it.
Tim’s wife also believes in an expanding universe that grows faster and faster as objects speed away from one another. If you ask her what the universe is expanding into, the answer is that “the universe is all there is. Nothing exists without it. It keeps getting bigger. It is not expanding into anything because there is nothing in which to expand.”
That is precisely my point… at the remote end of the universe is the void, just as in the remote beginning.
The good thing about the void is that it can be anything you want it to be. It can be God, Buddha, Allah, Jupiter, or Ra the Sun God. It can be the Tao, the heavens, Nirvana, or altered consciousness.
What is created can be nature, reality, illusion, Maya, or something in between. It can be nothing and everything at once. Nothing really exists but the void and the realized potential it has wrought.
It takes both awareness and information processing for dimensions to come into view. To see something in three dimensions, one has to view from outside and above the apparent dimensions. A circle on a plane—like a drawing on paper—does not appear as a sphere until viewed from above the plane. The added property of the height, added to the width and length, creates an object in space that becomes manifest in three dimensions, where height and width, and length are experienced.
The third-dimension requires conscious awareness in that it must be seen from above the plane to become an independent object. Two-dimensional objects are not distinguished from their background until they are observed from above the plane.
Duration is not only an element of time but an element of length. “Length” commonly refers to physical size, as in the length, width, and depth of an object. Duration measures the time period, but the term length is also used to define a period of time as in: “How long have you been waiting?”
ZERO DIMENSION
Being equals existence. Nothing cannot exist because nothing has no being. Nothing was always a human conception, not a natural fact. The Arabian people, Babylonians, and the Mayans all came up with the conception of zero.
The ideas of infinities and endless eternities are foreign to human thought. To believe that one can travel on forever and never see an edge of the universe feels intuitively preposterous. To believe that time goes on infinitely forward and eternally backward is an awkward conception. We all have a hard time coming to terms with infinity. The idea that space is infinite means that infinitely huge sections of space can never be seen. What would be the point in that? We always need a point on which to anchor.
The same holds true for the universe. All things in space and time have beginnings and ends. They are finite. Yet, because the finite exists, then there must be that which is not finite. It is called the infinite. The ‘undefined’ is an even better term.
The same is true of nothing. Nothing does not exist. It is the opposite of existence in its ‘non-existence’.
Yet, nothing exists. It also does not exist. Or is it in a ‘superposition’ where it is both?
The reason infinity can go on forever is that there is nothing there at all. Without time and space, there are no things… nothing.
If the infinite does not exist in time and space, does it exist at all? Is there a geometric plane above time and space where awareness can experience no time and no space and still be aware?
I believe the answer to that is, yes. There is the point… the universal point, the invisible center of every circle in the universe. That point is one-dimensional because it is all there is––just one single point that contains the entire universe. No matter how large or small this point is thought to be, it is still all there is and it is the center of everything everywhere.
We can only speculate about the original point and how the physical world emerges from this super-positioned point that is every place and at the center of everything. The infinite includes the finite, the indefinite, and all that all exists.
I think it is imperative to come to terms with infinity. We need to understand that which is beyond time and space. It is the obvious source of existence and the physical universe. We cannot get away from a first cause that came from nothing. For explanation, some turn to the idea of an eternal universe. Yet, that theory cannot take wing and fly as a conception in the temporal world where all begins and ends. Even if energy is fundamental, the question remains: “From what did it spring?” Is energy eternal? Did it come from nothing?
The zero-dimension must be indefinite. It cannot be more than a point or it would be two-dimensional. It cannot be less than a point or it would have no existence. As such, the indefinite holds everything within it, including the finite. The indefinite is not limited by dimensional views. The indefinite has no reason to distinguish between the realms of physical and mental being for they are molded as one.
Consciousness creates the idea of time, then measures the duration as well. We need to understand that the realization of our world is both a mental conception and a physical reality. The world around us has myriads of viewpoints that change as our consciousness moves through the now. The person I call myself is but a collection of memories, hereditary information, experiences, learning, emotions, and patterns of thinking. We are here in the now because this is the only place for us to be. We cannot be in the past or the future except in mental processes. The physicality of our existence changes as the mental universe changes. Being in the now is a conscious and continuous mental state.
