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.
Dimensions are mental constructs. A dimension is a measurement of something. These measurements are in the mental world of conscious awareness. We can only measure things with our conscious intellect. When we become aware of a dimension, it is a viewpoint.
This parade of dimensions begins with the zero-dimension, a non-dimensional viewpoint without material content. For dimensions to come into view, both awareness and information processing is required. That is why the zero-dimension is a mental world of awareness. It precedes the existence of being. This non-material zero-dimension is without time, without space and is eternally present everywhere at once. The zero dimension is the source of the awareness that projects the universe into being.
This is where each of us came from before birth and possibly the same non-place that we dwell in when we die. We all remember this place. Since we have all experienced the place where our awareness of ourselves was united with everything before we began to exist in this time and space. Everyone has experienced an infinity of endlessness.
Timelessness can be pictured as a sleeping form of awareness that—when awakened—develops into the recognition of sensory touches and perceptions. In time, awareness births the subconsciousness and the self-consciousness.
As the universe is born from infinity, we are as well. Infinity is that which was before this life experience. The world about us is similar to a continuous dream that is made real by our consciousness awareness.
Because the zero dimension is static and unchanging, the first and second dimensional structures are also timeless in that they are everywhere at once.
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 dimensions of height, width, length, and duration create a space that becomes visible in three dimensions while height, width, and length are being experienced.
Duration is not only an element of time but it is also an element of length. “Length” commonly refers to physical size, as in the length, the 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?”
When and space and time are molded into a common dimension, they become that fourth-dimensional viewpoint which Einstein called spacetime.
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.
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.”
Born squawking with a curious furrow in my brow, I had no choice in the matter of my birth. Later, I was to learn I had been born into a large country and into an even larger universe that I am still learning to comprehend.
When I was eight I had an abdominal operation and was placed under either. I still remember the vision I had under the influence of the drug. I was running from Father Time who chased me with thunderbolts shooting from his fingertips as he yelled, “Stop, stop! You are ahead of time. Stop!”
It was a powerful vision that is vivid to this day.
How strange this world is to the young:I was born to be myself and not someone else. This is odd enough but it was even odder to come to conception here in this time instead of somewhere else in another time. Everything was such a mystery. I truly wanted to solve the mystery. I felt this could well be my calling.
It did not take long to discover this fact: everyone is stuck in themselves, the same as I am. Everyone has their own little universe where they are the king or the queen.
Sometimes while I was in a playful mood, I asked myself, “If you could be somebody else, who would that be?”
When I ran through the history of people I have met or known, I could not choose to be any of them. There was no one I might want to be morethan myself, male or female. It’s inconceivable I could be someone other than myself unless I was play-acting the part. Since I have to be me, I might as well make the most of the situation, I decided.
I took a while to understand why I arrived to be a player in this era. I surmised that it had to do with time and consciousness, something science cannot yet explain. It is so easy to miss this vital connection: the now is ever present, just as awareness is always present.
Is this a mere coincidence? Is the now not a measure of time?
The now is not measurable at all, but a micro fraction of an instant where the past changes into the future. The only thing solely contained in the now is our awareness. Consciousness remembers the past and imagines the future, but always does so in the now.
I came to this realization at a young age and caused myself great confusion. Did this mean the world is a mental construction?
For a while, I considered the possibility that the universe is actually a vision which comes alive in the intellect. This was a problematic idea. The mind itself is a mystery. How could the mind be only a product of flesh and blood, neural connections, when nature obviously had a mind which did not need a nervous system?
We are the centers of our worlds, yet nature has carried out its miracles for billions of years without the help of human consciousness through an unconscious process of evolutionary experiments. This has likely been the case since time began.
The colors we see are wavelengths of light. The mind learns to recognize these as different colors. About me, the people I knew had their own personal mindsets. They were different and separate from my own thoughts, though they used much of the same information I used to make their own world view. The primary difference between us is the type and quantity of the information we process both in the mind and the body.
Throughout our lives, the now remains stationary. It is not time that moves, but consciousness. Awareness is always being transformed through experiences, interactions, and observations. If time were to move, what would be the speed of time? If time flowed, what would be the volume of the flow?
No fixed universal clock can measure the flow or speed of time. Time is relative to dimensions, not to a fixed standard. With no way to measure the speed of time, no method can be devised to measure the speed of the now. The now has no speed at all, nor can it move.The rational thing to conclude is that time does not flow and the now does not move. Instead, consciousness changes.
Then painters paint to be seen, actors act to impress and singers sing to be heard.
If this is the case—and most often it is—the newer writers of the world are setting themselves up for great disappointment. They will not find the audience that they did in the past. They will not achieve the fame that others did in the past. They will quite likely not enjoy the riches that others have had In the past.
