THE COMPLETE THEORY OF NOTHING

There is nothing out there.  Oh, I know that you are out there, at least in my universe, as I am out there in your universe, but you and I are not things.  We are not a that but a that which.  We are context not content.  We are that which experiences and desires.  We are the non-physical bowl within which we experience our experience and desire our desires.  Your experience, your thoughts, feelings and perceptions, are also real but are not things. Forces including what scientists call gravity, electro-magnetism, the strong force and the weak force, are also real but are also not things.  We know forces and conjure laws describing these forces because of their consistent effects on things (or what we call things) but there is no stuff, no matter, that causes these forces.  Even if you buy into the Western idea that forces originate in particles, emanate from particles, the force, itself, regardless of its origin, is not measurable or observable.  We only know that it is there because of its effects on things, or seeming things, that we can measure.

So if there is nothing out there, what is all this stuff that I am constantly smelling and tasting and touching and observing and bunking into?  According to Western thinking, forces are caused by the interaction of particles.  Solid particles, which at first were considered to be atoms, then electrons, protons and neutrons, and now quarks and other subatomic particles, are somehow emanating forces.  The Eastern way of thinking is that forces cause the illusion of particles, which are, themselves, merely a somewhat stable interaction of forces.

How could forces by themselves create stable configurations?  Certainly if we consider forces to be gravity, electro-magnetism, the strong force and the weak force, there is nothing in these forces that would bind together to create anything stable.  But traditional Eastern thinking and spiritual thinking and pre-industrial thinking, views the world as an interplay of two forces which interact with each other.  These forces are called variously Yin and Yang, In and Yo, Father Sky and Mother Earth, Celestial and Terrestrial, Tirawa and Atira, Fana and  Baqa, Shiva and Shakti, etc.

These two forces are not to be confused with the positive and negative charges of electro-magnetism.  Positive and negative charges are, supposedly, emanating from particles; they are an attribute of particles.  To have a positive and negative attraction requires at least two particles with opposing charges.  With yin and yang there are no particles that yin or yang are emanating from.  They are not attributes of particles; there are no particles.  Yin and yang are the things themselves. 

Yin and yang do not attract each other so much as capture each other.  They form spirals, with the yin force creating the expansive outward dimensions of the spiral and the inward yang force creating the contour, the finite shape of the spiral.  Spirals can be thought of as a circle moving forward.  the circular aspect of the spiral is the yin element and the forward, linear aspect of the spiral is the yang element.  More circular spirals are more yin and more elongated spirals are more yang.  Within the spiral is a force field of bound yin and yang and outside the spiral are force fields between more yin and more yang spirals; but with all of this there is no matter, no particles; there is just the illusion of solidity caused by impermeable force fields of finite dimensions.

A recent twist of modern Western thought is string theory, or superstring theory.  According to string theorists, within the most fundamental subatomic particles,  there is a tiny vibrating string and the oscillations of this string determines the spin and mass and charge of the subatomic particle that encloses it.  This concept is represented by a loop of string bent at odd angles and curves, within the shell of a particle; the energy generated by the oscillations of the string being contained by the solid particle ball or capsule.
             
In Eastern theory there is no shell, no particle, and certainly no strings.  In Eastern theory the forces themselves interact and are capable of forming stable configurations, eliminating the need for encapsulation, particles or strings.  If there actually was a particle there, if there was a kind of container for these vibrating strings, what would that container be made out of?  Certainly not any of the known elements.  The simplest element is composed of at least one electron, one proton and one neutron.  Here we are talking about a tiny piece of a single proton, which is an infinitesimal fraction of the entire atom.  Is there any matter at all at this sub atomic level?

Superstring theory is considered to be a prime candidate for the complete theory of everything.  Yet even if it could be mathematically proven, it would provide a theory for everything that underlies particles, but not the particles themselves.  In other words it would provide a kind of energy substrate which causes all the movement of particles and things, but it would not explain the origin or even the material of things.  We would still have this duality between matter and energy.

Yin and yang combine to form the material world, or what we call the material world.  This does not mean that yin and yang attract.  It's more like they capture each other.  The yang force does not want to be captured.  It wants to merge with the nearest stronger yang force.  It wants to consolidate and increase in strength.  Yang wants to contract into itself and merge into the center of the earth, or beyond planetary pull, into the center of the sun, or beyond astral pull, into the non-physical center of the universe, where the Big Bang explosion took place, the yang center which pulls the whole material world back toward it and acts as a brake on the universal expansion. This pull of yang toward the nearest large yang center we call gravity.  The pull of yang toward the non-physical yang center of the universe, not the presence of dark or undetectable matter, is the reason that the earth is not expanding at the rate that scientists originally predicted. 

The yin force does not want to be captured either.  Yin wants to continue to infinitely expand.  It goes toward infinity but that is not really a direction.  Yin, not being a thing, moves at infinite speed, which means that it is unfathomably fast and absolutely still at the same time since it takes yin no time to traverse the universe and return to the same spot.  Yin is also a unity, since there is no 'thingness' to separate one part of yin from the other.  There is no pure yang in the material world, because the moment pure yang becomes detached from yin (as in the Cern proton collisions) yin immediately reforms around it creating yin spirals to surround the yang center and holding each other in place. .  


Spirals can appear in short time periods as a circle.  For instance, the orbit of the moon around the earth, or the earth around the sun may appear circular or elliptical, but if you follow the motion of the moon it is not only rotating around the earth, but it is following the earth in its orbit around the sun, so the path of the moon is really a spiral.  In the same way, the orbiting earth follows the path of the sun around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and is also a spiral.  We are familiar with two dimensional diagrams of energy waves, but in three dimensions the wave becomes a spiral.  Atoms are usually conceived of as a number of tiny spheres surrounded by circling electrons.  But aside from the possibility of absolute zero temperature, which no one has ever been able to achieve, the atoms are in motion.  The electron orbit in motion is a spiral and the protons and neutrons spin as they move so that any point on the surface or within the proton and neutron would be following a spirallic path, just as we, standing still on a rotating and orbiting earth are proscribing a spirallic path.

Spirals are absolutely ubiquitous in nature.  They appear all through the plant kingdom, in the arrangement of petals, branches and stems.  Galaxies are organized into spirallic arms.  Look at the curled up human fetus.  The torso of the body appears as a spiral ending in the head.  The ear is a spiral, ending in the ear canal.  The intestines ending in the stomach form a spiral.  Fingerprints and footprints are elaborate spirallic patterns. The fetal arm curled up into a fist is a spiral, as is the spinal cord ending in the brain. Nucleotide base pairs are arranged spirallically along the DNA molecule and are coiled and recoiled in a fantastically elaborate folding process of coils coiled within coils, coiled within coils, that allows ten feet of DNA to fit into the nucleus of every cell in the body. All waves are spirals and, if all particles are also waves, then all particles, at least in their wave formation, are spirals (in their particle formation they are simply more contracted spirals).  To see the endless variety and beauty of spirals in the world around us, google 'spirals in nature.'

One common form of spiral is the whirlpool or tornado or dust devil.  This common form of spiral is made of water or air or dust molecules, but these molecules are not causing the spirals.  They are being moved in spirals because of a concurrence of forces which have formed a spirallic pattern.  Anything swept up in this spiral including drowning bodies and flying cows is moved spirallically, but the whirlpool and the tornado are not 'caused' by any particles.  It's hard to imagine a whirlpool or tornado without any molecues being moved by them, but that is because we live in a macroscopic world where atoms and molecules are everywhere.  But within the submicroscopic world of the atom, there are no molecules or atoms.  A whirlpool within that world would consist of forces but not matter.  My contention is that each of these subatomic particles that so fascinate modern physicists are not particles at all.  They are tiny whirlpools of forces, each type with its own shape (either more circular or more elongated, its own spin, either centripetal or centrifugal, and its own mass.  (As I explained earlier in the post 'Particle Fever', mass is not a measure of the amount of stuff in an object.  There is no stuff.  Just as weight is the gravitational measure of the amount of pull that the largest near object [the earth for things near the surface of the earth, and the sun for things beyond a planetary influence], so mass is the measure, not of 'stuff,' but of the amount of yang force, the amount of force pulling all the interlocking spirallic forces in a particular space, toward the center of that space.  