Our self-consciousness creates the dichotomy between mental being and physical being. They are two separate states of awareness. Each is equally welcome and both have their own dimensional viewpoints, complete duplicates of one another except one is coded into the physical state and the other is informational and coded into the mental state. The informational data of the universe is coded in the mental aspect (2-D). It is a part of the infinite while simultaneously, through entanglement, the data is physically encoded in the temporal world of physicality.
We are always in the middle. We create the ideas of time and motion and eternity and project them into a timeless era where they do not belong. Timelessness must exist, though we can barely imagine it. Experience, we deduce, cannot be had without events in time. How, then, can timelessness be possible?
It is possible because the now is always present. To be present in the now requires no thought or action at all. It simply is. Physical change occurs in time but time is not the cause of the change. It is the movement of conscious awareness through the eternal line of the electric now that creates change. Change is a movement that when measured, becomes time. But it is the conscious awareness that is doing the movement. It is the awareness that creates the change we call movement. The physical counterpoint of awareness is pressure, the force responsible for all physical movement.
We can surmise that the tool called mathematics springs from a natural source because the universe exhibits mathematical precision and patterns from the very start. Perhaps human minds create mathematics, but the muse is Nature itself. Mathematics and equations are commonly used to define what physical changes can produce.
In order to be useful, knowledge and information must be stored. Genetics and the nervous system are where we store our personal data. I think that the totality of this information and experience is stored mentally in the second dimension and physically in the third. The infinite plane of the second-dimension is similar to a universal soft drive that records all reality perpetually. Alas, this can probably never be proved, but it makes for great hope. It would answer the question as to why the universe destroys and recreates its parts.
Knowledge and experience form our four-dimensional viewpoints. Modern viewpoints revolve around the physical aspects of the mind. These scientific interpretations often hold that the mind is roughly identical to the brain and is reducible to physical phenomena such as the firing of neurons and the chemical encodings of memory.
Yet, we did not always think in this manner. Throughout the age of human reasoning, the mind has been connected to the psyche. The term “soul” is often used synonymously with the psyche—which includes the totality of the human mind, both the conscious and unconscious elements. The soul has long been thought to be the immortal aspect of the human condition, a ghostly spirit where the personality and moral compass resides.
Carl Jung used the words ‘soul’ and ‘psyche’ as they are the same word in the German language. Of this he wrote: “I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche, I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a “personality”. (Jung, 1971: Def. 48 par. 797)
In a universe paired with a mental aspect and a physical aspect, would the realities in each pair be different? The first dimension of the one point would be the same in both, but the second dimension of the two points becoming connected to form a line would be different. It is through this difference that they come to be independent entities. If one point is infinite and the other is temporal, then the world line of the eternal second dimension would be a straight line to infinity in the mental state. Meanwhile, the world line of the finite point would curve and eventually return to its own starting point, creating an orbit—a geometric figure. It would be temporal and physical because it had a beginning and an ending.
Infinity is not one thing. Even infinity must be paired to its opposite, the finite. Infinity simply has no beginning nor end. There can be many infinities in a larger infinity because small infinities, like endless numbers, take up no space at all and are not in time.
Objects exist beyond my personal awareness—such as the place I dwell, the people I know, and the universe I inhabit. They too exist in the now. They are a product of consciousness, but they cannot be of my consciousness alone. They are in the consciousness of all.
We all have a similar basic vision of the world about us. A common sharing of conscious knowledge between existing entities and objects obviously occurs––though much of nature works through an unconscious mental process. Our conceptions reside in the mental state and deal directly with the infinite process of energy transformation and electrical connections. This mental state has to be of universal proportion—just as the physical state is of universal proportion.
When we realize that objective awareness is essential for the very existence of objects, we come to understand the unity of all. We are all objects. We are mental conceptions, dreams that are molded together in the one universe that provides adventure, knowledge, and experience for all from the interactions of its individual parts.
Like most any white male born on the 40’s and raised in a rural midwestern town, I was raised with racist and chauvinistic people all around me. There were no black people in the old home town. I never had a chance to relate to any other influence until I left the nest and joined the larger nation around me.
Though women were almost sacred to me, it was not long before I was accused of chauvinism as well. Whether or not this destroyed my first marriage is an open question. It did not help. I entered marriage with the idea based on what was about me—that a woman’s role was to cook and do most of the cleaning. Men took care of the outside and women took care of the inside. That’s what my mother and their mothers did. It was that way everywhere for all I knew. There was little experience to be had about any alternative life styles. The TV shows of the time reinforced this mindset.
