To Know All We Can Know

We operate in dimensions of space and time. In so doing we could be called four dimensional beings. We have volume (viz, take up space) which is manifested in what we have come to know as 3-D. We are a point that is extended into length and expanded into depth occupying space. That is the first three dimensions. Our fourth dimension is the consciousness and involvement in the passage of time. We are continuously moving through the passage of time.

There are other dimensions. Wikipedia informs us as follows:  

Abstract five-dimensional space occurs frequently in mathematics, and is a legitimate construct. Whether or not the real universe in which we live is somehow five-dimensional is a topic that is debated and explored in several branches of physics, including astrophysics and particle physics.

In physics, the fifth dimension is a hypothetical extra dimension beyond the usual three spatial dimensions and one time dimension of Relativity. The Kaluza-Klein theory used the fifth dimension to unify gravity with the electromagnetic force; e.g. Minkowski space and Maxwell's equations in vacuum can be embedded in a 5-dimensional Riemann curvature tensor[1][unreliable source?]. Kaluza-Klein theory now is seen as essentially a gauge theory with gauge group the circle group. M-theory suggests that space-time has eleven dimensions, seven of which are "rolled up" to below the subatomic level. Physicists have speculated that the graviton, a particle thought to carry the force of gravity, may "leak" into the fifth or higher dimensions which would explain how gravity is significantly weaker than the other three fundamental forces. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_universe_of_five_dimensions)

Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of the boundless four-dimensional continuum known as spacetime. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space)

Whether five or eleven dimensions, we have the capacity for interfacing in four of these dimensions.

Could we access more? We know what is within our view materially now, namely, presently. On information and belief we know that which we are told exists or conclude by the various methods of communication and measurement we have developed. We know the past. We do not know the future.

The future is not known to us because it has not happened yet in time. But, time is no more than a function of materiality. It doesn’t exist beyond its confines of material world.

We know many things, starting with black holes and particle composition of matter more by conclusion. Just as Einstein concluded about relativity and the facility of what has come to called wormholes, we reason to the likely existence of such things, and assess their power or potential.

On the level of spiritual transcendence many conclude there is a God who created us. There is nothing empirical that can demonstrate God. I believe the existential philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel said it best. ”There is no way we can know God. We are finite, God is infinite. But then again we can know God by knowing finitely what God is not!”

As we spend that last part of our lives where we are given to being reflective, might we not do more to know, to see and to surmise? Is it possible to go back and learn other ways to access what about us? As we start musing through our right brain capability might we not intuit more than the evident?

With that capacity for intuition might we not take further steps into extra sensory perception, develop abilities for prescience, delve into the paranormal, detect and understand psychic phenomena?

These abilities have not been of practical use in our time in materiality. Because we haven’t needed them we haven’t tried to use them; does that mean they are not possible?

Reflection is that time in our life to expand what we have come to know. I would like to believe it is also our time to learn new things.

We should all keep an eye on what happens to us on this third stage of our worldly way and assess what new challenges we have. The times in mid-life as we concentrated on what we had become and endeavored to gather all the fruit of that, we did not have time or opportunity to look.

Now in our senior years we do have that time, also with the time the opportunity, and the wisdom of having been where we’ve been. Some of us need no more than reaching this age to harvest these fruits.

Some of us, me as an example, need a kick in the pants to go in that direction. I knew something was missing, I knew there was more for me to do, but I was trying too hard trying to hold on to bits of my professional life where I had a meaning I at least understood.

Kicked as I was by Dementia, I now have been forced from what I was holding to and forced into finding my fulfillment. Coping with this terrible disease made taking action necessary. That action amounted to getting out of myself and taking a real view of all that was around me.

The Infinite Moment

  

Lifetimes of ignorance have brought us to identify the whole of our being with ego. Its greatest triumph is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering. Yet, ego is so terribly convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us. To be egoless, ego whispers to us, is to lose all the rich romance of being human, to be reduced to a colorless robot or a brain-dead vegetable. Rinpoche, Sogyal (2009-10-13). Glimpse After Glimpse: Daily Reflections on Living and Dying (Kindle Locations 554-558). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

The theme of this series of articles following the thought “There is more than meets the Eye”

Is served by the forgoing quote from Sogyal, Rinpoche discussing ego, something which is well known to all of us; it is well known and relied on as our identification and by that our meaning. It is in fact distraction, diversion, something lying in wait for us and continually defeats us in reaching beyond our egos.

The misconstruction we have of the passage of time, we have of the reality of materiality is much the same. What we perceive of it has the appearance of being real; it influences our action; it does all kinds of distraction. But it is damaging to us to believe in its priority of importance to our lives. The trick of life is to learn how to walk away from these as the mighty Ulysses closed his ears so he couldn’t hear as he sailed past the island where the sea nymphs sang their siren song asking him to come and be with them.