In a space ship there is no gravity so there is no weight.  There are no heavy or light objects.  But there still is mass.  If you try to accelerate an object, push an object, across the room in a gravity free zone, it will be harder to accelerate an object with more mass than with less mass.  But just as weight is a measure of the pull of forces and not a measure of the amount of stuff, so is mass.  Mass is the measure of forces within the object that pull all the elements of that object toward its center, just like gravity is a measure of the forces at the center of the earth that pull the objects beyond its surface toward its surface.  Mass is the pull within the surface as gravity is the pull beyond the surface.

If this makes sense on a subatomic level, then, when we get to the interaction of whole atomic particles, and whole atoms, then do we get to 'stuff'?  Is that where the actual material world begins?  No!  The hundred or more elements of nature strike us as being wildly different; their colors are different, their densities are different; they are penetrable or impenetrable, liquid or solid or gas, powdery, smooth or congealing, hard or soft.  Yet we are told that the only difference between elements is the number of electrons, protons and neutrons they contain, and that electrons, protons and neutrons are identical to each other no matter what element they are found in.  Is all this amazing range and variety due simply to the numerical addition of more of the same identical components?  I think not.  These subatomic particles, which are not really particles, but are themselves tiny force fields of bound forces, bound and consistent in form because the outward yin force giving the "particle" width and height and depth is held in place by the inward yang force giving the "particle" a finite contour.  It is between these particles, which are really spirals of interlocking forces, that the differences in our experience of  atoms is created.  The area between the contracted yang nucleus of the cell and the expanded surrounding yin cloud that we refer to as the electron cloud is itself a force field with the more yang, positive, nucleus pulling in on the more yin elements trying to escape out.  The denser this force field and the ratio and amount of yin to yang forces in this field is what creates the variety of permeability, the hardness and softness, the lower and higher boiling points, the difference of colors as light waves are refracted differently by different force fields, and the strength of force connection between each atom (or each atomic force field) that creates the wide variety in our experience of elements.

So matter is not really matter.  It is bound force fields within bound force fields, non-physical but energetic spirals within spirals.  This is a true theory of everything, which is really a theory of nothing, because it does not acknowledge the separate existence of matter from forces.  There is no "shell" as in the diagrams of super strings within the quark.  The quark does not have a material shell.  No particle does.  The contour of the quark, of the proton, of any particle, subatomic, atomic, molecular, visible or not visible, is created by the balance of the outward force of yin with the inward force of yang.

And these forces, even when tiny, are extremely powerful.  Yin and yang, tightly bound within quarks, can create an enormous amount of energy if those tiny quarks are split.  There is much more energy bound within a so-called particle, then extending beyond its boundaries.  Another way of saying that is that the pull of yang within the particle, the mass, is much stronger than the pull of yang beyond the surface of the particle, the gravity.  Yang contracts.  It does not get stronger by expanding.  It gets stronger by contracting more and more.  At the center of each natural object is yang, surrounded and bound by yin formations.  What was seen at CERN in the collision of protons, was not the assumed arrival of a Higgs Boson, but the sudden exposure of the pure yang center of the proton formation which was instantly balanced by yin formations.  These yin formations which were taken as proof that a Higgs Boson had passed through in a micro-instant, like a modern day Santa Claus, distributing the gift of mass and leaving undetected, was nothing of the kind.  It was the instant regrouping of these yin formations to bind the exposed yang center which was there in the first place.  There is no need to postulate ubiquitous Higgs Fields which materialize into bosons which impart mass and instantly disappear.

I remind you that all of this is not a theory of everything, but a theory of nothing.  There is no matter here, no real 'stuff' that creates mass.  These are just the interplay of two forces, which themselves are not things.  Then what are they?  Whether you buy my argument or not about an expansive and contractive force that bind each other to create what seems to be a solid material world, whether you are sticking with the four forces of physics: gravity, electro-magnetism, the strong force and the weak force, the question remains, what are these forces?  We cannot see any of them directly, but just observe how they exert their forces on things that we can see and measure.  Forces are laws.  In fact, we call these forces laws, like Einstein's Laws, or Newton's Laws, which are just attempts to explain how these forces behave.  What is the origin of a law?  In human society laws come from ideas that people have about how to organize society, for the betterment of the lawmakers, at least, and hopefully, for the betterment of the entire society.  Human laws must include, if they are to be effective, a method of enforcement.  There have to be, written into the laws, a system of penalties, fines, incarcerations, and police or inspectors to enforce these laws and lawyers and judges to decide when to impose these penalties.  With natural law, the force is not external to the law itself.  The law is the force and the force is the law.  The entire universe is built upon the total compliance to these laws or forces.  Violation is impossible.  A violation of any one of the interlocking forces of the universe, would bring down the entire structure like a house of cards.

There is one exception to the above.  God, or the god head or the cosmic consciousness, from which natural laws came, could violate natural law, but that would destroy the entire universe.  These precise forces which underlie and support the entire universe were put in place because God wanted them in place and remain in place because God wants them to remain in place.  The universe continues to exist at each moment because God wills it to exist at each moment.

Like human laws, natural laws originate in ideas and the ideas come from nothing, or should I say Nothing, or should I say God, or the cosmic consciousness or the godhead, which is, whatever you call it, not a thing, but is the no thing that is the source of all ideas for this universe and for ourselves, ideas which our brains can receive but not generate, all love, which we can receive but not generate, and all wisdom and insight, that we can receive but not generate.  Cosmic consciousness has no brain like we do to record and organize our perceptions.  The universe itself, is God's brain.  There is no need for memory.  All the processes that formed every part of the universe including the elaborate mental structures of our own often tortured psyches, are immediately evident to God who knows all these processes, who created all these processes and knows how they interact.  Just like a good geologist sees a lot about the past of a landscape from its present condition, and a good therapist sees a lot about the psychological past history of a patient from their present behavior, so God instantly understands the entire past of any phenomena by the way it is formed and behaves in present time.

So this is a complete theory of nothing.  God, which is not a thing, created the universe by creating two forces, which are not things, whose interplay creates whole formations of forces and force fields between them which give the impression of solidity, of solid particles, all of which is actually and ultimately illusory.  Everything that is seemingly solid is really the interplay of forces which are themselves merely the manifestation of an idea and have no more actual solidity than an idea.  There is no mysterious shell that covers the energy within the quark.  There is no shell.  There is no real within or without when it comes to quarks or to anything else. There are no particles. There is no matter.  Quarks are whirlpools of interlocking forces just like the macro world is composed of whirlpools of interlocking forces.  

           Nothing will come of nothing,
           Speak again,

says King Lear in Shakespeare's great play.  But here Shakespeare is giving voice to a materialist king who does not yet recognize that the love of his daughter Cordelia, which is not a thing, means everything, not nothing.  In  The Tempest, Shakespeare gives voice to the mystic Prospero, who speaks this great truth,


            Our revels now are ended.  These our actors,
            As I foretold you, were all spirits and
            Are melted into air, into thin air:
            And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
            The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
            The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
            Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
            And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
            Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff
            As dreams are made on, and our little life 
            Is rounded with a sleep.

Shakespeare was truly remarkable, wasn't he?  And he never even read Darwin, Dawkins or Pinker, never realized that human beings and all we accomplish are merely the product of mindless molecular accidents; never understood that the self is a delusion and that love, passion, transcendent joy, even the self itself and one's own, in Shakespeare's case, incredible, soaring talent, were all only randomly evolved survival strategies.  He, along with those other deluded fools like Beethoven, Mozart and Michelangelo, were naive enough to think that their talents derived from God, that their passions and enormous abilities were gifts and that it was their divine destiny to express those gifts.  

If you wonder why modern poetry, art and music so rarely soars and there is so much anger in it, even though the artists find themselves in relative material comfort, you may look to the accepted materialist, Darwinian belief system that we have all inherited from "the experts" without ever questioning and within which the spirit, denied its very existence, languishes in this materialist cell; sometimes raging, often times bored, and always feeling at least somewhat alienated and empty; while the true glory and brilliance of this universe that surrounds us, within and without, remains unnoticed.


Please feel free to comment.

OCEAN VS. WAVE

You may be familiar with the metaphor of the ocean and the wave, a metaphor for the relationship between God and man.  Some people take it to mean that even though we may think of ourselves as having an independent existence from God, as being separate from God, that we are actually made of God and fall back and dissolve into God at the end of this separate existence.  We can actually look at this metaphor more deeply.