Technology and world Internet communications have obviously changed the world. Though it has democratized the ability to be read and seen and heard, by doing so it has practically eliminated the institutions that originally supported and brought culture to the world. Some vestiges of the old system remain, but they are losing ground with each passing year. They have been replaced by myriads of smaller, more democratized platforms that do not pay, do not develop and do not guide.
Moguls still control what is printed and sold in local stores. They chose the music that is allowed to be bought at box stores, the movies that are shown and the art that is displayed in museums and fine art shows. The competition for such space is fierce. The rewards to the artists have been drastically reduced from that it was just thirty years ago.
This leaves the would-be writer with a great dilemma. They feel that they have talent and should pursue an audience and readership, but the audience is slimmer and the finger of fate even more fickle than ever.
Only by applying a talent is the talent polished and sharpened. “Practice,” it is said, “makes perfect.” Perfection, though, is a subjective judgment that should be left out of that axiom. Practice makes us more exceptional. It is a fact, though, that natural talents of all kinds need to be performed and utilized to get beyond the level of the commonplace.
Writers now write blogs to keep their talents active and polished, but the readers of blogs are also a fickle lot. The individual blog does not really reach a substantial audience. Blogs and personal journals are worthy tools for a writer, as they can refer to them in the future, draw on them for ideas, and reference them for later promotion. There are few, if any, works that cannot be made better by multiple rewrites. So coming back to what you did before it quite valuable for the future.
Professional writing has not totally become extinct, but it is nearing that vanishing point. Professional writers are not free to write as their muse moves them, but are pressured to write what their superiors believe their readership wants to read.
Even with access to statistics that determine what people are choosing to read, the writer is often no longer free to follow their muse and write from the heart if they want to increase their following. Yet, writing from the heart and being true to your own voice is the only possible way to beat the odds. Only that will make you stand out in a crowd.
Even if you write from the heart, your heart and voice must be very special, very unique and quite original. Your perceived persona must be likable, strong and quite different from the masses. The vast majority of us will never be that person.
Chloe Thurlow recently spoke of “the time before smartphones made the whole world a banal image and the photographer like the editor became a dinosaur.” https://www.facebook.com/chloe.thurlow.5?fref=ts
We have a changing dictum.
As writers, we must write for ourselves to be original. We will probably never make any financial profit from these efforts. Few in history ever have. We may not even achieve any large readership no matter how hard we try. Everyone has an opinion to share, a broken heart to express, a love that they feel they must share with the world about.
All lives are novels in the making.
The only thing we can do is persist or quit. Of course, if we quit, we never will have an audience. If we want an audience or a readership, our only alternative is to persist. To persist means to continue through depression and despair. It means we need to develop tools to combat and dispel our negative feelings. To persist means to struggle with the reality that we spend too much time doing things that we do not love in order to do what we do love.
It is easier to be a baker or a cook or a carpenter. All such work is creative, but the requirement of pleasing more than a few is not essential in many occupations.
Artists always had to pay their dues. The fees are even higher these days.
The hosting of awareness is something inherent in all things existent. This awareness of which I speak is the same awareness that you are using at this very moment. All awareness comes from and shares the same origin in the zero dimension. Awareness is the source of things, but awareness is not a thing. Neither is it nothing. It is what we might term the soul of the universe, not a material substance.
Awareness is invisible. It is not something that we can touch or measure, yet it is ever present even when we are not consciously aware of anything. Awareness is the observer that is awakened by reactions to objects from within and outside ourselves. These reactions to our inner and outer worlds create information that eventually organizes itself and becomes experience.
Awareness does not need the concept of time and space. It creates time and space when it awakens to stimulus from another. Awareness is all that is necessary for the building of a universe. Nature is the child of awareness.
I am aware of the existence of a universe around me. Other things that are not my being validly exist but I can never prove it unless the world outside me and my own conscious awareness are one and the same. If the universe outside me and my being are ultimately connected and the fundamental awareness that is present in both is one and the same, then both are logically substantiated. The perceptions I use to perceive my being are the same as those used to perceive the universe.
What we call the Now—this fleeting moment that seems to move through time and space—is the very embodiment of our human personal awareness. It is always present—a universal phenomenon that can be viewed from many points of reference.
Awareness is non-material. It is not a product of a nervous system any more than it is the product of the evolution of elemental interactions. That thing which makes you aware of yourself and the world around you is not unique to you personally, but the basic property that creates the geometry and form of all things existent. Awareness has evolved an unconscious network of differentiated components that build and project an actualized world into our locally personalized world and the universe about us. The business of physical sciences is showing how this happens in a physical manner.