When you are living alone, you have to do everything. I did some cooking, some sloppy cleaning, and either went to the corner laundry or dropped my clothes at the cleaners. But that did not change the mindset that formed when I was young. My expectations for my marriage were much more traditional than I like to recall. By myself, I eat in restaurants, sleep in motels or small efficiencies and take my wash to the laundry masters. These were my preferences. Living with others required compromise.
Born male, I could only guess at the female mindset. I was not at ease with sex and dating for many years. I finally pecked my way out of that smothering egg long after those around me.
Women were elevated to goddess status in many stone-age cultures. Carvings and stoneworks of the Donna reflect the respect some stone-age peoples had for their women. The Abrahamic and Islamic religions did not glorify, but enslaved women as male possessions. Through most civilized society, women were treated as chattel.
Chivalry supposedly reinstated women as objects of affection that needed protection but cast women in the role of delicate objects, fragile creatures who needed protection. Likely, this applied more to high-bred women of wealth or nobility, than the milkmaid or the tavern servers.
Unlike the generations before me, I came of sexual age after The Pill. Unlike generations after me, my encounters came before AIDS. A short span in the 60’s and early 70’s turns out to be one of time’s few social reprieves for active sexual freedom. Single young men and women were hungry for sexual pleasure and the deep-rooted desire for stable companionship, but we soon found that people often mix like oil and water. Paradise is sweet and sour.
It does not take men long to realize that the woman is the great decider about physical contact. Those men who respected others also respected their wishes. Some—who had no real respect for themselves or others—tried to force themselves on women.
Most people have no tolerance for sexual predators. Using and abusing power (be it physical or economic) to force sexual favors has been wrong for a long time. Many men in powerful positions felt they had a right to demand sexual favors from subordinates.
Community leader and organizer, Tarana Burke, founded the “ME TOO” movement in 2006 to help sexual harassment victims and survivors to cope.
By late 2017 the movement has taken on social-changing roles as women came out to expose their unwilling experiences with people of power. However, not everyone was on board that ship. Catherine Deneuve, the famous 74-year-old French movie actress, denounced the movement in an open letter in France’s LeMonde. She claimed “legitimate protests against the sexual violence that women are subject to, particularly in their professional lives, had turned into a witch hunt.”
“Rape is a crime” she wrote, “but trying to seduce someone, even persistently or clumsily, is not—nor is men being gentlemanly a macho attack. Men have been punished summarily, forced out of their jobs when all they did was touch someone’s knee or try to steal a kiss.”
Street harassment is a form of sexual harassment that comprises unwanted comments, wolf-whistles, cat-calling, and other actions by strangers in public areas, according to Google. And to think, just a few years back that was the common practice of hard-hatted males on break when a pretty woman walked by.
So what are men to do now? Ask if she’s comfortable. Phrase your words with more care. Think about sexist jokes before you relate them and you will likely not repeat them.
“Whether we know it or not, whether we allow ourselves to admit it or not, every man has a list of times that he has violated a woman’s boundaries. Men are raised in a society that teaches boys that they are entitled to have access to women’s bodies. You may not be drugging women’s drinks in a nightclub, you may not be stalking sex workers in a van, but you have probably pressured someone sexually more than once in your life. The game teaches men to assume that women want what we want. The game teaches women that they are supposed to want what men want. Men benefit from this, women do not, but the game is rigged to hurt everyone. The only way to end that cycle is to reject the game itself.” -Indigo Nai on Facebook, 10/17/17
It is sound that causes a bang. Sound needs something through which to travel to be heard. There is no sound in the vacuum of space. Sound also needs a sense of hearing. Since none of these things were present for the Big Bang, we have to conclude that the Big Bang had no sound at all. It was neither a bang nor was it big.
The reason it was not big is simple. The Big Bang would have been everywhere because that is all that existed. The singularity from which it came was supposedly an infinitely dense single-dimensional point. Being unstable, we are told, it exploded violently.
Despite the anthropic descriptions we hear about universal theories, the appearance of infinite energy instantly occurred, without a sense of time, without a sense of space. The place it occurred had to be everywhere as that was all there was. Before that, no universe existed.
Existence is a strange and heady subject. To exist means to have objective reality or being, an actual being; it means being present in a particular situation or place. The word ‘exist’ was not even coined until the 17th-century and was likely an abbreviation of existence.