The greatest paradox of our life is this: Our experience of life does not include involvement in the passage of time. We know of its passage in retrospect. We are able to see pastime is the days gone before. We do not see the time to come we simply trust it will because each day becomes yesterday on running its course. Why is this? It is because we are constantly present, present in the time known as “now” this instant, and then that too passes into the time that was. 

We live in an infinite moment made up of “Now.” It is a continuous “now!” Now has no before, no after. That makes it what it is in the present moment. It may be affected by before, influenced by before, it may be directed to after, but essentially it stands alone in the moment, the presence of it totally in charge.

“Now,” this present moment is under the direction of whatever power it was that provided us with conception, gestation in the womb, birth into a space/time limited dimension into which we carried our consciousness, not anything more, and forgot a good portion of that consciousness. The lost or forgotten consciousness waits for our return from this dimension. It is however in the nature of this life that we can retain and use some of that forgotten as we evoke the transcendent available to us in this life as discussed in previous essays.

In the unique form our “Life”, that period between our birth and our death, much of the consciousness we carry into life is limited and for the interim is unknown by us. All we know is what the material that constitutes who and what we are in this life is able to perceive and develop knowledge from as we encounter it and apply our consciousness and the latent talents or abilities that come with this existence seem to have.

Like starting the first day of work we do not carry into this new job “Life” a conception of what to expect, a list of achievements we want to accomplish, a plan of how to do it. When we first start dealing with the new day of work, or what it metaphorizes:  “Life” we do so from a clean and blank slate.

We are able to perceive what is within our field of encounter; soon we are able to perceive we are separate and distinct from that which surrounds us. It is at this point our organic brain kicks into action and we commence a time of data observation and data storage, all managed by our consciousness and sorted by this body we seem to occupy.

ONLYTHE MOMENT IS OURS TO DO is an essay posted on April 25, 2009, which discusses the instant in time, the infinite moment, in which we act as the overall plan interfaces with all of the other action of ours linked to it.

The conclusion reached in that essay was this: 

• ·       Retrospective view is the one insight given us from which we can learn something. When I look back I see this:
• ·       Everything that happened follows a direct course linked to the events which preceded it leading to it. One after another they all connect. In this way these previous events do influence the subsequent events.
• ·       It is as if they form a pattern. A pattern I have had little or no hand in formulating.
• ·       So many of the events are such that there is no way I would have chosen them to happen. They are no more directed by me than was my birth to my parents in the time frame it occurred with the gender choice for me as I entered this life.
• ·       The degree to which I stepped back out of the way eased the process of the happening of these events. The extent in which I could turn it over, let it be, go with the flow, the easier time the process has reaching its result.
• ·       As each of these events transpired, one following necessarily on the other, the pattern of them produced in my view a favorable result. Not a pattern I might have chosen. But, not something I would now choose to turn aside. I like the result in spite of what I would have had it be.

 From the foregoing I have come to believe my life has occurred according to plan, not my plan, but a plan, that flowed along on its own terms. I do not know who set the plan, where it came from; whether or not set in some dimension beyond this one in which I find myself, none of it is of material consequence to me.

What is significant about it is the way it seems to happen. Anything I have done to defeat the plan fails or explodes all over me. Usually the plan’s choice of action occurs in spite of me. When I take control of my moments and try to direct my response it makes it harder for the natural consequence of my moments to occur. Having 75 years of living this experience I am convinced this is how it works!

The Way It Really Is:

(I apologize to the reader. This is long, too long. I could not break it down and stay on message.  For this reason I did not want to break it up. Therefore as you read it if you don't feel like reading the whole essay at one time you might want to do so in segments) 

Human beings are part of a whole, called by us the “Universe.” Our part is limited in time and space. It is a part of a “Greater Existence” not readily apparent to us because we are limited by the same limitations that limit our “Universe.”  Persons here experience themself, their thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of their consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task here must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

I cannot claim the foregoing as mine. I cannot find the source but qualify it as someone else unknown to me. Although the writer is unknown the context fits the theme of this series of essays, there is more that the eye can see. My object in this series is to propound the idea that the primary object of our lives is to live it in such a way that at some point we are moved to look, to see and to act on what we see unfold. What unfolds is a view into the “Greater Eexistence” referred to in the foregoing quote.

What there is to look for is what is aptly described by Sogyal, Rinpoche, a Buddhist teacher who said as the reading for March 9, in a book I read daily entitled, Glimpse after Glimpse: 

Sometimes we have fleeting glimpses of the nature of mind. These can be inspired by an exalting piece of music, by the serene happiness we sometimes feel in nature, or by the most ordinary everyday situation. They can arise simply while watching snow slowly drifting down, or seeing the sun rising behind a mountain, or watching a shaft of light falling into a room in a mysteriously moving way. Such moments of illumination, peace, and bliss happen to us all and stay strangely with us.