Now please understand that this is a metaphor.  No one is claiming, certainly not this author, that the ocean is conscious or that a wave has a consciousness that can entertain the idea of connection or separation.  But if it did have a consciousness, then the idea of separation, of independence, from the ocean would be just as ridiculous as humans entertaining the idea of separation from God, or the cosmic consciousness or the godhead, if you prefer.  The wave does not, even during that brief moment when it is a wave, have a separate existence.  If the wave has an ego; if the wave prides itself in it's own power, size and speed, it is not the wave, but the larger forces at work in the ocean that are providing that power, size and speed.  It is taking pride in something that has been given to it and not something that it independently created.  If somehow you were able to separate all the water in that wave from the ocean that is supporting it, you would wind up not with a wave but with a very large and inert puddle.

And the temporal nature of the wave's pride is also worth noting.  The very moment that the wave achieves the peak of its height and power is the very moment of the beginning of its downfall when it begins to fold, curl into itself and quickly diminish and disappear.  The pride in its growing power and strength is quickly transformed into the terror at its speedy dimunution.  As the independent nature and the temporal nature of that pride is laughable, so is the competitive nature of that pride.  For just as the wave begins to gloat about the pathetic little ripples that it sees in front of it,  it becomes precisely the object of what it had just scorned with the roar of the monster wave behind it echoing in its terrified and humiliated ears.

Just as the wave has no possible existence apart from the ocean, is inextricably linked to the ocean, is created at every moment by oceanic forces, so a human being has no possible existence without God, without the cosmic consciousness.  Intelligent designers and now even Pope Francis, a man for whom I have enormous admiration, seem to be promoting a limited conception of God, as some one, or some thing that created the world, designed the world, including, in the case of Pope Francis,  the apparatus of evolution, did all these things at a certain point in time, and then left to let these process unfold 'by themselves.'  But God is infinitely bigger than that.  God is beyond space and time.  God cannot do anything and leave.  God can not leave.  There is no place where God isn't.  Where would God leave to?  Creation is perpetual; it is happening at every moment.  The plant kingdom and the animal kingdom are continually adapting, to each other and to their environment.  Genes are a visible, measurable part of that adaptation, but only a part.  Each adaptation is an idea, an idea that includes a change in organic materials, related to changes in genes; a change in the fantastically complex timing system of the firing of genes; a change in the shape that structural proteins, formed by genes, and cells take; a change in the distribution of blood, energy and nerves, to service this new adaptation; a change in the allocation of brain neurons to bring sensation and control to this adaptive change; and a change in the entire equilibrium of the changed organism.  The cause of all these changes are not genes.  Changed genes are one of the mechanisms by which new protein materials are used for the new adaptation.  The cause of all these changes is a new idea; an idea that springs from the cosmic consciousness.  In fact, it is not even an idea as we know it.  Ideas are mental concepts that exist prior to their execution.  In the Godhead there is no temporal sequence between ideas and execution.  The solution to the problem occurs simultaneously with the arrival of the problem; and the solution is executed immediately, although the complete realization of that execution may take a long time, perhaps many generations, because God must work within the laws of the physical universe, including the biological universe; laws that God created.  Since the entire structure of the physical universe is built on the precise balance and synchronicity of many interrelated laws, God cannot violate these laws without bringing  down the entire structure of the universe; which God could do, but chooses not to.  These laws, which we call either laws or forces, that sustain the universe, are themselves sustained at every moment by God's will.  In other words the universe continues to exist at each moment because God wills it to exist.

Our society has become so entrenched, so hypnotized by the observable world that we are convinced that nothing can exist if it is not measurable.  We convince ourselves of this even though the entire moment to moment experience of our lives is neither measurable nor observable to anyone but ourselves, and neither is our actual selves, the experiencer of our experience.  So at the same time that we conclude that everything real must be measurable and observable, the self that is making this conclusion is neither of those things and continues to elude our most sophisticated physical observations  and measuring devices.  And yet, of course, our self is the realest thing in our lives.  It is the one thing that we can always be sure of.  Even if you realized, which scientists often do, that everything that you previously thought was wrong, that your entire perception of reality was distorted, and all your observations and measurements were inaccurate and now, thanks to the latest theory or insight, they are right; even in that case you can be absolutely sure that you, the self, the observer of your observations, the measurer of your measurements, the concluder of your conclusions, was always there and always exactly the same, even though the measurements, observation and conclusions are now completely different.  You were deluded, you think, and now you are not deluded; but the you, once deluded and now rational, is still the same you.

"But I see no evidence of intelligence in the world," you say.  Everything can be explained by the genetic code, by accidental mutations of that genetic code, and by the machinations of the brain; and if it can not be explained at the moment, with some more research into the mechancis of genes and the brain, we will soon have those explanations.  What follows is a list of the most common phenomena of our existence which defies explanation either by genes or by brain function and I invite any reader to offer a remotely plausible material explanation as to how any of this could happen without the constant intercession of a transcendent intelligence:

1. The growth of a living being from one fertilized ovum. 

In humans this one fertilized egg mitotically divides into thousands of daughter cells forming a blastocyst.  This blastocyst was at one time considered to be composed of thousands of identical cells, yet they could not possibly be identical.  Although they look the same they will soon differentiate into two thousand different types of cells.  The reason they differentiate into the various cells that will form not just the newborn baby, but the placenta, the amniotic sac, the placental villi, and all the organs and formations needed to support the fetus until it is able to eat and eliminate and digest and circulate blood by itself; all of these are also formed from that one original fertilized egg.  How is this done?  Many scientists believe that the distribution of hundreds of thousands of protein molecules within the cytoplasm of the original egg is not random, but is absolutely precisely distributed so that, without any filaments or support structures to hold them in place, all these protein molecules, which are protein molecules which have the capacity to re-enter the nucleus of the cell and initiate genetic transcription, are in the exact spot they need to be in so that after all the mitotic divisions of the blastocyst period, and after the twists and turns and foldings and cell migrations of the gastrula period, that all the right types of cells will be formed by the transcription of the precise different genes, at the precise moment that they need to be formed.  How is this miraculous distribution of protein molecules within the fertilized egg done, a distribution which must include the foreknowledge of what precise cells these protein molecules will wind up in after countless mitotic divisions, foldings, curlings and migrations?  The only other explanation, equally miraculous, is that the differentiation of cells, and the stimulation of different genetic combinations to create these different cells, takes place later, during gastrulation; which means that there is some oversight, some energy field, some transcendentally intelligent supervision that is directing all this differentiation and marshalling from without the cell, the forces necessary to propel certain sets of protein molecules to enter the nucleus and initiate transcription for many thousands of cells and in two thousand different patterns of transcription.

2.  The folding of the nucleotide base pairs of DNA.

In each of these new cells in humans is 3.2 billion nucleotide base pairs.  These form the strand of DNA, along which, at different spots are found the stretches of nucleotides that are coded for the amino acid chains of proteins that we call genes. The base pairs are folded over and over each other so that all 3.2 billion of them, about ten feet if they were all unspooled, can fit within the nucleus of each cell and still have plenty of room for transcription and other nucleus activities to take place.  Since each of the two thousand different types of cells specialize in manufacturing a different suite of proteins, then two thousand different sets of genes must wind up on the exterior edge of these folded coils of 3.2 billion nucleotides, where they can react with protein and other molecules floating through the nuclear fluid that initiate and aid in transcription.  These gene sequeces cannot be buried deep within the coils and inaccessible.  Beyond that, transcription requires not just a particular gene sequence, but many other nucleotides that aid in this process which is, in itself, wondrously precise and complex.  These helper nucleotides may be located hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions, of nucleotides distant from the actual gene sequence that they will be assisting with.  Yet, when the folding is completed, not only do all the gene sequences that that cell specializes in, find themselves on the outer edge of the coil, adjacent to the nuclear fluid, but all the helper nucleotides wind up adjacent to or abutting the gene sequence they are assisting with.  This means that within each of the trillions of cells of our human bodies, 3.2 billion nucleotide base pairs are folded in two thousand precisely different ways.

How is this Herculean task accomplished?  I say Herculean, because for a human being, the folding of say a strand of pearls, 3.2 billion pairs of pearls long, which would be about eleven thousand miles, which would represent the nucleotides of just one cell, just the folding of such a strand into any kind of compact shape would take a life time of effort, never mind the precise folding so that specific sequences of pearls wound up on the outside of this compact shape with all the helper pearls adjacent to them.  And please don't tell me that these folding patterns are 'known' by the genes.  As I said above, genes are sequences of simple molecules called nucleotides,  only four different molecules in fact, which are coded for twenty different amino acids.  How could genes 'know' anything?  How could genes 'learn' anything?  What is the mechanism whereby genes learn to coil themselves or to take any shape for that matter?  What is the relationship between genes and shape?  There is none.  In fact in complex many celled creatures like humans, each structural gene is used in the manufacture of proteins involved in many different areas and many different shapes within each body.

