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 19 Sep 2009 @ 09:19
A Practical Tip from a Taoist Handyman More >
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30 Aug 2009 @ 10:00
Universe of Light ---- Part II
Space = Time C Squared More >
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27 Jul 2009 @ 09:49
Magnetism and Coherence More >
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24 Jul 2009 @ 10:46
David Bohm's work 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order' asserts and hints that there are very strange and remarkable properties to light. I am taking up his theme and attempting to simplify it, popularise it and put it in my own words.
According to Einstein's 'Theory of Relativity' the speed of light is a limit on the velocity which anything can attain. This in itself is a very remarkable fact, yet very few people have drawn out the implications of it.
I would like to put forward some ideas, which are by their nature speculative but which I believe are plausible and even likely. Firstly, I believe that light has a fractal quality. It seems to me reasonable since light can be used to create holograms, which are themselves fractal and self-similar, that light itself partakes of the same quality. I will investigate presently how this presents itself.
Next, if we look at Einstein's famous equation E = MC2 I see something different in it from the usual interpretation. I have never doubted that this equation is true, but rather I found that it obscured the correct dialectical relationship between Energy and Matter. If Energy and Matter are opposites, equal and complementary then I prefer the formulas:
E= C ; MC=1 ; 1/M =C ; M= 1/C
This gives us the same traditional formula except it highlights the fact that Energy and matter are in inverse relationship. Units have never really interested me very much and it would be interesting if someone could find a system of units which would make these simpler equations meaningful.However, from the dialectical point of view, the assertion that energy is light, and its inverse is matter, makes sense.
So what I am asserting is that all energy is in fact light or, more generally,electromagnetic waves. This is in fact another way of stating what is already known.
Matter, on this account, is the inverse of energy and is Unity divided by the speed of light.
To return to the beginning of this article; This is another way of saying that everything is light, and that all electromagnetic radiation is self-similar and different versions of the same thing. The wave-lengths and frequencies may vary but basically the're all the same thing.
Finally, I believe that light waves are like an attractor in that they have the fractal quality of being able to split in two at smaller and smaller scales. This reminds me that God is Love and God is Light and according to many traditions, including the Taoist and Gnostic, all reality emanates from the Godhead in the form of dualities splitting into complementary qualities at smaller and smaller scales consistent with the account given above of Light splitting in a fractal manner. God is Fractal. Everything is Light
More >
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7 Mar 2009 @ 14:42
Financial Crisis,Other Crises and a Warning
Civilization is a topic I have written a lot about over the last thirty years. It is now in the greatest danger it has ever faced. My analysis of civilization as a social form pinpoints as its basic feature an imbalance, a disharmony, a society out of kilter with nature and itself. To some people this is even its most appealing feature; they love the disparities of wealth and talents and individual destinies that it contains. To me, that is all well and good, except this disharmony is now proving lethal and threatening to destroy our society, civilization and humankind.
The exact disharmony which I believe is pivotal is the Yin/Yang balance, or rather imbalance. Western civilization particularly is oriented to a vast over-Yangness, a vast over-masculinity which is exemplified in aggression, wars and destruction and a myriad of lesser and similar evils. The recent financial crisis was partly caused by this very over-Yangness, manifested as a reckless, macho, casino-style way of doing business at every level.
There is something wrong with many of the men I know, whether in pubs,cafes or meeting in other social venues. Some of these people have considerable talents and social positions as well as intellects.I do not know any high-flying bankers but I daresay that they are similar, to judge from their recent behaviour. The problem I'm referring to is this: If you refer to sexuality in any way, particularly homosexuality or other diverse forms, the reaction from these men is to giggle like adolescents, show considerable embarassment, even become abusive or violent. I'm speaking of people I know and there's no way of ascertaining if this is universal. But I fear It is.
Now climate change, strange as it may appear, is connected with this sexual unease. As I pointed out in my article "Homophobia is destroying our Planet", our inner nature, or sexual identity, is a direct link to outer nature, the very planet we interact with on a daily basis. Our discomfort with various modes of sexuality ( also gender), is mirrored, I believe by all the disharmonies we have with Nature as exemplified by climate change, resource depletion, unsustainable economies and societies. Of course, the planet can look after herself. She has experienced far more serious upheavals in the past. It is our global society and civilization which is fragile and vulnerable.