I think we do, sometimes, half understand these glimpses. But then, modern culture gives us no context or framework in which to comprehend them.  Worse still, rather than encouraging us to explore them more deeply and discover where they spring from, we are told in both obvious and subtle ways to shut them out. We know that no one will take us seriously if we try to share them. So we ignore what could be really the most revealing experiences of our lives, if only we understood them. This is perhaps the darkest and most disturbing aspect of modern civilization—its ignorance and repression of who we really are.

(It is most important to note the meaning of the phrase “the nature of mind” as used in the foregoing. Nature of Mind as I understand it is the consciousness that we access through our brain but is not part of our brain. It is part of something far larger, far more comprehensive which I call Cosmos [all of creation]. The nature of mind is our consciousness in that mix accessing and communicating with the Cosmos of which it is quite capable of doing. While in the limitations of this time limited dimension we are too distracted by all the bells and whistles, all the intrigue we encounter here, that attract us then distract us from reality.)

The ideas and concepts propounded by the foregoing I first encountered in the AA program. “Turn it over, step out of its way as you let your Higher Power take care of your addiction problem,” they said. I saw it again studying Judaism, the religion I chose to follow half way into my life. Martin Buber said it best in his book I and Thou. I then found it codified in Buddhism. It is there the product of the Mysticism of the Orient.

Putting it into simplistic language it might be said this way: Life is actually good for us, the bad of life included. The determination produced by the tensions of the good and the bad, the purposeful and non-purposeful and all of the situations forcing our decisions, the experience of all of them are what we need to be able to ultimately see what we are supposed to see. That view is of the “Greater Existence” our life is meant to direct us to so we can act on it to our benefit having lived.

My manner of discovery went like this:

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) prompted my introduction to what I have come to believe are the ways and means to learn what it is all about. This is the way it really is!

I arrived at knowledge of what my life has been all about by putting it together into memoir then stepping back and looking at it. In the memoir I wrote:

We Have a Plan

We seem to follow a plan as we live. Whose plan, what plan, where did we get it?  I honestly do not know other than I know the plan is not mine. I know this because there are too many things in my life I would not have done, would not have planned to do, and am totally surprised by having done them. 

I arrive at this conclusion in this way: I look at the results of this plan as I have lived it. I am pleased. I would not change the result in any way. At best, at each juncture of the plan, each event I encountered following it, I had the choice of accepting the direction in which I was urged or refusing to take that course. The times I have followed the plan I obtained the best result.

What I learned applied in the context of this topic is that my life included more than myself in the living of it. There was a hand other than my own helping to live my life. This is seen in the decisions I made, why I made them, and the purpose that revealed by where these decisions took me. The end result was to my benefit, and in many ways was in spite of me were the choice to have been mine.

This discovery of mine is significant in this respect. A purposeful bias accompanies me in the exercise of my conscious interaction in my life. It seems the bias is the exercise of a power the source of which is not in me. This power seems active in all of us, guiding, directing and challenging us.

The significance of this as it regards the topic of this series of essays has to do with recognizing a bias going on in the process of our conscious interacting in our world which is not singularly ours. It is as if there is a power active within us, patterning so much of what we are doing.

It is the presence of this power that can be seen in the way we think, the way we develop our powers of cognition and the how we interface our world using it.

We have the power to learn, the power to share, the power to make more of what we have in this process we use in confronting the world, interacting with it and with each other.

It seems like we are all programmed in the same way from birth to death in the use of our capacity for sentience and cognition. We use it in a practical way, in different ways through stages of our lives, and use it to survive within this strange framework of time and space in which we find ourselves.

I have discussed this process and proclivity in a number of blog posts previously. One of my first posts was ESSAY:LIMITS BY DEFINITION January 14, 2009. Click on it to read it.

In this essay I speak of reality and interacting in what we sense reality to be. Centering on how we interact using the marvelous machine we know as our brain. We learn with our brain, store what we learn in our brain, make short cuts to remember what we learned and extrapolate the data assembled into a more meaningful whole from which we go on learning.

It is fascinating looking at the pragmatic way we use this power that is ours, use it for our purposes and expedite the process doing so.

What the essays discusses fits so well into the theme of this series of essays. It is as though we follow a predetermined path. This path brings us into this world naked, without a clue of how to get along in it. We are however equipped with a great tool box starting with those looking out for us, the nurturing they give us. Next in the tool box is the talent, the intellect, the wonder and the inclination to learn and become familiar with everything about us. Next we use the talent we have to build on all that we have learned to learn even more.

Through all of this we find ourselves first inquiring and then planning what will I be when I get big? We complete the training and the education to get to where we become whatever that is to be. We then enter the middle period of our time here being what it is we became. That includes serving all of the operating plans for the one or many things we have become, from spouse to job and all in between.

