Please note that Peter’s correspondence below was written by the feeling-being ‘Peter’ while ‘he’ lived in a pragmatic (methodological), still-in-control/same-way-of-being Virtual Freedom before becoming actually free.
> Selected Correspondence Peter Time – This Moment, Timeless and Eternity RESPONDENT: In my experience this concept of time appeared to be one of the main ingredients from which my social identity was being generated. PETER: To have a concept of time is neither sensible, nor does it serve any practical purpose. RESPONDENT: I find it, Peter, kind of surprising that, you don’t find time considered to be a concept. PETER: And yet I didn’t say that I ‘don’t find time considered to be a concept’. Human ‘beings’ have a psychological and psychic persona who thinks and feels it exists over time and therefore time is experienced as a psychological and psychic concept. Hence ‘I’ have emotional memories of ‘me’ existing in the past and imaginary fantasies of ‘me’ existing in the future. Whereas, in fact, the only time that can be experienced as an actuality is this very moment. This is not to deny that past moments did not exist or that there will be future moments to then experience but the only moment that you can actually – i.e. sensately – experience is this very moment. Hence, as I said – ‘To have a concept of time is neither sensible, nor does it serve any practical purpose’. RESPONDENT: I take it that my invitation to dialogue on that subject is been accepted. PETER: The only person thus far I have refused to dialogue with is No 22 and that was because it is impossible to have a dialogue with someone who has convinced himself that he is GOD. RESPONDENT: Ok. So time you consider to be a concept if not, you could not call it either ‘practical’ nor sensible to have it and even more so you must have one. PETER: No. Time is a fact. Past time is a fact, as is future time. But the only time that can be experienced as an actuality is this very moment. Hence, to rephrase what I said – To make a concept out of a fact is neither sensible, nor does it serve any practical purpose. RESPONDENT: But guess what I found for practical, running off to the dictionary in a desperate attempt to stop the spinning. orderly : so from your statement I might conclude that you advocate disorder systematic : well ... indeed I beg to differ from opinion. efficient : if you will excuse my please pragmatic : I choose that for my plea for sanity business-like: There’s no business like actual business but this really did it: on top of that I find as a synonym ‘sensible’. PETER: Which means that anyone who makes a concept out of the fact of time is neither being pragmatic nor sensible, to pick the most relevant meanings. RESPONDENT: Btw, most accurate perception, Peter, there’s no arguing about this, yet we differ somewhat from opinion as so you might suspect already. Note: as I want to make it clear that reading prima facie or face value for me is as if I wrote that myself and repeat it until it sounds like spoken with a voice of honesty. So ... then it works out like thus: I ‘lose’ you already after the first line. It appears to me if it [to have a concept of time] is not sensible then it must be silly. I must think black-white here because I see no options to differentiate, as you even deny the practical purpose of having firmly integrated in the brain the concept of time. Don’t hang me for this one (you did not say that and neither do I imply you said so); it is just my way for pleading for sensibly because next, you begin pleading for that statement as to be even ‘more’ then silly. PETER: It seems as though the confusion is about the meaning of the word ‘concept’. A concept means an idea, a notion, an abstraction, a conceptualization, a conception, a theory. As you can see, a concept is abstract thinking whereas the aim of asking yourself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is to get you out of your head, out of abstract thinking, conceptualizing, theorizing, imagining, and so on, and get you to come to your senses. And you can only sensately experience this moment – you can only hear something in this moment, you can only smell something in this moment, you can only taste something in this moment and so on. RESPONDENT: Then you bring in your psychological and psychic concept (which made me spin around) and then you jump to hence, ‘‘I’ have emotional memories of ‘me’ existing in the past and imaginary fantasies of ‘me’ existing in the future’ so just to make a wild guess would that mean something like ‘time is a boat on Lala-river’? PETER: Okay, I’ll attempt to go along with your terminology. How about – ‘you’ are ‘a boat on a Lala-river’, a river that ‘you’ call ‘your life’. ‘You’ usually spend most of your time either re-running past emotional memories or imagining things that may or may not happen in the future. By doing so, ‘you’ are unable to focus your attentiveness on how you are experiencing this, the only moment you can actually, i.e. sensately – experience being alive. The actualism method is aimed at more and more mooring ‘you’, the ‘boat on Lala-river’, to being here, in this very moment of time. It’s not an easy thing to do at first because ‘you’ are so used to not being here – in fact even the idea of being here, and nowhere else, is at first a frightening business. But what ‘you’ can do is nibble away at all the programming – both social and instinctual – that prevents you, the flesh and blood body called No 23, from being here, firmly moored in the utter safety and perfect stillness of this very moment. RESPONDENT: ‘To have a concept of time is neither sensible, nor does it serve any practical purpose’ which I find as a statement a bit too radical. But hey, OK that’s how you tick. PETER: It is very common to hear the refrain that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ within the human condition. This understanding that it has all been said and tried before is the cause of a morbid fatalistic despair that feelings of hope never manage to quell. Once I acknowledged that it was obviously useless for me to re-run the old tried and failed solutions it then made sense to me to try something really radical – something that had only been road-tested once before. If that makes me too radical in your eyes, hey, that’s OK with me. RESPONDENT: I would agree in its ‘phrasing’ though with : ‘Peters concept of time is neither sensible, nor does it serve any practical purpose’. PETER: And yet because I found having a concept of time neither sensible nor serving any practical purpose, I focussed my awareness on how I am experiencing this moment of time – because I realized that this moment is the only moment I can actually experience. As such I no longer have a concept of time, for me time is a simple and obvious fact. RESPONDENT: So thus I find your sensibility with regard to the following statement ‘the only time that can be experienced as an actuality is this very moment’ questionable. PETER: If that means you are leaving the statement open to question, then it sounds good to me. Whenever I ran one of these questions in my head for a while – and there were many such questions that are thrown up in the process of actualism – I would look for an experiential answer and not an intellectual answer. In other words, I would seek an answer in my own experience and not settle for just agreeing with what someone else said because it sounded good, right, appropriate, groovy or whatever. RESPONDENT: Hence to make this a little more transparent: What is the discriminating factor/ mechanism by which you are enabled to make a distinction between past and future? PETER: Calendars and clocks. RESPONDENT: Iow, how can you know the difference between what actually happened (emotional memory) and what your imaginary projections are? PETER: In order to prise these three separate issues apart, – actual experience, emotional memory and future projections – a practical down-to-earth example may be useful. I will use an example that I have written about in my journal, a time when I was waiting to meet Vineeto – [Peter]: ... The final straw came as I waited to meet her one evening and she was late. As the time ticked away, so my mind raced away, and after about thirty minutes I was furious. How could she be late?
> How could anything else, or anyone else, be more important in her life than me? As my fury built and built, as my mind churned over countless possibilities as to why she was late, suddenly I began to see the stupidity of it all. Here I was, comfortably sitting at a seaside café, cool drink in hand, looking at a spectacular sunset on warm summer’s evening. I’m involved in the adventure of a lifetime, I’ve found out more about what it is to be a human being in the last few months than I have in a lifetime, there is this wonderful woman in my life – and I’m being neurotic because she is thirty minutes late! Gradually I came out of it and was able to be where I was, delighting in the balmy evening air and the gaiety of the scene as the last of the beach-goers drifted home. When Vineeto arrived she apologized for being late, and I explained what had happened to me. We had a beach walk, dinner at a nearby restaurant, and tootled off home to bed.’ Peter’s Journal, Love |
> This is a description of something that actually happened – two people were involved in an event that occurred in a definitive location over a definable period of time in the past. As I have described, at the time this event was happening, ‘I’ had feelings of jealousy raging, and these feelings prevented me from enjoying the sensual delight of what was actually happening at the time. If ‘I’ now had an emotional memory of what happened, ‘I’ would simply be reliving ‘my’ feelings of jealousy in this moment, thereby preventing me from enjoying the sensual delight of being here. By evoking an emotional memory of having been jealous in the past, ‘I’ re-vive the emotion in this moment and thereby run the danger of imagining situations or events to justify ‘my’ feeling jealous now. Given that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’, ‘I’ therefore exist over time – in other words, ‘I’ exist as past emotional memories, current affective experience and future fearful or worrisome imaginations. RESPONDENT: So ... this is merely a plea for my sensibility not to say sanity with regard to my ‘In my experience this concept of time appeared to be one of the main ingredients from which my social identity was being generated.’ And I begin to suspect that this perception is rather accurate with regard to the overall make up of any social identity. PETER: Indeed, your statement is rather accurate but, if I may suggest, it would be more accurate to say that ‘I’ as a social and ‘me’ as an instinctual identity can only experience this moment conceptually and/or affectively. At this point, it is good to remember that there are three I’s altogether and only one is actual. RESPONDENT: Ie. ‘I must not be too late at school/ work/ appointment/ the airport’, aso. Or ‘How much am I a going to ask/pay for say 1 hour of service’, aso. Imo, if time is not appropriately conceptualized this brings about stress in the system. PETER: And yet you don’t need a concept of time in order not to be late – you simply need a watch and the sense to plan not to be late. Again you don’t need a concept of time to know how much to charge for one hour of service, a watch gives you the time, and market-value usually determines the appropriate rate per hour. And as for stress, having an appropriate concept of time does nothing to eliminate stress because being a thinking ‘I’ and a feeling ‘me’ is inherently a stressful business. RESPONDENT: Which brings indeed once more to light; the interesting qualities of this way of conversation. So I’ll put my experience as to the concept of time differently. Ground zero? Neither the past nor the future are actual. PETER: That’s a reasonable concept, or working hypothesis. I certainly took it that way when came across it in Richard’s writings. For me it made sense, but then I went looking for my own experiential evidence that this was so. Reflective contemplation on issues such as this, combined with a sincere intent to be happy and harmless, can lead to a direct, unfettered sensual experience of the actuality of this very moment. Such experiences are known as pure consciousness experiences, whereby ‘I’ and ‘my’ concepts, beliefs, theories, imaginations, feelings and passions are temporarily in abeyance for a brief period. RESPONDENT: Only through inference I can conclude that there must have been a past and a future yet to come. PETER: No. Even as an ‘I’, you don’t have to conclude that there was a past. Whilst ‘you’ have mostly emotional memories of the past, the past did in fact exist and there is ample evidence of the fact. I need look no further than the fact that I have received a number of posts from you all dated and timed, that prove that the flesh and blood body called No 23 typed them out and sent them. Now the entity called ‘No 23’ who first started corresponding on this list is not the same ‘No 23’ who is reading these words for, as I take it from your correspondence, ‘No 23 the spiritualist’ seems to be somewhat weakened. This process is what is meant by demolishing one’s own social identity, as bits of your identity literally fall by the wayside as you begin to replace your beliefs with facts. Again, you don’t need to conclude ‘through inference’ that there is a future yet to come for, barring accident or physical death, you can be reasonably certain that you will awaken tomorrow morning and the day after that, for a number of years yet to come. RESPONDENT: I may have images of the past or the future yet these are nothing more than then the activity of my brain ie memories. PETER: No. You can look at a photograph taken of you in the past and that is an image, but it makes no sense at all to deny that there was an actual flesh and blood body called No 23 existing at the time the photo was taken. This type of conceptual thinking, i.e. thinking abstracted from facts and actuality, is common in spiritual circles and can only lead to a ‘me’ who imagines ‘I’ am real and the past, the physical world and other human beings are but an illusion. RESPONDENT: So ... now seems to be this floating experience in between past and future yet, it all happens HERE. PETER: Indeed. If you start believing that the world of people, things and events is but an image, your feet can literally leave the ground and