By the time the fetus is ready to be born, it is composed of five trillion cells, each containing 3.2 billion base pairs of precisely folded nucleotides.  How is this blindly, simply mechanically and randomly arrived at?


3.  The entire body plan of each species including formation of the blastocyst, the gastrula and the budding of organs and features.

How is this body plan conveyed?  How is it executed?  We know that each species has its distinct form of genesis, but how is this done?  Yes, each species has, as well, a distinct arrangement of genes, but do the arrangement of genes cause or dictate these precise and intricate shapes?  Of course not.  Genes dictate protein materials, not shapes.  To say that these tiny, submicroscopic protein molecules dictate the shapes of our organs and body features would be like saying that the tiniest pixels of modern technology, which are gigantic in comparison to protein molecules, that these tiniest pixels dictate the shapes of the pictures and symbols that they are used to represent; that the shape of grains of sand dictate the shape of sand sculptures.  Yes, a certain kind of Carrera marble takes the shape of Michelangelo's sculptures, and a certain type of titanium takes the shape of dental implants; but to say that the Carrera marble 'causes' or 'dictates' or creates by itself Michelangelo's sculptures, or that the titanium 'causes' the shape of dental implants, or that a certain combination of sugar, flour, butter and milk causes the shape of wedding cakes, makes no sense at all.  It is important that we, as a society, recognize these things for what they are, wondrous miracles, and not anaesthetize ourselves by saying idiotic things like, "it's just our genes," or, "it's evolution."  No matter how knowledgeable, how "been there, done that," your obstetrician acts, we must recognize these processes for what they are, wondrous, transcendentally intelligent and miraculous, and at the level of causation of forms, completely unobservable.

4.  The fact that at every moment of your life you are able to do what you want to do.

I understand that sometimes you are not able to satisfy your greatest, long term desires.  I am not talking about those.  Although you are able to do everything that you choose to do that is within your power, on the way to fulfilling that desire.  I am  talking here about those little moment to moment desires that we have at every second.  The desire to look at a certain thing when you want to look in that direction.  The desire to focus on a certain thought or memory.  The desire to stretch, to shift your weight, to get up off the sofa and get a glass of water.  These desires that you have constantly during your entire waking life, are fulfilled the moment that you have the desire.  In fact, they are often fulfilled so instantaneously that you don't even have a moment to realize that that was your desire, unless that desire is momentarily frustrated.  For instance, when you itch, which is the desire to scratch, you scratch.  You don't necessarily experience that itch separately from the scratch unless it is in a place on your body (the middle of your upper back, for instance) that you cannot reach or that is socially unacceptable to reach at that moment.  Then you experience the itch until that time that you can find a way to scratch it.  

Scientists, thousands of scientists, study the machinations of the conscious brain.  They study the patterns of firing neurons which lead to whole pathways of electrical signals which lead to shifts in blood and energy distribution and the precise contraction and release of specific muscles in absolutely precise timing sequence involving many millions of interacting molecules within muscle cells.  Yet, why do these initiating neurons start this whole cascade of processes?  Because they want to?  No.  It's because you want to.  Initiating neurons are not themselves the initiators.  Your desires, your nonmeasurable, unobservable desires are the initiators that cause the firing of these initiating neurons.  And each of these neurons is connected through thousands of axons to thousands of other neurons.  So the number of pathways that these initiating neurons could take is close to infinite. Although there could be any number or combination of initiating neurons of the two hundred billion neurons in your brain, and an almost infinite number of pathways as signals move from neuron to neuron; there is in fact, only one precise combination of initiating neurons and only one precise firing path that these neurons take,  and that is the precise combination of initiating neurons and the precise path of firing neurons that will lead to the precise movements, the precise memories, the precise thoughts, the precise word formations, that you want them to lead to.  The conscious brain is the servant of your desires.  It does what you want it to do; that should be obvious.  But how does it do that?  How are your nonmeasurable desires translated at each moment to patterns of thousands or millions of firing neurons that are then sent along precise firing patterns that cause whole cascades of molecular activity that lead to you doing exactly what it is that you want to do?  

If the world's greatest pianists can look at a score of music and press the right set of three or four or possibly five keys of the 88 keys on a piano a split second after reading that score; then who is the transcendentally intelligent and nimble pianist, who, at every moment of your waking existence, fires the precise combination of a hundred million, or two hundred million neurons of the two hundred billion neurons of your brain and guides that electric charge down the precise pathways that allow you to do exactly what you want?  Who is that transcendent pianist who knows your desires before you do and executes them with utterly miraculous speed and efficiency?  If that is not God, the god head, the cosmic consciousness at work, then who or what is it?  Again reader, I anxiously await your alternative explanation.

5.  The fact that at every moment of your life you are able to see sights, hear sounds, smell smells, taste tastes, remember memories and think thoughts.

"Well, that's the brain, of course, and we are learning more and more about the brain every day," you say.  Yes, our knowledge of how the brain works is growing, particularly the mapping of different areas of the brain which are stimulated when we experience different things; but the brain is recording and filing and organizing our experience, it is not experiencing our experience.  There is no entity that calls itself 'the brain' that sees our sights, hears our sounds, smells our smells, tastes our tastes, or thinks our thoughts.  We do that.  The most we can say is that when we experience these various things there is observable electrical stimulation in certain brain neurons.  We learn more and more about how light photons are translated into electrical impulses and where those impulses impinge on brain neurons, but how we translate those flows of eletricity into the sunsets, and roses and our children's faces, into the things that we actually see, has not even begun to be known.  That is because there is no physical organ of translation that we can observe that accomplishes this.  And although we may be able to locate different areas where memories rather than input from light photons, where thoughts rather than input from sound waves, are processed or stored or recorded, we have absolutely no idea why these basically same electric flows, moving at the same speed and voltage,  are translated into such completely different experiences.  

In another post (GENOME vs. CONNECTOME) I wrote about how the means of tranlating genes into amino acid chains has been discovered by the growth in the power and depth of optical measuring tools, but those tools are already known.  There are no observable areas on the surface of the brain,  no as yet undiscovered organelles, where such a translation could take place.   As opposed to the transcription and translation of genes, the translation of neuron firings, of the so called 'connectome' does not take place on the physical plane and therefore eludes and will continue to elude scientific measurement.  But who knows this code?  Obviously someone does, otherwise how could we use it at every moment of our waking life?  Is it us, ourselves?  Do we know this code?  Are we able, by ourselves, to locate the exact neurons among the two hundred billion brain neurons where a specific memory is stored?  And once discovered, are we able, by ourselves, to translate those stored traces of neuron firings, or the chemical deposits within those neurons, or the pattern of axons connecting those neurons, or the precise location of those neurons, or any one or a combination of those things which are somehow organized into a code, can we, ourselves, read this code and translate it into a specific memory?  Speaking for myself, I definitely cannot.  I am the recipient of the successful execution of those locating and translating processes, but I don't have the faintest idea how they are done.  All I know is that they are done and done by a being that employs an amazingly nimble, instantaneously speedy and profoundly accurate ability to do those things which I am the grateful recipient of.  

If any one reading these words does know of a randomly arrived at, observable, mechanical way  of doing all of this remarkable locating of neurons and their translation into actual experience, please let me know about it immediately in your comments.

Of course this list could be much longer.  It could include the origin of every phenomena, living or inert, in the physical universe.  It could include every phenomena where behavior is initiated and where anything is experienced, but this list should be enough for us to conclude that in the race for most stupid, between delusional ocean waves and myopic materialists, who chatechismicly mouthe such moronic mantras as, "There's nothing left for God to do," for these people so separated by their frantic, restless desires from the experience of meditation, introspection, even simple self reflection, that they do not realize that they have absolutely no idea how they are able to utter their atheistic words  the very moment that they choose to utter them; that refuse to be awed or mystified by anything; that innoculate themselves against spiritual experience by the continual self repetition of episodes from the meager scrapbook of there own experiences; the score is: myopic materialists one, delusional ocean waves nothing.


If you disagree, please don't just disagree to yourself.  Write a comment and we can both discuss your objections.  Thanks.