During this time we all do what is to be done almost automatically. Not a great deal if any thought goes into it. The process does get us to the point of having done all that seemed expected and now we have time. It is this time that is given to either holding on to what has been acquired, on to who or what we have become wishing only to continue that.

If we are lucky, or blessed, or whatever, we lose that urge to be, to acquire and all that goes with it. We enter that field named “Why.” It is here in this field our needs have slipped away and we want to know the meaning of all of this. Why am I here? What is this time/space we occupy? Is that all or is there more? Has there been purpose in being here? The questions are endless.

What happens to us is this: No longer in need, no longer part of that war, we look above our foxhole to see what is really out there. The many of us blessed, able to raise our heads up and look, and ask, arrive at this point from many different paths.

My path has been all of my life, finally losing all to disease, and finding as result all that is there to be had which far exceeds in value anything in this life that had distracted me from it.

My point is: I am the jackass led to water but I knew not to drink. My master hit me over the head with a hammer whereupon I figured it out all too quickly put my head down and drank!

The Way it looks and the Way it really is!

REVISED ON 3/13/2012 AT 11:56 am CDT

A writer named Robert Lanza takes the cosmology of space, the pathology of cognition and surmises within that context along with many other factors, like Schrödinger’s Cat, that the world is not as we believe it to be. He calls this his theory of Biocentrism.

At the end of this essay is a part taken from Wikipedia giving a cursory explanation of Biocentrism. The theory is essentially as follows:

Those things observed by us to be outside of us are not controlled by the confines of space and time as we believe them to be. Starting with the fact they are movement captured by us as stationary material in the instant of time we make our observation of them, they are as we observe and appear to us to be no more than the observation we make of them.

Although occupying the cosmology of what constitutes all of that in existence; add to that the separate universe from which we are observing that existence; we  can draw this conclusion:  that which we observe is not necessarily bound by either the time or space limited universe we currently occupy. That time/space universe limits what we see but does not limit the reality of what is.

From there Lanza asserts the control we can exercise over what we observe by observing it with the particular characteristics in which we make our observation of it we thereby seem to create it. All we do is generate it into this dimension, we have no proof one way of the other of it existing elsewhere.

Deepak Chopra a kind of Renaissance Transcendentalist and New Wave Thinker, speaks of our power over the objects outside of us much in the same way, however for other reasons. He takes what he believes to be the extrinsic properties of them and us and speaks of what we can evoke from between and within the communion of both.

In many ways this is not unlike the existential existence derived by the encounter between Martin Buber’s I and Thou. Much of the same thought permeates writing on Buddhism and premises in foundation from beliefs of other Eastern Systems of Philosophy and Thought.

The bottom line is this: boiled out, so much of this is the same, not simple, but uniform in its basics. It is the same whether looked at through Western eyes or Eastern eyes, from whatever spiritual discipline; the same conclusions are reached when all is reduced down to the essentials.

The technically adept West believes this is all there is. The rest is poppycock. Science, Religion, Philosophy, it is all time limited material, serially evolved and or projected! All of the rules discovered about it with all of those yet to be discovered, absolutely determine it and by determining formulate it absolutely as this: Everything we know occupies space passing through time from a start to a finish.

But then there is the East, the reverse or mirror image of the West in so much of this. The concepts of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, etc. see things quite differently. I can only speak with a small amount of authority having studied Buddhism.

I was educated and trained in the Western tradition. I found Buddhism as an important subject of study after a lifetime of an existential search of “What’s it all About?” I could not find a complete answer in the Western Traditions.

I put what I learned into book form the title of which is From AA to AD, A Wistful Travelogue available at Amazon. Click on the title to go there. It is from the conclusions I made in writing this and other material, including a memoir that preceded the book, in which I concluded it all boiled down to the same thing.

There is more that we can see, there is more than we can see. Living this life is a period given to discovering all we can see or what does not appear on the face of things.

The forgoing is purposeful and fits the theme of my overall topic “There is more that the eye can see” in this respect:

Appearance allows us to see our way in the world one way, that way being tied up with things of the world. Such things like: How Much Money do Have? What will I be remembered for? All of these have to do with what I acquired in the world. This is appearance generated in and by a space/time limited dimension. Like its dimension it has no more basis in reality more than any thing else in the dimension. Ii is illusion just like all the rest of this dimension. Therefore, in the end, it has no value to us. The value of it is in the way and why it happened on our journey through. The lessons from it are more the essential value than the occurrence itself.

Looking at the essentials of life we see the value of our lives. Values can be many things, such as: Who have I helped? What have I done for others? For what kind of good have I used my talents?

One such Essential is what I see at the end of my road. In my case I see me struck down by the horrible disease with which I am afflicted. Carrying me to this Essential awakening is the background I have had, the talents I gained professionally, the family I nurtured, and failed to nurture, the method for living successfully as I learned in AA. The negatives and the positives of my past life’s experience brought me to my moment of truth asking what am I to do about this intrusion Dementia has been to my life. Terrible as it is can I convert that make it matter? Undertaking to Make it matter has been the fulfillment my life was yearning for.