But if no universe existed before the Big Bang, then what was there? What was in its place when there was no place? Nothing? But nothing cannot exist because it has no being. The ‘it’ we seek cannot be anything.
Whatever it was, it did not exist because without objects it had no objective reality. An observer and an object for the observer to perceive is essential to objective reality. No thing can be present in a particular space or time without an object and an interaction [observer].
With no time or space into which a reality could be actuated, space would need to be created instantaneously for energy to have a place to go when it was released. The Big Bang explanation posits the expansion of the universe from a singular point. Space came into being as radiating objects that found dimensions to inhabit. Time came into being as these objects expanded outward in all directions, becoming vibrating strings that created virtual fields and brought to the observer a sense of duration in time.
And what of this observer?
What is the qualia of the observer? Observers are generally thought of as being people, but they can also be a system built from awareness. An observer is a person or a system that observes.
The quality essential for observation is awareness.
Awareness must actually precede observation as awareness needs to be present for an observation to be recorded. Awareness comes before time, comes before space, comes before the universe, and comes before existence. Awareness without objects is similar to that proposed singularity from whence the universe sprang. It is present before anything is actualized into being is present without time and space as an eternal and infinite zero-point dimension from which the dreamscape of reality is constructed. All things are made manifest within eternal awareness, the essential foundation of all things.
I posit that all things are awareness in its myriads of localized forms. All things are formed and made of the eternal and non-material awareness which has always been present in the eternal now.
The one-dimensional point is where awareness identifies itself and gives birth to space by releasing universal fields where simultaneous events can occur—abstract fields of possibility. Actuality can be built, piece by piece, as awareness actuates universal mental conceptions that become the scope of our reality.
Assuming the Big Bang occurred, that which was initially released by the Big Bang would be an unformed virtual energy. Radiated energy is measured by the frequency of its vibrational waveforms. Virtual energy has no vibrational components, the first step to physical actuality.
Dimensional realities occur when the infinite becomes finite. When a dimensional limitation is placed upon virtual energy, vibrational fields are created. Because this occurs in the first-dimension, beyond and before space and time, mathematical patterns are created which nature can later emulate. These patterns last and sometimes repeat through eternity. They are precursors to the sense of time.
When virtual radiation slows to a vibrational state, a sense of time and duration is created. Since this radiation is awareness—as all things are composed of awareness in one of its many forms—the observing system can identify the frequency of these vibrations as an entity of substance. Awareness becomes aware of its own being, awakens from its great sleep, dreams of its own experience, and posits its own being into conceptual existence. Only then can nature begin the evolutionary process of universe building.
Seen from an infinite point, there is no time nor space in the lower first and second-dimensions. Everything existent is a part of an eternal now. Awareness, formed of its own being, creates time and space in localized pockets of consciousness. These local entities become networks that communicate and stores the information gleaned from observations.
Virtual radiation transforms into increasingly complex forms of light energy—like photons and cosmic rays—which vibrate in diverse patterns and frequencies as new dimensions are added to the primordial soup. The information recorded is encoded to become physical actualities.
Before spin and mass comes to exist, bosons—which have little or no spin and mass—crystalizes into the elemental hydrogen and helium as they pass through a universal Higgs field created by the timeless second-dimension which adds the spin and mass and begins the processes that form the great clouds of dense gases which fills the primitive universe. New dimensional senses evolve and come into existence. All the while, this new universe remains connected to the eternal awareness from which it was formed. Each new sense creates a different dimensional reality and adds additional limitations upon this eternal awareness.
We know nothing of these natural processes at the time of our birth. Our personal selves are a very tiny part of the unconscious and conscious processes that awareness develops. Our growth as a person follows the hereditary patterns laid out in our DNA. We are not conscious of the awareness behind our appearance in the universe. This awareness precedes consciousness and is lost in the misty visions of our personal identities. Our lives are similar to coming into the world in the middle of a motion picture we have never seen, except that we write the plot though our own free choices with the help and the hindrances of all the other playwrights that come to influence us.
We expand and extend our universe through consciousness. It is not that distant galaxies and black holes have no a priori existence of their own. They have an existence outside ourselves. The moon is present whether we see it or not. Our consciousness is like a moving snapshot of a moment in the now, different for everyone and every thing.
Nature obviously has its own thoughts and ideas. Most of our own brilliant inventions are derived from observing nature in action. A simple walking through the fall landscape can bring us face-to-face with the brilliance of nature’s thoughts if we take the time to notice them.
