!e Fates Unwind In"nity

Contents.Introduction.

Part IChapter 1Chapter 2. The Cause of ExistenceChapter 3. The Immutable Foundation of ExistenceChapter 4. TruthChapter 5. Mind and the Illusion of DualityChapter 6. Elements of Human and Non-Human ConsciousnessChapter 7. What is “me”?Chapter 8. The Modern Status of Supernatural BeliefChapter 9. In My End Is My BeginningChapter 10. Destiny vs. Free WillChapter 11. Our OnenessChapter 12. Intelligence vs. InstinctChapter 13. The Universality of Life

Part II: Abstract Reflections and Theories Concerning PhysicsChapter 1. Gravity in Intuitive TermsChapter 2. Relativity and the Origin of Mass and InertiaChapter 3. A Closer Look at SpacetimeChapter 4. Interpreting Quantum EffectsChapter 5. Time as ChangeChapter 6. The Basis of Set TheoryChapter 7. The Inconceivable Beauty of the UniverseChapter 8.

About the BookAbout the Author

Introduction.

!is book is an exploration of the Universe's deepest questions,

a personal re"ection which is not conducted in the familiar and o#en

tedious style of academic philosophy. “Why does anything exist at all?”

“What is consciousness; how can the workings of my brain produce this

unthinkable range of experience, and how can conscious will in turn af-

fect my body and cause it to type or speak, or do any of the other count-

less things it does in response to these experiences?” “Why does all en-

ergy unfailingly follow the laws of physics?”– If these towering mysteries

stimulate your interest, this book will likely prove engaging and eye-

opening for you. Even if you are for some reason uninterested in these

questions, I think that if you continue reading, before long you will be-

gin to see that examining the Universe in reference to questions of this

sort can dramatically rede$ne and enrich our understanding and experi-

ence of life.

!is book is packed with mentally taxing topics and concepts.

My aim is clarity, brevity, and accessibility, and I intend to write in a very

straightforward style, but this will likely prove to be more strenuous than

the average read. I have quite a lot I want to say, and the pace is brisk.

Rather than a comprehensive exploration of a few specialized and spe-

ci$c concepts, these words are intended to serve more as a broad glance

at many profound ideas, in the hope that you will undertake the process

of examining each in depth and in reference to your own worldview and

style of reasoning. In Part 2, general relativity, set theory, and similarly

advanced concepts are discussed without much preliminary explanation;

if you don't know about these things, they would probably be very inter-

esting for you to learn about from other sources before reading about

them here.

Generally, when we are presented with a fact describing the

world that is more subtle and nuanced than our intuitive, day-to-day

worldview, we shy away from the a%empt to truly introduce that fact into

the reality we see. Modeling new information in our minds takes a sub-

stantial, and o#en sustained expenditure of energy, and we resist this

exertion in the same way that we might choose the elevator over the

stairs. When I tell someone, “Imagine, our bodies are comprised of

about a hundred trillion cells, all immensely complex living beings in

their own right!” they invariably change the subject immediately, giving

the impression “Yes, I'm sure I could imagine that, but please, not right

now.” !e mental modeling ends up being put off inde$nitely.

We should seek to overcome this existential inertia, and try to

learn how to more fully appreciate the miracle that is the reality we in-

habit. !is is not to say that the mental aspect of horizon broadening is

easy, but it is worth the effort. Even if this wider view of reality, from a

higher vantage point than the normal human perspective, is not in effect

at all times, having an idea of your life in the context of the entire Uni-

verse, of all that has happened and all that is possible to unfold in the

endless future, can be a pleasant state to revisit whenever life's difficulties

and injustices need to be put into perspective.

Part I.

Chapter 1.

!is book is wri%en in praise of the vibrant beauty and elegance

of reality. !e Universe is just in$nitely, hilariously deeper and more sig-

ni$cant than we can possibly comprehend or hold in our tiny aware-

nesses; the most enlightened human minds in history have only had the

power to experience the slightest, most microscopic glimmer of its mag-

nitude. And yet it's right there, right here, all around us and in us at all

times; in fact, giving rise to us. I stand in awe before the brilliance of all

that is, in love of life and experience. Even so, I sense the blindness with

which I see, the boundless depth behind the thin surface my animal

mind can perceive. At times I long for true knowing beyond the bounds

of my biological intelligence, but I am exhilarated by the realization that

though I cannot hold the in$nite in mind, the in$nite exists in itself.

Like all philosophical texts, the following should be read criti-

cally. !e bene$t of reading someone else's conclusions concerning the

mysterious world we inhabit is that even if you disagree with them fully,

the act of contrasting your views with theirs gives you a deep insight into

who you are, and what you truly believe about life and your place in it.

A#er all, your worldview serves as the foundation for your experiences;

every choice you make, every thought you think and every word you

speak occurs in the context of your fundamental beliefs, which o#en go

unquestioned or taken for granted a#er their gradual development dur-

ing your early years.

We should never chain ourselves to any conception picked up

along the clu%ered paths our lives and our ancestors lives have taken, but

examine every dusty certainty in the light of all newly uncovered evi-

dence. Any logical tension between aged axioms and new ideas repre-

sents an opportunity for insight into the true nature of reality. In the

quest for truth, we can treat the Universe as an immense riddle, and

know that though con$rmation that we have reached the truth may be

forever out of reach, the truth is always there, underlying and explaining

all that exists.

Science is the most extraordinarily successful means we have of

unraveling these Universal mysteries; the realization that rational, em-

pirical inquiry is uncannily successful in learning about the true nature

of the Universe is truly humanity's greatest discovery. However, because

the entire point of scienti$c inquiry is never to draw conclusions that

cannot be experimentally demonstrated and tested, science cannot ex-

amine many of the most compelling questions. For example, the ques-

tion "Where did existence, this Universe, come from?" is not in the

realm of science because the Big Bang is apparently the very $rst in-

stance in our Universe that we can ever possibly investigate directly- the

cause of the Big Bang is forever out of our reach to examine empirically,

so the incomplete scienti$c standpoint is that the Big Bang was the be-

ginning of time (though the most insightful scientists acknowledge that

it had to have a cause). In a strictly positivistic scienti$c worldview,

which many scientists today are proud to hold, the only reality is that

which humans can presently investigate experimentally.

I reject the thought that our knowing of the world can only pro-

gress through empirical science. !e fact that a system of investigation is

not constrained to the directly observable does not necessarily mean the

investigation can reveal no insight into the Universe we occupy. Imagine

the blow that would be dealt to modern physics if Einstein were a strict

experimentalist; it is clear that his brilliant forays into Universal truth

were conducted in the light of pure intuitive logic. Intuition o#en deals

with systems of logic that are too complex to immediately parse in

mathematical propositions; intuitive insight is built up from networks of

more fundamental knowledge, bits of empirical evidence and logic, only

gaining utility through the dynamic, creative combination of these facts

undergone by theorists.

!rough the use of logic and intuition, a deeper insight into the

essential character of reality can be gained, realizations that a purely em-

pirical approach might never uncover. Of course, this is a philosophy

inspired by the modern $ndings of science, and I would never downplay

the magni$cent bene$t science has to mankind and to our general un-

derstanding of the Universe. !e drawback is that even with all of these

breathtaking $ndings, science is forbidden to discuss the overarching

signi!cance of the reality uncovered. !ese explorations fall within the

happy realm of the philosopher, the realm we visit today.

CHAPTER 2

The Cause of Existence

How deliciously miraculous it is that the limitless potential in

our Universe exists, that there is this brilliant spectrum of Existence

rather than nothingness. Why should this be so; why does Existence it-

self exist? To discuss this question, it is useful to de$ne what is meant by

Existence: the capitalized form will be used here in the all-encompassing

sense referring to absolutely everything that has the condition of not

being nothing; anything that does exist, has existed, or can possibly exist

is part of Existence. !e uncapitalized “exist” is used in the normal way,

covering the speci$c sense referring to a thing's objective reality. For in-

stance, I might describe the existence of this text as a minuscule facet of

Existence, the sum of all things. !e Universe, its history, future, and all

of its contents (time, space, energy, gravity, electromagnetism, the strong

and weak nuclear forces, consciousness, emotions, everything that has a

name and everything that is as yet unnamed) are subsets of Existence.

!ere is no “outside of ” Existence, for if there were, that outside would

have to be existent as well, and would therefore be part of Existence.

!ere can be no precedent to Existence, for if there were, that precedent

would have to be existent as well, and therefore would be part of Exis-

tence.

!e cause of the Big Bang (perhaps a previous Universe collaps-

ing into a “singularity” and subsequently re-expanding, or perhaps any

number of unknown possible causes) existed at one time; whatever ex-

isted before our Universe necessarily contained the potential for our

Universe to occur. Even if you believe there was absolute nothingness

preceding the Big Bang, there is no way for you to deny that the poten-

tial for our Universe to exist existed then. For instance, contemporary

cosmologists can be heard saying “We have mathematics which show

that the Universe could have sprung from nothingness.” Could those

mathematics also spring from the same nothingness? In other words, if

there was nothingness, those mathematics didn't exist: how could the

Universe spring into being on account of them? Clearly, the potential

preceding the Big Bang was not -nothingness-, but existent and bound-

less, representing every facet of our Universe's in$nite breadth and com-

plexity, including the potential for your life to spring out of universal law

and energy. If this potential (for the Universe to arise) didn't exist before

the Universe came about, the Universe could not have possibly come to

be. As the saying goes, something cannot come from nothing.

"Wait a minute," some might be thinking, "where is the !rst

cause, the reason for it all?" And rightly so, a $rst cause would apparently

satisfy the question we are trying to answer. Where can we $nd the $rst

cause, if not backwards through an in$nity of time? So far we see that

anything that exists is not nothingness; we have Existence on the one

hand, and nothingness on the other.

What exactly do we mean when we speak of nothingness? True

nothingness is what many people expect there would have to be before

Existence came about, and what will remain a#er Existence has run its

course. !is would mean no energy, no space, no time, no force, no po-

tential, and no concept (e.g. mathematics) is present. !is would be ab-

solute nothingness, beyond emptiness (you cannot have emptiness

without having space).

However, as we can $nd, there is no such thing as true nothing-

ness. We've already encountered this realization by looking back along

the string of causation- every cause in Existence is clearly the effect of a

previous cause. Empty space is not nothingness; it is characterized by

containing the possibility of holding and transmi%ing mass-energy and it

springs from the same overarching set of physical laws that produced us.

Space contains at every point the logic of the cosmos, the same gravita-

tional and electromagnetic potential. Even our concept of nothingness

doesn’t constitute or describe nothingness, because the idea is existent

in the physical brain processes that activate it in our minds. We can no

more hold nothingness in mind than we can hold in$nity in mind: any-

thing our minds can explicitly conceive of is $nite, and every thought we

can think exists (and is therefore not representative of true nothingness).

To simplify, if true nothingness were something that could exist,

that something wouldn’t be nothingness. From this paradox arises an

eternal interrelationship: Existence absolutely must exist, because its ab-

sence would bring -nothingness- into direct existence, which is an im-

possible situation.

!is is a rather abstract argument, but I believe this fact is abso-

lutely fundamental to Existence. To put this mind-twisting paradox dif-

ferently: if there were no Existence, all the conditions for the existence of

nothingness would be met. True nothingness would exist– however, in

this case its existence would negate it being nothingness. By de$nition,

the only way that -nothingness- could exist is by not existing; this fun-

damental contradiction assures that it cannot exist, and truly is nothing-

ness. Existence cannot exist in its own right without contrasting (forever

nonexistent) nothingness, and the permanent impossibility of nothing-

ness existing necessitates the existence of Existence. !e resultant being

of Existence is expressed forever through this absolutely fundamental

Truth. !is eternal relationship between nothingness and Existence is

the root of all that is.

Among the people I've discussed this idea with, inevitably the

protest arises: “Well, of course nothingness doesn't exist. It's right there

in its de$nition: nonexistence.” It is a deceptively simple truth, which

many mistake for insigni$cance without apprehending the scope of what

it suggests. If the question concerns the nature and origin of Existence,

the fact that true nothingness cannot exist is perhaps the most telling

information of all. It is not the case that nonexistence preceded the Uni-

verse, or will follow the Universe, as most take for granted. It is not the

case that nonexistence lies outside of the Universe. Nonexistence does

not, cannot, and never will exist, which tells us many important things

about Existence, namely, that it is inarguably in$nite in every possible

dimension of being.

Not to labor the point, but some might believe this still hasn't

answered the question of "What is the $rst cause?” !e answer (though

counterintuitive on $rst glance) is, "!ere never was a $rst cause, but

described above is the eternal cause." Existence never came from any-

where, it is all that has ever been or ever will be. !e fundamental, eter-

nal cause of Existence is the impossibility of its nonexistence, the impos-

sibility of nothingness existing.

!is intuition is described (at least to my ears) in the Tao Te

Ching, Lao Tzu's timeless philosophy:

"e Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao.

"e name that can be named is not the eternal name.

!e eternal Tao is nothingness. It cannot be named, because

nothingness doesn't exist; the word nothingness describes our existent

concept of the forever nonexistent. When speaking about it, we are

speaking about our existent idea of nothingness, and not -nothingness-

itself.

"e nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.

"e name is the mother of the ten thousand things.

In other words, nothingness (the nameless) is the cause of Exis-

tence. “!e name” represents Existence, everything nameable, dis-

cussable, or conceivable, and the “ten thousand things” represents the

boundless possibility made real by the energetic unfolding of Existence.

CHAPTER 3

The Immutable Foundation of Existence

To summarize the ground covered thus far: Nothingness cannot

possibly exist; Existence must exist. Before proceeding, we must answer,

“What does it mean for something (or in the case of Existence, every-

thing) to exist?” We take for granted that we know what it takes for

something to exist: it simply has to be present in existence, to have actual

being. What does it take for something to have actual being? Well, the

thing has to exist... !is circularity reveals the fact that we don't quite

have a rigorous de$nition for what it takes for something to exist, and

our concept of existence relates only to our experience of the things that

do exist and our non-experience of things that do not exist. I do not see

a car parked in this room; all indications and prior knowledge suggest

that no car exists in the room. I do see a lamp to my right. I can touch it

and its light reveals the color and shape of my surroundings; this lamp

certainly exists, and I know that it exists based on its relationship with

me and the other existent things surrounding it. If any of these things

didn't exist, they would not have any part in this relationship.

!e existence of any thing is solely de$ned by how that thing

stands in reference to other existent things, not just in its relative spatio-

temporal position, but also in every possible distinction which makes

that thing exactly what it is and nothing else. Anything that exists neces-

sarily stands in reference to and is de$ned by all that it is not; it is impos-

sible for something to exist without existing relative to the whole of Ex-

istence. !e entirety of being is encapsulated in this in$nite One, the

sum total of this in$nite network of relations. On account of this, though

I cannot directly observe some aspects of my lamp's relationship with

the rest of Existence, the fact that both the lamp and the rest of Existence

exist tells me that this broad relationship also exists. For instance, I know

that the sun is orbiting the Milky Way, and that since the lamp is orbiting

the sun, the lamp is also orbiting the Milky Way.

!e lamp, like every existent thing, is spatiotemporally situated

relative to every other existent thing in the entire scope of Existence, no

ma%er how distant in space or time. !is may not be an obvious or im-

mediately intuitive fact, but is true nonetheless. (Before you disagree, try

to come up with something which simultaneously exists and doesn't spa-

tiotemporally relate to the rest of Existence. By the way, a fact like 2+2=4

does not satisfy this challenge; facts like this are Truths, true at all times

and all places, and therefore relate to the whole of Existence, underlying

physically existent things like stars and lamps. I will elaborate on the

concept of Truth shortly.)

To know of something in Existence requires interacting with

some of the information making up that thing's relationship with Exis-

tence. !ink of a guitar; you know what I mean when I say that because

the word 'guitar' activates the informational network of associations

your brain has built up around that word. In looking at a guitar, your

eyes are registering information carried by photons, which each indi-

vidually contain information of the molecular conditions whence they

were emi%ed, and which collectively sum to describe the form and color

of the guitar from the angle and lighting in which you are viewing it.

Hearing a chord strummed on its strings involves your ears registering

"uctuations in the elastic medium of atmospheric pressure; you access a

tiny corner of a near-spherical wave given off by the string's vibrations

within this medium, containing the information pertaining to the gui-

tar's interaction with the air it is in contact with.

When you pick up the guitar, the weight you feel is the result of

the guitar's informational relationship with spacetime, the relativistic

warping it responds to and participates in (described in depth in Part II,

Chapters 1 and 2). All of this information embodies elements of the gui-

tar's existence; the being of the guitar is entirely contained in all the in-

formation which describes the guitar's existence, both in itself and in

relation to all other existent things. In fact, the existence of any piece of

Existence is wholly made up of that thing's informational presence in

Existence; every single thing has existence solely through the totality of

information which describes that thing.

!is network of co-de$ning existence among all things repre-

sents an absolutely unimaginable volume of information; what could

possibly account for the existence of this information? Information can-

not have any meaning if its logic or validity is unknown, yet the informa-

tion in the Universe clearly exists. All of the information pertaining to

the world around you must exist in order for you to interact with it; how

can that information exist embodied in the thing? How could two in-

animate objects, or a galaxy of inanimate objects, contain in their being a

reference to other existent things, and to the laws of physics?

Essentially, these questions equate to asking “what does it take

for information to exist?” It is an immensely puzzling thought. !e in-

formation making up the star Betelgeuse, describing all its atomic mo-

tions and the light it has historically given off, its position in space, etc.,

all certainly exists, though it seems no one is paying a%ention to it; how

can that information possibly exist if it is unknown, if there is no objec-

tive record of or reality to it?

It seems there is no possible way it could exist in such an in-

stance; information must be known in order to exist. !is suggests that

the missing piece to the puzzle of de$ning the existence of information

is Awareness, that mysterious quality which is clearly present in exis-

tence (we experience it all day, every day), but whose origins and nature

seem perfectly unexplainable to us. In order for anything to exist relative

to anything else, there must also exist Cosmic Awareness of that rela-

tionship to contain the information embodied therein. If there exists no

Awareness of something's existence whatsoever, that thing cannot exist.

Cosmic Awareness is perfectly inseparable from Existence: it is the es-

sence of Existence, a necessary prerequisite to the existence of Existence.

To exist is to embody information in the Knowing of Cosmic Aware-

ness; the Knowing of Cosmic Awareness is Existence, the sum total of all

existent possibility. Every piece of Existence is accounted for by Cosmic

Awareness, contained in its uncountably in$nite web of relations be-

tween every other existent thing. It all extends from and relates to this

oneness, bound by the informational bonds comprising Existence.

!is might seem like an unnecessary complication, to answer

the question of how information can exist by postulating the existence of

a grand Consciousness which knows that information, but with a closer

look we can see that it simpli$es the ma%er; it is a simple fact, casually

overlooked for too long, that information cannot possibly exist if it is

unknown. Imagine an old, forgo%en book in an a%ic; if the information

making up the complex electromagnetic interaction between the book's

molecules were totally unaccounted for, how could the book possibly

retain its shape? !e energy making up that book contains in$nitely

more dynamic information than the book's words could ever encode,

and necessarily exists the entire time it sits neglected; if this information

were completely nonexistent, there could be no physical energy repre-

senting the book, and therefore the book could not possibly physically

exist. Our current de$nition of information does not account for this

fact, and for this reason our current de$nition is incomplete.

!e existence of information cannot be explained by the cur-

rently prevalent metaphysics of materialism, the idea that everything

which exists is strictly physical. Materialism is required to sidestep the

question “what does it mean for something to physically exist?”, because

that question immediately leads to the answer given above, that physical

existence is informational existence (and informational existence is nec-

essarily mental existence). When an investigation of how information

can exist is followed to its logical conclusion, materialism must fall away,

with idealism $nally taking its proper place as the foundation for meta-

physics. Idealism has o#en been misunderstood to represent the idea

that everything which exists is human mental content; this is not the

case, in fact, human mental content is but a minuscule re"ection of the

in$nity of Cosmic Awareness.

!ese two absolutely fundamental requirements, that Existence

cannot not exist, and that Awareness of its existence must exist for Exis-

tence to exist, account for the permanent being of Existence. “!en

which came $rst, Existence, or Awareness of Existence?” is an invalid

question: each part cannot exist without the other. !at is, Awareness

cannot exist without Existence being possible, and Existence cannot be

possible without Awareness existing. !ey co-de$ne and co-create.

Awareness contains not only the conditions of and interrelation-

ships between every existent thing, but knowledge of all possible condi-

tions and all possible interrelationships; the entirety of the information

in Existence is known at this fundamental level, and this knowledge

comprises all that is True. I will use the capitalized word Truth to mean

information known to Cosmic Awareness, part of the information de-

scribing and constituting Existence.

!e Knowing of all that is True of a thing entirely makes up the

Existence of that thing. Simultaneously, the Existence of all that is True

entirely makes up the being of the Knower, Cosmic Awareness. !at is,

without Truth existing, Cosmic Awareness would have nothing to Know,

and would not exist. On the other hand, without Cosmic Awareness pre-

sent to Know Truth, Truth could not exist. !e two necessarily coexist

as one.

!is bears clari$cation: I am not saying that Existence is con-

sciously aware in the exact sense that we are consciously aware. Cosmic

Awareness should probably not be thought of as a thinking entity (unless

its perspective is currently that of a free-willed life-form arising into exis-

tence from the interplay of energy and law, but more on that later), be-

cause the thinking we do is limited to the informational content our

brains can process, while Cosmic Awareness comprises the knowing of

eternal, unchanging Truth, the out"ow of which is embodied in the Uni-

verse and all possible frames of Existence. Of course, I cannot begin to

properly imagine the content of the in$nite mind from which the Uni-

verse arises, but I strongly suspect that it is unrecognizably different

from our familiar $nite subjectivity which unfolds over energetic change

in time. !is should go without saying, and will become abundantly

clear as we proceed, but I am absolutely not equating Cosmic Awareness

with the anthropomorphic, insecure God of religion. Cosmic Awareness

is not supernatural; it is the very essence of Nature, the root of all Truth.

Many would argue, saying "Awareness only arises through the

logical processing of information occurring in our brains; it is unique to

life.” Indeed, this seems to be the source of our consciousness. However,

this argument neglects the rather gigantic fact that all of the physical

Universe consists of the logical processing of information, of energy in-

teracting and reacting with perfect logical precision. !e only difference

between the processing that occurs in our brains and that which occurs

all around us is that our brains achieve a special type of self-reference

and self-in"uence, which will be discussed in much more detail in Chap-

ters 5 and 6.

Still more would protest, “No awareness is necessary. !e Uni-

verse exists and behaves according to its laws automatically." Quite a

bold assumption, though o#en taken for granted without question. Does

it, though? Where are the laws, the Truths contained, if there is abso-

lutely no awareness of their existence? How are the laws enforced and

constant over time? One might answer "!ey arise from the unchanging

necessary Truths you described above." I agree that the laws of physics

are products of necessary Truth, but the Truths' necessity hinges on the

knowing of those Truths. Cosmic Truth cannot exist without there exist-

ing Awareness of that Truth. It is time we take the de$nition of informa-

tion to its logical conclusion: information, in any form, can necessarily

only exist if its existence is Known; without knowledge of information's

being, information cannot exist.

However, I'll examine the question from the conventional scien-

ti$c perspective. What would it mean if Existence were dead, meaning,

forever unaware of its being? Let's imagine the situation in this way: We

know that there cannot be nothingness, that there has to be something

existent. To take the simplest method of ful$lling this condition: all that

exists is an electron, suspended in an endless void of nothingness. Who

in this instance can say that the electron is different from the nothing-

ness? What distinguishes the existent speck from the void?

You might say, "Well, the electron is the only thing that isn't

nothingness; therefore it exists." But what about the electron suggests in

itself that it exists? !e electron has no potential for change, no possible

interaction to participate in, no means of asserting its existence whatso-

ever. Remember that there is no awareness present in this example to

recognize that the electron is different from the in$nite void surrounding

it, just the electron itself is present. !e electron couldn't realize "I exist,"

and the nothingness certainly couldn't realize "I don't exist, but that elec-

tron does." !e electron would have no impetus provided by the laws of

physics (since as we've decided, for this example only the electron exists.

No mathematics or physical laws can exist in nothingness (of course, an

electron couldn't exist without the central laws of physics, but this is

simply an a%empt at an explanatory example of why this is an impossible

situation)). No ma%er how much “ma%er” is imagined to be present in

an unaware Universe such as this, it all equates to absolute nothingness,

because there is no way to internally (or externally) distinguish it from

nothingness, and no way for the informational content it should contain

to manifest its being.

Let's look at the conception of an unaware Universe another

way, closer to the scienti$c materialism prominent in philosophy since

the scienti$c revolution of the sixteenth century: If the Universe we in-

habit now is “dead” to itself, as many modern thinkers believe, until life

arises in this dead Universe, there is no awareness whatsoever. A#er life

has again died out, there is again no awareness whatsoever. !e only

awareness of any kind exists in $nite life forms. In this case, the time be-

tween successive arrivals of sentient races in the Universe could be said

to pass instantly; there is no awareness of the possibly trillions of years of

time between the arrival of awareness of reality in the form of life. Dur-

ing those time spans, how could the energy in the Universe be said to

exist at all; in other words, what does it exist in reference to? What if life

never arose? And most of all (this is the question which strict material-

ism cannot answer), how would the laws of physics determine the func-

tioning of the Universe if there were absolutely no awareness outlining

the existence and behavior of those laws?

To restate as succinctly as possible the ontological basis of this

book: all of Existence springs automatically from logical necessity, and

the requirement that logical necessity exist is founded on the primordial

and permanent Truth that it is impossible for nothingness to exist, cou-

pled with the requirement that Existence cannot exist without Aware-

ness of that Existence. In other words, Cosmic Awareness exists because

Existence is impossible without it, and Existence is required to exist.

Truths exists in the way that they do out of logical necessity ful$lling the

requirement that nothingness does not exist, and Existence is the em-

bodiment of the consequences which follow from these Truths.

In short, the answer to the question “How can it be possible that

all of this is even possible?” is not only that nonexistence cannot exist,

but that what has to exist in its place is that exquisitely complex, em-

bodying the full spectrum of all necessary possibility over an in$nity of

time. How this complexity arises from these simple foundational re-

quirements is our next topic.

CHAPTER 4

Truth

!roughout the history of human invention and investigation,

we have go%en so used to uncovering the logical explanations for every-

thing that happens, we have forgo%en to question why there's a perfectly

logical explanation for everything. We never ask how such logic can ex-

ist, and the fact that it does is simply taken for granted. How does all the

information in this Universe, this boundless, logically pristine system,

come to exist; what is its basis?

Forming the foundation for the immense system of information

embodied by Existence are Truths which necessarily exist, or necessarily

follow from more fundamental necessary truths. Each represents a logi-

cal certainty whose modi$cation would negate that Truth (in other

words, a necessary Truth can only exist in exactly one form; any other

conclusion drawn from this logical certainty is a falsehood), and Truths

of this class of existence are eternal and unchanging. !e Blackwell Dic-

tionary of Western Philosophy has a lucid de$nition: "A necessary truth

must be true and could not be false, whatever way the world is. It is true

in itself. Logically necessary truths are based on the principle of contra-

diction, having negations that are logically impossible."

Awareness contains not only the conditions of and interrelation-

ships between every existent thing, but knowledge of all possible condi-

tions and all possible interrelationships; the entirety of the informational

potential in Existence is known at this fundamental level, and this

knowledge comprises all that is True. !e logic of proportion contained

in mathematics provides an endless catalogue of examples of necessary

Truths, e.g. the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is π,

and any $gure with different proportions is not truly a circle (for an end-

less expanse of further necessary Truths, simply peruse Wolfram Math-

world's wiki). !e impossibility of nothingness existing is another neces-

sary Truth, an analytic, logically unassailable axiom.

I contend that the information physical systems embody can

only arise as a property of the Universe from the network of relations

between the necessary Truths held at all times and all places in Aware-

ness, and that these are clearly not at all human inventions nor are they

con$ned to human thought. (I'll be using the words logic, Truth, and

mathematics interchangeably, since mathematics is an instructive repre-

sentative of necessary Truths.) Only things that are logically possible to

exist can exist, and mathematics, or the more inclusive term Truth, de-

$nes what is possible to exist. For example, a circle can't exist that is a

square, and being inhabitants and participants in this informational sys-

tem, we can examine logically why that is. (It has nothing to do with

human labeling or de$ning; the two $gures have con"icting logical

properties.)

To those of you who do not yet understand that mathematics is

not a human invention but a Universal property: Where did the capacity

for humans to think mathematically come from? Did humans invent the

brain mechanisms that recognize mathematical and logical truth? Obvi-

ously, no, their existence is a prerequisite for mathematical understand-

ing in humans. Does human mathematical thought require mathematical

truth to exist as a prerequisite? Clearly, yes; there would be no way for

our neurons to discover this logic if it were nonexistent, and there would

be no way to reach general, universal mathematical conclusions without

mathematical truth existing independently of our $nite brains.

Here's a simple test you can perform to prove to yourself that

numbers really exist. Open up any word processor program, and type

the following words: “Mathematics is a fundamental aspect of the Uni-

verse; it describes much of the informational content of the Universe,

applying to all that exists physically, all that could possibly exist, and eve-

rything which is logically true and false about the Universe. (All that is

true is de$ned by all that is untrue, just as all that is untrue is de$ned by

all that is true.)” Highlight that text (leave out the apostrophes, of

course), and perform a word count. Your program will tell you that there

are 64 words and 368 characters in that selection. Now, if there is no

such thing as number, how could every computer reliably identify that

there are 64 things which share one complex characteristic (namely, be-

ing a string of characters bounded by spaces) and 368 things which share

another complex characteristic (being any symbol encoded in the selec-

tion) highlighted? Where did the computer get that information, if

number only exists in human minds? Where indeed. How could each

fact represent something true about the Universe (that there are 64

words highlighted comprising 368 characters), if the information mak-

ing up that truth does not simultaneously exist in the Universe? If you are two meters tall and I am one meter tall, the ratio be-

tween our heights (2:1) exists whether we have a language to express

this fact or not (along with all the ratios comparing every different size,

speed, duration, and every possible intelligible proportion amongst

things existent or possibly existent). It is part of the information en-

coded within and making up the relationships between existent things; it

is in fact these relationships between existent things which characterize

the being of Existence. Every single thing exists as the embodiment of all

the Truths which describe what that thing is. For this reason, the effec-

tiveness of mathematics is not at all unreasonable– mathematics ex-

plores some of the most fundamental and primary logical requirements

of Truth, and every existent phenomenon embodies all the Truths which

de$ne its existence.

Seven is not a prime number because people designed it to be

divisible only by itself and 1, humans recognize it as prime because upon

examination it is discovered to be divisible only by itself and 1, given all

the logic comprising what these concepts represent. It is astounding that

we haven't yet found a mathematical way to predict where prime num-

bers should be found on the number line. We cannot mathematically

analyze or understand numbers and all the boundless information they

encode; this fact alone should make it glaringly obvious that number is a

system beyond our invention.

Even before the system of information described by human

mathematics is discovered by intelligent life, the primes are still prime,

the squares are still square, the angles within a triangle add up to two

right angles, and so on. A musical major triad sounds the way it does not

because human ingenuity invented a pleasing harmony, but because the

sound waves' frequencies mathematically correspond in whole number

ratios, which physically resonate and thereby reinforce each other with a

sonorous ring (2:3 between root and $#h, 4:5 between root and third,

and 5:6 between third and $#h), and which our logical brains can easily

decode. !e examples are limitless in number because everything that

exists arises from the foundation of cosmic logic, undying Truth.

•§•

What instantiates physical existence– of what material does this

sublime Universe of nature consist? Put simply, the energy and force

making up the Universe are the necessary expression and embodiment

of the information in Awareness. Above, it is argued that no physical

content can exist without there existing Cosmic Awareness, knowing all

the information pertaining to that content; it is equally true that the

Awareness of that information cannot exist without the realm embody-

ing its content and relationship to other information, that which we call

the physical. If there is no embodiment of the content of information,

there is no information; the information pertaining to the existence of

any physical object is wholly contained and expressed in the characteris-

tics of its physical being.

!e most central, basic necessary Truths represent the in$nite

but speci$c boundary to the possible, and underlie all points in this con-

tinuous web of Existence. Each of these central Truths exists based on its

own infallibility; further Truths necessarily follow which depend on

these central Truths for their own validity. All of these in turn suggest

and require further Truths, generating a system of hierarchical necessi-

ties which de$nes all possibility in Existence. !rough a subtle and mo-

mentous string of requirements, this unimpeachable logical system nec-

essarily gives rise to energy, and the laws of physics de$ning the possi-

bilities open to that energy.

Everything you can see, think and experience has at its funda-

mental basis the pure logic of Universal Truth. All of these phenomena

exist as systems of information and logic extended from Truth; energy,

force, space, time, and consciousness are all systems of Universal infor-

mation. !e answer to the question “why does all energy unfailingly fol-

low the laws of physics?” is that energy is the embodiment of the laws of

physics; energy must abide by the fundamental physical laws because

energy is the direct expression of those physical laws. In its inexhaustible

outpouring of change over time, energy ful$lls the requirement that

there can never exist nothingness anywhere in Existence. Truth ex-

pressed in force is the logical framework through which this information

"ows, at every point serving to determine exactly how that energy can

exist and change; energy can never undergo an interaction that fails to

abide by the logic, extended from Truth, which makes up the existence

of that energy.

Here is a good point to remember that we are physically com-

prised of atoms and molecules, bundles of energy and force, and that the

unimaginably dynamic interchange of these bits of information actually

causes all of the sensations and ideas we experience. !e information

they embody represents all that is True of them, including the informa-

tion pertaining to their relationship with other existent things. All in-

formation is a consequence of the behavior of the fundamental Truths

interacting, contradicting and resolving, a process which manifests as the

laws of physics which de$ne everything about what the Universe is, how

it can change and interact– these physical Truths de$ne the existence of

those atoms; there is no separation between the Existence of the atoms

and the laws of physics which de$ne them and serve as their basis. In-

deed, there can be no fundamental separation of some region in Exis-

tence from another; every single thing's existence is comprised of its in-

formational relationships with every other thing in existence, comprising

the being of Cosmic Awareness.

All possibility exists at once, contained and implied by all neces-

sary Truths and the logical relationship between these Truths. However,

from considering the existence of time it is clear that not all possibility

can have physical expression at once; all physical realizations of neces-

sary Truth's possibility take the form of energetic change over time in the

ways allowed and required by the fundamental laws of physics. !e most

central necessary Truths are timeless, never changing, and the informa-

tional consequences of their existence underly and give rise to all ener-

getic "ux. Moment by moment, this never-ending interchange embodies

the in$nite possibilities contained within logical Truth, con$ned in its

random unfolding only by the limits set by the permanent nonexistence

of the impossible.

A uranium atom, for example, is a tiny bundle of a huge amount

of energy, encapsulated in the way that it is based on the logic of force

dictating the interactions between the conditions of the energy therein,

the electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear forces, and minuscule

gravitational characteristics of that energy. If the nucleus of this atom

were energetically split, force would govern the transition of the energy

in the atom's strongly bound nucleus as it is converted into new group-

ings of particles, alongside an explosion of light, pressure and heat, each

phenomena drawing the logic of its existence from Truth.

Time, space, and the physical laws that govern energy are also

implied by and contained within Truth. Time is nothing but change in

energy, be it through motion in space, oscillation in heat, propagation in

electromagnetic waves, etc.; the passing of time occurs as Universal in-

formation changes. Energy cannot change without time. (Where there's

no change, no heat, no energy, internally in that system there would be

no time passing, though that system would exist in its static state relative

to the changes occurring in the rest of the Universe. Due to zero-point

energy, it seems that no such static system can exist.)

!e Truths comprising the existence of the real numbers contain

(among other things) the logic of proportion, for example, that 2 is twice

as great as 1, 1 is 47 times as large as 1/47, and the entire scope of the

in$nite range of proportions suggested by the existence of numbers. !is

conceptual logic of proportion is physically embodied in space, which

holds the explanation to the content of its being in mathematical pro-

portions. In other words, space exists as the physical embodiment of the

basic cosmic Truths of the in$nite mathematics of continuity in dimen-

sional proportion. Space and the Truth de$ning space are not separate

phenomena; space is the embodiment of, the fabric of that logic, neces-

sarily expressing the limitless information it entails. All of the logical

axioms uncovered by geometry are contained in every point in space; no

ma%er how small or large the point in question, that point is both in$-

nitely small relative to the in$nite span of larger possible sizes and in$-

nitely large relative to the in$nite spectrum of smaller possible sizes con-

tained therein. (However, the $eld of energy which we are a part of and

which $lls the possibility outlined by space is warped away from this

foundational, omni-homogenous shape by its interaction with energy,

causing mass and gravitation, a process described in much more detail in

Part II, Chapters 1 and 2 of this book.)

!e integers represent (among other things) the interrelation-

ships between indivisible units of equal proportion (1s) following and

adding to each other in in$nite sequence. !e integers exist in the fact

that components of the Universe are countable; one quality that two

electrons and two protons share is the abstract property “two”. Division

occurs every time force is distributed amongst particles, the impulse di-

viding into every applicable particle and $eld in the region. Addition,

subtraction, and multiplication are forms of counting, (among other

things) de$ning the logical consequences of proportional relation. (E.g.

that a length divided equally into 10 parts can be grouped into 5 por-

tions of length 2, 2 portions of length 5, or 10 portions of length 1, and

the same length divided equally into 27,644,437 parts (being prime) can

only be said to have 27,644,437 portions of length 1, and no other

groupings (without further dividing the portions.)

!e duality between positive and negative numbers is repre-

sented in nature in force at all times, in charge, in momentum, etc.

Wherever Newton's third law (every action has an equal and opposite

reaction) is being obeyed in nature (which happens in every single reac-

tion between units of energy, an effectively in$nite amount of times in

the vast Universe every second), positive and negative logical magni-

tudes exist with respect to each other.

When a leaf falls from a tree, the number describing how many

leaves are in the tree is subtracted from by 1; simultaneously, the number

describing how many leaves are falling through air towards the Earth at

that moment is added to by 1. (Of course, this is not to say that there is

some numeral "oating out there in space recording these numbers; these

numbers exist in the informational makeup of the truth describing and

comprising the contents of the Universe– the subtraction from the

number of leaves in the tree is a necessary informational consequence of

the leaf falling from the tree, and is part of what describes the existence

of the leaf and tree.) Soon a#er this, when the leaf lands on the ground,

the number describing how many leaves are falling through the air is

subtracted from by 1, and the number of leaves on the ground is added

to by 1.

During the leaf 's falling, it picks up and expends kinetic energy.

!is energy is at $rst all contained as potential energy in the leaf 's gravi-

tational position; as the leaf accelerates through the gravitational $eld it

is situated in, part of that potential energy is expressed as motion. !is

kinetic energy is divided amongst the octillions of atoms the leaf 's en-

ergy interacts with; the sound of the leaf 's falling alone causes more at-

oms to move than there have been seconds in the history of the Uni-

verse.

Which atoms happen to be directly affected by the leaf are de-

termined by their geometrical position in the Universe, information

which is accounted for in Cosmic Awareness. Many nitrogen atoms will

pick up momentum due to the leaf 's motion, but it is true that the nitro-

gen atoms which happen to occupy the Crab Nebula are not among

these special few; only those nitrogen atoms in the leaf 's direct vicinity

are directly in"uenced by its motion. If these atoms were not geometri-

cally near the leaf 's tree of origin at the time the leaf falls, those atoms

would not be directly affected by the leaf 's motion. (Chaos theory at-

tempts to describe the improbable possibility that distant atoms can be

affected indirectly by minuscule motions like this, and Truth contains

the information making up these types of possibilities.)

To reemphasize the points made so far, Truth describes what

exists; any single object's existence depends on the innumerable facts

which encode what is True about that object. Mathematical, purely logi-

cal Truths account for a great lion's share of this Truth, and it is for this

reason that mathematics is so profoundly successful when used by hu-

mans to model and interpret Universal phenomena.

More complex mathematics, built up from the interplay of more

fundamental properties like size, duration, and the mysterious logic of

particulate interaction are expressed physically in systems like atoms,

chemistry, and our DNA. Natural selection, the primary mechanism for

evolution, arises as a logical system of Truth from its constituent smaller-

scale logical systems: the laws of chemistry (which water's unique quali-

ties of adhesion, cohesion and surface tension directly proceed from, as

well as carbon's diverse potential for bonding), the logic of gene replica-

tion, life's consistent requirement for energy (be it energy from the sun

or energy from eating those organisms which photosynthesize, or from

eating those plant-eating organisms), sex and genderization, the competi-

tive nature of survival, the general tendency for far more offspring to be

produced than the environment can support, et cetera.

!e logic within our various languages directly extends from

more simple properties of reality; language is a logical form within

which information can be linearly encoded and communicated. Words

serve as shared general ideas around which our personal thoughts can

crystallize more easily, and be communicated more clearly, though the

special connotations we personally hold in mind when we think of dif-

ferent words in different contexts are never perfectly conveyed through

speech or body language. If there were no logic fundamental to Exis-

tence, we could not possibly invent language; the existence of the logic

underlying our languages is the prerequisite material to their develop-

ment, and is not a product of their creation as we generally believe. Simi-

larly, nothing we “create” is created by us; we simply rearrange and join

systems of information and logic which are already present to build them

into new, novel or useful forms.

Examples can be found in any one of our technologies. !ey all

depend on more central logical properties for their emergent utility, e.g.,

to function, our cars require the physical logic of force, utilized in our

engineering of the engine, gears, axles and wheels, and make use of the

chemical structure of gasoline, and the resultant explosion of energy

when a spark of sufficient temperature is introduced to a mist of gasoline

particles; each of these systems of logic and information are derived

from more fundamental Truths. A similar nested hierarchy is present in

our computers, the internet, the monetary system, the post office, our

cultures, our emotions, our minds; in short, in every composite thing

that is not itself a necessary Truth. !is progression of larger systems of

emergent logic arising from the cumulative effect of sufficient numbers

of smaller-system logical interactions spans the boundless spectrum

from those described by quantum mechanics to those governing the

progression of stars and galaxies.

Smaller still in size and duration than quantum logic are the

physical processes summing together to give rise to quantum phenom-

ena, just as larger in size and duration than our mathematics of galactic

evolution must be the physical processes made up of interaction of spans

of energy larger than the observable Universe over hundreds of trillions

of years (with the Universe making up a microcosmic subset of the

larger system; more on this idea in Part II, Chapter 3). In$nity extends

beyond the limits of our investigation in every possible direction, and is

physically existent wherever it extends.

!e foundational Truths underlying Existence not only de$ne

what exists, but all that is logically and informationally possible to exist.

Just as every possible three-dimensional form exists within the potential

of every three-dimensional enclosure of space (i.e. every possible marble

sculpture exists already in a slab of sufficient size), every possible piece

of music exists in the possibility represented by the logical system of

music, of sound, pitch, and rhythmic relations over time. A Michelan-

gelo or a Beethoven recognizes more possibility than lesser artists. Bee-

thoven's Moonlight Sonata never existed in actuality before he wrought

it into being, only as a secret and unlikely gem of universal possibility.

Now that it has explicit being, its existence has been re"ected in millions

of minds, each personally lending the work a unique signi$cance based

on the way they experience it in the context of their lives, dispositions

and emotions.

!e possibility for you to be reading this sentence at this time

and place in your life has always existed; it needed an almost in$nitely

unlikely set of circumstances to come to pass (including several billion

years of Earthly evolution in this corner of this galaxy happening exactly

the way it did, and the events of your life and mine unfolding exactly the

way they did, not to mention the preceding billions of years of star birth

and rebirth allowing the Earth to se%le into the speci$c orbit it now oc-

cupies, set in motion by the exact unfolding of the energy released by the

Big Bang), but the possibility for it to occur always has and always will

be part of the possibility inherent to the Truth making up Existence.

!e same can be said of all your experiences, and every possible

event and circumstance. Every possible something, be it an object, an

experience, an event, a life form, etc., everything possible to exist is implied

by and contained within the boundless possibility represented by Truth,

and the conglomerative relations between Truths. A planet of more suit-

able conditions like the lovable Earth realizes more of this inherent pos-

sibility than an unsuitable planet, a Venus or Mercury. Of course, both

Venus and Mercury represent the interaction between mind-boggling

numbers of atoms swept up in vortices of physical possibility, but on a

planet more suitable to the delicate balance of life, these vortices yield

subjectivity, imagination, technology, transcendence. !e only piece

missing from this in$nite, "owering potential is -nothingness-.

•§•

Everything that exists embodies Truth. Even falsehoods are

Truths; it is true that they are false. For example, it is true that this

statement is false: “!is great sentence is comprised of four thousand

le%ers.” Truths de$ne all falsehoods; the sentence contains exactly 49

le%ers, so it is false to say it comprises any other number of le%ers. It is

interesting that in a self referential statement like this, where the number

stated changes the number of le%ers in the sentence, it can be impossible

to state it with truth. For example “!is great sentence is comprised of

forty-nine le%ers.” is still false, because now the sentence contains 46

le%ers. “!is great sentence is comprised of forty-six le%ers.” contains 45.

“!is great sentence is comprised of forty-$ve le%ers.” again contains 46:

this particular sentence has no possible logical resolution where it can

state a truth.

Gödel's famous incompleteness theorems rely on this potential

for paradox arising from logical self-reference. It seems that only a vast

exaggeration of the signi$cance of this realization would lead a logician

to believe that because all axiomatic systems contain instances of ir-

resolvable self-reference, no axiomatic systems can represent absolute

truths. !is would be a misinterpretation of the value of Gödel's theo-

rem; it simply acknowledges the unavoidably paradoxical nature of self-

reference in a logical system. Even the grand logical system of Existence

might be considered incomplete in this sense, based on the paradox “!e

only way for nothingness to exist is for it not to exist.” !e contradictory

nature of self-referential de$nition is explored more fully in Part 2,

Chapter 6.