******

ROBERT LANZA:

THEORY

Lanza argues that the primacy of consciousness features in the work of Descartes, Kant, Leibniz, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and Bergson.^[7] He sees this as supporting the central claim that what we call space and time are forms of animal sense perception, rather than external physical objects.^[8] 

Lanza argues that biocentrism offers insight into several major puzzles of science, including Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the double-slit experiment, and the fine tuning of the forces, constants, and laws that shape the universe as we perceive it.^[2]According to a Discover magazine article adapted from Lanza's book, “biocentrism offers a more promising way to bring together all of physics, as scientists have been trying to do sinceEinstein’s unsuccessful unified field theories of eight decades ago.”^[9]

Lanza's theory of biocentrism has seven principles:^[10]

1.     What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An "external" reality, if it existed, would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.

2.     Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.

3.     The behavior of subatomic particles, indeed all particles and objects, is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.

4.     Without consciousness, "matter" dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

5.     The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The "universe" is simply the complete spatial-temporal logic of the self.

6.     Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.

7.     Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.

It Is Real! It Is Not Real, Just Illusion! Well Then It's Illusion With A Purpose!

In the last post I wrote with the following paragraph near its end:

In the process of occupying a common environment where we are linked in communication one to the other in the passage of time, our brains are programmed to recognize non material objects as material objects in the same way. Therefore it seems in the sameness to each of us of all things seen, we believe it to be the same. To the extent that it is made up and confined within the parameters of its moment of movement it is the same seen by us as the same. Through the multiple ways we communicate with each other our brains learn to identify things observed in the same way.

I then went into a description of the Schrodinger Cat experiment.

The Cat is in a box which at first is there, and then events in the box (release of radiation) kill it. It is covered then uncovered and it possible the cat won’t be dead but alive. There can be a series of observations in which it alive, dead, alive again, dead again each depending on whether the fatal dose of radiation has been released while the box was covered.

The discussion had to do with what we see in a material way is not necessarily what its reality is. I used the metaphor of Algorithms put into play creating the appearance and producing the situation that the material appearance depicts. This hints at or suggests all reality we observe is purposeful though not necessarily actual. It is there to serve us in our experience occupying this Space/Time limited dimension as such its purpose is tuning us into an interface with what appears and what is produced as if it is the only existing reality.

Science brings us to this conclusion. There is more than meets the eye. Uniquely enough, stepping away from science as we know it and looking at the cosmological foundations of what is will bring us to the same conclusion, including the manifestation of how much they agree one with the other.

In a book of daily readings I follow, entitled Glimpse after Glimpse, by a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Sogyal, Rinpoche, the reading for March 10 recites a poem of Buddha:

Know all things to be like this:

A mirage, a cloud castle,

A dream, an apparition,

Without essence, but with qualities that can be seen.

Know all things to be like this:

As the moon in a bright sky

In some clear lake reflected,

Though to that lake the moon has never moved.

Know all things to be like this:

As an echo that derives

From music, sounds, and weeping,

Yet in that echo is no melody.

Know all things to be like this:

As a magician makes illusions

Of horses, oxen, carts and other things,

Nothing is as it appears.

Rinpoche, Sogyal (2009-10-13). Glimpse After Glimpse: Daily Reflections on Living and Dying (Kindle Locations 503-514). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

It is for us as it appears. In reality Buddhism tells us it is all illusion, purposeful illusion, nonetheless it is still illusion. The purpose of it is to serve us as we interface with it in a Space/Time limited Dimension

From this inexplicable turn of events, namely: is the Cat alive or dead or alive? Is a particle a wave caught in an instantaneous snapshot? Can  a wave-particle be in more than one place, subject to our observation,? Is it our observation that gives it the dignity of being? Science asks these questions.

Cosmology than opens the door further. It sees the same illusions as seen by science. It dwells more heavily on the interface of each essence of materiality and predicates its existence on the existence of all other things having the essence of materiality, then turns around and limits their existence to illusion, illusion with a purpose, served by the time/space limited dimension, which for that matter really isn't. It is seen or interfaced as such for the purpose of all material interfacing within the confines of its own Schrodinger’s Box.

This brings us to the 64 million dollar question: Is our dimension exclusive? Are there others that exist? Do some of them or many of them or all of them depend on each other in their genesis or their continued existence/non-existence?

Science surmises there are channels available to pass thru time and place to other times in places, forward, backward and laterally. For lack of a better term describing them they are called “Wormholes” the forward and backward feature of them could amount to time travel, lateral movement could be travel from one universe to another.