VIRTUAL HUMANS

I recently listened to a radio show concerning civil rights for virtual humans.  According to the two researcher guests, there will be virtual humans rolling off hi-tech production lines within ten years and the researchers were anxious to make sure that the rights of these virtual humans would be protected and they expressed the hope that those in the audience would have the necessary patience, sympathy and support for these virtual humans as they engaged in their struggle for social respect and justice just as blacks and women and other subjugated groups had struggled in the past.  The host's only query in response to this madness was to wonder if virtual humans really would be 'ready' in ten years; that he was of the opinion that it would take more like fifty.

Where do I begin to address this insanity?  Such idiocy is indicative that our society has completely lost its way and that we have forgotten who we are, why we are precious and unique, and what our real birth right is.  Let me start by saying that while a virtual human machine may give the impression that it can do things that humans do, there is not one thing that it can actually do that humans do, in fact there is not one thing that it can actually do period, in the sense that we humans have of actually doing things.  A virtual human machine cannot talk, cannot hear, cannot think, cannot listen,  cannot see, cannot smell, taste or touch.  It cannot engage you in a conversation.  It does not know that you are even there, and it does not care that you are there or care about anything else.  And that is because a virtual human machine is not conscious which means that it neither desires nor experiences anything.  It does not care whether it is turned on or turned off, it does not care whether it is talking to you or not; it does not care whether it is functional or not.  It does not care if it is used constantly or remains unopened in the package that it was wrapped in when it was originally manufactured, and it most certainly doesn't care whether it's civil rights are protected or not; as a matter of fact it is not even an 'it.'

There is no 'it' there.  There is no unitary consciousness that knows that it is a virtual human.  There is know unitary consciousness that knows anything.  A virtual human knows absolutely nothing just like a computer, even the most advanced one, knows absolutely nothing.  To know something requires a know-er.  But in these cases there is no knower.  There is not even, from the perspective of the virtual human or the computer, any information.  In fact there is not even any persepective.  To have a perspective, a point of view, to hold an opinion, there has to be an 'it', a consciousness, that has that perspective, that holds that point of view.  Now a virtual machine can be programmed to fool people into thinking that it does have a point of view, that there really is an 'it' in there that is as conscious and as intentional and as experiential as you are, but of course all this is nonsense.  All there is is programming, patterns of electrons meeting other patterns of electrons which causes certain reactions as opposed to other reactions, but never with the oversight, or interference of consciousness.  In fact, patterns of electrons are not information without consciousness.  They are just patterns of electrons.

Exactly as in our human brains, there are coded bits of information stored, but they only become information when they are translated by consciousness into something meaningful.  What the virtual human conveys to us we may translate as being meaningful, but to the virtual human there is no meaning, no information at all.  The virtual human may be talking, may be making sound, may be doing tasks, may be giving the impression that he or she is happy or sad or excited, but there is no one, no being within that machine to hear the sounds it is making, to experience doing anything that it is doing, or experience any emotion that it is mechanically conveying the experience of.

I do know that these machines are very complicated and they are the result of a lot of careful, meticulous work, but I will make the generalization that virtual human machines do things because certain patterns of electrons whose source originated in the environment external to the virtual machine, fit other patterns of electrons internal to the virtual machine which provokes certain mechanical/electrical responses, like recorded words being spoken, eyes being moved, the corners of the mouth being raised, etc.  During all these electrical/mechanical activities there is absolutely no experience of the sort that a human has when a human does anything.  First of all, a human does something because he wants to.  Never mind if that desire is instinctual, biological, learned, chosen, whatever.  It doesn't matter.  However that desire got there, a human being does something, whether it is scratching it's nose or writing the Magna Carta, because it wants to, or if it doesn't want to, someone that has a power over this individual, like his parent, his boss, his teacher, his ruler, wants him to do it; in which case he still wants to do it, perhaps not enthusiastically, but he wants to do it more than he wants to incur the wrath of the person making him do it.  So humans, us, we, do things because we experience wanting to do them.  When we speak we speak because we want to express something.  We may be pleased with how we expressed the idea or the experience that we wanted to convey, or we may not be pleased with it.  A machine is never pleased or unpleased by what it says, because, first of all, there is no "it", no "I", that is saying it.  A machine does not say anything because it has an experience or an idea or an opinion that it wants to express.  A machine has no "I" therefore it has no experiences, no ideas and no opinions.  Again, a machine may be programmed to say things that give the impression that the machine has an experience, an idea or an opinion, but it has none, because there is no "it" within the machine, no ground of being, no consciousness, no milieu of desires, out of which a virtual machine could experience or desire anything. If a machine surprises you that is because it has been programmed in a surprising way by a conscious, living, desiring, intelligent human programmer.  The machine is the non-conscious, automated recipient of that surprising program just as it is the non-conscious, automated recipient of every other program.

The French often use the pronoun 'on' which means one.  We use the pronoun also, but in English, unless it is being used in the negative, no one, it usually sounds pretentious.  "No one is home." "One should work hard if one wants to succeed."  Who is this 'one'?  It is you, the unitary consciousness.  Not the two hundred billion neurons of your brain, not the one hundred trillion cells of your body, not the 3.2 billion nucleotide base pairs within each of those cells, nor the multitude of activities within each and every one of those cells, but you, one; the one ground of being, the one experiencer, the one desirer.  This is the very you that your parents celebrated when you were born.  Yes, they were happy that you had ten fingers, ten toes, two eyes, etc.  But all that would be absolutely for naught if you were still born.  The celebration happenned because a new consciousness, a new being, with the same kind of desires, and ability to experience, and capacity for love, had arrived into our world.  And when one of your parents died, it was not the body or any part of the equipment that was missed so much, but the same consciousness, the same experiencer, the same desirer, the same ground of being that had departed, leaving the body and all it's equipment in tact, but no longer animated by the experience and desires of a living being.  

I am not my wiring.  I am the consciousness that translates that wiring into experience, and my wiring allows me to have a rich and colored and sonic and textural and sensual and reliable and orderly and recognizable experience, but my wiring does not experience my experience.  I do that; and my wiring is organized so that I experience my experience in a way that is similar enough to the rest of my species so that we can have a shared community of experience, which is what a species is, or should be.  And my wiring is organized in a transcendentally precise and complex way so that my desires, can be translated instantly into the actions that allow me to fulfill those desires. I am consciousness.  I am the desirer and the experiencer which I do with the assistance of my wiring.  A virtual human is wiring. 

Before we worry about civil rights and respect for virtual humans lets figure out who we real humans really are.  We are that most precious of commodities, not the product of mechanics, programming or material, but living consciousness.



Let me know what you think.

PARTICLE FEVER

The documentary film, 'Particle Fever,' is about the enormous (in terms of size, expense, and the involvement of  literally thousands of theoretical and experimental physicists world-wide) undertakings at CERN in Switzerland and the design, construction and operation there of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).  I should say from the beginning that the film is narrated by a group of sincere, charming, and extremely dedicated and intelligent scientists.  Nevertheless, from the mystical point of view, and from the point of view of this author, at the same time that many of their calculations may be fairly accurate, their understanding is entirely wrong and they are looking at the problem almost exactly backwards.

Early in the video, theoretical physicist David E. Kaplan explains that, "We are reproducing the physics, the conditions just after the Big Bang so we can see what it was like when the Universe just started.  We study particles because just after the Big Bang all there was was particles, and they carry the information about how our universe started and how it got to be the way it is and its future.  In the beginning of the 1900's it became clear that all known matter, everything we know about, is made of atoms and atoms are made of just three particles, the electron, the neutron and the proton.  In the 30's other particles were discovered and by the 1960's there were hundreds of new particles with a new particle discovered every week and it was mass confusion until a number of theorists realized that there was a simple mathematical structure that explained all of this; that most of these particles were made of the same three little bits that we call quarks and that there are only a handful of truly fundamental particles which all fit together in a nice, neat pattern, and there was born The Standard Model.  Eventually all the particles in the theory were discovered except one…Higgs.  And the Higgs is unlike any other particle.  It's the lynchpin of the Standard Model.  It's theory was written down in the 1960's by Peter Higgs and a number of other theorists.  We believe that it is the crucial piece responsible for holding matter together.  It is connected to a field which fills all of space and that gives particles, like the electron, mass and allows them to get caught in atoms and then is responsible for the creation of atoms, molecules, planets and people.  Without the Higgs, life as we know it wouldn't exist.  But to prove that it is true, we have to smash particles together at high enough energy to disturb the field and create a Higgs particle.  If the Higgs exists, the LHC is the machine that will discover it."