And now the Warning. Others have been saying this for a long time, but now I feel it is my duty to repeat it. If mankind, and I use that word carefully,does not grow up and mature very quickly, there is very little hope for us to save ourselves. The Chaos we are experiencing in the world at the moment, following the excesses of extreme Yang in recent years, is equally extreme Yin or Feminine. As it seems to me, we cannot go on like this and we have to learn the lesson of integrating these opposites and creating harmony, positivity, maturity and wisdom. There is no alternative.
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19 Dec 2008 @ 09:42
Cosmic Egg, Cosmic Onion
It is time to stop being outsiders looking in, aliens in a place which is our own, alienated people who don’t belong, fragmented beings seeing things with a fragmented consciousness and awareness. One way we can deal with these problems is to start looking around from the inside, being comfortable with ourselves and the world, constructing a worldview where we are insiders rather than outsiders.
In his book “Wholeness and the Implicate Order” David Bohm looks at the situation instigated by the creation of a grid which we put in front of our eyes and consciousness and see things “over there”, separate and alien. This is the case, he suggests, with Descartes’ co-ordinate system and also, going further back, with the Euclidean geometry project itself. In passing, he suggests that herein lies the mystery and solution of Zeno’s paradoxes. In slightly different language and terms I will try to convey my understanding of what he is getting at. A line between A and B is finite but the minute we try to measure it with a number system we encounter problems that lead to contradictions. The minute we try to measure a finite length with numbers we create a fractal, something where finite and infinite co-exist because between any two points on a line an infinite number of quantities exist, which is what Zeno’s paradoxes are all about. This is my interpretation of what Bohm says when he hints that he has solved Zeno’s paradoxes.
And indeed, as we know from the Differential and Integral Calculus, this Cartesian system does not like infinities. You cannot integrate or differentiate across discontinuities. The hidden bugbear of this alienated Cartesian system, despite its successes of the past three centuries, is infinitude.
The Cartesian project, like the creation of 3-D perspective which happened earlier, in the Italian Renaissance, are signs that a certain split in consciousness, in awareness, was descending on the Western mind. Other evidence of this is the Mind/Body split and dualism also associated with the name of Descartes.
Now is the time to heal this split. How to do it? By taking the grid away; by taking the graduated quantities also. One way we can do this is suggested by Chaos theory which isn’t very interested in grids and gradations, but is rather more interested in maps and scales of self-similarity. In Chaos theory infinities are no longer seen as a problem but as something inherent in the fractal vision which can easily be dealt with.
Personally, I believe that the ancient view of a cosmic egg, or the more modern idea of a cosmic onion, both fractal, are very near to the truth. I also believe that the so-called space-time continuum is an alienated view that misses a lot and does not exist. It seems to me that the reality we are in is the inside of a cosmic entity, such as those just mentioned, and that at the centre of each whirling fractal at smaller and smaller scales lie infinities. In other words the inside of this cosmic entity is discontinuous, riddled with an infinity of holes rather like a Sierpinski gasket. Infinity is no longer something that can be ignored.
Moving inside and looking around and exploring is the first step to becoming Insiders, and at home in the Cosmos. More >
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16 Oct 2008 @ 08:40
Some Thoughts on questions raised by Erwin Schrodinger and David Bohm
Erwin Schrodinger’s little book consisting of “What is Life”, “Mind and Matter” and “Biographical Sketches” is still cutting-edge today though written nearly half a century ago. I will mention one point he raises and I think it is central to further progress in science/physics. David Bohm’s work “Wholeness and the Implicate Order” more or less takes up Schrodinger’s challenge and though very much “work in progress” outlines an approach to these questions. Schrodinger says that science and particularly physics have reached an impasse and must re-assimilate consciousness into the equation, which was banished at the time of Descartes’dualism. He suggests this is done by adopting the Hindu “Law of Identity” which says that we all share in our consciousness , in the consciousness of the Godhead.
Bohm’s effort is vast and complex and deep and I will not try to give an account of it here. What I will do is put forward certain thoughts which reading these two books have prompted in me. Mainly, I would conclude that my interest in the importance of self-similarity, which I have referred to a number of times in previous mathematical articles, is a working out and development of points made by Bohm. Considering these points has led me to draw further conclusions, which you may find original and striking.