The same musing suggests there has to be more than one universe in existence to accommodate choice and change as naturally exercised by us. The explanations ange around the topics of the exercise of free will, the results of choice, the relative nature of existence that is within our exercise of consciousness to see, like seeing Schrödinger’s Cat either dead or alive or a repeat of that.

This is then extended from the act of consciousness coupled with the act of choice of one alternative in the exercise of free will over another as the cause of the difference and the necessity of the generation of a new universe to accommodate both choices or accommodate predetermined cause. The choice of one (Yea) in either and all events demands the generation into reality of its partner the other (Nay).

The yea and nay being mutually exclusive it is reasoned that the both yea and nay must necessarily happen. They must coexist as Yin and Yang must coexist. Because they are mutually exclusive they must exists in another universe. The effects of this kind of generation of course wears out the concepts we have of a singular universe.

Keep in mind! This all has to do with Dementia, and the theme of the Essays “There is more that the eye can see” In my case Dementia lifted the last curtain allowing my view of reality as it is rather than as it seemed to be.

With Dementia I found my purpose in life and go to my death with that satisfaction.

I Think Therefore I Am!

So said Descartes. Who is he? Wikipedia tells us this:

René Descartes (31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, physicist, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the "Father of Modern Philosophy", and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day. In particular, his Meditations on First Philosophy continues to be a standard text at most university philosophy departments.

The arrogance of the West calls Descartes the Father of Philosophy. “I” is his concept, encapsulated into an aphorism serving as the title of this Blog Post, namely, “I think therefore I am.” It is this concept that comprises so much to which we in the West direct our study of philosophy.

As we learn more of the science of things, see so many new discoveries having consequence in understanding the Cosmology of existence in this, to observe that “I Think” and conclude from “I Am” looks a little like oversimplification.

There is more to us than meets the eye. We do more than think. There is more of which we are capable that is not limited by our material consequence which together with thinking make up who we are. We feel, we intuit, we senses, we imagine, we create, this list goes on.

Questions we need to ask of us and others are these:

Looked at from the view of I think makes me I am, we must ask is that it? Is that all of it there is? Is it the mind I sense as mine doing the thinking or is it the brain in its bio-chemical functioning doing the job? Are they one and the same or are they different properties each of which is part of me? My brain dies when I do. Does my mind do likewise? If it continues where does it go? If it doesn’t why doesn’t it?

Is the mind more than this bio-chemical marvel in operation in our head? If so, if it is more than an anomaly of the function of a bio-chemical process, how did it become separate? How did it come to be? Did it come before our body materialized in our mother’s womb and/or the brain was formed in this process of gestation? Or, is the body with its organ the brain but a portal, a conduit, a vessel for expression of the mind in this unique temporal dimension?

The scientists tell us about this complex Universe we occupy. That Universe is observed in part by our power of observation and conclusion. We observe how it is made up and how it functions in the dimensions of space and time. The scientists tell us of the constitution of matter. They tell us of that matter of which we are aware. They also tell us of more matter of which we are unaware.

We see a striking similarity between the universe and the essential breakdown of matter into its component parts. Broken down these parts appear to consist of objects orbiting around an additional object in the middle. These orbiting groups of objects in turn orbit around each other. These orbiting groups of objects orbit around each other in growing dimension, spinning out from the center of the first orbiting mass to myriad orders of mass.

Does that refer to matter, particle, neutrons, quarks, waves, or does that relate to planets, stars, galaxies and universe, oh, and which Universe? It seems almost the same looked at in in Macro and in Micro.  

About universe Scientists now talk about more than one, the multi-universe, alternative universes, and parallel worlds.

The scientists then say the basic component of matter, particles or other smaller component parts, are really not those at all. They are in fact waves. They are movement that we observe at the given moment of time in which they move. As such we see them as something in place which in fact they are not. They are pulses of energy on the move. They’re composed of movement within a confined integrity within the passage of time.

The component parts aggregate together, namely, they consist of what we observe as a set mass characterized as a singular object. Within the power of our observation we recognize that object as a material object. It is the object as we observe it to be that makes up the spatial structure we identify as material. The object observed has far more properties than we observe. It is not material, only our reference point, that part observed by us is material. We see its observable component parts as one object existing outside of us. However, it exists only in our observation, nowhere else.

The essential part of property of an object we observe to be material is not material. The observation we make of it is how the brain, the bio-chemical part of us is programmed to account for the existence of it within that brain’s capacity to observe it in its existence.

The bottom line of what the scientists say is matter is not that (it is not matter). It is movement. What we see is illusion created by the pre-conditioning in our brain. They haven’t determined whether this pre-condition, this programming is the creation of the function of the brain, the influence of the mind or instilled by an outside source, the object itself or something beyond that, or some combination.

In the process of occupying a common environment where we are linked in communication one to the other in the passage of time, our brains are programmed to recognize non material objects as material objects in the same way. Therefore it seems in the sameness to each of us of all things seen, we believe it to be the same. To the extent that it is made up and confined within the parameters of its moment of movement it is the same seen by us as the same. Through the multiple ways we communicate with each other our brains learn to identify things observed in the same way.

