So…. What’s It All
About, Adam?
The amazing thing is that every atom in
your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand
probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most
poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be
here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen,
oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution - weren’t created at the
beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the
only way they could get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to
explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.
(Theoretical physicist Lawrence
Krauss [1954- ] - A Universe From
Nothing)
At
these Northern latitudes, it felt like a well-earned indulgence for Adam to
awaken early in the morning but just cozy down in his warm bed, snuggled beside
his Eve. It was late February, and it would be another hour before the sunrise
hues would reflect upon the wall over the headboard, so he would lie on his
back with his hands crossed over his chest as his older, departed friend Norm
had instructed many years ago, and “allow the body’s energies to course through
its meridian circuitry to recharge the heart” when floating in reverie. After
all, Adam reasoned, he was now in his 75th year, had lived a rich
life, and in the quiet of an early morning being rested and relaxed – he could
allow the energies within to flow and create intuitive meaning from his life
experiences… the discrete pieces could kaleidoscope into patterns from which
needed meaning could be derived.
It
was surely good to have lived in interesting times … and greater to have the
gift of reliable memory at advancing age … but best of all was to be able to
float on the existential implicate ocean in reverie – with all biases suspended
– while one’s Director organized the events of one’s life and presented them
within the theatre sanctum for conscious examination through the imaging
faculties of the palimpsest mind. An abiding curiosity into the meaning
of his own life invariably extended to a curiosity as to the meaning of the
cosmos itself, and as Adam continued to study and explore, additional pieces of
the grand mosaic presented themselves and facilitated the realization of deeper
intuitions. Matter and space-time isn’t engaged in a sterile and eternal love
embrace, and others have also hungered to know what it all means, and through
tracking in the gifted afterglow of these ‘fireflies’, Adam enlightened his own
quest…
We've begun at last to wonder about our origins, star stuff
contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion
atoms contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it
arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps throughout the cosmos.
Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also
to that cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring. (Carl Sagan)
We come here to complete a missing portion of ourselves, and to
that purpose we gravitate to those interests with the nutrients to feed our
unique hunger. Our Mother-world is sufficiently bountiful to yield that for
which each craves, if we but live in such a way as to feel worthy of completing
our mission.
Hence, at the age of 12 in early Grade 9, Adam had fallen in
love. No, not with the precocious farmer’s daughter sitting in front of him …
after all, she was two years older than he, and was honing her feminine
attributes by attracting the 16 year old lads in grades 10 and 11. No … Adam
fell in love with the cosmos, through reading a l930’s book by the theoretical
astrophysicist Sir James Jeans
(1877-1946) entitled ‘The Mysterious Universe’. See…it’s as though we take on a
life so as to fill in a void in our frequency … for some people it’s one thing,
for others it’s something else. When Adam’s expanding mind read about the
incredible vastness of the cosmos, and he studied the colour plates of distant
stars and galaxies, something fused within him and he knew that – whatever
vocation he ultimately engaged to sustain existence – his life’s avocation
would center on the cosmos. He submitted his book report and even the
embarrassment of being called on by the teacher to read it aloud before the
Grade 9’s and 10’s didn’t diminish his awe and wonder about this greater world
he now knew as home.
“The tendency of modern physics is to resolve the whole material
universe into waves, and nothing but waves. These waves are of two kinds:
bottled-up waves, which we call matter, and unbottled waves, which we call radiation
or light. If annihilation of matter occurs, the process is merely that of
unbottling imprisoned wave-energy and setting it free to travel through space.
These concepts reduce the whole universe to a world of light, potential or
existent, so that the whole story of its creation can be told with perfect
accuracy and completeness in the six words: 'God said, Let there be light'…
“The stream of human knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical
reality. The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great
machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of
matter. We are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the
creator and governor of this realm.”