you can feel as though you are floating. Actualism is about getting your feet back on the ground – a radical proposition, I know. RESPONDENT: So ... time is not actual only here is actual what does that mean actual here? Here there cannot be isolation as here stretches out from my small room into the infinity of the universe. I’m here an Animal at heart with yet a brain that calculates a body made of stardust. PETER: No. Only this moment is actual for only this moment can be actually, i.e. sensately, experienced. This is not to deny that past moments did not exist or that there will be future moments to then experience. If you do so you start to trip off into imaging all sorts of things, such as feeling yourself to be timeless, which then leads to feelings of being immortal ... and so on. Pretty soon your head is so far in the clouds that you can never get back down to this very earth where we flesh and blood human beings actually live. RESPONDENT: So ... How can I live without the concept of time? Given that this is more or less from a Darwinian perspective I take it that you’ll enjoy this little poetic eruption. PETER: I seem to have dissected your poem a bit, but then again I was never a fan of poetic imagination. RESPONDENT: Actualism ... Let’s make things better. PETER: The wonderful thing about actualism is that making things better by having the sincere intent to become happy and harmless is entirely your business – it has nothing at all to do with anyone else. And what a relief that is, for your destiny is entirely in your own hands, and who would have it any other way. You have to earn your freedom from the human condition, nobody can magically give it to or bestow it upon you. If someone else could make you free, you would end up beholden to them – be they a God, Goddess, God-man or God-woman – and being beholden to someone or something is not freedom. RESPONDENT: Hence to make this a little more transparent: What is the discriminating factor/ mechanism by which you are enabled to make a distinction between past and future? PETER: Calendars and clocks. RESPONDENT: Yet you would not be able to use them sensibly had time not been firmly been integrated as a concept in your system. PETER: No. I was taught how to tell what time of the day it is by looking at the hands of a clock at school. Quite straightforward stuff, like when the little hand points at three and the big hand points at twelve it is 3 o’clock. The same thing with days in the week and months in the year. Nothing conceptual about knowing what time it is at all, it’s all down-to-earth. * RESPONDENT: Iow, how can you know the difference between what actually happened (emotional memory) and what your imaginary projections are? PETER: In order to prise these three separate issues apart, – actual experience, emotional memory and future projections – a practical down-to-earth example may be useful. I will use an example that I have written about in my journal, a time when I was waiting to meet Vineeto – <story snipped> As I have described, at the time this event was happening, ‘I’ had feelings of jealousy raging, and these feelings prevented me from enjoying the sensual delight of what was actually happening at the time. If ‘I’ now had an emotional memory of what happened, ‘I’ would simply be reliving ‘my’ feelings of jealousy in this moment, thereby preventing me from enjoying the sensual delight of being here. By evoking an emotional memory of having been jealous in the past, ‘I’ re-vive the emotion in this moment and thereby run the danger of imagining situations or events to justify ‘my’ feeling jealous now. Given that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’, ‘I’ therefore exist over time – in other words, ‘I’ exist as past emotional memories, current affective experience and future fearful or worrisome imaginations. RESPONDENT: [I’ exist as past emotional memories, current affective experience and future fearful or worrisome imaginations.] Ok given that now is the only moment you can experience any reference to future or past (ability to discriminate) can only be arrived upon as a factual instance by appliance of time as a concept (a measure tool) hence I say the discriminating mechanism is the ability to conceptualize time. PETER: A memory of a past event is not a concept of a memory of a past event – it is a memory of a past event. Similarly the reasonable anticipation of a future event, say that I am going to get up in the morning and have breakfast, is an anticipation – not a concept of a reasonable anticipation. To make a concept out of something is to make an idea, a notion, an abstraction, an hypothesis, a theory or an image out of it. RESPONDENT: Iow long as I can label an experience as past (memories) this discriminating mechanism is the very labelling of the experience. Otherwise there would be only experience. PETER: And the only moment you can actually experience is this very moment that you are reading these words. You don’t need to have a concept about this experience. You read the words on the screen and they mean something to you. Reading is a sensory experience, it is not a concept. The computer screen is an object made of the stuff of this planet we humans live on, it is not a concept. And the only moment you can actually experience all this is this very moment. If you are sensually experiencing this moment, there is simply no room for conceptualisations or abstractions, let alone past emotional memories or future fearful imaginations. RESPONDENT: We have had extensive discussions about time and likely we will apply that term with a slightly different understanding then as it is being understood by the majority of people. My latest way of going about this subject time is that I find it necessary to take in account that time for most people is not an actuality but rather a concept that is more or less the fuel for the engine of a social/spiritual identity. For an actualist time is most certainly not thinking whereas thinking as well as performing a sequence of actions like preparing a nice breakfast getting dressed a.s.o. yet requires time. In short for a realist, time most often is a source of pressure, hence the flesh-blood-body is carrying a considerable load of stress, whereas for an actualist time basically is to enjoy, thus a source of sensuous pleasure, hence the flesh-blood-body knows how to relax. PETER: For me, contemplating on the fact that this is the only moment I can actually experience being alive eventually led to the realization that this is the only moment I can actually experience being alive which in turn led me to have a direct experience that this is the only moment I can actually experience being alive. This experience is known as a pure consciousness experience. There is a lot to be gained from thinking about time – exactly as there is in becoming attentive to how you are experiencing this moment of being alive, this the only moment you can ever experience as an actuality. RESPONDENT: My intrigue though (loosely stated objections and not strongly felt): I think that the space is curved (as a result of space time being curved) can be measured empirically by instruments. This may not have any effect or visible result or even an interest as the curvature is too small... just like we can’t see the bacteria. But it might have an effect as in resulting in some properties of matter like ‘mass energy equivalence’ that is demonstrated in the destruction. That the time is relative (I am not going into the origins of how this theory came about by Einstein’s imagination: a separate mail) whilst unimaginable (all the scientists struggled with this concept and did not like it and made fun of it at some point and decided to give up common sense in favour of the empirical proofs of the consequences of this theory) is measured in the subatomic world. Again, it has no or almost nil consequence in our everyday functioning as it applies only to fast moving (as fast as light... only subatomic particles can do it) world... so one can divide one’s experience into everyday stuff where one uses common sense and when it comes to subatomic world one says: oh I can’t use my common sense, it is beyond my understanding, here is some mathematical model explaining and predicting stuff that goes as far as creating an atomic bomb, sending space crafts: so I give up my common sense and use logic and mathematics here. And then comes a stage where one says: Logic and Mathematics have succeeded where a common sense approach have not (in explaining subatomic stuff and fast moving stuff). Therefore I will buy the consequences of Logic and Mathematics even if it means that I have to lay down my common sense. I will use the same principles that helped me to get beyond in the subatomic and fast-moving universe and extrapolate and apply to this everyday world (and probably justify my spiritual fantasies). This is where Richard says (I think): Direct experience of the everyday world if you are willing to lay down in favour of your success in micro-worlds, you land up in imaginary world justified by mathematics and logic. The current models may be great in predictions but they are useful models... that’s all... do not justify one to jump to imagination sacrificing the common sense. Moreover these models that are based on logic and mathematics themselves use common sense at some level and nothing is just a standalone ‘logic and mathematics’ (as in there is no God that is running the world according to ‘logic and mathematics’). I have just written my thoughts and let me see how all this goes... will refine these stuff based on what you think. I know I am talking a lot out of my hat :) but after some great successes in actualism, I have become much more cheerful and talkative :). PETER: Einsteinian relativity theory relies upon imagining that time is a fourth dimension to the three dimensions of space, thereby allowing that time can be an abstract entity (t) having a hypothetical numerical value in abstract relativistic mathematics. A PCE experientially reveals that time is not an abstract dimension because a pure consciousness experience is the direct experience that this very moment is the only moment that is happening and that this very moment is perpetually happening. Whilst past moments did happen and future moments will happen, only this moment is actual – one is perpetually locked into this seamless moment of time as it were. It is always this moment of time, one cannot actually experience any other moment of time but this very moment. This is not an esoteric or philosophical wisdom as one can also become aware of this fact in one’s normal daily life – in fact the actualism method is specifically designed to bring one’s attention to this fact as an on-going experience. As an example, if you care to remember back to the moment when you first opened this post and began to read it, it is obvious that when you did so you could experience that the opening of the post was happening in this moment and now that you are reading these words it is also this moment. As Richard puts it – this very moment is the arena in which actual events happen. To keep with this practical observation, if you look at the computer monitor that you are reading these words on you will see that it has three spatial dimensions – width, length and depth – and that your observation of this is happening in this moment. The very spontaneity and instantaneity of this very moment gives vibrancy to the things and events that one sensately experiences in this moment of time. In short, in actuality, time is not a fourth dimension, space and time are not a continuum, space is not bent, nor is it expanding – all of these concepts and theories are nought but impassioned (subjective) fantasies. To get back to your comment, I take it that you are aware that the theoretical subatomic particles described in quantum physics are mathematical suppositions that have no material existence. Quantum physics deals with abstracted models of hypothetical subatomic realms in exactly the same way that relativistic cosmology deals with abstracted models of hypothetical universes that have no material existence. For me, once I understood that much of science masquerades theory as being fact and imaginary models as being things that actually exist, I also understood the absurdity of calling an internally-logical subjective theory an objective scientifically-verifiable fact. But then again, I have no emotional investment in supporting relativistic theory because I was not indoctrinated into believing that it is true, and nowadays I know by direct on-going experience that there is no underlying metaphysical reality to the universe. My ongoing objective attentiveness reveals that this is the only moment I can experience and this objective observation itself makes a nonsense of Einsteinian relativistic subjective observations and theoretical calculations. The actuality of the infinitude of the physical universe compared to the fantasies of metaphysical beliefs is such a good subject to contemplate upon. Who knows, it may even provoke the males of the species to get out of their heads and in touch with their feelings – after all taking such a step is an essential prerequisite to beginning to become free of the insidious grip of the instinctual passions. PETER: Hi Everyone, Just a note with some more about theoretical scientists. I had dug out some relevant quotes but Richard was quicker to reply. I thought I would leave it but a recent meeting twigged me to post them anyway. Vineeto and I were invited out to dinner recently, and after the meal the evening turned to an interesting discussion on life and the universe. We merrily talked of what is actual and they merrily talked of what is spiritual, so few alleys of conversation were pursued to any depth. The woman was particularly interested in the ‘method’ we were using and I asked her: ‘method to do what?’ As it turned out, she didn’t have an aim in life but was just interested in finding a new method per se. She was simply on a spiritual quest for methods, paths and teachers. That conversation soon dwindled, and in an attempt to inject a bit of common sense into the evening I steered the discussion back to the actual – tapping the arm of the chair to give an illustration of what is actual. The man immediately told me it was a scientifically proven fact that the chair did not exist as the essence of matter was ethereal and constantly fluctuating between here and there – pointing over there – and as such could not be actual. Needless to say I nearly fell off my chair, literally, as what I was comfortably sitting on had magically been transported, by scientific theory and this man’s belief, over to the opposite corner of the veranda. Which only goes to prove that believing what theoretical scientists say could be a danger to one’s health – as well as one’s sanity. So a few quotes – from the late Darryl Reanney’s book – The Death of Forever – A New Future for Human Consciousness. Longman 1991 While his teaching background is microbiology and biochemistry he draws on a broad range of theoretical sciences to substantiate his vision in understandable form.. As such, he reveals much that is usually ‘hidden’ from the lay person by scientific jargon and bewildering mathematical complexity. (...) [Daryl Reanney]: As the cosmos shrinks beyond atomic dimensions, the matter it contains will become dense beyond imagination and the radius of spacetime will contract towards zero. At its ultimate limit, this process leads to a spacetime singularity in which the curvature of spacetime becomes infinite, enfolding in its vanished embrace a universe of imploded matter. Like an image fading in the mind of God, reality itself dies and the sum of all things ceases to be. Some faint hint of what this means can be garnered from an examination of Figure 7.2, which shows that an ordinary black hole is smoothly connected to the ‘flat’ spacetime structure of the surrounding universe. It is this matrix of surrounding spacetime that enables science to measure properties of black holes such as mass. However, if the cosmos is closed, everything is ‘inside’ a black hole. Thus, as the cosmos implodes inwards, there is absolutely no frame of reference to serve as a guide. Here, then, is the Shiva of cosmology, the destroyer of worlds. Nothing can survive transit through a singularity. The spacetime fabric with its embedded ‘memories’ of past events (in which billions of human lives lie encrystallised) is annihilated. The fine structure of matter, everything which gives form to physics, is unremittingly ‘ground out of existence’. By this, I do not simply mean that it is destroyed in a physical sense, overwhelmed by the colossal tides of gravity: rather, infinitely warped spacetime sunders us completely from anything that might have gone ‘before’, just as it does from anything that might come ‘after’. The present incarnation of the cosmos can never remember its parents (if there were any) or transmit a legacy to its children (if it has any). D. Reanney, The Death of Forever, pp. 148-9 What to say? It appears that cosmology has invented the lot. The cataclysmic ‘end’ of the world, the black hole of hell, the ‘parallel’ universes as in levels of consciousness and reincarnation on a universal scale! I guess we will soon see a rash of Past-Universe Therapies for the ‘therapeutically under-nourished’. Alan, if you ever get to this side of the world we could make a bob or two running ‘Meet the other-you’ sessions. We could connect people to their other selves that exist in parallel universes. We could issue certificates to people who could wave them at their partners or the police and say ‘It wasn’t me – It was the me that is now in a parallel universe that did it!’ Could be a winner ... [Daryl Reanney]: In order to bring spacetime back into the realm of physics, Hawking is forced to abandon ‘real’ numbers and use ‘imaginary’ ones. Real numbers give a positive quantity when multiplied by themselves; pure imaginary numbers give negative values when multiplied by themselves. The special virtue of imaginary numbers in this context is that they cause the distinction between space and time to disappear. This makes it possible to use Euclidean geometry to build models of the cosmos because, in this representation, time has no privileged status. <snip> Hawking defends the use of imaginary numbers on the grounds that it is ‘merely a mathematical device (or trick) to calculate answers about real space-time’. However, the universe we live in exists in real time. Hawking’s model predicts that in real time, ‘it [the universe] would collapse again into what looks like a singularity in real time. Thus, in a sense, we are still all doomed, even if we keep away from black holes’. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever, p. 154 Does that also mean that if somehow we could all manage to avoid living in ‘real’ time and hang out in ‘imaginary’ time we would avoid being ‘doomed’ and avoid the black hole? Having invented black holes – a mathematical supposition given credence by the discovery of some, as yet, unexplained observational irregularities in the vast depths of space, the theoreticians are indeed having a field day. I find it telling that the scientists have to resort to fanciful speculation as they approach ‘nothing’, the subatomic where mass (as in substantially evident) disappears; and when they explore the ‘vast’ – the more distant (as in substantially evident) realms of the infinite universe. [Daryl Reanney]: Some years ago, Stephen Hawking was elected to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University, the chair once occupied by Isaac Newton. Hawking’s inaugural lecture had the ambitious title ‘Is the end in sight for theoretical physics?’ That is, Hawking was suggesting that science was close to accomplishing its ultimate goal – the unification of all the laws of physics into one coherent, consistent framework which would define and encompass the whole of reality. Such a unified scheme would not just ‘represent’ truth in some abstract way, it would in an important sense be truth. By now, this should not surprise us. As we have seen, the homely metaphors of commonsense and everyday life offer us no guidance when we look at the bewildering cosmos in which we find ourselves. Only mathematics, in whose code nature writes her secrets, can tell us what is ‘real’. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever, p. 156 It comes as no surprise that science is firmly rooted in mysticism, shamanism and alchemy and steeped in the search for the meaning of life. It has been a bare few centuries since science has very hesitantly emerged from the control of the church in Europe. Galileo was forced to publicly recant his finding that the earth orbited the sun because it did not fit with the flat-earth version of the universe described in Genesis. Nowadays we have the ability to eliminate many hereditary diseases with the simple manipulation of genetic codes but research has been curtailed as ‘unethical’ – religion still reigns supreme. One should not meddle with ‘Mother Nature’ or God, or whatever – or there will be Hell to pay! Well, I’m busy meddling with Mother Nature’s implanted instincts – and the rewards are extraordinary. Those who think genetic engineering is the answer to the human dilemma ignore the stranglehold that morals and ethics have on the Human Condition. Better to get on with the job yourself – neither God nor science will be of help. Well there are a few more quotes so I will just tootle on and finish ... [Daryl Reanney]: As Fred Allen Wolf says in Parallel Universes: [quote]: The past, present, and future exist side by side. If we were totally able to ‘marry’ corresponding times each and every moment of our time-bound existences, there would indeed be no sense of time and we would all realize the timeless state, which is taken to be our true or base state of reality by many spiritual practices. [endquote]. Through mathematics and experiment, we have deduced the existence of a fourth spacetime dimension but we do not experience it as it is. We see it in glimpses, strangely fractured into ever-dissolving, non-dimensional planes called ‘now’. We know this is less-than-perfect because our reality is locked into fiction – this Dali-esque ‘now you see it, now its gone’ trick-state called the present. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever, p. 203 It would seem to me that Mr. Einstein’s greatest contribution to physics is to theoretically propose ‘another’ dimension – space-time – which gave validity to the mystics ‘other’ dimension. Interestingly after the publication of his theory it was Herman Minkowski who offered a geometric picture of this new spacetime and it was only reluctantly that Albert accepted it. On my reading he seemed wary of the many extrapolations that resulted from his theory but by then Fame and Fortune were his for the basking in. Mr. Hawkings recently added imaginary time to the space-time dimension and ‘Bingo’, the theoreticians have completed the scenario of the actual being illusionary – both in matter and space, as well as time. [Daryl Reanney]: At this stage in the evolution of our minds, our experience of reality is like that of the shadow, a limited, impoverished ghost-image projected into the three-dimensions of our present (average) mode of consciousness by the invisible (to us) four-dimensional ‘truth structure’ that lies beyond and behind it, extended in time as we are extended in space. I cannot stress too strongly that it is this four-dimensional truth structure which is the universe’s reality. What we call objective reality, our everyday commonsense world, is but a dim phantom construct of the timeless hyperstructure that exists, in or perhaps as, the ‘mind of God’, to use religious imagery. Yet, just as our present three-dimensional state of consciousness evolved from the one dimensional mode of our remote ancestors, so there is abundant evidence that the four-dimensional mode is struggling to be born in the homo sapiens species at this human moment in the cosmic story. We are almost there. Whether a four-dimensional state of consciousness is the ultimate truth of the universe or whether beyond this lie higher states of being that extend into an infinitely rich, multi-dimensional hyperspace and hypertime we do not know. One day our descendants may. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever, p. 205 Having ‘confirmed’ that matter, space and time are illusionary we then have to evolve to a four-dimensional state of consciousness to access the ultimate truth. This theory gels so neatly with the mystical Altered State of Consciousness or Higher Consciousness as to make a mockery of theoretical mathematics, physics and cosmology. [Daryl Reanney]: I find it fascinating that Hawking himself recognizes that his use of imaginary time, far from being a ruse or trick, may in fact be a door to a higher order of insight. Listen to his own words: [Stephen Hawking]: ‘This might suggest that the so-called imaginary time is really the real time and that what we call real time is just a figment of our imaginations. In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time, there are no singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like.’ [endquote]. This goes to the heart of the matter for the defining quality of the inner eye in its most highly evolved forms is that it can ‘see’ the deepest hidden structures of reality without impediment. If timeless-ness is an authentic feature of consciousness – and the evidence I have summarized in this book very strongly suggests that it is – then consciousness may just as well ‘exist’ in what the mathematicians call ‘imaginary’ time as in ‘real’ time. Indeed, it may be precisely because the ego-self lives in real time that it ‘knows’ death while it may be precisely because consciousness lives in imaginary time that it ‘knows’ eternity. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever, p. 207 And just to round off, the late Mr. Reanney managed to convince himself – with the help of theoretical science – that his consciousness is eternal. Of course, he will not be reporting back from the fourth dimension as no information can cross the space-time ‘boundary’ at a black hole or a naked singularity. Thus this theoretical (and mystical) forth-dimension will remain forever ‘unknown’ to mortal man in his state of ‘lower’ consciousness. Well enough twaddle – time to kick back for a coffee and couch in three dimensions. There is a ‘high probability’ that the couch is still where I left it, and the coffee is still in the jar. There is a lot to be said for what is actual and that’s a few more words for the case for the affirmative. PETER: Hi Everyone, Just a bit more from the meta-physicians of mathematics, theoretical physics and cosmology. I thought I would post some quotes on the subject of infinity as they reveal much about the tortured imagination of the human mind. Imaginative flights of fantasy, such as we see in children’s fairy stories, are well documented, fervently believed in, passionately defended and financially well supported in the ‘adult’ worlds of science, religion and philosophy. Much convoluted and twisted thinking has gone into making up stories about ‘what lies beyond’ – whether it be beyond the stars in the physical world, or beyond death in the spiritual world. The theoretical scientists realm is supposedly that of the physical world but when they encounter infinity – the fact that this physical universe has no limit, no ‘outside’, no edges, nothing ‘beyond’ – they eagerly succumb to the spiritual or ethereal. I remember, it was a stunning realization when I contemplated on the fact that the universe is infinite. No outside ... this is it. And I am nowhere in particular – there is no bottom left-hand corner in infinite space. And there is no room for God. I had had previous glimpses of the infinitude of the universe while sleeping out at night in the desert when the stars alone were as bright as a coastal full moon night. Or the evening when we stopped to camp and sat out on deckchairs to watch the sunset. As the sun was setting to a huge golden-red ball I turned to see the moon rising behind me – an equal sized golden-red ball on the opposite horizon. What a sight, I didn’t know which way to look, such was the magnificence of it all. The actual leaves any paltry imagination for dead. So, on to some quotes from – Paul Davies, The Edge of Infinity, Beyond the Black Hole, Penguin 1994, Chapter 2 – Measuring the Infinite [Paul Davies]: In science, however, infinity is frequently encountered, sometimes with dismay. Long ago mathematicians began attempts to get the measure of the infinite and to discover rules which would enable infinity to join the ranks of other mathematical objects as a well understood and disciplined logical concept. <snip> Even in science, for many purposes, infinity is only an idealization for a quantity which is actually