The Cosmologists take a further step with the Scientists and by testing determine:

This object, this movement, whatever it is in existence is no more than our observation of it. This adds to the illusion. By testing they have determined the existence of it in space, limited by its observation in a moment of time, limited as movement in a moment of time as it is observed by a consciousness; it is the conscious observation of it that generates it into our space/time limited dimension. More confounding: its place in space is not necessarily limited in its placement there; it can change in the process of observation of it. It can be observed, thereby exist in more than one place.

The Schrödinger Cat Experiment demonstrates this.

See my Blog Post: IsThere More That We Can See? In this blog post I discuss more to see that we don’t see.

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Schrödinger’s Cat gives the best illustration of this. I discuss it in the foregoing blog post.

The Cat is in a box which at first is there, then events in the box (release of radiation) kill it. It is covered then uncovered and it is possible the cat won’t be dead but alive. There can be a series of observations in which it alive, dead, alive again, dead again each depending on whether the fatal dose of radiation has been released while the box was covered.

To assure this imparts what I mean it to do, I need to reiterate my goal in this series of essays. In my own small way of wonder I have discovered my purpose in life.

The significance of the subject matter of this essay fits into the common theme of this series of essays in this respect.

To Descartes and the western philosophers who followed him, the power of intellect is that which distinguishes us from all other creation. We are something more than the animals. Taking this and applying the faith orientation of Christianity in the west to  the creation story described in Genesis, adding to that the gift of redemption by Christ, together these allow us with our intellect to stand with the angels. In this way we were made in the image of God to be with God in the end.

Looking at it empirically absent faith which is the view of my essays, looking from our perspective in this world, observing this in our materially limited way, it takes on a different appearance.

We can see beyond our materiality and see that which is transcendent, that which ranges beyond the material limitations our view is otherwise handicapped from seeing.

This is the gift my Dementia has brought me. It made me look, it made me narrow my focus in order to see what I have been driven too. In choosing to cope with this otherwise curse, the choice to make the best of it, embrace it and try to do good with it, I have discovered my purpose that all that has happened in my life was purposeful in bringing me to this point in my life. All I have done in my life has prepared me for this. All that went before brought me to all that goes with me having Dementia and all that I can do by reason of having it.

Although this is little in the larger scheme of things, it is mine to do; it is mine to have;  it is what gives me meaning occupying this world. It is my Epiphany!

Is There More That We Can See?

Why is this possible? How can there be more? Why can’t we observe it? If we do not observe it does that curtail its reality? These are all questions that will not be answered in the essay I have re-posted in my Archive entitled: Is There More That We Can See? Click on the title to access the post.

Nota Bene: My use of the word “that,” describing the reference to what we can see. In the past this phrase has always been: Is there more than we can see? The answer to that is easy. Sure there is. It is all in that vast default zone the existence of which we cannot deny.

The question raised by change of “than” to “that” raises this question: Is it possible to start seeing more of that we haven’t seen? The answer to that has been the subject of this series of essays. I have been discussing what can be seen by simply looking deeper at all that happens during the course of a lifetime.

To do this we simply apply reason and logic to what we have apparently seen and look at it more deeply. We ask the questions: Why after experiencing the kick, the enjoyment, of our first phase, encountering the wild and wonderful world we are in, given the talents and the drive to learn all we can about it, we come to a second stage in which we are prompted to close down the first stage?

Somewhere something in us clicks and we transfer to stage two. It is this stage where we have become what we learned how to do in the first stage. We then enter into a more intensive process of becoming what we find we are, doing what there is to be done about what we have become and we start collecting the fruits of our labor. This becomes more than a full time, time and a half or double time undertaking.

To do well, to simply keep working at that, to acquire whatever it is the appears to be the emoluments of what we are working for, to hold on to that, whether it be wife, family, job, status, home, care, appearance, acceptance, and the list could go on and on. This takes us up completely in the second stage this middle stage of our lives. We are programmed, determined, driven to do that and have time for that and nothing other.

We often have the inkling there is more but…. Most often it is not until the third stage, our senior years, when we have the time or the inclination to do other than what dominated us in the second stage. With the time and the inclination we enter into that time of reflection and discovery.

This is the time we can start looking and seeing more that there is to see. It seems a natural progression open and available for all of us. All of us do not do it but many do. It is ours to embrace the fulfillment offered by this sight, this insight, of what is more that we haven’t really seen before.

It is in this that we can see beyond our materiality, our temporality, seeing above and beyond that, and above and beyond the parts of us not material, not temporal, but transcendent and continuing after this life.

More that we can see has been my subject. More than we can see is a subject for another discourse wholly separate from the one in this essay series.

