Electricity and the Spirit in Nature
- a tale of certain
considerations of the present state of science,
in the light of a modern practical understanding of the
nature of mind -
by Joel A. Wendt
first, from the end of my novel American
Phoenix:
~!~!~!~!~!~
All the same, this tale is like foreplay. The reader is not going to have a mental orgasm just from reading it. My own love affair with the Spirit in Nature took me many years and ten times as much reading and thinking about the kind of stuff which is in the (notes). Not to say the foreplay itself can't be quite satisfying - foreplay is meant to make us want to go on. But being involved with the wind (spirit) is a Way of mutual intercourse - "The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit." To know this Spirit in Nature directly is to have a Lover, and to be a Lover.
To begin:
The human being seems suspended between
two far away realms: that
of the stars and that of the infinitesimally small
realm of particles and quantum events - the very far
away and galactically large on the one side, and
the extremely tiny, yet supposedly near
at hand, on the other.
It is this aspect of our shared reality
that I believe is overlooked, or whose meaning is at
least quite underestimated.
Why is the human
being placed in this condition, in
between these two spirit-realms, about
which modern science, with a considerable assertion of
authority, claims to know a great deal? For
some the explanation is that this aspect of
existence of where in Nature we are situated is
simply an accident, in an uncaring cosmos, born in
a Big Bang, and then evolved through random
evolutionary processes over eons upon eons, having no point or purpose
at all.
?=?
Although, ... I
occasionally watch TV shows about animal development,
such as on the island of Madagascar, where sentence
after sentence of narration, seeking to explain the
unusual variations, contains the idea that
evolution acted with the intention to produce that
particular adaptation. I’m sorry, but an
actual random process can’t ever form an intention.
If we think of Nature as a “mechanism”, or of
evolution as natural “selection”, we are using words
whose normal meaning includes the idea of a conscious
actor. Human beings make “mechanisms”.
Human beings carry out “selection”. A
truly random process can’t act with purpose.
(Special thanks to Don Cruse, whose book "Evolution
and the New Gnosis: Anti-establishment
Essays on KnowledgeScience, Religion and Causal
Logic, covers this point with
wonderful exactness).
The reality, however odd it may seem
whether one attributes this condition to God or to
random chance, is that the fact remains that at the
pinnacle of evolution sits the human being, who
perceives and thinks nature in a Way quite unique.
Nothing else that we know of does what we do.
Emerson put it this way, at age 33 in his
essay/story “Nature", published in 1836:
The human being has something the very
very large and the very very small apparently do not
seem to share (according to materialistic
science): life and consciousness. We live, but not the
stars. We think, but not the electrons and protons, unless we
recall Leibniz and his "monads". To
Leibniz his “idea" of monads - the very smallest bits of
matter - that for the world to be logical, the
part would be like the whole, such that even the
smallest would have had consciousness and will.
I
only point in this direction to suggest that, at the
very least, we need to have an open mind about what
“matter” is in fact; especially given certain
experiments pursued in work on quantum physics which
shows that particles seemed to be united in a
“behavioral” fashion, even though separated by great
distances. Einstein called it: “spooky action at a
distance”, referring to concerns 19th Century physicists
had about material causality.
One basis for the approach here in this tale is to note that our history as thinkers on scientific questions reveals that the whole set of modern scientific conceptions is filled with assumptions (1). People like to ignore them, or forget after a time that the assumptions ever existed. It is kind of like building a wall in which several of the foundational stones are made out of dreams. We can give a nice sounding name to such dreams, such as “theoretical assumption”, but for all the kindness in the naming, the fact remains that there is nothing there that is real - it is perhaps a best guess, and sometimes just totally unjustified speculations.
For
example, no scientist has ever empirically observed the
Big Bang. Nor has anyone ever observed empirically
macro-Darwinian Evolution, particularly that aspect called: speciation - where evolution
is claimed to have produced the separate species of plants, animals and
human beings (2). These grand ideas are all human created
conceptions (theories). This is not to ignore that a great deal of
honest effort has produced those ideas, but the fact
remains that the Big Bang and macro-Darwinian Evolution are
nothing more that ideas born in the spirit-minds of human
beings, who have never directly and empirically
observed and experienced the basic elements of the stories
they have created, and announced as “scientific”.
We are
then justified in examining the nature of the
spirit-mind, for that human organ/capacity seems to have
created these ideas (3). Also, what role did the “wind”
play in leading human beings into a degree of confusion
about the Spirit in Nature.
All of
this effort and change over the years, since natural
science was born in the era around 1600, has reached a certain modern condition, where in point
of fact, even the idea of mind has disappeared, such that all
that was once recognized as mind is now described by the
term: brain. Whatever consciousness is, many insist it is a
product of a purely material, evolutionary-produced, organic artifact called the brain.
By the
way, scientists of consciousness used to know they had no
explanation for how the brain produced consciousness:
In our time this “common
assumption” is no longer questioned - it has
disappeared into the realm of the dreams and dogmas
recognized as the religion of scientism, and most research is
conducted as if this speculation/assumption is a reliable and
proven fact. Keep in mind that the experiments
showing a relationship between neural events and human actions
is not in question. Obviously the brain and our actions
have a connection, although the real nature of that connection
is unknown, precisely because for all the "brain"
experimentation, we still have no sound idea why there is
consciouness, or what consciousness actually is.
Grazzanica admits "explaining how" is difficult. That
explaining remains undone, which suggests whatever the real
natue of the connection, science still doesn't know, and
mostly still acts as if the brain-stuff by itself
produces consciousness, thoughts and thinking.
We'll get deeper into these questions as we go along.
So the
current tale is then: first a Big Bang creating space, light and
matter, then macro-Darwinian Evolution and speciation, until finally
the complex matter thus created and organized produces a
human-animal being who has thoughts
(ideas)
via a material organ we call the
brain. Not only that, but some believe that our perception of “consciousness” and “self-consciousness” are illusions this
brain thing produces.
Now I would like someone to tell me, how this piece of supposed meat (the brain) got smart enough to actually know just what is happening in the very first microseconds of Time, when everything supposedly all began? How is that not just another illusion produced by this brain thing? If it can produce one illusion - the experience of “self-consciousness”, that is shared as widely as the common and shared human perception of the actual existence of a “self”, certainly it can produce all manner of other shared illusions.
Sure
we study the geographic record, which is available to our senses. But deciding
what all that dirt and bones and fossils means ... that is done by
the spirit in the mind.
Are
the people who think that Way kidding? Of course
not, but I can’t imagine this supposed “meat” organ doing
anything more completely arrogant, and unjustified in logic and reason, than to believe
that we can see and know the truth about things that
happened billions of years ago, which we are incapable of
observing directly. Most of us can’t remember what we ate for lunch
last week, and we were there.
How then do we “know” this Big Bang
thing really happened?