Another theoretical physicist Nima Arkin-Hamed, equally charming and intelligent, adds the following, "Since the mid-seventies we've had an amazingly successful theory of nature called The Standard Model of Particle Physics.  But sitting at the heart of the theory is a sickness; very, very glaring conceptual problems that infected this fantastic understanding.  Why is the universe big?  Why is gravity so much weaker than all the other forces?  The kinds of answers that this theory gives to these questions seems so patently absurd that we think we are missing something very, very big.  And on top of all that, there is one prediction that is absolutely crucial for it to make even internal theoretical sense and this is the famous Higgs Particle.  The Higgs or something like it must show up.  If it doesn't there is something truly, deeply wrong, very, very deeply wrong with the way we think about physics."

In this post I will be explaining, in detail, why most of Kaplan's statements are obviously wrong and why Arkin-Hamed's fears are almost certainly justified.  I will also be offering an alternative view to The Standard Model, a view that, I believe, is much simpler, makes much more sense, reduces the four forces of modern physics to two, and comes much closer to explaining the real origin of the universe.

Kaplan says that,  "we are creating conditions just after the Big Bang to discover things about the origin of the universe."  From my point of view, materialists, which all these people are, are exactly the wrong group to turn to when you are wondering about the origin of anything.  If, as the materialists believe, all things are material, then how do you discover the origin of material except by resorting to other material.  If you want to understand how the universe began you have to understand how material began and by simple logic, you cannot begin that understanding with material, because whatever material you are starting with, you have eliminated in your thinking, the origin of that starting material.  And you have eliminated in your thinking the origin of the interrelated laws and forces that govern the behavior of that material, the slightest variation of which would have made a physical universe impossible and which would, in present time, bring down the entire material universe like a house of cards. 

In searching for the Higgs particle, or the Higgs boson, the LHC hurls two protons, sub-atomic particles, that are part of the nucleus of a cell, at each other at enormous speeds.  This collision of protons causes them to break up, at least momentarily, and it is this momentary dissolution of the proton which is the focus of the research.  Until very recently, protons were not considered to exist at all.  In very ancient times many people believed that solid things were completely, uninterruptedly and permanently solid. At that time mystics, both unaffiliated and those affiliated with organized religions, experienced the material world as having no real solidity and therefore no real particles.  Twenty-four hundred years ago Greek philosopher Democritus propounded the belief that solid things were made of separate particles, too small to be seen, that were attached to each other by hooks, while liquid substances were also made of tiny separate particles that were round and smooth and rubbed off of each other. These separate unseen particles he called atoms.  At that time mystics of every religious persuasion continued to experience the material world as having no real solidity and therefore no real particles.  In 1803 English chemist John Dalton proposed the idea that the tiny particles that Democritus had spoken of were indivisible and indestructible and remained unchanged during chemical reactions.  At that time all mystics, unmoved by these developments, persisted in experiencing the material world as having no real solidity and therefore no real particles.  In 1904 British physicist JJ Thomson put forth the opinion that the fundamental indestructible unit was not the atom but the electron, a sub-atomic particle a thousand times smaller than the atom, and shortly thereafter New Zealand physicist  Ernest Rutherford opined that the atom was made up of a positively charged nucleus composed of indestructible and indivisible proton particles and  negatively charged electrons particles that orbited the nucleus like the planets orbit the sun, (shortly thereafter James Cavendish, Rutherford's student, suggested that the nucleus was composed of indestructible and indivisible neutral particles, called neutrons,  as well as the indestructible and indivisible positively charged proton particles)  and that the great majority of the atom was not solid at all, but was actually empty space.  At that time those flighty mystics stubbornly continued to experience the material world as having no real solidity and therefore no real particles.  One thing is now absolutely clear concerning the above list.  Every scientist on it has been wrong, has been proven wrong by successive scientists, and they have been wrong in that what they had considered solid, fundamental and indestructible turned out to be spacious, changeable and divisible. Whether or not the mystics are wrong remains to be seen.  

So this brings us to the present time.  As Kaplan stated above, starting in the 1930's the proton and the neutron were discovered to be not solid, indivisible, fundamental particles, but rather force fields which contained many, many so-called sub-atomic particles, now considered to be the fundamental, indivisible bedrock of the material world.  Hundreds of these new particles, at the rate of one a week, were being discovered through the 1960's, at which time The Standard Model was proposed which attempted to bring some order to this chaos of particles.  And at this time and since the 1930's, mystics  of every nationality, unperturbed by this theory or these discoveries, as they had been by all previous theories and discoveries, continued and continue to experience the material world as having no real solidity and therefore no real particles.  So now that contemporary scientists have settled on the quark and other subatomic particles as the solid, fundamental and indestructible foundation of the material world,  are they right, or will they be proven wrong, as all the previous theoretical physicists have been proven wrong and discover that these particles, too, are not at all fundamental or indestructible, but, like all the larger, seemingly solid particles that preceded them, are actually spacious, changeable and divisible?

Especially baffling, for the materialists, was the theory proposed in 1924 by Frenchman Louis de Broglie that all matter had a dual nature; that it behaved, at times, as a solid particle and at other times like a wave.  The now proven dual nature of these particles has called into question their so-called solidity and since these very particles compose the whole physical universe, the solidity of the entire material world.  It would probably be easier to understand this particle wave duality if we realized that subatomic particles are not really particles at all, not in the usual way we have of understanding particles. They have been detected because, although they are way too small to be seen directly, a certain charge, a certain spin and a certain mass has been measured at a specific place and at a specific time within the proton.  These concise areas (much more concise when they are behaving like a particle and much less concise when they are behaving like a wave) have been referred to as particles. If they are, then what are these particles made of? When we think of a particle, the first question that usually comes to mind is, “A particle of what?” If I said to you, “Why don't you come over to my house so I can show you these particles that I just got?” the first thing you would want to know would be, "what kind of particles? Particles of what?" And in the case of sub atomic particles this is no easy question. When we think of particles we think of material of some kind. But all the material that we know of consists of the just shy of one hundred natural elements, possibly the twenty or less synthetic elements, and molecular combinations of these. But the subatomic particle is certainly not made of any element. The smallest element, hydrogen, is made of one proton, one neutron and at least one electron. These subatomic particles make up a small part of one proton or one neutron. So what could they be made out of, if they are not made out of elements?

Suppose they are made simply out of nothing, out of forces, which are not matter at all.  If they are made out of nothing, which I am asserting here, then how could they have a spin or a charge? Don’t charges emanate from particles, from matter? How could they spin? Is it possible to have a nothing that was still charged and spinning? And most daunting, how could they be made of nothing and still have mass, as some of the subatomic particles, but not all of the subatomic particles, have been detected as having? Isn't mass matter itself? How can something have no matter and still have mass?

First off, is a force a thing? Certainly forces are very real. Try and pull apart opposite poles of a magnet and you will feel with absolute certainty how real electro-magnetic force is. And the same holds true for trying to force two like poles of a magnet together. And certainly gravity is very real as anyone who has ever fallen, or dragged themselves up a steep hill, can attest. These forces are real, but they are not things. There are no particles of gravity, no matter that weighs down on you when you fall. There are no electro-magnetic particles that are pushing against your hand when you try to pry two opposite poles of a magnet apart. These forces are very real, attraction is very real, it is just not made out of anything.


Have you ever seen a dust devil? These are whirlwinds of dust that spiral upwards from the ground. Dust devils are made of dust, but they are not caused by dust. These are just particles of dust that happened to be caught up in a swirl of forces. If there were powder on the ground, the same swirl would form a powder devil. If there were dried out, very light weight fallen leaves, it would be a leaf devil. What if there were no leaves, powder or dust? Would there still be a whirlwind? Yes, you would have a whirlwind of air. Tornadoes are whirlwinds of air and water and often many other objects that the tornado picks up once it touches ground join this whirlwind of particles. But is the tornado caused by the air molecules or any of these particles? Are whirlpools caused by water molecules? Or are they simply caught up in a whirl of forces and passively being moved by them? Well, you say, they are caused by winds or air currents, or tides or water currents. But are the air and water molecules causing winds and tides or is it that these molecules are just randomly caught up in forces that move them along?

Let’s consider an ocean. At many places in the ocean there are various formations. There are waves and whirlpools and breakers, to name a few. Given the fairly consistent flow of forces, we can say with some level of predictability, that breakers will appear in certain particular areas, small waves in other areas, larger waves in others, and whirlpools will appear regularly in still other areas. But these are not particles. The same water molecules, the same particles, that are swept up in a large wave, can, at another moment, be part of a breaker or a whirlpool. The so called parts, or particles, are interchangeable, all depending on where they happen to be at a given moment in this force field that underlies the ocean. And the same can be said of the atmosphere. Molecules of air can be caught up, at different times, in balmy breezes, hurricane winds, tornadoes, mixed with water molecules in clouds, etc., all depending on where they happen to be in relation to the atmospheric field of forces, which underlie these phenomena.