Milkweed is the only food of the caterpillar for Monarch butterflies. It is an important source of nectar for bees and wasps and butterflies alike. How they propagate is not only worthy of our attention, but could be an essential clue to understanding the mind of nature itself.
The little brown seeds are enmeshed in light filaments of silky white hairs called coma that blow away in the wind to disperse and propagate new generations of the milkweed family.
Such revolutionary method for propagation has to develop from an idea in the mind of nature. Somehow, a genetic blueprint for this form of reproduction is developed and slowly revised over time. Due to the complexity of the parts of the plants involved, it makes sense to think of this natural process as an idea that is carefully nurtured and carried out by some natural thought pattern that regulates and develops the botanical universe. The common dandelion has a similar method of asexual reproductions the flowers turn to spore The offspring that grow from this method are genetically identical to the parent plant.
This milkweed floss is hollow and coated with wax, making very good for insulation properties.During World War II, milkweed floss was collected as a substitute for kapok. The milk in the milkweed contains 1 to 2% latex, but has not been widely used as a source for rubber of paint because other sources are more prevalent. The fibers are used to clean u oil spills. (Milkweed touted as oil-spill super-sucker — with butterfly benefits”. cbc.ca. 2 December 2014.)
Milkweed in the Asciepias species is the only food for the caterpillar of the Monarch butterfly. Preserving and growing milkweed is essential for the continuation of this beautiful insect.
Some years back, I believed that people grew old and died because they became ill and their bodies deteriorated. As I age myself, I wonder if that is so. Could it be that people pass on because the world about them changes so much that they no longer feel attached to it? Can a person evolve to the point where withdrawing from the world seems the best logical choice? Does this changing of the world about us affect our consciousness and then our health? Does life culminate in the desire to no longer desire? Is death the natural end because we lose the desire and will to persist? Or is the will to persist yanked from us despite our rage against the darkness of the unknown night.
What is true for one might not be true for another. The sheer variety of humanity and the vast complexity of nature creates a different world for each entity that lives within it.
Inequality is everywhere because inequality is essential for movement. Inequality is gravity. It is that weak force that binds things together, feet to the earth and planets to the stars, friends to friends.
Each individual life is a cosmos unto itself.
As a young man, I easily saw the truth in the unity of all being but saw also that the world is a game of one-upsmanship. People compete to produce winners and losers. The world around us is stratified, socially and economically.
Social inequality is a constant, but nature demands a balance for stability. The highs must not be too high and the lows must not be too low. When things are too far out of balance, they explode and gravity is overcome.
Gravity is the result of inequality. When things are equal, there is no push nor pull.
Each side of the equation is different, but the equality creates the balance.
For most of us living on Earth, there is nothing as fine as the era in time in which we now live. How could this not be so, when this time is all we have? Are we not practical? We cannot live in another era.
Yet, eras change, and change brings new actors to the stage, new athletes to the field. Soon enough, we barely know the rules of the game because it has changed so much.
We spend our lives speaking our lines and doing our work. We seek what makes us feel good—through pleasures, work, pastimes, and relationships. It becomes the driving factor that motivates and moves us.
It is movement that produces the gravity that keeps us centered enough to survive. We—like our Earth, our Sun, and our Galaxy—must evolve and revolve as we orbit around something much bigger than us. Heinlein wrote: “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” Love is one of the gravitational anchors that hold us in place.
Health does get worse with time and wear. Physical strength does deteriorate. Passion itself takes a tumble with age. We know this is so. Yet, our fast-changing world can become so unfamiliar that we can easily become those Strangers in a Strange Land that we heard or read about years ago.
Heinlein’s character said: “Thinking doesn’t pay. It just makes you discontented with what you see around you.” Time passes and consciousness is overloaded with evaluations and judgments made by past choices. It becomes harder to distinguish the winner from the loser when you know each all too well. We can become confused or dismayed about the directions our society and nations are going.
“Thou art god, I am god. All that groks is god,” Heinlein wrote.
Grok may be the only English word that is derived from a fictional Martian language. “Grok” was introduced in Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It means to understand fully and intuitively with empathy of intuition. It is hard to grow old and not see the reality of these observations. “Random chance is not a sufficient explanation of the Universe—in fact, random chance is not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot cannot hold itself.”