The
point of the above is just to bring us down to earth, and stop us
from hyperventilating about how smart and wise we are. A good
exercise is to be honest about how many of the
personal lives of scientists and big thinkers are screwed
up. Divorces, lawsuits, children on drugs.
We can’t run our lives, so on what
basis do we imagine we can figure out where everything came
from and how it got to be the way it is today?
In
point of fact, this entire problem is so intricate and confused
that I had to write a whole book about the limits of science
to do what it thinks it can do, and in the process offer a completely
alternative Theory of Everything (4) to those abstract
and purely mathematical versions now in play. The human intellect is capable of many
arts, but if it is not ruled by the heart, as we see
everywhere today, our social life fails and civilizations
fall.
Don’t
worry grasshopper, ... but all the same the beginning of this tale so
far has been the easy part. While everyone who thinks we know the stuff we
believe we know needs a Twelve Step Group, there is a way
through this mess which saves all the work of the last
couple of hundreds of years of the Way of Science - a Way
new to the world that is yet immature and nowhere near its
full potential. The problem is that we have to learn new
stories. If you are willing to learn new stories, read on.
Some
brief background here: I once went to a lecture on enlightenment by an
American teacher of enlightenment: Andrew Cohen. When he was done talking, I asked him if
he knew everything, and as most of us would have to admit, he confessed he
did not. Then I asked him another question, which requires
us to think about something a little bit first before
answering. It goes like this:
If you
don’t know everything, then that logically means there are matters new
about which you can learn. That being the case, is it not entirely possible that if you learn
things you didn’t know, these new matters might well cause you to
readjust what you already believe you know? That question
too we have to answer in the affirmative, which is why I
just asked above whether the reader was willing to learn new
stuff.
Sometimes
I tell my students (see my websites and YouTube videos - (5)) that up to now
science has been very good at taking things apart (analysis), but not too
good at putting the parts back together in wholes (synthesis). People who put
things back together once practiced what was called: metaphysics, and this meta-physics became for a long time an activity
that was shunned. The people who engaged in that art kept going
on about God and spirit and such (6), while at the same time most natural
philosophers (early scientists) were trying to get out from under the thumb of
the Catholic Church, and avoid being burned at the stake. Once the
Church got too weak to any more have them killed, a lot of them
went out of their way to insist, in one fashion or another, that the story
of existence was only a story of matter, and never a story
of spirit (7).
Not
only that, but everything had to be able to be measured
and counted, so we could reduce it to mathematical
formulations, number structures, and geometric concepts
(8).
So, where are we?
Well ... we are in this curious condition where we
insist that all of existence is visible matter (at
least with instruments), and use as our main source of proof
mathematics.
Even the “fields” of gravity and electro-magnetism are “there” - have a spacial existence. The funny and seriously weird thing is
that we do all of this proof and understanding using
thinking and thoughts. All of it. The mind is our basic tool, but do we understand that tool at all?
In that case then, what the heck are thoughts, and what is the act of thinking which
produces them
(9)?
Now
wisdom
about
such
questions
can
appear
in
many
kinds
of
places, not just the work of philosophers or
scientists. Take for example these two quotes
from the last episode of Season One, of the TV show:
Joan of Arcadia. God is talking to Joan, or at
least the show is written as if God says these things:
“You have to trust the world behind your
eyes.” And, “Learn to see in the dark”.
We also have this picture today that the
material brain is analogous to a computer, where all this brain/nerve stuff has
electrical and chemical happenings in it. We are encourage to believe we “compute” all sense data, and all internal experiences (such
as “feelings”), while walking around trying to avoid
being mugged on the metro or divorced or fired or
caught looking at porn on the Internet while at work. Our DNA is supposedly “hardwired”. Our brain keeps memories like a “hard” drive. In the near future some think (as
in believe) we will be able to “upload” our consciousness into robots and live
forever.
The tragic fact is that our ideas in
popular writings about DNA research, in particular the biology of the “cell”, lag behind the actual cutting edge of
ongoing research (10).
In those places a new tale is being spun (or an
new version of an old tale), where the parts do not
determine the whole, but the whole determines the
parts.
Then too, somewhere in all that imaginary
brain driven confusion, people still want to find
someone to love and someone to love them. Good for them.
Meanwhile, more than a few scientists can’t talk to
the religious, who in turn often can’t talk to the
scientists, and many in those two groups don’t
understand a lot of artists at all. Dada. Graffiti. A Cross in a glass of piss. What to me is the most strange thing of
all, being that many colleges and universities have
educated our professional politicians, of both the male and the female
persuasion, is
that all these highly “educated” leaders can’t manage to solve any of our acute social problems, and seem to prefer war to peace. This is a rational and scientific world?
The dry abstract intellect is being
trained in our Universities to serve the needs of a
few, while the needs of the many are forgotten and
knowledge is preferred to wisdom.
Maybe scientists aren’t as smart as they think they
are, and the religious aren’t as morally
perfect as they think they are. And some of the artists, ... just watch some French films for the
really absurd and self-indulgent.
One of the facts is that thinking and
thoughts are not visible. We don’t see them. We experience them inwardly in our own
minds (please let’s forget about brains and go
back several decades and remember that for a
long time we used the term: “minds”
(and before that, oddly enough, the terms: "spirit
and soul"). And, to repeat an important
point, the God character in Joan of Arcadia said: “You have to trust the world behind
your eyes.” And, “Learn to see in the dark”.
What
is the world behind the eyes, and what is the dark in
this context?
Now
personally I never experience my “brain”, but I do very clearly experience my “mind”. I can, in fact, make an
empirical study of my own mind.
Not many do this, but it is
possible and I can attest to its efficacy in almost all
realms of human existence. Self knowledge of the own mind reveals a great
deal.
Yes,
the brain scientist and psychologist and psychiatrists
believe they study the brain/mind nexus. But do I
really want them to tell me what is going in my own mind?
The best soul (psyche) healers, by the way, just
suggest to us how to ask ourselves good questions. They know only we see
fully what goes on in our own inwardness - behind the eyes
and in the dark - the places where only we can shine the
light of consciousness and thinking.
When I
think, for example, I don’t experience what we see when we see an
electrical discharge in physical space. There is no
spark with a “snap!”, although there is an experience of light of
varying intensities. When I imagine or fantasize I make pictures in
my mind. I make these pictures out of inner light, which I then “see” in my mind. These pictures take place in a realm
which is initially dark, and which is “behind my eyes".
The
brain scientist would like me to believe that there is some
kind of electrical or chemical things going on in my brain when I
think and when I imagine, but neither he/she nor I experience thinking in
any other way than as light - inner light (or "sound", but discursive thinking is a special case and
so is the "sound" that our inner talking to ourselves produces - more soon).
The
other crucial matter is that this thinking and imagining
that takes place in my mind is entirely the result of my own
activity. I make it happen, otherwise it does not happen. And, I am conscious
of both the doing of it and the experiencing of what I am
doing. And (again), any brain scientist that tells you that’s not
his/her experience too, is lying, or what may be worse - simply asleep inwardly.