(Sir James Jeans - The Mysterious
Universe)
Four years later with his formal education behind him and now
temporarily reconciled to the drabness of a future life as Farm-boy, one
morning Adam was by himself, forking hay from the barn mow. Suddenly his inner
eye opened and he looked forward in his life and saw with despair that he had
badly blundered in opting out of continuing education … that there would be
severe limitations to his being able to acquire the nutrients to fill the void
within his enquiring mind. He was so weakened by that initial realization that
he’d had to sit down in the hay, and then the greater epiphany blazed – it was
as though an inner corridor had opened, and Adam saw that his current life was
only the most recent manifestation of countless prior lives … hundreds upon
thousands of them.
This insight really floored him, for in a flash Adam saw that
existence was not simply a one-off process, and that while the teachings of
societies and religions are geared to helping many ‘get through’ their lives by
giving them rules and heavenly rewards – some souls are neither interested in
just ‘getting through…’ nor in grandiose metaphysical inducements; some
desperately need to get closer to the mystery itself, and discover clues as to
the meaning behind the process of existence. So Adam shrugged and aroused
himself ... he was here, and hence must get on with it. Pitch hay, chop
wood, carry water … Regardless there being only one page or thousands in one’s
Book of Life, only experience in the NOW would prepare him for intuitive
understanding.
Within a year, Adam had apprenticed into the larger world of
finance, and at least had the opportunity of engaging challenges with more
potential than that of (in his father’s earthy metaphor) “servicing the heads
and harse-hends of a herd of cattle and team of horses”.
In 1929, in The
Universe Around Us Sir James Jeans wrote “The
universe consists in the main not of stars but of desolate emptiness --
inconceivably vast stretches of desert space in which the presence of a star is
a rare and exceptional event. ... The stars move blindly through space, and the
players in the stellar blind-man's-buff are so few and far between that the
chance of encountering another star is almost negligible.”
...and around that time Jeans had been the first to conjecture a steady-state cosmology
based on a hypothesized continuous creative recycling of matter in the
universe.
Over subsequent decades, Adam went on to study the work of Sir
Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), President of The Royal Astronomical Society
(1971-73). Hoyle – along others such as Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi – pushed against the flow of mainstream
scientists who disliked the idea of a steady-state cosmology (an eternal cosmos
in flux). The herd preferred instead the concept of a Big Bang – a defined
starting point for the Universe. Hoyle saw this concept as being a sop to the
theists and their Genesis ideologies, and pandering to the natural preference
of many more comfortable with thoughts of intentionality, beginnings,
paternalhood, and finite terms and rewards. The mainstream Big Bangers claimed
victory in 1965 with the discovery of the cosmic microwave background which was
widely interpreted as the tell-tale signature of the Big Bang, followed by the
concept of ‘red-shifting’ stellar bodies, interpreted as evidence star
recessions in a post Big Bang expanding universe.
Life is a Universal phenomenon, and that form of consciousness has
a fundamental role in the cosmos. Consciousness actually creates the Universe,
forcing reality into being out of a quantum mechanical haze of possibilities.
It is we who make the microscopic world real. We decide what the Universe has
already done by looking at it. A little bit of God operates in all of us. We
are his observing instruments. He observes the Universe through us. The
Universe which we look at is an intellectual structure, not mere chance. ….
I opposed the ‘Big Bang” theory of creation since I could not see
how something could arise from nothing. In its place I proposed the creation
“Quasi-Steady State Theory” --- a constant greater Universe wherein the
creation tap opened in our part of the universe 15 billion years ago,
unleashing a flood of matter and causing the expansion of galaxies we observe
all about us. Quasars and active galaxies are powered by relatively modest
creation events, rather than black holes, and such phenomena are highly
condensed aggregates of matter producing very strong gravitational fields.
(Sir
Fred Hoyle – Royal Astronomer)
The very first book that Adam studied after his
escape from the salary-man ratrace in late 1988 had been the recently released
“A Brief History of Time” by the theoretical physicist Stephen
Hawking (1942- ), wherein after
explaining his theories of quantum gravity and black holes, Hawking concluded "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the
ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of
God." In the same book he’d earlier suggested the existence of God
was unnecessary to explain the origin of the universe, and subsequent
interviews and documentaries clarified that that he was "not religious in the normal sense" and didn’t "believe in a personal God".