What I am saying is that in the tiny world of the atom, there is no stuff, no matter. There are forces and the forces have certain patterns, shapes and intensities, but there is no stuff, no elements, no matter that is being moved along by these forces. The so-called sub-atomic particles are patterns, sometimes very stable patterns, of forces within the force field that we call a proton or a neutron or, for that matter, an atom.

How, you may ask, could forces, by themselves, form stable configurations?  Certainly if you consider forces as being gravity, electro-magnetism, the weak force and the strong force, it is impossible to imagine any stable configurations.  But I would like to suggest that we replace those four forces with two forces, and for these two forces I turn not to modern theoretical physics but to ancient, pre-industrial religions, many of which were based on monistic dualism.  From one comes two. The Taoists say that Infinity (one) bifurcates into Yin and Yang (two). The Bible starts with, “In the beginning, God (one) created the Heaven and the Earth (two). The heaven that we refer to as the sky with stars and a sun and a moon, and the earth that we refer to as our planet with a firmament and oceans, were not created, according to Genesis, until two or three days later (actually unspecified time periods, and certainly not a twenty-four hour day which would require both a sun and a revolving earth, neither of which were there by the Biblical account until two or three days [epochs] later), then the Heaven and the Earth of that opening sentence must be referring to two opposing forces, an outward, expanding, centrifugal heavenly force (yin) and an inward, contracting, centripetal,  earthly force (yang). So the Judeo-Christian statement and the Taoist statement mean exactly the same thing. Other traditions call the two forces of duality In and Yo, Shiva and Shakti, Vata and Kapha, Tirawa and Atira, Father Sky and Mother Earth, etc.

Now you may have heard of yin and yang, but are probably acquainted with these ideas on a superficial level.  Yin and yang are not properties of things.  Yin and yang are the things themselves.  All things are made up of both yin and yang. Pure yang exists but not in the physical universe.  Pure yin transcends the entire universe, both physical and non-physical, but it is not in time and space and can only be measured and observed in its interactions with yang.  The physical universe, including all particles, is formed by combinations of yin and yang.  From this perspective, forces do not emanate or originate from particles, but particles, or the illusion of particles and their illusion of solidity, originate from the combination of forces which have a very real force but no real, physical, observable material basis.

Yin and yang are not really attracted to each other.  They are trapped by each other and it is not a peaceful union.  The center of every object is more yang and the periphery is more yin.  The yang force wants to keep contracting into itself, pulling all of the elements of the object with it, and in turn, getting pulled into the pure yang which is at the non-physical center of the physical universe.  It is prevented from doing that by the outward force of yin which would like to unbind itself from yang, stop being a thing and disperse at infinite speed through the entire universe, but is held back by the inward force of yang.  The tension between the inward yang force and the outward yin force creates a force field which creates in some cases the illusion of solidity.  The force field may, in fact, be impenetrable and solid, at least to humans unaided by sophisticated and extremely powerful technical devices, but at the same time consists of nothing but forces which have no material existence.  

According to modern physics, the electro-magnetic force, the force that exists between a positive ion (an atom that has one too few electrons to balance out its nucleus) and a negative ion (an atom that has one too many electrons to balance out its nucleus) is much weaker than the strong force within the atom.  But let's look at it from a yin yang perspective.  Within the atom are so called particles, which are yin and yang forces in a tight embrace.  Let's say you have two teams of brawny individuals playing a game of tug of war.  These two teams, each of which have tremendous strength and energy, are exactly equal in terms of the opposing forces that they exert upon the rope.  Now suppose I covered both teams and the rope with some kind of covering so you couldn't see what was happening underneath.  Outside you had a negative pole some ways off at one end of this covering and a positive pole some ways off at the other end.  If the two teams continue at every moment to exert two perfectly balanced opposing forces, you would see no movement of this "particle" either toward the negative pole or the positive pole and would call this particle neutral, even though within the particle there are tremendous forces being exerted.  Now suppose one team gets slightly more fatigued than the other team and that other team, the negative team, starts inching toward the negative pole; or you could imagine the reverse situation, where the positive team started inching toward the positive pole.  These are the charges that we see when we look at subatomic particles.  Now suppose someone suddenly cuts the rope that both teams are tugging on.  Then you would see a sudden explosion of energy as one team falls back past the negative pole and the other team falls back past the positive pole. This is the energy that we see when these particles are split.  This strong force is exactly the same force and the same energy as electro-magnetism, it is just that there is a lot more of it, since all the so-called particles, which are yin and yang bound in a tight embrace, are split releasing much more energy than the slight imbalance of the proton and the charge of a single electron.

Kaplan says, "We are reproducing the physics, the conditions just after the Big Bang so we can see what it was like when the Universe just started.  We study particles because just after the Big Bang all there was was particles, and they carry the information about how our universe started and how it got to be the way it is and its future."  Again, I remind you that Kaplan seems like a very charming, intelligent young man, but what utter non-sense.  All there were after the Big Bang were particles?  He himself goes on to say, and the whole point of the CERN endeavor at this time, is to establish the existence of a Higgs field, a field of energy which had to exist, according to their theories, before the Big Bang, along with electro-magnetic fields, and other fields.  How can you talk about creation without talking about the creation of these fields. Also, there may or may not have been a Big Bang, but it certainly wasn't the beginning of creation.  If it was, then what was banging? What was the stuff that created that huge explosion?  How did that get there?  Now a Big Bang, but not even remotely close to the way that modern physicists conceive it, could have taken place, but that would not be the origin, that would have been the end of a contractive cycle of the universe, and the beginning of an expansive cycle, cycles that may have been repeated endlessly.

And then Kaplan talks about particles carrying information about how our universe started, got to be the way it is and how it will be in the future.  Really?  What is this information that particles carry?  The only information that I know of that can be carried by particles is when those particles are part of a code, created by an intelligent being to be read by and for the benefit of other intelligent beings.  The assumption is that these particles, the electron, the proton, the neutron and all the subatomic particles that compose the proton and neutron are exactly the same as they were since their inception.  So what information about how things have changed and will change, could they possibly carry?  Also, an absolutely integral part of the theory they are working with is that particles change as they pass through different fields.  So the only thing there was after the Big Bang was not particles, but particles and fields, and the fields actually preceded the Big Bang.  They are studying particles because particles are the only thing they can detect, not the only thing that there is; and since they are all materialists, they both acknowledge theoretically the existence of fields which they can only detect because of their effect on particles, but acknowledge the existence of these fields and forces begrudgingly, and avoid any discussion of them and how they got to be there when they are discussing creation.  But if you are talking about true creation, then fields and forces, whether or not they can be directly observed or measured, must be accounted for.

Let's get back to the Big Bang.  Now if there is an explosion on the surface of the earth, let's say, then the explosion throws debri in many directions, and if you stumble upon the scene of this explosion after it happened you can follow the lines of debri back to the origin of the explosion.  That would seem true with any explosion.  Now the physical universe is expanding, and it is expanding on a curved surface, something like an expanding balloon.  If all the material, or seeming material, of the physical universe is  debri moving away from the Big Bang explosion, then the lines of that explosion are moving outward from a center, a center that is not within the physical universe, but at the center of the expanding sphere of material that makes up the physical universe.  In other words, the source of the explosion is at the center of that expanding balloon, the yang center of the universe. 

At the end of a contractive universal cycle, all the yang energy is pulled back to one point which does not grow, but continues to contract, increasing in strength and pulls in all the yin which is trying desperately to escape.  Under this unfathomable pressure, much greater than the pressure at the center of the sun, all atoms and molecules collapse; therefore the force fields that separate them collapse, therefore there is no matter, but only force. At a certain point the yin force, which hates compression, and is usually found most prominently toward the outside of configurations, is being compressed by more and more yang moving in on top of it, to the point where the compressed yin explodes out carrying a lot of the yang with it.  Some of this yin and yang capture each other to form new particles, protons, neutrons and atoms, and some yin escapes away, not as matter, because yin and yang only form matter in combination, but as pure yin accelerating past the speed of light (the speed of light is the fastest speed that a thing can travel and still be a thing, but pure yin, not in combination with yang is not a thing) beyond the physical universe and into Infinity, where all things, which are not really things, travel at infinite speed, which means they are impossible fast and absolutely still at the same time since it takes them no time at all to traverse the entire physical universe and return to the same spot, and they are not divisible, since there is no matter, no 'thingness' to divide them, so they are a unity.  Another word for this unity is 'cosmic consciousness' or 'the Godhead.'  