Yes, sometimes we
can't sleep for the inner chattering is relentless - the mind wants
to go on and on whether the body needs rest or not. Then there are
obsessions and mental illnesses, but these are special cases - instructive
yes, but we have to master first the more general
condition common to most of us if we seek knowledge of the
mind directly through our own experience.
These
inner-mind matters are subtle, but they are also quite empirical. We can report
to each other their universal characteristics, and we can each
confirm that we share the same general characteristics. Let me give a
couple of examples ...
For
most naive thinkers we experience what is known as
discursive thinking. We appear to ourselves as inwardly talking to
ourselves. This stream of inner dialogues serves many
purposes, each purpose according to our own choices. Maybe we are
going on a date, and we are “rehearsing” what to say. Or we are going to a job interview.
As to
the "sound" element ... something
speaks (it
seems) and
something hears (again, it seems). The point here is to be empirical, not
theoretical. What is your actual experience when you think
discursively? There might be a mystery here worthy of a more careful
exploration.
Perhaps
we are writing, and the discursive thinking enters onto the
page as the code we call language, and in which “code" we generally “think” (11). Most of the time we are not self-observing the
thinking, we are just doing the thinking.
Certainly
when we speak to others, or are in conversation, the sound we
hear when we or they speak is not like the "sounding" inside our own
minds. Perhaps the other is making a point, but in our mind
we feel we have a better point, so there is a kind of jumping up and down
inside - while we wait, and don't want to wait to speak. We are
suppressing something in order to
"hold our
tongue". Again, a mystery worth
careful empirical self-investigation.
We
also make what can be called: mental pictures.
Perhaps we are discursively
thinking about a coming conversation with a friend, and we are
planning what to say to them, while simultaneously we “picture” them. Or, maybe we are
thinking about how to fix a car, or plant a garden, or search for a lost cat. We make
pictures - mental pictures - all the time. We just don’t notice it, because we are
wrapped up in the purpose behind the thinking activity.
Without
going into details (see my writings in the footnotes), here are some
other kinds of thoughts and modes of thinking. Some kinds of
thoughts: mental pictures, generalized concepts, pure concepts, and ideas. Some modes of thinking: organic
thinking, pure thinking, abstract thinking, concrete thinking, warm thinking, cold thinking, associative thinking, discriminatory thinking, thinking-about, thinking-with, thinking-within, and
thinking-as. See also my essay in the footnotes about “The IDEA of the
Thought-World” (12).
We
also have what might be called "trains of thoughts". We connect one to another in series. Here a mental
picture, there a generalized concept, now an idea
that seems to come with a "flash" of "insight" (soundless -
no snap!). A further
level of inward mystery is what are the relationships
between our feelings and our thoughts. These “feelings" are not so obvious -
they are “in the dark". That’s why we sometimes
need a skilled soul (psyche) healer - to help us draw forth
our feelings from this “darkness" and work with them.
Then
there are people who have what we call aspergers or autism,
who often think in very unusual Ways, such as what is
sometimes called: pattern recognition - an instinctive
thinking in wholes, by the way. Lots of questions, but
one single fact remains at our core: We can see the realm
behind our eyes and what is in our own “dark”. No
one outside us can do that which only we can do.
A bold
statement: When we consciously think and imagine, we are not in
the physical world at all.
Rather we are an
active spirit in the closest realm of spirit, which in some
paradigms is called: the Ethereal World, or the world of life forces and light (13). We are an
invisible being in an invisible world, which most
scientists don't want to recognize as real, much less
spiritual. This although every theory they produce
comes from the spirit of abstract intellectual “thinking”.
Body
and mind are not the same, and the movie Avatar gives a decent imagination
of this reality. The movie assumes we can move our
consciousness, including thinking, feeling and willing, into another body.
The idea of reincarnation
contains the concept that the body is not the reincarnating
spirit, which moves from incarnation to incarnation
always finding a new physical-avatar. If we follow
out this empirically, we can come to know that sleep too is a daily
leaving behind of the physical-avatar body so that our
consciousness stops overdoing its use of the physical
organism and causing it harm (illness) through the
related stress.
Rest
and sleep has long been recognized as the best medicine for
illness. All kinds of modern wisdoms suggest we need
to slow our lives down - we live too fast, want too much,
and seldom take the time to reflect.
There
is here nothing theoretical at all that each individual
cannot rediscover and replicate for themselves. Unless there
is some mental or physical difficulty, most people can
empirically study their own minds, and until the scientists of consciousness take
up these arts they really have no business telling anyone
anything different. Until you study your own mind, with the same
rigor and exactness as you study the physical world, you don’t know
anything about these questions.
The
future of the Way of Knowledge that is science, depends upon
us slowing down and taking the time to reflect empirically
on the true nature of the spirit-mind.
Now - finally! - we are ready to
begin to turn our thinking and imaginative capacities to the
problem of electricity and the Spirit in Nature. Hopefully this
long preparation will be useful to the reader who has come
this far.
First, let us remember
that the words electricity and spirit and nature are just
that - words. More important is the underlying experienced
phenomena and their related concepts. We also need
to again reflect on the significance of the overlooked fact
that the human being perceiver and participating actor in
the Creation is inserted, with his gift of thinking, in between the
macro-cosmic starry world and the micro-cosmic world of
particles and imagined quantum events.
Let us
also consciously be metaphysical - that is on purpose seek to make wholes of what
up to now has been an impulse to tear the natural wholeness
of the world asunder into tiny parts and processes. For example, if we go to
Wikipedia, and read there the entry on photosynthesis, we will find
all manner of observations and categories of the processes
by which the Sun acts on our World to create the food we
eat. Its all broken down into discrete parts as if
the basic gesture of events was many things, not just one. Here is a
sample:
Without
the “light-energy” nothing happens. The pattern is
basically a series of transformations, wherein the
initiating “causal force” is being called: “light energy”. Light energy is also an aspect of something
that in reality (seen as a whole) is not at all discontinuous. Light doesn’t
really arrive at the leaf in the form of discrete photons as
the excess of analysis tends to picture, for during the day the leaf is
bathed in light - the leaf swims in continuous waves of streaming enveloping light.
There
is also the problem of the stuff.
Where does the matter come
from? The light initiates the transformation we label
photosynthesis, but something is there already - the stuff, the CO2 and so forth.
We are
told the story that the “stuff” comes from the Big Bang. Very magical
this “Bang”, - first nothing
and then something. A rabbit out of a hat.
We have to do better than
this with our "thinking".