Hawking wrote, "The
question is: is the way the universe began chosen by God for reasons we can't
understand, or was it determined by a law of science? I believe the
second." He further indicated that "the
universe is governed by the laws of science. The laws may have been decreed by
God, but God does not intervene to break the laws. …Because there is a law such
as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing."
In an interview published in The Guardian newspaper, Hawking regarded
the concept of Heaven as a myth, stating that “there
is no heaven nor afterlife - such a notion is a fairy story for people afraid
of the dark."
In 2010, Hawking contrasted religion and science,
saying: "There is a fundamental difference
between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on
observation and reason. Science will win because it works."
- - - - -
Here is an artist's conception of the spiral
structure of the Milky Way with its two major stellar arms and a bar:
To context the subject of cosmology, all the stars
that can be seen in the night sky are part of the Milky Way galaxy. There are
between 200-400 billion stars in the Milky Way, which itself is but one of one
approximately 200 billion galaxies identified in the observable universe
through the large telescopes. The populousness of the Milky Way galaxy can be
compared to the one trillion stars of the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy.
The stellar disk of our Milky Way galaxy is
approximately 100,000 light-years in diameter.
Hmmmm……
- - - - -
Lee Smolin (1955- ) is a founding and senior faculty member at
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. He is also
Adjunct Professor of Physics at the University of Waterloo and holds an adjunct
position in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Toronto. As
indicated in the following intriguing quotes, Smolin is an adversary of
group-think and a proponent of ‘possibility’ and ‘thinking outside the box’:
“There appears to be "natural selection" of universes. In
some sense the universes that allow complexity and evolution reproduce
themselves more efficiently than other universes. The ensemble itself is thus
evolving in some complicated way. When stars die, they sometimes form black
holes. Inside a black hole it's possible for a small region to, as it were,
sprout into a new universe. We don't see it, but it inflates into some new
dimension. The laws of nature in the new universe are related to those in the
previous universe. What that would mean is that universes big and complex
enough to allow stars to form, evolve, and die, and which can therefore produce
lots of black holes, would have more progeny, because each black hole can then
lead to a new universe; whereas a universe that didn't allow stars and black
holes to form would have no progeny. Therefore the ensemble of universes may
evolve not randomly but by some Darwinian selection, in favor of the
potentially complex universes.”
“Perhaps for the first time in human history, we know enough to
imagine how a universe like ours might have come to be without the infinite
intelligence and foresight of a god. For is it not conceivable that the
universe is as we find it to be because it has made itself; because the order,
structure and beauty we see at every scale are the manifestations of a
continual process of self-organization, of self-tuning, that has acted over
very long periods of time.”
“Belief in a final theory shares with a belief in a god the idea
that the ultimate cause of things is something that does not live in the world
but has an existence that, somehow, transcends it.”
“It's unnecessary to think in terms of an intelligent designer -
the idea that the complexity and beauty we see around us was intended by a
single intelligence is silly. Instead we understand, in the biological context,
that the living world has created itself and organized itself, because of the
action of simple principles – primarily natural selection – that inevitably
operate. I believe that the same will turn out to be true about the laws of
physics and the structure of the cosmos.”
“The world will always be here, and it will always be different,
more varied, more interesting, more alive, but still always the world in all
its complexity and incompleteness. There is nothing behind it, no absolute or
platonic world to transcend to. All there is of Nature is what is around us.
All there is of Being is relations among real, sensible things. All we have of
natural law is a world that has made itself. All we may expect of human law is
what we can negotiate among ourselves, and what we take as our responsibility.
All we may gain of knowledge must be drawn from what we can see with our own
eyes and what others tell us they have seen with their eyes. All we may expect
of justice is compassion. All we may look up to as judges are each other. All
that is possible of utopia is what we can make with our own hands. Pray let it
be enough.”