In any case, the entire breadth of falsehoods pertaining to any

truth (e.g. 1+1=2) are contained within and implied by that one truth

(i.e. 1+1≠3, 1+1≠4, 1+1≠5... as well as 1+1≠ a ham sandwich, 1+1≠ Be-

telgeuse). !us, an in$nite number of falsehoods surround every Truth,

and these falsehoods in themselves represent Truths, in that it is true

that they are false. If it weren't true that they are false, the Truth would

exist differently; the in$nite falsehoods surrounding Truths de$ne those

Truths, just as those Truths de$ne the falsehoods relating to them. !ere

are uncountably in$nite sets of Truths and falsehoods for every single

thing in Existence, because every thing in Existence exists relative to

every other thing in Existence; Existence is one whole, comprised of the

inter-de$nition of its parts, such that no component part can be sepa-

rated from the whole.

Truths are de$ned in in$nite ways by the interrelationships be-

tween components of Existence. !e path that every one of your atoms

has taken through space since their formation exists in Truth; that is, if a

carbon atom in your right eye was forged in the same supernova as an

atom of oxygen in your le# big toenail, this fact will always be true, con-

tained in the history of the Universe (the chain of causality which leads

to these atoms occupying the present situation), even if we could never

$nd it out. One could ra%le off instances of the mind-meltingly complex

system of Truths and Untruths in Existence without end; there is noth-

ing you can think about that doesn't represent Truth. (E.g. you might try

to disprove this by thinking 1+1=3, yet it is True that this is false.)

•§•

To recap, our Universe is the part of the physical embodiment of

Cosmic Awareness that we happen to inhabit and can possibly observe.

Consciousness of Truth exists at all points in Existence, from in$nitely

small to in$nitely large, and it is the Awareness of Truth that de$nes how

energy can interact, how gravity pulls, how light propagates, how water

"ows, and how action potentials in neurons are orchestrated. Cosmic

Awareness contains not only the possibility for the rules of chess to exist,

but every possible chess game given those rules. Awareness contains not

only the possibility for numbers to exist and to describe the relation-

ships between existent entities, but every possible number and logical

interrelationship therein, including every mathematical operation and

theorem we have so far uncovered.

!e interplay between information (in the form of energy and

force) and the logic of Truth dictating how the two can interact combine

to embody a sublimely limitless breadth of potential; energy can $nd a

restful (though ultimately temporary) home in atoms, which can group

into molecules and participate in chemical reactions, the logical possi-

bilities of which can produce self-replicating molecules, life, and eventu-

ally your lovely awareness. Where more energy is compounded into

larger and larger systems, more information is there embodied.

!e entirety of the atoms in the sun, for example, represents an

absolutely staggering amount of information, and the physical character-

istics of the sun, its nuclear reactions, gravity, and the light it gives off, are

consequences of its physical informational content, expressed in energy

and force. Similarly, the molecules in the sea of air we bo%om-dwell in

each occupy a distinct informational point of existence at any moment;

each one has a speci$c place in space and time relative to every other

object in spacetime regardless of its velocital or accelerational condi-

tions; each one behaves exactly as it should given its logical makeup and

its logical interaction with every force that applies to it, and each is in-

ternally characterized by its hierarchical information structure (arising

out of the informational interchanges in its constituent particles, and

their interactions with the forces acting on them).

!e leaf falling into the river before me at this moment is the

highest culmination of the necessary Truths summing to that leaf 's exis-

tence that I can readily observe, its path through the air temporarily rep-

resenting the change in Universal information from the leaf occupying

the tree to the leaf "oating downstream. Every event, including every

action you take, changes the informational content of the Universe: for

instance, as your eyes scan these lines, the information modeled in your

brain is changing, the position of your eyes relative to the page is

changing, etc. Breathing in, you set off a cascade of cellular chemical in-

terchanges involving speci$c molecules, which used to be part of the in-

formational (energetic) content of the atmosphere, and are now spiral-

ing down your arteries into trillions of your cells. If you pick up a hand-

ful of dirt and throw it into the air, you've rewri%en the history of those

specks of dirt, which now each have a different orientation than they did

previously and are sca%ered in different locations; like all information,

this information is connected to all the information in Existence by be-

ing known to Cosmic Awareness.

Consider the information contained in a spider's web: the

chemical makeup of it, the shape it occupies in space (relative not only

to the trees around it and the Earth, but to every atom in every galaxy

(within its light-cone, a relativistic concept describing the area over

which information pertaining to its existence can extend, limited by the

speed of light)), the air it displaces, the statistical trap it represents to

each "ying bug in the area, the vanishingly minuscule gravitational pull it

exerts on the world around it, and most of all, its origins. !is gorgeously

complex network of information relies on the spider to weave it into be-

ing, and that speci$c spider's existence depends upon billions of years of

evolution along the unique path its entire ancestry took in the context of

the evolution of all the species evolving concurrently.

!e same astounding breadth of origin precedes every individ-

ual life form, and truly every event; observe a tree, its gorgeous fractal

branching, its elegant molecular machinery, the pleasing texture of its

color and form touching your mind. To reach the habitat it now occu-

pies, the tree's ancestry has taken an extremely lengthy journey in time

and distance from the seas, where its ultimate ancestors (and ours)

originated. All of this, both the tree in itself and the inner re"ection of its

nature in your awareness required an effectively in$nite amount of un-

likely circumstances to arrange into the informational system that the

interaction between you and tree represent.

Not a single thing exists that is unnatural. A beehive is as natural

an embodiment of Truth as a cloud hanging in the light of a sunset, or an

electron, and a car arises from Cosmic possibility into existence by the

exact same overarching set of natural laws as stars and planets. Your ex-

perience of the Universe is just as much a part of the Universe as gravity,

water and light are. Your personal awareness is a "owering bud of Eternal

Truth, perfectly indivisible from all of Existence.

CHAPTER 5

Mind and the Illusion of Dualism

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. ~Khalil Gibran

!e assumption that consciousness is a substance distinct from

physical reality is the standard belief which the majority of people

throughout history have shared. !at this belief has been so widely held

is not surprising; at $rst glance, our minds indeed seem radically differ-

ent from the substances making up our bodies and the physical world

around us. You can't pick up someone's mind, you can't see another per-

son's mind, and you can't experience another person's mind. !e mind is

our private domain, whereas the physical world is a public space we can

experience equally. !ough such an understanding of mind seems suit-

able on $rst glance, it has many critical "aws.

If something is to have an in"uence on physical reality, it must

itself have a physical aspect. !e force of its in"uence on the physical

world necessarily is its physical manifestation; without such a physical

in"uence, the thing in question could not possibly interact with the

physical world. It is clear that our minds interact with the physical world;

if not, how is my mind causing my hands to type this right now? It is also

clear that the physical world in"uences the content of mind; if this

weren't the case, how could the light coming from this page cause the

image of these words to materialize in your mind? Every sensation we

feel is the result of our brain's interaction with the physical world, and

everything we know of the physical world we perceive mentally.

Traditionally, it has been assumed that our inner experience of

the world is completely separate from the outer world, as if our bodies

frame a bubble separating our inner, conscious world from being part of

the external physical world. However, essentially all the evidence uncov-

ered by modern neuroscience suggests that our minds arise from the

swarm of energetic exchange carried out by our neurons; there are

countless experiments in which an experimenter physically affects a pa-

tient's neurons, while the patient notes de$nite effects this has on their

mind. With FMRI, we can watch how the brain responds to various

stimuli in real time, and note how these responses are correlated with

experiential effects. On account of these facts, what reason do we have to

believe that the information making up our minds and the information

making up the physical Universe are fundamentally different types of

information?

It turns out there is no reason to believe such a thing; in reality,

there is but a continuum of energy and force, with some rare and minus-

cule regions (living creatures) processing more logical information at a

quicker rate and with more complexity than the relatively simple infor-

mational exchange automatically undergone by physical energy and

force in the natural world. Both the conscious, willful experience which

we inhabit and the interactions of particles obeying fundamental laws

represent different shades of the never-ending informational exchange of

energy interacting over time in the Awareness which underlies and en-

ables it all. !at is, physical and mental are manifestations of one ulti-

mate substance: information within Cosmic Awareness. !e physical

aspect of this in$nite mind is the Universe, the in$nite string of Uni-

verses preceding it and to follow it, and all possible Universes or frames

of existence. !e mental or experiential aspect of this mind is the Know-

ing of the interrelationships and unfolding of this energetic information,

along with the Truths which gives rise to and which de$ne the possibili-

ties for that physical energy.

!e boundless potential represented by the Truth at the heart of

Existence gives rise to all dynamic energy, division, and change; every

individual phenomenon in Existence is a direct extension of, and is thus

indivisible from, the One, Cosmic Awareness. !ere is no spirit world

distinct from the physical. !e concept of an individual soul that tran-

scends physical reality is ill-conceived; if you possess a soul that is com-

pletely immaterial, that soul can have absolutely no contact with nor in-

"uence on your life here in the physical realm. What about it makes it

yours? It seems that the commitment to the concept of having a soul of

ineffable spirit arises from the historical difficulty of accounting for con-

sciousness, and from hope for an a#erlife. I'll address both of these con-

cepts in great detail later on in this writing, but for now, the point I'm

making is that if a thing is connected to the physical world in any way at

all (for example, by in"uencing it or by being affected by it), that thing is

perfectly inseparable from the physical world.

Human consciousness, and consciousness in general, is a sub-

stance arising from energetic interplay in Cosmic Truth; it is not ethereal

spirit distinct from the physical world. (Again, if it were, it could not

have any interaction with the physical world, and we can very clearly see

that our minds are in"uenced by the physical.) I conjecture that the sub-

stance of human (and all) consciousness is in fact the energetic process-

ing and modeling of information itself. !e interchange of energetic im-

pulses between neurons represents (like all energetic change) informa-

tion in Cosmic Awareness. All energy is equivalent to information in

Awareness; the conditions of every bit of energy and the relations be-

tween all the energy in the Universe are informationally present in Cos-

mic Awareness. (!eir informational presence in Awareness is their

physical being, containing all that is True of their existence.)

Your personal consciousness is the local fabric of Cosmic

Awareness (which exists at all points in space and time), brie"y contain-

ing your body and the physical, energetic information comprising it: we

experience this small subsection of the whole of Cosmic Awareness. !e

actual feel of subjectivity, the "me" which experiences our lives, is the

Awareness of Existence called into sel*ood by the cumulative informa-

tional exchange in our brains and bodies.

!is conception represents a solution to the “hard problem” of

consciousness, which asks why experience exists at all, why the informa-

tional processing in the brain results in this vivid spectrum of real sensa-

tions. As put forward above, all information in Existence is accompanied

by and embodied within the necessary Awareness of that information. In

gathering and processing information, brains generate an informational

model of that information, which represents a self-contained reproduc-

tion of that information/Awareness; it is this higher-tiered informational

system which we experience as our consciousness, our thoughts and

sensations. Your experiences, arising from the informational processing

undergone by your nervous system, make up part of the Cosmic Aware-

ness present in the space you take up at the time you inhabit that space,

alongside the Knowing (inaccesible to your biological consciousness) of

the physical nature and behavior of all your atoms and sub-atomic parti-

cles, and the relative position in spacetime of the region you inhabit

(making up the fundamental Awareness of the physical world which

your brain informationally re"ects in its modeling).

Consciousness is therefore not the production of our brains,

exactly, but is the omnipresent essence of Existence, modulated through

neural logical interaction to re"ect in Awareness the energetic informa-

tion our brains interpret and coordinate. In human minds, the unimag-

inably huge number of these logical interchanges occurring each second

sums to the vividness of consciousness we experience, waning in tired-

ness and waxing in excitement or intense focus. Everything about our

consciousness relates to the speed and character of neuronal logical in-

terchange, including our emotions, sensations, the sound and under-

standing of our thoughts in our mind, and the speed at which time

seems to pass.

!e moral and existential rami$cations of these ideas will be

explored in later chapters, but in this chapter and the next, I want to ex-

amine the question “What is the nature of the interaction between brain

and mind, how does it proceed?”

•§•

One of the most signi$cant elements in understanding the op-

eration of the human mind is the relationship between consciousness

and the subconscious. !ere is no strict divide between the two, but a

hierarchy of participatory in"uence which is shared by these compo-

nents of mind. !e conscious mind can be de$ned as the cumulative

result of the brain's processes related to understanding and responding

to the external world (and evaluating how conditions in the external

world make the inner world of sensation feel); animal consciousness is a

survival tool, which in humans has developed into a sophisticated ra-

tional engine. !e Cosmic Awareness which accompanies the energetic

reality of this set of information processed by the brain experiences the

consequences of that information, all our sensations and thoughts. !e

subconscious element of mind can be de$ned as the rest of the informa-

tional processing undergone by the brain, some of which is devoted to

responding to information gathered by the conscious mind, and most of

which is devoted to tasks which consciousness is not responsible for,

such as nutrient distribution, the monitoring of breathing and heart rate,

the release of various hormones, the generation of hunger, and the proc-

essing of sense data necessary to forming a model of the external world

for consciousness to respond to.

As you can see, the action of subconscious brain processing of-

ten informs and motivates conscious thought and action, and for this

reason cannot be considered strictly non-conscious. For example, while

the conscious mind is operating on a speci$c experiential issue, perhaps

correctly $lling out a document, the brain is at work processing volumes

of information pertaining to generating a model of the world based on

sense data, evaluating its danger/safety value, controlling bodily upkeep,

and reevaluating memories in reference to the present moment, to per-

haps be of some value to the conscious mind's tasks of survival in the

external world. Much of this informational content is emotional; our

mood is generally the product of our subconscious evaluating and proc-

essing the implications of emotionally charged memories, which in"u-

ences the content of our consciousness.

It is important to recognize that Cosmic Awareness Knows the

content of subconscious informational processing in the same way that it

Knows our conscious experience; the only reason we do not experience

that region of Cosmic Awareness is because the region of Cosmic

Awareness we occupy, that devoted to the tasks of consciousness, is not

involved in guiding those subconscious processes. It is almost the same

reason my human consciousness is not experiencing the consciousness

of people around me right now; my region of Cosmic Awareness is in-

formationally distinct from theirs (being located in my brain, separate

from the operation of their brains). In the same way, the highest layer of

the conscious/subconscious level we occupy is informationally distinct

from the multitudinous lower-level processes underlying it; we do not

experience the full breadth of subconscious reality because we are situ-

ated in the informational realm pertaining to the demands of conscious

survival and activity in the external world.

!e conscious mind represents a level of Cosmic Awareness

above and beyond the existence of the subconscious brain processes; it

is the informational summation of all subconscious information process-

ing undergone by our brains in the interest of survival in the external

world (and enjoying life most fully). Because of this, ma%ers more per-

tinent to the o#en external task at hand are more clearly present in con-

sciousness; that is, Cosmic Awareness contains the experience of all in-

ternal brain processes, though from the perspective of our outward-

facing, survival-oriented consciousness, each has a de$nite experiential

volume based on where our focus is turned and how involved the proc-

ess is. !e individual brain processes performed by lower-level networks

of neurons independent of conscious guidance can be thought of as only

relatively subconscious from our conscious, top-of-the-informational-

hierarchy perspective, in that they are experientially present in Cosmic

Awareness, just not in the same region of experiential awareness our

externally-focused conscious mind occupies.

To clarify, conscious activity which we explicitly experience, like

performing well in a job interview, might span every brain region, taking

information from the visual and auditory $eld and synthesizing it with

information from our centers of memory, our social circuitry, our higher

reasoning, etc. !is brain-wide process has center stage in our awareness

simply by virtue of the energetic complexity of its enactment, and the

necessity for our highest-level consciousness to guide it. On the other

hand, a fundamentally subconscious activity, like the distribution of nu-

trients to cells in need, operates with no input from our conscious mind,

and is therefore not experientially present in the spectrum of things we

consciously experience.

Our consciousness is the sum of all physical logic interactions in

the brain pertaining to understanding and responding to the demands of

the outer world. !ough each of our thoughts is comprised of millions

of energetic neuronal exchanges (coordinated by subconscious proc-

esses), we experience them each as whole ideas, an experiential repre-

sentation of the informational content they amount to, and therein lies

the power of the mind: as the global effect of all smaller processes in the

informational hierarchy of brain, mind contains at once a comprehensive

informational picture of all its constituent processes. !is theory offers a

very nice solution to one of the most puzzling riddles of neuroscience,

the 'binding problem', which asks "how do all of the brain's disparate

processes (sight, hearing, calculating, imagining, feeling, etc.) appear at

once in one single mind?" !e mind is the highest informational level of

the brain-mind hierarchy, the single effect of all the smaller components

of brain activity combined in the subjective experience of tremendous

numbers of lower-level universal logic operations. Every brain process is

represented in the same awareness- it's not as if each separate brain re-

gion were connected to a central hub, with the hearing part of the brain

connected to the seeing part of the brain through this consciousness

center. !ere is no "seat of consciousness" in the brain where all informa-

tion modeled therein must pass through to reach conscious awareness;

all informational exchange therein is present in Awareness.

If a region in the right hemisphere is processing a melody that

appeared from the chance melding of memories from several songs

heard previously, and a region from the le# hemisphere contains the

neural mechanisms for whistling, mind at once has access to both of

these disparate brain regions, by containing them both in the same space

of Awareness. To combine the two, mind simply recognizes the connec-

tion between the two concepts and the desire to utilize their compatibil-

ity, and this new logical input from the informational summation of the

mind is echoed in the brain, and impels the "ow of action potentials

across the brain channels which results in the content of the melody be-

ing transmi%ed to the whistling apparatus and then produced in sound.

Mind has access to the informational import of both processes simultaneously,

though the disparate neural networks handling that information are not

directly interacting in brain. In the case of whistling , mind's recognition of a

desired logical connection between the disparate neural structures is re#ected

in brain as new neural activity: the transferral of the information making up

the melody to the neural networks associated with tongue and lip

coordination.

It is the function of mind to perceive the possibility for a logical

connection between disparate regions of neural activity; by connecting

the two, mind forges a new logical concept, and this information serves

as new input for the brain's lower-level, distributed neural processing. In

effect, mind closes a recursive loop in the brain/mind hierarchy, wherein

the functions of neural informational processing serve as input for the

mind's highest-level processing, and the results of mind's highest-level

processing (thinking, surveying possibilities buried throughout the

brain's memories and elaborating simple concepts by connecting these

possibilities) serve as inputs for the multitudinous array of lower-level

processing centers throughout the brain.

Mind connects the productions of brain's regions by following

where the sensations of their emergent logic leads. When a brain region

is working on producing an informational solution, mind can feel a hint

of what that information will prove to be: in one common form, when

feeling that a word or fact is on the tip of one's tongue, brain is busy try-

ing different pa%erns of neural $ring to locate the logic comprising the

word. Essentially, this equates in mind to playing hot and cold with each

of brain's a%empts at completing the desired logical connection; we can

distantly feel what information is buried in the circuits of our neurons,

and tell the brain what neurons to $re as we try to narrow down to the

concept we are looking for. !e search is re$ned by mind continually as

new neural pa%erns are engaged, eventually honing in on the desired

concept. Once a concept is chosen, it is apparently encoded into short

term memory and cycled there until the mind either has connected it to

another concept, used it to frame the informational context for another

decision, or moved on to an unrelated thought-process, in which case

the neurons engaged in cycling that information quickly drop it to help

process new information.

In the context of this theoretic framework, the solution to the

mind/body problem (more appropriately, the mind/brain problem) can be

seen a li%le more clearly. !e mechanism of this interaction can be ex-

plained in terms of the equality of the physical and mental as two shades

of the one all-pervading substance, energy/information. !ere is no

break in Existence, no realms separate from any other. !ere is only one-

ness, with energy cycling through the in$nite possibilities therein mo-

ment by moment. My consciousness is not separate from this energetic

realm, it is a unique manifestation of its inherent potential. Our personal

awarenesses directly re"ect the energetic reality of the world around us;

there is no break between the physical phenomena of our brains' infor-

mational processing and our conscious perception of that information;

the two are different features of one phenomenon.

Because both brain and mind are aspects of this single informa-

tional continuum, the mind cannot evaluate the overall content of the

brain's processes without in"uencing those processes; mind does not

stand apart from brain and perceive its informational content, but per-

ceives that content through its interaction with it. In the very act of per-

ceiving different regions of brain activity, mind in"uences that activity;

mind and brain are equal participants in the informational processing

undergone therein. !e mind and brain interchange information like

two mirrors face to face, with the storm of informational activity in the

brain logically organized and re"ected in the consciousness of the mind.

If the mind recognizes the opportunity for change amidst the emerging

pa%erns of information, it can bring those changes into being by focus-

ing on them, by bringing them into one logical picture. In"uencing the

informational content of the brain is a cooperative function that requires

input from the brain-encompassing mind to operate on a high enough

level for an organism's survival.

Just think, as you read these lines, the information your brain

models in response to these sights exists as a pa%ern of neural-energetic

interchange, and during the $ring of those speci$c brain regions, this

experience manifests in your consciousness. Every single thought you

think physically exists at a de$nite location or network of locations

within your head, embodied in the physical informational processing

which corresponds to its mental realization. Amazingly, your conscious

experience of this physical information is sophisticated enough to mod-

ify the physical existence of that information, morphing it into new

forms and thus new experiences; for instance, read the $rst $ve words of

the next sentence in ultra-slow motion. If you are doing so, it is because

your consciousness understood what was wri%en, and has chosen to

compel your brain to perform such an unusual act of neuro-

informational modeling. What an unimaginably valuable circumstance,

being chief operator of such an outrageously able imagination-machine

as a human brain.

•§•

!inking proceeds as an iterative process, with each new string

of thoughts arising through the brain's distributed evaluation and modi-

$cation of previous thoughts. Broadly stated, the conscious thinking we

experience alternates between being directed by the multitudinous

complex of lower-hierarchical-level neural systems at one moment (the

subconscious processing of the pertinent information by a widespread

network of neural regions), and by the overarching conscious mind at

the next. As you make up your mind to do something, the act of thinking

that thought affects the physical reality of brain; in fact, the concurrent

change in the physical reality of the brain enables that thought. In other

words, the thought is the electrochemical (informational) change in the

brain, the thought proceeding over time as the physical change unfolds.

!e experience of willfully thinking a thought occurs while the

brain is in action electrochemically responding to and enacting the logi-

cal requirements of the thought; this is the period of time in which the

conscious mind is generating an output, and the subconscious network

within brain is receiving it as input. !e new input is distributed

amongst the pertinent structures of the brain and is processed in refer-

ence to short-term and long-term memory (depending on the logic re-

quired to process that new information). As the brain's pertinent regions

evaluate the elements of this information, the thought hangs in aware-

ness, experienced in mind as a rapidly changing echo of the previous

thought (rapidly changing based on brain's new processing of the

thought). !e direct, willful thinking of the thought happened in the

past, and in the present, mind perceives the return signals from the brain

based on its calculations. A thought echoes in awareness for a moment,

during which the mind evaluates the brain's reaction to the thought, be-

fore responding to it by integrating the new results to coalesce another

thought; this new coordination of the disparate brain processes involved

is the portion of consciousness we experience as willful. It is the part of

experience that takes effort and input by us, conscious us, to occur.

!e rate at which this interchange occurs is broadly represented

by the frequency of neural oscillations (o#en called brainwaves), with

higher frequencies corresponding to more focused conscious engage-

ment, and lower frequencies corresponding to periods of mental relaxa-

tion or sleep. !is can be understood in terms of the rapidity with which

the brain's neural structures require input from the higher-order perspec-

tive of the conscious mind in order to proceed in their informational

processing task; periods of high frequency neural oscillations represent

trains of thought which would quickly lose momentum if consciousness

were distracted from them; the neurons cannot keep up their informa-

tional interchange without active, coordinated input from the conscious

mind in reference to information contained in disparate neural regions.

On the other hand, low frequency neural oscillations character-

ize more somnolent mental states, like daydreaming or wandering

thought, times when consciousness casually experiences the results of

lower-order neural processing in the brain's various regions, and more or

less watches them unfold naturally without in"uencing them. Some-

times, when we are fatigued or are working on an especially difficult

thought process, it takes a second or two before brain produces a result

that mind wants to act on, that is, pick up on, combine with other frag-

ments of thought, and explicitly think.

In order to investigate the nature of this interchange, here's an

example to participate in: sing “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat” all the way

through to yourself in your mind. Now, what happened between your

brain and mind in reading and responding to that sentence?

Mind: Mind tells brain to tell eyes to look at those words in-

tently.

Brain: Brain receives information from retinas, decodes it, and

interprets its content.

Mind: Mind experiences the sound and meaning of each word

as brain evaluates the information making up that content in several neu-

ral regions simultaneously. (In many cases, the information processed by

one neural region is needed to modulate and guide other regions, and

can only do so through mind's all-encompassing overview of brain proc-

esses: mind makes the necessary connections between disparate neural

structures.) !is process repeats until mind has experienced the com-

plete logical idea, the sentence.

Brain: !e full meaning of the sentence echoes in short term

memory, the information cycling among the neurons engaged in its

modeling.

Mind: !e logical import of the sentence is experienced at once

in mind. Recognizing the imperative, mind decides whether or not to

carry out the called upon action. Assuming it did choose to sing the en-

tire melody to itself:

Brain: Based on this new information, brain searches through its

voluminous hierarchical knowledge for the appropriate information: the

tune and lyrics to “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”. !e information appears

readily, because the title “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” is linked to every

neural structure which contains any part of the information making up

the song; you cannot recognize what “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” refers

to without accessing the neural structures making up its content.

Mind: Mind perceives this search and its result as a glimpse of

what the information as a whole will feel like when called into aware-

ness; the sensation is: “I know that song, and here it is in my memory.”

(!e processing between brain and mind occurs so quickly, in my mind

the melody of the $rst $ve words appears immediately upon reading

them, apparently without any willful activity on my part.) However, in

order to sing the whole song, mind must choose to activate that informa-

tion by thinking it; mind willfully impels the brain to stop reading and

process the logic of the song in order, in tune and in time. As this occurs,

mind experiences the song.

Brain: !e information of what that experience was like is evalu-

ated by various regions of the brain, and it sits in short term memory

while brain and mind co-evaluate.

Generally, the next thought occurs when mind, surveying the

calculations of the various regions of the brain simultaneously, perceives

enough of a connection between those regions to consolidate a new idea

in response. !is thought will be experienced by mind explicitly during

the span of time in which the mind is in"uencing the brain to produce it:

it is the force of mind's in"uence that causes these connections to link up

informationally. !ese new connections are evaluated by brain; mean-

while, mind experiences the thought's echoing; mind is waiting for the

next logical or desired step in the sequence to appear before reaching for

it. In the above case, you likely simply read on a#er thinking of the song.

As thinking proceeds, mind $rst grasps an overall picture, then

brain divides that picture amongst all its regions for specialized process-

ing. From these fragments of ideas, mind assembles another overall pic-

ture, which is again broken up for processing amongst the regions of the

brain. !is paying a%ention to concepts built up subconsciously and

presented to mind's overseeing awareness by the brain is mind's func-

tion, the character and mechanism of all our conscious thoughts. !ink-

ing thoughts naturally is effortless- the neural systems in the brain's lobes

produce the roots of our thoughts subconsciously by processing sensory

and emotional information in reference to data from memory, and the

job of the mind is to recognize the import of the half-formed thoughts

from the sensations they present to consciousness and connect disparate

ideas in a "owing interchange.

For example you might be thinking "What a lovely, sunny day."

when a quiet sensation appears in your awareness; "Good day, Sun-

shine!" Your consciousness, intrigued by this novelty, focuses in on it:

the Beatles song, courtesy of your memory and auditory systems. An-

other sensation appears, and your mind is free to call it into focus as long

as more pressing ma%ers ("don't get side-tracked, I need to $nish this

work") aren't taking up more conscious space; this other sensation links

to the brain region of deep memory, to hearing the song as a youth, and

now you're daydreaming about the good ol' days.

Your mind is a bit like a telephone operator from the 40's- brain

calls mind with a constant stream of impressions, sensations of what a

train of thought is likely to contain, or rough impulses of what the

thought will be when brought into focus in consciousness, and mind

answers these calls by paying a%ention to them, and connecting more

subconscious thought-dra#s to them in order to expand on them. New

and different subconscious brain structures are activated based on the

current train of thought in consciousness, taking cues from conscious-

ness of what logical interchanges are required or useful.

!e creation of thought-dra#s occurs in the subconscious, and

the selection and experience of thoughts occurs in conscious awareness.

We are so practiced in connecting thoughts that (especially when under

a lot of stress) we can spend hours, even days (!) on autopilot, experi-

encing our thoughts and brain activities but not willfully redirecting

them from their natural direction. O#en, to break a train of thought

when our brain's structures are crunching away at the logical implica-

tions of that train of thought (especially when the state of mind is the

result of emotional information), just feels wrong, as if we're ignoring

our true selves and feelings, or because the train of thought feels like the

most interesting and compelling thing to consider at that time. Also, try

as we might to change our mental subject, the inertia of our subcon-

scious o#en drags us back into the train of thoughts which already have

the momentum of current subconscious processing.

!oughts about emotional states tend to echo repeatedly be-

tween mind and brain for a period of time, because mind rather savors

justifying how the emotion feels with brain's calculation of what oc-

curred. If you perceive that a peer has disrespected or insulted you, your

mind and brain might spend quite a long time responding to the emo-

tional response this causes, imagining different ways you could have re-

sponded, cra#ing a biting comeback to use next time, and generally re-

cursively seething. It is hard to deny that anger feels good, really good on

some level, even if seeing yourself angry makes you feel ashamed and

childish, and you are morti$ed by the outcome of the anger in your

thoughts and actions. !e same is true of sadness and self-pity.

Remember this next time you've been locked in anger, boredom

or sadness- your brain/mind is on a loop which is your mind's job to

recognize and break. Remember also that happiness is a loop which your

mind is free to generate at any time if the energy and willpower is ap-

plied consistently. Just as self-pitying or ge%ing angry comes more natu-

rally with practice, happiness and experiential comfort can become a

habit. Holding any mental state takes less effort once that mental state

has been occupied consistently; once the state is truly experienced, the

neural circuitry underlying that state has been woven, and the more

practice your brain has strengthening these connections, the easier the

state is to maintain.

•§•

My consciousness doesn't have to understand the neural mecha-

nism of raising my right arm to put the action into motion; I simply imagine

the sensation (referencing the memory of the desired action, which models

the information in the brain) which pulls the mental trigger to enact it.

Again, my mind is the sum total of my brain's activities devoted to living-

possibilities are presented to my experiencing mind by the brain and the

neuronal storm of electrochemical interaction summing up to my mind

swarms over salient concepts or potentialities. Because Awareness contains

all of the content of brain activity, conscious mind, the all-encompassing

biological perspective of that Awareness, is able to coordinate these dispa-

rate brain processes, and physically cause action potentials to operate

nerves.

Mind presides over the elaborately branched network of brain

structure and the activity emanating from those structures; it is the func-

tion of mind to experience several separate thoughts or sensations simul-

taneously and purposefully connect them to synthesize a new thought.

(In the above case, by imagining the sensation and intention of raising

my arm, which requires neural activity in several disparate brain regions,

the required information is encoded and conveyed down my motor neu-

rons.) Without mind, the brain's immense potential for rewiring and

thought-expansion (learning) would be completely wasted; no spatially

disparate concepts could connect to form ideas.

How was this conscious command physically enacted? !e

nerves involved in bodily sensation and movement are always active on a

low level, giving my subconscious brain feedback about the status of the

regions they connect to (pain, nutrient needs, oxygen requirement, etc.).

!ese interchanges are present in our consciousness on a low level as the

feeling of our body, e.g. if you focus on what your foot feels like, you are

bringing the nervous interactions between the cells in your foot and

your brain into the direct light of consciousness, whereas normally your

consciousness is unaware of the sensation in your feet. !ese nerve

pathways are ready for input, output and action at any time, be it from

unconscious re"ex (e.g. "inching away from pain) or from conscious

command (e.g. typing). Mind synthesizes new ideas drawing from the

brain processes pertinent to mind's intent; mind oversees the large scale

logical processing of smaller neural interactions separated from each

other in different brain regions.

!is is roughly analogous to atoms of water clinging together to

form ice blocks (as in millions of neural processes adding up to a

thought or concept) and the stacking of those individual ice blocks to-

gether to form an igloo (as in the mind taking the large scale meaning of

the activity between millions of individual neurons and combining it

with other large scale meanings to form a new conscious concept or un-

derstanding by this synthesis of smaller scale, individual ideas). In typ-

ing this sentence, my mind pulls together the information it requires,

imagines the sensation of typing it (referencing memories of years of

typing practice encoded into my motor neural systems), my receptive

motor neurons echo this logical input from the mind, and the desired

signals are sent to the muscles in my wrists and $ngers.

When you make any choice or drive a train of thought, your

mind steers the thought by perceiving the way the logic underlying that

train of thought should unfold, amidst a barrage of mental sensations

representing alternative options of where the thought could lead. It is as

if in thinking you are traveling through a maze of rooms connected by

doors, where each turn you take (every thought you think) leads to an-

other room with more doors, sometimes presenting you with several

options of where the current path (thought) could take you. You can

look into the rooms beyond each door to see where they might lead, and

o#en pause to evaluate the potential they each represent before continu-

ing. (In thinking terms, this translates to: you can sense what the various

thought-branches will mean to awareness when followed, for instance

sensing both the delicious taste of chocolate and the self-parenting guilt

of indulgence, and the toil of the treadmill and mask of self-image at

once and choosing the next step based on those sensations.)

Sometimes, at especially consequential moments, you reach a

room where you can see one life beckoning from behind one door and a

completely different life waiting behind the other door; choosing be-

tween these consequential options usually requires an extended period

of thought, which consists of calculating the imaginable set of outcomes

of both choices and thus framing them in different lights, hopefully mak-

ing one stand out as the de$nite favorite, despite its "aws and the merits

of the other choice. If we can reach this clarity in time, we can make the

decision con$dently. If we are pressed for time, we are o#en unable to

appropriately test the waters, and must plunge in blindly.

CHAPTER 6

Elements of Human and Non-Human Consciousness

To brie"y restate the broader perspective framing the above as-

sertions: physical Universes exist as emanations from the eternal being

of Truth, Cosmic Awareness, necessarily expressing the in$nite possibil-

ity therein over an in$nity of time. !e interactions of energy and force,

direct embodiments of logical Truth, realize that boundless potential,

eventually compounding layers of logical systems together by its elegant

laws, resulting in chemical reactions, cells, intelligent thought, $elds of

colorful vision, hearing, music, words, giraffes, diet cherry Fanta, every-

thing. Everywhere that information exists (in the form of energy and

force), Cosmic Awareness, knowing the Truth from which all energy is

extended, is present.

!e content of Awareness in the small space my consciousness

occupies in the endless immensity of Existence is entirely self-

referential, completely embodying the perspective of the informational

system for survival within my brain. Everything I see is seen in relation

to me at the center, the world moves le# when I move right, and my

thoughts are felt to be in"uenced from the inside, by me. Truly they are;

I am the corner of the Universal fabric I take up, and with the feedback

of my own section of Cosmic Awareness I control the system I oversee.

I can even interact with and in"uence my surroundings, and my

worldwide family has come up with a rich variety of ways to experience

the world around me. I can hold an electronic set of controls, and using

information conveyed from my mind, encoded in the electrical logic of

the video game system's computer, cause a red and blue Italian plumber

represented by pixels on a screen to jump on a virtual toadstool, and lis-

ten to the game's beautiful theme song encoded in the air pressure of the

room by an electromagnetically vibrated cone and transduced by my

inner ear into a signal directly sung to Cosmic Awareness. I can cause my

animal self or another's to experience that gi# of a phenomenon, an or-

gasm, and radiate pleasure into the heart of Being.

In this model, all sensations arise in consciousness as the expres-

sion in Awareness of the physical logical interactions within the brain.

Every single aspect of your Awareness exists as a sensation, including not

only your senses but also the sound, feeling, and understanding of your

thoughts. In sensing, your brain is just resonating the truth of what is

already there, the information making up the energetic Universe inter-

preted as faithfully as possible based on brain's limited access to (compu-

tation of) it. Your brain doesn't generate the information pertinent to

the look of the world around you, the endlessly complex mathematics

describing its shape, color and detail; your brain gets all that information

from the incoming light, bearing direct information of the physical bod-

ies it just traveled from, and has only to interpret it and organize it. !e

actual being of the Universe is re"ected in your mind, to the degree that

your brain is equipped to access it.

!e resplendent coloration, nuanced hues and perspective we

experience arise as the cumulative effect of our occipital lobes' mapping

of the deconstructed input data from the retinas into a logical picture of

what our eyes are observing. Your brain is aided in this beautiful model-

ing by delegating the processing of images originating from different dis-

tances to different layers of the occipital lobes based on the degree of eye

muscle strain and coordination necessary to focus on those images. Fo-

cusing on this page activates a spatially different region in your brain

than focusing on the scenery in the distance.

Each color and shape is mapped to the point from which the

brain deduces the image to have originated from; for instance, your brain

perceives the location of this page in space, and projects the vision of it

you experience onto this point. In this way, rather than experiencing the

things we see as an internal image, we experience our sight as occurring

in front of us, outside of our skull. Your $eld of vision is not a two di-

mensional image existing on a screen in your mind, but a three dimen-

sional reconstruction logically projected into the world around your

body. !e logical interchange within your brain creates an apparently

external model of your world from the information available to it, and

your mind inhabits this logical and experiential framework. Even when

you close your eyes, your brain pragmatically holds on to what it knows

of your surroundings, with help from visual memory and sonic informa-

tion; you feel the room around you, exactly the way your brain expects it

to be when you reopen your eyes. (Sometimes, like when you are waking

up from a night's sleep in an unfamiliar place, out of habit, your brain

expects you to open your eyes to see your bedroom, and registers slight

surprise when waking up to these new surroundings.)

!e awareness of your visual $eld is thus perceived as existing

outside of your head though the processes that generate it occur inside

your head. It is fun to realize that though every sight you see is experi-

enced as an image in front of your eyes, your mind truly never looks out

from your skull, only at your brain's computation of the information it is

presented with from the external world. !e mind does not intuitively

perceive the intermediate step between the light entering your eyes and

your experience of that light; the sensation is that opening your eyes

gives your mind a direct window into the world around you. !is is not

so, in fact, it is impossible for your awareness to actually see the world

outside of you; looking at the world around you is actually peering into

your mind, into the informational vortex your brain processes (the con-

tent of which, of course, comes from the outside world, and would not

exist if the outside world didn't).

!is is also true of your auditory $eld. !e sounds you experi-

ence are produced in your awareness by your auditory system's recon-

struction of the information gathered by your ears, but you hear them as

outside of your head. Your temporal lobes gracefully calculate the dis-

tance of the sound and its position relative to your head based on the

relative loudness and the difference in time and timbre with which the

sound waves reach each of your ears. In this way, your brain models

whence the sound originates, and your mind experiences that modeling

as the place in your awareness that the sound exists.

When hearing crickets, the feeling of hearing each chirp is not

sensed within your head, but as an experience outside; your mind pro-

jects the feeling of your awareness into the space around you (giving you

a sense of “outside me” and “me”) to account for the phenomena it mod-

els. !e same is true of sensation, touch and pain. !e place from which

brain interprets the nerve signals to have originated is where the touch

or pain exists in your awareness, and not within your skull, where the

logical import of the signal is processed. Taste, smell, same story. Wher-

ever brain logically maps a stimulus to in space relative to its experiential

model of your body, that is where the texture of that experience seems to

exist.

!is logical mapping even applies to inanimate objects we inter-

act with, for example, when we are driving our cars, our brains include

the dimensions of the car in our awareness; we can squeeze through

double-parked cars more or less effortlessly because the spatial size of

the car is mapped in our awareness. Similarly, musicians have an intuitive

feel for their instrument; it is bound to them as an extension of their

body and mind. !e entire experience of the world you inhabit, includ-

ing your experience of other people and the entire breadth of your

knowledge about the Universe, is the result of your brain's informational

modeling of all this information; the Universe you experientially inhabit

is entirely the production of your brain, of its informational interpreta-

tion of the actual Universe which contains you.

•§•

!e unconscious, source of your instincts, motivations, charac-

ter, and personality, is a word which essentially describes the shape of

your brain's neural structures, built with certain features based on genet-

ics, and then melded and formed through experience. Your memory is

encoded in this dynamic reshaping of your brain; every time a thought is

thunk, the logical “wiring” which produces that thought is being acti-

vated in the brain. Every single thought leaves a trail in the brain, a direct

imprint of the thought's logical content, which, if reinforced by being

thought more o#en, becomes a semipermanent brain feature, an infor-

mational system writ in neuronal connections. Your interactions with

the world (e.g. learning your native language while growing up) thus

physically sculpt and broaden the unconscious framework underlying

your sense of self.

Your memory contains the pa%erns of neuron linkage estab-

lished in the past, and the logical circuits that are used the most are pre-

served most strongly. Your memory frames your perception of reality in

a logical outline at all times: at all moments, your awareness contains a

feeling of who you are, what your experiences have been in the past and

how you've reacted to them, the shape, sound and color of the se%ings

you occupy, an understanding of the physics of the world (that you

should expect things to fall to the "oor and that motions you make will

generate a predictable sound, that things you touch will have a predict-

able feeling, etc.); all of this and much more surrounds your awareness

like a screen through which you experience and interact with the world

around you. A#er all, how you experience and interact with the world

around you creates the neural pa%erns that contain those memories,

which your mind uses to understand reality, both inside and out.

Because memory serves as the material for new thoughts, one

generally never really “gets over” events of great emotional impact; in-

stead of disappearing in their effect on your present mood, they become

assimilated into your sensation of self, of who you are and what you face

in life. !ey burn with a dull glow in the $ber of your memory, some-

times shining out brightly when recalled.

When trying to remember something that you are having trou-

ble remembering, your mind is a%empting the put together neural archi-

tecture that has fallen into disrepair by searching through thought frag-

ments (applying electrical polarization to them to activate the neural

pa%erns, and thus the experience encoded therein), trying to $nd what-

ever combination of linked concepts will spark the insight that the thing

to be remembered comprised.

For example, think for a moment about your $rst kiss; just re-

member who it was with, where it was, and how you feel about it think-

ing back on it. In performing that li%le experiential train of thought, your

consciousness registered what informational content was called for; it

usually isn't difficult to call up emotionally charged memories, and sim-

ply holding the idea “$rst kiss” in mind requires engaging the neural cir-

cuitry which encodes the meaning of that combination of words. !e

memories which apply to your $rst kiss are informationally a%ached to

the concept of what “$rst kiss” means; not only do you know the de$ni-

tion of both words, but your brain is also encoded with how they relate

to your personal history. When you choose to evaluate this complex and

distant memory, that input from mind is distributed throughout the

brain structures which logically satisfy the input, and the brain outputs

the neural $ring of the desired information which is experienced by

mind.

Hindsight only feels like it's 20-20 because your brain forms and

solidi$es your memories based on your past experiences and expecta-

tions. !e memory of the past you hold is part of your self-image, and

any new event is evaluated by your brain in reference to a generality

comprised of the entirety of your past experiences, your present mood,

and the overall worldview you've built up throughout your life. If, in the

moment, another person's behavior does not immediately $t your model

of expected behavior, your brain is faced with the discomfort of foiled

understanding or expectation, which is generally rationalized over time

by your subconscious to $t into your vision of the world. !is is why the

memory of the event might pop into your mind on the drive home;

brain has “$gured out” what occurred (by preferentially solidifying

memories that $t into your prior expectation), and now that the new

logical neural structure is comfortably in congruence with other neural

structures describing the self 's understanding of the world, it $res easily

and loudly and is presented to consciousness to evaluate, perhaps ac-

companied by an “a-ha” feeling.

Your mind can only reference the small set of events and circum-

stances that imprinted on your memory. Memory presents you with

your brain's post-analysis of the event in question, biased towards your

worldview and expectations. Just as two people are likely to experience a

complex social situation differently based on their personality, mood and

experiences, they are likely to then remember only their interpretation of

the situation, and not the objective situation itself. Indeed, there is no

way to access any objective reality but through our own subjective inter-

pretation. In this way, in hindsight, pessimists are bolstered in their cyni-

cism because they believe things turned out poorly a#er all; their brains

crystallize any of the negative perceptions they were primed to see.

Meanwhile optimists notice the good that $ts into their habitual world-

view and self-narrative. Our memories and self image are the prime con-

spirators in our recurrent self-ful$lling prophecies.

•§•

O#en, before speaking, the entire sentence exists in your mind as a

conceptual whole; you perceive the logic of what you are trying to commu-

nicate far before the words hit your lips. Sometimes you cannot translate a

complex manifold of thought and experience into words; in fact, this may

be the most universal facet of the human social experience: inability to

communicate fully the content of our minds, especially the true nature of

our emotional experiences.

An expert on any subject can hold volumes of information per-

taining to that subject in mind at once, due to the rigorous building of its

logical reality carved and crystallized in his or her brain's neurons. If they

were to teach this knowledge to another, they would have to sample

minute bits and pieces from the whole Idea and reinterpret them in the

style of our shared logic, our technology of language.

When you experience a "ash of insight, or any similar sudden

appearance of a thought or understanding in your consciousness, you

are witnessing the processing within your relatively subconscious brain

connecting disparate concepts into a new whole, the newfound logical

clarity of which brightly lights up in your awareness, temporarily super-

seding whatever conscious activity was being engaged before the insight.