If we
skip the making-stuff-up-imagination of a hugely
ancient past we will never see, and just try to notice what is available for
our observation in the present, we might observe that life everywhere precedes the
lifeless. No where to our observations of Nature is there
lifeless matter making life, but rather only the reverse. The embryo is
living tissue before it ever makes the bones - the hardest
parts. The plant has a locus which is called: the growing
point - the tip of the leaf-bud, for example (14). If our
observation is careful enough we can see that matter seems
to be created there, right in front of our eyes.
The
idea of the conservation of energy and matter is not
precisely correct, at least as we presently understand it.
Our ideas are too abstract to encompass the actual
dynamic living world of Nature, which is full of Being and
Consciousness. That we learned to think the Way
we presently think is understandable - it is this Way
because of our present evolutionary style of consciousness,
which some call: the onlooker separation. To overcome
the resulting enchantment of our conceptual life we
have to learn how to “participate” in the knowing process.
Not stand off from it - separated from it and watching
it, but enter into this knowing process purposefully -
become part of the world. We choose to be "whole" with
the world. "Be at one with Nature" said the character
played by David Carradine in the TV series Kung Fu.
Again, careful
observation would also reveal that soil is created by the
plant, not the reverse, which is why our force-feeding of farms with
chemical fertilizers and bug-killing sprays has ruined the
soil and denatured the plant before it ever gets to having
to be “processed” to make food. The roots too are tipped with growing
points, although these practice their art inside the soil.
Remember the leaf of the plant is involved in an
exchange with its sun-lit environment. So too the
roots are involved in exchanges with their “dark”
environment.
All
this is related to a massive experiment on the whole
population of the earth, changing our relationship to Nature, and
substituting mechanized farming that has resulted in most
modern diseases. We killed the truly vital life-element in the plant and in the soil, and then we
started getting cancers and heart disease on a scale never
before seen in human history (15).
The
continuous creation of matter is everywhere in Nature, but remains
unobserved because of our 300 years' history of scientific-seeming
assumptions that makes us blind.
Nature acts right in front
of us, and we only need observe what She actually
does, rather than make up stories about a past we can
never observe directly.
All
the same, we appear to have a duality: matter and
spirit. How do we resolve the seeming contradictions?
There
are many anomalous facts which can be noticed. For example, the surface
temperature of the Sun is said to be 6,000 degrees C, while the
temperature of the Corona (the next-to-the-sphere-of-the-sun “field” of the Sun) is said to have a
temperature of 1 to 2 million degrees C.
That is, the immediate space
outside the sphere of the Sun is hugely higher in its “temperature” than is the Sun
itself. A mystery ignored and forgotten, although one
sun-scientist described this anomaly being as if the frying
pan was hotter than the fire.
As to the interior
properties of the Sun, all this in modern physics is basically
speculation (16). We have plenty of stories (theories),
but no empirically observed facts about the Sun’s interior.
Sort
of like our own inwardness, isn’t it. The priests of
our scientific culture tells us a lot of stories they expect
us to believe, but we are the only ones that can actually
look there and observe - behind our eyes and in the dark.
The
Earth on which we live swims in the Sea of the Corona, which
everywhere permeates the Solar system (this is called:
zodiacal light in astronomical science, which again sees the
parts but never makes the parts into a whole). We see this at
night, for the Moon changes what it reflects of the
Sun-light according to a regular rhythm connected to its
rotation around the Earth. Not only that, but when the surface of the Moon is bathed (like the Earth it
swims in the “field" of the Sun-corona) in Sun-light it instantly warms radically (the range goes from
minus 153 C to plus 123 C quickly as the surface goes from dark to light). The Moon
does not retain this "heat" as it rotates around the Earth, because unlike
the Earth there is no Airy mantle or atmosphere, to help
hold “in” the so-called heat.
When
immersed in the sea of light, the moon's surface is almost instantly warm. When the
moon's body gets in the way of the waves of that very
intense sea, it rapidly cools.
On the
surface of the Earth, lives the Plant World, which if we learn to think in wholes is just
one organism (17) of an incredible variety in its many many forms
of manifestation. Let me repeat myself here. When we learn
to really think in wholes we will realize that the
green-world is one spiritual entity
(after Goethe), manifesting in
an incredible variety of forms in
“matter".
We can
begin to understand this when we bring together the
processes by which leaves transform/exchange (with the necessary
aid of light-energy or forces) carbon dioxide for oxygen. The
World-Plant breathes, and we breath within Its breath. Perhaps
we can now begin to understand why aboriginal peoples speak
of “Mother
Earth”.
The
human lung, wherein oxygen is exchanged/transformed for
carbon dioxide (the reverse of the World-Plant processes), is also in its
shape and form the polar opposite of the Royalty of the
World-Plant, - the great trees.
The shape of the great
tree is “matter” filled, while the shape
of the lung is tree-like in form, but empty of dense matter and upside
down/inside out. At both surfaces (lung and leaf) the Airy mantel (itself invisible in the Sun-light) mediates the
exchange/transformation process involving oxygen and carbon
dioxide.
Sun-light
transforms, via the leaf, into the Plant organism. The animal
kingdom eats the plants, and we eat both the plants and the animals. This too is a
continuous series of transformations, even though our “analysis" gave names to all
the parts. What then is “eating”?
Eating
too is transformation. The human being’s metabolism is a kind of
oxidation process (which is why we count calories), wherein “food” is seemingly
“burned” to produce “energy”. Now nutrition is a much more complicated
process than just that, but the basic structure of the relationships
remains, even though the details are massively intricate (18). Light energy
becomes plant energy becomes human energy.
At the
upper end of this process, human energy creates thought which is itself
also light to our own perception of the nature of thought. Sun-light dies
into us to become the human light of thought, which takes
place in the invisible realm we call: consciousness. As noted
before, a prior age called this invisible realm of thought
and consciousness: spirit and soul (19).
In
addition there is the odd fact, often overlooked, which is that we don't actually see "light" itself, but rather only
color. Newton explained this one way (abstractly) and then Goethe
came along and did a better more "whole" job. So even in the physical world light is "invisible", while at the
same time the "light" we create inwardly is visible to our mind's "eye", or spirit.
What then is “energy”, as used in the term: "light-energy"?
All of
us experience energy every single day. We wake up “energized” from the rest of
sleep, and at the end of the day are tired, and must retire
in order to renew our “energy”. Again we have here an intricate and detailed
multiplicity of micro-processes, many of which we can give names to, but which
remain something whole in spite of the fact that we can give
abstract labels to all the many parts.
We
take “drugs” to manage our
consciousness and our ability to think. That is, we
consume and metabolize specialized kinds of “matter” for the purpose of
changing and enhancing the light of the mind - our spiritual
life. We call them, in general: uppers and downers.
The most dominant can be troubling: sugar and caffeine
(uppers) and alcohol (downers), without even getting to the
worse of the addictions. Both
matter and spirit co-exist. These are also not a discontinuous polarity. They are not
separate, but united - a whole themselves.