Everything living has a blind instinct to survive built into its system.
“The only religious opinion I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.”
Melania, you love him, right? Some advice from Garrison Keillor
By Garrison Keillor Washington Post Writers Group
First Lady Melania Trump listens as President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with administration officials on the opioid addiction crisis at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., on Tuesday. Nicholas Kamm, AFP/Getty Images
My wife has gone East for a couple weeks and now there is nobody to say, “You’re not wearing that tie with that shirt, are you?” Nobody to point discreetly at her left nostril and hand me a tissue. Nobody to remind me of the name of that woman with the glasses (Liz) whom I ought to know — I told my wife, “Her and me went to school together” so that she’d have the satisfaction of saying “She and I.” “No,” I said, “I don’t think you went to our school.”
It’s a comedy routine when she’s around and now it’s a lonely monk in his cell, quill pen in hand, making illuminated letters and living in darkness.
At this very moment, if you want to know the truth, the big crisis in my life is the fact that my iPhone has accidentally upgraded itself and I don’t know how to downgrade it except by hurling it into the river. My wife would know how to fix this.
Some genius at Apple designed it and now I need a password to make each call or text and the texting screen is odd. Instead of a simple “Send,” there is a row of icons. I press one and colored balloons float up in the background, I try another and the phone offers me a choice of cartoons to accompany the text — a ferocious gorilla in a cage, Snow White, a galloping horse — which must be big fun for 5-year-olds but I’m 75 and I don’t need balloons to accompany my texts, and meanwhile the thing keeps asking for my Apple ID verification, which I do not have. This hellish idiocy descended on me suddenly; evidently I clicked on a “Yes” I shouldn’t have clicked on. My wife would know how to do a reset. I’d like to reset the phone with a ball-peen hammer.
Man was not made to live alone. My friend Frank came to visit who has been divorced for a couple years and I sat and took issue with him on about half of what he had to say which required me to lean farther to the right than I care to lean but I did it for his own good and he was grateful for the opposition. He’s been alone for a long time, living on love and sympathy, and he needed the boost to self-esteem that comes from someone telling you you’re full of prune juice.
This is the American way. Those whom we love, we needle. Better honest skepticism than false piety.
One person can’t do it all. I pretty much handle foreign policy issues in our home because I am not inhibited by ignorance, whereas my wife handles science, technology and the arts. She reads science articles in the paper and explains them to me. She tends the plants in the yard and knows their names. She is well-versed on social convention and has sound opinions about music, books and design. The marriage operates on a delicate system of checks and balances. I say, “Let’s put a ping-pong table in the living room” and she says, “After I’m gone,” and so we don’t.
Everyone needs a truth-teller in his or her life and truth-tellers are becoming rare. It’s the Age of Sensitivity when we’re made to feel that we should be validating each other and not telling someone that his fly is open. Which brings me to the point of this column (“And about time,” I can hear her say).
Melania — do you mind if I call you Melania? — I assume that you love this guy. I don’t, even though Scripture tells me to. A bully and a braggart who is also a liar and somewhat clueless might be lovable if he were a cabdriver, but not a president. But you do, so fine. You owe it to him to tell him, “Darling, you’re making an ass of yourself. For the sake of your family, stop.” Would you let the man run around in a headdress of flamingo feathers singing the song about each and every highway and byway and not in a shy way with his trousers around his ankles? No, you wouldn’t. But that’s what’s happening now.
You married a New York Democrat and now you’re married to Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick. Make him stop. If you can’t tell him face to face, try Twitter. A short punchy message will get his attention. Something like, “You are dumb enough to be twins. Shut up and be beautiful.”
Garrison Keillor is an author, entertainer and former host of “A Prairie Home Companion.”
source of nectar for bees and wasps and butterflies alike. How they propagate is not only worthy of our attention, but could be an essential clue to understanding the mind of nature itself.
Some years back, I believed that people grew old and died because they became ill and their bodies deteriorated. As I age myself, I wonder if that is so. Could it be that people pass on because the world about them changes so much that they no longer feel attached to it? Can a person evolve to the point where withdrawing from the world seems the best logical choice? Does this changing of the world about us affect our consciousness and then our health? Does life culminate in the desire to no longer desire? Is death the natural end because we lose the desire and will to persist? Or is the will to persist yanked from us despite our rage against the darkness of the unknown night.
Kenneth Harper Finton 