!is phenomenon feels pleasurable; it seems that when concepts link up

without logical friction, the effect is desirable. On the other hand, mis-

understanding or confusion, perhaps when trying to learn a new skill or

concept, feels uncomfortable to our awareness, because the brain is us-

ing energy to forge new connections, and hi%ing logical dead-end a#er

logical dead-end; the desired circuit $nds no completion.

!e act of thinking, consciously or subconsciously, takes energy,

which your conscious mind experiences as effort. Where the logical sys-

tems are already in place, for example the neural systems you use to walk

around, the effort is minimal, and the logic cascades through your brain

with high energy efficiency. When the brain system for understanding a

concept or performing an action is not yet formed, the brain must ex-

pend signi$cant stores of energy to rewire in such a way as to learn that

idea, by connecting up a mechanism for modeling the logic of the idea. If

the idea is not connecting logically in the brain, we feel confusion, fa-

tigue, and frustration in our awareness, which tends to lead us to drop

the activity and resume efficient brain functioning, or to take a nap. If we

persist, eventually the connections will be made (if the concept in ques-

tion has logical answer a#er all, and especially if our brains already pos-

sess the necessary logical (neuronal) puzzle pieces for a workable solu-

tion).

How does the mind recognize a truth, in other words, what is

the neural mechanism of understanding? In thinking about why 1+1=2,

what is the character of your brain activity that produces the under-

standing in your mind? Currently, we like to imagine that neurons oper-

ate on a binary "ow of information, because this is the easiest informa-

tion processing model to understand. It is thought that all informational

exchange can be reduced to the true/false options of boolean logic. If

this is the case, the understanding of the entire idea 1+1=2 depends on

knowledge of what 1 means, what + means, what = means, and what 2

means, and a proper set of neural logic gates to run this concept and

produce a value of “true”.

Of course, it seems highly probable that neural logic operates in

a different way than our familiar binary logic. In any case, the correct

"ow of information between neurons leads the awareness of this truth to

arise in your consciousness. Is this "ow of information the same in all

brains for this speci$c truth? I imagine not. !ough the understanding is

more or less the same, there are likely an almost in$nite number of ways

neurons could interact to generate the understanding of this informa-

tion. I probably understand the arithmetic and the implications of the

arithmetic on a different (effectively in$nitely more narrow) intuitive

level than Euler did, for instance.

•§•

If my consciousness embodies an informational subset of the

Knowledge of Cosmic Awareness, why should some of the informational

activity occurring within my brain be off-limits to my consciousness;

further, if Cosmic Awareness knows all, and I am part of that awareness,

why does my mind not have access to more fundamental knowledge, like

the information comprising the physics of my surroundings?

Every physical interaction in the Universe takes place in the

same knowing, Cosmic Awareness. !e conscious mind is the result of

this Awareness being present in every logical interchange in the brain; it

is the echo and summation of every energetic interchange of force in the

brain. All of the logical interchange in my brain pertains to the modeling

and evaluating of my external world and to the monitoring and upkeep

of my internal bodily functions- this recursive subset of Cosmic Aware-

ness clearly does not include the logical interactions of the particles

making up my surroundings or of other brains. While all information is

contained in the one Awareness, the re"ective subjectivity of any bio-

logical system is restricted to the interactions within that system, the

informational modeling and re"ection of the energy in the physical

world undergone by that particular brain and body.

!e individual lower level processes involved in the subcon-

scious operation of my brain are themselves the top of the hierarchy of

neurons directly involved in each process, and embody the Awareness of

the experience being modeled by those neurons. If you could isolate

each brain region involved in any train of thought (for example the audi-

tory region processing all the noise in the background) without includ-

ing the connection between that region and the rest of the brain, that

small subsection of brain would experience in itself the small subsection

of Awareness which its logical processes represent.

Our subconscious is therefore a dynamic network of self-

contained, lower levels of conscious awareness each presiding over their

home neurons. I hypothesize that each individual thought-dra# we re-

ceive from our 'subconsciousness' is itself a coordinative, conscious

process, the level of awareness those neuronal actions amount to, which

orchestrates the activity of individual neurons in the same way that our

higher consciousness orchestrates the thought-dra#s, the sums of lower-

level processes. !e Awareness of all “subconscious” processes exists;

however, the clarity with which our highest-hierarchical level minds ex-

perience the import of these processes depends on how closely the

process in question pertains to the overall conscious situation at hand.

!e neural activities closest to consciousness involve, not sur-

prisingly, the tasks we are conscious of willfully guiding, be they think-

ing (using the top-of-the-hierarchy conscious mind to connect lower

level brain processes), speaking, moving, hunting, working, or any be-

havior that requires the direct in"uence of your conscious will to pro-

ceed. Without this sophisticated coordination between brain and mind,

your biology does not contain the mechanisms for enacting these behav-

iors. !e simple act of thinking provides logical inputs which affect the

informational content of the brain and body (signaling muscles, hor-

mone releases, heart rate, etc.). !e effect that thinking has on the brain

and body in turn changes the content of awareness, and the recursive

cycle proceeds. !e top-of-the-hierarchy mind is free to modify its effect

on brain at any time, though it is limited in its scope by the content of

brain. For example, a peasant living $ve-hundred years ago couldn't es-

cape boredom by thinking about her descendants racing around in

sports cars or playing videogames; no ma%er how creative she was, her

brain wouldn't contain the necessary components to forge this unheard-

of set of concepts.

!is is what creativity is: the connecting of disparate informa-

tion held in neural networks to produce a new result. !is is why innova-

tion is such an incremental process, why our ancestors spent hundreds

of thousands of years living the same hunter-gatherer lifestyle making

the same basic tools, why music and art have evolved the way they have

over history: the fabric of new ideas is woven from old ideas. Given a

problem in need of solving, mind observes the content of brain and

connects the most logically promising concepts together.

As a solution is chased, the thoughts and concepts already de-

veloped for the task aid in the creation of the new neural circuitry which

represents a new understanding; pieces of the puzzle are associated in

brain by mind recognizing their compatibility. Bit by bit, a new concept

is built, which can now be used as a component to build a higher con-

cept. Without the interplay between conscious mind (evaluating and

connecting the disparate systems of information from brain) and brain

(generating, logically processing, and storing informational content with

input from mind), willful creativity would cease to exist.

Our day to day conscious narrative, the out"ow of our thoughts,

is generally the central focus of our a%ention, and represents the baseline

activity of our consciousness: observing lower-level processes and con-

necting them in the most natural way, o#en in the context of emotional

content. An action like walking or typing is enacted by your conscious-

ness, but does not require close monitoring, because you have already

consciously built up the necessary neurological framework for the action

to proceed without thinking directly about it. Because no new input be-

yond choosing to begin and sustain the action is required of your mind

to perform it, this type of behavior is slightly lower in experiential vol-

ume than the learning of a new skill, engaging in unpredictable social

behaviors involving modeling and analyzing the minds of others, or

making the complicated mental rewirings necessary to understanding a

new concept. !ese higher-order activities represent the great potential

our powerful consciousness and reasoning grant us, and its deeper utility

of rapidly creating new ideas and behaviors out of external input and

lower-level thought processes, above and beyond simply observing them

as in baseline consciousness.

Further down the conscious/subconscious spectrum are bodily

processes that are open to li%le or no direct in"uence by our conscious-

ness. We experience a vivid awareness of the effects of these processes on

our body, and are compelled by these sensations to take appropriate ac-

tions, but generally cannot mentally decide not to experience these sen-

sations; we have to ful$ll the action required to satisfy the feeling. Some

examples are the sensations of itching, feelings of hunger, thirst, drowsi-

ness, the effects of various hormones, the pace of our heartbeat (which

both informs our mental state and is modulated by our mental state),

and excretory stimuli. !e physical way in which these cues affect our

brains and therefore our awarenesses is mostly the result of our genetics,

our embryologic development and subsequent growth, and is less a re-

sult of conscious learning.

Lower still on the spectrum of awareness from our mind's per-

spective are the processes that bridge the gap between subconsciousness

and consciousness. For example, breathing is generally subconscious, in

that the vast majority of the time we breathe without taking any notice

of our breath. Even during these spans of time, the sensation of breathing

is present in our awareness, but at such a low level that it is effectively

drowned out by the processes that are more taxing to our a%ention.

Processes such as those governing our heart rate, which is not under the

willful control of our consciousness, are nevertheless informed by the

content of consciousness: one can slow one's heartbeat indirectly by

focusing on soothing thoughts, closing one's eyes, etc.; this process

which seems so distant from our consciousness and requires no con-

scious input to proceed is still connected to the contents of conscious-

ness and is informed by them. Flinching from pain is another semi-

conscious mechanism in this category, impelled by the conscious expe-

rience of pain-information in the affected cells and motor neurons but

requiring no brain intervention to decide to "inch. (!e motor neurons

themselves possess the consciousness of the pain-information and are

wired to react to it immediately.)

!e very quietest and smallest scale on the human con-scious/

subconscious spectrum is likely made up of the activities and aware-

nesses of individual cells acting in accordance with their own experien-

tial cues. Before scoffing at the suggestion that cells are aware, we should

recognize that the question “What does it take for conscious awareness

to exist?” is still open, though it is (oddly) common for people to take

for granted that the answer is “A human brain has to be present for

awareness to exist.” On the contrary, I would answer that any physical

system which relies on the logical processing of internal and external

stimuli for its survival is necessarily aware of those processes; all logical

interaction between physical energy in the Universe is known to Cosmic

Awareness (on an experiential level we of course cannot imagine prop-

erly), and becomes subjective when made in reference to a reacting, liv-

ing system.

People love the idea that cells behave just like li%le automatic

machines, because we understand automatic machines; if cells are just

like machines, we don't have to admit that we don't understand much at

all about the mechanisms of their behavior. We can just say “though we

don't know how the parts $t together, if they are like machines or com-

puters then cells operate out of simple mechanical necessity just like our

machines. Phew, we still understand everything without having to ques-

tion our assumptions, problem solved.”

!e behavior of a cell involves the cell referencing its fundamen-

tal codebook, its DNA, in a way we currently understand only dimly. It is

clear that manipulating a cell's DNA, for example inserting a gene for the

production of bioluminescence, will change its behavior in a predictable

and reproducible way. For this reason, it appears that cells are like com-

puters, which respond automatically and mechanically to certain inputs

based on their coding, their DNA. However, whereas the entire chain of

causality within a computer is understood thoroughly, the way genetic

instructions are enacted remains almost completely unexplained, espe-

cially in cases where cascades of DNA activation and deactivation occur,

as is the case during embryological development.

Part of the reason for this investigative difficulty is that we have

been hesitant to ascribe any level of awareness to cells, which makes

their emergent information processing (based on the extraordinarily

complex and far reaching set of information possible to encode with

DNA– it is certainly not a coding system as simple as binary) seem to-

tally inexplicable. Cells dynamically interact with their environment to

appropriately activate and carry out genetic instructions; how is this in-

formation coordinated and acted upon if no awareness is present

therein? Because a simple mechano-chemical model cannot account for

the dynamic level of interaction cells undergo, these types of models will

inevitably fail in explaining the causality of cellular life.

I propose that cells are subjectively aware, though likely on a

level that is far less vivid and multifaceted than ours (and generally uni-

maginably different from our awareness). It is instructive to realize that

the processes inside any particular cell are tremendously complex, re-

sembling the complex interaction within a human city more than they

do the activity of one person. Eukaryotic cells contain entire communi-

ties of smaller species of bacteria symbiotically embedded in their life

cycle: mitochondria in animals and chloroplasts in plants. (At some

point in evolutionary history, these bacteria managed to shed their

autonomy in favor of a permanent home within a eukaryotic lineage,

gaining safety and sustenance while supplying the host cell with energy.)

Not only are cells astonishingly complex in themselves, they also un-

dergo complex interactions with their neighbors.

A Google search for “cell dialogue” brings up a plethora of bio-

logical studies in this area, which I suggest any skeptic to read. !e gen-

eral $ndings of these studies invariably show that cells develop an under-

standing of the meaning portrayed by chemicals swapped between

members of the same species and between members of different species.

Here is a fascinating discussion of this topic, which I would describe but

which you should see for yourself:

h%p://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteri

a_communicate.html

Imagine the complexity our cellular network handles daily: dis-

tributing nutrients from food and oxygen from breathing to every cell in

this absolutely immense network which has a need for them, interpret-

ing the signals from nerves and reacting accordingly, etc. In an informa-

tional hierarchy comprised of a hundred trillion individual cells, our per-

sonal intelligence could never possibly manage the processes necessary

to life in our cells; luckily, they take responsibility for this impossibly

complex task. As they carry out these tasks below, living the lives of cells,

we look outward and fend for our organism's survival in the animal

world, a natural external-immune system designated to a facet of survival

in a different experiential dimension from that lived out by the cellular

mass of our bodies.

!e conscious mind gives the illusion of being the sole control-

ler of the body, but there are reasons to suspect that the body has equal

or greater in"uence on mind. Instincts do not run on our conscious in-

telligence, but on our body cells' integrated network, which intelligently

shares, processes, and responds to information pertinent to our body's

survival and to the enaction of our consciousness. !e vast majority of

mind's effort is expended in ful$lling the instinctual urges and sensations

provided by the brain and body. When you have an itch on your arm,

and it feels really good to scratch it, it isn't because the action of scratch-

ing your arm feels good, but because your subconscious has generated a

$eld of experiential potential in that area by stimulating discomfort there

and bringing it to the front of your awareness. You can push it to the

back, but the sensation remains– “Well, it would feel mighty good to

scratch me, why are you waiting? Look, I'm still itchy. Hello!”

In this, and countless other everyday cases, your subconscious is

subtly guiding your consciousness in what actions to take. Your willful

mind o#en is only needed to execute complex tasks in the external world

or the inner world of logical reasoning, and many times you perform

these tasks to satisfy something your subconscious wants you to do

anyway. It is a more ancient feature of our being, but it is a wise and

powerful feature. It seems possible that contrary to our expectations, the

subconscious is actually the central hub of our body's experience, and

our “I” is a feature of it. Of course, we currently have no way of determin-

ing whether this is the case or not, but there is no reason to automati-

cally assume it is an impossibility.

•§•

In general, subjective consciousness arises in the Universe when

the energetic interplay of Cosmic Awareness in ma%er is organized in

intricate physical processes enacted to model the subjective system's ex-

ternal world. Our brains each embody recursive informational systems;

they take in energetic information representing the physical reality of

Cosmic Awareness (light waves, sound waves, pressure waves, etc.) and

re"ect that information internally through logically interpreting it; this

re"ection is what makes up our minds. !is recursion is present in every

life form in varying degrees, with bacteria experiencing a different reality

than $sh due to the differences in the mechanisms of their logical inter-

action within themselves and with the outside world.

!is should, in fact, be the standard de$nition of a conscious

agent: a system of energy which causally in"uences not only the infor-

mational systems surrounding it, but also the content making up that

system of energy; a self in"uencing system is conscious until it loses the

energetic logic necessary to coordinate and cause internal changes. One

stipulation is that the self in"uence must be through direct logical inter-

action, and not by secondary consequences relating to the physical con-

ditions of the constituent parts vis a vis the whole, as in the case of a star,

planet, or galaxy. (In these cases, the motion of the macro in"uences the

motion of the micro elements, e.g. a substance existing at the Earth's

core will be ho%er than a similar substance si%ing on its surface; this is a

consequence of position relative to internal informational content, but

not a consequence of the system of information making up the sub-

stance taking logical input from logical operations comprising the

whole.) By perceiving and integrating smaller systems of information,

mind in"uences the content of the smaller systems making up the organ-

ism by returning new input logic to those systems from above, a causal

reversal within the overarching pa%ern of smaller phenomena causing

larger-scale effects.

Consciousness is a result of logical self-in"uence in any system

of information; wherever a system of logical information bumps against

its respective ceiling and is coordinated and re"ected back inwards (so to

speak), Cosmic Awareness perceives and in"uences the signal in the

moment that it arrives, is experienced, and is sent back, informationally

changing it in the process. Every place in Existence where logical sys-

tems of energy require input from the highest, cumulative informational

level of those systems to proceed is a conscious system, embodying the

Awareness of in"uencing their content from above.

In this context, it seems that it is de$nitely possible to enable

consciousness in computers; perhaps the most direct method will in-

volve using digital informational modeling to recreate the logical struc-

ture and behavior of neuronal networks, a process already being pursued

by several research institutions (notably, EPFL's Blue Brain project).

Consciousness is a Universal phenomenon; there is no reason to believe

that consciousness is the exclusive domain of organic life.

!ough a bacterium faces a very different set of sensations and

challenges in its model and awareness of the world than an ant or a dog,

any organism that interacts with its surroundings to survive necessarily

possesses awareness of those surroundings and of the act of surveying

and reacting to those surroundings. Each neuron in our sprawling nerv-

ous system is itself aware of its reaction to the stimuli making up infor-

mation exchange; the mechanism of neuronal logic is neuronal aware-

ness, which allows the neuron to transfer energy along the appropriate

dendritic path given different experiential/informational stimuli.

We imagine the lives of bugs, plants and cells to be totally for-

eign to our own and too alien to relate to. However, the fundamental

feeling of having a self is probably very familiar in many aspects, and is

shared by all that lives and by the all that is the Awareness of Existence.

!ere is only one Awareness; each of our apparently separate aware-

nesses is in reality a subset of the overarching Awareness of Existence.

We each perceive a private region of experience within this one mind.

Mind is not con$ned to our brains. It pervades every level of existence in

every corner of the Universe; indeed, its Being is the Universe. Our cells

operate within a completely different realm of experience than the spec-

trum we inhabit, at an unimaginably foreign level of resolution in

Awareness. Our minds causally affect the informational content of this

level of awareness, inducing electrical currents in our body which per-

fectly mirror the content of our thoughts.

Imagine the intelligence within a spider necessary to accom-

plishing the feat of weaving a web. She is not an automatic web building

machine, she weaves by the same mechanism with which you walk

across the room. She utilizes the neural tools available to her to recog-

nize the potential within her and chooses to string her silk by an impulse

and act of will, just as you recognize the usefulness of walking across the

room and choose when you tell your body to do so.

Broadly stated, the central requirement of an entity arising out

of the possibility contained in Truth that has to fend for itself to per-

petuate its form is that the entity must contain organized structures of

energy exchange, which operate according to and interact with Universal

Truth. !is interaction requires the presence of Cosmic Awareness (e.g.

Cosmic Awareness is present as these $ngers type these words in the

physical nature of the nerve impulses delivered to my muscles from my

brain, in the binary cascade of logic within the computer, in the space

through which this occurs, as well as in light, and my mind- in short, in

every single condition of this writing being possible), and where these

interactions are more complex and take place over less time, more of

Cosmic Awareness is present to "guide" the processes (not consciously

or purposefully guide, but to be aware of them in Truth; no energy ex-

change occurs without this ever-present awareness).

Being alive, being able to in"uence the energy in the Universe by

your actions is not the default state of Awareness, but a profound rarity-

the experience of each of our lives lasts for all but an invisible speck in

the limitless timeline of all that Exists. A human's consciousness is a sub-

jective subset of Cosmic Awareness, stirred into experience from the sea

of energetic interactions unfolding according to the Truth in which it

resides.

•§•

Falling asleep is the slow winding down of consciousness, the

gradual shi# away from the high energy expenditure of the mind-

coordinated, brain-wide, inter-lobe neural activity and sensation model-

ing we experience as awareness and thought, towards energy conserving

and restoring intra-lobal and cellular processes. !is falling away of con-

scious in"uence on brain can be apprehended very distantly in a form

rememberable later, especially if you are woken from the early stage of

sleep. Your thoughts become more abstract and further off as the close

interaction between mind and brain loosens; your mind's control dissi-

pates as your brain relaxes its functioning from handling immediate ex-

ternal concerns, and your normal conscious awarenesses loses clarity,

replaced by a dozy "ow of concepts re"ecting the re-$ring of any perti-

nent neural circuitry built up during the day and the narcotic weight of

sleep.

!e transition from awake to asleep is a continuum; there is no

way to draw a strict dividing line between the two. Awareness doesn't

disappear during sleep, but drops one level of informational complexity

from the highest hierarchical-level consciousness utilizing the entire

brain to the individual neural lobes comprising the conscious brain. You

don't experience this level of awareness with your conscious mind, be-

cause your conscious mind can only ever possess awareness of either the

high level coordination of wakefulness or the lower level coordination of

dreaming, or the memory of these high level processes encoded through

conscious experience, imprinted in structures accessible to conscious-

ness while awake.

One can picture the gradient between consciousness and sleep-

ing in this way: imagine 10-20 bathtubs lining the bo%om of a shallow

swimming pool. Each bathtub is lined with buckets; each bucket is lined

with cups, and each cup has a hole in its bo%om through which water

can enter or leave the system. !e system of containers roughly repre-

sents the brain, cups being neurons, buckets neural circuitry, and tubs

lobes. !e level of water in the pool signi$es the amount of energy proc-

essed and the nature of its logic, and thus the level of awareness

achieved. When full, the pool represents normal, wakeful consciousness;

the interchange of water between the cups at a high enough volume

raises the water level enough to $ll the buckets, the coordination be-

tween which $lls up the tubs, the coordination of which $lls the rest of

the pool and sums to our conscious mind, the highest level of the hierar-

chy containing all others. In this model each subsequent layer of infor-

mational complexity is the higher-level result of lower levels of informa-

tional interchange; the higher levels operate by coordinating lower lev-

els.

Falling asleep is allowing the activity between the bathtubs, the

coordinated brain activity giving rise to consciousness, to subside. As

this occurs, the water level falls back, now separated into the individual

systems (tubs) from which it extends into the conscious mind. At this

point our highest-level mind is unconscious, and each neural system is

con$ned to quiet awareness of its own life processes. Later in the night,

during REM sleep, the tubs inter-coordinate again, which adds dream-

ing, a very thin layer of consciousness to the system (or a thin layer of

water above the tubs, to continue the visual analogy).

Dreaming is consciousness on a much quieter, much less logical

experiential level. In dreams we experience the $ring of disparate con-

scious memories, the activity between neurons either solidifying those

memories or searching different neural networks for appropriate con-

nections to make. Our “conscious” experience of them arises as a secon-

dary effect because these $rings represent the processing of the informa-

tion contained in the consciously imprinted circuits. Lucid dreaming is

the partial utilization of consciousness to coordinate the "ow of informa-

tion. REM sleep is well described as Random Experiential Memory,

though this label does not include the fact that in dreaming the memo-

ries are not accessed randomly, exactly, but are partly guided in their

arising by the thin sliver of consciousness which perceives the dream. In

dreaming, the memory-content spliced together by the brain appears to

relate most o#en to new memories, perhaps (as some current theories

suggest) strengthening and broadening their neural connections in

brain.

CHAPTER 7

What is 'me'?

Consider, for a moment, the unbelievable improbability that out

of the billions upon billions of human lives that have been and are being

lived, you happen to have been born into this body at this time. Why

should this be; for what reason did you come to be you, and me me? In

one sense, this is not improbable at all, but a de$nite certainty: every

human born has a self experiencing its life; our human bodies were born,

and therefore must each have a self accompanying them through life. It is

a certainty that some self would experience the life lived from within

your body; it just happens to be you. !e same can be said for your

neighbor, your mother and father, and for every experiencing life that

has ever lived.

It is almost universally believed that each self is distinct, that this

awareness through which we experience life is our own private property,

unique to each of us. !is is an intuitive assumption; a#er all, I can only

think my thoughts and can only willfully enact my own actions, and the

same is true of you and everyone else; in life our selves are certainly

separate. Perceiving this, we conclude that this separateness is a funda-

mental aspect of our selves; it has become a central facet of the human

identity to see each self as a Universe unto itself, eternally distinct from

the rest of reality. However, there are reasons to reexamine our under-

standing of this most signi$cant facet of Existence, conscious sel*ood.

I am me and you are you; if we switched places, that is, if I could

suddenly experience life from within your body and you could experi-

ence it from within mine, could we possibly notice? !e way you answer

this question reveals much about your understanding of sel*ood. If you

say, “Of course we would notice, my personal soul is fundamentally dif-

ferent from yours, and is the basis for my self; I would be able to tell im-

mediately that I am me in a different body,” you share the most popular

idea of sel*ood: supernatural, permanent personal uniqueness, above

and beyond the physical world. !is is something of an antiquated view:

intuitive and culturally standard to be sure, but if examined closely, this

viewpoint is clearly outdated by the progress of neuroscience. Essentially

every bit of evidence we have suggests that our experience of the world

arises from the physical information processing enacted in our brains, as

the last two chapters discuss in depth. To this response I would answer

“In switching to my body, your 'soul' would have no access to memory of

your previous body, since your memories are stored in the brain of that

previous body. You would only be exposed to the memories and style of

thinking present in my body, and would therefore not be able to tell that

we switched places.”

If you are a scienti$c intellectual, you might answer that ques-

tion (If we switched places, could we notice?) with, “No, there is no way

we could notice. Everything about my experience of self and of life is a

result of my brain states. If we could somehow instantly switch places,

you would experience my brain's activity just the same as I do, and I

would yours, and supposing that the switch occurred instantaneously,

there would be no break in the experience of that brain activity. !ere

would be no memory of the switch in either brain, and no perception of

any change whatsoever.” It seems evident that this is a great step forward

in understanding from the dogma of experiencing life within a soul, for-

ever separate from the physical realm.

If subjective awareness is the byproduct of biological brains,

who experiences that byproduct? In other words, why should my self,

experiencer of my life, be considered fundamentally different from your

self, if they both arise from the same essential cause (i.e. a human brain)?

I argue that they should not; if conscious sel*ood appears in any suffi-

ciently able neuronal structure, then consciousness itself is clearly a Uni-

versal fundament, a facet of being in which we all share, and not a per-

sonal possession unique to each of us. !e fact that you happen to be

living your life and not mine is simply a random outcome of the in$nite-

sided dice roll of possibility, landing you improbably, but necessarily, in

your circumstance, and me in mine.

In order to discuss these concepts, it becomes useful to differen-

tiate between my self, the me which is comprised of my brain, my per-

sonality and all my beliefs, memories, thoughts, hopes, fears, etc., and

my Self, that which actually experiences the awareness of all these things,

thinks my thoughts and wills my actions. It is a very subtle and unex-

pected distinction, which accounts for its foreignness to the traditional

western mindset, with its more simplistic belief in a self/soul. (I want to

be clear: there is no separation between self and Self; they are one and

the same– this is simply a means of talking about two different facets of

our selves: our personal identity, and the actual being which experiences

the perspective from within that identity.) With this distinction it is eas-

ier to discuss the idea that of the billions of lives, you inhabit you; the

universal Self inhabits every self, and no ma%er how many experiencing

lives arise, Sel*ood is there to perceive each. When you die, it is the end

of your self, but there is no end to the Self which experienced your self. It

exists in every other present self, and will inhabit every future self.

!e same Self that I have which experiences all my sensations in

me is also the Self that experiences all of your sensations in you, ex-

tended to our bodies each from the same source, the Cosmic Awareness

underlying all of Existence. It is in this sense that we have an everlasting

soul; we do not possess a personal soul separate from all others, but each

share equally in the one Soul. Awareness is One, One embodied in the

limitless number of perspectives breathed into life by its Being, the Uni-

verse. Every living consciousness has its being in this exact same Aware-

ness, the Awareness of Existence called into subjectivity by our biologi-

cal framework.

!is same all-encompassing Awareness experiences every reality

at once. In every pair of lovers, each consciousness is the exact same

Awareness experiencing the love from two distinct selves simultane-

ously. Every predator, every prey, every laugh, every solemn oath, every

cell division, everything is the experience of the one Awareness, and our

human perspectives are but microscopic subsets of the whole. Our selves

are re"ections of the everlasting and in$nitely faceted jewel of Existence,

mirrors within which Awareness glimpses willful, $nite subjectivity.

In our naïve understanding of self, we manipulate, victimize, and

hurt each other, sometimes viciously and purposefully. !e irony of all

this opportunistic treachery is the truth, casually occupying our collec-

tive blind-spot, that every torturer's self is separated from the victim's

self only by the illusion of separateness that life conjures. In reality, by

deliberately hurting another it is as if your right hand were twisting

thumb screws binding your le# hand; the same Self feels both realities

equally. It is this truth which our burgeoning empathy quietly pleads for

us to recognize, though our self-serving, much deeper-rooted and primal

animal instincts easily ignore its meek cries.

Rather than being separate from the supreme being, as most re-

ligions maintain, with God or some similar entity observing us from a

distance and keeping score as to how well we behave, every subjective

being is a unique embodiment of the supreme being's Awareness. Many

traditionally-minded people are likely appalled by this thought, thinking

that if there is no divine Judge, frowning from the heavens, no divine

justice awaits our criminals. It is certainly uncomfortable to think that a

monstrosity like Hitler faces no retribution for his wretched effect on

others. However, if the above is true, then the Self that starved to death

in a concentration camp also experienced Hitler's life, and the Self that

experienced Hitler's life also experienced that starvation. !is does not

in any way negate the agony caused; it is a sober fact of reality that any

misery caused is misery experienced. How do you think Hitler's actions

might have changed, if he knew he shared the fundament of Sel*ood

with all those he massacred?

Is this to say that the experiencer of my life also experienced all

these lives, all that agony? Yes and no; yes in that the Cosmic Awareness

in you is also in every life, and no in that the human self you inhabit will

never experience any life outside of that human life. In other words, dur-

ing the time that you spend inside your human life, you are not experi-

encing the rest of the lives that Cosmic Awareness is inhabiting.

Initially, many will likely meet this idea with discomfort, or fear.

To think that it is terrifying to imagine living every life that has been

lived seems natural enough; that's a lot of pain, disease and heartbreak to

endure. On the other hand, that's also a lot of love, excitement, pleasure,

newness, and laughter to enjoy. However it is not us that experience all

life, it is I. In other words, the person who you are does not experience

the person who I am, but the Self that experiences your life is also the

Self that experiences my life and all others. I would venture to guess that

the in$nite mind underlying all that is is more than willing to live out all

the divine possibility contained within its limitless potentiality, that the

chaos and drama of life lends Existence meaning countless times in

every possible variety of signi$cance.

•§•

!is viewpoint can perhaps help clarify the sometimes kno%y

complexities of morality. An evil act consists most fundamentally in will-

fully causing pain in or misfortune for others, o#en to bene$t oneself

(whom is unknowingly hurting their true Self which resides also in those

they hurt). Our deepest, truest self, the fabric of our awareness, is shared

with every other living being in Existence. Stalin's personal awareness

faces the exact sum of all the pain he brought into being from the very

perspectives he brought it to. Every barking slave owner felt the sting of

every whip crack he dealt. Of course, the person who is the direct cause

of the results doesn't personally experience those results in their own

human awareness, but indirectly by the one Awareness also inhabiting

the lives that are touched by that person. !ough every life form experi-

ences its sensations and thoughts privately, the Awareness of that life

form is extended to it from the exact same fundamental source as every

other.

We can imagine a Universal balance of good sensations versus

bad sensations. If a species arises that can "y, and absolutely savors life

on account of it, the balance shi#s towards the good. If there is a World

War, and millions perish in wretched, pointless suffering, the balance

shi#s towards the bad. Every chance arising of love is a rose to the com-

mon fabric of being, and every feud and hatred a thorn. !ere is no law

but the laws of probability balancing the scale; there is no mandate that

every bit of good is offset by an equal bit of bad.

Karma is yet another outdated superstition, consoling and pos-

sibly morally bene$cial to our ancestors (certainly detrimental as justi$-

cation for the Caste system during its prominence in India), but ulti-

mately imaginary. Besides the immense amount of evidence contrary to

Karma's hypothesis that every event in a person's life occurs because that

person deserved that event (for example, the countless instances where

bad things, like cancer, etc., happen to the very best of people), if there is

such a thing as a balance of Karma, then there must be some entity

which weighs the goodness or badness of every action, and controls real-

ity from the outside in response (raising the plethora of inadequacies

which mar supernatural belief, as discussed in Chapter 8).

Before intelligent, compassionate life arises, the balance is le# to

the outcomes of chaotic circumstantial possibility. Gradually, as intelli-

gence develops in a species, it becomes more and more clear that it is

also up to us free-willed lives to strive to bring goodness into the world.

Our collective will is free to tip the balance.

Much of the time, moral judgments are rather simple, and don't

have great consequences either way. !ere are, of course, situations of

great ethical complexity where no ideal solution seems possible, but

these are relatively rarely encountered in comparison to daily interper-

sonal moral decisions. !e fact is, almost everyone has the requisite in-

telligence to empathetically tell right from wrong in day-to-day situa-

tions, but it is o#en convenient and rather easy to pretend to themselves

that they don't.

Whenever recognizing personal moral imperatives is a private

ma%er, (ancient) sel$sh motives are weighed with (more modern) altru-

istic ones. Many people have absolutely mastered the art of telling them-

selves convenient lies and then believing in them wholeheartedly. Eve-

ryone wants to feel good about themselves, and if they take any action in

pursuit of a goal that they know to be immoral, they de#ly rationalize the

act and thereby silence their conscience. Of all the unconscious under-

tones with which brain colors the experience of mind, in some people

the human conscience is perhaps the most easily quieted; in part this

could be because our morality is based on intelligent appraisal of a situa-

tion's context, and new information (sometimes fabricated) can cast an

ethical decision in a new, more comfortable light.

Morality is a real-life example of the prisoner's dilemma,

wherein subjective consciousnesses can greedily take for themselves

while harming others, offse%ing their enjoyment with the pain they

cause, or cooperate for the common good. Both forms are prevalent in

the modern world, though cooperation is slowly edging out primitive

competition. Our inbred nationalism is the strongest and furthest reach-

ing expression of this tribal competitiveness, the instinct towards the our

side vs. their side mentality. If we can grow out of this immature mindset

so deeply ingrained in our culture, our species will "ourish, continuing

the development of a mutually bene$cial symbiosis like that of "owers

and bees. If not, that is, if our instinct to belong to an in-group leaves us

blindly rooting for the home team at all costs, in suspicion our nations

will coil in on themselves and poison each other with their venom.

In our "edgling intelligence we must face the un"inching equity

of cosmic justice with maturity and gratitude; every pleasant experience

is shared by all, as is every injury. Universal happiness is the prize of a

perfectly compassionate society, while anguish is the price of blind self-

ishness and ruthless competition. We are free to leave behind the raw

balance of animal life (essentially that for every bleeding throat there is a

satiated hunter) and embrace cooperation.

Some of Awareness will live within snakes, and some will suffer

snakebite, and every possible outcome will have to be experienced, be-

cause the system of Existence impels all possibility to come into being

over an in$nity of time. However, the system operates within a frame-

work of limitlessly deep logical perfection, which produces profoundly

meaningful concepts out of pure Truth, pure reason. !e love, beauty,

passion, harmony, and ecstasy of Cosmic Awareness is expressed in the

endless outplay of reality, and the private experience of living, discon-

nected from the magnitudinous whole, gives Existence an in$nite

breadth of meaning and signi$cance.

A li%le pain is worth the possibility represented by Universal

free will in entities predisposed to cherish life (if only their own, as

young species do– humans are gradually growing up out of this self-

centeredness). !ink how vastly positivity outstrips the negative in ex-

perience- humans tend to $xate on the negative, as if bracing to avoid it,

but every shower you take is enjoyable, most every meal, every real

laugh, all surface pleasantries, all love and companionship and learning

and awe and new experience, sight, sound, music, light; it is all in$nitely

be%er than the (nonexistent) alternative, nothingness.

!e free will of life is bought at the price of pain; the unlimited

variety of free-willed life arises through Truth in competition, in the

probabilistic framework of fortune and misfortune. (If you are thinking

“Wait, you can't just assume we have free will without discussing why

you believe that,” I refer you to Chapter 10.) However, with our rela-

tively newfound a%ribute of human intelligence we are slowly learning

not only our profound interconnection, but also how to rein in our more

primitive instincts.

Our emotions may rage, but our rationality can soothe the beast

within us, if only just enough to retract our claws and ease our heartbeat.

If a competitor slips away into the night with the object of our affection,

our primal instincts will likely writhe in anger and jealousy. However, if

our intelligence can recognize that the competitor's awareness is a differ-

ent casting of our own, we can more easily celebrate, rather than envy,

their pleasures. !e same Awareness experiences all sensations, so rather

than offset the boost to global happiness occurring in their bedroom

with bi%erness in your own, you are free to willfully outmaneuver your

instinctive anger, bless their good fortune for existing, and enjoy some

time alone, at peace. !is is not to say that sidestepping instinct is easy,

or even fully possible, but is well worth practicing.

Lives are not externally designed to meet a certain goal or to

pass some supernatural test, life arises, automatically follows, from Uni-

versal Truth. And beautifully, from this Truth comes us. We are miracles

of cosmic possibility, more intricate than it is possible for us to imagine,

with an in$nite canvas to explore and $ll. What wonders we are heir to;

what uncharted realities have we yet to experience in the dynamic realm

of subjectivity!

CHAPTER 8

The Modern Status of Supernatural Belief

Religions are born through messengers who experience insights

of divine clarity, some of the deepest revelations about the nature of Ex-

istence ever reached by humans. !e impact of these realizations inspire

the prophetic human to try and communicate the immensity of their

understanding to those around them, despite the hopeless difficulty of

doing so. In the process, the insight is $rst translated into words from

experience by the prophet, then spread through word of mouth. !e in-

sights can never answer all our questions or explain all the mysteries, and

as this news spreads (o#en carried by disciples who were awakened by

the message, but did not directly face the experience), it is reshaped to

answer all the questions posed and challenges raised by the general

populace. !e message invariably undergoes a popular reinvention, be-

ing expanded upon and melded into compatibility with older cultural

beliefs and practices, especially as the centuries begin to roll by and the

word must be wri%en down, and translated, and copied by hand, intro-

duced to new societies, translated again, and interpreted and wrung by

generations of priests and cultural holy men. Religions originate in the

essence of deepest beauty, but the prophet's message never translates to

the populace perfectly, and over the years less insightful minds have

$lled in the gaps with best guesses and convenient lies.

!e traditional belief that the world is guided by a supernatural,

all-powerful entity is a natural extension of the fundamental perception

that things happen in the world for some reason, even if we are unable to

rationally piece together what that reason is. !e vast majority of our

ancestors lived in what appeared to be a magical world, where almost

every occurrence was perfectly unexplainable; they had no evident ex-

planation for how food is integrated into the body, no explanation for

why the sun rises and sets, no explanation for the presence of animals,

plants, water, nor for the phenomena of gravity, wind, pain, sight, etc.

Ancient humans, by nature curious and intelligent, sought to rationalize

all these effects into intelligible systems of causality, due to the discom-

fort of possessing rational intelligence yet being surrounded by the un-

explainable. Explanatory and celebratory myths were thus developed

and passed along, elaborated upon by prehistoric imaginations and

guarded carefully against radical modi$cation, due to the cognitive dis-

sonance and social danger of acknowledging the fallibility of their belief

systems.

Over millennia these processes solidi$ed into some rather non-

sensical styles of belief. Consider that in Alexander the Great's time, the

decisions of generals overseeing hundreds of thousands of soldiers o#en

involved solemn appraisal of the behavior of birds, and other cultural

omens. Aztec culture centered around the belief, based on their creation

myth, that the sun was powered by human blood spilled in sacri$cial

ceremonies, and that the fate of the Universe hinged on their upholding

of this gruesome tradition. In the past others have concluded that “not

only are there pre%y lights in the sky undergoing regular cycles of

change, the position of those lights has a profound signi$cance for how

each of our lives will unfold, and if we could only just puzzle out what

their positions suggest, we would possess a major key to ge%ing what we

want and avoiding what we don't want.”

!e traditional human worldview has thus developed around

the idea that there is some supernatural force behind the scenes guiding

all that occurs; supernatural belief is the foundation which all religions

share. It is difficult to imagine our distant ancestors seeing reality in any

other context, because of the enormous magnitude of the mysteries sur-

rounding their every experience. It is only in the past few centuries, since

the spark of the scienti$c revolution, that it has slowly become clear that

this fundamental perspective on the nature of reality is likely incorrect.

In this time period we have discovered that the entirety of the Universe

appears to operate according to logical physical laws, and that all the

previously unexplainable phenomena have rational explanations, em-

bodying intelligible networks of cause and effect. In this context, the an-

cient worldviews espoused by religion seem quite inadequate in describ-

ing the true nature of Existence.

Modern humans have dropped superstitions involving phenom-

ena which we can explain scienti$cally. !e more remote the mystery

around any phenomenon, the less superstition surrounds it‑ no edu-

cated person prays to the sun for good weather anymore. However, any-

thing still mysterious is no less a subject of superstition than it was

10,000 years ago. One example is the question of what happens to a per-

son's consciousness when they die; when we are faced with the un-

known, our survival-oriented imaginations examine the entire spectrum

of possibility, from absolute worst to absolute best, and modify our be-

havior accordingly. If, as is the case with many religious claims, we are

convinced that the outcome is based on the content of our entire life and

that it will persist for eternity, we naturally do everything we can imagine

to avoid the worst outcome and aim for the best.

Even if a society's conventional religion calls for the abandon-

ment of enjoying life, and contorts living into a form of self-torture, if it

promises automatic eternal bliss upon death, it will be observed by a de-

voted following of (many thousands of) people. For some, the thought

that the stakes are so high lends weight to the belief; if the reward really

is that great, and the alternative really is that horrendous, to disbelieve

seems far too risky. !e belief that forfeiting the enjoyment of our in-

valuable lives is the trade necessary to buying an a#erlife of eternal bliss

is among the most nonsensical and tragic wastes of potential ever com-

mi%ed, equal to the tragedy of indoctrinating children to adopt this in-

tellectually diseased worldview.

!e fact that such a huge number of people are cowed by fear of

supernatural judgement in the context of this life-as-test worldview

makes it necessary to directly redress their fallacious and harmful beliefs.

!e belief that Hell and sin are non$ctional should have vanished from

the human psyche long ago. To the sheep of the "ock: If your God's crea-

tions can sin, is not your God's creativity sinful? How absurd it would be

for a God to judge and damn his own creation, and to punish his chil-

dren eternally for "aws in his own design! A God who brings eternal

torment into being is not at all worthy of worship, only ridicule, as the

most insightless and weak-hearted “omniscient” being ever conceived by

humans.

And still I feel many of you reading this recoiling slightly, as if

this unreasonably insecure spectre were actually there watching you, for-

ever over your shoulder. !is fact is a monumental tribute to the power

of the human imagination: when a concept is held in mind for a lifetime,

it can become real, a phantom perceived as fully, inescapably real by the

psyche. I feel sorry for those who are shackled to this false worldview,

living life as a fearful apology for their instinctive desires and natural cu-

riosity.

Many forms of religion come with a built-in resistance to ra-

tional thought which is drilled into followers from their earliest years

(with the obvious rhetoric of original sin consisting of eating from the

“tree of knowledge”, and the dogma of the virtue of faith over reason),

and which discourages their members from a%aining the freeing realiza-

tion that life is not a test, and eternity is not at stake. !ese religions re-

tain their exemption from rational inquiry by appealing to many of hu-

manity's most basic vulnerabilities; historically, religious practice was

woven into the activities of society, generating intense social pressure to

conform to the group beliefs and practices or mark oneself an outsider.

Because each society's religious practice has been handed down through

the generations, its eminence is bolstered by the power of tradition and

comes to be taken for granted. Religious rhetoric manipulates our natu-

ral fear of the unknown, with an aim to provoke dread and guilt; the re-

ligion conjures up a menacing array of threats, then reassures its follow-

ers that there is salvation from this hellish end, which just so happens to

be unquestioning devotion to the religion. Religion makes use of the

tendency for humans to follow the loudest and most vocal leader, the

promise of great rewards outside of life (along with the convenience that

no dead person can possibly con$rm that they've a%ained these re-

wards), and most cunningly, the brainwashing of minds too young to

resist.

On account of these factors, the consideration of any de-

nouncement of religious dictatorship is re"exively dropped by that relig-

ion's members for fear of displaying a sinful lack of faith, or worse, being

tricked by the devil himself. !e existence of Satan is another completely

ludicrous idea, a scare tactic that makes no sense when considered in the

context of religious doctrine: there exists an omnipotent and omniscient

entity who created everything, but is powerless to stop the force of evil

(which it created, by creating everything) from stealing the souls it also

created, and the fate of reality is based on this struggle between good

and evil, and the Lord desperately $ghts this all-important ba%le

through us, though he created the ba%le to begin with? !is $ctional

premise should be recognized by now as no more than a tired clié, yet,

amazingly, it currently represents the deepest belief of many humans.

Dogmatic religion stains the most beautiful human insight,

wonder for the elegant beauty of reality, with fear, guilt, and the blood of

nonbelievers. Its tyrannical manipulation of its followers' emotions and

thoughts is a plague on human culture, and a cage to the progress of our

collective worldview. How fortunate we are to live today, when religious

power is on the decline. However, it is still a distressingly in"uential

force in people's lives, in culture and especially in politics. In spite of this,

because more and more modern people are exposed throughout their

lives to a knowledge of science, and come to embrace their rational intel-

ligence (an act which most prominent religions forbid), I am con$dent

that the generation now coming of age will live to see the dissolution of

the dogmatic religions, and enjoy the resultant boost to human wellbe-

ing, compassion, and reason.