The
Sun Being's "energy", or force of living will, sacrifices
itself into the Earth Sphere so that we are nurtured and
fed. When He incarnated in His physical-avatar body
for 2 and 1/3rd
years, He instructed his disciples, just prior to
excarnation (death), to notice
something: "While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given
thanks, he broke it and
gave it to his disciples, saying, "Take and eat; this is my body."
We
have sometimes thought (see the history of science, especially
Lehrs: note: 8) that electricity was of the nature and kin to
soul and spirit. In its early years, science, via the natural philosophers, banned the
spiritual (as they understood it through religious
authorities). Wanting and needing freedom to think (freedom of spirit), scientists
fought a war with religion, - a war started by religion.
While we can have a lot of theories
about electricity, the macro-phenomena have a lot to teach us
without our having to dwell in the realm of the micro-world
of particles and quantum imaginings (20).
First we have to recognize that we
found in Nature a latent force (energy/will), which we have put to work to serve us (or perhaps
this will has put us to work to serve it?). While we use
gravity effects from falling water, atomic effects
to heat water to steam, coal effects to heat water to steam and so
forth, the general principle underlying the
electrification of our civilization is found in the magic of
the mechanics of the electrical turbine.
All over the world there are these
huge weighty electrical turbines. The turbine's
insides are rotated by taking the mechanical energy of steam
and/or falling water, and because these insides are full of tightly
wound mostly copper wires, and because there is surrounding these windings
a permanent magnet, electricity is "created". The spinning core of wound wire moves through
the magnetic "field", and by "cutting" the lines of magnetism electricity appears in
the spinning wire core almost like "magic".
I use the word “magic” on purpose, not
just metaphorically. The theoretical explanations for
“why” the movement of a copper winding through a magnetic
“field” are very interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying.
Something is certainly happening, but why it happens
is not always obvious. We have done a lot of
experiments in inventing our electrical artifacts, but we
were not always clear about why things worked.
That things worked was often enough.
First look up on Google magic sigils, which are the signs
related to supposed invisible entities we want to control
via a talisman. We inscribe the “sigil” on the
talisman according to certain traditions and we then have a
result - an invisible being works for us, according to the
teachings of magic. Next, go to the Google and look up
electrical wiring diagrams, and you will find that during
the development of our many electrical artifacts we used all
this “symbolism” to describe how to control electrical
happenings. There is a remarkable relationship between
the idea and form of the magical sigil, and the electrical
symbols in our wiring diagrams.
Presently, with what we call a
circuit-board, we now create complex talismans in order to
make electricity - invisible beings - act according to our
desires. We explain all this by the use of the ideas
of the “flow of electrons" we call “current". But that
again is an abstraction made up out of the assumption that
if we grasp the parts, we have understood the workings of
the whole. Just because we believe there is no
consciousness in matter, does not mean there isn’t.
Please note in passing this is not a
process at all related to the invisible Sun light which "energizes" the chemical
happenings in plants, becomes food which then energizes our ability
to "think" - i.e. create
invisible inner light ourselves in the form of thoughts.
Electricity in the form of a spark
leaping a gap is not at all like light, although the
spark creates some color and a bit of heat. All we have to
do is put our hand in the way of electricity, and if
sufficient the charge will kill us. Light doesn't
to that. Light is life-creative, while
electricity is death-creative.
Some who have thought about these
questions have called electricity: fallen light. Meaning, quite on
purpose and exactly, the same as the Biblical usage which describes
the human being who succumbs to moral decay also as fallen. Goethe, in his book
Theory of Color, described color as arising from the deeds and
suffering of light. The poet responsible for the Prologue to the
Gospel of John writes of the Word: "In it was Life, and the Life was the Light of the World".
If we take the trouble to really
appreciate this, we will find in those words something not only
both religious and scientific, but also artistic. Why? Because while
the Big Bang assumes there is no consciousness and “thinking” (spiritual
activity) in the moment of creation, that’s all it
is - an assumption. Where do these great thinkers believe
consciousness and thinking came from? Out of a magic
top hat called "evolution"?
Perhaps it is far far past time to throw out some
weaker aspects of those ideas/thoughts.
Now, ...
do not doubt that in general "evolution" is true. Nature
constantly transforms because it is alive. We've just
been spending the last few hundred years trying to think (as
in believe) it was always dead in the beginning. Like the human
being, when “evolution” reaches a certain stage of its "life" processes, it
leaves behind bones, so the geographic record (including the
so-called "rocks") all came from living processes.
Matter comes from life, not
lifelessness. In it was Life and the Life was the Light of
the World.
Electricity seems to be a property of
matter, and a couple of decades ago (1990) I wrote an
article for the Journal of Borderland Research: There is No
Free Energy (21), where I pointed out that electricity was
related to the property of matter that makes it have what is
called: coherence. This is the tendency for molecules and such to
line up, and for the forms of matter to have the “order”
they need so that they can appear to be “solid”. This
meant, I explained, that whatever process we believe gives
us “free” energy in the form of electricity (or even nuclear
fission or fusion), all that comes from some “place” in
Nature. These powers are stolen from the rightful
realm in which the Spirit in Nature originally placed them.
There are consequences, and many of
these consequences can be horrific, such as the sea borne
radiation now flowing all over the Pacific Ocean toward the
Americas from the broken reactors at Fukushima, destroyed by
the warning/wisdom of Mother Earth to help us see how
dangerous are these energy/wills we treat as our servants
and playthings.
Now in Nature (to draw
ourselves closer to our essay's title: Electricity
and the Spirit in Nature), we have what we call the organic and
non-organic. In
Lehrs' wonderful book Man or Matter (see note 8), he makes a
distinction between matter which is inert (non-organic) and
alert (matter which is organic). What he says there is
not simple, and should be read. The basic idea is that
only "alert" matter is receptive of the spirit - of becoming
"animated".
A rock doesn't walk around or grow, while a plant
grows, an animal walks around, and a human
being has thoughts and imaginations which he/she can
self-observe. While we do project on the animal kingdom human
qualities (anthropomorphizing it), most everyone
recognizes there is a big difference between humans and
animals.
Of course, if we exclude
the spiritual, and continue to think we are only made of what
in the beginning was dead matter, then the
similar nature of our DNA and some primate DNA suggests an
unjustified nearness. All the same, the animal will not soon be writing
scientifically valid religious poetry in the form we just
saw in the Gospel according to John: “In it was Life and the Life was the Light of
the World”.
Electricity can be found everywhere in
Nature. As can light. The world of matter seems to require
electricity in order to have an organizing "force/will". If there is
too much order, we find the organic dying - falling apart. If we ingest too much of certain
minerals (such as metal-salts), we also die. The aging human being's bones naturally become
sclerotic (hardened and brittle). The embryo is
living flesh first - the slowly hardening bones come
later. In us death and life seem to be poised in
opposition. We can starve to "death", when we can no longer eat the gifts given to us
by the "light". Some religious celebrate with bread and wine - something in
the living is thought to be "divine".