Pure yin is everywhere within and without the physical universe and is also nowhere since it takes up no space.  But it becomes observable whenever there is yang, which attracts yin to it to form what we call particles.  All the yang in the physical universe is bound by yin.  Pure yang exists only at the non-physical center of the expanding physical plane, and an almost pure form of yang exists at the non-physical center of black holes.  The reason that the movement of the debris from the Big Bang, which we call the physical universe, is slower than expected, is not a mysterious dark energy, but is the yang, non-physical center of the universe, the center of the balloon, which exerts a force which pulls everything within its reach back into it.  So, while the physical universe is just out of the reach where it can be pulled back  to the yang center, it still feels it as a brake on its outward expansion. 

The reason large negatively charged sub atomic "particles" appear after an LHC  collision is not because of a Higgs Field, or an undetectable Higgs Boson particle.  There is no such particle.  The reason these large negative particles (which are really just forces) these fermions appear, is that the high powered collision of protons releases the yang at the center of the proton which instantly attracts a lot of yin to it to make balance.  It is simply an almost instantaneous reforming of what was broken, not the formation of a brand new particle which instantly vanishes.

Now let's talk about mass, because mass is puzzling to everyone, so puzzling, that modern physicists have imagined a Higgs field that when you pass through it a Higgs boson particle is formed which imparts mass to massless objects.  Once again, the assumption is that the origin of forces is particles, rather than that forces are the origin and the make-up of particles.  


What is mass?  It is not weight.  Weight is a measure of the attraction between an object and the center of the yangest object in its vicinity.  In our case, that would be the center of the earth.  Now there is a lot of heat and heavy elements at the center of the earth, but that is not what is causing the force that pulls things to this center.  It is just that any thing, including our planet, is most yang at its center, as all things are most yang at their center and most yin at their periphery.  If there are dense elements in the center of the earth, they have been formed by combining yin with all the strong yang forces at the center.  Weight is not mass.  You can get out of a gravitational field in a rocket ship and none of the objects would have any weight, but they would still have mass.  Is that because they still have stuff, have matter in them?  No.  Mass is measured by the amount of energy needed to accelerate an object. On a level surface, a surface which exerts the same amount of friction on all objects, it is harder, even in a no gravitation field, to accelerate an object across this surface that has a lot of mass than an object that has little mass.  Another way of saying that is that mass is a measure of the amount of inertia, the resistance to acceleration of an object.  But that is not due to the amount of stuff, and the density of stuff in the object.  It is due to the amount of yang energy, the amount of inward force, the degree to which all parts of that object are pulled in toward the center that makes it hard to accelerate, that gives it mass.

So mass, like weight, is a measure of force, not of matter, and it is a measure of the same force.  Mass is the measure of the yang, inward force that is exerted on all the parts of an object.  Gravitation is the measure of the yang, inward force that extends beyond the surface of an object.  Why, as Arkin-Hamed asks, is the force of gravity so much weaker?  It is because the yang force is so much stronger at the core of an object, than at the surface.  By the time the inward force reaches past the surface of an object it has been neutralized to a great degree by all the yin elements at the periphery.  And, again, this is not due to the dense elements or heat or pressure at the core.  The heat, pressure and the density of the elements are there because of the contractive force of yang.  Take the same elements that are millions of degrees at the solar core, that are under so much pressure that atomic fusion is taking place, and remove them to the surface of the earth, and the heat and pressure are gone.  As the powerfull bull of yang moves out from the core to the surface it encounters the yin picadores that bleed it of its strength so that by the time it exists as a gravitational force, pulling objects beyond its surface toward it, it has become weakened to a small portion of the raging force that was causing atomic fusion at the core.

All particles and waves are composed of yin and yang.  Without yang, there would be no pull to the center and the yin elements would disperse and not be able to hold a form.  Without yin the particle would not be able to expand and occupy any space.  It would just collapse into itself and dissappear.  Particles and waves are made from the force field created by the inward pull of yang and the outward push of yin.  All particles have mass, unlike what you may have been told by modern physicists.  It's just that some masses are so tiny that they cannot be measured, at least on the surface of the earth.  A particle or a wave must have both yin and yang.  Without yin, the particle would contract right out of the physical universe and find its way back to the yang center.  Without yang, the particle would have no form and just disperse into infinity.  This is why light waves or photons (in their seeming particle formation) which are considered to have no mass, bend when they pass close to much larger stars or close to the centers of large constellations and are pulled into and disappear into black holes.  Although they have no detectable mass on this planet, no detectable attraction to the earth's center, when they pass a much stronger yang center, they are pulled toward it and the light rays bend.

If there is no stuff within the individual subatomic particles, what about when subatomic particles combine to make atoms?  Is there real stuff, real material then?  No.  All research shows that protons, neutrons and electrons are identical, regardless of which element  they are found in.  The difference in the density, permeability, color, weight and mass of all the different elements is not due simply to the addition of more identical parts, but the difference in the field connecting these subatomic elements.  A field with several positive forces and several negative forces is a much richer, thicker field than one composed of one positive and one negative unit of force.  It is the difference in the force fields between subatomic particles within the atom, which, in themselves, are smaller but more intense force fields, that causes the difference in the qualities of elements. 

One more thing about yang.  As I said, yang is not really attracted to yin.  It is captured by yin to form waves and particles.  Yang is attracted to stronger accumulations of yang.  And strong accumulations of yang seek to attract more yang to it.  That is the source of gravity.  If gravity seems weaker than the other forces it is because it is attracting yang, but the yang is involved in particles which include yin.  So while the yang at the center of the earth is pulling objects toward it, the yin elements in those objects is resisting that pull, in the same way that the yin elements of the electron yearn to fly away from their orbit around the nucleus and resist the pull to the center of the nucleus.  Since all stable particles are basically balanced, the ratio of yin per the mass of the object is the same in all objects so the amount of resistance to gravity is proportionally the same for all objects and the speed and acceleration of falling objects is the same.  But if yang were unimpeded by the opposing force of yin, you would see a tremendous attraction between small yang and large yang and an enormous acceleration as the smaller yang flew to the larger yang and united with it.  But, as I said, this doesn't happen in the physical plane, since all objects that contain yang are instantly surrounded by yin, which permeates the entire field and instantly coalesces around any free yang, as in the CERN proton collision experiments.  

So, finally, if the material world is made up of forces and combinations of forces that give the illusion of particles and solidity, then the origin of the universe is the origin of these forces; and what is that origin?  Well, we call natural forces laws.  There are Einstein's Laws and Newton's Laws, and these laws are attempts to explain, accurately or not, how forces behave.  When humans create a law, they must also create a method of enforcing that law.  With natural laws, the method of enforcement and the law are the same thing.  Man made laws begin with an idea, an idea to improve society for the benefit of the lawmakers and, hopefully, for the benefit of the entire society.  Natural force-laws begin with an idea as well.  That idea, I believe, is a way of creating a physical universe that gradually forms the groundwork so that, ultimately, conscious beings can have an experience of separation, a separate existence dependent on a separate brain and body, a separate set of desires, and a separate consciousness that stores and organizes its own experiences and information in a particular way. The physical universe was created as a way of having a milieu in which separate conscious beings can have a unique existence with a unique set of desires for different aspects of the physical world; desires that can be met thanks to the brilliant and careful design and development of both the natural environment and the conscious beings that desire different aspects of that environment. 

You may think, then, that if the physical universe begins with an idea, then I am overlooking the creation of the physical being with a brain, and a very advanced brain, that has these transcendent ideas.  But that is the same thinking that says that forces are the result of, emanate from, particles.  Ideas don't emanate from brains.  If anything, brains emanate from ideas.  And when you "get" ideas, are they formed by your brain, or are they received and recorded by your brain?  You may prepare for receiving an idea by accumulating the information and the skills to use the idea when it arrives, but you do not create the idea yourself.  Ideas come from that yin unity, that cosmic consciousness, that God head, that I spoke of earlier, that transcends every corner of the physical universe and beyond, and is beyond space and time, and has never been created.  What we are is, in John Milton's words, the "bright effluence of bright essence increate."  We are the overflow of the bright consciousness  that is the essence of all things and is, itself, beyond time, space and creation. 

Any comments?  I would love to hear from you.