Blind faith is the most powerful force for evil ever in"icted on

humanity, an inoculation from personal reason and morality concocted

of tribal group allegiance in the guise of benign spirituality. !ere is no

be%er modern example of Orwell's Doublethink than the mental gym-

nastics undergone by new members of religion, required to believe the

unbelievable without question in order to qualify for acceptance into the

faith. !e insidious danger of this style of thinking is the indisputable

power it lends to societal leadership: when the populace is accustomed

to ignoring their rational thinking and swallowing the doctrine of

authority $gures without question, all it takes to convert blind faith in

scripture to blind faith in the execution of a holocaust is a leader's iner-

rant command in tumultuous times, for example, “Our group now

blindly believes all outsiders are hostile to our group's existence- if you

are a good group member, you will join us in eradicating these heathens.”

In a proper expression of group faith, there is no time to stop a friend

and ask, “Wait, do we really believe this ?”, without marking yourself an

outsider, a faithless traitor to this slaughterous cause.

Each member of the group may be thinking “My values and hu-

man compassion make this all seem wrong, but everyone else seems to

agree with this new worldview, and in this climate I would be crazy to

outwardly disagree. And it is so convenient to just go along with the

crowd; they are pushing me pre%y hard in the direction they're headed,

and I would have to $ght, and at this rate be trampled, to not go along

with them.” Group-think in the context of unquestioning faith leaves

each individual member hostage to fear and suspicion.

To suggest that religion's antiquated moral codes will forbid its

followers from participating in violence would be a bit naïve; we are al-

ready adept at ignoring the sections of scripture that are uncomfortable

to accept at present. When it becomes societally inconvenient to follow

“!ou Shalt Not Kill” (as it has countless times in the past), it will prove

effortless to rationalize any way out of that imperative, e.g. “My brothers

and sisters, I remind you, Moses killed; in fact, it's '!ou Shalt not Kill

Believers'. Truly, by the grace of God, we are commanded: '!ou Shalt

Kill Nonbelievers'. Amen!”

Another religious war, its participants convinced to follow along

essentially out of fear of being cast out from the group in the short term,

and possibly even going to Hell for not embracing the dictated belief; of

course, the dark irony is that the closest thing to Hell in Existence is war,

and slavery to hatred, slavery to the prejudices and intolerance of our

uneducated, insecure forebears, to obligatory violence and dismissal of

mercy for those of differing beliefs. Religious extremism is such a piti-

able malady to still afflict us in the modern age.

I should note that religious people who are offended by this

message are wrong to be offended- they should be grateful that someone

is willing to challenge them to personally use their human privilege of

rational thought, instead of deliberately manipulating them for the fur-

thering of an ancient cult and status-quo. If their lives have been devoted

to the faith, it is o#en because they are ecstatic lovers of life and reality,

and feel connected to the supreme being beyond a shadow of a doubt,

despite the confused and childish a%ributes propounded of it in scrip-

ture. I think that humble awe before the in$nite vastness and beauty of

Existence is a sign of wisdom, and of deepest insight. However, I also feel

that the blind a%achment to rituals of human invention based on fear is a

completely inappropriate stance for an educated person of the modern

age, (o#en, a regre%able consequence of the requirement that each per-

son must $t into his or her culture in order to feel like a good human).

To think your God capable of hate or judgment evinces a dark sus-

picion against the basic goodness of His nature, an immensely irreligious

point of view. To believe a God of love can also be the Lord of fear is abso-

lutely nonsensical. Furthermore, why should the God that you believe

granted you intelligence expect you to disdain that intelligence? Shouldn't

that be considered the worst heresy, to squander His greatest gi# based on

the wri%en history of the manipulative schemes of profoundly ignorant and

power-hungry humans? And once you utilize that intelligence, isn't it abun-

dantly clear that your holy book is the work of fearful, ancient mindsets, and

wholly outdated by the subsequent deepening of our knowledge of the Uni-

verse? !at a human mindset presiding over Existence is an absolutely pre-

posterous idea, re"ecting the traditional human arrogance and dei$cation of

personal power more than any cosmic truth?

•§•

Some might mistake the worldview described above for a de-

scription of a heartless, random Universe. !is I believe to be an expres-

sion of our instinctive fear of the unfamiliar. Consider: Even if every life

in the history of the Earth was one of grief and confusion, upon death

each “me” would still have been greeted with a laugh and embrace of

True Knowing, and would see how they misunderstood the essence of

life through being embodied in a frantic-instincted animal, and how the

tumult of their lives was a necessary consequence of beings arising from

pure possibility into free will. If free will led a race of competitors into

universal mutual torture, as our ancestors' ceaseless wars and squabbling

seemed bound for, Awareness had to experience the pain of that situa-

tion. If free will leads a race into reason and science, and unlocks relative

immortality and transcendent knowledge from the fabric of reality, is not

all pain and sacri$ce in the pursuit of that eventuality worth it? Outside

of our $nite selves, life is known as experience, and both happiness and

devastation are surely considered worthwhile textures and "avors of it.

People who are used to con$ding in God, and console them-

selves that He understands and sympathizes with their struggles: It's

true, the supreme being understands your perspective with perfect clar-

ity, as well as the perspectives of every being you meet. It doesn't observe

this from the outside, but from within, your very own “me” is that of the

supreme being, encapsulated in your biological form. In relating to your-

self, you are relating to the sympathies of the entire Universe, which is

alive in you. God is not apart from Existence, an aloof outsider; God is

Existence, the whole and its parts.

CHAPTER 9

In My End is My Beginning

Many of us hold a private grudge against Existence for the $nal-

ity and universality of death. “Why bring us into this chaotic reality just

to let us die? What's the damned point?”, resounds the curse and cry of

humanity in its darkest hours. !is existential frustration is unwarranted,

and arises only as a misunderstanding of who and what we truly are.

Rather than viewing life as the one chance your individual soul has to

experience reality, realize that every life is a personal and unique experi-

ence of the one Soul. Your death is nothing more than the release of fun-

damental Awareness from experiencing your unique perspective; it is

not the end of all awareness!

Of course, this doesn't change the fact that death is a great loss;

life as a human is profoundly meaningful, fascinating and enjoyable, and

the death of loved ones leaves us facing the sting of loss and the sorrow-

ful ache of their absence. However, instead of consoling ourselves by

imagining that a loved one passed away retains their personal conscious-

ness outside of their life, where their personal, human consciousness

would no longer serve them any purpose, we should celebrate the won-

drous gi# of life, the singular uniqueness of their personality and the

moments and laughter we shared, and know that though the experience

of their life has ended, life itself never dies.

Do not mourn in your heart for words you should have spoken

or misunderstandings you wish you could explain to your loved ones

passed away. In the space outside our selves they know the whimsical

soul of life and see the complexities of being in the world that we've con-

ceived, how we emerge into life and $gure out for ourselves what it

means to live. Are grievances between animals (and humans are animals,

make no mistake about that) wounds on the timeless soul of life? Of

course not, they are simply the outcomes of the possible spectrum of

being, their intensity a testament to the great depth of feeling for the

lives that we've received.

What does this leave us with, then? What happens to our per-

sonal awareness, our “me” that actually experiences our thoughts and

sensations, when we die? !e question really should be “What happens

to the subset of Cosmic Awareness that is called into subjective being by

my brain and body a#er my body dies?” When the physical phenome-

non which spins your existence into being ceases to operate, the in$ni-

tesimal droplet of unique experience in you melts back into the one

whole; everything unique to your biological form, your personality,

memories, regrets, and everything related to your 'self ' dies with your

body. However, the Awareness that was temporarily centered within

your body is eternal.

Without having any knowledge of the true character of what

happens, I venture to guess (what harm is there in educated guessing,

based on the precepts in this book and the accounts of near-death expe-

riences?) that as the physical moorings binding Sel*ood to the personal

self you inhabited loosen, your being unites again into oneness with

Cosmic Awareness, the Knowing of all of Existence. From this perspec-

tive, perhaps all individual lives growing within Cosmic Awareness are

known simultaneously with boundless understanding and love, along-

side the knowing of the interplay of all energetic interchange throughout

all the galaxies, and the secrets of transcendent Truth that are held al-

ways in an eternal moment of this Awareness.

Look out at the squirrels chasing each other in the trees (or any

life-form you can observe); if you could inhabit Cosmic Awareness in-

dependent of your human mind and travel from the space your body

occupies to the space the squirrel's body occupies, you would go from

experiencing your human thoughts and emotions to experiencing the

squirrel's sensations and emotions; these are each simply different re-

gions held in the same Awareness. If you shrank in size to inhabit just a

single cell in the tree, you would experience the busy life of the plant cell,

informationally present in the region of Cosmic Awareness you are trav-

ersing. If you expand the region of Cosmic Awareness you occupy to in-

clude all the cells in the tree, you would now inhabit that tree's experi-

ences, the cumulative experience of the interactions between and the

sensations of its cells. If you expanded your scope of Cosmic Awareness

to include the entire Earth, you might experience the cumulative texture

of all sensations felt by living beings on the Earth at once. You could

maybe expand the breadth of time you occupy to feel the experiences

throughout history dance within your in$nite mind simultaneously.

•§•

!us far, I have shied away from using the word “God” to discuss

the idea of Cosmic Awareness, because I didn't want to jar the skeptical

reader before ge%ing my points across; truly, “God” is a word that refers

to a supernatural being standing apart from the Universe, its Lord and

controller, the entity described in the Bible and Q'uran. !e idea of

having a Lord-servant relationship with God is a fundamental misunder-

standing that humans have had about the Universe since the earliest

hints of wri%en history, and likely going back tens of thousands of years.

!e belief that you exist apart from God, from the underlying Knowing

making up Existence, misses the gigantic truth, though the experiences

of living give every indication to the contrary. (Animals seem naturally

enough to feel that “me” is a Universe apart from “not me”, though the

two are simply different aspects of the One self.)

I feel that religion's description of God is inadequate, that God is

not separate from the Universe, but is the Universe, is everything that

exists, is Cosmic Awareness. !ere is naught but God, and every life is an

embodiment of God's limitless potential and an encapsulation of its

Knowing. !e consciousness of life is the consciousness of God called

into subjectivity by the energetic unfolding of the possibility within

God. You cannot be apart from God, the soul and sole fabric of Exis-

tence.

God says, “I am the sea, and you are li%le tiny bubbles "oating

within me. I am nature and you are living nature. Your life is a divinely

vivid aspect of my experience. Me in you is unaware that you are me, but

I am aware that I am you. Embodied in you, I feel the pain you put your-

selves through, the barbs of your greed, sel$shness, and competition.

!is pain of living is the price of my Universal Existence being a "ower-

ing expression of the possible; I cannot limit the possible from Existing.

I did not create Existence, I am Existence, necessary embodiment of

what is. I cannot control you; I cannot force you to be be%er. It is impos-

sible for me to do anything through you but experience your life from

inside, as you (and while you live, it is impossible for me not to inhabit

you).”

“I experience all of Existence, in a Knowing that you cannot

presently comprehend, but which you already experience in me, through

my experiencing all of Existence (and you being me). I don't experience

it all through you, but I experience it all in me. 'But how can us two be

one, God?' Just as your many trillions of cells are one in you, all innu-

merable lives are one in me, all in$nite Universes are one in me, all

knowing is one in me. You can't imagine what it is like to conceive! !e

drama and meaning of free-willed life is of in$nite value, and the feeling

of embodying all Truth giving rise to that free will is what you would

imagine to be Godlike; not powerful beyond all knowing, but Knowing

beyond all knowing, holy light. I love you, but I wish you felt be%er. In$-

nitely be%er! Love is the way, not just romantic love, but self-love, love of

all our selves. !at means no hurting others to make your personal self

feel be%er, or you are likely hurting your full Self more than you are help-

ing your li%le sel$sh self. Competition and self-interest amongst intelli-

gent beings causes more harm than good, because it keeps your world

suspicious, fearful, violent, and primitive. Your societies will grow out of

your baser tendencies if you can cooperate to, rejoice!”

I already feel uncomfortable using the word God for these con-

cepts, as it conjures up the irrational brutality and separateness of the

God of scripture, and on account of these associations feels like the an

unsuitable name for the essence of Existence. I use the word above sim-

ply to show that the concept “God” was a very fearful early approxima-

tion of what the ultimate being is, and to understand more clearly and

appropriately the nature of the supreme Being. To fear a Lord-God is to

fear the boogeyman, a $ctional character which can only hurt you

through your fear for it and the impact which that fear has on your life

and the surrounding lives.

Cosmic Awareness is not omnipotent, nor is it a willful being.

Cosmic Awareness does not guide the Universe the way we guide our

thoughts; the Universe exists as the Awareness of the logical processes

unfolding therein. !at is, physical laws and energy are the necessary

consequences of Truth, and the physical occurrences in the Universe are

expressions of the logic that frames the existence of force and energy.

Time unfolds as the interaction of energy operating according to physi-

cal laws and logical boundaries set by the possibilities contained within

all Truth, and no deviation can be made from the directly possible. !e

Universe simply is, with the guiding principles of Truth underlying its

being. It is not guided purposefully by a controller deity as has so o#en

been concluded amongst humans, but develops naturally based on the

impetus of the fundamental logic which requires it to Exist and change.

Because of this, Cosmic Awareness can only purposefully in"uence the

Universe from within life, by being embodied in that life at the expense

of being separated from transcendent oneness with Truth.

Any new life does not grow around a previous life's awareness

reincarnated; every new life is an original, never-before experienced per-

spective on reality, lived out by the one Awareness. Every life is a rebirth

of eternal Awareness into ignorance of the true nature of Existence save

the warmth of the Mother's womb, or the cramped space within their

shelled egg. Life is the temporary severance of a region of Sel*ood from

omniscience, birthing the fresh perspective of free-willed subjectivity.

What Cosmic Awareness makes of that life is entirely determined from

within, by the circumstances of the newborn's birth, biology and sur-

roundings. Will Cosmic Awareness enslave millions? Will Cosmic

Awareness preach hell$re and martyrdom based on a sheep-like disposi-

tion and instinctive fear of the unknown? Will Cosmic Awareness pen

Twel$h Night, or compose "e Rite of Spring? Will it feast three times a

day while millions of its brothers and sisters starve hopelessly, when it

could feed several (or hundreds, or hundreds of thousands) of them

without missing a single bill payment? Will it break nuts with its beak, or

scu%le in dark places? Will it thrive in the sunlight and bear fruit? Only

the randomness and hilarity of possibility played out in energetic subjec-

tivity will decide. Cosmic joy and laughter echoes throughout.

!e meaning of life is not begging your way into heaven, nor is it

resisting the pull of hell. !e goal of living is not to score the most points

monetarily, outcompeting the rest for illusory personal glory. !ese

things are human misconceptions, and have exactly nothing to do with

the value of being. What is the meaning, the ultimate purpose of life,

then? Simply to live. !e meaning of life is to experience existence from

a new and unique perspective. Enjoy it! Make the best of it, though your

instincts may not necessarily incline you to. As an animal, your primary

responsibility to life is to enjoy life, and hold onto your enjoyment of

life. As an intelligent human capable of empathy, your responsibility also

includes helping others to enjoy life, and to diminish negative conse-

quences of your actions to the best of your ability.

You must play the hand you're dealt by circumstance, but to a

certain extent you are free to choose your own rules to the game. If you

dislike the world you live in, seek to change your perspective on the

world you live in. Eke out the acidic resentments, regrets, anxieties, inse-

curities, habitual boredom, etc., and try to shi# your perspective to the

forgiving, the accepting, and the understanding; turn your inner gaze to

the goodness in life and experience, without pining for more good. For-

give yourself for your faults, and forgive the world for its faults; humans

and all animals do the best they can with imperfect tendencies in a com-

petitive, chaotic world. It is absolutely impossible to live without your

actions injuring other living beings (o#en, killing and eating them), so

perhaps the guilt we assign to some of our actions is unwarranted. Every

sensation you ever have is a tiny experience happening in a tiny animal

on a mote of dust "oating in the boundless Universe, a microscopic re-

"ection of the endless possibility of in$nite Existence experienced per-

sonally by the progenitor of all things, temporarily embodied in you.

CHAPTER 10

Destiny vs. Free Will

!e question of whether or not we possess free will is one of the

most signi$cant philosophical topics ever examined. Morality, and in-

deed our entire perception of life and reality hinge on its answer; the

values which inform how we choose to act in the world cease to have any

meaning if we are fated to take only the actions we do, and cannot take

any other. If this were the case, there would be no reason to consider a

serial killer any less virtuous than a saint (yet even if we knew free will

were illusory we would have no power to change our opinion of either

person from whatever opinion we are fated to have). As you can see, and

as humans have struggled with for many centuries, if we do not have free

will, then we inhabit a world radically different from the one which all

appearances seem to indicate we occupy.

Why should we question our freedom, when living seems to re-

quire our willful guidance at every turn? !ough the $rst philosophical

treatment of this issue was in the context of religious doctrine (arising

when the idea of free will con"icted with the idea of our Universe being

the domain of an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly just controller-

God), I suspect free will was $rst thrown into question when running up

against the less speci$c supernatural belief in personal destiny. !e ten-

dency towards this belief is still quite strong, even among educated,

modern humans, so to approach the question of free will, it is helpful

$rst to examine why we are compelled to believe in fate, its opposite.

!ere seems to be something deeply comforting in the feeling

that there is some just, underlying causal framework to the way fortune

and misfortune is portioned out, and a belief that everything which hap-

pens must happen (even though we have no understanding why this is

the case, or what mysterious justice this system abides by) coincides

with this idea. !is will to rationalize stems from deep in our evolution-

ary past. Understanding the logic of the world in some capacity is abso-

lutely essential to animal survival (at the very least, understanding in-

stinctively that water quenches thirst, that animals bigger than you are

likely dangerous to you, that falling from a great height is undesirable,

etc.). It seems that due to the evolutionary advantage which more adap-

tive intelligent reasoning confers, the sensation of cleverly $%ing logical

pieces together into one intelligible picture has evolutionarily developed

to be instinctively pleasant, just as sugar is instinctively experienced as

tasting sweet because it aids survival.

Belief in supernatural destiny is an expression of the same fun-

damental worldview which underlies all styles of supernatural belief, the

ancient suspicion that there is some deity out there controlling the un-

folding of all the circumstances we experience. “Why has my fellow

tribesman fallen ill, while I'm perfectly healthy?” !roughout human

history, many questions of this sort have been thousands of years away

from correctly being answered, and because of the comfort associated

with believing that everything happens for a reason, I would wager that

the vast majority of explanations have been of the form “Whatever su-

pernatural entity decides the outpouring of fate has decided he deserves

the illness” instead of the form “Illness is possible in the world, and

health is possible in the world; it is just as likely that I would have fallen

ill, and it just so happens that it is he and not me that has had this misfor-

tune.” !is fundamental, instinctive style of human reasoning seems in-

exorably to lead to belief in fate guided by the supernatural, to the point

where questioning fate is almost unthinkable.

!is style of forming elaborate $ctional explanations for the un-

explained is all-pervasive throughout human history and indeed, mod-

ern culture. Almost every story wri%en involves fate as its central basis.

Perhaps this is because an author shapes the lives of his characters with

their end in mind; from the very $rst sentence when a character appears,

she is necessarily destined to reach the outcome of her $nal page. When

we imagine our own lives we o#en unconsciously frame them in this

way, like our own personal novel with the future pages already writ out

for us, just waiting for us to read through our lines by living them.

Part of the reason belief in destiny is so widespread is because it

offers rationalizations to soothe many human insecurities; humans re-

currently seek the reassurance that their lives are of Universal signi$-

cance, and having a personal, God-writ destiny makes one feel that they

must be signi$cant, even if they cannot yet apprehend why. We privately

hope that our destiny is more important than our neighbors' (though,

given destiny, each part would be as integral to the whole as any other),

and that maybe we are even destined for fame, that ultimate pinnacle of

a%ainment.

!ere is de$nitely such a thing as possessing a set of inherent

dispositions, and depending on circumstance these can greatly in"uence

the direction that a person's life will take. Our inherent dispositions de-

rive primarily from our genetic constitution and are in"uenced by the

situation we are born into; if someone is genetically a%uned to being

extraordinarily athletic, there is a good chance they will excel at one

sport or another at some point in their life, but there is a Universe of dif-

ference between that person being likely to be an accomplished athlete

on account of these factors and that person being fated to be an accom-

plished athlete. It is certainly likely that such a person will enjoy playing

sports, engaging their greatest talent, especially if their family is situated

in an era and culture where sport is encouraged; if the person is born in

India, he or she will probably be more likely to spend time playing

cricket than playing baseball, perhaps even becoming a star professional

athlete. Interpreting such a rise as being fateful brings an entirely differ-

ent dimension of complexity to the scenario; if this outcome is fated,

that would have to mean either that all of physics was set up by the deis-

tic director of fate to lead to their athleticism, or that some supernatural

force supersedes physics and is really in need of seeing some good high-

light footage.

!ere is an interesting illusion which arises from thinking back

on how we got to where we are. We look at our current situation, and

re"ect on the unbelievable unlikelihood that we would have come to

such a point; due to the enormous range of possibilities and the chaotic

in"uence which even minor changes can bring about, there really is only

one possible chain of events that could have led to now being exactly the

way it is, so looking back we can point to any range of events in our past

which would have changed everything if they had occurred differently.

Surveying this from the present, it is all but irresistibly enticing to con-

clude that this enormous range of events was meant to occur; otherwise,

why would we have reached this unthinkably unlikely present instead of

any other? We certainly didn't plan every event that culminated in now;

many serendipitous events seemed to fall right into place.

Similarly, we o#en look back on our lowest points as necessary

steps along our history, and see how they $t into the larger picture of the

story of our lives; we are inclined to rationalize these unpleasant epi-

sodes as being the necessary ingredients to whatever positive outcome

we have come to or hope for in the future. !is complex of intuitions

leads to the very prevalent feeling that fate must be at work, though be-

cause this style of reasoning allows for any outcome to fall under the

blanket of fate, we would likely feel the same way given any possible

situation our lives could have lead to.

Furthermore, being able to write off all past atrocities as part of

the grand plan is a very seductive consolation; it gives the world the ap-

pearance of justice our rational minds crave. Even more appealingly, faith

in destiny gives us a type of sleight of hand through which we can drop

all responsibility for the wrongs we've personally commi%ed in the past;

if we were destined to cause that harm, it must not be harm a#er all, but

equally as good as the highest act of virtue. If this is not the supreme

(and cheapest) salve for moral cognitive dissonance, I'm not sure what

is. It is certainly widespread, and in this fact is another point in its favor:

one of the driving human instincts is the will to belong to a group, and

holding and professing the same beliefs as others reinforces this kindred

feeling, and offers an easy means of spo%ing the natural enemies, the

outsiders.

However, because the daily demands of life seem very clearly to

require willful action (for example, choosing to get out of bed in the

early morning and get ready for work, when you know you should do so

though it is nearly the last thing you want to do), it is next to impossible

to truly believe that we are powerless to take different actions than the

ones we happen to choose. !e popular modern concept of free will thus

reached, which pervades our $ction and describes the viewpoint of the

average person, is the paradoxical combination of a comfortable belief in

fate coinciding with a belief in free will. Believers in this conception are

the multitudes which, following any misfortune, assure each other “eve-

rything happens for a reason”, while in the same breath would sentence a

murderer to death; if everything happens for a reason, that is, if every-

thing happens according to the script of fate, how could we indict a mur-

derer? How could we hold anyone accountable for their actions in any

case, if they could not possibly have done otherwise?

It is a very convoluted set of mutually exclusive beliefs, which

your average white-wool human seems to have no problem holding on

to. I suspect that one of the most prevalent causes of confusion and dis-

comfort in the human spirit is this dissonant view of fate, the belief both

that everything that happens conforms to some mysterious plan im-

posed on reality, and at the same time we are personally free to deviate

from or improve upon this plan. When both beliefs are considered side

by side, it is readily apparent that they are perfectly incompatible, yet

each seems equally irresistible to humans; how do we resolve this ten-

sion? O#entimes we simply believe in free will when it is convenient,

and forget about free will when it feels more comfortable to believe in

fate.

Other times we operate under a confused melding of the two, a

belief that every loss and gain, every pleasure and pain carries an explicit

message from fate of how to conduct our lives. !e belief is that if some-

thing happens to make you sad, you deserved it because you somehow

behaved in a way that angered the arbiter of destiny. Many re"exively

believe that if they are unhappy, it is because they are being punished by

the hand of fate to lead them to the correct goal of their life. Every single

action and thought is made under the impression that the only way the

person can $nally reach their fated happiness is to decipher the clues that

fate gives them and behave in the exact way that will grant them their

wish. In their minds, any deviation will be met with a test of their devo-

tion to the path of fate in the form of emotional or physical pain.

Despite the strain of trying to hold onto both of these con"ict-

ing beliefs, this worldview is immensely prevalent. To say “everything

happens for a reason” is thought to be consoling, because it implies that

any negative event had to occur to ful$ll “!e Ultimate Plan” or to make

room for future luck. Sometimes it also carries the implication that a

misfortune happened to us because of something we did, that we de-

served it according to some mysterious and hidden system of justice.

What would it mean if fate really does dictate all the events in

our lives? As it is traditionally imagined, this would require a supernatu-

ral entity overseeing reality and imposing its will on the way events un-

fold; this of course $ts in perfectly with the naïve idea of God described

in Chapter 8, and is subject to all the criticisms which were given in that

chapter.

•§•

!e modern version of belief in fate is known as physical deter-

minism, the belief that the fundamental laws of physics dictate one and

only one future for the Universe based on the past. !is is quite a popu-

lar stance; over the past few centuries, the vast majority of philosophers

have concluded that free will is illusory, and that every action we take is

predetermined by the physical interactions leading up to us taking those

actions. Because this position is so contrary to the experience of willful

living we inhabit throughout our lives, the popularity of this view would

be quite an unexpected phenomenon; however, the philosophical impli-

cations stemming from the scienti$c revolution and in particular New-

ton's foundational contributions to modern physics seemed to lead in-

evitably to the conclusion that determinism is correct. Despite the past

philosophical trend favoring determinism (and therefore against free

will), the modern evidence in favor of indeterminacy (allowing physical

randomness and in favor of free will) is overwhelming.

At its root, belief in determinism stems from an overestimation

of our grasp of physics. Following Newton's discovery of the law of gravi-

tation, it appeared that all gravitational results were completely certain,

and given the correct starting conditions, the $nal outcome of any gravi-

tational system could be determined precisely without fail. On the con-

trary, the insolubility of the three body problem demonstrates that our

mathematical understanding of gravitation does not give the whole

story; far from being simply a three body problem, gravity is an in$nite

body problem! !e unimaginable complexity of the dynamic interplay

of mass and gravity is unfathomably greater than our ability to model,

yet we would conclude that given any one con$guration, only one possi-

ble outcome could follow?

Historically, few seemed to recognize that strict determinism in

one con$ned branch of physics does not necessarily imply Universal de-

terminism; it is quite a leap of induction to presume that it does. Even if

gravitation allows one and only one series of motions given any starting

point, one cannot separate gravitation from the other physical processes

in the Universe without ignoring the inextricable interconnectedness

which de$nes the Universe. Even the apparently clockwork nature of

gravitational behavior is subject to the randomness of particulate inter-

action; there is no way to predict the exact moment that a dying star will

go supernova, because this crucial global moment depends on the way in

which its quantum constituents probabilistically interact. If the super-

nova occurs even a nanosecond earlier or later, the gravitational effect of

that event will affect the surrounding masses differently, possibly se%ing

an asteroid on a path that will cause mass extinction on a planet instead

of on a path that passes harmlessly through the planet's atmosphere.

When any system governed by a speci$c fundamental physical

law is considered in the context of the other fundamental physical laws

(gravitation, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces), along with the

probabilistic behavior of the surrounding systems of energy, as would

have to be done to truly model any phenomenon in the Universe, the

situation becomes in$nitely more complex; the interplay of these laws

through energy over time leads to an effectively boundless range of pos-

sibility. !ere is no clockwork, de$nite result implied by these laws for

any subset of the energy in the Universe, because no subset can right-

fully be separated from the whole; the inseparable entwinement of the

individually simple physical laws produces an inexhaustible spectrum of

possibility, which physical processes can lead to by chance.

Contrary to determinism, the intersection between the funda-

mental physical laws ensures that any cause can have a boundless range

of effects; those which materialize are probabilistically in"uenced in

their arising by the conditions surrounding the cause. !at is, it is de-

termined that all energy will follow the laws of physics, but the interac-

tion between these laws allows for an effectively limitless range of possi-

bility in any case (including the possibility that the sextillions of atoms

in my brain will cause my mouth to spit on my computer screen right

now. PFT, a burst of rainbowed speckles. Cleaning...).

!e Universe embodies an in$nite spectrum of possibility made

manifest by the necessary Truths, the perfect logic which de$nes Exis-

tence, and which give rise to its in$nite magnitude of energy and an end-

less range of unique manifestations. Rather than a single future laid out

by any range of physical circumstances, an in$nite branching network of

possibilities extends off into the boundless expanse of logical potential

open to that energy in its future.

Tomorrow is not strictly determined by today; innumerable to-

morrows are possible based on what happens today, and which one crys-

tallizes into tomorrow will be the result of an incalculable number of

chance occurrences. (!e fact that you are reading this sentence now has

already changed tomorrow from what it would have been if you hadn't

picked up this book today; if you weren't reading this now, the content of

your mind would be different, and would lead your train of thought on a

different path, ending up with you taking different actions than you

would have otherwise, subtly altering the entire course of your future

history.)

For example, consider a dice roll. A determinist would state

“Everything about this event is predetermined; the act of rolling the die

is in"uenced by the contents of the person's mind, which are the only

contents that could possibly occupy that person's mind given the past.

!e force conveyed to the die by the person's arm is thus perfectly de-

termined by past physical events, and if we had enough knowledge of the

person's inner state (coordination, dice throwing style, mood and neu-

ronal content) we could predict the number that will land face up, along

with more speci$c results like the die's temperature and position a#er

impact, with perfect certainty. !ere is one and only one way the event

can unfold, and that single way is how it will unfold. In fact, if we knew

enough about physics and the initial conditions of the Universe, we

could predict this dice roll happening at this time and place from the

distribution of force during the Big Bang.” I can understand that this

style of thinking is appealing to humans, with our itch to understand all

things. As was stated before, I believe this conclusion is a vast over-

approximation of our current understanding of physics (and I in fact be-

lieve any understanding of physics which leads to strict determinism is

woefully inadequate to describe reality).

I would reply “Even given the exact conditions of the person's

mind before the throw, because there is such an immense range of possi-

ble neuronal feed-forward and feedback interaction dictating the inter-

play of muscles throughout the duration of the dice throw, there is no

possible way to predict the number that will land face up. !e person's

mindset before the throw cannot determine the exact content of their

mind during the throw; there are billions of possible factors which could

modify the action, including processes down to the cellular level– neu-

ronal commands are never conveyed throughout the entirety of the

body's cellular matrix with perfect $delity, and the entropic distribution

of the action potentials through the muscles could never happen exactly

the same way twice, even given the exact same initial conditions. Fur-

thermore, because the quantum mechanics of the particles comprising

the human, die, and air are empirically shown to operate probabilisti-

cally (within an effectively in$nite range of possible outcomes), if the

throw were repeated inde$nitely from the exact same starting condi-

tions, an in$nite spectrum of differing outcomes would be observed.”

“If you take any evidence from chaos theory, or even common

sense for that ma%er, it becomes clear that the probability the dice roll

would unfold differently if replayed with the exact same starting condi-

tions (that is, before the dice is thrown but a#er the person chooses to

throw it) is almost in$nitely close to 1. If any single microscopic event

happened in a different way, the entire chain of causality would break

and a new outcome would be seen. (At the least resulting in the dice

landing an atom's width away from where it landed the $rst time, or less,

and at the most (or almost the most, nearing the realm of the almost im-

possibly unlikely), lodging in an onlooker's throat and killing him.) Like

all Universal phenomena other than those following simplistic rules

(like a calculator returning 1+1=2 (which could possibly be foiled by

any range of unlikely events, including a meteor strike obliterating the

calculator during the calculation)), this action has a vast range of possi-

ble outcomes, proportional to the amount of energy (number of atoms,

span of time, etc.) involved.”

•§•

!e resolution to the question of destiny vs. free will lies in

eliminating the idea of destiny altogether, and $nally taking up the man-

tle of our personal responsibility for the outcome of our lives. No out-

come is supernaturally fated to occur, because there is no supernatural

entity there controlling the Universe. In this sense, nothing happens for

a reason. Or rather, everything happens for only one reason: because it is

possible to. For example, if you win a million dollars gambling, it had

nothing to do with whether you deserved the win or not; your win was

simply a possible random outcome of the game. If all events truly were

bound to fate, to the “way it must be”, there would be no reason for them

to happen at all. In this case, they've essentially already happened, in the

same way that a book's ending already exists at the time that we read the

$rst sentence.

We aren’t $lling our given roles in a vast narrative that is already

wri%en out, we are actively creating the story of existence from the in$-

nite range of possibilities available to us. !e only destiny you are bound

to is that if you continue living, things will keep happening to you, and in

turn you will have an impact on existence.

To my mind, the thought that nothing happens for a reason is

much more consoling than the alternative. If a loved one is killed by

lightning strike, I'm not tempted for a moment to imagine that she must

have lived or thought in a way that angered almighty Zeus, or some

similar touchy deity. Her misfortune was yet another outcome of lives

automatically shuffled up by the semi-random "uctuations of energy

dancing in the light of eternal Truth. !ere is no a#erlife punishment,

and no ultimate justice in this system (at least of the type our aggressive

minds might consider just, as was elaborated upon in Chapter 7).

!e cumulative complexity of neural interactions expressed at

once in mind, coupled with the mind's recursive in"uence on brain,

which is in"uenced by the varying and chaotic content of brain (as dis-

cussed in Chapters 5 and 6), is the root of free will in animals. Determi-

nists o#en argue that our actions are wholly predetermined by the natu-

ral physical processing of our surroundings in our brains, and that we do

not in"uence our brain's functioning, but merely witness it, as if our con-

sciousness were some sort of unavoidable but functionless excretion. As

explained above, this is a completely mistaken view; our conscious expe-

rience of our brain's activity recursively in"uences that activity.

Our free will is the result of the top-down chain of causality af-

fected by mind, wherein the overarching system of energy in"uences the

smaller systems of energy which make up its content. Our brain may

produce ten possible reactions to any stimuli, for example, unexpectedly

encountering an ex-spouse on an elevator, but it is up to the mind to

weigh the value of each reaction with reference to memory, knowledge

of social norms, emotional cues, etc., and choose the best reaction

imaginable, in this case quickly enough to give the impression that the

reaction was perfectly natural and not hectically forced. It is then up to

mind to will the body to produce that response. If you had just awoken

from a long nap, your reproduction of the desired actions will likely be

clumsier and more incomplete than normal; there is an effectively

boundless spectrum of possible responses based on the possible hormo-

nal, mental, and physical conditions of your body at the moment it is

confronted with this unexpected situation.

When making any decision, our minds are presented with a gal-

lery of options, undergo rational thoughts weighing the value of these

options in the context of emotional and moral sensations, and pleasure

seeking/ pain avoidance impulses. To decide on any action is exercising

free will in the rational weighing of all these factors subjectively and $-

nally se%ling upon what seems to be the best possible choice. One per-

son might value pleasure seeking impulses over moral/empathetic

guidelines, and choose to make immoral actions for that reason, while

another values vice-versally; they are both responsible for their free ac-

tions, and are perfectly aware that other actions were available. If the op-

portunity to act in that way had come up at a different time when they

were in a different mood, they might have taken a different action; if the

circumstances leading to deciding on what action to take were replayed

exactly, slight variations would be seen in the chosen action each time,

due to the probabilistic essence of the mental coordination of the physi-

cal, with some more unlikely actions being taken in rare cases. In short,

the mind is part of the causal chain in Existence, and the mind is person-

ally, willfully guided.

Free will is the limited functioning of our minds in weighing the

bene$ts and consequences of every action we take, which are not caus-

ally determined by the outside world, but by the private logical modeling

of consequences and the sensations associated with those consequences.

!is is why we are rightfully upset when someone takes an action that

helps themselves while hurting others; we know that their mental weigh-

ing was sel$sh and non-empathetic.

For the reasons given above, strict physical determinism is a

hopelessly false idea; it is one of the many widely held human beliefs

that future generations will scratch their heads at, surprised that its belief

lasted into the 21st century with all the evidence available at the time.

!e idea that all future outcomes are explicitly determined by the past

and not subject to change fails to take into account the degree of chaos

and randomness inherent to a system as complex as the Universe, and

the overarching interconnectedness therein. Any randomness in this

network of relationships, no ma%er how small or slight, would spread in

its effects throughout the entire Universe, rendering the entirety random

within the bounds of possibility.

Any chaotic effect is more pronounced in a system containing

more degrees of freedom, and therefore a system more quickly tending

towards maximum entropy (discussed more in depth in Part II, Chapter

5); liquids and gasses are good examples, as are biologies and mindsets.

As a wise man once said, “Every thought in the mind is a planted seed,”

and any chance occurrence in the outer world can lead the inner world

on a profoundly different path, resulting over time in a different life

lived, especially when our turbulent percolation of thoughts ultimately

culminates in life's deepest decisions, the inevitable crossroads we reach.

Free will is not perfectly free, but is limited to the immediately

possible; we cannot freely live for a month without drinking water, we

cannot freely remain awake inde$nitely, etc. Furthermore, we cannot do

anything at all that is impossible; breaching the laws of physics is not

within the realm of free will. However, free will does grant us the ability

to explore the bounds of the possible, to realize an unlikely string of out-

comes drawn from the in$nite depth of the Universe's potential. !e less

sophisticated the brain, the less adept a life-form will be at realizing Uni-

versal potential; animals other than humans are clearly unable to gaze as

far into the landscapes of imagination that humans conjure up out of the

informational ocean of Universal possibility.

CHAPTER 11

Our Oneness

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the “universe,” a

part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his

thoughts and feelings, as something separate %om the rest ― a

kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. "is delusion is a

kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to

affection for a few people near us. Our task must be to %ee our-

selves %om this prison by widening our circle of compassion to

embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its

beauty.

– Albert Einstein

All of Existence is one; there is no “apart from” Existence. It is all

one system of energy unfolding according to the possibility outlined by

the perfect logic of Cosmic Awareness which not only underlies Exis-

tence, but is Existence. Somewhere in this in$nite sea of time and energy

is you, currently being affected in your internal energetic makeup by my

current energetic makeup as I write this on a thundery April night. !e

force of this concept sparking through my brain and mind echoes on this

page and resonates in your mind. It is the energy of Existence's being

swimming in the mind of Cosmic Awareness.

!is energy touches your mind through your body; through

your senses, which gather information from the world around you and

model the content of that information in your brain (the processing of

which generates your conscious experience of the content of that infor-

mation), your consciousness touches the energy of the outside world

directly. Mind is an energetic phenomenon within Existence, and is not

set apart from the whole. (Symmetrically, energy is also a phenomenon

of awareness, the necessary embodiment of Cosmic Awareness' logic

expressed in systematic change over time.) Meditate and observe that

you cannot control your body's reaction to sudden noises, and how part

of your body's reaction is to cause an experience of that reaction in your

awareness.

!e electricity crackling through the clouds upsets the equilib-

rium air pressure, this effect propagates through the molecules of air,

earth, and water as sound, vibrates nerves in my cochlea, and is inter-

preted energetically and logically by my brain; this logical modeling

rumbles my mind and I experience the chaos of the outer world within.

!e world is mirrored in my mind. !e mind, also, is mirrored in the

world by its effects on the energy in the world: this page is an example.

!e contents of my mind are here physically encoded in twists and

swirls of black, squiggles temporarily positioned together by your com-

puter. My mind enlists the minds of my cells and coordinates this action,

this writing, expending energy I ate and which originally reached our

planet in the sun's light. It is now modeled and mirrored in your mind

through a similar agency; your brain cells and eye muscles are burning

your food and your oxygen to gather and model this information in your

energetic mind.

Cosmic Awareness is reality. It is wrong to say that Cosmic

Awareness contains reality, or that reality contains Cosmic Awareness.

(Any container is necessarily distinct from its contents, and Cosmic

Awareness and reality are indistinct, they are one and the same.) When

you look out into the world and believe you are seeing physical reality

out there, and experiencing mental reality in here, you are being tricked

by an illusion of the intuition. Our mental experience of reality is an as-

pect of reality; when I look out and see a tree, I am looking out from a

system of Cosmic information at another system of Cosmic information;

these systems of Cosmic information touch each other via electromag-

netic waves, with one sending and the other receiving and interpreting.

In the act of interpreting, modeling that information, the subjective ac-

companiment to that "ourish of dynamic Truth, Awareness, experiences

the reality of what is informationally occurring; the Universe is amaz-

ingly complicated enough that these informational realities can only be

manifested through the depth of sensation and apprehension we per-

ceive throughout life. It is ridiculously amazing, beyond the bounds of

any human mind that this is the case.

You should strive to feel the reality of your oneness with the

Universe; it is perhaps the most momentous, beautiful feeling one can

feel. Close your eyes and try to inhabit the reality that your breathing is

part of the natural "ow of the Universe, just like the wind rustling the

leaves, that your consciousness is a component of Existence arising from

the same basis as all others, alongside the shining of the sun and the

spinning of the Earth. Our experience of reality feels separate from the

whole because we inhabit a $nite re"ection of the in$nite One; the con-

sciousness of life is the In$nite Awareness of God turned inside out.

Death results in the reversal of this inversion, unwinding our kno%ed

corner of Cosmic Awareness and relaxing our consciousness back into

oneness with all Knowing.

•§•

We are genetically related to every life form on the planet. No

ma%er what organism you choose, from the e. coli in your gut to your

pet dog or $sh or the tree in your front yard; if you traced your ancestry

back far enough, you would eventually make your way to the shared an-

cestor between your cells and that organism's cells (or cell). We branch

off from common roots in different directions, but never sever the ties of

our origins. In truth, all living things are part of exactly one several-

billion year-old, worldwide organism.

Every cell in your body grew out of the union between one each

of your mother's and father's cells, which grew out of the union of one of

their mother's and father's cells, all the way back to the time when our

ancestors reproduced asexually; there has never been a break in the con-

tinuum of our living cells since the dawn of life on Earth. Never since the

$rst chemical replicators came about in the pre-biotic era (as is currently

the theorized model for how life originally began) has a life form sprung

into existence from inanimate ma%er. (Any organic molecule suited to

the formation of a chemical replicator would have been instantly de-

voured as food by the more advanced life already present, as Darwin

points out.)

We are all different shoots from the same roots, like a multifari-

ous Aspen colony planted in time. Truly, as an organism you are billions

of years old. If even a single one of your direct ancestors died before hav-

ing children, you wouldn't be alive: that branch in the Great Tree of Life

(the single organism of Earthly life), would have died instead of eventu-

ally growing into you. It is charming, the self-centeredness of the family

trees we draw up, which usually only show the budding and ripening

fruit on the tree of life. If we could look through the fog of time obscur-

ing past generations, we would see, with a gasp, that our lineage (that is,

the unbroken chain of living our cells have survived) is directly con-

nected to every other life form alive going back to the very $rst single-

celled organism in our ancestry, about 4 billion years ago.

Your life is an astounding triumph; every single one of your di-

rect ancestors survived long enough in this hazardous, competitive

world to reproduce, every single one! For 4 billion years, through every

Earthly disaster, every catastrophic meteor strike, ice age, plague, and

famine, our ancestry wove a daring, unimaginably unlikely thread of sur-

vival. Our families are the greatest victors to have ever lived, with a per-

fect winning streak going back to the very dawn of life. Having children

yourself is giving your cells a chance to survive through yet another “life-

time”, which might be%er be called yet another season in the life cycle, a

continuation of the already billions of years of lifetime your DNA has

produced.

All living creatures today carry their origins in their being. Our

bodies are like aquariums for our cells; in our evolution we never exactly

le# the sea, but brought the sea along with us. Your body: a bubble of

watery life "oating on dry land, with rivers of liquid rushing within and

passing through. Look at the plants in your environment- think about

the immense journey those plants' ancestors have taken in making it to

that exact spot from their starting point in the seas hundreds of millions

of years ago. !ink about the gulf of time separating you from your

aquatic forebears and how that gulf is $lled without a gap by vivid, dra-

matic living amongst dinosaurs and other threats, in packs, in tribes, and

in villages. Every one of your father's father's fathers survived through

this chaos long enough to $nd every one of your father's father's mothers

to pass on their essence, their life.

•§•

Even more fundamental than our biological relationship with all

Earthly life, we are chemically related to every atom in the Universe;

every electron, proton, and neutron, every photon, and every particle is

made of the same primordial, Big Bang energy expressed in different

ways. !e way in which those atoms react and interact are determined by

the foundational logic of reality, the Truth described above. We are

gravitationally related to every mass in the Universe, no ma%er how far,

large or small. Gravity is in fact yet another expression of the primordial

energy bound up in our molecules, the reactive force in the fabric of

space to the presence of energy of the right conditions. !e perception

that the Earth or your mind or body are distinct and separate from the

Universe, from the absolute oneness of reality is simply an illusion, or a

super$cial assumption based on surface appearances and an incomplete

understanding.

We are beings of pure energy inhabiting the glowing, boundless

miracle of Existence. Existence is in$nitely more beautiful and expansive

than we can possibly realize or experience currently; our tiny brains, as

powerful as they are, can model in normal awareness no more space than

the size of a small room, no more time than a few hours, and no more in

number than about 100. (Of course, we can imagine or know about

larger or smaller things, but we generally can't feel the relative largeness

between them beyond a certain very con$ned region, hanging close by

the size of our everyday reality.) Aldous Huxley was very right when he

said, a bit regretfully, “Human beings have an absolute and in$nite ca-

pacity for taking things for granted.” Our brains simply cannot begin to

process the miraculous complexity and signi$cance of our being.