so large that to treat it as strictly infinite involves negligible error. From time to time, though, the appearance of infinity in a physical theory denotes something much more dramatic – the end of either the theory, or the subject of its description. This is the case with spacetime singularities. There we are brought face to face with infinity, and it seems to be telling us something profound: that we have reached the end of the universe. Paul Davies, The Edge of Infinity, p. 22 The ‘end of the universe’, in spacetime terms, is an illusion built upon an illusion. Spacetime is an imaginary ‘other dimension’ invented by Mr. Einstein – so whatever is theorized to happen in spacetime is twice removed from the actual universe (with actual time and actual space) that we live in. All this nonsense is based on the stubborn and instinctual fear of acknowledging the fact that the physical universe is infinite and eternal – no other worlds, no other place, no other dimensions. [Paul Davies]: None of the results quoted will be rigorously proved, for the proofs would require many years study of advanced mathematics to comprehend. It is important to realize that the subject of discussion is not a theory about the world, but mathematics. Paul Davies, The Edge of Infinity, p. 23 A little disclaimer he slips in here but then proceeds to apply his mathematical theories to the real world – predicting the existence of black holes and singularities in the physical universe despite a stunning lack of any factual evidence. [Paul Davies]: Given the fundamental axioms on which all mathematics ultimately rest, the results are therefore correct, beyond any possibility of doubt, as all the proofs rest on concrete and universally accepted logic. This point is stressed because the results often seem impossible to believe; yet they are true. We shall see that measuring infinity can be a very strange experience indeed. Paul Davies, The Edge of Infinity, p. 23 ‘... impossible to believe, yet they are true’. ‘True’ is a word that is currently so abused as to be useless. Christians believe the virgin birth was true, NDA-followers believe that inert planets hurtling through space affects their moods and behaviour, Trekkies believe in Warp-speed and wormholes, and Mr. Davies believes in an edge to the infinite universe. Strange tales, but ‘true’ ...? [Paul Davies]: The first step on the road to infinity is to discard any ideas about ‘very, very large’. Infinity is larger than any number, however large that number may be – and there is no limit to numbers. We shall see that not only is infinity beyond all limits, but is, in a sense, so large that it is almost impossible to make it larger. <snip> Paul Davies, The Edge of Infinity, p. 23 I hate to quibble about words, but Mr. Oxford says of infinity – ‘Having no limit or end; boundless, endless; immeasurably great in extent, duration, degree, etc’. Oxford Talking Dictionary So how is it almost impossible to make it larger? Could it be by inventing a plug hole in the middle – a black hole – so we can all disappear down there one day? Or how about a hole that ‘new stuff’ comes flowing in one day? Of course, you would have to bend space a bit around the holes but ... then again ... why not? It is just a theory after all ... truly ... honestly ... [Paul Davies]: [The concept of infinity] in 1600 even contributed to the death sentence passed on Giordano Bruno at the hands of the Church. Bruno had declared a belief in the infinity of worlds, against the established doctrine that only God was infinite. Paul Davies, The Edge of Infinity, p. 23 How not to win friends in the church. Mr. Davies has no such trouble, as he collected a cool million dollars in 1995 for the ‘Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion’. [Paul Davies]: Many people first encounter the idea of infinity when thinking about the universe. Does it extend for ever? If space is not unlimited in extent, does that not mean that there exists a barrier somewhere – in which case the barrier must lie beyond, and something beyond that ...? Another question, frequently asked by children, is of the ‘what happened before that’ variety. It seems that every event must have been preceded by some cause, and every elapsed moment must have come after an earlier moment. We shall see that the answers to these questions can be bewilderingly different from the obvious. <snip> Paul Davies, The Edge of Infinity, p. 23 Questions ‘frequently asked by children’ and adult cosmologists? Answers provided by science fiction writers and cosmologists – if there is a difference between the two. The only difference between Paul Davies and George Lucas is that one writes science fiction books and the other makes science fiction movies. As for the cosmological ‘answers’ – beyond the stars we see from earth have come pictures of vast nebula thousands of light years across, fantastic arrays of particles, rocks, gases, storms, eruptions, explosions, lights, clouds. All actual – requiring no imagination. All obvious – raising no question. All perfect – requiring no solution. [Paul Davies]: If the infinity of all even numbers is as numerous as all the even and odd numbers together, it looks, crudely speaking, as though doubling infinity still leaves us with the same infinity. Moreover, it is easily shown that trebling, quadrupling or any higher multiplication of infinity has equally little effect. In fact, even if we multiply infinity by infinity itself it still stubbornly refuses to grow any larger. The square of infinity is only as numerous as the natural numbers. <snip> Paul Davies, The Edge of Infinity, p. 27 [Paul Davies]: Cantor’s great discovery was that the set of all decimals (i.e. all rational and irrational numbers) is a bigger infinity than the set of all fractions (i.e. rational numbers alone). These issues may appear to be mathematical quibbles, but they run very deep. Centuries of groping towards a proper understanding of time, space, order, number and topology lie behind the work of Cantor and others to grasp the infinite as an actual, concrete concept. Some of the greatest minds in human history have foundered on the rock of the infinite. Few ideas can have so challenged man’s intellect. <snip> Paul Davies, The Edge of Infinity, p. 32 [Paul Davies]: Measuring the infinite must rank as one of the greatest enterprises of the human intellect, comparable with the most magnificent forms of art or music. Mathematics, ‘eternal and perfect’ in the words of Lord Bertrand Russell, can be used to build structures more beautiful and satisfying than any sculpture. Yet Cantor’s edifice of infinity – ‘a paradise from which no one will drive us’, as his contemporary David Hilbert was moved to say – took its toll. Grappling with the infinite evidently proved such disconcerting experience that when the respected mathematician Leopold Kronecker pronounced Cantor’s work on set theory as ‘mathematically insane’, he seems to have struck a raw nerve. Cantor suffered several nervous breakdowns, and eventually died in a mental hospital in 1918. Paul Davies, The Edge of Infinity, p. 37 Yep, insanity and madness prevail. And the passion and fervour of Holy Mathematics is indicated by the phrase – ‘a paradise from which no one will drive us’. Their search for God, ‘eternal and perfect’, involves trust, faith and belief in concepts that are held to be truths, all firmly based on the quick-sand of imagination. An imagined new dimension – spacetime that bends, folds and warps, that has holes and peaks; an imagined time that can run backwards, split into two or more and even loop the loop, imaginary numbers that are unreal, irrational and illogical; imaginary matter that is negative, uncertain, anti or virtual, particle and/or wave or even string-like. And from this mish mash come theories which are ... ‘impossible to believe, yet they are true’. ‘True’ they may be called, but factual they are not – nobody has found a black hole, or a worm hole, let alone a naked singularity! It was nuclear chemists and engineers who developed nuclear energy and the bomb. According to the book, [Robert Jungk]: ‘Einstein assured the American reporter W. L. Lawrence that he did not believe in the release of atomic power’, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns by Robert Jungk – as late as 1939 i.e. he didn’t think it was possible. Further, Edward Teller states [Edward Teller]: ‘I believe at the time he had no very clear idea of what we were doing in nuclear physics’. Edward Teller The Americans got to the moon with Newtonian physics and engineering, not Einsteinian theory. [Paul Davies]: Einstein’s general theory of relativity is regarded by many as the supreme intellectual achievement of the human species; certainly it surpasses Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory in elegance, economy and scope. <snip> Yet Einstein’s theory leads irresistibly to a singularity, to unbounded gravitational collapse. It is frequently proposed that the theory should be abandoned in the face of this absurdity. <snip> Tinkering with this great edifice of descriptive and predictive power in order to alleviate the singularity crisis seems like a ‘cop-out’. It was not the way out in 1911, and it would be surprising if it were the solution today. Paul Davies, The Edge of Infinity, pp. 176-7 The more I read and understand Mr. Einstein, the more mystical and Guru-like he becomes. It’s all mythical tales and wishful thinking of anywhere but here, and anytime but now. Anything to avoid the fact that we are mortal and that neither goodness nor Godness can make us happy and harmless. Anything to avoid the instinctually-sourced malice and sorrow of the Human Condition. Anything to avoid the fact that this is the only moment one can experience being alive. Anything to avoid being here and now in this very actual world, happening at this very moment. What a waste to bury one’s head in the sand or in the clouds when what is actual is perfect, benign, delightful, magnificent, tangible, tactile, tasty, vibrant, alive, immediate and right here on this planet. And it is the destiny of all committed actualists to experience this actuality 24 hrs. a day, every day. To sacrifice one’s self – to psychologically and psychically self-immolate, in order that the perfection and purity of the infinitude of the physical universe can become actualized in a human being. In order that the universe can experience itself as a human being. RESPONDENT: When I am dead there will be no time whatsoever because there will be no consciousness of ‘not being here’. PETER: When you are dead, your sense of ‘being here’ will cease, as a direct result of you not being here – as in dead, finished, deceased, passed away, expired, extinct, stuffed, finito, kaput, no more alive. But time will go on, exactly as it does when your consciousness of ‘being here’ ceases during deep sleep every night. Given this discussion seems to be focussing on what happens before and after No 7, a bit on time from the Glossary might help focus on No 7, as you are now, here on earth, right now. time – A finite extent of continued existence; eg. the interval between two events, or the period during which an action or state continues; a period referred to in some way. Time when: a point in time; a space of time treated without ref. to duration. Peter: Time can be conveniently be regarded in the three tenses: past, future and present. Past time is recalled by us as memories or thoughts and as such is both a cognitive re-call and an emotional re-call. Not only was our perception of the place, people or event coloured at the time but our recall is coloured and somewhat shaky. Current investigations suggest that in fact we only recall the last time we recalled something rather than re-calling the original memory. There is good scientific evidence that memories of traumatic or fearful events are not only stored as conscious memories in the neo-cortex, but are also stored in the amygdala as ‘unconscious’ or non-cognitive memories. These memories stored in the amygdala or primitive brain give substance to ‘me’ and give substance to ‘my’ life of suffering and ‘my’ pains and hurts from the past. To dip into this treasure trove of suffering can be a bittersweet occupation. Future time is conceived by us as imagination and as such is emotionally coloured. Given our over-riding instinct of fear, most of the future we see in fear ridden terms. This fear of the future is given credence by the bountiful store of emotional memories of past hurts and fears located in the amygdala. Hence the general future scenarios of gloom and doom, apocalypse and annihilation. To balance this we invent a ‘good’ – and always in the future – scenario of salvation, redemption and a blissfully happy afterlife, which we pray, trust and hope will eventuate. Present time is the closest to now , this very moment and is generally regarded as now. The problem for the human perception of now is that there are so many things going on in the brain and the body that the clear and direct sensate experience of experiencing this moment of being alive is impossible. The emotional affective faculties are on constant overload, with emotional memories of the past and imaginations of the future constantly crowding in. Added to that is the automatic neuro-biological operation of the instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire experienced as overwhelming passions due to the pumping of potent chemicals into the body and brain. One is usually ‘sensing’ or ‘feeling out’ this moment fearfully and aggressively such that the actual direct sensate experience of this moment of being alive is impossible. But all is not lost. With sincere intent and diligent application one can eliminate this constant neurosis and associated feelings, passions and emotions such that one becomes both happy and harmless. Thus freed of malice and sorrow it is then possible to directly, intimately and fully experience this moment in time. And the trick to getting here, now at this moment in time and this place in space is enjoy and appreciate this moment of being alive. To facilitate this you ask yourself, as an ongoing non-verbal attitude, ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ This moment in time is, after all, the only moment one can experience anyway, and if you are not happy now you are missing yet another moment ... and another … and another … The Actual Freedom Trust Library What I found when I came across actualism, was that I was more interested in what happened before I was here and what was going to happen after I was gone – a fascination born of years in the spiritual world with its concept of eternal time and my eternal being. A bit from my journal about my realizations concerning the utter futility of spiritual philosophy may be useful – [Peter]: ... ‘It is amazing that, of all the animals on the planet, only we human beings, with our ability to think and reflect, know that we have a limited life span and, further, that we could die at any time. We know this, we can talk about it and think about it. We see other people and animals die, and we see our bodies aging and dying. We know that death is an inevitable fact. This is the fact of the situation, but we have avoided this fact largely by making ‘Why are we here?’ and ‘What happens after death?’ into great religious, philosophical and scientific questions. Indeed, for many humans the pursuit of the answer to these meaningless questions is deemed to be the very meaning of life. The search for what happens after life becomes the point of life and the Search is endless. One is forever on the Path. One never arrives. That always seemed some sort of perversity to me. All that the religious and spiritual meanings of life have offered us is that they point to life after death – that’s where it is really at! ‘When you die, then you can really live!’’ ... Peter’s Journal, ‘Death’ So, I do understand your difficulties on focusing your attention on No 7, here, now and not go searching for the ‘Here and Now’. It is exceedingly difficult to turn one’s brain around, so to speak. The programming is so set, so set in one direction, so used to viewing and experiencing the world in the usual duality of either normal or spiritual that anything else seems inconceivable. It took me months and months of effort, not only of reading but contemplating and investigating the facts for myself. RESPONDENT: So, the only time ‘I am alive’ is whenever a body is being alive, the body which produces the sensation of being. So life is immortal because ‘I’ can exist only whenever a body exists, and one ‘I’ is not significantly different from another ‘I’. PETER: It seems to me that your ‘life is immortal’ idea should be written as ‘Life is Immortal’, which is a common spiritual / religious belief. An actualist takes ‘life’ to be what it means factually. At present it is the 30th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, the first of a series of seven expeditions to the barren, life-less surface of the moon. So boring a desert, in fact, that by the sixth mission the astronauts were reduced to hitting golf balls to see how far they went and doing wheelies in a dune buggy they had taken with them. By the time a geologist went on the seventh mission he was able to confirm what was already known – there is no life on the moon. No carbon-based life forms of any description were evident. It inevitably proved to be the last mission, but the images of the earth taken from space helped fire a passionate ‘save the earth’ program, as it was realized that there was no evidence, and bugger-all possibility, of life anywhere else in the universe. Human beings, being as perverse as they are, then proceeded to be concerned with ‘saving’ wild animals – the rarer, wilder and more bizarre the better – rather than ‘saving’ the human species. But that’s another story. Just as there is no evidence of intelligence anywhere else in the universe there is no evidence, whatsoever, of life anywhere else in the universe. Some sixteen SETI (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) programs are currently in operation in a search that began over 50 years ago. The current range of their search extends out some 50,000,000 light years from earth and still no messages received. Meanwhile carbon-based life, on earth, is most definitely mortal, not immortal. Modern medicine, increased hygiene and better living conditions have stretched human life expectancy to some 74 years, particularly in countries that no longer rely on ‘traditional’ ancient healing such as divination, exorcism, ‘energy’ release, blood-letting, herbal infusions, prayer, etc. There is ever-mounting scientific evidence that humans are indeed mortal, that carbon-based cell decay is inevitable – but then again, a tippee toe through the local cemetery would readily confirm that fact anyway. Life, Existence, Intelligence, Essence, Energy, etc., all are concepts that point to a belief in an over-arching ethereal force that lies behind, outside of, overlaid over, prior to, other than, or separate from, the physical universe. All are spiritual concepts, as in ... spiritual – of, pertaining to, or affecting the spirit or soul, esp. from a religious aspect; pertaining to or consisting of spirit, immaterial; concerned with spirits or supernatural beings ...Oxford Dictionary. The spiritual world is all pervasive, it could be described as programmed into one’s very cells, for the spirit, or soul, is nothing other than one’s primitive self. Nothing less than a mutation will free one from one’s soul, its instinctual program and the spiritual world. And what good news that is – there is nobody, or no-thing in charge, so there is nobody to blame nor anybody to bow down to. You can stand on your own two feet and get on with the business of sorting things out – cleaning your-‘self’ up ... to the point of disappearing. PETER to Gary: I always found being a parent a somewhat strange business – it was something I had no training for, it came at a stage in life when I knew nothing about life and it was clearly a case of the blind leading the blind. I always found the business of teaching or instilling my morals and ethics a bit hollow and phoney so as much as possible I adopted a tread lightly approach – which was still an approach. As quickly as possible I abandoned a fatherly teaching role – opting instead to allow my children as much freedom to explore and find out for themselves, make their own judgements, have their own successes and failures. In the work I have done, I have often been involved in co-coordinating and supervising the work of others and again found adopting the role of teacher or mentor to be not my cup of tea and to be inhibiting of another’s learning for themselves. Another more pragmatic reason is I find if I do offer advise, no matter how sound and sensible, it was rarely followed and often resented or rebelled against. The last episode that stands out was when the teenage son of the owner of a house I was building came to work on site, fresh from school. After about 2 weeks of turning up late on the job, I said ‘I will tell you the only rule you need to know about work – turn up on time’. I said if you find yourself coming late, just take the day off because every one else is on time and you don’t want to be seen as the owner’s son taking advantage of the others. From then on, he wasn’t late and he picked up the necessary carpentry skills himself by observing others he worked with. I think I taught him all I knew about working for someone else – they are buying your time and the mutual bargain is time and effort exchanged for money. In the case of actualism, all I can say is it works, and the return is related to the time and effort that you put in to actually changing yourself. Enough words and writing exist on the Actual Freedom Trust website for anyone to pick up the necessary skills needed to become more happy and harmless and to become free of the human condition, if that is your goal. PETER: As part of my investigation I also delved into theoretical physics and cosmology in order to ascertain whether any evidence had emerged that contradicted Richard’s experience that the physical universe is eternal and infinite. That it had no beginning, can only be actually experienced in this moment of time and has no end, that it has no centre, no ‘holes’ or edges to it other than imaginary ones – and therefore there is no ‘outside’ to it. Reading a few books and scouting around a bit was enough for me to ascertain that, while all sorts of fanciful theories and spurious evidence abounds in theoretical physics and speculative cosmology, no empirical evidence has been found to contradict what Richard says and what everyone has directly experienced in a PCE sometime in their life – that the universe is infinite and eternal and hence peerless both in its perfection and purity. RESPONDENT: To relevance to actualism: If in fact the universe is electric, or if in fact it is filled with rubber duckies ... how is it relevant to actualism? PETER: If you want to contemplate on life, the universe and what it is to be a human being, and your contemplations are based on the currently-fashionable pseudo-scientific theories of an expanding universe – replete with a Big Bang beginning, full of or even empty of, all sorts of unseen, unseeable and unmeasurable phenomena and which will suffer some Diabolical End – then you will remain in the grip of spiritual belief. When I first began to dig into these scientific theories I was amazed how unscientific they were, and I say this as a layman with only a basic knowledge of mechanics and engineering. The reason I posted the links about an alternative explanation to the empirical observations of the universe was that the explanations make far more sense to me than those currently held to be the truth. An obituary of Hannes Alfvén, the founder of plasma physics, reinforces my own layman understanding – [Eric G. Lerner]: ‘But Alfvén’s most significant contribution to science is his daring reformulation of cosmology, his critique of the Big Bang, and his posing of an alternative, the plasma universe-an evolving universe without beginning or end. To Alfvén, the most critical difference between his approach and that of the Big Bang cosmologists was one of method. ‘When men think about the universe, there is always a conflict between the mythical and the empirical scientific approach,’ he explained. ‘In myth, one tries to deduce how the gods must have created the world, what perfect principle must have been used.’ This, he said, is the method of conventional cosmology today: to begin from a mathematical theory, to deduce from that theory how the universe must have begun, and to work forward from the beginning to the present-day cosmos. The Big Bang fails scientifically because it seeks to derive the present, historically formed universe from a hypothetical perfection in the past. All the contradictions with observation stem from this fundamental flaw. The other method is the one Alfvén himself employed. ‘I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote and uncertain epochs.’ This method begins with observation – observation in the laboratory, from space probes, observation of the universe at large, and derives theories from that observation rather than beginning from theory and pure mathematics. According to Alfvén, the evolution of the universe in the past must be explicable in terms of the processes occurring in the universe today; events occurring in the depths of space can be explained in terms of phenomena we study in the laboratory on earth. Such an approach rules out such concepts as an origin of the universe out of nothingness, a beginning to time, or a Big Bang. Since nowhere do we see something emerge from nothing, we have no reason to think this occurred in the distant past. Instead, plasma cosmology assumes that, because we now see an evolving, changing universe, the universe has always existed and always evolved, and will exist and evolve for an infinite time to come.’ Copyright © 1991, 1995 Eric J. Lerner. http://www.marxist.com/science/inmemory.html The other aspect I found of interest in my early explorations into mainstream cosmological theories of the 20th century was that many of the proponents of the theories were heavily influenced by the Eastern religious beliefs and philosophies that were particularly fashionable in European intellectual circles at the time. What really set the alarm bells ringing – my scepticism if you like – was when I discovered that the man who formulated the Big Bang creation theory was Abbé Georges LeMaître, a central figure in the Vatican’s Pontificia Academia de Scienza di Roma. RESPONDENT: From an experiential point of view, it ‘can only be actually experienced in this moment of time’ is certainly true, but that does nothing to describe the universe’s physical evolution over time. PETER: Whilst there is ample empirical evidence in the fossil record of this planet to support the theory that vegetate matter emerged from the mineral matter of this planet due to a unique combination of physical conditions – and that it then further evolved into animate matter, conscious animate matter and apperceptive animate matter over time – it is a leap of pure imagination to propose that the universe itself has evolved over time. The physical universe is ever changing but it is not evolving, because implicit in the word evolution as it is commonly used is that the process of evolution has a beginning point. The universe, being eternal and infinite, had no beginning point, no creation event. Further, the physical universe is not evolving towards perfection – it is already perfect, as can clearly be experienced in a pure consciousness experience. RESPONDENT: While that experience implicitly involves my flesh-and-blood, hence can only be happening in this moment, I know also that the flesh-and-blood is subject to physical laws and will eventually become dust. Why would similar laws not apply to the universe too? PETER: The universe, being eternal, can have no ending, no doomsday event. To propose that because flesh and blood human beings are mortal – ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ – it therefore follows that the universe is mortal – ‘will eventually become dust’ – is an anthropocentric viewpoint. Thus far in human history, all of humanity’s wisdoms and truths have been founded upon an anthropocentric viewpoint, be it that of the spiritualists’ much-vaunted search for immortality for the human spirit – the ‘Unborn’ state – or the scientists’ futile search for metaphysical spirit-like creationist forces. RESPONDENT: I ask this in all sincerity, and I’m not arguing the physical nature of the universe, nor its perfection and purity, just how it is pertinent to the matter at hand. PETER: Anyone who holds to an anthropocentric view of the universe and holds on to spiritual and/or creationist theories about the nature of the universe will, by the very nature of these ‘self’-centred and ‘self’-perpetuating views and beliefs, remain locked out from the pure consciousness experience of the perfection and purity of the infinite and eternal universe. It is as pertinent as that. (...) * PETER: Talking about contemplating the physical nature of the universe brings me to the point of my letter, which is to post a couple of links I thought you might be interested in. I don’t want to comment specifically on the subject matter of the links, as I would not want to pre-empt you from drawing your own conclusions as to whether the explanations offered make more sense than do the currently-fashionable theories and long-held beliefs about the physical nature of the universe – so I’ll leave it at that. http://www.holoscience.com/eu/eu.htm and http://www.electric-cosmos.org/ RESPONDENT: Of course, back to the original subject. As I said above, I need to do more reading to see how the math hangs together, but the argument is persuasive and interesting. PETER: As I read it, it was scientists’ reliance on mathematics that lead to the abandonment of common sense in the first place. RESPONDENT: I was put off at the initial screen for Holoscience as it said: [quote]: ‘The Electric Universe introduces a far richer science that has no rigid disciplinary boundaries. Instead it encompasses all human experience, arts and endeavour. Holistically, it embraces evidence from ancient civilisations as well as the latest space probes. The result is an astounding concordance between modern plasma physics and the ancient testimony of battling planets.’ [endquote]. My suspicions are aroused whenever I come across the word holistic, it’s typically used to capture a mish mosh of metaphysical gobbledygook. So, I thought, is this another Capra-esque affair? PETER: Indeed there is a good deal in the links I provided that make no sense to me – the supposed evolution of the universe being one. But I do find the explanation of the nature of the universe to be far more scientifically plausible than the creationist theories of a Big Bang and a Wimpy End, not to mention the Other Invisible Universes fantasies. What this group of scientists is saying is that what has thus far been empirically observed in the universe can be attributed to the combination of physical matter and the physical energies and forces associated with that matter. * RESPONDENT: From an experiential point of view, it ‘can only be actually experienced in this moment of time’ is certainly true, but that does nothing to describe the universe’s physical evolution over time. PETER: Whilst there is ample empirical evidence in the fossil record of this planet to support the theory that vegetate matter emerged from the mineral matter of this planet due to a unique combination of physical conditions – and that it then further evolved into animate matter, conscious animate matter and apperceptive animate matter over time – it is a leap of pure imagination to propose that the universe itself has evolved over time. The physical universe is ever changing but it is not evolving, because implicit in the word evolution as it is commonly used is that the process of evolution has a beginning point. The universe, being eternal and infinite, had no beginning point, no creation event. Further, the physical universe is not evolving towards perfection – it is already perfect, as can clearly be experienced in a pure consciousness experience. RESPONDENT: In checking the dictionary, I find no specific indication that evolution implies a beginning point. However, it is defined as (generally) an increase in complexity. Clearly that is presumptuous, and I used the term incorrectly. But, whether the universe is becoming more or less complex, or is static, does not imply that the universe has a beginning or an end, or is finite. They are possibly related but exclusive. PETER: If I read you right, you seem to be willing to acknowledge that the universe may not have had a beginning, i.e. was not created by someone or something out of nothing, but you are hedging your bets by saying it does not necessarily follow that the universe won’t have an end – an extinction caused by someone or something whereby the universe wimps or bangs into nothing. I am left wondering why you would abandon half of a belief and yet hold on to the other half? RESPONDENT: At this point I do acknowledge that my common sense tells me that the universe is likely infinite in both time and space, but that is more opinion than scientific fact. PETER: Perhaps, in the interest of getting to the root of this issue, you would like to post the scientific facts that provide evidence that the universe is not ‘infinite in both time and space’. Then we can put them on the table and see if they make sense or not. Just as a point of interest, you will have noticed I am not alone in questioning the common popular theories in cosmology. You will have noticed that I have previously posted some comments made by Hannes Alfvén, astrophysicist and joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970 in which he questioned not only the methodology but the substance of the scientific rationale for a finite created universe with a beginning and end. * RESPONDENT: To relevance to actualism: If in fact the universe is electric, or if in fact it is filled with rubber duckies ... how is it relevant to actualism? From an experiential point of view, it ‘can only be actually experienced in this moment of time’ is certainly true, but that does nothing to describe the universe’s physical evolution over time. PETER: The universe, being eternal, can have no ending, no doomsday event. RESPONDENT: Can you offer a scientific argument as to why the universe should have no end? Common sense or a PCE is adequate to propose the hypothesis, but not the proof. PETER: I don’t have a scientific argument to offer because it is impossible to refute the arguments of those who believe in a creationist beginning event or a doomsday ending event to the universe. This is akin to believers asking for scientific proof that God doesn’t exist or proof that there isn’t life after death. It is beholden upon those who believe to provide empirical scientific evidence to back up their theories and beliefs – after all, it’s their belief, their conviction, their fantasy. To be stuck between a hypothesis and a belief is a hard place as I remember it, but out of this confusion came the understanding that certainty lies in the observable facts of down-to-earth matters. Or to put it another way, once I realized that actualism had nothing to do with any spiritual belief whatsoever, it gradually dawned on me that actualism is completely and utterly down-to-earth. Having said that I don’t have a scientific argument to make, I will offer the scientific explanation as to why – [Tom Van Flandern]: ‘Creation ex nihilo is forbidden in physics because it requires a miracle. Everything that exists comes from something that existed before, that has grown, or fragmented, or changed form. Growth requires accretion, nourishment, or energy input. Fragmentation ranges from chipping to evaporation to explosion into bits so tiny that we can no longer see or detect them. Changing form includes changes of state, such as solids, liquids, gases, or plasmas.’ <Snip> ‘The counterpart of not allowing the creation of something from nothing is ‘No Demise as nihil’; i.e., something cannot become nothing. However finely a thing may dissolve, however undetectable the bits of ‘energy’ into which a thing may explode, if all the individual bits were brought together again with the same ordering, the original thing would be recovered. In other words, nothing has ceased to exist; it has merely changed its appearance or form.’ Tom Van Flandern, ‘Physics Has Its Principles’ * PETER: This belief is somewhat understandable considering that it emerged in the days when it was universally believed that the world was three layered – a flat earthy plane full of dangerous animals and dangerous humans, a mystifying heavenly realm above and a mysterious underworld below. Eventually it was empirically observed that the earth was not flat but was spherical and subsequent explorations over centuries proved that this was in fact so. Nowadays photos of earth taken from spacecrafts have subsequently convinced all but the wacky that the earth is not flat. RESPONDENT: This is my point exactly. We base our understanding of the universe on the facts we have gathered using the scientific method, and the tools we have available presently. A spacecraft is a sophisticated tool that allows us to gather useful information about the physical characteristics of the universe. Historically, the availability of ever more sophisticated tools (telescopes, microscopes, particle accelerators, ...) has resulted in the refutation of previously held beliefs (masquerading as truths of course). So, the tool that someone invents in the 25th century could prove conclusively that the universe is not actually filled with plasma as previously thought, but actually filled with rubber duckies. PETER: By the same logic, an agnostic would say it is best to keep one’s options open because ‘higher dimensions’ or evidence of creation or other worlds or black holes or singularities or meta-physical forces, or whatever else one chooses to believe in, might well be found to be true after all. This line of reasoning is often used as a last resort by those who can find no evidence to substantiate their belief and fall back on claiming the evidence does exist but it ‘hasn’t been discovered yet’. RESPONDENT: BTW, I don’t think any of this is incompatible with the perception in a PCE, ‘that the universe is infinite and eternal and hence peerless both in its perfection and purity’. PETER: I used to think that a lot of beliefs I held didn’t matter or weren’t relevant to actualism, but eventually I discovered the act of holding onto any beliefs only served to keep ‘me’ in existence and therefore kept me hobbled to the human condition of malice and sorrow. In short, if I couldn’t drop a belief I always knew it was something ‘I’ identified with – i.e. that it was part and parcel of ‘me’ as a social or instinctual identity. * PETER: I could go on tripping through other fields of scientific discovery and endeavour, but you probably have got the gist of what I am saying – human beings will never be free from the fear and hope inherent in superstition if they insist on believing in higher dimensions, supernatural forces, metaphysical realms, divine beings, good and evil spirits and so on – or persist in hoping that one day science will provide the empirical evidence that spiritual belief so tellingly lacks. RESPONDENT: I guess I don’t really like the term ‘higher dimensions’ – maybe a better term is ‘characteristics of the universe that are not perceptible at present with the available human senses and tools’. PETER: Maybe you would like to refect on what characteristics of the universe have changed since the beginning of human awareness of the universe? Such reflection might lead you to the conclusion that the characteristics of the universe exist independently of human sensory perception, and are unaffected in any way by human sensory perception. Anthropocentricity runs deep within the human psyche, manifested in each and every human being as ‘self’-centredness. Contrary to popular belief, the universe was not ‘created’ especially for human beings – the human species is manifestly a species of animate life that has evolved from the matter of the universe. So predominant is anthropocentric belief that early humans, out of ignorance, believed the earth to be the centre of our solar system – a geocentric belief – but it has been discovered over time that the earth is but one of a number of planets that orbit the sun, which is but one sun in a galaxy full of suns, which is but one galaxy in an endless cosmos of countless galaxies. And yet these physical characteristics of the universe have always been so despite the early beliefs and superstitions that the earth was the centre of the world and that this world must have been created by a Someone or Something. I don’t know wether you came across the modern ‘Fingers of God’ tabulation – if this didn’t send the alarm bells ringing amongst creationist cosmology as to how geocentric, hence anthropocentric, their observations are then nothing will. http://www.electric-cosmos.org/arp.htm RESPONDENT: Again, I emphasize that none of what I am talking about has anything to do with metaphysics or spiritual belief. PETER: And yet, despite your disclaimer, you have said previously in this post – [Respondent]: ‘The Big Bang theorem is still a theorem as it has not yet passed the test of the scientific method.’ [endquote]. The Big Bang theory is a creationist theory. The Big Bang theory is metaphysical in that it presumes there was a force or energy existing prior to the existence of physical matter and that this non-material force or energy then created the physical matter of the universe. The Big Bang theory is spiritual at root in that ancient spiritual belief was the prior source of all metaphysical science. And just a note to finish with – Personally I didn’t try to understand the science of all this too much. Simply contemplating on what would have existed before the universe was supposedly created, what would exist after in supposedly ended and what I would see if I got to the supposed edge of the universe was enough to convince me that the creationist cosmologists were off with the fairies. * RESPONDENT: It may be changing (i.e. electrical energy flows), but it doesn’t necessarily become more complex. My point all along is that I do not have enough evidence to determine whether the universe is finite/infinite, eternal/starting/ending, etc. Nobody does. PETER: Indeed. None who subscribe to any of the theories that the physical universe is finite in time and space have provided any substantive, verifiable evidence of there being an edge to the universe, let alone address the question of what lies beyond the supposed edge? If there is ‘nothing’ beyond the edge, then is that ‘nothing’ infinite or does it too have an edge? Similarly, if the physical universe was created out of nothing, what existed before the supposed creation event? Nothing? Was that pre-existing ‘nothing’ that the universe was supposedly created out of infinite or did it too have an edge? The ‘present Big Bang theory has many holes’, as you put it, and yet those who hold to these theories and beliefs seem willing to suspend reason, ignore common sense, and blithely accept that the theories of modern cosmogony must have credence solely because the theories are proposed by scientists. What such people also ignore is the fact that these scientists have themselves been trained in cosmogony by the very cosmogonists who proposed the currently-fashionable theories in the first place. This closed-loop spoon-feeding form of teaching invariably leads to a blurring of the distinction between contemporary theory and verifiable fact. I know from my own experience that many of the things I was taught to believe at school as being facts have proved to be falsehoods. Common sense has it that the universe is infinite in space, eternal in time and perpetual in matter – it simply defies reason to propose that anyone can provide physical evidence that all of the space and matter of the universe came instantaneously into being some 10 billion years ago. It equally defies reason to propose that anyone can provide physical evidence that all of the space and matter of the universe will instantaneously disappear at some time in the future. It was this uncommon application of common sense that led me to contemplate on the consequences of the infinitude of the universe, which then led me to directly experience this infinitude in what is known as a pure consciousness experience. This is the reason I posted to the list the scientific findings that question the currently-fashionable creationist theories about the universe – contemplating upon such matters could well lead anyone sufficiently interested in actualism to experience for themselves the immediate vibrancy of the actual physical world we corporeal bodies are in fact made of. (...) * PETER: As part of my investigation I also delved into theoretical physics and cosmology in order to ascertain whether any evidence had emerged that contradicted Richard’s experience that the physical universe is eternal and infinite. That it had no beginning, can only be actually experienced in this moment of time and has no end, that it has no centre, no ‘holes’ or edges to it other than imaginary ones – and therefore there is no ‘outside’ to it. Reading a few books and scouting around a bit was enough for me to ascertain that, while all sorts of fanciful theories and spurious evidence abounds in theoretical physics and speculative cosmology, no empirical evidence has been found to contradict what Richard says and what everyone has directly experienced in a PCE sometime in their life – that the universe is infinite and eternal and hence peerless both in its perfection and purity. RESPONDENT: To relevance to actualism: If in fact the universe is electric, or if in fact it is filled with rubber duckies ... how is it relevant to actualism? From an experiential point of view, it ‘can only be actually experienced in this moment of time’ is certainly true, but that does nothing to describe the universe’s physical evolution over time. The universe, being eternal, can have no ending, no doomsday event. RESPONDENT: Can you offer a scientific argument as to why the universe should have no end? Common sense or a PCE is adequate to propose the hypothesis, but not the proof. PETER: I don’t have a scientific argument to offer because it is impossible to refute the arguments of those who believe in a creationist-beginning event or a doomsday-ending event to the universe. RESPONDENT: That is the nature of beliefs, rather than facts. PETER: Which in turn explains why it is far easier to fall in line with one group of believers or adopt the chameleon-like stance of agnosticism rather than bother to pursue the facts of the matter – no matter what the consequences may be. As I have said before, my bothering to take the time and make the effort to question the theories of modern cosmogony lead me to a PCE wherein the fact that the universe is, was, and always will be, infinite and eternal became stunningly apparent as a direct and sensual experience. If I can use your stance as a counterpoint – [Respondent]: ‘I think it’s a bit scientifically naive to assume that just because something is the ‘way we perceive it’, it must be the whole truth.’ [endquote]. … what about this direct sensual experience was a good dose of scientific naiveté. (...) * RESPONDENT: While that experience implicitly involves my flesh-and-blood, hence can only be happening in this moment, I know also that the flesh-and-blood is subject to physical laws and will eventually become dust. Why would similar laws not apply to the universe too? PETER: To propose that because flesh and blood human beings are mortal – ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ – it therefore follows that the universe is mortal – ‘will eventually become dust’ – is an anthropocentric viewpoint. Thus far in human history, all of humanity’s wisdoms and truths have been founded upon an anthropocentric viewpoint, be it that of the spiritualists’ much-vaunted search for immortality for the human spirit – the ‘Unborn’ state – or the scientists’ futile search for metaphysical spirit-like creationist forces. RESPONDENT: You have applied the scientific method to my hypothesis and it has failed. My argument is flawed. PETER: Flawed or not, you still seem to be arguing for the belief in creationist cosmology, albeit as half a belief. On one side you offer ‘granted that the present Big Bang theory has many holes’ and yet on the other you ask ‘can you offer a scientific argument as to why the universe should have no end?’ RESPONDENT: Again, I am not arguing for any particular side. I am just stating that we do not have the knowledge, tools, etc to determine the veracity of any particular scenario. In fact, it seems you are the one that is holding tightly to a particular POV. From here, it sounds a bit like a belief. PETER: I can well understand that you regard the perception that the physical universe is infinite in space, eternal in time and perpetual in matter is but a belief. It is becoming increasingly apparent that only way you could intellectually understand it as being a fact is if you abandoned your agnostic stance and dared to come down on one side of the fence or the other – something you appear unwilling to do. It was only by intellectually understanding that the physical universe is infinite in space, eternal in time and perpetual in matter infinitude is a fact that I could then proceed to wanting to have an experiential verification of this fact and this very act of wanting to find out then led to one of many subsequent PCEs – each one of them born out of a naive curiosity as to the facts of life. * PETER: You wrote to No 21 and No 45 making a comment on our recent conversations about the nature of the physical universe. RESPONDENT: No 21/No 45: Peter and I had an ongoing dialog on this very subject not too long ago. You will save yourselves a lot of time by searching the site for terms like universe / infinite / theory etc. You will find an unequivocal stand on the nature of the universe which rejects all questioning. PETER: I took the opportunity of reviewing our dialogue on the subject of the universe and I found no instances that I have an unequivocal stand on the nature of the universe nor that I rejected all questioning. In fact if you recall, our most recent dialogue on the subject began when I wrote to you pointing to a scientific theory that questioned the current fusion/gravitational model of the physical universe. The very reason I did so was because I like it when theories I took to be fact are brought into question and I particularly liked this new theory because much of what I read made sense to me – albeit that I have what could be called a layman’s knowledge about such matters. I fail to see this as ‘an unequivocal stand on the nature of the universe …’ As for rejecting all questioning, when I re-read our discussions I could not find anywhere where I had rejected your questions – rather I found that I had addressed all of the points you raised and answered all of your questions, very often supplementing my answers with quotes from scientists who do not hold to the creationist model of the physical universe. For example – [Respondent]: At this point I do acknowledge that my common sense tells me that the universe is likely infinite in both time and space, but that is more opinion than scientific fact. [endquote]. [Peter]: Perhaps, in the interest of getting to the root of this issue, you would like to post the scientific facts that provide evidence that the universe is not ‘infinite in both time and space’. Then we can put them on the table and see if they make sense or not. Just as a point of interest, you will have noticed I am not alone in questioning the common popular theories in cosmology. You will have noticed that I have previously posted some comments made by Hannes Alfvén, astrophysicist and joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970 in which he questioned not only the methodology but the substance of the scientific rationale for a finite created universe with a beginning and end. Peter to Respondent, 22.2.2003 Rather than rejecting all questioning, I actively question the plethora of theories of those scientists who propose that the physical universe was created out of nothing, or evolved out of nothing, is either expanding or contacting and will eventually disappear or somehow cease to exist. I have heard it often said that the empirical evidence that the universe is not infinite and is not eternal will be found someday, but until this happens the creationist theories about the universe remain but theories that should be subject to questioning – and the beliefs in other-than-physical worlds remain but spirit-ual beliefs that should be subject to questioning. Whilst this may appear to you to be ‘an unequivocal stand’, for me as an actualist, it simply made sense to question all of the cosmologist’s creationist models of the universe as well as all of the spiritualist’s beliefs in a Creator, by whatever name … and to keep doing so until I discovered the facts of the matter. To settle for a state of ‘not knowing’ was simply not good enough. I have previously made clear the reason that an actualist needs to question these theories and beliefs – [Respondent]: I ask this in all sincerity, and I’m not arguing the physical nature of the universe, nor its perfection and purity, just how it is pertinent to the matter at hand. [Peter]: Anyone who holds to an anthropocentric view of the universe and holds on to spiritual and/or creationist theories about the nature of the universe will, by the very nature of these ‘self’-centred and ‘self’-perpetuating views and beliefs, remain locked out from the pure consciousness experience of the perfection and purity of the infinite and eternal universe. It is as pertinent as that. Peter to Respondent, 14.2.2003 Or to put it another way, it is impossible devote one’s life to becoming happy and harmless in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are – to put all of one’s eggs in one basket – if you cling to any beliefs that the physical world is other-than-it-is – infinite and eternal – or if you cling to any beliefs that human beings are other-than-what-they-are – corporeal and mortal. PETER: To give you a down-to-earth example we both can relate to – let’s take a computer mouse, and I presume you can see one in front of you as I can. Now what these scientists are telling me is that it is possible to instantaneously create matter such as this out of a ‘great energy’. In other words, an instant before there would be no matter and an instant after there would be matter. Hmmm…. But then again, if I remained open that this was possible, I would ask the theorists: did this supposed ‘great energy’ that all of the matter of the entire universe was created out of always exist – was it eternally existing prior to the coming into being of matter, or did some prior event cause this great energy to come into being? If so, what caused this ‘great energy’ to be created in the first place? Was this ‘great energy’ infinite or was it limited in size and scope in some way? RESPONDENT: All good questions – and all questions that are being answered by cosmologists in a variety of ways – but peripheral to what is currently under discussion. PETER: I take it that you are making a case for the facticity of relativistic cosmology, unless you are merely conducting an intellectual rebuttal of what I was saying to No 60 for the sake of making an intellectual rebuttal. Whatever your motive is in writing, I have appreciated your probings as it has spurred me to look a bit deeper into the world of relativistic cosmology and my investigations have served only to confirm my initial impressions. * PETER: I have just taken a break from this post and put my feet up for a bit and skimmed through a book from Paul Davies, who achieved an international reputation for his ability to explain the significance of advance scientific ideas in simple language. I came across this – [Paul Davies]: ‘At this stage it is worth recalling the point made in the previous chapter that the big bang was not the explosion of a lump of matter into a pre-existing void, but the sudden explosive appearance of space and matter out of nothing. <…> As explained in Chapter 7, the expanding universe is not the dispersal of galaxies away from some centre of explosion, but the inflation of space itself’. p. 159 The Edge of Infinity. Paul Davies and further on … [Paul Davies]: ‘If the above model of the big bang is taken seriously, and the mathematical progressions pushed right back to infinite density and zero model, then we cannot continue back beyond that point. When infinity is reached in physics, the theory stops. Taken literally, space has disappeared, along with all matter. Whatever lies beyond, it does not contain any places, or any things in the usual sense of material entities. We seem to be on the very edge of existence once again …’ p. 159 The Edge of Infinity. Paul Davies If I take this on board, I can only assume that the ‘great energy’ that you say is normally proposed as having existed prior to the Big Bang would have to be a formless (there being no space existing before the big bang), spaceless (there being no space existing before the big bang) and timeless (there is no time existing before the big bang) energy. And I say timeless because Paul Davies says – [Paul Davies]: ‘… for the creation of a universe at a finite time in the past does not necessitate the assumption that there was a time when nothing existed. Time itself can be created …’ and further on … ‘If the universe did really emerge from a singularity, then the singularity itself cannot be considered as belonging to spacetime – it represents, as discussed in length in the preceding chapters, a breakdown of the spacetime concept. If the singularity is not part of spacetime then it is not an event and did not ‘occur’ at ‘a moment’. p. 168 The Edge of Infinity. Paul Davies From what I make of what Paul Davies is saying it also appears that I am wrong in saying that the Big Bang theory proposes the universe was ‘created out of nothing.’ because nothing existed prior to the Big Bang (as in no space, time or matter existed prior to the singularity) and not only that but the Big Bang was not an event and did not happen at a particular moment in time because the event did not occur either in a place in space nor at a moment in time (as in no space, time or matter existed prior to the singularity). After re-reading some of this book, I knew why I regarded relativistic cosmology as being absurd when I first started trying to make sense of it … but I digress. To get back to the practicalities of your statement, when you say this ‘great energy’ that existed prior to the supposed Big Bang is ‘hardly nothing’, what do you mean? Do you mean it is ‘hardly nothing’ because it is a cosmological theory or ‘hardly nothing’ as in it is a bona fide energy that had, or has, a real existence? I ask because I am interested in what sense you make out of these theories, not as philosophical sense but as down-to-earth sense. (...) * * PETER: In hindsight, t’would have made much more sense and would have been much more accurate if I had have said – The theory that the universe was created out of nothing was based on an a priori principle based on a subjective thought game that led to a mathematical theory that the space of the universe is expanding which lead to a mathematical process of regression whereby the universe was assumed to have had a beginning point, and this whole set of theories based on subjective mind-game scenarios, abstract thinking and conceptual mathematical theorems seemed to me at the time to be the antithesis of what I understood science to be. Nowadays I know it is simply an absurdity, and a widely accepted absurdity to boot. RESPONDENT: Now I’m not following your logic. PETER: It’s not logic, it’s a clear-eyed description of the house of cards that is relativistic cosmology. This is how Richard put it recently – Richard: You are aware that the topic under dispute is whether or not the universe is spatially infinite, temporally eternal, and materially perdurable (and not just Einsteinian relativity per se)? I only ask because the whole notion of it not being so comes out of the ‘big bang’ theory ... which is based upon the ‘expanding universe’ theory which was based upon Mr. Albert Einstein’s relativity theory ... it is, in other words, a notion drawn from a mathematical computation based upon a mathematical computation based upon a mathematical computation. And the ‘experiential evidence’ you refer to are theories and not observation (for example ‘red-shifted galaxies’ is the observation; ‘galaxies moving away at high speeds’ is the theory, or, for another instance ‘microwave radiation’ is the observation; ‘cosmic background radiation’ is the theory). Richard to Respondent, 11.2.2004 I do realize that this pulls the rug out from under one of the core planks of modern theoretical science and that it also disenfranchises secular humanism from having its own naturalistic/ evolutionary cosmology – but then again t’is only a fantasy after all. PETER: I found your comments so interesting I thought I would reply, RESPONDENT to No 23: I have decided that anything more ABOUT Peter and Vineeto bores me right now, also. I am going to interact with them elsewhere, else-time. PETER: I take it you are talking of some sort of ‘next lifetime’ interaction, so favoured by many. You surely won’t be meeting me in that great commune in the sky, or on Sirius for that matter. RESPONDENT to No 23: No, their written material will be highly regarded by our children. PETER: This comment really intrigued me. Are you saying that the next generation will be the one who will finally abandon the idea of good and evil spirits roaming the earth, and that the earth will no longer be a place where humans are forever meant to suffer and fight, as some sort of cosmic ‘penal’ colony. That the next generation will finally get around to doing something about the endemic suffering and fighting on the planet. Why is it always the ‘next’ generation that is going to find the answer as this generation fails yet again to find the solution to the Human Dilemma and inevitably turns to praying to the Gods for salvation and redemption? I wrote a bit in my journal on what happened to the last generation –
> | [Peter]: ... ‘I marched to stop the Vietnam war, I poster-pasted to save the forests, I grooved to the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park in London, I hung around in Amsterdam, I travelled to the East, I became politically and socially concerned and involved. I’ve thought about these times during the last twelve months – what happened to the dreams, the enthusiasm of those times? Remember John Lennon singing ‘Imagine’ or ‘Give Peace a Chance’, or watching Woodstock? We were going to change the world! And then it all started to fade a bit – I got rather lost in the daily business of wife, two kids and two cars. And then, when that crashed, I was off to the East with thousands of others, seduced and fired up by the promise of a New Man, Peace, Love, Utopia and an end to my personal suffering. In fact, the whole of the revolution of the sixties was simply sucked into the mystery, confusion and ‘mindlessness’ of the Eastern religions.’ ... Peter’s Journal, ‘Peace’
And a bit more – [Peter]: ... ‘In my life I have been involved in many revolutionary movements and I had many ideals about changing things. In some thirty years of adult life, I have been involved and concerned with movements for peace; for environmental, political, social and spiritual change. And I have come to see all of them as revolutionary – in other words, going around in circles. I participated in a spiritual revolution with a living Guru deriding the past traditions and the idea of religions only to see him eventually form his very own Religion and become part of the traditional religious warring campus. And the so-called ‘New Age’ of today is really nothing but a return to the Dark Age of spirits, omens, divination, witches and shamans. And so it has been going on for millennia ... round and round in circles ... revolution after revolution. It is so good to be free of that nonsense and to have found a process that is evolutionary, that actually works. A process that is easy, simple, uncomplicated, describable, direct, and that produces both instant results and an assured evolutionary change – to eventually become actually free of malice and sorrow. It is now possible to change Human Nature. There is now a cure available for the disease called the Human Condition – for those who want to be free of it.’ ... Peter’s Journal, ‘Evolution’ The ‘next’ generation was of no concern to me, I wanted freedom for myself, here, now, on earth – no matter what the cost. And I ended up becoming the ‘next’ generation anyway ... Cute Hey. PETER: Self-realisation or Enlightenment is a mere delusion (an illusion fabricated out of an illusion) whereby the psychic entity ‘feels’ it is Immortal and Eternal.’ ‘Actual Freedom lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction to spiritual freedom. It is actual, sensate, tangible, ever-present, delightful, pure and perfect and available to any who is daring enough to free themselves of both the psychological and psychic entities within. RESPONDENT: Is your ‘ever-present’ anything like ‘Eternal’? PETER: No, I am only capable of experiencing this moment of being alive as a sensate, reflective flesh and blood human being. This moment is ever present. I, as this body, did not exist some 50 years ago before the sperm hit the egg, and when I die nothing can continue. My awareness of being alive – consciousness – will cease with this body. This is clearly indicated when I am asleep when consciousness ceases for the period of sleep. Death is the cessation of consciousness. I am mortal, not ‘Eternal’. It is the physical universe that is eternal and infinite, pure and perfect. PETER: To be a watcher, or a witness, is to watch oneself living life. RESPONDENT: No 12 here: This is where you go wrong! Witness is a transcendental state, no self, no identification to a self, no self to watch, and no thought. To me, it is from ‘knowing’ this space, that my experience of living life is momentary. PETER: It’s all a bit like the Pope and Galileo. If you insist on having a conversation on the basis of you’re right and I’m wrong we will get no-where really quickly. So now, what you are proposing is that your watcher, who was really the witnesser, and who became the Real watcher, is now the transcendental, non-identified, un-watchable, no-thought, of one-mind, space – with a male and a female side to it. Why do you keep insisting that the entity that ‘feels’ – who you ‘feel’ yourself to be – should stay in existence? It just means that you are going to be forever on a see-saw of emotions – sorrow, depression, sadness, boredom, excitement, frantic, blissful. Up again and down again, keeping the lid on, aiming to be good, aiming to get out of it by any way possible – alcohol, drugs, meditation, Realization. Why not get rid of the churning emotions and instinctual urges and enjoy an actual personal peace 24 hours a day for the rest of your life – free of the feelings of sorrow and malice. It takes a bit of effort at the start to get rid of them but their elimination is permanent. I remember clearly thinking at one stage, near the end of the journey, what a relief it was not to keep up an identity any longer, trying to be good, trying to fit in. It was all an effort and so tiring, so exhausting. To be free of malice and sorrow I am free to be here as me, this flesh and blood body – no longer racked by churning thoughts and emotions. For me back two years ago the two major things that stood in the road of my freedom were the feelings of fear and pride. I just figured it was silly to let such paltry feelings run my life. I wanted to be free of them, for ‘my’ feelings were ruining my life – spoiling my happiness and causing me to inflict them on other equally inflicted people around me. RESPONDENT: To quote Osho on this point: [quote]: ‘You are always given a single moment; you are not given two moments together. If you know the secret of living one moment you know the whole secret of life, because you will always get one moment-and you know how to live it, how to be totally in it.’ Osho PETER: Ah! I see you still want to compare what I am talking about with what the mystics say. The mystics all talk of an ethereal mystical world, the inner world of feeling peace and feeling God. They knew something was wrong with us human beings, but their solution was to attain an altered state of consciousness (ASC) such that the identity shifts from being a mortal, lost, lonely frightened and very, very cunning ‘self’ to become the ‘Self’ – Realizing that it is God and Immortal. The ASC only got rid of half the problem, the ego, and the soul is free to run amok such that they believe they are God and that they are immortal. It would all be okay except others believe them, and proceed to worship them as Gods ... and yet another Religion is born. What I am talking of is the actual world, where flesh and blood mortal human beings live, here, now, on this planet. What I am offering is information about a down-to-earth freedom from self-centred neurosis and churning feelings and instinctual drives. Not some flight of fantasy – there are no spirits in the actual world, they all dwell in the spiritual world. So, to the quote – Looks good on the surface – if you don’t think about what he is really saying – but dig in a bit ... [Osho]: ‘You are always given a single moment I am not given a moment – it is always here. I can either be here in this moment, as this flesh and blood body or ‘I’ can be somewhere else, ‘off’ replaying or rehearsing some scene, worrying about what someone else is thinking, feeling sad, lonely, deep in my ‘inner’ world or cut off altogether in an altered state of consciousness. For ‘I’ am anywhere but here, now. [Osho]: ‘you are not given two moments together I guess this is a ‘no-mind’ piece of Wisdom – but even the scientists are running a fantasy about parallel universes and they guess that then you could have two moments. I always see the parallel universes in a stack like a pile of plates on God’s dinner table. [Osho]: ‘If you know the secret of living one moment you know the whole secret of life, because you will always get one moment There is this whole secret bit running and the biggest secret is that the ‘Truth that cannot be spoken’. The secret is actually no secret at all – it is that by achieving an altered state of consciousness one gets to feel like God and one imagines oneself to be immortal. In the actual world there are no mystical secrets – they are seen plainly as the fairy tales they are. [Osho]: ‘– and you know how to live it, how to be totally in it.’ Yes indeed, there is no grander feeling than to feel like God, to have a feeling of Oneness with it all, one feels as big as the universe. You are so ‘totally in it’ because it is all your own creation. If the physical world is an illusion then you are ‘totally in’ an illusionary moment in an illusionary world. The author is, after all, on record as saying he was an alien on earth and just a visitor. Me, I am an earthling, made of the same stuff, ageing and mortal. The mystics can never know the actual world. It’s so good that it is 1999 and serendipitous that I met Richard and got free of all these nonsensical mystical beliefs. To prove that it is possible to change Human Nature ... That there is – ‘something new under the sun’. If you are interested, the Evolution chapter talks about this and has an answer to the question ‘why me?’ that I ran for a while. Gee – there’s a lot of words again ... another rave, hey. All just to say – ‘step out of the real world into the actual world and leave your ‘self’ (and ‘Self’) behind.’ Actualism Homepage
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