(Lee Smolin)
Whoa, now. Cosmological evolution considered as a
sort of ‘natural selection’, similar to that present in biological systems??
Smolin, non-religious, believes that "there never was a God, no pilot who made the world by
imposing order on chaos and who remains outside, watching and
proscribing." He also opposes the anthropic principle, which he
claims "cannot help us to do science." Further, philosophically, Smolin indicates (source - http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/39306 ]:
There is only one universe. There are
no others, nor is there anything isomorphic to it.
All that is real is
real in a moment, which is a succession of moments. Anything that is true is
true of the present moment. [Not only is time real, but everything that is real is
situated in time. Nothing exists timelessly.]
Everything that is real in a moment is
a process of change leading to the next or future moments. Anything that is
true is then a feature of a process causing or implying future moments.
[This principle incorporates the notion that time
is an aspect of causal relations. A reason for asserting such, is that
otherwise anything that existed for
just one moment – without causing or implying some aspect of the world at a
future moment – would be gone in the next moment. Things that persist must be thought
of as processes leading to newly changed processes. An atom at one moment is a
process leading to a different or a changed atom at the next moment.]
Viktor Ambartsumian (1908-1996) was a highly
accredited astrophysicist from Armenia who became world renowned for his work
on radiation transfer and stellar dynamics. Simply by looking at pictures of
galaxies on photographic surveys, he deduced that galaxies were born by
ejection from nuclei of larger active galaxies. In spite of the fact that this
directly contradicted the Big Bang theory that all galaxies concurrently
condensed out of a primeval medium, he was still elected President of the International
Astronomical Union and was a respected representative of the U.S.S.R. Academy of
Sciences. Amartsumian’s theoretical analysis, based on the observational material for
stellar systems belonging to our Milky Way Galaxy resulted in a discovery of a
new type of stellar system – the quasars – from which new galaxies emerged.
These expanding systems are endowed with a positive energy he named “stellar associations”
and he proved their relatively young age, and that the star formation process
in the Milky Way is still ongoing and that stars are born in groups. From his
early work on the expansion of stellar nebulae and the fact that those objects
result from the ejection of the outer layers of older stars – the dynamical
dissolution of star clusters via evaporation and cluster associations – he was
able to create a logical background for the radical conclusion that the basic
evolutionary processes in the Universe are not gaseous contraction and
condensation into stars, as conventionally thought. On the contrary, new
stellar formation is always outgoing from some denser state of matter. Thus, he
postulated the existence of 'protostars', i.e. superdense objects as
protogenitors of stars, nebulae, diffuse matter, etc.
It was in the early 1950s when Prof. Ambartsumian
first raised the issue of the Activity of Nuclei of Galaxies (AGN). In his
famous report at the Solvay International Conference on Physics (Brussels,
1958) Ambartsumian said that enormous explosions take place in galactic nuclei
and as a result a huge amount of mass is expelled; and further, these galactic
nuclei must contain bodies of a huge mass and unknown nature. During a break in
the session Walter Baade went up to him and said, "Professor Ambartsumian,
you have come from the Soviet Union, and I from America. Logically speaking,
you should be a materialist, and I an idealist. But what you have just said is
nothing other than a pure idealism! It’s fantastic! You speak about some kind
of ‘non-stellar’ objects which no one has seen. So it must be something
inexplicable, mysterious." The idea about the activity of galactic nuclei
at first was accepted skeptically and only after many years, under the pressure
of observations (the discovery of quasars, radio outbursts of galaxies,
consequences of explosions in nuclei, ejection from nuclei, etc.) did it gain
recognition. The concept of AGN now is widely accepted.
On the basis of the various observational data
concerning the Milky Way, Ambartsumian showed that the stellar associations
(and the stars comprising their structures) were born rather recently. He was
first in the history of science to establish that the star-formation
process in the Milky Way began only a few billion of years ago and is
undergoing a modern stage of its evolution. This conclusion had fundamental
importance and completely rejected the conventional understanding that all
stars in the Galaxy were formed simultaneously several billion years ago. From
the observational fact of the abundance of dynamically unstable multiple stars
and stellar chains in the stellar associations, another principle result was
obtained: the stars constituting a ‘community are of a common origin, with
the stars being born in groups. Clearly, stellar birth and evolution was not
a one-shot Big Bang event, but was ongoing.