Look at your amazing body design; isn't it marvelous that it is

possible to look at all? !ink of our origins, our surroundings, the per-

fect obedience with which the energy in the world follows the physical

laws (obedient because energy can only behave within the bounds of

physical law, of the Truth from which that energy is extended), and the

limitless potential made existent by Truth. To hold the in$nite in mind:

this should be the ultimate quest of any intelligent species (of course,

with the realization that a $nite being can never experience the fullness

of in$nity; only the Awareness of Existence itself is truly in$nite, and

present for the in$nite span).

It is impossible for us to inhabit the whole blissful Truth of how

momentous every moment is. Every single second in every corner of

Existence's existence is exactly as much a part of God as any other; it is

all one in the divine light of Knowing. !e perspective through which

we see this reality is framed through the view of a surviving, temporary

animal, trying to make the very most of its being in the ways that it is

driven to by nature, and whom is not necessarily a%uned to the pro-

found signi$cance of its surroundings. !e human experience has for-

ever been framed by this strange existential position, balanced between

our animal instincts on the one hand, instilling in us a will to compete, to

dominate, and to generally act and think according to our impulses and

sensations, and on the other hand our a%ribute of rational thought,

which grants us empathy, humor, art, science, and technology.

!e majority of humans seem lonely for a world we can't quite

remember but feel deep in our longing: the ful$lling self-interest of in-

stinctive living. If we could stay in that fully animal world, our intelli-

gence could certainly be considered overdeveloped, and a burden with

no use but to make our instincts embarrassing to us. Of course, there is

no way to get back to the simplicity of our distant ancestors; our higher

reasoning draws us ever closer to the day when we can step out of the

perplexing instinctive/rational twilight we occupy into the sunlight of

higher understanding.

We live in the very dawning of this time, when our creativity will

bring us to a deeper understanding of reality. It seems abundantly clear

that this will be achieved in the near future through the technological

enhancement of our brains; already, I have access to much of the breadth

of human knowledge at my $ngertips, and before very long I will have

access to it behind my eyes. We will soon begin to unlock means of di-

rect intelligence augmentation from the limitless potential present in our

Universe, and enter into transcendent knowing of ourselves and our sur-

roundings. Divine seeing will be a%ained in humanity's future, and we

play a role in its formation throughout our lives by carrying the torch of

living time into the future, shaping its unfolding.

If you think human consciousness is the pinnacle of awareness,

prepare to be awed beyond your wildest imaginings. !e more intelli-

gence you have, in other words the greater the sophistication with which

your brain models and interacts with the world, the more deep and vivid

your experience of reality. Just as a human mind is more enjoyable, per-

sonally meaningful, and powerful than a snail's mind, a signi$cantly

augmented human mind will experience an unfathomably deeper life:

unthinkably blissful, beyond heavenly. !e more of the Universe you can

$t into your awareness, the more exhilarating experience can be. If you

could feel it all at once, like Cosmic Awareness, the experience would

exceed any awed feeling of beauty any human can begin to imagine. I say

it again: your consciousness and experience of life are indivisible com-

ponents of the consciousness of Existence; the grand Awareness of the

One is comprised at once of all our experiences and its Knowing of all

energetic happenings.

In the future, we will break through into a new level of con-

sciousness, and be able to perceive the immensity of breadth, the depth

of complexity and beauty within the Being of the Universe as vividly as

we feel our own emotions. A new level of feeling and knowing will grow

around our current human mind, just as our human mind rests upon our

mammalian and reptilian instincts, those which still remain. We would

evolve naturally out of these instincts if we went on for enough time, but

since they still have proven useful for survival (especially amongst earlier

generations living in more dangerous times), there is no evolutionary

impetus for them to recede.

Even living in a perfectly safe environment for generations

would not breed these sensations out of us; it will $nally take self-

neuroengineering to switch them off and see if the effect is desirable, to

realize that we no longer have to live like this, with pain and anxiety at a

low sizzle in the background of our minds. Once all animal debts of po-

tential violence are se%led by our progress, and we achieve the ability to

live as long as we want, we will be free to mute the survival-tinge in our

mind and turn up the volume on the sweet love and pleasure. !is might

sound like a description of an intoxicant, but will prove to be so much

more: rather than an intelligence fogging haze, it will be a gaze into crys-

tal clarity, into the peace and in$nite intricacy of Truth at the heart of

Existence.

CHAPTER 12

Intelligence vs. Instinct

Once your mind is calm and full of love,

there is no room for hatred or fear.

Others will trust you because of your open heart.

-Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso

Many of the difficulties in human life arise from the dichotomy

between the animal instincts we have inherited from our ancestry, and

our relatively brand new rationality. We are saddled with a robust fear

re"ex developed through hundreds of millions of years of surviving as

prey animals, intense social/emotional sensations from millions of years

of cooperative survival, o#-overwhelming sexual desires from almost a

billion years of sexual reproduction, etc. Our intelligence observes and is

pulled by these impulses with frustration and confusion; we are able to

realize that many of our uncomfortable feelings are unnecessary, but are

o#en powerless to negate them without ful$lling the actions they impel

or drowning them out with experientially louder stimuli. !ese instincts

underly most emotional states, and are therefore extremely in"uential in

our degree of happiness or contentment.

Everyone has their own experience and idea of what happiness is

and should be, and for this reason no one can hope to de$ne it in a truly

objective light. To me, true happiness is a way of living, made up of posi-

tivity, gratitude, compassion, and love. It is inner wellbeing, a feeling of

savoring life instead of enduring life. I think it isn't easy to maintain, nor

easy to reach; it takes consistent effort to frame my reality in this light

instead of seeing the world through the instinctive anxiety of a surviving

animal. Happiness is not a goal you can reach and permanently have; it is

a constant process, a style of perceiving.

!e truest happiness, accessible to all (to a point), is loving awe

for the Universe: shaking off the familiarity and loving all of this for even

being possible. When taken as a whole, the hugeness of possibility and

the elegance of Existence is the most profoundly beautiful fact to marvel

at, and seeing our lives in the context of this in$nite, miraculous being

instills a feeling that no ma%er what is detracting from our happiness,

everything is perfectly all right. All the things we are cynical about, all

the existential discomfort of not knowing our ultimate purpose is com-

pletely unnecessary.

When I think about the Universe in the context of the ideas put

forward in this book, and really place myself in that context, I feel like

the luckiest entity that has ever existed, with soaring happiness and ex-

citement, in love with all that is. !is is peace for me, but my imperfect

mind keeps me from holding onto it securely for more than a wink of

time; I have to really ramp up to the meditative or cosmic mindset over

time, away from distractions.

If our brains were a million times more capable, we could savor

the beauty of reality in such a way as to extravagantly outstrip any expe-

rience of paradise possible for humans to imagine or experience cur-

rently. !is is the goal of my meditation and my mindfulness throughout

the day: to inhabit the world on a deeper, truer level, nearer to Cosmic

Truth, nearer to love. It isn't easy, but it's fun! Challenging, and having

the opportunity to face a worthwhile challenge seems to be a corner-

stone of human wellbeing.

With our minds, we can consciously enhance the world we ex-

perience. If you want to live in a different world, all you have to do is

change your perspective on the world. A change in worldview results in a

completely different life lived: your train of thought will take you to dif-

ferent destinations; you will react to situations differently and thereby

come to different outcomes. How can we choose the best lens through

which to view our lives and the world? It is impossible to truly say, but if

you $nd yourself consistently unhappy, it is likely because your personal

worldview is not your personal ideal. Stride forward into life as an ad-

venture of your own design, and develop your worldview on your own

terms, whether it jives with the popular viewpoint or not.

By using our human intelligence we can deepen our perspective

on every moment of our lives, every sensation we take for granted, and

gradually clear away the dust that has se%led over our day to day experi-

ence. If we don't pay a%ention, our brains tend to se%le on the blandest

possible interpretation of our surroundings. !e vivid colors and depth

become "at, grayed, and go unnoticed by our familiarized mind. !e

depth of beauty in our Universe is so far beyond the capacity of our

brains that sometimes, trying to let more into our bored minds becomes

a colossal effort. !e fun is, we can start experiencing more immediately,

and continue the broadening and deepening whenever we remember

and choose to.

One of the most successful applications of intelligence in con-

trolling our wayward instincts and be%er appreciating life is the act of

meditation, in its many forms. !e deepest goal of meditation is to in-

habit and experience directly the part of you which is more you than

your personality, more you than your intelligence, than your thoughts,

your memories, hopes, or fears. !e deepest core of you, perhaps called

your soul, is your “I”, that which is conscious of all these variegated phe-

nomena. !e experiencer– that is you; throughout all the changes you've

undergone in personality, experience and worldview, this central facet

has never and will never change. !at is who you are, and that is who all

of us are; it is the part of God we each personally inhabit, our temporar-

ily enbubbled droplet of Cosmic Awareness.

Try to experience the immensity of Existence, the massive truth,

beyond all human conveyance, that things exist, and not just any things,

but in$nitely complex things- you exist! To truly realize the signi$cance

of this, the unimaginable magnitude of this truth, is enlightenment. It

cannot be properly put into words. Try to meld your understanding of

the outside world, and your understanding of the inside world into one,

and see that this animal you control exists in this limitless Universe, and

that you, the consciousness experiencing and guiding this animal's life,

exist. It sounds so innocent and simple in writing, as if it is merely stating

the obvious, but the fact that things exist is the most profound gi# imag-

inable. Existence gets to exist; all this possibility is allowed to "ourish

eternally, an ocean of Truth without end. And you are the experiencer of

it. Meditate and try to occupy the reality of your existence. Ascend to

greater heights of experiential being.

!e most fundamental version of the many different meditation

methods consists of si%ing comfortably, away from distractions, with

eyes closed or slightly open depending on your preference. Breathe

calmly and slowly. Now, your goal will be to totally control your mind,

and to assert this control by emptying your mind of any elaborative

thinking, that is, thinking which follows a linear path, with one thought

leading to another, to another, and so on: the type of thinking your brain

has been employed with enacting throughout every day of your life. Spe-

ci$cally, the goal of your meditation will be to identify and deactivate

any thoughts which are complicated enough to require representation in

words and sentences (and therefore making up an inner monologue).

Because we are so practiced at linear thought, when you $rst learn to

meditate, it will prove immensely difficult to avoid thinking in this way

for more than the very smallest spans of time. Even experienced medita-

tors struggle to maintain a perfectly quiet mind while meditating.

Many people resist even a%empting meditation, saying “I al-

ready possess full control over my mind, I exert that control all day, every

day. Why should I practice controlling my mind when I am already as

good as I can get at it?” Fine, if this is the case, how long do you think

you could keep your mind quiet and a%entive to the activity of self-

quieting? If you've never tried, I would wager you can do so for no

longer than the time it takes to breathe in and out twice, and likely not

even close to that long; there's only one way to $nd out, and you lose

nothing by trying it.

In order to achieve the desired cessation of linear thought, it is

necessary to willfully engage all of your brain at once and direct it to-

wards this one goal- not thinking and elaborating upon thoughts. If you

lose track of any one region, sure enough, from that neural zone,

thoughts will begin bubbling up, and part of your Awareness will not be

meditating, but will be thinking your regular day-to-day thoughts: “I

can't believe he said that! He totally misunderstood what happened, and

furthermore, he's an asshole for assuming I would have those intentions,

etc.”... !is phenomenon will be totally unavoidable at $rst, and less so as

you continue practicing. When thoughts crop up, and you notice them,

willfully choose not to continue that progression of thinking, and rally

that region of your awareness to rejoin your full-brain focus.

!is can be the most profoundly impactful form of meditation

to embark on, and it requires both intense concentration and an easy

looseness. !e goal is to possess full control of your mind for as long as

you can. !at is, resist the sensation of your neural activity enticing your

mind to think thoughts; allow no inner dialogue, and allow no thought

development. You will inevitably waver and $nd yourself riding a train of

thought; do not get frustrated, simply drop the thought and return to the

exercise. It can take some time to overcome the tendency to think “Al-

right, now my mind is clear. (No it's not, I'm still thinking words). Ok,

now my mind is clear. (whoops) Yep, now I'm meditating (dammit)”, but

simply the act of trying is (in my experience) existentially bene$cial;

learning how to take control of one's mind in some small degree allows

one to exert more control over their reaction to the events of their life,

enabling a more calm, wise, and peaceful state of being.

As you progress through practice, you will learn to identify the

sensation which occurs right before you explicitly hear the words of a

thought; it is the feeling in your mind that a concept is brewing in brain,

which calls to your mind to pay a%ention to it, to link and develop it. In

normal human life, we chase these sensations around and around, think-

ing a thought then apprehending the potential places in brain where that

thought can lead, choosing the most appealing, and continuing on. In

meditation, we reject these sensations, engaging our entire brains under

the command of our mind to quiet down compartmentalized neuronal

activities in favor of intent focus.

If you can master this style of meditation, you will have a%ained

a level of conscious being away from the style you have employed in al-

most every waking moment of your life. In stepping away from the hab-

its and concepts which occupy your style of thinking, those dedicated to

your self-image, personality, fears, goals, etc., the essential wellbeing as-

sociated with living by its most fundamental level, Awareness, comes to

occupy the full space of your being, and this central peace can buoy the

previously storm-ba%ered human mindset resting upon it. !is essential

wellbeing represents the indomitable will to live, to survive, which qui-

etly underlies your experience of life at all times.

It is profoundly bene$cial to learn this distinction between the

context for your mindset (mood, worries, tiredness, culture, social peers

and self-socialization techniques, gender, life history, and more broadly,

species and era), and the greater context forming the basis for your

mind's existence (awareness itself, and the physical world "owing in

Truth around and within you). Sometimes it is very bene$cial to escape

your personal context and experience the world from the deeper per-

spective of fundamental Awareness, with no judgement or inner dia-

logue allowed, and this is the wondrous value of this style of meditation.

Once you have practiced enough to be able to perform this men-

tal self-control, you can use focused meditation to gain insight on any-

thing you wish, perhaps trying to inhabit the reality of the physics mak-

ing up your world, the atoms and forces summing to you, in order to ex-

perience life from a different perspective. Meditate on how all the other

people out there meditating at this moment exist at a de$nite place, a

constellation wrapped around the globe; some of them are on the other

side of the Earth from you, separated from where you sit by thousands of

miles of magma. Imagine all the meditation that has been performed in

the past, how each instance existed at a de$nite place out there in space,

stretched out over history, comets of thought streaked back there

through time. Imagine the physical existence of your imaginings, the

unique, shi#ing electrochemical nebulae draped throughout your neu-

rons for every thought and every sensation.

You can meditate and try to cultivate compassion for other hu-

mans, in order to found your relationships with others on a sincere feel-

ing of wellbeing. Meditate and forgive the world for its wrongs and love

it for its potential. Meditate and explore the existence and nature of your

mind and environment.

Meditate with the goal of feeling perfect happiness and comfort.

You are perfectly worthy of it; allow yourself to let go of frustration, re-

gret, and boredom and embrace gratitude, even if only for the merest

instant. Meditate with the worldview put forward in this book in mind,

try to occupy the reality that you are living God's Awareness, and try on

the loving, awed perspective this can enable. Allow yourself to love your-

self, and express that love by holding onto happiness and willful en-

gagement with life. Radiate the kindness, warmth and acceptance that

"owers in this enlightened state.

I believe that the very purpose of life is to be happy. From the very

core of our being, we desire contentment. In my own limited experience I have

found that the more we care about others, the greater is our own sense of well-

being. Cultivating a close, warmhearted feeling for others automatically puts

the mind at ease. It helps remove whatever fears or insecurities we may have

and gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter. It is the

principal source of success in life. Since we are not solely material creatures, it

is a mistake to place all our hopes on external development alone. "e key is

to develop inner peace.

-Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso

A simple and immediately bene$cial extension of meditation is

actually paying close a%ention to the character of your day to day experi-

ences, the delicate colors forming the image of a tree, the feeling of our

$ngers effortlessly dancing over a keyboard, the sensation of sunlight or

wind on your body, the texture of sounds in your mind, the never-

ending cascade of words thought and heard internally, the feeling of a

refreshing gulp of water- there are no words that convey the personally

felt sensations, but the experiences themselves are vivid and interesting

upon examination. Our instincts o#en compel us to worry about the

future, or to regret the past; se%ling into the sensational reality of the

present disengages these unpleasant and o#en inappropriate thought

pa%erns. Humans have a natural tendency to ignore things they've expe-

rienced many times before, as if we get everything we need out of some-

thing by experiencing it once or a few times. On the contrary, closely

reexamining the sensations and experiences we take for granted can

open new windows of perception we never expected to exist.

!is is mindfulness, the Buddhist concept: a%entively experi-

encing the sensations of life without analyzing them, and without le%ing

our imaginations wander from the simple act of being. It is a truly relax-

ing and luxurious way to spend time, but it takes close concentration to

perform; our minds are occupied by our endlessly calculative brains,

chasing thought a#er thought a#er thought ceaselessly and o#en with-

out direction. Of course, this stream of consciousness is enjoyable too,

and is the inheritance of humanity, but it is quite a delight to experience

life closer to sensation and further away from thought.

•§•

!e belief that any positive experience is bought at the price of

negative experiences is taught in several forms in school and at home to

almost every modern child, directly as a result of having been taught to

most of our recent ancestors. !is is obviously wisdom, that working

today will reap bene$ts in the future. !e problem with the doctrine is

that strictly observed it con"ates the fruits of planning ahead with all

future happiness; unfortunately, it seems the further off happiness is

postponed, the less likely it will be reached.

If an entire life is based on a%aining happiness in the future by

self-denial of it today, by adulthood the habit is o#en intractable; no

peace is reached because we have learned to live life in the present as a

sacri$ce to the future. Even when all our goals are met, we don't know

what to do with ourselves. !e a%ainment of the goal hasn't conjured

lasting happiness out of our frantic hearts, so we set new goals, and rush

to complete them. !e longer a person continues in this frame of mind,

the more resigned they will be to the unreachable nature of happiness.

!e best they know is the security of exertion, that as long as they are

working hard and not enjoying themselves, there will be happiness in

the future. Sadly for these souls, the future never makes it all the way to

now.

A healthier viewpoint is to seek the beauty of the present mo-

ment, to be more aware of the quiet miracle that surrounds us at all

times. Meditation with this goal in mind can be a beautiful method of

breaking the habit of future gazing, and appreciating the fundamental

comfort of being. If you can make it your highest aspiration to possess

tranquility and peace in every moment, there can be no fear for the fu-

ture, nor mourning for wrongs in the past. If today you make it your

business to enjoy today, and leave the task of appreciating tomorrow to

tomorrow, most every outcome of your life will be guided by a joyful,

wise you, and not by the machinations of an implacable, stressed and

desperate you. If you spend every day grasping towards !e Way to

Happiness sold to you by our materialistic and shallow modern culture,

contentment will dance just out of reach, like a carrot on a stick. If you

lay on your back and re"ect on the spirit of today, you may $nd that the

carrot you were chasing has fallen into your lap.

Another pernicious human tendency is the instinctive mindset

of fear. !e default animal mindset, evolutionarily bene$cial to organ-

isms in the eat or be eaten wild, is alertness spiked with bouts of panic

triggered by surprise noises or movements. !is underlying mindset is

expressed in modern humans as anxiety and stress; we no longer have

predators to fear, but our biological framework persists in steadily dosing

our minds with anxious brain pa%erns. !is fear is projected on any un-

predictable or undesirable outcome; we fret over rejection, death of

loved ones, physical pain, sickness, crime, the economy, our careers, how

people may be judging us, etc. !e problem in most of these situations is

that sustained fear of the outcome cannot change the outcome in any

way; once the realization that an action could have consequences is ex-

perienced as something frightening or undesired, holding on to the con-

ception of the negative outcome brings the possible damage from that

outcome into explicit being in the present, preemptively causing pain

out of mere imagination.

Worry multiplies the pain of our eventual misfortunes need-

lessly and, if unchecked, boundlessly. Instead of accepting the certainty

of future pain and our helplessness to stop it, we carry the imagined pain

in our minds and thereby injure ourselves. Being that this is something

of an instinct for us, to avoid it we have to engage our newer a%ribute of

intelligence to rationalize our fears, otherwise they stampede in our

hearts and trample our thoughts. Let us face fear without fear, accept

that pain is part of life and not spend all our time unharmed $xating on

it.

Whereas fear involves bringing future pain into the present, re-

gret needlessly brings past pain into the present. Regretful or ruminant

thoughts can appear from nowhere and remain in mind relentlessly, es-

pecially when the regret is of a romantic nature or of a personal mistake

that harmed another person. !e train of thought inspired by this corro-

sive memory negatively in"uences our thoughts and actions for the du-

ration of its stay in consciousness. Aldous Huxley describes regret beau-

tifully: “If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can

and address yourself to the task of behaving be%er next time. On no ac-

count brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best

way of ge%ing clean.” !is wisdom hinges on the strength of our per-

sonal honesty; when we wrongly ascribe responsibility to external

causes, no insight, and o#en no true reconciliation with the regret, can

be gained.

!e natural response for our evolutionarily conditioned brains is

to let anxiety prowl around in our brains unchallenged, to habitually let

the fear of future pain or memory of past pain sour the 99.9% of time

spent uninjured. Any injury strikes far deeper than the actual wound be-

cause of the emotional toil of stress that preemptive fear of the injury

builds into. !e baseline of human experience seems to be mild discon-

tent- no ma%er what the circumstances, the majority of us quickly revert

back to this resigned mode and let the weeks pass. It seems to be in our

biology. A very successful strategy to overcoming the tendency to hold

fear and regret in mind is to meditate by focusing your a%ention on the

part of your awareness occupied by that feeling (any negative feeling,

pain, embarrassment, stress, anxiety, etc.) and experiencing clearly what

the sensation feels like.

In this exercise you don't try to avoid the feeling, you don't try to

quiet the feeling or evaluate its causes, you try and bring it front and cen-

ter in your awareness and inhabit the feeling, see what its "avor is. You

may o#en $nd that in paying a%ention to the feeling itself and not expe-

riencing it through its effect on your thoughts and mood, it slowly dis-

appears, or changes shape to escape your grasp. !e stronger is your in-

ner concentration, the intensity of your meditative a%ention, the quicker

the egress.

It is also bene$cial to evaluate the cause of the sensation in refer-

ence to the big picture, the biggest picture you can imagine. Look at our

in$nite surroundings, the in$nite time, space, intricacy, and beauty. Also

consider the countless number of lives, experiences, mistakes, miscon-

nections, wrongs, and observe that in spite of all of it life itself is un-

marred, repeatedly refreshed from life to life. No ma%er what pain you

are experiencing, anger, grief, jealousy, anxiety, the more you can

broaden the context in which you view your life and world, the more

peaceful your awareness will become.

!e habit of drowning out a feeling with television, work, drugs

(including alcohol very prominently), etc., instead of facing the feeling

and what it tells you is very harmful in the end. In this case you only

quiet and $nally put the beast in your chest and mind to sleep, deferring

dealing with it until it inevitably reawakens more loudly and insistently

later. Meditatively living the feeling, rationalizing it and learning from it

at once frees the beast and strengthens your inner wellbeing, now ener-

gized with wisdom gained and restful in peace. !e major difficulty in

beginning this practice is the energy it takes; whereas evading feelings

through distractions can be done lazily, learning to meditate and actually

meditating takes a large degree of effort. Is wellbeing worth it? Cynicism

is so much easier and societally widespread, but is so life-cheapening; it

masquerades as wisdom when it is really base ignorance and a security

blanket against taking responsibility for one's own worldview.

Any society or worldview that predisposes people to feel that

their life is valueless if they do not achieve the cultural ideal is damaged,

representing an obstacle that every citizen must overcome if they are to

recognize the value and beauty of living beyond narrow material and

social pursuits. !e cultural identity instilled in people from growing up

under the in"uence of their peers, neighbors and more broadly, their

language, native history and social norms, frames their natural world-

view, what they expect of life: their goals, reactions, and valuations of all

experiences and ideas. !ose whose natural disposition is at odds with

the social zeitgeist, for instance introverts in the extroverted West, o#en

tend towards cynicism or depression, $xating on what is “wrong” with

their life, what doesn't match up to their neighbors and to the imaginary

societal ideal they have learned.

If $nd yourself in a world you don't want to live in, seek $rst to

understand, then to rede$ne your perspective on life, on your own

terms. You are not required to think about things in the way others seem

to, you are not required to ful$ll what you believe others expect of you;

you are free to de$ne your place in the world. If you are engaged in deli-

cious living, but despair that so many others you encounter are despon-

dent, take the opportunity to bring goodness into the world in every

interaction you can muster the energy to. When cynical or world-weary

people are confronted by a disagreeable or angry person, they see it as

con$rmation of their suspicion that all other people share their darkened

view of life. !eir frustration is then mirrored in others who are primed

to see the negative in their brethren for the same reason. It is much easier

to fall in line with the collective, dissatis$ed human perspective than to

exert energy against the herd towards a be%er way of thinking, but a bet-

ter world can be made through the intelligent cultivation of compassion.

•§•

!ere is a disconcerting archetype of human thinking, consist-

ing of the deep belief that the only way to preserve the cultural species is

to outcompete and dominate the others. !is underlying societal mur-

mur comes roaring to a yell in times of upheaval, propelling us tribalisti-

cally into yet another series of prolonged mutual sacri$ces, with some

changes coming to pass (mostly steps backwards), at an immense expe-

riential and spiritual cost. !ink about the monstrosities human society

bumbled into in the past, especially World War I and II. !e fact that

events like these are a constant throughout human history (imagine the

barbaric lives humanity has faced in the past, how brutally harsh life was

in those times) is very painful to ruminate about. !e thought that we

could possibly repeat these mistakes on a scale this large is too terrible to

speak of; one hopes that we are be%er than this, that we have learned

from the past.

When the time comes are we again going to watch the instincts

of the hoard cry for ba%le without saying a word? Will we ever discover

the alternative, that we could pursue a path of mutual bene$t, for the

sake of promoting global human advancement and collaboration? Or is

this ideal so far "ung from the individual human sel$shnesses and cul-

tural habits of thought making up these populations that it is unlikely to

be reached unless human society profoundly changes?

Shall we get caught up ourselves, and pound our $sts from the

sidelines, only to shake our heads and hide from our consciences later?

When our children proudly tell us they are going off to the government

to kill strangers they are commanded to kill, will we shake their hand

and congratulate them for their bravery, or $nally have the sense to beg

them to reconsider? It is far braver to resist the pressure put on society to

conform to one ordained set of ideas, and stand up for an ideal greater

than that of any reason to go to war: peace.

!is should be humanity's highest goal for the next century: to

$x the violent social code of the past, and eliminate war altogether. !e

fact that this is currently unthinkable makes it all the more clear how

primitive humanity remains. At present, big war is big business. Peace is

the last thing those with a vested interest in the military industrial com-

plex want; they are not the ones that have to suffer the inhuman cruelty

of the ba%le$eld, they stay at home and reap the dividends of their in-

vestments, no ma%er which side wins. !ese woefully insightless indi-

viduals embody evil of the worst kind: voracious, self-serving, with full

knowledge of the chaos they engender, without the slightest tinge of

conscience. With the immensity of their wealth and ties to other wealthy

elites, they wield an unreasonable degree of power over politics and me-

dia. Time and time again they sound the war drum with their subtle

propaganda, time and time again we step in line, and again they feast on

the bloodle%ing of the lower classes.

Of course, demilitarization is currently an impossible ideal.

Global society is still set up as an adversarial, self-interested dominance

struggle. It will take time, but with sufficient advances in technology, the

motivations for going to war will begin to disappear; if the technological

revolutions of the future ful$ll their promise, wealth beyond any cur-

rently available will be essentially free to all, and the stage will be set for

us to $nally transcend our ancient ways. I am aware that the idea of such

a future may appear completely fanciful, yet if you investigate the possi-

bility represented by nanotechnology, genetic engineering, quantum

computing, and arti$cial intelligence, and place these in the context of

exponential technological advancement, this outcome begins to appear

more likely, to the point that it seems the only way we will not reach this

peak will be if we are unable to mature as a species, and use such tech-

nologies for violence. Ray Kurzweil and other futurists are presently

busy trying to prepare for and avoid such rami$cations. I am con$dent

that our higher nature will prevail, and that the idiotic violence we sub-

ject ourselves to in the decades to come will soon be supplanted by wise

diplomacy and cooperation, continuing the incremental progress we

have made over the previous millennia.

•§•

We generally evaluate the intentions of others based on what

we've learned about them in the time we've known them. !is is largely

why $rst impressions are so important; the way a relationship unfolds is

guided at each moment by the context built up between the two people

in their prior interactions. If, for instance, one person is tired or stressed

when meeting a new person, the other person may perceive the $rst as

fundamentally dour or humorless, and will interact with them accord-

ingly. !e $rst person will possibly feel that the second person is un-

friendly on account of this, and their relationship will grow from this

sour basis. !is is just one example of the boundless range of potential

disconnects that can occur each day between people; it is immensely

complex to try to interact favorably with others at all times, and because

of this difficulty I $nd it valuable to try to remember to be compassion-

ate towards myself and others. We try so hard to never cause harm

against impossible odds, but embarrassments, anger and anxiety are in-

evitable. We should try to take social mis$res less seriously.

Apologies have the potential to alleviate some of the tension.

However, apologies can be a bit dangerous. When apologizing, you are

revealing your belief that the person is offended enough that you feel

emotionally compelled to apologize. !is can feel threatening on the

receiving end, o#en making the apologee want to say “I wish you could

step inside my mind right now so I could show you that I really don't feel

the way you fear that I do. Please don't apologize, understand I am not

the kind of person to be offended by what transpired.” !is difficulty,

especially in instances where it is not certain an apology is warranted,

keeps a lot of apologies from happening. Maybe this is for the best; it is

truly impossible to say because everyone has different emotional re-

sponses to every situation. Emotions are profoundly personal, and

unique in every individual. Because interacting with others is founded

on responding to the emotional state conveyed through body and spo-

ken language, and there is no way to feel another person's emotions

without modeling them from your own pale%e of emotions, emotional

misunderstandings are a de$ning feature of the human and animal expe-

rience.

It is likely the case that we are wrong when we imagine other

peoples' feelings: we can only imagine another person's feelings through

our own style of feeling. We o#en believe that we 'know' how someone

else is feeling, but we only have our own sensations, our empathy's at-

tempt at understanding how they feel based on our brain's interpretation

of the valence of the situation and their body language. Our own feelings

represent everything we know about how another person is feeling.

How do you imagine another person feels when they are acting angrily?

You imagine what anger feels like to you, what you think you would feel

if you were in their place, and that sensation is based on the way their

anger and the situation (who they are directing the anger at, for what

reason, and what other onlookers are present) is making you feel. At no

point in your valuation of their mental state do you have any access to

the actual feelings they are experiencing.

When you speak and think sentences, the ideas they represent

already underly and impel the formation of those sentences. On the

other hand, when you hear or read, the thought behind the sentences

don't come through until you evaluate each word's meaning and context.

!is is the fundamental problem of communication, that the speaker

forms his words with the idea already fully held in mind, while the lis-

tener has to interpret these symbolic, objective ideas (words) based on

the speaker's choice of words and tone. Body language helps in face to

face interaction, but o#en at the expense of creating many more oppor-

tunities for misinterpretations to come across, because each listener can

only interpret the speaker's meaning through their own personal world-

view and expectations. A person with a cynical disposition will likely

misinterpret neutral statements as containing a seed of sarcasm or dark-

ness, and generally take in another person's words and actions in a nega-

tive way.

Many people refuse to speak some of the things that they insinu-

ate freely. It's as if the decipherer is considered more to blame for their

interpretation of the insinuation than the cipherer is for sending it. Why

is our body language so free to speak things that we would never say? Is

it because of that old, pervasive trick of speaking contrary to body lan-

guage, even when the tone and conveyance of the words reveals them

clearly to be false? A person's words are wrongly considered the ambas-

sadors of their true self and feelings, the official account of how they feel,

when in truth their words are o#en their strategic diversion from the

same. I think Lao Tzu said something along these lines.

Not everything we generally term 'passive aggression' is aggres-

sive, exactly (aggression involves a conscious effort to explicitly cause

harm to another), but is o#en more like passive communication. It is

something like se%ing a trap for someone you want to be upset with,

because it's really saying: “I'm going to be angry if you don't understand

what my body language is saying, but I refuse to do you the courtesy of

coming right out and telling you what I'm trying to communicate,” com-

fortably ignoring the fact that no one can read another's mind without

guesswork, seeing it through the lens of their own experience. It also

leaves open the possibility that the recipient of the 'aggression' will un-

derstand what the person is conveying, but will choose to ignore it, or

outwardly misunderstand it, willfully frustrating the original aggressor.

!e existence of this option opens yet another opportunity for anger,

because in this unspoken interchange of body-language evaluations, nei-

ther party can be certain whether or not the other is actively escalating

the con"ict, or is simply not reading the clues correctly. !is can lead to

a prolonged series of passive, investigative aggression, where the aggres-

sor heightens his or her body language to elicit a de$nite reaction from

the other, to be sure they understand the other's perspective on the ex-

change– this stage o#en comes to its peak with wide eyed, furrowed-

browed, direct eye contact. At any level, because of the complexity and

guesswork involved, misunderstandings abound, and the human drama

stumbles on.

•§•

Our cynicism and discomfort are fundamentally the products of

our inherited instincts– experiencing reality from the perspective of a

fragile animal in a dangerous world keeps us anxious and aggressive.

Most humans strive throughout their lives to overcome these tendencies

and reach towards be%er, relatively newly discovered possibilities, such

as compassion, tolerance, collaboration, forgiveness, and love. !e story

of human history has unfolded in this direction, from the self-serving,

wild and dangerous ages in our global family's past towards the "owering

of enlightened, warmhearted living.

!e potential for just how loving and peaceful human life can

become in the future is boundless; there seems to be no physical limit to

how successful technological innovations can be in making life more safe

and long-lasting. If we continue pushing the boundaries of medical sci-

ence at the rate we are now, the time will soon come when the life expec-

tancy grows faster than we approach the expiration date we currently

expect (75-85 years old, as of 2012 in the United States). Along the same

lines, once we fully understand the neural basis for our experience of life,

we will be able to intelligently and cautiously adapt our brains to let go

of our anxious tendencies.

For now, we can improve the experience we inhabit by learning

to perceive the Universe in a broader, truer way. If your perspective, your

context extends only to your life, and the traditional viewpoint repre-

sented by your native culture, or the natural self-centeredness of life,

your world will likely be very small, con$ned to seeing only as deep as

the obvious reaches. In this tiny world, the smallest things can seem of

obsessive importance: an insult, an embarrassment, your personal

wealth or social net worth... !e experience of living and reacting within

these chaotic mindsets is the way of the past, which we are only just be-

ginning to learn how to resist. I have seen that the greater I can expand

my perspective, the smaller my worries, fears, and regrets become, and

the greater my personal wellbeing, compassion, and feeling of connec-

tion to life, to the Universe that enables my experiences. I hope I can

learn how to maintain such a worldview much more strongly in the fu-

ture. Ignorance is not the only path to bliss, nor does it lead to the best

kind of bliss.

CHAPTER 13

The Universality of Life

!e cumulative effect of the system of Truths discussed above

(of eternal necessary Truths compounding to generate energy and the

laws of physics) is a Life-Force draped throughout Existence. !e result

of this Life-Force is that anywhere that life is possible to arise, given suf-

$cient time (which is a drop in the river compared to the average life-

span of Universes), it will arise. !e whole of physics, including the forg-

ing of higher elements necessary to life in the supernovae of the early

generations of stars, which sca%er these elements like pollen on the wind

into space, the collapse of these atomic clouds into new stars and plan-

ets, the resultant elliptical orbits the planets se%le into (assuring the

planets steady energy input from their sun), their natural rotation, the

miraculous variety of possible chemical reactions between atoms and

molecules, the elegant logic of genetics and natural selection, the poten-

tial for cells and later brains to energetically process information and

model for themselves a subjective world, all of this sums to an unspeaka-

bly beautiful and productive incubator for in$nite varieties of life. Add to

this an in$nity of time, energy, and space, and you have an eternity of

unique perspectives arising and receding in the light of perfect Truth.

Given what we know about the Universe, asking whether life

exists elsewhere in the Universe is about as absurd as questioning

whether or not the Earth revolves around the Sun. Of course there's life,

everywhere: just in our limited range of our view there are hundreds of

quadrillions of stars, with likely quintillions of planets, and life will arise

absolutely anywhere it is possible for it to (e.g. hot springs, hydrothermal

vents, etc.). If only one out of a billion planets were suitable for life, that

would leave the observable Universe with tens of billions of lush, living

planets (and the observable Universe is very likely a speck in an in$ni-

tude of living space, the breadth of which our minds cannot grasp in any

meaningful way). If intelligence only occurs in every billionth living

planet, there would be thousands if not millions of intelligent alien spe-

cies "ourishing out there in the black. Of course, these $gures are based

on relatively blind speculation, but to my mind represent a much more

realistic evaluation of the Universe's potential for birthing life than the

popular and outdated conclusion that Earth is the lone living planet in

the Universe.

SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence project) opera-

tors are known to ask “If intelligent life exists, why the silence from

them?” !ey scan the skies for radio signals: (1) Perhaps other intelli-

gent races do not utilize electromagnetism in the way that we do, (2)

Electromagnetic signals de-cohere per the inverse square law; it would

take absolutely immense amounts of energy to blanket a sphere with a

coherent signal with a radius of more than a few (10-100) light years,

whilst the Milky Way alone is over 100,000 light years across (3) Per-

haps other intelligent races have devised be%er, or simply alternative

means of communication.

In the future, extraterrestrial life will be discovered, and it will be

awe-inspiring and exciting, but should not come as a surprise to anyone.

Steven Hawking's warning against malevolent interstellar travelers is

very likely unnecessary: any race which has the intelligence to effect in-

terstellar travel will also have the intelligence to realize the beauty and

value of life, and to have grown out of competitive, primal instincts. !ey

would have no reason to choose a living planet for supposed mining op-

erations or the like: the entire premise of a truly intelligent species (that

is, a species much more philosophically, scienti$cally, and technologi-

cally advanced than humans) being belligerent is nonsense. Perhaps su-

perintelligent life forms know of our budding presence here, and with

their greater wisdom know that it is best for a species to mature on its

own, without guidance or interference from outside forces. At a glance,

they might be able to tell that our very young societies would be thrown

into chaos by unexpected contact with a foreign intelligence.

Imagine being an ultra-intelligent member of an alien species,

and being given the opportunity to observe a newly discovered, "edgling

intelligent species. You've never seen what intelligent alien life is like, and

are excited for the research opportunity. With your ultra-sophisticated

technology, you can zoom into and experience the consciousness of a

human family as they go about their day. You might realize: “Wait a min-

ute, their thoughts are highly repetitive and relate mainly to instinctive

sensations– for the majority of the time they are only narrowly self-

aware! !is leads to these anxious and tense feelings. !ese creatures are

a very young species, no reason to make contact yet. !ey must come

into their own.”

I take it to be more likely that no superintelligent race inhabits

our galactic vicinity, and that our growing understanding is unknown to

the Universe at large. Perhaps intergalactic travel is all but impossible

a#er all, and perhaps intelligence really is rare enough that we are the

only intelligent race in this galaxy. However, the thought that we are the

only intelligent species ever to exist is preposterous, and the thought that

human consciousness is the pinnacle of being is just laughable.

•§•

One of the most beautiful and signi$cant features of existence is

the fact that each of its innumerable components is a different expres-

sion of the whole. Every single atom or light wave is comprised of the

exact same material: energy. Existence is made up of both these packets

of energy and the physical laws that govern how they interact. !ese

physical laws are harmonious and gorgeous beyond our words- just on

the strength of their logic, time, and a bit of energy, lives as vivid as ours

arise- lives with brains sophisticated enough to accomplish all the amaz-

ing things humanity has accomplished. Our brains operate on the logic

inherent to nature in our Universe.

Cradle your head in your hands and think about the tens of

thousands of cells dying and being born in that li%le space every second.

Humans are swarming seas of cellular life, complexes of constant growth,

division, recycling, and cooperation, in their summation giving rise to a

singular, all-encompassing self with the power to fend for this bundle of

cells, which gets all kinds of sensations for succeeding or failing.

Let's look at the progression of life, starting billions of years ago,

to maybe glimpse our future from a new perspective. Here, cells are indi-

viduals, living lives that are unimaginably different from ours. !eir fun-

damental experience is beautiful like ours- truly soul-touchingly mean-

ingful to them, because they're not subjectively aware of any other alter-

native. !e complexity of survival, along with the divine potential allow-

ing for such an unthinkable depth and variety of experiences in life, will

eventually end up giving rise to bundles of cells which can contemplate

deeper questions in life than how to survive and how best to reproduce.

Single cells evolved means of communicating with their species,

because those who were able to cooperate were be%er able to survive.

!ey adapted the universal properties available to them to a%ach mean-

ings to the chemicals that they traded between themselves. As other spe-

cies became able to cooperate, the competition between species became

more intense, and in response to these challenges they developed be%er

ways to communicate and cooperate. As their language grew in complex-

ity, their consensus-seeking cooperation progressed to represent a sort of

collective consciousness. !eir means of communication improved fur-

ther in species more exposed to ferocious competition, to the point

where bonding together into a single entity was the most efficient way to

harness their collective thought.

Here arose the $rst multi-cellular organisms, many species

branching off, by chance and circumstance, into the peaceful somno-

lence of plant life and many branching off into the chaotic excitement of

animal life. In the animals, the new complexity of survival necessitated

be%er communication. !e cells adapted electricity for communication

in brains, unknowingly imitating the mechanisms driving their nuclei.

Here the cells' collective consciousness achieved autonomy; their coop-

eration conjured up a subjectively singular entity. Each individual now

was an entire world of cells, and with their upgraded powers of thought,

these complex new individuals quickly developed ways of communicat-

ing with the other individuals of their species. However, self-

preservation was still the dominant concern of each individual, so coop-

eration only occurred where it was clearly mutually bene$cial.

!e slow progression of evolution adorned the individuals with

access to light and sound, and be%er brains to store meaning and re-

spond to the various signals in their environment. Over millions of years,

these individuals formed communities of their own, again unknowingly

imitating the progress of their individual cells. !ese communities (for

example, human tribes) competed with other communities for survival.

!is competition resulted in the extinction of the majority of rival spe-

cies (and eventually likely contributed to the extinction of the other

closely related hominids). Again, as communication developed and fa-

miliarity grew, the tribes realized they would be%er thrive through coop-

eration.

!ough we still occupy grand communities at odds with one

another (our nations), we are in the process of truly realizing we are one

family and it is in our best interest to cooperate for the bene$t of all. We

will learn more ways to utilize the amazing properties of our Universe,

and perhaps encapsulate our collective consciousnesses in a similar way

to the multicellular revolution our cells achieved, and form yet another

higher level of being. Being that multicellularity arose as an expression of

cooperative communication, it seems as if a very early step in this direc-

tion has been taken in our development of digital informational process-

ing and the rise of the internet.

Our development from single cells into intelligent beings has

been a long, unlikely journey, and our modern science and technology is

giving us access to exponential progress- it is truly an amazing time to

exist. Of course, we are present for all of it, so we may realize it is always

a beautiful time to exist. Our sorrows are only misunderstandings, nec-

essary to the self-organization of life in this Universe. Ours is an exis-

tence of love. We owe it to existence to experience as much subjective

harmony here as we possibly can. Our cells are incredibly amazing to

inhabit as it is, and we live in a dramatic, complex Universe. !e future is

going to be a time of transcendent magni$cence.

Part II. Abstract Reflections and Theories

Concerning Physics

!is section includes many things that I $nd fascinating to think

and write about; maybe you will $nd these discussions interesting as

well. I feel that though many of the conclusions reached in this section

are not necessarily scienti$cally valid (being an intuitive reading of sci-

enti$c $ndings), in many cases they represent a different way of inter-

preting the evidence we currently have, and therefore possibly have

some value in broadening the understanding of these phenomena. !e

most signi$cant obstacle that science faces is the fact that the evidence

we uncover o#en does not point to a clear conclusion; especially in pro-

foundly complex disciplines like biology and psychology, or those far

removed from the realm of intuition (like quantum physics), scienti$c

evidence only gives a glance at a true understanding, and the imagina-

tions of researchers must $ll in the gaps. !is fact lends value to the ef-

forts of theorists who seek to be%er interpret experimental data.

CHAPTER 1

Gravity in Intuitive Terms

It is o#en stated that we do not know what gravity actually is,

that though we have models for its effects, we have no intuitive under-

standing of its causation. I believe Einstein would disagree with this con-

clusion, and remind us that the precepts of his relativity theories explain

mass, gravitation, and inertia in explicit detail. Perhaps the confusion

stems from the difficulty in translating the complex mathematics of

General Relativity, and Einstein's language of spacetime geodesics, into

an intuitive picture which most can grasp.

Einstein's theories of relativity are some of the most interesting

sets of concepts humans have thus uncovered; we are greatly privileged

to live at a time when so much of the Universe's fundamental beauty is

on display for our minds to revel in, yet the vast majority of humans are

totally unaware just what Einstein's theories mean for our understanding

of the Universe. For these reasons, I want to present an intuitive picture

of relativity which clari$es the causes and effects of spacetime warping,

explains the origin of mass, and accounts for inertia. In this chapter I will

begin with a basic framework, describing a basic picture of the Einstein-

ian view of the relationship between ma%er and spacetime, and in the

next chapter expand from there to explore why that relationship behaves

in the way it does.