When we examine the material world for evidence of its history, we discover things that are both previously unknown and surprising. These things exist independently of our perception, just as the world exists independently of our perception. Why is this so if we are all of the same elemental awareness?
Each of us has our own constantly changing version of that which we are aware. It is composed of what we have been taught and what we have learned both consciously and unconsciously.
Primal awareness is the precursor of consciousness. Interactions are observations and they create the world through interaction, which is the same as observation, materializing matter from a field of primal energy, forcing time into existence by slowing the speed of light.
In quantum physics, a virtual state is a very short-lived, unobservable quantum state. In many quantum processes a virtual state is an intermediate state, sometimes described as “imaginary” in a multi-step process that mediates otherwise forbidden transitions. Such is the state of the universe before the actualization of dimensional realities.
The first step in actualizing an outside world is the creation of dimensional awareness. The first dimension has no time and space. It is simply a point that exists everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, as there is no time nor space nor observer with which to measure and define it. It cannot react until it is duplicated and reacts to movement and touch,
The second dimension records the point in motion. Movement creates spacetime, which until that movement took place, never existed. A line is composed of many clones of that individual point. All points are the same point. The prototype line also exists everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. Space is defined by the measurement of duration. The entanglements of electrons are possible because they exist in the second dimension, everywhere at once without time’s duration. They materialize when observed and remain in a physical timeline,
It is through the ‘observation’ of itself, perhaps by touch, that a point becomes a line. This second dimension is the birth of the finite. It creates a process of a beginning and an ending. It creates an observed, closed system.
The only way a point can be influenced by itself is to clone itself into many points, all of which are the same point, and then move in a curved line that comes back to its beginning location. This creates a closed, circular system or orbit. Only at this moment is there an inside and an outside. What is inside is virtual energy and empty, unused fields of possibility. What is outside is the undifferentiated awareness of the zero dimension.
With the third dimension, we have the birth of the unconscious mind from the formless, undifferentiated primal awareness. This awareness unconsciously observes the two-dimensional closed circle from above and adds the dimension of height to the width and length of the two-dimensional circle, creating what appears to be a sphere by the act of awareness observing a circle from above in three dimensions.
Light itself, the photon, is one-dimensional and has no experience of time and duration. Light gets to its destination as soon as it leaves. We are in the 4th dimension. This dimension gives duration and time to light and we perceive light as traveling for many light years to reach us, but the photon does not experience time and duration. This is relativity. By the same process, electrons, being in the primary dimensions, can be many places at once and are not fixed until they interact and are observed. This is quantum mechanics.
The fourth dimension emerges as the duration of time is observed and merges with space as duration—and spacetime is added to the primordial soup. As we live in the 3rd and 4th dimensions, our awareness seems to be locked into these dimensions, though more elementary existences—such as waves and particles— exist in the many dimensions.
In 1993, the physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft put forward the holographic principle, which explains that the information about an extra dimension is visible as a curvature in a spacetime with one fewer dimension. For example, holograms are three-dimensional pictures placed on a two-dimensional surface, which gives the image a curvature when the observer moves. Similarly, in general relativity, the fourth dimension is manifested in observable three dimensions as the curvature path of a moving infinitesimal (test) particle. Hooft has speculated that the fifth dimension is really the spacetime fabric.
If this is so, then we may live in the 5th dimension as well, but we cannot perceive it with our senses, as we cannot perceive any of the larger dimensions by virtue of our physical senses.
A perspective projection of a five-dimensional penteract
Entanglement or non-separability is the core idea of quantum theory. It is a simple idea: the universe is not a bunch of independent parts, but is rather one entity that evolves through time as one entity. That’s it. The problem is that this means there’s no such thing as causation. This is very hard to wrap your head around. Quantum theory is extraordinarily accurate, and our knowing quantum theory is why we have things like cell phones and computers. But what is quantum theory, really? Why is entanglement its primary prediction? This talk will explain what quantum theory is. It will show that quantum theory has nothing to do with tiny particles, wave-function collapse, or Schroedinger’s cat. Quantum theory is about how observers obtain information about the world. It is, in particular, about how observers who have memories and use language obtain information about the world. It is, in other words, about how you and I interact with perfectly ordinary things like tables and chairs and each other. You will leave this talk with a new understanding of quantum theory, and a new appreciation for entanglement. Chris Fields is an interdisciplinary information scientist interested in both the physics and the cognitive neuroscience underlying the human perception of objects as spatially and temporally bounded entities. His current research focuses on deriving quantum theory from classical information theory; he also works on cell-cell communication and cellular information processing, the role of the “unconscious mind” in creative problem solving, and early childhood development, particularly the etiology of autism-spectrum conditions. He and his wife, author and yoga teacher Alison Tinsley, recently published Meditation: If You’re Doing It, You’re Doing It Right, in which they explore the experience of meditation with meditators from many walks of life. Dr. Fields has also been a volunteer firefighter, a visual artist, and a travel writer. He currently divides his time between Sonoma, CA and Caunes Minervois, a village in southwestern France.