In order for the matter we seem to
need to use to form thoughts and to function, this “matter” has to
renounce aspects of the ability to heal. Brains and
nerves can be cut and then never grow together again, while blood
vessels and other organs heal far more easily.
Nerve tissue is then more "dead" than other tissue. This renunciation allows spirit to interpenetrate the"alert" matter of the physical-avatar body. The brain is an organ which helps spirit live in matter between birth and death. The physical technology imagined in the movie Avatar has actually been created by the Divine Spirit, and is then the whole blossoming flower of physical evolution that makes it possible for spirit to inhabit matter in order to learn.
If we think further on the idea of
renuciation of life, in order for spirit to have a
"conscious" entrance into organic or "alert" matter, we just
might come to the conclusion that the spirit, inhabiting our
physical-avatar body, - this spirit, at death - at the
momement of completely separating from physical matter -
this "spirit" becomes even more intensely conscious.
There is life as consciousness after death, just as there
was life as consciousness before birth.
Can thinking be living? Can thinking
be dead? Can some thoughts "live" in our shared social existence, and in healthy
ways? Can some thoughts bring death into our social
existence? We tend to call the thoughts supporting of life
in the social: moral, and those that do not we call: immoral.
Where does Nature end, and human
social life begin? Is there a difference? Electricity
fuels our civilization's ability to get "work" done, and gives us
machines that some mockingly fantasize will be able to
think. Can a machine be moral? What about
Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics? Even human
beings can't seem to follow those Laws, much less the
golden rule. There is a lot of fanciful and logically
unjustified thinking going on out there.
Everything is all mixed together. We are
familiar with the parts. Can we learn to think the wholes? This we have
been trying to do. Let us continue.
In my essay on Cosmic Space (astronomy - see note 1), I wrote of the
problems with parallax and red shift. Next I want to
look at some of the ideas underlying the Big Bang, and reflect on
the conception of matter there applied. As with my
piece on Cosmic Space, it is actually more crucial to follow the
history of these ideas as they arose in our civilization, for if there
is an error of thought in that his(story) of the
development of the ideas of the Big Bang, then the
inherent flaws will be obvious.
As science developed its first
iterations in a more mature fashion, during the 18th and 19th and then
the 20th Century, it appears to discover several kinds of
physical constants, which could be mathematically represented, such as: a
gravity constant, the speed of light, Planck’s
constant, the electric constant, and the
elementary charge constant.
This process
of developing constants, in relationship to our broader scientific
ideas, was noticed in the 19th Century
and discussed under the name: Uniformitarianism (22).
That discussion centered on the idea
that rules and laws, so-far seemingly discovered, would be
constant throughout space and time. What was true
on the Earth would be true out in deep space, and changes
observed in the present as constant would remain constant in
the deep past. This was especially crucial for the ideas in
biology, particularly macro-Darwinian Evolution. This idea of
unchangableness became more and more questionable to some, such that
Stephen J. Gould felt compelled to try to defeat it, or
at least work around it, in an article in 1963. We quote from
Wikipedia here:
I think the reader can see the obvious
problems here - simply declaring that a difficult problem no
longer matters, or rejecting it as unjustified, doesn’t work
and can hardly be called rigorously scientific - where is
the empirical experiment? In reality it is more like the denial structure
of someone with an addiction, than it is a form of reasonable science. In this case
it is an addictive need to keep the idea of spirit out of
biology completely.
Mostly this uniformitarianism
concerned the problems with macro-Darwinian Evolution which
very much depended upon the assumption that constants could
be found and they would be permanent throughout time and
space. Sadly for all, Nature never really does that - for example, while Kepler’s
Three Laws regarding planetary movements are generally apt, in the
particulars they are not accurate. Nature
constantly varies what it does, and over the
supposed geological spans of time, an assumption
of invariance is about as far from an empirical observation
as possible.
In addition, modern
physics, as it conceives of the Big Bang, also assumes
that life and consciousness are the late-in-time products of
this invariant evolution, such that at the moment of the Big Bang there
is no life and no consciousness. So when we
read a nice detailed article in Scientific American on what
happened in the first tiny moments of the magical Big Bang, we are looking
at scientific speculation, which itself is often without any justifiable
limits. Sometimes it is nearly impossible to
distinguish this scientific sounding speculation from
something written in the literature of science fiction (in fact many
scientists write science fiction).
Consider one last bit ... a lot of ideas
about the time-lines of the past we have currently, in the sense
they get mathematically represented, are based on
assumptions about the rate of decay of atomic particles. We do
radio-carbon dating wherever possible in all our research on
the past, including the eons old biological past as well
as the anthropological past of midden heaps and other debris
of how humans lived thousands of years ago.
All those time-lines depend on there
having been, throughout all of time, what we know
today as invariant modes of radioactivity. But we have, factually, no way to test
whether or not if we went five thousand years in the past, radioactive
matter actually would have existed at that time. Yes, in our present we observe
radio-activity, but the important question, again is:
Would we have observed it in the Past?
We just assume we would, and the rates
of decay are then used as a constant to support all our
ideas of the long periods of time in which evolution could
work its particular magic. For an interesting discussion of whether the
Table of the Elements supports such a view, read Georg
Blattmann’s: Radiant Matter - see note 15, as well as Hauschka’s book on chemistry: The Nature of
Substance - also in note 15.
Sure, in our present radio-active decay is observed, but it is a
huge leap of scientific “faith” to assume that if the measuring instrument was
present in the deep past - that in a past we can never
empirically observe, the instrument would make the exact
same observation.
A prediction: We are going to find out that one of the reasons the megalith builders of Stonehenge and the Pyramids, for example, were able to cut and move those huge blocks of stone, is that the density of matter (its supposed weight and coherence within the field of planetary gravity) has changed over time - it is not a constant. Not only that, but the “field” of gravity is interpentrated by a corresponding “field” of levity, which is how the plant grows upward. Lehrs here quotes Ruskin, from Ruskin’s The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century:
We’ve fudged all our ideas of Time and
Space in order to invent a non-religious non-spiritual
completely material “theory” of the creation of everything so God can be
excluded, and no support accidentally given for even a
small part of the Christian and Hebrew Bible’s Genesis (creation) statement: Fiat Lux, or Let there be Light. There are some, by the way, who “think”
if we analyze correctly the Big Bang theory and
macro-evolutionary theory, we can find support for the whole
6-day Biblical creation story. We just have to
recognize that from the point of view of God’s perception,
Time is seen differently than we humans have
otherwise “measured” it.
What this history of science reveals
is that a lot of our large ideas come from a tendency to
just make stuff up. Today
we don’t know much more than we did
when science started taking things apart without figuring
how they actually work together - which clearly
they must.
Light is here. Matter is
here. We are here.
All of it now. The deep past
is beyond our empirical vision. If we
empirically investigate mind we will discover spirit - in thought and
in thinking.