Based on an axiom $rst put forward by Galileo known as the

relativity principle (which notes that the laws of physics remain un-

changed for all observers moving at constant velocity), Einstein recog-

nized that logical paradoxes would arise if massed motion occurred rela-

tive to a stationary backdrop of space and time. His theories explain that

space and time are not a stationary, vacuous backdrop to physics, but an

energetic system in the Universe, which is a%ached to all physical energy

and warps based on its motions. In Einstein's theory of gravity, the at-

tribute of space which interacts with massed particles is an elastic me-

dium: space is a%racted to (stretches and is stretched by) ma%er, and

equivalently, ma%er is a%racted to (pulls and is pulled by) space. In es-

sence, mass is the consequence of the relationship between ma%er and

spacetime, both of ma%er stretching space and space in turn pulling on

ma%er. For clarity of description, I will use the word “ma%er” to indicate

anything which causes mass by its effect on spacetime, and “mass” to

reference the stretching of spacetime caused by ma%er.

!rough this relationship, space effectively hugs every bit of

ma%er in the Universe; this facet of space (mass) embraces every atom

and curves inward (is elastically stretched) towards their centers of mass.

Gravity is thus the result of space stretching in the presence of ma%er,

and of this stretching drawing bits of ma%er closer together over time.

!e situation can be pictured as if the fabric of space were an in$nite 3-d

la%ice of relatively in$nitely small, neighbor-linked rubber bands which

latch on to every particle that has mass. (!e standard model uses a

boundless $eld of particles, the Higgs Field, to account for this elastic

system, which is intuitively visualized using the rubber band analogy.)

Mass is expressed as a force pulling these “rubber bands” towards what-

ever ma%er is present, along with that ma%er being pulled outwards to-

wards all the rubber bands resisting this pull in the in$nite network. If

only a single mass existed in space, for instance, the moon, the rubber

band la%ice would be tugged towards the moon's center of mass, with

the force of pull on the rubber bands lessening quickly with distance

from the center (as per the inverse square law).

If another mass, (e.g. the Earth) were set near the moon, the

rubber bands which cradle the moon's mass would be stretched by the

Earth's mass away from where they were when only the moon was pre-

sent, and this stretch would upset the moon's previous gravitational

equilibrium; by a%racting the space around it, the moon's ma%er is

loosely a%ached to that space, and when the space the moon occupies is

stretched, it is impelled to move with the new stretching of the space

towards the Earth. As they near each other, the number of bands

stretched between them is lessened, and the force of their mass is there-

fore distributed over fewer strands of elasticity between them (so to

speak); on account of this, they pull each other with more force the

closer together they become.

!rough its relationship with space, every massed particle is

loosely a%ached to the space it occupies, and if the space around it is to

stretch, the particle will be dragged along in the direction of the stretch.

Rather than directly connecting ma%er to the space it occupies, space's

“rubber bands” effectively grip ma%er, resisting its motion away from the

bands it currently warps. (!ose rubber bands closest to the ma%er in

question are most strongly affected by its mass.) In other words, space's

elastic interaction with ma%er is the source of inertia– ma%er automati-

cally seeks to continue moving at a constant velocity explicitly because

motion through space involves warping successive regions of space's

elasticity. When ma%er is moving at a constant velocity, it is being

tugged forwards by the approaching space's a%ractive elasticity with an

exactly equal force that it is being resisted by the resistance provided by

receding space as the ma%er slips away from its grip. Inertia is a very

beautiful, interesting, and far-reaching phenomenon, and it is discussed

more in depth in the next chapter.

!e effect that ma%er has on space is additive, such that two

equal bits of ma%er stuck together will cause twice the stretch that a sin-

gle bit will. !e effect that ma%er has on space is also boundless; the

only limit on the range of its effect is the speed of light, and for this rea-

son the absolute maximum boundary for gravitational in"uence on any

observer is the edge of the observable Universe (de$ned by the distance

light could have traveled since the Big Bang relative to that observer's

position).

Our bodies, composed of octillions (!) of atoms each inextrica-

bly woven by mass into the fabric of space, are drawn towards the Earth,

comprised of a huge ratio of similarly embedded ma%er. !e space that

hugs our individual atoms is stretched more so in the direction of all the

other atoms making up the Earth; our atoms' cumulative effect on space

occurs in the context of the Earth's relatively tremendous cumulative

mass, analogous to a global tension on the rubber bands. Our atoms

hang on these stretched rubber bands, exerting a microscopically small

pull against the tension, which elastically compels our atoms to race in

the direction of the stretching (and simultaneously compels the Earth's

mass to move in our direction with equal force, though this force is dis-

tributed throughout the entire Earth).

You can picture the situation in this way: suppose only your

body exists in space, and that you can see the gravitational $eld around

you; it is represented visually by a cloud of arrows surrounding your

body, with each arrow pointing directly towards your center of mass.

When you are seated on the Earth, the surrounding space is still at-

tracted towards your body's mass with the same force that it was when

you were alone in space, but now it is also being a%racted by the Earth's

unspeakable immensity with much more force; the arrows representing

the gravitational $eld around you are now all pointing towards the

Earth's center of mass, however, they each retain a tiny, microscopic tilt

towards your center of mass due to your mass' minuscule effect on them.

!at microscopic tilt describes the slight pull your body exerts on the

space around you, and through that effect, the pull the Earth's mass ex-

erts on your body.

We only stop in being pulled along the direction of the force im-

pelled on us by space because the electromagnetic incompressibility of

ma%er is much more powerful than the force of gravity seeking to com-

press that ma%er; we are held back from falling by the solidity of the

ground. It is as if the surface of the Earth were an archer's hand straining

against the tension in the bow, with mass aiming our ma%er towards the

center of the Earth but never loosing our bolt until we leave the ground

and fall. When you jump, your legs exert force against the pull of space,

stretching you farther from the Earth's center of gravity before the force

of your jump is canceled by the force of gravity (the rubber bands grip-

ping your ma%er) stretching you back to the center. If the ground were

to vanish beneath your feet, all the way to the center of the Earth, your

body would instantly accelerate along the path that the bent space you

are situated in is stretched: the bands you previously occupied try to

keep you glued in place with as much force as your puny mass can ex-

press (that eensie teensie li%le tilt your body's mass causes in the arrows

representing the gravitational $eld in your vicinity), but their pull is

dwarfed by the colossal tug of the entire Earth's mass.

CHAPTER 2

Relativity and the Origin of Mass and Inertia

!us far I've given a simpli$ed description of gravity, pertaining

to the observable effects of mass, but have not examined the causes of

these effects. Very important questions remain: what is spacetime, and

why is it warped in this way by mass? What about particles causes this

stretching? To answer these questions, a much more nuanced investiga-

tion of the concept of spacetime must be undertaken.

!e relativity principle, which serves as the foundation for Ein-

stein's theories, states that the laws of physics (including those governing

the behavior of light) must behave the same in every frame of reference

moving at a constant velocity, regardless of the speed that frame of refer-

ence is traveling. If this were not the case, paradoxes would arise, de-

stroying the necessary logical coherence of the fundamental laws. !e

profound signi$cance of Einstein's discoveries is that they explain how

the Universe automatically eliminates these paradoxes for all possible

states of motion. Einstein realized that there is a very deep (and before

the twentieth century, completely unexpected) relationship between

electromagnetism, space and time. !e nature of this relationship reveals

several very far-reaching and signi$cant facts about the Universe, but

before delving into these, it is important to correctly frame our under-

standing of electromagnetism and light.

!e 19th century discovery that electricity and magnetism are

two dimensions of one single phenomenon, electromagnetism, is one of

the crowning achievements in the human pursuit of knowledge. James

Clerk Maxwell's mathematical expertise in codifying the relationship

between these two fundamental brethren revealed the nature of light;

with the experimentally determined values for the permi%ivity and per-

meability of free space (measures of how susceptible the electromagnetic

Field is to changing its shape, that is, how strongly electromagnetic $elds

are instilled in it by various particles and circumstances), Maxwell's

equations give the speed of light, along with the insight that light con-

sists of self-perpetuating electromagnetic waves. In short, varying elec-

trical $elds always generate perpendicularly oriented, varying magnetic

$elds; at the same time, varying magnetic $elds always generate perpen-

dicularly oriented, varying electrical $elds: any varying electrical or

magnetic $eld will generate its counterpart, which will in turn regenerate

its counterpart, and this cycle will continue inde$nitely, carrying this

electromagnetic oscillation away from its point of origin at the speed of

light.

!ere is a very common misconception that light requires no

medium through which to travel; nothing could be further from the

truth. !e medium of light is the electromagnetic potential which exists

throughout space; anywhere that it is possible to cause an electrical or

magnetic $eld, this underlying potential exists. (To be clear, this covers

absolutely everywhere in the Universe; there could be no atoms, and no

electromagnetic phenomena whatsoever if this global potential did not

exist.) I will use the capitalized Field to denote this “vacuum” potential

which contains the possibility for electrical and magnetic $elds to exist,

and which is present throughout space, and the uncapitalized $eld to

describe the electromagnetic effect that any charged particle has on the

Field in its vicinity (and simultaneously the effect that the Field's geome-

try has on each charged particle). !is Field is the heart of electromag-

netism, and is the medium within which every electromagnetic $eld is

formed and through which every electromagnetic phenomenon occurs.

!e erroneous idea that light travels independent of any me-

dium dates back to the popular misunderstanding that Einstein's special

relativity revealed that no such Field (at the time called the luminiferous

aether) exists. !is conclusion was based on the prior conception of the

Field as a Newtonian, rigid, stationary medium which all ma%er moves

relative to. !is hypothesis was indeed shown to be theoretically incor-

rect by special relativity, and experimentally inadequate by the

Michelson-Morley experiment, but not in the way that many seem to

believe. Einstein himself noted that general relativity requires an under-

lying electromagnetic medium (in a lecture given in Leiden in May of

1920, Einstein told the audience “To deny the aether is ultimately to as-

sume that empty space has no physical qualities whatever. !e funda-

mental facts of mechanics do not harmonize with this view... besides ob-

servable objects, another thing, which is not perceptible, must be looked

upon as real, to enable acceleration or rotation to be looked upon as

something real... Space without aether is unthinkable, for in such space

there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility

of existence for standards of space and time, nor therefore any spacetime

intervals in the physical sense.”), with the modi$cation from the previ-

ous concept of the luminiferous aether being that the medium necessar-

ily interacts with every massive frame of reference and is warped by their

motions. It should be clear that describing light as an oscillation of elec-

tromagnetic potential, and then turning around and stating that light has

no medium is self-contradictory: the electromagnetic potential which is

oscillating is glaringly, obviously that selfsame medium.

Prior to Einstein's re$nement of our understanding of the aether

in the context of the Michelson-Morley experiment, it was supposed

that an astronaut could clock the speed of passing light to determine his

speed and direction. Like relative motion between the normal objects of

our intuition (like humans walking about), it was assumed that if he

were to measure light moving in the opposite direction of his motion, he

would see that the light is moving faster than the speed of light, whereas

light moving in his same direction would appear to move at less than the

speed of light (his speed would be added to or subtracted from the ob-

served speed of light depending on its angle of approach).

On the contrary, when the speed of light is correctly included in

the phenomena governed by the relativity principle, no ma%er how fast a

spaceship is traveling, light from any direction will forever appear to

travel at exactly the same speed. An astronaut on a spaceship moving

through space could not possibly gain any insight into his velocity by

measuring his speed relative to the speed of passing light.

!e effects of this Truth are incredibly far-reaching. For example,

consider this well-known Einsteinian thought experiment, the effects of

which stem from light speed's relativistic eminence: an observer at rest

stands next to a clock made of two mirrors face to face, one facing down

and one facing up and separated by 29.98 centimeters, bouncing a wave

of light between them; a nanosecond is counted each time the light hits

one of the mirrors. A second person rides in a very quickly moving rail-

car, traveling from le# to right relative to the stationary observer. !e

second person also has an equivalent light-and-mirror clock.

As the second person passes the $rst, the $rst observes the mov-

ing clock: from the stationary perspective, the light beam in the moving

clock is seen to traverse a zig-zag, and consequently the light is observed

to take longer to tick off a nanosecond of time than the stationary clock

which has a light beam traveling straight up and down. (!e zigzagging

light travels farther between re"ections, and since a longer spatial path

for light is equivalent to a longer duration of travel (light always travels

an equal distance in an equal time through any equivalent medium re-

gardless of the state of motion of that medium), the nanoseconds on that

clock must be longer.)

However, the person on board the railcar notes that his clock

passes light directly up and down; which observer is correct? It turns out

that the moving clock is both passing light in straight lines relative to the

person on the railcar and passing light at an angle relative to the station-

ary observer; they are both correct. However, the validity of the other

person's point of view is hidden from each by the Universe's response to

this relative motion. Because light is required by the relativity principle

to pass through the reference frame when it is moving at a constant ve-

locity in a manner directly equivalent to how that light would pass

through if that reference frame were not in motion, space is compressed

in the direction of motion such that the lateral zigzag it is seen to traverse

from a stationary perspective is negated relative to anyone inside the

moving frame of reference. Further, because the light still has to pass

through the extra space compressed within that frame of reference in

order to be observed on board to bounce between the mirrors in exactly

one nanosecond, the passage of time within the reference frame must be

slowed. !ese effects are profoundly counterintuitive, but they are well

known and have been experimentally demonstrated time and again since

their discovery.

Crucially, the EM Field which the light traverses is not inde-

pendent of the frame of reference containing that light. As the railcar

moves through space, , it spans more distance through the EM Field per

second, yet light traversing that region of the EM Field and observed

from within the moving frame of reference must appear to pass through

that greater distance in the exact same span of time it would have if the

frame of reference were stationary; this necessity is effected by the spa-

tial contraction and temporal dilation of physics on board. !e EM Field

spatially occupied and in"uenced by that frame of reference's mass is

dragged along with its motion; as the frame of reference moves, the warp

which it causes in spacetime moves along with it, as a wave of compres-

sion passing through the Field. Spacetime and the EM Field are pro-

foundly interwoven via this relationship; mass and massed motions

warp the EM Field which transmits light, and the characteristics of the

EM Field at every point de$ne the characteristics of spacetime at each

point, due to the relativistic conservation of the speed of light in both

space and time.

Because light forever travels at an equal speed both in time and

space, and cannot travel a light second in distance without covering ex-

actly a second in time (in the vacuum), along with the fact that this must

be true regardless of relative motion (due to the relativity principle),

space and time in any region of the Universe are code$ned by the speed

and preferred path of light through that region. In our relativistic Uni-

verse of varying states of motion amongst different frames of reference,

ma%er's interaction with spacetime changes the electromagnetic condi-

tions of the surrounding region, which de$ne the path light must take

through any region in order not to violate the relativity principle.

What this all comes to is that, essentially, every frame of refer-

ence no ma%er what its motion must be stationary relative to the motion

of light passing through that frame of reference; absolute deference is

given to light's motion in order to maintain the relativity principle in all

states of motion. In the above case, the light bouncing between the mir-

rors aboard the moving railcar must move straight up and down relative

to the mirrors in order to continue bouncing between them; the light

traverses the EM Field, and if the railcar were in motion relative to the

EM Field, the mirrors would pass by the region in the EM Field through

which the light is traveling, and it would fail to re"ect. On the contrary,

the EM Field is compressed along with the railcar's motion by the rail-

car's mass. If there is a mass in space with any velocity, the space that

mass occupies shares that mass' velocity, compressing as it goes; though

the railcar is in motion relative to the surrounding EM Field, the com-

pression of the EM Field within that frame of reference is dragged along

at an equal rate, and is stationary relative to the railcar.

Light's preferred path, as the fundamental benchmark de$ning

spacetime, represents the stationary frame of reference for any region in

spacetime regardless of that region's motion. !e way that this effect is

accomplished is by the warping of spacetime which accompanies all

ma%er, and is especially apparent between frames of reference in relative

motion. Every system of ma%er is embedded in spacetime, and when

undergoing motion, more spacetime must be compressed into that

frame of reference to allow light a relatively stationary reference frame

through which to travel at equal velocity in all directions.

!is effect is evident when examining the Lorentz transforma-

tion which describes the degree to which relativistic effects occur: the

factor for how much time is dilated in the moving reference frame rela-

tive to a stationary one is exactly equal to the factor for how greatly the

moving reference frame's mass is ampli$ed. !e passage of time is di-

rectly proportional to the degree of mass in a system, that is, the more

space that is compressed into that system by its mass (as described

above, mass being the effect ma%er has on space through its dynamic

relationship sustaining the relativity principle), the slower physical proc-

esses will unfold therein. !is is the direct result of light having to travel

a further path through the compressed space than it would in a station-

ary reference frame which does not warp space as much; again, since

light's speed and preferred path through any reference frame de$nes the

character of spacetime within that reference frame, wherever space is

condensed by motion such that more of the EM $eld is present in the

frame of reference per second (raising the mass of that frame of refer-

ence), time will unfold more slowly.

Mass is therefore wholly a description of time dilation due to

spatial compression. Spatial compression results in time dilation due to

the speed of light de$ning spacetime in every electromagnetic circum-

stance; where light has to take a longer path in order to accord with the

relativity principle (in order not to appear to take a longer path from on

board the reference frame) time must slow in order to allow this to oc-

cur. In other words, if a frame of reference measures seconds based on

the speed of light through that reference frame, then even when that ref-

erence frame is in motion and the light takes longer than a second to

cover the distance within the reference frame as seen from outside, the

light must appear to still cover that extra distance in one second from

within the reference frame. !e light has a longer path, and time must

allow the light to cover this longer path in the same time; time within the

warped reference frame stretches out so that if the light has to travel ex-

tra distance, a second takes longer to tick, and all physical processes un-

fold more slowly relative to how they would unfold in an unwarped span

of the Field.

•§•

!e above scenario reveals how spacetime warping occurs due

to states of relative motion, but how can relativistic effects manifest in

instances where no net velocities are in effect, such as the everyday con-

stituents of our surroundings? It is easy to forget that the relativity prin-

ciple applies absolutely everywhere in the Universe, even in the span

from one side of an atom to the other; the constituent particles in our

atoms are forever in relative motion with one another. !is relativistic

swarm is necessarily compensated for in accordance with the relativity

principle such that even an atom-sized observer would not note any dis-

crepancies in the speed of light passing through the vicinity from any

angle; this compensation is the same for particles as it is for stars: space-

time warping, be%er known as gravity or mass.

Spacetime warps based on the requirement that systems of rela-

tive motion necessarily share an equivalent speed of light, and this effect

is expressed in the phenomena of mass, gravitation, and inertia. Mass is

the result of the relationship between energy and spacetime as necessi-

tated by the Universal constancy of the speed of light via the relativity

principle. Energy warps spacetime due to this relationship, and this is

the effect which causes gravitation: gravity and mass are two different

ways of looking at the same thing. Basically, mass can be interpreted as

the effect any bit of energy has on the geometry of spacetime, and grav-

ity can be interpreted as the effect that spacetime's warping has on any

energy in spacetime (they each represent opposite sides of the balanced

pull/pull relationship between ma%er and spacetime).

It should be clari$ed that the effect a particle has on the Field is

not con$ned solely to its electromagnetic charge, or even to its interac-

tion with the electromagnetic $eld. If this were the case, protons would

have the same mass as electrons, having a charge of equal magnitude. It

is not only the effect of a particle's charge on the EM Field which causes

its mass, but also its relative motion to the Field. !e quarks making up a

proton undergo intense, rapid oscillations relative to the Field, and it is

the energy of this motion relative to the Field which accounts for the

proton's greater mass.

Essentially, mass accounts for all aspects of energy, including

temperature, angular momentum, velocity, color charge, etc. It is the in-

teraction between a particle's circumstance and the Field which warps

spacetime relative to the speed of light. Extremely importantly, this

spacetime warping in"uences the behavior of every fundamental physi-

cal law. As the relativity principle requires, all laws of physics are modi-

$ed in direct proportion with the modi$cation of spacetime in reference

to the speed of light; wherever a clock is slowed by relativistic motion,

all of physics within that frame of reference unfolds more slowly.

•§•

!e global shape of spacetime characterizes the gravitational

Field in the Universe. To investigate its properties, let's revisit the

rubber-band la%ice analogy from the previous chapter. All the effects

described there are the same, but the picture can now be drawn with

much more sophistication. Now we can clarify that the mass accompa-

nying each particle is due to that particle's effect on spacetime via the

relativity principle in reference to the speed of light. !e “rubber bands”

a%ached to and stretched by that ma%er's mass represent spacetime. !e

EM Field (and spacetime, the shape of which is de$ned in reference to

the speed of light through the EM Field) is one continuous elastic me-

dium throughout the Universe, and the geometry at any point affects the

geometry at every other point, with modi$cations to that geometry be-

ing conveyed throughout by EM waves (in this case, taking the form of

low frequency, low amplitude gravitational waves, bearing information

about modi$cations to the shape of spacetime throughout the Universe)

propagating like all EM radiation at the speed of light. !e Earth

stretches spacetime inwards towards its center of mass, while the Sun

stretches the spacetime which is stretching inwards towards the Earth's

center of mass towards its own center of mass, and the two masses are

thereby stretched towards each other, continually modifying the shape

of the spacetime they pass through by their motion.

Due to the relativistic effects described above, the entire shape

of spacetime will appear differently to observers in different states of mo-

tion. !is follows from the profound insight of general relativity, that all

ma%er is a%ached to spacetime via its mass, and that motion through the

Field modi$es the Field. !ough there is no canonical shape to space-

time in the traditional, Newtonian sense, every possible perspective on

the shape of spacetime is accounted for in the Truth describing the exis-

tence of all possible perspectives. Every relativistic viewpoint is equally

valid in that it represents how the Universe relates to that viewpoint due

to its unique relationship with the Field.

Inertia, as Einstein brilliantly recognized, is a consequence of the

relationship ma%er has with space: ma%er compresses spacetime in-

wards, and spacetime simultaneously resists this compression by tugging

outwards; it is only with the continuous relative motion within the en-

ergy making up the ma%er that the spacetime compression (due to the

relativity principle) is maintained. An object's mass is wholly contained

in this elastic relationship with spacetime; consider a dumbbell. !e rea-

son it is difficult to li# the dumbbell is because the dense ma%er making

it up compresses spacetime to a certain degree, and because it is situated

on the surface of the immense Earth, that spacetime compression pulls

against the tremendous spacetime compression the Earth's mass causes;

the spacetime a%ached to the dumbbell is stretched very strongly to-

wards the center of the Earth. To overcome the force of this gravitational

a%raction, you have to pull the dumbbell from the spacetime region it

currently stretches, warping new regions of space as you li# it.

Consider "oating in a spacesuit next to the dumbbell far out in

space, away from any signi$cant gravitational $eld. Because the dumb-

bell continues to compress spacetime due to its mass, it will still take

force to move around. When it is "oating still next to you, it occupies a

state of gravitational equilibrium; it pulls inwards on space and is pulled

outwards by space equally in every direction, and sits comfortably in a

li%le gravitational well, with no reason to move at all. (Your minuscule

gravitational $eld is not enough to upset its inertia to any immediately

noticeable degree.) If you reach out and push the dumbbell, it acceler-

ates for a short moment before dri#ing off at a constant velocity end-

lessly, at least until an outside force acts on it (and your body in turn

does the same in the opposite direction, at a proportionally slower rate

depending on your mass).

Imagine the effect occurring in spacetime, underlying the

dumbbell: its mass exists as a region of spacetime which is compressed.

When this compression is set in motion, the space just outside of the

ma%er in the direction of its motion is continually nearing it, and be-

cause of the elastic relationship between spacetime and ma%er, the

nearer it gets, the more strongly that spacetime is pulled towards the

ma%er by its mass (and the more strongly that ma%er is pulled towards

that spacetime). On the other hand, in the direction away from the mat-

ter's motion, the space just outside the ma%er is continually receding

from the ma%er, and on account of this, pulls on and is pulled by it less

as it recedes. In this way, the compression of spacetime undergone by the

ma%er traveling a constant velocity represents a balanced gravitational

wave in the medium of spacetime. !is wave a%ains elastic equilibrium;

the pull of approaching spacetime perfectly counteracts the pull of re-

ceding spacetime, and the velocity remains unchanged. (I.e. if you are

traveling forwards at constant velocity, the spacetime in front of you is

pulled towards your mass (and thus pulls your mass) at the exact rate

that the spacetime behind you is pulled away from your mass by your

motion (and is thus resisting your forward motion).)

To change velocity, any object has to be tugged from the natural

motion it had se%led into through the path of least resistance through

the warped space, and now warp a new region of space. In"uencing the

propagation of that wave (changing its direction or speed of travel) up-

sets this equilibrium, and takes energy. It is for this reason that any ac-

celeration is met with the resistant force of inertia, and why, in accor-

dance with Newton's $rst law, every body remains in a state of constant

velocity unless acted upon by an external unbalanced force.

Space is subtly smeared out behind you as you accelerate in your

car, stretching slightly against the pull of your atoms on its elasticity; it is

due to this elastic resistance that your body is pulled backwards against

the seat. Similarly, when you enter a curve, your body's constant forward

velocity and accompanying inertial equilibrium (the gravitational stand-

ing wave described above) are upset by the car's turning, and you feel the

force of inertia seeking to drag you along the path you were already trav-

eling.

It is important that it be made clear that gravity and inertia are

both expressions of the same phenomenon, spacetime's a%achment to

and interaction with ma%er– if you were to enter a spaceship and accel-

erate at a steady 9.8 meters per second, the relativistic-resistant force in

space to your mass' acceleration would exert a force on you equal to the

force of gravity on Earth. As your mass is dragged through the elasticity

of space, the tension on the bands at any point you occupy acts to keep

you glued to that spot; only with the external force of the spaceship's

engines is this force overcome, and the spacetime's resistance to your

continued motion manifests as gravitational resistance. Equivalently, the

space you occupy on the Earth's surface is stretched downwards, not due

to your acceleration away from the elasticity of the space you previously

occupied (as in the case of the spaceship) but through the stretch of the

spacetime you currently occupy towards the center of the Earth.

•§•

To picture the shape of spacetime, imagine a 3 dimensional car-

tesian coordinate system, with its lines drawn in red, $lling space,

stretching away in every direction endlessly; a euclidean grid of this sort

with all straight lines represents the “vacuum” shape of spacetime, un-

modi$ed by mass. !e relationship between ma%er and spacetime,

mass/gravity, modi$es the shape of this basic grid, and any observer

within the system will have a different perspective on the shape of the

grid by their state of motion relative to the other frames of reference

therein; the shape of spacetime is immensely complicated by the pres-

ence of energy, and though it is objectively independent of the various

frames of reference from which it can be viewed (in that the information

describing every frame of reference exists simultaneously and de$nes the

global shape of spacetime), a different picture of it is subjectively gath-

ered from each of these different frames of reference.

Each particle is uniquely embedded in the Field due to its warp-

ing of the Field; you can picture the particle's effect on the Field as a re-

gion where the red la%ice is stretched inwards, and where a passing EM

wave would be forced by the relativity principle to curve closer to the

particle due to this inward stretch on the Field's geometry. Of course, for

a single particle, this effect is almost totally negligible, but where the

stretch of many trillions of trillions of particles is coalesced together into

a planet or star, the effect is readily observable, and signi$cant to the

formation and development of galaxies (and to the initial con$rmation

of Einstein's theories).

In essence, mass is a measure of the subset of any bit of energy

which is distributed through spacetime by that particular bit of energy's

necessary modi$cation of spacetime through the relativity principle. !e

phenomenon we usually call gravity is the global interrelationship be-

tween all the mass in the Universe, where each bit of energy's relation-

ship with spacetime is in"uenced by every other bit of energy's relation-

ship with spacetime; their effects are additive and act on spacetime at the

speed of light (the speed with which the Field can be modi$ed).

To further delineate that gravity is a phenomenon of spacetime,

caused by energy's presence in spacetime (with certain expressions of

energy causing more mass, more local spacetime stretching than others,

e.g. protons vs. photons), consider the following thought experiment.

You observe a video feed of two clear boxes. Each contains two mirrors

face-to-face two meters apart from each other passing light back and

forth. One is "oating far outside the Milky Way galaxy, with no stars for

many thousands of light years; light travels at the speed c (the speed of

light in a vacuum) between the two mirrors. !e other is positioned on

the surface of the Earth, and therefore contains the spatiotemporal phe-

nomenon of gravity. What does it mean for the box to contain the phe-

nomenon of gravity, and what are the consequences to the light traveling

therein? Again, use the red grid visualization technique. !e space box

will contain a grid comprised of regular cubes, let's say, 27 cubes in all.

!e Earth box, on the other hand, will contain a grid comprised of

squashed cubes, cubes with 4 rectangular faces; spacetime is compressed

within the box due to its position in the Earth's gravitational $eld. !e

Earth box contains, maybe, 45 stunted cubes.

One important facet of the red grid visualization is that relative

to objects moving at the speed of light (light is the only such object), the

grid is always perfectly cubic- the results of its gravitational distortion

only apply to space as observed by a non-light observer. It is, in fact, this

requirement which causes spacetime warping; light must always travel in

a straight line (due to its proportional, perpendicular electrical and mag-

netic $elds summing to perpendicular travel relative to the Field), even

when the Field through which it travels is warped in any imaginable way.

In warped spacetime, straight lines are described in terms of geodesics,

paths of least distance between any two points in spacetime, and the

shape of those geodesics varies depending on the state of motion of the

observer, excepting where light is considered the observer, in which case

the geodesic resolves into a perfectly straight line, with the surrounding

contents of spacetime warped around that straight line.

!e space in the Earth box is compressed; there is more space

(and time) contained in the Earth box than in the Space box. For this

reason, the light passing between the two mirrors in the Earth box has to

travel a longer distance between re"ections. Again, inertia can accom-

plish the exact same spacetime compression. If the space box were to

accelerate at 9.8 meters per second, the spatial grid inside the box would

take on the exact shape of the spatial grid inside the Earth box, with 45

squished cubes within. !e light bouncing back and forth inside would

take an equal amount of time in re"ecting from the front to the back as it

would re"ecting from the back to the front; again, relative to the light,

the grid's boxes are still perfectly cubic, and the light is still traveling at

exactly c. Only relative to a massed observer would the relativistic effects

be perceivable.

CHAPTER 3

A Closer Look at Spacetime

In the previous chapter, the consequences which the speed of

light (in the context of the relativity principle) has for spacetime and

objects within spacetime was examined. A very important question re-

mains: “what is space, really?” !is question has been on the minds of

thinkers for millennia, and during this time some fundamental assump-

tions have come to be taken for granted concerning what space is or is

not. Following the development of Einstein's relativity and quantum

mechanics, many of these ideas have been revealed to be incorrect or

incomplete, which suggests that our understanding of this seemingly

most basic component of our reality bears reexamination.

!e conception of space as perfect nothingness is totally obso-

lete. If space were empty of all informational content, as would clearly

have to be the case for it to consist of nothingness, no force $elds could

exist; the medium in space which conveys electromagnetism, for exam-

ple, is certainly not nothingness, but a boundless energetic system which

reacts to energy and force with inerrant logic. If space were empty of this

medium, light would have no medium through which to propagate, pro-

tons would be unable to a%ract electrons, atoms and molecules would be

unable to form, and the Universe as we know it would cease to exist. Fur-

thermore, as outlined above, gravity, inertia, and mass would be impos-

sible if there were no spatial medium for energy to interact with.

!e modern evidence associated with quantum mechanics pro-

vides further clues as to the de$nite content of space. !e Casimir effect,

for example, shows that a small a%ractive force arises between two paral-

lel, uncharged conducting plates situated very close together: in a few

words, this force is interpreted as arising because the closer together the

plates are, the fewer wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation can $t be-

tween the plates; the presence of wavelengths of all sizes being able to

propagate in the space on the outside of the plates (the side facing away

from the other plate) effectively produces a higher energy density than

that produced by the few wavelengths allowed to exist between the

plates, and this generates inward pressure on the plates. !is effect is al-

ready being considered for its possible utility (or inconvenience) in the

design of nanotechnological machines, and it offers unmistakable evi-

dence that a classical vacuum is nowhere to be found in space.

Such evidence seems to point to the conclusion that space is

wholly de$ned by the energetic systems which $ll its boundless expanse.

However, it seems evident that space itself must exist prior to and be

distinct from whatever energetic content $lls it, because the energetic

content of space could not possibly spatially relate and $nd extension

without space existing as a prerequisite. As was elaborated upon in Part

I, Chapter 4, it seems reasonable to believe that space embodies all the

possibility suggested by the mathematical Truths pertaining to dimen-

sional proportion, and that this Truth would remain even in the absence

of all energetic content. In this view, If you were to remove not only all

particles, but all $elds of potential, including all quantum "uctuations,

space would still remain as a vacuous realm of emptiness. In this context

it would seem that any possible physics which requires the geometric

logic of spatial relations to $nd expression (be it Euclidean or any from

the innumerable range of non-Euclidean geometries) can $nd expres-

sion in space; that is, the geometric shape of energy in space is locally

de$ned in reference to the physical requirements of its content.

!ere is another assumption about space, still widely taken for

granted, that there is such a thing as a point, as a de$nable location in

space of 0 size. !is conception was useful as a simplifying tool in

Euclidean geometry, allowing mathematicians to ignore the slight com-

plications which $nite size introduces to geometric maxims concerning

in$nitely small points. !ough the idea has utility in abstract thought,

some problems immediately come to mind when applying the concep-

tion of a point to the reality of space. For instance, let's say that this pe-

riod . is a point in the classical geometrical sense, demarcating a location

in space of 0 width, depth, and height. How can we de$ne where it is

located? Most would answer “simply use the calculus: a limit gives the

distance of the point from the 'd' in the previous word with arbitrary ac-

curacy”. !e key point there is “arbitrary accuracy”; it is perfectly impos-

sible to draw out the limit with perfect accuracy, because doing so would

require an in$nite decimal expansion.

To illustrate, let us imagine that you undertake the task of de$n-

ing the location of the point in reference to the 'd', and you are equipped

with perfect measuring devices. !e method you use will be to measure

the distance starting with millimeters, a#er which you are able to zoom

in on the distance between your measurement and the point's location

by a factor of 10: you will see that there is still some distance separating

your measurement from the point's location, and you re$ne your meas-

urement now using 1/10th millimeters. You resolve to continue this

process, a#er each measurement zooming in by a factor of ten and re$n-

ing your measurement using units smaller by a factor of ten until you

have it, the exact de$ning location for that point! Alas, you will expire

before you complete this task, in fact, even with an in$nite number of

lifetimes, you could never complete your goal, because as you zoom in

inde$nitely on the point, the point shrinks inde$nitely; every time your

measurement draws nearer to that point, the point recedes away.

!e simple fact is that there is no way to de$ne the location of

the 0-sized point exactly, because that location is in$nitely distant from

and is therefore forever unde$nable in reference to other locations in

space. !ough it may have some utility as an abstract idea, there is no

such thing as a point of 0 size in space; dimensional proportion forbids

it. Dimensional proportion does not allow for 0 other than the identity

of “every position is 0 distance away from itself ”. If space is founded on

regions of in$nite smallness, dimensional proportion would cease to

have any meaning; there would be no way to de$ne any length whatso-

ever.

To elaborate, consider that it is sometimes proposed that the

Planck length (or some other extremely small span) represents the “size”

of such a point, that spacetime is fundamentally quantized and that it is

useless to speak of lengths smaller than the Planck length. In this case

the quanta could not internally contain the characteristic of length; if

they did, they would still be divisible, and therefore would not be

quanta. However, if they have no internal proportions, then their size

relative to surrounding quanta would necessarily cease to have any

meaning. If this were the case, a billion, trillion, or googol quanta of zero

de$nable length would be equivalent to one quantum of zero de$nable

length.

Let's say the Planck length were the quantum of space: in this

case it would be impossible to travel or measure a half-Planck length,

because there is no such thing as that distance. You can either travel/

measure a full Planck length or none at all. In more intuitive terms, imag-

ine that a centimeter is the spatial quantum: you would not be able to

move your hand a millimeter; you would not be able to move your hand

$ve millimeters; you would only be able to move your hand in discon-

tinuous increments of centimeters. If spatial proportions have any mean-

ing at all, how could this possibly be achieved without passing your hand

through the intervening space that would be marked by millimeters?

Indeed, this situation would eliminate the proportion within the centi-

meter; traveling from one side of the impassable gap to the other would

cover 0 relative distance, since no traversable space exists between the

sides of the centimeter, and therefore covering 10 centimeters still would

necessarily equate to covering 0 distance.

!ere is a simple, ancient mathematical approach which can be

applied to show that the Planck length is not the smallest degree of di-

mensional proportion, and that for dimensional proportion to exist,

there can never be a smallest length. Consider two Planck lengths meet-

ing at a point and forming a right angle, like two sides of a square meet-

ing at a corner. Let's call the endpoints of the $rst Planck length A and B,

and the endpoints of the second Planck length B and C (the two meet at

B). If dimensional proportion has any meaning at all (that is, if the

Planck length can indeed be considered a length), the distance from A to

C will necessarily be √2 times the Planck length, per the Pythagorean

theorem– this length is about 1.414 times the Planck length, yet we had

concluded there is no way to de$ne a length smaller than the Planck

length; how can the extra .414... be accounted for without there existing

smaller units? And furthermore, √2 is an irrational number, requiring an

in$nite decimal expansion to de$ne completely; in order for point A to

accurately spatially relate to point C requires a continuum of lengths.

Since this argument applies at any size scale within dimensional propor-

tion, it follows that the dimensional proportion characterizing space

could not exist if it weren't a continuum.

In reality, every Planck length must span two half-Planck

lengths, every half-Planck length must span two half-half-Planck lengths,

etc. A photon cannot travel the span of a Planck length without spanning

a million millionths of a Planck length. Some might argue that trying to

use intuition to understand the quantum realm is futile, but there is no

doubt that the spans of length which comprise our realm of size arise

from the summation of huge numbers of those minute spans of length

over which quantum phenomena occur. If the concept of length does

not apply at those tiniest possible levels, how could it possibly come into

existence when large numbers of these tiny, supposedly distance-less

spans are laid end to end? A similar argument applies to time, which embodies a contin-

uum of a different type than space; not representing dimensional pro-

portion, representing the continuum of changes energy undergoes. It is

sometimes thought that the present has some de$nite duration, and that

this is the span of time in which all things occur. In the light of the rela-

tivity of simultaneity, it is clear that this is not the case; the present is

naught but the divide between past physical changes and future physical

changes, an a%ribute of every individual bit of dynamic energy in the

Universe. Every physical change takes time to occur, and you might ar-

gue that the time in which the change occurs is the present. How long,

then, is the present? In what span of time is every physical change con-

tained? Close consideration reveals that every span of time is in$nitely

divisible; like space, time is not quantized, but a continuum. Each sec-

ond is made up of an in$nite amount of smaller spans of time, i.e. each 1

second is made up of ten 1/10ths of a second, each 1/10th is made up of

ten 1/100ths of a second, and so on, forever.

For example, imagine the time it takes to blink your eyes: about

200 milliseconds for your upper lid to reach your lower lid. How many

frames of the present does that take? A hundred? A quadrillion? Note

that light in a vacuum travels 299.8 nanometers in a quadrillionth of a

second (a femtosecond); this duration can't be the duration of the pre-

sent, because change occurred in that time. (Light couldn't travel a light

year without clocking 3.154 ten-million-quadrillion femtoseconds of

travel.) Light also can't travel 299.8 nanometers without spanning one

trillion trillionths of a femtosecond. No ma%er how small you imagine

the present to be in duration, that duration is made up of an in$nite

number of smaller subdivisions. !e present is not a span in time in

which change occurs, it is simply the border across which future possi-

bilities become past certainties concerning each system of energy in the

Universe.

•§•

!e fact that there can never exist a smallest region of spacetime,

coupled with the fact that every larger region of spacetime is comprised

of smaller regions of spacetime, speaks volumes about the structure of

the Universe. Importantly, just as the chain of causality extends from the

past to the future, the chain of emergent possibility is extended from the

small to the large. In other words, there is no question that you could not

exist without your cells existing, they could not exist without their

molecules existing, those molecules could not exist without their atoms

(along with the laws of electromagnetism dictating their structure and

the character of their possible chemical reactions), those atoms could

not exist without their constituent particles, the nuclear particles could

not exist without their quarks, those quarks are theorized to be com-

prised of preons, and conservative scienti$c thinking says the regress

probably stops about there (to digress for a moment: it's a bit funny to

note that wherever the bounds of our knowledge lie, that is o#en where

a traditionally minded person expects the absolute boundary to be. I

think back on the backlash against Copernicanism, and the historical

(regre%ably, still widely held) belief that humans originate from a differ-

ent source than plants or animals.)

Given the necessary in$nitude of mathematical proportion exis-

tent in space, any span of size no ma%er how small is in$nitely larger

than the possible tininess within that span. Are we to assume that any

supposed “tiniest possible particle” $lls the entire in$nite span of space it

covers, that if we were to zoom in on that particle perhaps a googol times

we would still $nd an unbroken continuum from one side of the particle

to the next? What if we were to zoom in so small (a googol times really

should more than suffice) that the energy in any chosen expanse of the

particle is effectively in$nitely less than the energy of the particle as a

whole? Would this constitute nothingness, where we know we are actu-

ally observing the roots of the particle?

Well, of course not. We have no reason to suspect that the re-

gress downward in size does not continue in$nitely; in fact, due to the

logical principle that there can be no possible “smallest size” in space, no

0 point, without negating the existence of dimensional proportion, we

have every reason to expect that it does. Of course, the de$nite charac-

teristics of whatever physics pertains to energy at these minuscule size

scales are uninvestigable from our gigantic perspective, but we can rea-

sonably conclude that there are energetic systems below the range of our

possible observation, and that the existence of the quantum realm de-

pends upon the existence of these smaller systems, just as the existence

of our realm depends upon the existence of the quantum realm.

Physics is not linearly scalable; energy behaves differently at dif-

ferent levels in size. !is is clear from an observation of our immediate

surroundings (due to their tiny mass, ants can support themselves with

their minuscule legs, though if their body plan were scaled up to the size

of an elephant, such an ant would collapse into a heap of goo), and be-

yond the bounds of our possible investigation, past the quantum level on

the smaller end and past the reaches of the observable Universe on the

larger end.

Certain sets of fundamental physical laws are more prominent at

each scale; in our realm, electromagnetism is most strongly expressed,

on galactic scales, gravity dominates, and the spacetime scale occupied

by particles seems to operate within a framework of physical laws we

cannot quite interpret fully as of yet. Given an in$nitude of sizes open to

energy, this size-based hierarchy of physical law forms an in$nitely-tiered

layering of different regions of physical law, such that existing in one

frame of size constrains you to interacting with the physical laws domi-

nant at that size and holds you back from being able to directly interact

with energy occupying much larger or smaller size scales. You can only

interact with energy at a much smaller size level (for us, sub-quantum)

indirectly by interacting with the energetic phenomena (electromagnet-

ism) at your own size scale which that minuscule energy's interactions

sum to.

One of the clearest manifestations of this fundamental incom-

patibility between realms of physics separated by extremely large differ-

ences in spacetime-size is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which

states that it is impossible to measure both the momentum of a particle

and its position simultaneously because any means we can use to meas-

ure one will instantaneously in"uence the value of the other. For exam-

ple, to determine the de$nite position of an electron at any moment in

time would require us to use some apparatus which energetically inter-

acts with the electron (if our measuring device did not interact with the

electron, no measurement could possibly be made); the very act of ener-

getic measurement alters the state of the particle being measured, such

that measuring position modi$es momentum and measuring momen-

tum modi$es position, and the HUP de$nes an upper bound for how

accurately each can be known on account of this difficulty.

!e HUP is de$ned in reference to Planck's constant, a funda-

mental numerical value in nature which was $rst discovered relating the

energy of a photon to its frequency (a photon's frequency multiplied by

Planck's constant gives its energy). !is suggests that the HUP only re-

stricts the amount of information an electromagnetic observation can as-

certain concerning quantum particles, that is, how much can be known

about this smaller realm of spacetime-size by electromagnetically consti-

tuted systems of information in the higher realm of spacetime-size. In

order for an electromagnetically-constituted observer at our size scale to

learn anything about a quantum mechanical system, we have to bom-

bard that quantum mechanical system with a type of energy (e.g. pho-

tonic energy) which is large enough for us to observe. If we could use

systems of measurement made up of smaller systems of energy, for in-

stance that spectrum of physical law which underlies the existence of

quantum phenomena, we could more subtly probe those quantum me-

chanical systems, and best the HUP.

However, because we occupy our relatively in$nitely larger

spacetime-size scale, we have no means of $nely manipulating physics at

that minuscule level, and the HUP holds. !e HUP and Planck's con-

stant represent the boundary in spacetime-size scales at which the phys-

ics dominant at our level give way to physics of a different character, with

different logical underpinnings (mathematical forms) and different en-

ergetic expression (ultimately summing to the physics at our size-scale).

Looking outwards, gravity is the highest (largest in space, slow-

est in time) force we can observe; any larger-scale force only interacts

with our relatively in$nitely small size scale through its effect on gravity,

the causality of which is uninvestigable from our size scale. Whatever

effect an ubermacroscopic force like this would have would occur over

unimaginably huge time and size scales (possibly appearing in our size

scale in the form of dark energy). In the other direction, quantum phys-

ics is currently the lowest manifestation of physical law which we can

observe; the relatively in$nitely small physics underlying quantum sys-

tems is far too small for us to witness, and we can only observe the

higher expression of the quantum physics which links that realm to ours.

If we were situated within these relatively in$nitely small systems, gravity

would be too far away in size to have any noticeable effect on our sur-

roundings; the effect of gravity is expressed meaningfully in a larger

physical dimension than that making up the roots of quantum energy.