The more that we can see is within the purpose of our lives. Acting on it and embracing it is the gift of this life. It is this gift of life that is the object of our incarnation into this dimension. It gives purpose for being here, to having to live within the limits of here, to know the gift that is ours by doing this, doing it well. 

Let Us Do the Celestial Dance

At one time in the history of our culture, most of the time in the history of many eastern cultures  as well as currently, and in many cultures of less developed countries, the old are venerated. They are known to be the wise ones, the ones who have thought it all out. They are the ones from whom to seek advice.

We do so because we know: They have been there; they have seen it all; they have thought it over; they know better; the accolades could go on and on. We seek them out to just listen or be directed by their advice.

They are the ones with Wisdom.

Wisdom bears many definitions in the many dictionaries. The one I like is this: The ability to make a decision based on the combination of knowledge, experience, and intuitive understanding.

Wisdom has to do with what I write in the essay entitled: We Join the Grand Celestial March. I have posted it in my Archive. Click on the title to go there to read it.

In that essay I discuss the penchant we have in that last stage of our lives to quit the frantic pace to acquire, to be someone, to live as we deem we ought to. It is the time for us to relax, smell the daisies and count it all up.

It is the time to start asking: Was there meaning in where I was? Was there purpose in what I did, or did I abuse all the time and talent I had in the first and the second stage? The answer to these questions is "no way!" We did what we were supposed to do, what this unseen force prompted us to do each step of the way. What we did was good.

In the first stage we learned how to survive in this very different mode of life. In no other dimension have we known the limitations inherent in occupying space as we pass through time. In no other dimension have we been blind to who we really are.

We seem to be so committed to first, surviving, and then making the best of the talents we have. Doing so as we are driven or programmed to do this; doing so we lose sight of the bigger picture. That bigger picture is comprised of our consciousness. It is our consciousness that existed before and will continue to exist after this life.

This material consequence of time and space demonstrate another constraint viz: We are born, we live, until we die. That is all there is to life. Our existence in the plane starts, runs its course,  quickly and absolutely terminates.

It is this Fact of Life that gives the importance to that third stage. That importance is to reflect, review what life has been about, determine where it should take us and include in that view more than the eye can see in this life.

There is enough for each of us to look at, if we choose. It is within us to make some judgment about its purpose. It is particularly within our power to see and understand the consequences of this complicated, seemingly chaotic life that had a definite purpose.

We can’t see that purpose, nor really adequately reflect and evaluate, unless we dispense with the drive to acquire and hold onto what we have acquired. We have been there in the second phase long enough. There no longer is any pleasure, any sense of fulfillment in continuing to do it. Many do for many reasons, the greatest being obsession, insatiability, fear of leaving what seems to have been working.

A major theme of this series of essays I have posted in this blog deal with objective for the third stage. We are here in this stage to first give up our acquisition phase. It is time to reflect and evaluate. It is time to acquire the wisdom that is able to be drawn from what we have done, so that wisdom can tell us what it has been all about and its meaning for our going on.

As I have been writing on this theme for this series of essays and throughout all of my writing, I have had this question of myself: This has been my experience in this third stage. Is it true for everyone? I don’t see anyone else really talking this up but me.

I give myself two answers.

First our style of life is such that no one has any time to think. We are continually out of time because of all that is on our plate needing completion. When we are not working at it, when we should be at “R&R” Reflection and Review we are distracting ourselves instead.

The convenience accessible to us, whether it is television, smartphone, internet, recreational activities, reading, all of our time that is not directly productive is a one sided activity of being distracted for the fun of it.

It is in this way that our minds never are put in play. It is all packaged from introduction, to presentation, to conclusion, than it is done with. We are then ready to go to the next distraction or it is time to go to bed.

That is the life of too many. It is just too easy to be that without ever having to let a thought or a concept bounce around in your brain.

Wisdom comes to those who can get off this fast moving train before it is too late. When we do we will find the time to smell the roses, view the beauty of the circumstance we have lived and do our sums with all the phases, events and episodes.

When we add it all up, the total is in part Transcendent. We have found wisdom. Sadly our society will not accommodate that, it is more prone to put us in the “Home” and “Soporify” us with the latest designer drug to keep us calm.

The real loser in this is you and me. If we don’t do all there is for us to do in this life, the balance of life says “ok, do it all over in another circumstance, another algorithm, another life!

Unfortunately the society outside of “I” “Me” “Us” will not seek us out to be edified by all we know. At best we can know it and certainly, it is in our interest to know it. This is so because our purpose in life is to sow seeds, nurture their growth and then harvest their fruit.

It is in this Harvest that we find what is to be. It has been my gift of life that everything that went before led me to where I was diagnosed having Dementia. Horrid as it can be to live a slow disabling, disruptive, debilitating disease from which there is no escape, for me it is my Gift of Life. Life has disarmed me and made me look beyond it. This has been my blessing.