One day, when I was little, I was with my father in the bathroom while he was doing his daily grooming. Being the didactic father that he was, he wanted to teach me about all the right things to do in the world. He told me that, after removing the accumulated hair from the hairbrush, it was very important that I should never put it in the waste bin. There, it could too easily catch on fire and he urged me always to flush it down the toilet.
On a separate occasion, when I was with my mother in the bathroom during the daily grooming, I was told by her (being the didactic mother that she was) that I should never put hair in the toilet because it clogged the pipes. She urged that I should always use the waste bin.
In later years, when I began doing household chores on a regular basis, my father told me always to vacuum before dusting because the vacuum kicked-up dust onto the furniture. Of course, mother told me that I should always wipe the dust before vacuuming, because dust fell to the floor when wiped. (This should give you some insight as to what went wrong with me, but I digress.)
Their truths were perfectly logical and reasonable to them, even though they were conflicting in practice when applied by another. Since that time, I have learned that the best truth evolves from oneself. Truth is too relative to circumstance to leave its cultivation to someone regarded as “authority”, uninspected. We don’t always have that luxury as children, to inspect our authorities for truth, but we’ve all put on enough years now that we can be our own authors of truth. Maybe it is time for a reinspection. It’s OK to dump in the round file, or flush down the porcelain convenience, things that you have been told in the past. Even everything, if you find that it is not in actual fact producing results for you in the present. Because the truth is, our truths are how we shape this world.
One day, when I was little, I was with my father in the bathroom while he was doing his daily grooming. Being the didactic father that he was, he wanted to teach me about all the right things to do in the world. He told me that, after removing the accumulated hair from the hairbrush, it was very important that I should never put it in the waste bin. There, it could too easily catch on fire and he urged me always to flush it down the toilet.
On a separate occasion, when I was with my mother in the bathroom during the daily grooming, I was told by her (being the didactic mother that she was) that I should never put hair in the toilet because it clogged the pipes. She urged that I should always use the waste bin.
In later years, when I began doing household chores…
The world has always been filled with mediocrity. Mediocrity lies in the middle––the median plane––so it is more plentiful than that which is above and below it. As individuals, we always find ourselves in the middle, for we are the center point of our unique worlds.
We all have conflicting opinions––sometimes even within ourselves. That is because our concerns and viewpoints differ. Each of these viewpoints is composed of observations from different levels and perspectives. These levels are dimensional. The tool for the understanding of these dimensions is awareness. In other words, dimensions themselves are levels of observations and awareness. As we learn and assimilate information, we change our dimensional viewpoints. We become more complex. There is more information to sort and balance to form judicious judgments. We are multi-dimensional beings.
The Roots of Conflict
Conflicts of opinion are caused by judgments. Without judgments, we would have no conflict of opinion. All judgments are made from a limited perspective. Since none of us know it all, we will make bad judgments as well as good ones. It becomes even more complicated. What is good judgment in one instance is bad judgment in another.
In many cases, it is best not to rush to judgment at all. Judgments can be modified with the acquisition of different observations and facts.
The judgments others have made have drastically affected us. The opinions others have formed about us have a profound effect on our personality and character. When we have too much respect for the opinions of others in this world, we can lose our personal bearings. We need to care about what others think, but not so much that we lose our inner voice.
What we are, primarily, are present beings. There is not a single one of us that does not live every moment in the now, this present time, no matter what occupies our minds and muscles. The present continuum, the now, occupies all time.
The present, after all, is but awareness. The now is that immeasurably small and timeless moment that is observing what is happening at this split second. As soon as we blink or think about it, it has joined the past. The now is where we constantly find ourselves.
The past is where the physical forms of existence dwell. The past is the artifacts of events that happened as the timeless now passed through history and left its tracks.
The Present is Awareness
It is good to remember that the present is awareness because we can change awareness at will. We need but turn our heads to see another scene. We need but expand ourselves to see a different viewpoint. We need but to change the radio station to hear a different song.
We are our dreams if we care to dream. We are our hopes if we care to hope. We are our past in so far as it has brought us to the present.