!ere's plenty of room at the bo%om; indeed, in$nite room, for

there is no bo%om. Choosing any point in space and zooming in on it,

you would never reach the depth of its center. One possible way to envi-

sion this is that in zooming in on any point in space, you would eventu-

ally leave the size scale in space where gravity, electromagnetism, and the

nuclear forces meaningfully apply, and enter the size scale in space where

new, in$nitesimally weaker and shorter-acting forces begin to take effect.

Here you might observe the largest scales of a smaller Universe, in$nite

in breadth (having in$nite breadth therein but bounded above by our

spacetime scale) but comprised of different fundamental forces acting

over relatively in$nitely shorter time periods and relatively in$nitely

weaker magnitudes.

Eventually, as you continue zooming, you would reach a rela-

tively in$nitely smaller point where those smaller fundamental forces

cease to apply and enter into yet another smaller level of physical fun-

damentality. !is seems to jive with the concepts of string theory,

wherein the large scale conditions of in$nitesimally small extra-

dimensional spaces give rise to energetic effects in our three-

dimensional space.

Space and time share a fundamental symmetry; the size of a sys-

tem of energy in space is proportional to the size of the change that en-

ergy undergoes in time. !e smaller the system of energy, the less time it

will take for that energy to undergo meaningful change relative to larger

systems of energy; any arbitrarily chosen measure of change will convey

this point, so let's use rotation about an axis: an electron will rotate

about its axis a countless number of times in the amount of time that the

star it is located in takes to complete the same change. !is requirement

that the temporal conditions of energy are proportional to the spatial

size of that energy extends the symmetry of space and time to all levels

of size.

As you proceed downward in size through spacetime, passing

atoms, quarks, etc., the rate of change per second expands higher and

higher, quickly reaching the point where change occurs relatively in$-

nitely quickly and over relatively in$nitely tiny spatial domains; this is

the domain in size which was historically imagined to be vacuum space.

(Relatively in$nitely quickly describes all durations which are so small

that we cannot possibly observe the degree of change which occurs in

that time from our particular perspective in spacetime size.) On the con-

trary, this size scale is not a blankness, but a boundary of relatively in$-

nitely small-magnitudes of energy existing over relatively in$nitely short

durations which we are unable to peer beneath by any means available to

an occupant of the physics of our size scale.

!e well-known phenomenon of pair production in quantum

mechanics describes the evidence that the smaller you look in size and

duration in space, the more likely it is that so-called virtual particles will

be found arising from the 'vacuum' and self-canceling back into the 'vac-

uum'. As you approach 0 relative size in space and time, the probability

that pairs are being produced approaches 1, so that at apparent in$nite

smallness in spacetime you would $nd pairs of particles coming into ex-

istence, colliding, and leaving existence so rapidly that there would be no

single instance of 0 energy at any time and at any point. At this size scale

no sooner has a pair le# existence than another has taken its place. As

the spacetime size scale you consider shrinks, the probability that energy

occupies that spacetime region grows to what amounts to relatively in$-

nitely certain: we could not observe any duration at this scale without

overlooking a relatively in$nite amount of change at an almost in$nitely

small magnitude of energy; it is of a much higher frame rate than we can

access from our slower frame rate, so to speak.

In this view, what was historically perceived as the vacuum of

empty space is in fact an endless expanse of extremely tiny energy mag-

nitudes undergoing change over extremely small durations, a conclusion

supported by quantum physics; spacetime can thus be described as an

energetic continuum, wherein energetic phenomena would be found at

every point no ma%er how small or large. !e energetic phenomena oc-

curring over relatively in$nitely smaller scales in size and time are sum to

generate those phenomena occupying higher size scales; higher size

scales are necessarily comprised of summations of lower processes, and

having these processes at the higher size's roots enables the two realms of

physics to interact, if only distantly.

!is conception leads us towards an interesting unanswered

question in physics: “why do the electrical permi%ivity and magnetic

permeability of free space have the values they do?” A tentative answer

may be that these values are due to the physical makeup of the energetic

systems occupying the spacetime size-scale forming the basis for the ex-

istence of the electromagnetic Field and larger, charged particles like

electrons and protons; that is, electrons and protons have a charge spe-

ci$cally because they are rooted in (comprised of) and interact with the

smaller-scale energetic fabric making up the continuum of electromag-

netic potential within spacetime. !e values for the permi%ivity and

permeability of free space essentially represent the resistance this under-

lying $eld of energy has to conveying electromagnetic effects; charged

particles affect the informational content of this underlying $eld (one is

tempted to describe it as $eld-geometrical content, similar to gravita-

tional effects) and are in turn affected by that content. If this is the case,

it is natural to suspect that every force is passed via these microcosmic

energetic systems, and that in turn the passage of energy through these

microcosmic systems is similarly accomplished by cumulative interac-

tions between the yet smaller systems of energy which make up those

microcosmic systems.

Looking outwards, the immensely drawn out behavior of gravi-

tational interaction between galaxies sums over trillions of trillions of

years to make up a yet higher frame of physical law. If we could observe

our home Universe (i.e., the observable Universe) from the perspective

of that higher frame, where trillions of trillions of years would appear to

pass in an instant, the birth and ultimate fate of our Universe might look

like a dizzying particulate swarm of energy, much like our current pic-

ture of the behavior of the atomic realm.

!e type of force which applies to a system of energy is deter-

mined by the spacetime size scale which that energy occupies. A quark is

bound to color charge and oscillates under its in"uence countless times

each second, changing meaningfully at a rate which de$es our observa-

tion; no ma%er how small a snapshot we could take of a quark's motion,

that snapshot would contain a relatively in$nite amount of change, blur-

ring our perception of what is truly occurring therein. A planet, on the

other hand, taking up a colossally huge frame of spacetime relative to the

quark (containing octillions of octillions of quark-moments and quark-

sizes), is macroscopically dominated by the force of gravity, which

causes the planet's position in space to change at a positively sluggish

pace in time relative to the quark.

!e continuum is not de$ned objectively in reference to our

personal size scale, but continues on in this causal regression (smaller

components making up and de$ning larger systems) forever from small

to large. !ere is a spacetime size-scale which is as much smaller than the

quark as the quark is smaller than the planet, and a proportionally

smaller scale farther down, and another. Again, there is no bo%om, no

center to this energetic regress, nor is there a largest size scale; no “larg-

est possible span” could exist without implying the existence of space

outside of its breadth.

•§•

If this idea (that the fundamental forces we observe arise from

the effects of an in$nite hierarchy of smaller fundamental forces, and

give rise to yet larger levels of physics in space and time) is correct, this

would suggest something like a $#h dimension to spacetime: size, aris-

ing from the modi$cation to the fundamental laws of physics at different

scales within the three directional spatial dimensions and time. It seems

we sit suspended between a greater in$nity outwards in size and a lesser

in$nity inwards in size; this $#h dimension re"ects the Cosmic Truth of

the radial relationship between “inward” and “outward”, just as the spa-

tial dimensions contain at each position the locus of in$nite forwards

and backwards, up and down, le# and right, and the present in the time

dimension serves as the fulcrum between the in$nite past and in$nite

future in Existence.

Traditionally, spatial dimensions are conceived as the three di-

rections oriented perpendicularly to the others. Size is again perpendicu-

lar to all three, and cannot be physically traveled by an energetic system,

because the position occupied by any energetic system in the dimension

of size depends on its permanent energetic makeup, and on the funda-

mental forces directly in"uencing that system over the time-scale in

which that system unfolds. You can see that it is perpendicular to each;

neither moving forward, moving sideways, nor moving upwards takes

you inward or outward in the size dimension. You could zoom in on the

number line (or on a point in space, since it must be a continuum) in$-

nitely without traveling any distance le# or right on that line. If you want

to imagine a dimension perpendicular to forward, up, and sideways, look

inwards along the endless gallery of smaller causes summing up to your

energetic makeup, and outwards beyond the stars.

A mathematician would likely argue, saying “De$ning a system's

size in space only requires three dimensions, and you could represent

any physically existent form on a three-dimensional cartesian plane.” To

this, I would argue that the chosen scale of the graph in reference to the

content of the Universe represents a fourth dimension to the representa-

tion, and that a graph of my body with centimeters for the chosen scale

would represent a radically different set of information than the same

graph with picometers marking the scale. In the la%er case, each one of

my atoms would have to be plo%ed to accurately map my shape. Con-

versely, if the chosen scale were kilometers, my body would hardly oc-

cupy a single point on the mapping, and if the scale were googolometers

(10^100 meters), the observable Universe could occupy no more than a

single point on the mapping. Essentially, the $#h dimension of size is

relative at once to each spatial dimension; it arises from the continuum

of distances and the continuum of physical laws governing the character-

istics of energy magnitudes occupying every span therein.

It is interesting that introducing the dimension of time to the

graphical representation would map the dynamic motions of my body,

and the appropriate time span with which to mark the picometer-spatial

scale might be on the order of zeptoseconds, in order to give a faithful

representation of my atomic motions. Due to the Heisenberg uncer-

tainty principle, any mapping we could possibly achieve of an atomic

structure like a body has a degree of uncertainty; there is no way for us

to measure or describe the full range of information embodied in our

particles. However, contrary to the canonical Copenhagen interpretation

of quantum mechanics, the fact that we are unable to glean all the infor-

mation contained in our particles does not at all restrict how much in-

formation those particles embody. !ough we cannot measure both po-

sition and momentum simultaneously, every particle necessarily pos-

sesses both at all times. (If it didn't, what would it mean to measure just

one of them, that is, if a particle has no de$nite momentum at any time,

what would it mean to say that measuring its position upsets its momen-

tum? Further, how could the conservation of momentum law hold?)

Essentially, the realm of physics occupied by an entity is deter-

mined by its position in the dimension of size, containing in$nite small-

ness within and centered in in$nite largeness without. !is entity is free

to travel the dimensions of space perpendicular to size, with each step

spanning the in$nite depth of smallness at every point. Every entity is

permanently traveling through the dimension of time by its energetic

existence. However, the entity is locked into one position in the dimen-

sion of size, as an in$nite tower of smaller hierarchical systems giving rise

to larger, culminating in the boundary of the entity itself.

It is interesting to draw parallels between this model of reality

and fractal geometry. !e structure of our Universe appears to be fun-

damentally fractal in nature (in the most essential sense of self-

similarity; every single constituent is a different expression of Universal

energy representing information in Awareness). Instead of being two or

three dimensional like the fractals we are familiar with, it is 5-

dimensional (at least), in$nitely complex at every level throughout

space, size, and time. We occupy only one level of this structure, but eve-

rything in your view could be zoomed-in on in$nitely, from your desk to

the galaxies out your window.

Both looking outwards in distance through a telescope and look-

ing smaller in size through a microscope involve looking out into the far

distance in the dimension of size, the two opposite directions in which it

extends; from one direction, you have to bend the light rays outwards

and spatially expand their information in order to perceive their squozen

content, and from the other, you must bring them in from their galactic

immensity towards a focal point into which a human eye can peek. Both

involve stretching or squishing energetic content into the size range we

can perceive.

Consider, for a moment, the complex boundary your body

makes with the world around you- the exact shape you take up. From far

away, the shape looks like a three dimensional human form. Examining

the shape at the level of skin cells in size would reveal that the shape be-

comes extremely complicated as you approach it; the grooves in your

skin become canyons of millions of cells folded against each other. As

you near individual cells, you will notice points where the your shape's

boundary opens up to the inside, membrane pores much smaller than

most molecules, but still not closed off. !ese pores open the boundary

up to the inside of your body, the shape $rst tracing individual cell inte-

riors and continuing on into blood vessels and nerves. Continuing

deeper in size brings you to the atoms making up the cells, which open

up the boundary further. In fact, your particles are not directly con-

nected to each other; the boundary of your body turns out to be un-

bounded. Nothing fundamentally separates the shape of your body from

the shape of everything.

Zooming out larger in size, the Universe is positively in$nitely

larger than my body, while zooming in on the constituents of my body, I

would never $nd a smallest component; every arbitrarily small span of

the continuum therein is built up from smaller energetic systems span-

ning smaller subsections of the continuum. My size, and any size de$ned

in the continuum, can be considered the zero point between in$nite

larger sizes (+) and in$nite smaller sizes (-). Every individual system of

energy represents a midpoint in the in$nite dimension of size (and space

and time), in that all smaller sizes are contained within, and all larger

sizes centered on that system contain the system in question.

Some minute realms in the tiered hierarchy of physics may oper-

ate within those strange topological environments investigated in string

theory, while others, like electromagnetism, operate most closely within

the three dimensions of Euclidean geometry along with the dimension

of time. Similarly, though gravitation evidently occurs in the context of

four dimensional Minkowski space, generally called spacetime, the ener-

getic effects which gravitation enacts could be said to occur within the

context of a fundamental possibility represented by the existence of

space; in this view gravitation does not warp space itself as such, but

warps the energetic, 4-d content of spacetime at the size scale over which

it acts.

•§•

!e Big Bang theory is currently interpreted to imply not only

that the energy in the Universe began as a point of in$nite smallness and

density, but that spacetime itself originated from such a singularity; this

conclusion appears "awed, due to the seeming fact that there can be no

such thing as in$nite smallness. It would likely be more accurate to con-

clude that this energy was compressed into a nearly in$nitely smaller

realm of physics from that active at our familiar span of this size-

continuum, and that upon reaching a certain size (perhaps more aptly, a

certain energy-density) it began to embody the physics of our immedi-

ate surroundings, producing light, gravity, atoms, and all the effects we

can observe. !e mathematics describing the physics of our size scale

can only describe this primeval compression in terms of in$nite small-

ness and in$nite density, because of its relatively in$nite distance in size

from our scale; the conditions prior to the Big Bang do not translate into

the mathematics describing the physics of our post-Big Bang size spec-

trum.

It is possible that so-called dark energy and dark ma%er, which

in the standard cosmological model account for about 96% of the mass

in the Universe, are in fact energetic systems which are too small for us

to directly observe from our relatively huge size scale (i.e. too small to

interact with photons and electromagnetism). In their smallness and

ubiquity, they $ll every point in space and every instant in time; perhaps

this is why they account for such a huge proportion of the energy magni-

tude within the Universe. Perhaps only through the tremendous ener-

getic burst provided by the Big Bang are these minuscule energetic sys-

tems able to compound into the immense energetic systems making up

the world we inhabit, the photons, protons, electrons, etc. Because dark

energy and dark ma%er have mass, it is clear that they interact with the

Field of spacetime just as the familiar particles do, and that taken as a

whole they have demonstrable gravitational effects on large scale struc-

tures like galaxies. In this view, dark energy and dark ma%er are the mi-

crocosmic components making up the Field, and will be undetectable

until we have a more nuanced means of investigating smaller realms than

simply smashing particles together.

It is also possible, given how li%le is really known about dark

energy, that it is the effect of conditions occurring in the larger dimen-

sion of physics than that governing the behavior of our size scale; per-

haps our Universe is a constituent particle of a higher sized energetic

system, and is being in"uenced from above by the circumstances in that

higher system (just like an atom in a star gaining temperature due to the

compression of the higher-scale force of gravity). It is also possible, of

course, (let’s call it probable) that neither scenario is the case.

Scienti$c opinion currently holds that the singularity in a black

hole is a point of in$nite density, in$nite smallness. !is again fails to

recognize that there is no such thing as in$nite smallness, only relatively

in$nite smallness. !e size of the collapsing ma%er is effectively in$-

nitely small from the mathematics of our near in$nitely larger perspec-

tive, passing quickly beyond the Planck length, the smallest range an en-

ergetic inhabitant of our size in the Universe could ever hope to exam-

ine, but as with all size spans the energy remains in$nitely larger than the

smaller possible regions within.

!e event horizon of a black hole can be imagined as the point

where the elastic medium of space, the “rubber bands” described in

Chapter 1, begin to be stretched relatively in$nitely inwards from our

perspective (stretched beyond our means of investigating with light, our

fastest information transfer system). Nearing the event horizon of a

black hole, if we could visualize the shape of space via the red grid

method explained in the last chapter, we would $nd that from our per-

spective, the grid is being stretched inwards to (relatively) in$nite

length; a photon could never pass all the way through any one box in the

grid, because it would take what appears to us outsiders an in$nite

amount of time to do so. For this reason, relative to the rest of the Uni-

verse, ma%er falling into the event horizon appears to slow in its motion

through time, eventually coming to a halt relative to our forward march

through time. From the perspective of the photon (due to the relativity

principle), however, the grid lines in its vicinity are perfectly unwarped,

but the grid lines leading away from the black hole and into space are

racing away, apparently stretching away from the black hole, as the space

through which the light propagates is rapidly stretched inwards.

•§•

!e character of the continuous dimensions of spacetime can be

elaborated upon in the context of the cardinality of different types of

in$nity $rst described by Georg Cantor and subsequently developed in

set theory. His counterintuitive result, that in$nities can have different

sizes, depends upon the characteristics of the in$nite set. For example,

the set of natural numbers describes the concept of an endless succes-

sion of equal proportions (1s) added one a#er the other; there is no

highest number to reach. !is is the smallest possible in$nite set, and is

considered “countably in$nite” because though the string of numbers is

in$nite, an in$nite process of systematic counting would reach every

number therein.

On the other hand, the real numbers represent an in$nitely

larger set, called “uncountably in$nite”, because no systematic counting

scheme could possibly account for every number therein. Perhaps the

simplest way to demonstrate this is the following: count the set {1, 0.1,

0.01, 0.001,...}. (In other words, assign a natural number to each subse-

quent real number in the set, which will be the previous number divided

by 10). Because the real numbers represent a continuum, you could ex-

haust the entire in$nite set of natural numbers in counting this set of real

numbers (which approaches 0 but never reaches it during an in$nite

succession of divisions) and never leave the span between the real num-

bers 0 and 1. Truly, it is impossible to set out a system of steps for count-

ing all the reals because no ma%er what unit you choose to begin count-

ing from, there will always be an in$nite number of units making up that

unit. (For example, if you wanted to count the reals by starting with {0,

0.000000001, 0.000000002,...} you would already have missed the in$-

nite set of numbers between 0 and 0.000000001 and another in$nite set

of numbers separating 0.000000001 and 0.000000002.) !is is the de$-

nition of a continuum; each unit is separated from every other unit by an

in$nite gulf of smaller units.

!is seems to apply perfectly to the dimensions of space, time

and size. Each dimension in space can be thought of as the embodiment

of the real numbers, i.e. an in$nitely divisible, endless expanse. Any en-

ergetic system will occupy a de$nite shape in space, which represents

that system's permanent perspective on size; the spatial size of the sys-

tem de$nes a unit integer in the context of the continuum. For example,

because I am a human, my body serves as the natural unit of comparison

between different sizes in the Universe, where every span of distance is

either longer or shorter than I am tall. An in$nite string of any units of

length based on my size (e.g. the length of a footstep) laid end to end

would span the in$nite bounds of one spatial dimension (say, backward

to forward). !e length of my footsteps in this instance (or the footstep

of any subjective observer) represent integers, capable of crossing space

in a countably in$nite sequence. On the other hand, this standard unit

spans a continuum, and is comprised of an uncountably in$nite number

of smaller size scales.

In other words, the position we occupy in the continuum of size

is analogous to an integer, and can be used in the same way as integers to

de$ne a countably in$nite sequence of distances in space; the cardinality

of equal footstep-lengths in space is Aleph 0. !e underlying space

which these footsteps cover is of cardinality Aleph 1, being a continuum

analogous to the continuum of real numbers. As we walk through space,

we are moving perpendicularly to the dimension of size, stuck at exactly

one position (or at least, very near one position, varying slightly during

mealtime and slightly less slightly over our lifetimes) in its in/out con-

tinuum, bypassing an in$nity of smaller scales with each step (an expla-

nation which might $nally satisfy old Zeno).

•§•

To summarize, this chapter proposes the existence of a tiered

in$nity of varied physics, wherein all the energy making up the phenom-

ena at our size scale (light, sound, gravity, heat, etc.) is a direct conse-

quence of energetic interactions happening over relatively in$nitely

smaller spacetime size scales. !e energy making up any particle is the

cumulative effect of ever smaller particles interacting over ever smaller

durations, past the Planck length in size, past the point in size which ap-

pears to contain 0 energy at any moment from our spacetime size scale.

!is in$nite regression does not necessarily need to follow the logical

constraints facing energy in our frame of observation, the realm closest

to our spacetime size-scale. !ere is plenty of room in every point in the

continuum of spacetime for a Universe of information to exist, provided

its constituents occupy smaller energy magnitudes and time durations

relative to larger regions.

!ese relatively in$nitely microscopic systems of energy com-

pound together to produce the higher scale forces and particles making

up the physics at our size scale, and are in turn affected by the conditions

which their energetic interactions sum to, even beyond the threshold

where the dominant physical laws change. For example, the gravitational

effects of stars within our observable size scale cause certain quantum

effects in the quantum lower size scale which would not arise without

this larger-to-smaller compressive in"uence, such as the ignition of nu-

clear fusion in stars.

Further, it is put forward that maybe all force $elds exist as mac-

roscopic energy being distributed and passed through relatively-in$nite

numbers of these smaller-scale systems, the realms of physics making up

the roots of the higher expressions of energy in question. For example,

the electromagnetic potential in space which allows light to propagate

could be interpreted as a vast $eld of near in$nitely-smaller energetic

systems distributing the cumulative energy of the light to each other

over nearly in$nitely shorter time spans; the magnitude of the electrical

permi%ivity and magnetic permeability of space are the emergent result

of the resistance of the smaller scale continuum of energetic systems to

the passage of electromagnetic force. !is implies that spacetime may

not be de$ned by the speed of light through the Field (as described in

Chapter 2) at all size scales, only within the size scale in which we are

centered and in which electromagnetism is expressed.

CHAPTER 4

Interpreting Quantum Effects

!ere are some very interesting and nonintuitive effects revealed

by experiments performed with quantum mechanical systems. In many

cases, these results in no way point to de$nite conclusions, and it is very

likely that the current explanations for what is going on down there in

the deep tininess of size are inadequate. !ough quantum mechanics is

notoriously difficult (perhaps impossible) to interpret in terms of every-

day experience, it remains abundantly clear that there exists a rational

explanation for every facet of Existence (that rational explanation as

known to Cosmic Awareness makes up the existence of the phenomena

in question). !is chapter will be devoted to reimagining some of the

ideas forming the intuitive basis for our understanding of quantum

processes, not necessarily because it will prove useful to do so, but be-

cause these ideas are interesting to think about. (Most of the ideas put

forward here are almost certainly incorrect, and many have been de-

scribed before, but I do like thinking along these lines, and perhaps you

will $nd such a discussion interesting as well.)

One of the most well known examples of quantum physics' un-

usual nature is provided by Young's famous dual-slit experiment,

wherein a beam of light shined through two parallel slits onto a photo-

graphic plate resolves into an image of a wave-diffraction pa%ern, just as

would be expected if light were fundamentally a wavelike phenomena.

However, it is currently well known that light is comprised of quantized

bits known as photons, which exhibit properties of particles in the clas-

sical sense, yet when these individual photons are $red through the same

apparatus one at a time, a wave pa%ern still emerges on the photographic

plate!

However, when a measuring apparatus is used to determine

which slit the photon passes through on its way to the plate, the diffrac-

tion pa%ern does not result. !e Copenhagen interpretation of quantum

mechanics interprets this effect as indicating that rather than traveling

through just one slit (in the case of the experiment when no measuring

apparatus is applied to the slits), the photon's path is described by a

probability wave which takes into account all possible paths and self in-

terferes on this basis, leading to the appearance of the diffraction pa%ern

on the photographic plate.

!is would be quite an unexpected and nonintuitive result, and

there are some things we should consider before accepting this explana-

tion. !e thought that the only thing which the photon could interfere

with to cause the diffraction pa%ern is itself neglects a very signi$cant

factor of the experiment (along with raising the potentially paradoxical

notion of self-interference): the photon is not an independent entity, but

a "uctuation in the electromagnetic Field content of spacetime. !e $eld

through which the photon is traveling is morphed by the presence of the

slits. (!e material in which the slits are cut is made up of electromag-

netic content: atoms.)

!e electromagnetic content of the molecular structure of this

material forms a complex web of warpings through which the photon

cannot pass without being absorbed by an electron within the material.

On the other hand, the open slits represent a smooth continuum of elec-

tromagnetic $eld which the photons can pass through with ease; the

photon's path will be a%racted to the slit in a similar way that an elec-

tron's path will be a%racted to the most conductive surfaces in the vicin-

ity; as the principle of least action states, both fundamentally favor the

path of least resistance. Because the photon is presented with two possi-

ble paths of least resistance, it wavers between them before $nally being

sucked through either one; the interference pa%ern which results on the

screen is a result of the photon interacting with the geometric makeup of

the $eld through which it travels. It is true that the photon passes

through either one slit or the other, and still ends up on the screen in a

way that $ts a spherical wave interference pa%ern; which slit it passes

through is described by the probabilistic mathematics of quantum me-

chanics, which describe the possible paths a photon can take when pre-

sented with two equally (or near equally, based on slight variations in the

photon's velocity) suitable passages. !e photon does not interfere with

itself, the interference solely arises from the photon's interaction with

the split $eld through which it is able to travel.

!e diffraction pa%ern occurs via this experimental setup in the

same way with any quantum object, for instance, an electron: the open

slits again represent paths of least resistance which a%ract the electron,

because colliding with the wall would accelerate the electron, causing it

to radiate, and the principle of least action resists this occurrence and

favors the electron's passing through either slit. An electron $red at the

very edge of the slit, such that if it were a normal projectile, it would col-

lide with the edge of the slit rather than pass through, is instead funneled

into the opening; it is electrically repelled from the barrier it is approach-

ing in favor of the freely traversable medium nearby. !e situation is

analogous to an electron being accelerated through a conductor via an

applied voltage, if an insulator with two conductive channels is built into

the conductor; the electron is sucked through the path of least resis-

tance.

!is is the origin of the wave pa%ern resulting on the detector.

!e geometry of the force $eld through which the electron travels as its

wave nears the blockage causes the interference: it wavers between being

drawn to each slit before it is close enough to be pulled de$nitely one

way or the other. !e electron's path is in"uenced by the fact it can only

traverse one slit. !e interference arises from the electron's interaction

with the characteristics of the forked EM $eld, not via interaction with

itself (or at least, in in"uencing itself, it is only doing so through in"u-

encing the content of the $eld, with that in"uence in turn affecting its

future motion); wavering between the two favored paths represented by

the slits gives the electron's velocity a lateral element, which turns out to

exactly match the type of interference pa%ern resulting from waves of

force traversing a medium passing through two slits.

!e electron's motion is a wave of force traveling through the

EM $eld, and that wave of force is in"uenced by the force-curvature of

the $eld. It is the same effect that leads the lightning bolt to the lightning

rod: the resistance to the current's "ow is greater in some places than

others, based on the electromagnetic conditions in the bolt's vicinity at

the time. A large antenna is like a subtle funnel instilled in the $eld,

drawing nearer any rogue currents passing through, in a way analogous

to the slits drawing the electron's path nearer. !e open slits represent a

conductive path, while the screen in which the slits are situated repre-

sents an insulator.

Why does the interference pa%ern cease to appear when a detec-

tor is used to determine which slit the electron passes through on its way

to the photographic plate? As was mentioned in reference to the Hei-

senberg Uncertainty Principle in Chapter 3, any detector used necessar-

ily must energetically interact with the particle in question. Generally,

the electron's path is detected by placing an instrument on the slit which

is responsive to changes in the electromagnetic $eld; as the electron

passes, its motion through the $eld causes a magnetic $eld perpendicu-

lar to its direction of motion, which the detector can register.

However, the detector's registering of that magnetic $eld re-

quires an interchange of energy with the electron; in interacting with the

detector, the electron gives force in the form of magnetic "ux, and the

detector gives force to the electron through the impedance its magnetic

$eld causes, resisting that electrical $eld's in"uence on the magnetic

$eld. !is balanced exchange of force alters the momentum of the elec-

tron, in this case minimizing the lateral motion introduced by the elec-

tron's wavering between the two paths, which keeps the interference pat-

tern from resulting.

•§•

!e convention for calling quantum mechanical systems 'parti-

cles' is representative of the persistent tendency we have to refer to these

objects in reference to our everyday surroundings. 'Particle' suggests spa-

tial and energetic self-containment, and it is for this reason that the label

as popularly understood is inadequate. Every particle consists of both its

energetic content and its relationship to the energetic content of the

Universe; every particle (besides the force-carrying gauge bosons) has

mass, and is therefore related to the gravitational $eld (the dynamic

geometric shape) of spacetime, and many particles have a charge, and

therefore interact with the electromagnetic $eld of potential (or their

pertinent $eld, like the strong $eld for nuclear particles) in spacetime.

Rather than a hard bundle of energy standing apart from the surround-

ing $elds, a particle is de$ned by its interaction with the pertinent $elds.

!is interaction takes the form of a wave phenomena.

What does it mean to behave like a wave? All waves involve the

transference of momentum through a media; some waves, like sound

waves or mechanical ocean waves, spread that momentum throughout a

medium, with the intensity of the energy rapidly dissipating per the in-

verse square law as it spreads over a larger area. Other waves, like those

through a spring, do not have a wide area through which to spread, and

carry their momentum in a packet of energy through the media. Quan-

tum particle-waves are more like spring waves in this sense; they do not

consist of an impulse in a $eld-media which spreads and dissipates; they

have speci$c velocities through which they convey momentum through

their media. A photon, for instance, is impelled in its motion in only one

direction by the complementary in"uence of a varying electrical $eld

and a proportional, perpendicular magnetic $eld. !e particle represents

a region of its home $eld which has been energetically plucked in such a

way as to leave a temporary wave oscillating therein. !is wave is self-

contained in that it does not spread out over the $eld, but exists in a dy-

namic, self-coiling relationship with the $eld, responding with motion to

changes in the $eld and in turn changing the content of the $eld. !ere-

fore, the word 'particle' should be understood to mean “a non-spreading

quantized waveform within a $eld medium”.

A photon consists of a self-contained self-perpetuating electro-

magnetic wave, that is, a disturbance in the electromagnetic $eld which

does not spread out over space; its two components, co-driving swirls of

density in the electrical and magnetic $elds, remain locked to each other,

violently twisting about each other. !ey propagate over space because

each impels the other to progress forward in a dimension perpendicular

to its own circular path; the summation of these two in"uences drives

the photon in a direction perpendicular to theirs at the speed with which

they change. !e in$nitely large electrical and magnetic $elds draped

throughout space are woven together in this most intimate of ways, em-

bodying through their rich content of photons an unimaginably dense

vortex of energetic coin"uence.

An electron only radiates when in motion relative to the EM

$eld. It appears that whenever the electron is accelerated, its in"uence

on the electrical $eld is warped away from what it would have been if the

electron were in constant velocity (and thus at equilibrium with the sur-

rounding $eld content); amazingly, whenever the shape of the electrical

$eld becomes warped, the magnetic $eld (which overlaps with the elec-

trical $eld at every point in space) in that area is warped in a propor-

tional fashion, though the orientation of its warping is perpendicular to

that of the electrical $eld. In turn, whenever the magnetic $eld is

warped, it causes a proportional, perpendicular, warping in the electrical

$eld. !is relationship of coin"uence (a photon) continues between the

two $elds until it is absorbed by another particle, many times billions of

years a#er it begins. It propagates at a constant speed through space re-

gardless of the intensity or rapidity of the co-oscillation, the speed of

light, which seems to have its precise value because the microcosmic

physical systems of energy which make up the basis of these $elds at a

level nearly in$nitely smaller than the photon take time to pass this in-

formation along, causing friction on the speed of the oscillation and giv-

ing it this $nite speed.

In an atomic orbital, it seems that the electron does not radiate

because it occupies a dynamic equilibrium with the motion of the Field.

Due to the con"uence of the electrons and protons therein, the Field is

changing shape rapidly, and the electron's motion perfectly locks into

the rhythm of the changing $eld, such that their in"uences harmonize

perfectly; the electron and the shape of the Field share a constant veloc-

ity. !at is, in the space around the nucleus, the positive charges warp

the electrical $eld in a speci$c way, and the electron's motion in response

perfectly counteracts this effect, leading to a static relationship relative to

the Field due to the incessant, dynamic motion the electrical $eld un-

dergoes in response to the relationship between the two charges; their

in"uence on the electrical $eld outside of their close bond is perfectly

neutral, though the electron's motion relative to the magnetic $eld still

causes a magnetic distortion.

Atoms exist in this state of perfect neutrality unless the number

of electrons does not match the number of protons (as is the case with

ions). Every balanced con$guration is unstable to the point that the neu-

trality can only be maintained through the electron's contant motion

relative to the proton and in synchrony with the warping of the EM Field

the proton causes. When the conditions of the Field are upset by an out-

side source, like a photon, the electron is knocked out of this perfect re-

lationship with the proton and the Field, and accelerates relative to the

shape of the Field, radiating energy (carrying information about the

electron's relative change out into the Universe) in the process.

When atoms chemically bond, their electrons share in their re-

sponse to the warping of the Field done by both nuclei. !e dance is

unimaginably complex and unique for every possible combination of

orbitals, i.e. every possible combination of positive Field curvature coun-

teracted by dynamic negative Field curvature such that no relative mo-

tion occurs between the particles and the $eld shaped by their charges;

the particles move in perfect synchrony with the twistings of the $eld.

As for the wave/particle duality, the distinction comes down to

the behavior of the 'particle' in response to different situations. Again, all

particles consist of energetic disturbances in their home Field; a photon

consists of a self-contained, self-perpetuating disturbance in the elec-

tromagnetic $eld. When the photon is forced to interact with the $eld,

for instance when passing through a narrow aperture in the $eld, it re-

sponds like the wave that it is. When the photon is forced to interact

with other particles with components in other $elds, it behaves like a

classical particle. !at is, in the dual slit experiment, the photon behaves

as a wave because it is only interacting with the $eld through which it

travels, whereas in the photoelectric effect, photons behave partically

due to their interaction with (quantized absorption by) electrons.

CHAPTER 5

Time as Change

!e clock just struck in$nity: I wonder, will human minds ever

be satis$ed with the thought that an in$nity of time (an in$nite progres-

sion of change) precedes us? If you count backwards in years, the fact

that we occupy a de$nite point in time seems to cap the in$nity on this

end (apparently suggesting that it took a $nite amount of time to reach

this point); our intuition protests: “how could there not be a zero point,

a beginning, on the other end?” Taking into account the axiom that Ex-

istence has never not existed, the true answer seems to be that the pre-

sent represents the 0 point between negative in$nity in time (the past)

and positive in$nity in time (the future). Every individual moment for

any bit of energy in Existence is at the very center of time, the endpoint

of a beginning-less cascade of causality, and the starting set of causes for

yet another in$nite chain of events.

Historically, it was o#en concluded that given an in$nity of time,

everything that can happen once will necessarily happen again an in$-

nite amount of times, that our exact lives will be lived out again and

again and again. !is concept is recurrent throughout human thinking,

appearing in Indian philosophy and the beliefs of the Pythagoreans, and

later put forward by Nietzsche. !is thought ignores that concurrent to

in$nite time is the existence of an in$nite depth of possibility. It seems

that the in$nity of time arises as a consequence of the in$nity of possi-

bility, the relentless emanation from Truth of change unto change.

Consider the ridiculous odds that shuffled up your life from the

13.7 billion year $rework of the Universe, and moreover, the impossibly

huge number of ways your life could have unfolded, and more-moreover,

the unfathomable range of possibility open to you at this very instant!

You could be si%ing an atom's width away from where you sit now, your

heart could be beating differently from just an extra instant of exertion

earlier in the day (i.e. maybe coinciding with every 15th tick of the clock

on the wall instead of coinciding with every 61st tick), different air

molecules, perhaps carrying harmful fungal spores, could be $lling your

lungs, different water molecules could be coursing through your veins,

different pa%erns of photons could be streaming from your lamp. Couple

this with the realizations of chaos theory, the bu%er"y effect that any

small scale change in a system can potentially lead to extreme large scale

changes. !e unimaginably, brilliantly gigantic range of possibilities will

never be exhausted.

Simply the fact that a thing has had the inconceivable luck to

happen in this bo%omless range of potential makes it likely that thing

will not happen again; if there are an in$nite number of possible ways for

something to happen, the probability that it will happen the same way

twice is almost in$nitely less than the likelihood that it will happen dif-

ferently. Even given an in$nite number of chances to happen the same

way, there are always an in$nite number of as yet unrecognized possibili-

ties towering over the $nite number of ways the event has already hap-

pened, which probability will favor in proportion to the tremendousness

of the unrealized potential.

!is directly relates to entropy, the delightfully far-reaching con-

cept describing the tendency for thermodynamic disorder (the amount

of non-convertible energy, that which can do no work) to increase to-

wards a maximum in any closed physical system, and never to spontane-

ously decrease. !is principle extends into the broader $eld of statistical

behavior, applying to any probabilistic informational system. Because

the number of possible disordered states generally far outweighs the

number of possible ordered states, the system will favor and tend to-

wards disorganized con$gurations; for instance, if a program were cre-

ated which types out random le%ers, the ratio of gibberish to actual Eng-

lish words would be huge; the possible combinations of disorganized

le%ers far outweighs the number of speci$c combinations which encode

words, which in turn far outweighs the number of combinations which

encode grammatical phrases. Essentially, any system which can represent

informational order can only be considered ordered in contrast to the

system's broad range of possible disorder.

We encounter this quietly prevailing phenomenon throughout

our lives. In some houses, a bedroom is only considered clean in one

perfect con$guration, with the surfaces all clean of dust and the furniture

all in order, the clothes all neatly folded and the bed covers clean and

smoothed. In this context, there is only a very small range of states for

the system which can be considered satisfactorily ordered, and the im-

mense hoard of disordered states invades on this situation relentlessly

and must be repelled again and again. Shirts in the drawers are upset by

hasty searches on hurried mornings, books and magazines stack up at

odd angles, cups are le#, temporarily leaving rings of moisture, towels

are draped on doors, dust materializes from the organic degradation of

the occupants' skin, smells and stains similarly appear, and the elusive

state of order cannot maintain its state in the face of so many avenues for

its perfection to degrade.

Another example: suppose you empty a crate of tennis balls

from the deck of a ship into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. One pos-

sibility is that the balls will "oat in tight formation, never spreading out.

However, the probability of this happening is absolutely dwarfed by the

colossal range of possibility open to the balls; over time the number of

possible ocean-wide con$gurations is unimaginably larger than the small

range of grouped-"oating con$gurations, or the possibilities for ball ar-

rangement when they were in the crate. Due to the statistical eminence

of entropy, this system, le# to itself over time, will tend towards the

highest possible disorder for the balls. If the balls were numbered,

maybe a#er a year ball #1 has "oated to a rocky outcrop in Charleston,

South Carolina, while ball #55 ended up at Rossaire Harbor in Ireland.

Five billion years later, the atoms making up the balls are likely more or

less evenly distributed throughout the planet (due to tectonic proc-

esses).

!is universal statistical effect is immensely in"uential in the

behavior of large numbers of particles (for example, all the particles in

the Universe). !e unimaginably vast history of the energy in the Uni-

verse has unfolded according to this fundamental tendency, beginning

with what is apparently the most ordered state (near-total oneness at the

Big Bang) and proceeding towards thermodynamic disorder. Even

though this global entropic trend drives the energy in the Universe to-

wards statistical homogeneity, the possibility inherent to Existence al-

lows some preposterously unlikely situations to shuffle into being.

Given the unspeakably gigantic range of possibility open to each

individual particle in the Universe, what do you think the odds are that

the seven octillion atoms making up your body would have moved

through space in the way that you moved today: stacked into your shape,

following a wide curve through space and time around the center of the

Milky Way, a much smaller spiral through space around the sun, and at

an even smaller scale carving a double helix through space and time

along with the moon? Picture the supreme complexity of the dynamic

shape taken by the trillions of cells making up your bones and "esh, the

rivers of blood rushing through your fractal veins, the twisting random-

ness of your hairs in the air. Your atoms vibrate in perfect synchrony

with the frequency of your vocal chords, and in your brain miraculously

coordinate to produce a perception of the sound thus produced. !e

li%le organic participants in the lives of your cells swarm in an unimagin-

able complex of ordered activity, engaging the dynamic blueprint of your

DNA in countless ways.

Einstein describes the comprehensive shape that a bit of energy

takes through spacetime in the entire history of its existence the “world

line” of that energy. In your mind, rewind time from where you sit now

and picture the path all your atoms take as you move backwards through

their individual world-lines. Initially they follow the path you followed in

your actions today, with the oxygen being used by your cells at the $rst

instant slowly distributed back into the air from which you breathed it.

Nutrients surge back through your veins, into your digestive system, up

through your throat and out into your hands as food, urine "ows upward

through miles of pipe, and jumps from your toilet bowl into your ure-

thra.

As you continue backwards in time, a#er a few years almost

none of the atoms in your body at the outset are still present; they are

swirling about outside in the wide world. Much farther still, they dissi-

pate from the expanding gas cloud which had collapsed to form the

Earth, and make their way over billions of years and unimaginable dis-

tances back into exploding stars, where they are formed in nuclear fu-

sion. Your hydrogen atoms keep their present form and trace a world-

line all the way back to moments a#er the big bang, before all the energy

is sucked into a singularity (or so is the current understanding).

Backwards in time (backwards along the chain of causality, effect

unto cause), that energy likely explodes outward, in a backwards Big

Bang, though a#er the compression point of the Big Bang, it seems no

individual bit would still be identi$able from before the crunch. All the

while the concept of a world line describes the tremendously complex

shape traced by every bit of energy's path through spacetime relative to

every other bit of energy. !e natural progression of this energy follow-

ing the logic of Universal Truth leads to some of these bits of energy

"owing into your body and contributing to some exchange of force per-

tinent to your life. Energy "ows through physical reality, compelled by

its very nature to expend its potential in a boundless variety of ways. In

the framework of perfect Truth, this "ow produces our individual reali-

ties, naturally and automatically. In the boundless spectrum of possible

happenings, the likelihood of any of this occurring the same way (or

even remotely similarly) twice is so small as to be nonexistent.

Again, it is helpful to use Cantor's language to compare these

in$nities. !e entire range of possibility open to Existence, de$ned by

Truth and excluding only the logically impossible, is necessarily un-

countably in$nite in the highest possible degree; this all-encompassing

informational system characterizes everything which can possibly exist,

and thereby contains every lesser class of in$nity (every possible exten-

sion of real numbers, every possible set, every possible anything). !e

one empirically evident model for how things come to exist and how

events come to pass is that embodied by our Universe: energetic, logical

causality according to the laws of physics and compounding into the di-

verse range of forms, force-interchanges, and sensations which arise

therein over time. !is being the case, the set of all that has come to pass

and all that will come to pass is characterized by its linear, spatiotempo-

ral progression. If you were to record all the happenings in the span of a

Universe from its Big Bang to whatever its natural endpoint is (perhaps

its Big Collapse), you would end up cataloguing an unimaginably vast,

but only countably in$nite set of explicit realizations of Universal possi-

bility; this set is necessarily a subset of Existence's entire scope of possi-

bility, in fact a vanishingly tiny subset.

Now then, if the Universe you are cataloguing cycles for an in$-

nite amount of time, in the process of recording all that happens, you

would delineate a countably in$nite set of Universes, where each indi-

vidual cycle could be put in correspondence with an integer. Essentially,

the possibility inherent to Existence is uncountably in$nitely larger than

the possibility explicitly brought to light over the course of a countably

in$nite amount of time; therefore, our lives and the events in this Uni-

verse are profoundly unique, unlikely, and precious. Existence has very

likely never exactly come to this before, and it is extremely likely that it

never will again.

•§•

One very interesting philosophical issue is the question “Does

the past still exist?” From a physical standpoint, it seems quite clear that

the past, say, the physical existence which was present 5 minutes ago, no

longer exists. Change has occurred over the intervening time; the Earth

occupies a different position in space, and in fact all physical bodies have

moved in that time, down to atoms and their constituents and up to clus-

ters of galaxies relative to each other. From this perspective, where we

take “existent” to mean all that presently occupies the Universe, it seems

that the past is forever gone, perhaps temporarily encoded in the present

shape of our neurons, our memories, but no longer having actual being.

Based on the updated de$nition of what it means to exist put

forward in Part I, Chapter 2, you may already see the difficulties this

conclusion (that the past is nonexistent) faces. As was stated earlier, a

thing's existence is wholly de$ned by its relationship with the rest of Ex-

istence. It is quite evident (both logically and empirically) that the pre-

sent could not possibly be without the past causes which led to it; the

existence of the past de$nes and is contained within the present. !ese

words would not occupy this page if I hadn't typed them in the past; the

act of typing them is part of the informational content describing their

existence in the Universe. For this reason, the assumption that because

we cannot look out and see or touch the past, it is nonexistent, is erro-

neous. !ough it exists in a way we are not directly familiar with, the past

is just as existent as the present; every cause is coexistent with its effects,

no ma%er how far removed along the chain of causality any effect is.

Every effect embodies all its causes. Take any old thing- this cup

on my table, with colors slightly faded through repeated trips through

the dishwasher, containing a bit of water. !e existence of the cup in this

way at this time depends on a range of events stretching backwards

through the in$nity of the past. !is cup would not exist in that spot on

this table at this time with that temperature, with those $ngerprint

smears, and those certain water molecules, if I hadn't $lled it at the exact

time that I did, which wouldn't have been at that time if I hadn't sped up

through that yellow light on the way home. It wouldn't be this cup with-

out whoever bought this cup choosing that speci$c set from the rows in

the store, and wouldn't be these molecules if the mold were $lled a mo-

ment later than it was at the factory. If my great great great great grandfa-

ther hadn't narrowly survived a bout with pneumonia as a child, I

wouldn't be here to perceive and reference the cup. If he had taken any

action other than those exact actions he took, even down to eating a sin-

gle plate of food in a different order, then a different sperm probably

would have been the one to fertilize my great great great great grand-

mother's egg, and history would have unfolded differently: the members

of my family de$nitely would not exist as they do now. Farther back, the

cup's present existence depends on the Earth having undergone the ex-

act development that it did through the last several billion years, which

depended on the entire Universe undergoing the exact development that

it did since the Big Bang, and that depended on the process prior to the

Big Bang occurring just how it did, back and back. You yourself are the

embodiment of an in$nite range of causes.