Bohm talks about holograms and the making of them with coherent laser light, which was relatively recent when he wrote his book in 1980. It seems to me that “coherence” is a key concept in all this and has some bearing on self-similarity in that when all the light is coherent rather than incoherent, there is some sort of self-similarity at work. In previous examples I have written about, I have spoken of self-similarity in right-angled triangles and pentagons and spirals, which are essentially geometrical. Also I dealt with self-similarity in the Fibonacci and other sequences, which is a numerical example. Coherent light is, I believe, an example of self-similarity on a completely different plane. In every case, self-similarity leads to remarkable, almost magical results. Pythagoras’ theorem is remarkable, as is the Fibonacci sequence and its properties. Who can doubt that holograms display remarkable properties also. For reasons that are not entirely clear, wherever we find self-similarity, on whatever plane, we find things of a truly remarkable nature. This immediately suggests to me two corollaries, which if true, are also remarkable.
Now the causes of magnetism are not really known. I am suggesting here that it is another example of self-similarity in the form of coherence. That is, the molecules in a magnetized piece of metal, such as iron, are coherent in a way that produces the remarkable property of attraction. It is known that there is a co-ordination between the molecules, an ordering which has this effect, but the concepts of self-similarity and coherence are new in this respect.
This also suggests to me the solution to another riddle: superconductivity. A similar explanation seems to be suggested by the known facts. In a superconductor the electrons move together in a co-ordinated way to produce the remarkable property of by-passing any resistance. On the analogy of the hologram and the magnet, we can put forward the hypothesis that when certain materials have all their electrons in the same state, presumably the same shell, and presumably the lowest level, the base level, then the remarkable property of superconductivity occurs. This is a form of self-similarity and coherence. This idea is supported by the known fact that all materials at Absolute Zero temperature have their electrons in the base state, and it is usually at a very low temperature, close to absolute zero, that superconductivity occurs. But this hypothesis does raise the possibility of achieving superconductivity at higher temperatures, even room temperature, if materials can be found that have the requisite properties mentioned above.
Going back to Schrodinger and the “Law of Identity”, a possible reason for all these remarkable properties which follow from self-similarity and coherence, is that when a part is similar in form to the greater whole, then it mirrors in some way the similarity of our consciousness with that of the Godhead. More >
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1 Oct 2008 @ 08:40
Consciousness, Mind and Information
Mystics and indigenous cultures talk of a cosmic shift in consciousness occurring in the early part of the 21st century. The Mayan calendar even gives a date for this process late in the year 2012. It is appropriate then for me to consider the subject of consciousness and see if any light can be shed on it and these events.
As you may recall, Hegel spoke of the process whereby Spirit “alienates” itself into matter and then develops, through many forms, to return to itself in Mind. In an earlier article I proposed a “translation” of these terms into scientific ideas. Thus for Spirit we have Energy, and matter remains as matter, with the added idea that it is frozen or alienated energy or spirit. Also matter is discrete, individualised whereas Spirit is continuous and undifferentiated. So also we imagine is energy continuous and undifferentiated. Now when we arrive at the third term of Hegel’s triad, namely Mind, we reach the very thing we are concerned about today. For Mind, in an alternative formulation is the same as Consciousness. The consciousness of the godhead. In that essay “Mind Identity” I put forward the idea that Mind is translated by the scientific and journalistic term “Information”. Hence consciousness and information are related in some way. What I am suggesting is that just as matter is a discrete form of energy, both of which find their synthesis in “Mind” or consciousness, in the same way information is both individual, discrete bits of data/information, and also continuous like a field or wave. In other words information is the union of energy and matter in the same way as Consciousness/Mind is the union of Spirit and Matter.
Now there are many issues connected with these ideas. Indeed, everything I have written about, such as identity, and Schrodinger’s “Law of Identity”, alienation, archetypes and sub-personalities, are all connected in various ways with this.