–Kenneth Harper Finton
FURTHER READING:
Nothing Is Real: A metaphor for greater ideas, Kindle Edition
Dimensions are the building blocks of material existence. This book explores in depth the dual meaning of the title. Beginning with the source in zero dimension to the infinite 1st dimension (the point), to the second dimension of the universal plane, to the third dimension that observes the height and shape of an object in space, to the fourth dimension of spacetime where we view our world … the perception of dimensions creates our material universe
I often wish that dreams were more useful. I am talking about the dreams found in sleep that mix the past and present together in ways that can never exist in our reality. I am talking also about the recurring themes of dreams that form the outline and background of nightmares and sleep disturbances.
No one, in all the ages of mankind’s existence, has ever found a satisfactory explanation for dreams. Freud tried, but many think he failed miserably. Dreams are often so divorced from our daily routines that they appear to be random fantasies of a brain desiring content. Dreams do take us on an emotional ride, especially when we wake up and remember them vaguely. Yes, they can be positive and they can be negative to our emotional being.
Most often our dreams have some basis in experiences that we have lived and places we have been or called home. These dream experiences are distorted and take on extra dimensions, as though we are eternally reinventing our past and re-visualizing someone or some place based in our experience.
I have noticed that I am almost always young in my dreams. Aging, as yet, has never been a part of my dreams. I also dream of places that were at the cusp of great changes in my life. I can dream of my hometown dressed in bejeweled glamor, places I have lived or worked rewritten in seemingly endless fictional dramas––people and family that I have known are often present, even though they no longer live or are close to me.
Above all, dreams are emotional. They come with intense feeling and awareness. Sexual dreams may involve a person that we may or may not know. It is as though all our sensuality is wrapped in a longing for a person who is more a symbol of our desire than a real person, even if that dreamed person is someone we knew or know presently. Often, the object of a sexual dream is an unknown fantasy that embodies that which we desire. For this reason, some think that dreams serve the purpose of wish fulfillment, but many dreams can take us to places we have no desire to go.
Try as we will, we cannot find a real purpose for our dreams. This is likely that they have no real purpose. Like life itself, the purpose is simply the experience. They most often have no value or reason. The mind is restless and invents images and stories filled with emotional feelings that seem more real than their counterparts in our waking lives.
Vivid dreams tend to waken me from sleep and leave me restless and emotionally confused. Often I cannot get back to sleep right away after a vivid dream. Rarely does the dream continue after falling back to sleep. Vivid dreams are characterized by rapid eye movement and is a state of sleep called REM. The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology.
Most people have rather vivid dreams for several hours during the course of a night’s sleep. More often than not, these dreams are nor remembered upon awakening. Dreams with REM can be measured with an electroencephalogram (EEG) and last for a few minutes to a 20 minute maximum.
Sleep is necessary to repair body functions. All animal and some reptiles are shown to have dream episodes. Who has not seen a dog sleeping and moving their legs spasmodically in short bursts, sometimes emitting a muffled bark as though they are on the chase of running from a predator? Sleep deprivation is used as a technique for torture. Severe deprivation can actually harm the body tissue.
Déjà vu
Then we have déjà vu, the feeling of having experienced something before that becomes manifest in the waking state when simulated with a real event or place that mysteriously feels quite familiar. Two-thirds of the human population experience déjà vu at some time. No one has found any reasonable explanation for the phenomena.
It is easy to speculate that dreams could be connections with multiple unseen dimensions that exist within the mental universe. Since time and space is a product of dimensional awareness, there could well be other dimensions in the eternal now where we tap into electrical stimulus that awakens alternative dimensions. In other words, it might be possible that we live our personal existence many times during the illusory course of time and connect with them in our dreams. However, some dreams are so divorced from our waking reality that is seems impossible that these fictional visions have any actuality at all.
And then there are the productive dreams that inspire and can be built into waking realities. There are man examples of inventors, composers, writers, and makers of films using their dreams for creative purposes that become actuality. Horror films, for example, are filled with black dreams filled with fear and loathing. Some movies and literature describe the dream state,attempting to show that the dream state is the precursor to something real. The line between dreams and really become blurred in many a pop culture film. These dreams are not symbolic so much as an expression of the dreamer’s desires and fears.
Yet there are symbolic dreams. We recognize the symbolism when we wake and remember them. The disliked relative or acquaintance takes on a forbidding and villainous quality. A failed romance from the past becomes a sexual fantasy and we rewrite our lives in vivid visions.
Obviously,we need these dreams. They serve the purpose of making us think and contemplate. Just as sleep renews our energy and body functions, dreams can heal our emotional pains and help us re-envision a future that is more in tune with our desires.
Kenneth Harper Finton 