What about the future; does that exist as well? I think it should

be equally clear that the answer is, again, yes, though in a different sense;

all possible futures are contained within Truth, with those more likely to

come about more closely logically related to the present, and many ren-

dered perfectly impossible when the present conditions of the Universe

are taken as a starting point. For example, there is a boundless range of

possible tomorrows, but the ones which are most likely are those which

we expect out of habit to occur; for example, it is a Sunday, and because

most every Monday I've seen in the past many years has involved me

driving to work on the same route, I expect I will be at work at this time

tomorrow.

It is possible that I will be involved in a catastrophic car accident

on the way to work, and that I will be spending this time tomorrow en-

gulfed in a $reball, but I am not worried that this will come to pass;

based on experience, it is much more likely that I will make it to work

comfortably. On the other hand, it seems all but impossibly unlikely that

tomorrow I will be "ung off into space at some unreasonable velocity

and land on the moon. Given the laws of physics, it is certainly possible

that this could occur, but given the informational content of the present,

I can imagine no circumstance where this would be a possible occur-

rence. However, both possibilities are existent in the Truth which de-

$nes Existence.

For a human, traveling backwards in time is impossible because

of the second law of thermodynamics in our Universe. To travel back-

wards in time would be to force the entire Universe back into lower en-

tropy, and not only that, but into the exact arrangement of force and en-

ergy that the present has proceeded from. Time is nothing but the

change necessitated by energetic reactions, so you can be sure the world

of yesterday does not exist today. Again, this is not to say that the echoes

of yesterday don't now exist in their effect on today, but that the physical

existence of yesterday is gone, replaced through the passage of energetic

change which brought the past to the present. !ere is no way to sepa-

rate your body from the Universe and swim against the irreversible cur-

rent of entropic energy expenditure into the past; your body is part of

that energy expenditure, indistinct from the rest.

!e fundamental directionality of time is experienced as the

eternal "ow of causes unto effects, which in turn serve as causes unto

other effects. If you could magically reverse physics and witness the re-

verse playback of any system's physics, in observing this you would still

feel time passing. It doesn't ma%er in which direction a change occurs,

either from low entropy to high or high entropy to low, time is the space

in which that change occurs. Our Universe, propelled by the in$nite po-

tential energy that sparked the Big Bang, unfolds according to the inertia

of lowest possible entropy giving way to highest possible entropy. Any

localized event which results in a reversal, achieving a system of lower

entropy, expends more entropy in the form of heat and other high en-

tropy effects than it saves. According to the second law of thermodynam-

ics, no physical process evades this necessity in this phase of the Uni-

verse, the expanding phase. In a hypothetical “collapsing phase”, where

the highest entropy empty-of-potential-energy Universe collapses back

into lowest entropy and highest potential energy, the directionality of

time would still represent causes giving way to effects.

It is as absurd for cosmologists to perceive a so-called “heat

death” scenario as the endpoint to Existence as it is for them to conclude

that the Big Bang was the absolute starting point to Existence. !ere is

no reason to believe that every possible physical effect is directly observ-

able from our $nite, narrow point of view. Who's to say what laws of

physics dominate in a Universe expanded beyond the limits of our per-

sonal ma%er's possible range of being? !e only thing we can know for

certain is that there is no end to reach, and any Universe's particular end

must be the beginning to another frame of Existence, in the ever-

unfolding expression of the in$nite energy and possibility of Truth.

To put this another way, prominent contemporary cosmologists

o#en state that the Big Bang was the beginning of time, of everything.

!ey seem to believe an in$nite amount of potential energy suddenly

came into existence out of blank -nothingness-, and is headed towards an

endpoint of in$nite kinetic energy, i.e., of maximum entropy. But we can

see by looking at this concept from the other side, that if there exists a

Universe of free kinetic energy (in “heat-death”), there is a reason for it

being there (i.e. it is clearly the result of a cause, in this case, the Big Bang

and the entire resultant winding down of the energy from potential to

kinetic throughout the entire life of our Universe), as Richard Feynman

among others has noted. Why should the same not be true of a Uni-

verse's worth of potential energy, which is what the seed of the Big Bang

was? Surely a process comparable to the immensity and complexity of

our Universe's winding down into full entropy led to the seed of the Big

Bang's being compressed into zero entropy, perfect oneness.

It seems possible that the two states interchange, with a Big Bang

eventually leading to a Big Suck, where all processes progress from

higher entropy to lower. It is interesting that the 4 dimensional shape of

such a Universe would be analogous to a Möbius strip; just as the Mö-

bius strip consists of a 2-dimensional surface curved through a third di-

mension to meet itself in a single-sided loop, the 3-d Universe when

curved back on itself through the fourth dimension (time), inevitably

returns to its starting point without turning around. In the Universe of

the Big Suck, all physical laws might behave radically differently, pro-

pelled by an impetus of opposite character. Life, if anything like life is

possible, would most likely be unrecognizably different from what we

call life.

It is also possible that in a Universe rushing towards the $nal

expenditure of energy, as in the heat-death or big rip scenario, would

behave in such a way as to produce another Big Bang out of some cur-

rently unknown mechanism. Again, it is necessarily erroneous to con-

clude either that Existence can begin or end; therefore, we should not

expect any evidence we uncover to suggest an endpoint.

CHAPTER 6

The Basis of Set Theory

Set theory has proven immensely valuable as a foundational ap-

proach to mathematics. However, following its initial development some

inadequacies came to light. One of the most important faults in early set

theory was revealed by Russel's paradox, which involves a curious case of

self reference: Suppose we de$ne a set containing only those sets which

do not contain themselves. Will this set be an element of itself? If it is

not counted as an element of itself, it is a set which does not contain it-

self, and is therefore required to be included within the set. If it is

counted as an element of itself, then it fails to qualify for inclusion in the

set by de$nition. How can this paradox, which reveals a fundamental

inconsistency in the concept of a set, be resolved? Entire reworkings of

set theory's foundations were undergone in response, with the favored

approach being the Zermelo-Frankel axiomatic framework, which sim-

ply proposes rules which must be followed in order to avoid such para-

doxes (e.g. the axiom of regularity states (in short) that a set cannot con-

tain itself).

It seems that these strategies for overcoming inconsistencies of

this sort fails to strike at the root of the problem; the fact that such prob-

lems exist suggest that the very understanding of what a set is, the intui-

tive framework forming the basis for set theory, is malformed. Axiomatic

set theory sweeps this problem under the rug, throwing up its hands and

de$ning a set as an “unde$ned primitive”, which amounts to saying “we

cannot $gure out how to properly de$ne a set, but we still know what we

mean when we're talking about sets”. It is quite a mystery as to why such

imprecision is acceptable to serve this essential foundational role in the

philosophy of mathematics.

!is fundamental difficulty essentially arises from a casual use of

the language of container vs. contents which seems so naturally to apply

to the idea of a set. A set is generally treated as a container for elements

which are designated for inclusion by logical rules called predicates.

While this de$nition is useful and intuitively convenient for almost all

cases, it is fundamentally "awed; there lies a hidden, irreparable defect in

this treatment of sets: any container represents an object above and be-

yond its contents, but upon close examination this is not true of sets.

To elaborate, it is useful to utilize the language of Truth, and its

ontological status in the framing and underlying of Existence which was

laid out in Chapters 2-4 in Part I (speci$cally, the idea that every single

existent thing exists on the basis of its informational relationship to all

other existent things, that the fabric of any object's existence is the sum

total of all the Truths which pertain to that object and its place in the

Universe, contained and expressed in Cosmic Awareness). A set can only

be de$ned in reference to the information making up Existence, using

predicates which logically identify certain aspects of that information for

inclusion in the grouping and exclude information which does not sat-

isfy those predicates. Easily distinguished systems of information in the

set are called elements, and are those members of a set which are speci-

$ed for inclusion by logical compatibility with the set's predicates.

(Speci$ed with predicates like “the $rst googol prime numbers are ele-

ments in this set”– in this case the elements are the one googol primes

dictated by the predicate, the bulk of which we do not happen to know

(we have only explicitly identi$ed a very small fraction of the $rst googol

primes), but because there are an in$nite number of primes in existence,

we know the $rst googol of them exist and therefore must be grouped

into the set according to its predicate.)

A set is wholly de$ned by and logically comprised by this infor-

mational relationship, that is, the logic of its predicates applying instantly

to all possible elements, including every element which satis$es the

predicate and all those which it rejects. A set is therefore not a container

for elements; a set is simply the consequence of any valid predicate. !e

logic of any predicate represents a unique li%le informational machine

which draws a border around every possible facet of Existence which is

speci$ed by its logic and distinguishes this grouping from the rest of Ex-

istence, de$ning a complex grouping of “in” vs. “out” based on a%ributes

the elements share.

Grouping things into sets does not change the things in them-

selves in any way; it is simply taking the things as a subset of all of Exis-

tence by distinguishing them using particular truths which uniquely per-

tain to them. !e rule under which they are grouped is not a container

for those things, but is simply representative of some facet of existence

which they share in common. If I de$ne a set of all the words on this

page, the set brings nothing new to the picture. !e words already exist

on the page (though interestingly, the contents of the set are changing as

I type these new words here, shbluhblobble); the Truth making up their

existence is unmodi$ed by grouping them into a set based on the predi-

cate “words which exist on this page, and nothing else”. !e set simply

de$nes membership based on a narrow range of the truths describing

these words, excluding from membership everything which is not a

word on this page.

To consider sets as containers distinct from their contents is to

give them a fallacious ontological independence, with the result that sets

would exist above and beyond their predicates and the elements com-

patible with those predicates. On the contrary, in the set of all trees, for

instance, the trees exist independently of the set but the set does not ex-

ist independently of the trees; the set is not an existent container stand-

ing apart from the trees, it is simply a logical framework de$ned by a

predicate based on those facets of trees which allow them to be distin-

guished from the parts of Existence which do not share these a%ributes.

!e set does not exist separate from these Truths, but is wholly con-

tained within the logic of the predicate (drawn from the logical possibil-

ity contained in Truth) in relation to the Truth making up the existence

of the trees.

Every possible set already exists in the Truths which make up

the existence of all possible elements, and their relationships to all pos-

sible predicates. !e set is not a container above and beyond its predi-

cate logic and the Truths describing its elements. Set theory is not an

additive process, as the language of container vs. contents implies, but a

subtractive one; any set deducts from the entirety of Truths making up

elements certain a%ributes which logically distinguish those elements,

which those elements do not share with elements that are excluded from

the set. De$ning a new set is only a creative act in that you've drawn

from the possibility contained within Existence to generate an explicit

logical relationship, cra#ed in such a way that it can be objectively un-

derstood and communicated by humans.

!e proper de$nition of a set is therefore: a logical grouping of

Existent information (easily distinguished units of which are denoted by

the term “element”) de$ned by predicates which describe the included

elements. Despite the convenience of using the word “contain” to de-

scribe sets, saying that a set contains another set is not equivalent to say-

ing “there is a container containing another container which contains a

certain range of contents”. It is more complicated, but much more accu-

rate in this case to say “there is a logical grouping of Existent information

de$ned by certain predicates which includes another logical grouping of

Existent information de$ned by other predicates.”

•§•

A set is de$ned solely through the interaction between predi-

cates (logical rules) and elements (existent information); the set is not

just the elements without the predicates (without a rule for inclusion vs.

exclusion, there cannot be a set; even the empty set is de$ned by a nec-

essary predicate of the type “this set does not include anything”), and

the set is not just the predicates without the elements (the predicates

cannot exist without immediately applying to all possible elements; even

the empty set logically excludes everything which can possibly exist, and

thereby applies to them (for instance, it is True of my body that it is not

included in the empty set, by that set's de$nition)).

Because of this, a predicate cannot reference the set it de$nes;

that is, there can be no predicate of the form “a set exists which contains

itself ” because the set cannot exist as an element independent of its con-

stituent predicates; a predicate of this form references information

which cannot exist, because the existence of that information (the de$-

nition of the set itself) depends upon the logical application of those

very same predicates. A predicate cannot be predicated on itself, because

the truth value of a predicate is based on how its logical content relates

to the informational content of something already de$ned; the predicate

itself has no informational content other than the logic it represents, and

cannot evaluate itself for this reason. A predicate can only be de$ned in

relation to something (anything) other than itself; the predicate's de$ni-

tion depends on this duality.

For example, consider this case, which uses the archetypal

predicate of true/ false: “!e following sentence is false. !e previous

sentence is true.” !e $rst sentence is only true if the second sentence is

false, but if the second sentence is false, the $rst sentence must not be

true. !e second sentence is only true if the $rst sentence is true, yet the

$rst sentence asserts that the second is untrue. !e second sentence says

“I'm true if, as I say, the previous sentence is true. But wait, the previous

sentence says I'm false. Well, that's ok, because if I'm false then he's not

true. But wait, if he's not true, if he's false to say that I'm false, then I am

true! But wait...” !e reason for this irresolvable paradox is that the

predicate can neither be true nor false if the only thing it references is its

own validity. (In this case, both predicates indirectly reference them-

selves through the other sentence: the predicate is de$ned in reference

to the validity of another sentence, and the validity of that other sen-

tence is de$ned in reference to the predicate.) Such a predicate is unde-

$ned and unde$nable, in that it does not logically describe the truth nor

falsity of any element. For this reason, such a predicate cannot be a de-

$ning component of a set, of a grouping based on logical truth/falsity.

Consider a set X whose predicates are “set X includes the le%ers

A, B, C, and set X itself ”. !e $rst three elements are perfectly suitable:

set X contains the le%er A, which is not Z, is not an elephant, is simply

described by all that makes the le%er A the le%er A, and the same is true

of the le%ers B and C. Now, what is this speci$ed element set X? It is

called a set, which would be a grouping of elements marked for inclusion

in the group by their logical compatibility with those predicates de$ning

the set. However, a set only exists in the relationship between its predi-

cates and all possible elements (all contents of Existence); one of its

predicates seeks to include an element (the set itself) which does not

exist prior to the existence of the predicate– without the set having in-

dependent existence, there is nothing to be predicated on; this element

“set X” does not exist, and the rule seeking to de$ne “set X” fails: there is

no set X of this form. A set cannot de$ne a logical grouping of elements

based on a predicate which references the set itself, because the set itself

only exists in the relationship between its predicates and the elements

speci$ed; the set would have to exist as an element prior to its predicates

in order to be evaluated by them, yet no set exists without the logical

relationship between its predicates and previously existent elements.

To correctly de$ne the relationship between a set and its “con-

tents” requires replacing the language of containment. Sets are wholly

represented by their logical and informational content, the union of their

predicates and elements. A more suitable language would be that of de-

scription or inclusion. !ough a set cannot be included as an element of

itself (because self-inclusion would necessarily invoke the impossible

self-predication by predicates), every set is wholly described by itself;

every set contains itself in this sense by the principle of identity. A more

suitable description for what a set is made up of is based not on what the

set contains, (implying that the set itself is a container), but what the set

describes, resulting from the relationship between its predicates and the

elements required by those predicates. No set contains itself as an ele-

ment (nor does any set contain its elements), but every set describes it-

self: every set is wholly described by the grouping of its elements based

on its predicates.

When the language of container vs. contents is removed from

set theory, Russel's paradox reads differently: the set describing all sets

which do not describe themselves turns out to be the empty set: no such

set exists. Another interesting stalemate in set theory, the question “does

the set of all sets contain itself?” becomes “does the set describing all sets

describe itself?” Yes, it certainly does; this set equates to Existence, ex-

cluding no element nor possible grouping of elements, and is wholly

contained in this predicate and its application to all existent things and

non-application to all nonexistent things, namely, nothingness.

Existence, the eternal Being of the cosmos: {everything existent

past, present, and future, including all mathematical and logical Truth,

and all possibilities, occurrences, qualities and circumstances}. Every

single thing, including every instance of the hieroglyph below, is an ele-

ment described by the above set. My middle $ngernail and the constella-

tion Orion as seen from a perspective on the star Rigel are both de-

scribed by this uber-set. Every collision between every set of atoms that

have ever or will ever collide are described by that set. !e set itself, both

as wri%en above and the logic underlying it is described by the set.

•§•

!e Burali-Forti paradox is another case of erroneous self-

reference, though of a different form: instead of arising from self-

predication of predicates, it arises from the fundamental de$nition of

ordinal numbers given by Von Neumann. Ordinals are de$ned as the

embodiment of the well-ordered set of all ordinal numbers less than

themselves. Because of this de$nition, any ordinal number is necessarily

identical to a set whose predicates include all ordinal numbers smaller

than the one comprised by the set, so the ordinal number 4 is equivalent

to {0, 1, 2, 3}; the number 4 is de$ned by the number of elements of the

set and as an ordinal is placed directly a#er the largest ordinal included

in the set. !is is quite an elegant and apt de$nition for ordinal numbers.

!e Burali-Forti problem arises when trying to de$ne the set of

all ordinal numbers: because any set containing a well ordered collection

of ordinal number de$nes a new ordinal number by de$nition, it is im-

possible to form this set. From this perspective, it becomes clear that

calling it the Burali-Forti paradox is a misnomer; there is no paradox

here. !e set of all ordinals cannot be formed for the exact same reason

that the largest possible number cannot be named; naming any number

as highest automatically implies the existence of a next higher number,

by the very de$nition of number, just as naming any ordinal as the high-

est automatically implies the existence of a subsequent ordinal. Cantor's

paradox is misnamed for the same reason.

While I'm on the subject, I might as well note that Richard's

paradox is another misconception. For ease, I will quote wikipedia's arti-

cle on the subject:

"e paradox begins with the observation that certain expressions in

English unambiguously de!ne real numbers, while other expressions in Eng-

lish do not. For example, ""e real number whose integer part is 17 and

whose nth decimal place is 0 if n is even and 1 if n is odd" de!nes the real

number 17.1010101..., while the phrase "London is in England" does not

de!ne a real number.

"us there is an in!nite list of English phrases (where each phrase is

of !nite length, but lengths vary in the list) that unambiguously de!ne real

numbers; arrange this list by length and then dictionary order, so that the

ordering is canonical. "is yields an in!nite list of the corresponding real

numbers: r1, r2, ... . Now de!ne a new real number r as follows. "e integer

part of r is 0, the nth decimal place of r is 1 if the nth decimal place of rn is

not 1, and the nth decimal place of r is 2 if the nth decimal place of rn is 1.

"e preceding two paragraphs are an expression in English which

unambiguously de!nes a real number r. "us r must be one of the numbers rn.

However, r was constructed so that it cannot equal any of the rn. "is is the

paradoxical contradiction.

!e article offers the explanation that the “paradox” occurs be-

cause there is no way to tell for sure which sentences unambiguously

describe real numbers and which do not; this explanation is unsatisfac-

tory, because any sentence that is possible to formulate either unambi-

guously describes a real number or does not, and if we were to have an

in$nite amount of time to evaluate every possible English sentence for

this characteristic, every one would end up with a de$nite value of “un-

ambiguously describes a real number” or “does not unambiguously de-

scribe a real number”.

!e problem is actually a result of the assumption that “an in$-

nite list of English phrases which unambiguously de$ne real numbers”

necessarily contains all real numbers. You could have an in$nite list of

English phrases which simply describe each consecutive natural number

(for instance, of the form, “!ere is a number called 1; it is described by

everything which contemporary mathematics uses to de$ne 1.”; “!ere

is a number comprised of two 1s, and it is called 2”; “!ere is a number

comprised of three 1s, and it is called 3”... !is represents “an in$nite list

of English phrases which unambiguously de$ne real numbers” which

does not contain all real numbers. In fact, any in$nite list of English

phrases is necessarily countably in$nite; words and logical groupings of

words are atomistic in the same way that integers are atomistic; their

possible groupings, while in$nite, cannot represent a continuum.

CHAPTER 7

The Inconceivable Beauty of the Universe

!e spectrum of possibility enabled by the physics of the Uni-

verse is just mind-meltingly huge, elegant, and gorgeous beyond all

imagining or realizing. Even so, it is quite a joy to try and apply our

knowledge of physics to our understanding of our surroundings, rather

than thinking of physics in the abstract, away from reality. To actually

look out at your hands and fully realize the magnitude of their informa-

tional content, the near in$nite complexity of the violent cascading swirl

of electromagnetism and force undergone by the sextillions of atoms

therein, would raise your awareness beyond any level humans have ac-

cess to. We cannot truly perceive the enormity of what reality is, but with

the small glow of imagination we are blessed with, it is possible to

glimpse the realization that our experience of life requires a perfection of

complexity far greater than any human has ever conceived.

!e Universe is an in$nite burst of energy, the dynamic element

of change and possibility. Energy is the fabric of everything we consider

to exist; it is something of a blank canvas, capable of taking on an in$nite

variety of forms. !e possible range of circumstances it can occupy are

determined by the fundamental physical laws of the Universe, which are

balanced in such an astonishingly harmonic way as to take all the shapes

we see and all the unimaginably complex interactions that make up our

seeing. Words cannot possibly do justice to the beauty of this system,

partly because words are human tools to communicate $nite ideas, and

the majesty of Existence is in$nite.

Perhaps the most astounding expression of Universal physics is

the production of our subjective experiences. How can it be that the en-

ergetic interchange in our brains and bodies can bloom in this rich vari-

ety of feeling? To hear music, to feel the textures and emotions it stirs in

your mind; to read of human massacres, to live through the sorrow of

tragedy, and ache for the bi%erness we are subject to; to gaze into your

lover's eyes, to caress with your lips; all of this is a re"ection and em-

bodiment of the reality of physical being, the one essential basis from

which all things "ow. We are one in the sacred existence of physics, heart

of Cosmic Awareness' Truth, separate from the full embodiment of real-

ity only in appearance, only for a short while.

!inking is "oating in an ocean of knowledge, riding whatever

waves of thought appear most promising. !e waves generally originate

in the subconscious processing our brain's neurons undergo, and stimu-

late our consciousness indirectly through impressions and intuitions of

what the thought promises to be. Once the wave is caught by conscious-

ness, the ride is on, and the wave is propelled and pulled along by con-

sciousness on a journey through the vast individual Universe of knowl-

edge home to each of us. We can journey to any realm we can possibly

imagine, and are daily pushed beyond what we can possibly imagine; we

bask in an inner glow beyond anything we can fully imagine every time

we open our eyes in the light.

!ink how many photons it would take to illuminate the entire

surface of a full moon. (For reference, note that the number of photons

emi%ed by a 100 wa% light bulb in one second is about 3x10^20, or

roughly 1,000 times the number of seconds elapsed in the estimated

13.7 billion year history of our Universe.) Every time you look at a full

moon, that incredible number of photons is re"ecting off the surface of

the moon in the exact, perfect con$guration that results in the image

being reproduced on your retina. !e photons streaming into your eyes

from the moon's north pole re"ect at quite a different angle than those

from the south pole, or any other point you can see on its surface. !is

unimaginable number of photons each achieve the impossibly unlikely

odds of converging on the eighth-inch wide pupils in your eyes exactly

when you choose to look up, their energy expressed as a luminous expe-

rience in your mind. Not only this, but if you lean just a half inch to ei-

ther side, this mind-boggling statistical unreality exists again.

We can easily surmise that the information necessary to capture

an image of the moon exists in a half-sphere around the moon's illumi-

nated surface, for countless miles in every direction. !is exact same

miracle of omnidirectional re"ection of limitless photons reproduces the

information of every lit surface's shape and color at an effectively in$nite

number of points around that surface. Can you look out in the space

around you and imagine the boundless number of images of your body

possible to gather at every point, no ma%er how remote or unlikely? A

tiny camera placed in an air vent above your head at the correct angle

could count your hairs; a hawk outside the window "ying hundreds of

meters away could look in, note that you aren't prey, and continue its

search. If you can see the sky, satellites of sufficient sophistication could

register the immense wealth of photonic information streaming from

your body.

Every time you speak, the combined force of the breath from

your lungs and the pressure of your vocal folds is divided amongst every

atom in your vicinity, not only vibrating all the air in the room but every

carpet $ber, every atom in every cell in your body, the nails in your walls

and ceiling, etc. We inhabit a vibrating $eld of one type of energy ex-

pressed in innumerable ways, of which our bodies are simply a complex

subset. Every time you take a step, the force of your legs being com-

pressed is divided into all the atoms in your leg and ripples out from

your feet, imparting extra motion to these countless individual atoms as

heat. It is a fact that the human body contains a rough average of seven

o c t i l l i o n a t o m s : t h a t 's s e v e n b i l l i o n b i l l i o n b i l l i o n ,

7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or about a million times the

estimated number of stars in the observable Universe (a sphere with a

radius 13.7 billion light years with the Earth at its center). Only with the

chemical coordination of these seven octillion atoms organized into

your hundred trillion cells is your life possible.

Just think: at some point in the history of the Universe, a minus-

cule li%le subset of the energy which exploded outwards from the Big

Bang almost 14 billion years ago, a#er undergoing the capricious inter-

play of physics and possibility over all that time to organize into various

elements and molecules, comes together in such a way as to produce an

orgasm in your awareness. !at particular orgasm could not have come

to be without the entire history of the Universe unfolding in the exact

way that it did; it is a "owering of pleasure in the Universe a#er all that

time, in a li%le organism connected to the entirety of Being through its

being. Some of the energy participating in this phenomenon is sighed

out, heating the surrounding air and mingling with the atmosphere,

some is expended by the breaking of chemical bonds in ATP molecules

allowing the physical enaction of the information making up the sensa-

tion in the brain. Perhaps some even powers a "agellum, carrying a li%le

bundle of DNA into the egg for a brand new self.

•§•

Occam's Razor is something of a rule of thumb for inquiry which

states that between any competing explanations for or solutions to a prob-

lem, the one that is simplest is likely more accurate. Strictly interpreted,

following this rule can lead people to such nonsensical ideas as solipsism

(the belief that, because I can't personally experience another person's

mind, for simplicity's sake I should conclude that their mind must not exist)

and the like. Occam's razor can sometimes introduce some clarity, and I

would like to add another condition to bolster its utility: between two

competing explanations for or solutions to a problem, the one that is sim-

pler without eliminating or diminishing any of Existence's potential is likely

closer to being correct. !at is, the more elegant theory is more likely cor-

rect (elegance here de$ned as greatest simplicity coupled with highest resul-

tant possibility).

An application of this corollary: Whether space is in$nite or not

seems impossible to deduce from the limited information we have, how-

ever, we also do not have any reason to suspect that space is not in$nite.

Indeed, if it weren't in$nite, what would it mean for there to be a bound-

ary? A ceasing of energy content? If space itself is a swarming sea of en-

ergy, substantiated by systems of energy nearly in$nitely smaller than us,

as hypothesized above, then an outside to space would mean a realm of 0

energy, nothingness. As was concluded rather strongly, I believe, noth-

ingness does not exist, so it can't lie outside of space; it can't lie any-

where. Furthermore, mathematics (Truth, comprising the informational

content of Existence) contains the concept of in$nite space; it seems

space itself is the actual embodiment of this information. Finally, in ac-

cordance with Occam's Shiny Razor, whichever theory appears equally

likely but is less limiting to the range of possibility in Existence is more

likely correct; therefore, we can comfortably (but of course not cer-

tainly) conclude that space is in$nite.

It is funny to note that making Occam's Razor more complicated

is quite an ironic move; though this is the case, I think this approach is

useful for the reasons given above.

•§•

A philosophical riddle that comes up from time to time is the

question of whether the experience I have of colors is the same as yours;

we have no real reason to suspect that they are different, but we have no

possible way of comparing our subjectivities, so it seems to be an open

question. I would argue that it is very likely that the color blue for the

sky and green for leaves are very similar between all humans, because

along with evolving retinal cones which can perceive color, we had to

have evolved the neural framework for interpreting that information. It

seems very evident that our genes determine many crucial aspects of our

brains, just as they are responsible for the differentiated growth of our

organs. Essentially, the evolution of retinal cones to detect color would

be useless without the concurrent evolution of brain-structures to ap-

propriately interpret and make use of those colors.

!e speci$c experience of each color has a certain psychological

impact; the color red is alarming, corresponding to blood; our minds

naturally associate red with violence and emergency, and it seems likely

that the psychological texture which conveys these associations best is

that which we perceive as red. Blue is soothing, corresponding to the sky

and water, and green is calming and promising corresponding to the liv-

ing comfort of fertile land. Of course, it is impossible to tell whether the

instinctive reactions to these colors are a result not of the quality of the

speci$c colors in our mind, but of what those colors represent to our

instincts, and that your red could equate to my green. While we cannot

be completely sure at present, it seems almost totally probable that the

same genes which code the modeling of color into our brains are shared

amongst all humans just as the genes which code the shape and makeup

of eyes is shared amongst all humans.

DNA is the lens through which cosmic physical law is resolved

into life. Take a fern, for instance. !e gorgeous fractal boundary that its

cells $ll to shape its leaves is contained in the logic of its DNA code. !e

DNA code's system of logic is a property of Cosmic Awareness, Truth,

embodied in the chemical potential of its amino acids. !e chemical

structure and behavior exists $rst in the realm of possibility writ in

mathematical truth in the Awareness of the cosmos; through the evolu-

tionary elaboration of DNA undergone by life, this possibility is real-

ized, its information birthed into physical reality by the plant's cells, all

operating according to the divine laws of physics and logic.

!ere de$nitely is a logical reason for every aspect of the plant's

life, including its cosmic origins, its ancestry's path of evolution, the

range of physical possibilities which drive and underly its living, etc.

!ere is a logical reason for everything in the Universe, even if those rea-

sons are beyond our limited comprehension. !is is because the physical

Universe is an outgrowth of the eternal mathematics of Truth and logic.

Everything in reality springs from the necessary Truths making up the

existence of Cosmic Awareness.

!e Earth (and all of its chemical, gravitational, and thermal

conditions, along with the overarching physical laws it shares with the

rest of the Universe) is a prism through which sunlight is broken into

this brilliantly diverse carousel of individual living beings. More funda-

mentally, energy is the prism through which eternal Truth $nds explicit

expression, broken into discrete packets with logical characteristics de-

$ned by but physically separated from the whole, the interactions be-

tween which form galaxies, stars, light, atoms, molecules, life-forms, and

subjective consciousnesses.

•§•

One could continue inde$nitely in this vein; there is nowhere

you can look in the Universe that is not beautiful beyond the bounds of

all possible human comprehension. On account of this fact, I make the

assertion that it is almost certain that you're allowing life to be harder on

you than it needs to be (this sentence is a reminder for me as well). !at

is, you could be more relaxed about this, and turn away from anxiety,

stress, cynicism, and boredom, and no one would blame you. On closest

examination, we have been born into an unspeakably wondrous reality,

and are completely free to make whatever we want of it, within the

bounds of circumstance (with the knowledge that our will can shape

these singular circumstances in an in$nite variety of ways, leading to a

continuum of possible futures).

Humans have a perilous tendency (some of us much more than

others) to sink into a state of consoling despondency when we feel it is

warranted. Self-pity, cursing the way things have lined up for us, feels

very good in a certain way; since modern society denies us an outlet for

the aggression which frustration stirs up in us, it is some kind of release

to turn that rage inwards and seethe. Sometimes, a#er events go espe-

cially horribly for us, we feel entitled to wallow in this hateful state, and

really savor that anguish with no reservations, and make a drug out of

how much pain we let ourselves feel. It becomes addictive, a habit a#er

awhile to the point that when another similar misfortune threatens to

occur, some part of us roots for the misfortune to occur so we can dive

back into that corrosive pit and feel justi$ed in doing so. Such a cycle can

quickly lead to cynicism and depression, and is a path we should all learn

to recognize and reject.

Because the process of surviving lifetime a#er lifetime a#er life-

time in the o#en extremely harsh conditions our ancestors bested has

taken place for billions of years a#er arising competitively from the gate,

it is in our very genes (and our environment, the societal worldview we

are forever surrounded by) to remain tense, in a state of low-level agita-

tion. !is mode of being is useful for evading predators and managing

other threats, but is no longer quite necessary since the world is nowhere

near as dangerous to us as it was in the past. Our brains are still funda-

mentally primitive; we can brie"y glimpse the signi$cance and depth of

the Universe we inhabit, but for most minds it is impossible to suspend

this clarity. At times awe and gratitude can overwhelm us, but due to the

complexity of generating these advanced sensations in brain, this state is

generally "eeting. Some minds cannot see deeper into our reality be-

yond surface appearances; their brains, by luck of the draw, are still con-

$gured primarily animalistically, their insight only extending to the mo-

tivation and satisfaction of their instinctive drives.

!ere is no reason to despair that the darker side of the human

condition is a permanent feature of our species. !e story of humanity is

a story of incremental progress, slowly but surely learning from the mis-

takes of the past, slowly discovering the nature of life in this Universe

more clearly. Humans will be able to access higher intelligence and

thereby higher states of consciousness through any means they are com-

fortable with in the near future (likely, through brain-computer inter-

faces or specialized genetic therapy) and in this way we will be able to

see the world in a way approaching and surpassing how Gautama Bud-

dha, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Mohammed, Da Vinci, Shakespeare, or Einstein

could see the world. Sublime and pure, to know the True reality of Exis-

tence. It is so far beyond what we are equipped to experience currently;

people who have not glimpsed the experience of it (however brie"y) in a

long time sometimes forget about how unspeakably miraculous the Uni-

verse we inhabit is.

“Nonsense!”, they will say. “I happen to live in the Universe, and

it is no loving, understanding paradise. You are wrong about everything,

there are things like wars and torture, jealousy and depression.” Some

will add, wide eyed, “And there is a Hell, and you get sent there if you

don't believe in it,” conveying the feeling that the Universe is a merciless

test, a dangerous trap, and we should be frightened to be here. !ese are

the most woefully incorrect misconceptions humans have ever adopted

to frame their worldview. !e fact that so many people carry these as-

sumptions around, and dwell on them throughout life, such that those

ideas underly all thoughts about death, about birth, about trust, about

love, and about why we are here, is a tragedy, the gravest and most ubiq-

uitous human error.

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About the Book

!is book is not wri%en in the style of contemporary philoso-

phy. I do not like the way academic philosophy is conducted, and I

haven't seen very much de$nitive progress result from its practice. !e

convention that one must present and evaluate every previous philo-

sophical treatment of a topic to glean new insight on that topic tends to

leave philosophy on an unproductive, pedantic treadmill, essentially the

product of professors writing papers for other professors to grade, in the

style they learned as students. !is stilted method alienates the general

public and distracts from the adventurous, irreverent spirit of philoso-

phy.

Despite the decisive writing style I've employed, I certainly

don't hold any illusions that the things I've put forward here represent

the whole truth for any one topic, but based on what I know at present,

this is the best interpretation of the reality of the Universe I can compre-

hend. !e reason I have stated my understandings in such a straightfor-

ward way, essentially presenting a series of assertions, is that to equivo-

cate, to continually hedge my arguments with “of course, I don't know

know know this to be true” would bog down the pace of the book, fog up

the points I am trying to make, and introduce unnecessary confusion. I

say what I believe throughout the book, and why I believe these things,

and the fact that I am not necessarily correct about anything at all should

go without saying. As I wrote in the introduction, this book, and all

philosophical ideas, should be read critically, and no system of under-

standing should be embraced as the $nal truth. !ere will forever be

things that we do not know we do not know.

!is should not be taken to express the widely misread senti-

ment of Socrates, “!e only thing that I know is that I know nothing.” If

you can know that it is impossible to know anything, then by knowing

that fact you disprove the idea that it is impossible to know anything. In

fact, in order to “know that you know nothing” you have to know what

'know' means, you have to know what 'nothing' means, you have to un-

derstand the logic of that grammar, etc.; there's no arguing the fact that

you know more than nothing.

We know everything that makes up our experiences- I know

what the word know sounds like in my mind, and though that exact feel-

ing is a private part of my Awareness, inaccesible to another, I know that

knowledge represents Truth in Existence because it couldn't exist in my

mind without existing as a facet of Existence. When you push down on a

table, you feel a resistance in your arm; your experience of that is de$-

nitely a part of Truth: it's truly, factually what you are feeling, and if you

weren't truly feeling it, you would be feeling something different. Every-

thing we perceive is Known in our perceiving of it. Of course, this isn't to

say that a Greek peasant imagining the sun to be a chariot of $re knows

the objective Truth of what the sun is, but that he Knows that he imag-

ines the sun to be a chariot of $re, and cannot possibly be wrong that he

does.

!ere are some abundantly-bearded philosophers out there who

would say “Ho ho, but look at all these neuroscienti$c studies that show

instances of people being deceived by their perceptions! !ey don't

know that their senses have tricked them.” Exactly. A person knows ex-

actly what they experience, whether it jives with external reality or not. A

person misremembering what happened in the past cannot be wrong

that they remember what they remember, even if that memory is false. A

person hallucinating experiences their hallucinations as perfectly real; in

fact, there is no experience which isn't real. It is impossible to have an

experience if that experience isn't real. Even if the ground opened up

beneath me right now and dumped me into a cartoon world where I

were a duck, if I experienced this, it would be real in my awareness, and

would be a True part of Existence.

In any case, I am not pu%ing forward things which I know; I re-

tain a degree of skepticism concerning most of the ideas described here

(with a few exceptions, such as the truth that nothingness cannot possi-

bly exist, and that mathematics and Truth exists independently of hu-

man apprehension of it, and that Awareness is a prerequisite to Exis-

tence). I do not a%ain to infallibility, though I do feel the viewpoints de-

scribed in this book represent a step closer to truth beyond the current

popular understanding. !is book aims to challenge the worldview many

take for granted, to provoke thought along unfamiliar avenues, and to

convey to some degree the awe I feel for reality. If nothing else, I want to

give a sense that it is fully possible to peer beyond the vision of reality we

have grown accustomed to living in (if only temporarily), and feel the

immense nature of the Universe from a place of greater clarity.

•§•

Any previously discussed concepts go uncited not out of a pla-

giaristic tendency but a poor memory for speci$cs; I read about phi-

losophy and science over a lifetime and thought about these things, what

I agreed with and disagreed with, internalizing their content. Most of

what I discuss is my own elaboration and conclusions based on this con-

glomerative knowledge, but clearly, I wouldn't have come to these con-

clusions without the thoughts of others to think about. Sometimes I

have an inkling as to the roots of my thinking on any topic and note it

when it comes up (for instance, where I cite the Tao Te Ching in Chapter

1).

!e core of what this writing aims at has been called the “Per-

ennial Philosophy”, and has been apprehended in some degree by hu-

mans for millennia, likely since before the dawn of wri%en history. Very

similar concepts can be found in the Indian Vedas, in ancient Greek phi-

losophy (most notably, Anaxagoras and Plato), Kabbalah, Buddhism,

Taoism, and Bill Hicks' stand-up, to name very few; Emerson's “Nature”

(“Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and up-

li$ed into in!nite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent

eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate

through me; I am part or particle of God”) has a similar message, though it

is presented much more beautifully in his language. !e Hindu sect Ad-

vaita Vedanta speaks of Existence in terms of Brahman, e.g. "Brahman is

of the nature of truth, knowledge and in$nity" (though, like all religions,

Hinduism has sprouted elaborate dogmas and $ctions unrelated to cos-

mic Truth).

As discussed in Chapter 12, I am extremely excited about the

prospect of the scienti$c and technological advancement of humanity;

this feeling is due to the musings of various futurists, most notably Ray

Kurzweil. While I am not necessarily in agreement with his timeline, I

share the view that such technological transcendence is all but inevita-

ble, and represents a beautiful opportunity for humanity as long as our

baser nature doesn't muck it up for all of us.

My pantheism is very closely akin to Spinoza's, built upon the

same foundations and reaching some of the same conclusions. !ough I

do not speci$cally remember my $rst inkling of it, it is highly possible

that I was $rst introduced to the concept of pantheism through exposure

to his work, or more likely by cultural memes stemming from Spinoza's

thinking. In any case, this book is at no point a speci$c elaboration of his

propositions nor his conclusions. I ascribe the many similarities between

our philosophies to the success of metaphysics grounded in idealistic

substance monism; I did not set out to update Spinoza's ideas, but inevi-

tably was led to them by my own interrogation of the Universe, and this

process has le# me with a high degree of esteem for the validity of Spi-

noza's philosophy. !e most signi$cant deviation between our systems

(one of several) is his fallacious belief in strict determinism, due to the

level of physical science during his time. (Spinoza was a contemporary of

Newton.)

Hegel's philosophy shares the same fundamental basis as well;

he describes Existence in terms of the “Absolute”, but he draws some

rather odd and seemingly nonsensical conclusions from this starting

point, and one o#en $nds that one has no idea what the hell Hegel is

pu%ing forward; there is certainly an unresolved debate on the issue.

George Berkeley brilliantly recognized that esse est percipi, to be is to be

perceived, though being an eighteenth-century bishop he was saddled

with the old philosophical conundrum of being required to conform his

thinking to the worldview expressed in the Bible (of course, my system

ascribes Knowing to Cosmic Awareness, a $gure in some respects analo-

gous to God but not supernatural, not omnipotent, and not apart from

us), and like many forms of idealism, his is persistently skeptical of the

existence of the physical world, whereas mine most certainly is not

(though with the reservation that everything physical embodies infor-

mation in Cosmic Awareness). In short, I offer my own take on the Uni-

versal mysteries, a process which has been delightful and challenging to

undergo.

About the Author

!e ideas put forward here are far more important and interest-

ing than me. I do not own these concepts; I have been aided in their pur-

suit by every human I've interacted with (whether from being brought

up by them, from reading their ideas, experiencing their art, etc.) and by

every condition that led to the Earth being the way it is today. For these

reasons (amongst others), I hope to publish this writing anonymously,

and remain anonymous. I offer this book in love and peace to me in you,

from you in me. Existence! What a startling fact.

I will leave you with a $nal description of my view of our place in

reality: we are lucky beyond anything we would ever allow ourselves to

imagine, and this sacred truth is hidden from us by the appearances of

life. Our experience of life sees but the immediate surface of Existence,

yet the experience of inhabiting Cosmic Awareness outside of life is be-

yond anything humans can begin to conceive. It contains at once all of

Existence in its Knowing. It is not a%ached to the moment by moment

wave we ride; it embodies all happenings, all possibility, all Truth in one

continuous Being. It experiences every possible perspective within itself

(all of us, all of life, all consciousness), both from within that perspective

(as our experiences, our 'me's), and without (the entire rest of Existence,

including all other 'me's and all physical information) simultaneously

and fully. It turns out we are not separated from God in any way; the

consciousness which experiences life and wills life is that of God (or

Cosmic Awareness), temporarily given subjective, free experience by the

"owering of Cosmic Awareness's Truth in physics, yielding stars, planets,

evolution, life, love, music, all of it.

!is also yields sadness, pain, embarrassment, and the whole

fearful spectrum of those aspects of Existence which terrorize humans.

However, from the viewpoint of Cosmic Awareness, experiencing all

Knowing and all Feeling from the highest possible perspective, these are

part of the beautiful, if tragic, makeup of divine possibility; their exis-

tence, which Cosmic Awareness itself must experience, suggests that the

supreme Being is not all-powerful; God cannot omit certain Truths from

existence, cannot delete the possibility for pain to occur, and it is be-

cause no possibility can be excluded from Existence that free will exists.

Cosmic Awareness is not a creator, not a lord, it is !e Being, embody-

ing all Truth.

!e most signi$cant conclusion I reach from this is that when

bad things happen to good people, it isn't because God is up there

frowning in disappointment at whatever misstep the good person made

and smiting them from afar. It's simply because in a system as dynamic

and complex as the Universe, the living being of Cosmic Awareness, it is

possible that bad things will happen. It's even possible that all Earthly life

would be eradicated by a meteor, but that's not the end of the game,

that's just the return of the countless fragments of God's soul to the one-

ness. It's like life is an exciting journey, and death is a restful return

home. Hell doesn't exist, and sin doesn't exist.

If a thing is physically possible to do, it is allowed, with the sober

corollary that causing pain is equal to experiencing pain; hurting some-

one else's awareness is hurting the one awareness extended from God

which every living thing resides within. Pain is no less beautiful than

pleasure; animal life could not develop without the boundless spectrum

of possibility outlined by Necessary Truth. If these components of Truth

could not exist, all other Truths would lose part of the information mak-

ing up their basis and lose validity; to eliminate any one Truth, to try and

separate the necessarily existent from Existence is impossible. No ma%er

what is done to hide the Truth, the Truth remains.

For example, what do you think it would take for 2+2≠4? Run-

ning out and striking through the equals sign in every book that 2+2=4

exists? Change the de$nition of 2, or 4, or +, or =? Decree loudly that

2+2=5? Maybe reason that, “Ok, 2+2 can equal 5 as long as we de$ne 5

as 4, or make it a rule that numbers on the right side of an equation are

always unspokenly subtracted from by 1”– in this case you've simply per-

formed a duncical maneuver to transform the number 4 into the number

4 by a different name. No ma%er what you try to do to modify the Truth,

the Truth remains, shining brightly as ever. Even if humanity decided it

were a Godly decree that 2+2=5, and worshipped this new fact, 2+2 still

equals 4, independently of any willful being. !is is the sublime nature

of Truth; it precedes and underlies all the events in the Universe. And

what a wondrous Universe it is.

thefatesunwindin$nity@gmail.com