- - - - -
To maintain life requires a capacity to escape from danger. The
galaxy is an evolving, intermittently violent environment. The organic colonies
that inhabit certain regions within it may or may not survive, depending on how
fast they recognize danger and how well they adapt, modify it or escape from
it. Looking out over the beautiful blue Pacific one sees tropical paradises,
and on one mountain top, standing on barely cool lava, is the Earth's biggest
telescope, looking out into the universe for answers. Can humankind
collectively understand these answers? Can they collectively ensure
their continued appreciation of the beauty of existence? (Halton C. Arp)
Recently,
Adam had been studying the findings of Dr. Halton Christian Arp
(1927- ) who, for 28 years was staff
astronomer at the Mt. Palomar and Mt. Wilson observatories, and conducted
research with Edwin Hubble. While there, he produced his well known “Atlas of
Peculiar Galaxies" that are disturbed or irregular in
appearance, and which (it was later realized) catalogued many examples of interacting and
merging galaxies. Arp discovered, from
photographs and spectra with the big telescopes, that many pairs of quasars
(massive quasi-stellar objects) which had extremely high Doppler redshift
values (and had therefore thought to be receding from us very rapidly – and
thus must be located at a great distance from us) are physically connected to
galaxies that have low redshift and are known to be relatively close by. Arp therefore hypothesized
that quasars are new objects ejected from the core of active galactic nuclei
(AGN), and that the new stellar formations, being younger and more energetic,
registered higher intrinsic redshifts than the parent galaxy. Ultimately these new, high redshift formations
mature into normal, quiescent galaxies.
From his findings, Arp suggested that the redshift of matter is an inverse function of
the age of that matter, not an artifact of Doppler recessional velocity.
Because of Arp's observations, the conventional assumption that high red shift
objects have to be very far away – on which the Big Bang theory and all of
"accepted cosmology" is based – had to be fundamentally reexamined!
The 50 year old conventional idea of a cosmos under expansion (redshift) hence
confirming a Universe derived from a Big Bang source point had for decades kept
running into glitches, requiring the introduction of additional ingenious yet
unsupportable hypotheses such as ‘dark matter’ in a 90:10 ratio to observable
matter, ‘dark energy’, ‘gravitational lensing’, multiverses and ‘space-time
curvature’, etc – all of which Arp concluded were only mental gymnastics
necessary to support a fallacious, pseudo-scientific yet theistically derived
mirage of ‘everything out of nothing’, analogous to the so-called ‘scientific’
gymnastics necessary to compensate for the wrong-headed 1800 year Ptolemaic,
earth-centered solar system concept. Without resorting to
exotic schemata such as dark energy or dark matter, but just relying on
observation, Arp claimed that galaxies, like a group of animals, reveal at a
glance all stages of birth, growth and maturity. The reality of the cosmos is that of a dynamic of perpetual flux out
of which creation, evolution and devolution occurs.
Notwithstanding
his 28 year contribution to the understanding of astronomy, Arp’s conclusions
were so radically divergent from – and threatening to - the accepted beliefs of
mainstream astronomers that – to bring him into line – they arranged to have
his research time on the Palomar telescope curtailed. Rather than recanting, in
1983 he
joined the staff of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, where
in his ‘80s he still performs his research and publishes his findings.
Arp also contradicted the hallowed relativity
theory, which claimed that all things could only be measurable in relation to
each other, rather than relative to a primary reference frame. Arp
claimed that the existence of the microwave background over the detectable
universe certainly represented an obvious, primary reference frame. Another
point on which Arp disputed relativity theory was its axiom that nothing could
travel faster than the speed of light. Gravity itself, rather than merely a
mass attractor, is increasingly thought of as a force of both attraction and
repulsion, affecting matter by way of transmissions through a surrounding sea
of much faster-than-light gravitons, whereby there can be nearly
instantaneous action anywhere in the Universe (not completely instantaneous
action, since that would violate the concept of causality).