We will find as true what I said in my
original essay There is No Free Energy (again: note 21), and that when we
fiddle with electricity and magnetism to make our electrical
civilization thrive, we fool with the fundamental level of coherence
(necessary order) of all the matter on the whole planet. The extraction
of electricity (fallen light) from where it sleeps comes at a price. That ear-bud
in your kid’s ear has a magnet in it and is causing
decay, where and whenever the relevant magnetic field
sweeps through organic “matter”.
Think about it (23).
Consciousness
and Life. Everywhere, throughout all time. Heavenly Light. Fallen Light. Light becomes Plant becomes
Human becomes thought - becomes Idea-Light. In the beginning was the
Word, ... and In it was Life and the
Life was the Light of the World.
But that is not the whole story ... is
it.
It matters to me
for Matter to be,
and that I to Matter,
do matter.
Electricity is also a benefit.
On my desk is a lamp, nearly in front
of me. To the left of me, a computer monitor and a
keyboard. Hidden behind the monitor, barely visible, a
500 gig external hard-drive.
To the left of the monitor and about
three feet more distant, a 34 inch flat screen TV, set up so
that the line of sight lets me easily glance from one screen
to another. Further to the left some low book shelves,
with books of course, but also a Vonage phone terminal, a
cable modem terminal, and a wifi broadcast unit. On
the next shelf below them, a combination VCR and DVD player,
on top of which sits the cable DVR box. In this room,
my office, there is more: a microwave oven, lamps, phones,
speakers for the computer tower that sits on the floor.
Also a duct, through which comes heat in the winter,
and air conditioning in the summer.
Everywhere in the house electrical
appliances.
Three years ago I had my gall bladder
out. No electricity, no surgery. Over 6
years ago I had two heart attacks on the same day. The
details are unimportant, but no electricity no car to start
to drive me to the ER, and no way to put stents in my heart
later that day.
My main work is about human social
life, and secondarily about the American Spirit and Soul
(24). While I read a lot of books, all published using
electricity, yet it is what comes to me via e-mail
daily, and watching TV daily, that provides the cultural food I eat that fuels (nourishes) my thinking about the
social and about America.
Everywhere on TV: art ... dramas in
the form of old and new movies, comedies and dramas
made just for TV, news, endless news, talk shows, reality
TV, music on YouTube and Facebook, and Netflix stuff
arriving by mail two or three times a week. Streaming
video on Roku. A 46 inch flat screen in the living
room.
In my underworld temple-basement two
laptops, a huge external hard-drive to hold the over 240
videos I’ve so far made for YouTube. Two camcorders.
Power tools for playing with crafts so as to make
stuff for a faerie-land terrarium outside the
temple-basement windows.
All the machines, that run the heater
and air conditioning, and heat the water and distribute
power and cable and electricity from the generator should
the power fail, are down there. The underworld
temple-basement has exposed ducts and wires and pipes and
plumbing. Nails poking through from the hardwood
flooring above in the main house.
Metal, wires, cables, ... an
accumulation of treasures of power and work, that runs
pretty much endlessly in service to my life.
Electricity is Fallen-Light? Not
quite. Sometimes groups of spiritual beings sacrifice
in order to help human beings become what they might choose
to become.
This sacrifice can even take the form
of becoming atoms and electrons and protons, ... becoming
the basic stuff of the material world in which I incarnate
to accomplish tasks and work I cannot do between death and a
new birth. Imagine a tiny elemental being agreeing to
become completely passive - fully at the beck and call of
others' wills.
Only in my avatar-physical body,
struggling in the world of matter, can I learn certain
lessons. There must be resistance to my true
self - a world with hard things and hard choices, wherein I
cut my mental (spiritual) and psychological (soul) teeth.
Where I can suffer and pay my dues.
There needs to be dark spirits, and
dark gods to go with my own darkness, which I need to fully
confess I have. Just as the Sun-light is a wholeness,
so is the world of electricity and magnetism and chemical
laws, and atomic laws, and social laws and human frailty and
failure. One of my spiritual teachers wrote: There is nothing unclean in
the whole of the Creation.
The Underworld, the inner spheres of
the Earth, the realm of the doubles, of the dark side of the
force ... all that mystery is ruled by the harshest mistress
of all: The Divine Mother.
Why do you think mothers and women have such social power,
as well as being picked to bear the pain of birth. Such is
the power of these Divine natures that I could only give
voice to them in a poem (25).
Electricity gives strength and order.
It is not the only “power” hidden in matter as we all
know. When we steal these powers from where they
normally belong, we unbalance the world. The World of
Matter, ruled by the Mother, - like Her this matter-world
gives itself freely to our needs and wants. Will we
bother to learn to understand and honor these gifts?
Even the writer of the John Gospel
could not quite get the true craft of the Mother, for at
that time 2000 years ago the Goddess religions where
inhibited by institutional patriarchies:
So Electricity serves us, and allows
machines to exist. It also has culminated just in our
time in a very very special gift, what we call social media
such that led to the Arab Spring and other social growing
points.
This interconnectedness of seemingly
separate human beings, I have written of as an emerging
Global Mind (27) when visualized as a whole. Space
does not separate human beings from each other anymore, and
with the collapse of distance then time too collapses.
Instantaneous are our media resources. Social
transformations accelerate. The young are more
wired-in than the old. Hip-hop is worldwide now -
everywhere the same revolutionary musical essence, reduced
to its minimal zen-like core: just rhyme and beat.
As I worked at finishing this essay,
the night July 20th, 2013, my girl friend called to me to
look out the window by the deck and then to go out on
the deck. There was a quite large stationary cloud,
perhaps ten to fifteen miles to the south, inside of which
light was putting on a show. The show lasted a long
time - tens of minutes. The stationary cloud’s outside was lit from the right by the moon, just
a couple of days from being “full”. Inside it was “light”, flashing and flashing.
Moving about, perhaps dancing.
Sometimes the “gaps” in the “cloud”
made it seem as if there was there a face - a changing,
child-like singing and dancing “face”. But not always.
It was play, and it delighted the mind that could
understand that Beings were at play.
Normally we would call this lightening
something electrical. But in my studies I had been
helped to see that in the laboratory, if we want to create
an electrical discharge, all the related surfaces must not
be wet, for if they are wet, then the “electricity” is
grounded and the experiment to produce the discharge never
happens. This fact should cause us to question our
usual understanding of lightening and thunder.
What I saw this night was not just
lightening-like flashes inside the stationary cloud, which
lit it up from inside. Instead, I was seeing great
blooms of living light, ever changing in shape and form.
There was no thunder, nor as far was we could see no
lightening striking the ground below the cloud.
I went, 20 minutes later after being
chased in by mosquitoes, to my computer and called up a
quick link that gave me local radar. There was,
apparently, no cell, no collection of cells and no
indication of a dense enough cloud cover to even make
rain, within a hundred miles of where we lived. But if
I was seeing something 100 miles away, it had to be huge.
