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:

T' asked the Captain: "what is spirit, to your thinking".
The Captain replied: "something you can't see ... its invisible, and because its invisible it might not even exist, right?"
T' continued: "Do you have a self, or something you think of as a 'self'?"
"Yes"
"Can I see it?  Is it your body?"
After a pause, "No".
"How do you know its not your body?"
"I'm not sure.  Its just that my self and my body are not the same things.  My self is more ... personal somehow.  My body serves my self, but my self doesn't serve my body.  I drag my body around.  I make it do things it doesn't want to do.  I guess that's the key - my being able to make my body do stuff it - the flesh - doesn't want to do.  I can override pain and tiredness.  Hunger.  I run it, it doesn't run me."
"Can you see Aryee's self, or Valentine's?"
After another pause, "No".
"But we treat each other as if we had this 'self', yes?"
"Yes."
"So, we can see each others physical body with our physical sense organs, but only with our thinking and feeling do we 'see' this self.  Yes?"
"Yes"
"Do you see me or others do this thing we call 'thinking'?"
"No."
"Yet, it is with this invisible thinking that you know you have a self, and with this invisible thinking that you believe others too have a self.  Yes?"
"Yes"
"So self is invisible exactly like spirit, and thinking perceives this invisible spirit in us and in others.  Yes?"
"Yes"
"Could anything be more simple?"

                                                               

                                                                                                                                                                 ~!~!~!~!~!~

In writing this tale of wisdom I hope to remain as much as possible in realms of thinking where we can ourselves clearly perceive the phenomena of the sense world, and the soul world; and as well develop our own spirit-thoughts with clarity.  I will as often as possible allude then to certain truths (with a small “t”), which I believe everyone can perceive and understand.  Often the most simple experiences, observations and conceptions reveal the deepest meaning.

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.   

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