Information is usually regarded in the context of computers and networks. And for many years there has been information science. But we don’t have to be specialists in this field to know that it is relevant to our present inquiries. Just looking at the events of the past few years is enough to confirm the belief that information is central to what’s happening and about to happen in the world. In this country (England) there have been numerous examples recently of lost or stolen information/data concerning thousands of people and their identities. This never used to be an issue but it is now. Also, it is said “information wants to be free” which puts it on a par with spirit which also tends to greater and greater freedom. Money is becoming less and less material and more and more digitalised and ethereal and spiritualised. Indeed it is becoming electronic information. Money has been proliferating for a long time at an uncontrollable rate and so has data/information. In the realm of culture the Matrix movies portrayed consciousness as pure information many times. All this, and the growing dominance of the information class, the media, suggests to me that information is the springboard by which we will all reach consciousness and identity with God. More >
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9 Sep 2008 @ 08:58
The Other Erwin Schrodinger
I was recently reading a small book by Physicist Erwin Schrodinger, noted for his Nobel prize and contributions to Quantum theory and the paradox of “Schrodinger’s Cat”. What is not well known is his mystical approach to certain things for example his concept of “negative entropy” to explain some unique characteristics of life itself. Writing over 50 years ago he states that classical physics has reached an impasse and has to change its ideas in some ways, in order to be able to advance further. The first way is to adopt what he calls the “Law of Identity”, which he borrows from the Hindu religion. This asserts that we all share in our consciousness in the consciousness of God. Schrodinger sees the question of whether this involves souls as an unnecessary complication, and seems not to believe in them. Linked to his view of consciousness is his profound belief that the split between Subject and Object, central to Classical Science, is an illusion. He believed that it is really a split in our minds, in our consciousness, that creates this illusion of a separation between observer and object. His views were remarkable at that time and are still cutting-edge today. I completely agree with his analysis and add here a few thoughts of my own. Recently I have been thinking and writing about “the Other” and it is clear to me that the split between Self and Other, which is the cause of so much trouble in the world, is a split in consciousness similar to what he describes. Self/Other is a false dichotomy, an illusion, on a par with that between Observer and Observed. It is caused by a split in our consciousness, our way of looking at things, and I will now elaborate why.
Schrodinger’s “Law of Identity” says that we all share, in our individual consciousness, in the consciousness of God. This is the Hindu view and that of many mystics. But most world religions resolutely deny that we are part of the Godhead and consider it blasphemy to say this. Yet it is this very same denial, I believe, that is the cause of this split in our consciousness that leads us to create “the Other” and “the Object”. First we deny that we are like God, then we start to perceive God as the Other, then we perceive parts of ourselves as other, then Nature, Woman, Gays, Blacks, Muslims and so on. This condition is called Alienation. In these circumstances the alienated Self, the Ego, itself splits into countless inner others. To the alienated, everything is other, nothing is self. In reality everything is God, but alienated people cannot see that. One consequence of this estrangement from God, and ourselves, is that we try to destroy everything we see as other. But this is impossible. The other is everywhere. It is like our shadow. In attempting to destroy the other all we do is destroy ourselves. All the environmental problems we have, such as climate change, come from this unconscious desire to destroy the other, and Nature is a huge other. The remedy for this malaise and all such, is to accept that there is no Other; Everything is Self, Everything is God. More >
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2 Sep 2008 @ 11:30
Sexual Identity is Basic on the Material Plane
In the past, since the beginning of modern progressive thought, it has been the case that anti-racism was the touchstone of the movement against the hatred of Difference, which is better described as discrimination and Fascism. In my last article, ”HomoRacism” I questioned this fact and put forward the idea that if we are to consider priorities it is not in fact racism which is fundamental. I put forward my personal opinion that sex, gender and sexuality are even more basic than the colour of our skin. The emergence of contradictions in the different attitudes of minorities who themselves discriminate against other minorities shows that a new and complex situation is developing. It is actually my belief that whereas the material identity that is crucial is the one outlined above, namely sexuality, the spiritual identity is something different. Specifically I believe in what Erwin Schrodinger, the famous Quantum physicist, called the “Law of Identity” that we all in our consciousness are one with God. This is the real identity which I believe will be revealed in the era of post-modernism. And this accounts seemingly for the huge importance which people are placing on questions of spiritual identity and particularly Religion. So I do think that the traditional paradigm on identity and ant-fascism has to be critically looked at and the new realities taken into consideration. More >
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