I had these thoughts: That the
Spirit of Nature was reminding me to tell the story of
atmospheric lightening - of the fact that to true observers
of the Spirit in Nature (see Lehrs again - note 8), thunder
and lightening are secondary phenomena that arises when the
Spirits of the Atmosphere create new water. We
know rain is fresh water, and that if the air is polluted
enough, we can get acid rain. But before the newly
created water becomes acid by absorbing atmospheric
pollution, it is newly created - truly fresh.
We assume the atmospheric processes
clean the water, in part because of all the rest of our
materialistic assumptions about Nature. That’s the
story we are told, but is it a true story of the real Spirit
in Nature and the relationship of light and electricity as
they manifest there?
Why did I tell this story about the
“cloud” and the “light” inside it? Because I’ve
learned to live in a world where “happenings” in Nature all
have behind them consciousness and being. There are no soulless “things” in
Nature. Nature is alive. It is our Friend.
We should have a conscious “relationship” with
It.
Hopefully this essay will inspire a
least of few of its readers to consider more. My lover
came calling tonight, and I have to stand always in awe of
It, grateful for the stories It tells, that come to me in my
mind, when I think in the right ways - when I tour and trust
the world of thought behind my eyes, and learn to see in the
dark.
The world hums. The Global Mind
shares. Electricity serves the human being who lives
in the center of the meaning of existence, just as does
Light - both aspects of the Spirit in Nature. In the
writings of some, there is Supra-nature, or beyond the
spiritual upper “boundary" of Nature; and, Sub-nature -
beyond the lower boundary of Nature. Above:
Heaven; below: the Underworld. Everywhere a world of
invisible - non-material - Beings.
There is one fact we have danced with, but which now needs to be made more clear. The human being is of Nature. We are - in thinking, as Rudolf Steiner’s puts it: Nature looking at itself. Only the human being does human thinking. Evolution puts us as the cutting edge of all developments on the Earth. Some call us: the Crown of Creation.
In and through us, via our thinking,
the invisible world - which includes our own spirit, sings.
We are the Children of the Sun, say the Hopi.
We are the Children of Mother Earth and Father
Sky. We are not perfectly good or bad, nor is the rest
of Nature. Remember one of my teachers: There is nothing unclean in
the whole of the Creation.
And, recall once more Emerson: “Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and
turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The
world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is
forever escaping again into the state of free thought”.
the foreplay has ended, ... next are teaching stories
to further one’s spiritual intercourse with the
Wind
(1) For details as
to the starry world, read my: “The Misconception of Cosmic Space as Appears in
the Ideas of Modern Astronomy” http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/space.html
(2) A delightful essay on the philosophical limits
of Darwin’s ideas as regards speciation, by Ron Brady, is here: Dogma and Doubt
http://natureinstitute.org/txt/rb/dogma/dogmadoubt.htm
(3) For a brief history and discussion of the
philosophical problems concerning mind and consciousness, see my The Idea
of Mind: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/tidom.html
(4) The Art of God: an actual Theory of Everything: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/artofgod.html
(5) Shapes in the Fire:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/ ; Joel Wendt’s
Theory of Everything Emporium:
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/joelwendt ; and, the foolish philosopher: http://www.youtube.com/user/joel232001#p/c/4CAB86F6A9E5F238
(6) We forget sometimes that Issac Newton was an
alchemist, and Kepler was an astrologer.
(7) See Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions for some sociology of science considerations.
(8) See E. Lehrs' Man or Matter:
http://borderlandresearch.com/book/man-or-matter
(9) For a pragmatic view of thinking and thoughts, see my Living
Thinking in Action: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/liveT.html
(10) See the work of Steven L. Talbott of the
Nature Institute, here: http://natureinstitute.org/txt/st/org/index.htm
(11) See the poem “the gift of the word”: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/giftoftheword.html
(12) The IDEA of the Thought World: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/thoughtworld.html
(13) see G. Adam’s Physical and Ethereal Spaces: http://www.scribd.com/doc/6372540/Physical-and-Ethereal-Spaces
(14) See Adam’s and Whicher’s: The Plant
Between Sun and Earth. http://books.google.com/books?id=E53HAAAACAAJ&dq=The+Plant+Between+Sun+and+Earth&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xWriUZ_6I8rc4APqtYDoAw&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA
(15) See the work of Winston Price here: http://www.westonaprice.org/, as well as Tom
Cowen’s work on medicine: http://fourfoldhealing.com/ Also work on
Biodynamic Agriculture: https://www.biodynamics.com/ as well as Man
or Matter - note (8) above. Especially see: The Nature of Substance, by Rudolf
Hauschka: http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=rudolf+hauschka&tag=googhydr-20&index=aps&hvadid=3280818781&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=19903077281180359181&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=e&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_8yyi0lgj_e as well, Georg Blattmann’s wonderful little booklet on
the Table of the Elements: Radiant Matter: decay and consecration. http://www.amazon.com/Radiant-Matter-Consecration-Georg-Blattmann/dp/0863150063
(16) See Georg Blattmann’s The Sun: the ancient
mysteries and the new physics http://books.google.com/books/about/Sun.html?id=zFHAJdTQB7cC
(17) See The Plant (vols 1 and 2), by Gerbert Grohmann: http://www.amazon.com/Plant-Guide-Understanding-Its-Nature/dp/093825023X
(18) See Gerhard Schmidt’s The Dynamics of Nutrition
and The Essentials of Nutrition: http://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Nutrition-Gerhard-Schmidt/dp/0938250221/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373793771&sr=1-3&keywords=Gerhard+Schmidt
(19) See again, my The Idea of Mind, note (3)
(20) See David Shaing’s
God Does Not Play Dice, for a well thought out refutation of
indeterminacy: https://www.amazon.com/God-Does-Not-Play-Dice/dp/0980237300
(21) There is No Free Energy:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/nofreeenergy.html
or http://journal.borderlands.com/1990/goethe-space-field-phenomena/
[CAVEAT: This essay was copied to the page it is on by a
program that reads printed text and makes it digital.
As a consequence, in this copy at Borderlands, the world
"field" has been translated many time as "held", so when you
read "held", please read it as "field". Thank you.]
(22) Uniformitarianism article in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformitarianism
(23) Speaking Truth to Power: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/truthtopower.html and The Mystery of Evil in the Light of the
Sermon on the Mount: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/mysteryofevil.html
(24) In Praise of the American Spirit - a page
of multiple links to many places: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/americanpolitics.html
(25)
See my America Quartet, especially the last poem: “a
gift from another’s eyes” : http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/americaquartet.html
(26) From: The Unvarnished Gospels, a translation from the original Greek by Andy Gaus, striving to leave aside conventional theological implications.
(27) The Global Mind: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/globalmind.html