My own working hypothesis for gravity is
that gravitons are very low mass particles with a huge De Broglie wavelength
compared to photons. Since their wavelength is so long they have much less interaction
with the intergalactic medium. So they far exceed the normal velocity of light
in vacuum (i.e. the vacuum that light in our locality of the universe sees). In
other words the photon is transmitted through the average cosmic false vacuum,
material vacuum or zero point energy field – to use just a few names given to
the old fashioned concept of aether. But the graviton interacts with much less
of this molasses and hence moves much faster. One might speculate that there is
a vast amount of matter in the universe which radiates at very long
wavelengths…. Since the particles of matter in the universe grow as they age
and communicate with ever more distant parts of the universe they have to
receive information. In the variable mass theory, this electromagnetic
communication is at the speed of light, c. The gravitons travelling much faster
than the speed of light, however, must also carry information. (No one could
argue that knowledge of the direction of an adjoining mass is not information).
So the old relativistic shibboleth that information cannot be transmitted
faster than the speed of light falls by the wayside. (Halton C. Arp)
- - - - - -
In reverie, Adam marveled. So many wondrous perspectives!! And
so marvelously divergent. So many sincere and dedicated truth-seekers
extracting the material from their worlds to support those realities that
reflected – to each – that for which they had been searching, and that
reflected to each ‘what it’s all about’. And the strange thing
was that, were one able to ‘get into their world’, it could also become one’s
own personal reality. The marvels (and perils) of induction. Yet somewhere
there must be something that is at least closer to fundamental truth than
‘wannabe be’ infections picked up from others.
Somewhere … there must be a reality ledge upon which one could
rest, and know that – at least for this current ‘page’ – there was firmament.
A valuable analytical tool that Adam had picked up over the
years as an aid to evading inductive traps, was Hegelian dialectics,
which attested that the personally meaningful and functional may lie
between conflicting polarities – as it were … in the stillness between two
ocean waves. Whenever a pat certainty was proffered to him, Adam had learned
the prudence of checking for a better and more functional truth in the opposite
of the ‘certainty’. Hegel’s dialectic formula:
Thesis>Antithesis>Synthesis. As in the Yin-Yang symbol, the opposite of
each polarity is embedded within itself, and under the right circumstances,
becomes the dominant energy of its former host. Following the dialectical path,
ultimately one may see that nothing can exist without its opposite,
concurrently residing within its own constitution … this process is also
called the unity of the opposites. Employing the dialectical
technique, one learns that before committing to any supposed certainty
(hypothesis), one should consider the certainty’s opposite (antithesis), as the
more functional value may lie along the movement arc between the two
polarities ... a position to be independently determined by one’s critical
reasoning – as opposed to blind acceptance of others’ truths.
Some insights may stand up to the test of reasoning minds for
eons. To many, such was the genius of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Darwin’s insight – together with later and ongoing, evolving findings in
quantum mechanics, astrophysics, geology, paleontology and biology point to a
natural world in an eternal motion of evolution, development and change,
intriguingly brought about through a conflict of the oppositional forces
co-existing in the agent itself. Although in narrow instances cause and effect
admittedly plays a role, at all general levels nature is governed by blind
chance events, with the iron necessity that is inherent in chance.
Distancing himself, Adam could see that evolution itself was motion
– and motion within any thing or process is due to the conflict of
the ever-present opposites residing in the very elements of the thing or
process itself and not because of an “impulse” from outside, as proponents of
causality believe. Thus motion is the mode of existence of all things
and processes; there can be no matter without motion and no motion without
matter. Dialectics and reason both insist that the world must be
comprehended as a plenum of processes wherein all things go through
ongoing dynamic changes of “coming into being and passing out of existence”
brought about by the interplay of chance and necessity. Adam –
admittedly no genius - had himself observed that all units – whether matter,
life, history or thought – evolve through series of revolutionary changes
mediated by the rigorous process of chance and iron necessity, powered through
the conflict of opposites and adaptation within the units themselves.
Conventionally,
chance may be thought of as blind, yet that is only when chance is not bound to
necessity. If a seed falls onto sterile ground, it will not grow there, because
there is no necessity for it there, no scope there for its further
development nor evolution of its line. So this kind of chance is sterile
and the issue ends there. But had the same seed by chance fallen onto fertile
soil, then it could flourish – not only due to its environment, but also
because of the dynamic of the inherent opposites within itself, thanks to its
unique genetic bequest. As a result of its built-in potential, the seed could
then synthesize itself and grow and multiply.
All motion
and development in material, organic or cognitive processes proceeds through
nodal points where inherent opposing (yet ultimately complementary)
energies within the unit either mutually annihilate each other or recombine
into new, fecund syntheses.
Conjecturally,
the morphology of the galaxies is mediated by the dialectical process of
dispersion/ejection/deformation initiated by the catastrophic events of
matter/antimatter annihilation and the regularizing effects of gravitational
attraction and repulsion. Further, the observed cosmic microwave background
radiation may in reality not be evidence of any causal ‘Big Bang’, but instead
may be the zero-point energy field – the fertile energetic plenum wherein
cosmic recycling occurs, allowing the birth and evolution of ever-more complex
and conscious forms within a vast but finite Universe.
And what about Time?
Perhaps it’s only an intrinsic, relative parameter for each particular particle
or unit of assembly … a frame for each unit of matter or organic life or
thought. Perhaps for each unit, Time begins as each unit comes into being … and
ends with the unit’s inexorable passing out of existence.
Surely
it is the task of enquiring minds to discover these natural processes and not
attempt to impose laws on nature merely created de novo within human
minds.
Once again in contemplative reverie, Adam pondered … Others’
perspectives helped him establish conjectural reflectors within his own mind,
and he’d found that perspectives rich in substance were also evocative
attractors and birthing chambers out of which his personal intuitions could
emerge. And, for Adam, that was the acid test of all learning: did it satisfy his
need for completion. Was there really something to the ancient Hermetic
aphorism “AS ABOVE – SO BELOW”? Was everything in the cosmos –
from the stars in their galaxies to organic life and human thought on Earth –
temporary and dynamic structures governed by physical laws and by the interplay
of chance and necessity? Was man himself simply an evolved accretion of
star-dust?
For Adam, there seemed to be a rhythmic movement underlying the
cosmos and all within it – and if he were really still, perhaps he might go so
deeply within himself as to observe this rhythm. And then he sensed that
the key to it all was not so much a rhythm as an eternal undulation, an eternal
carrier wave conveying all forms into existence, moving them into ripe maturity
followed by the autumn and inevitable demise inherent in all created form,
whether stellar, organic or conceptual. And there within the carrier wave Adam
also detected exotic frequencies – dualistic dances – of primal energies:
gravity and antigravity; matter and anti-matter; sacred and profane; Yin and
Yang; male and female; evolution and devolution … all existence itself in
movement … the coming into existence and the going out, the quadrille of
systemic imbalance and rebalance, give and re-give – the perennial harmonic of
movement and eternal renewal.
Perhaps … ah! But could it really be?? Perhaps there was no meaning
to IT at all. Perhaps it was all a Sanskrit ‘lila’ – a
wondrous, universal play of motion, existence, life … the cyclic joy of the
coming in and the grateful release in the going out … and with each new page in
the Book, the opportunity for discovery and completion again.
Adam
aroused himself from reverie and smelled the coffee. He knew that it was time
to talk with his Eve, or write … or both … so as to release that which was
bottled within.
Perhaps…
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(T.S. Eliot - Little Gidding)
Posted February 27th, 2012
Keith and Marnie Elliott’s “REMEDY” Site
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