A brief draft of Penultimate Cosmology

Greetings.

Many years ago, somewhere, though I can't recall precisely, I began examining the foundations of existence - not unlike many of you have, or will in the essential process of wrestling with paradigm shifts. I found myself connecting dots like circuits on a schematic: connecting Free Will, Decision, Dynamic, Static, Truth, Perception, Delusion/Maya, Mithya, Satya, and so on… So far, so good. Everything worked fine except for two struggles that vexed me until recently: The nature of Faith, and the nature of Light. Most recently, perhaps by mere fluke of overhearing a random speech by a rejected academic from the bible belt, a lucid interpretation of the latter become possible, and I've decided to elaborate here.

Trained originally as a Physics major, (before switching to the east Asian languages & cultures department) my confusion should come as no surprise with regard to any metaphysical aspect of light, having been trained to believe them as subatomic bosons and visualized as tiny packets of light or liquid energy droplets constituting the primary substance of Plasma. Obviously, trying to connect something so basic and materialistic to the insubstantial principles of Truth, Good, or Beauty, seemed entirely preposterous. All of the scriptures describing Light lacked any kind of substantial meaning. Examining old testament quotes confirms little value in the way of characteristics:

Light: begins with God saying so, who sees it; good; divided from darkness; shines; associated with but not synonymous with Truth; can be given; absent in the wicked; used for perception…

Not much to go on, in terms of metaphysics. As to that random speech - a fundamental Truth containing myriad potentialities, despite its simplicity:

The Darkness doesn’t move; Light does.

Darkness is without form, and void. You cannot grasp it, bite it, chew it, cut it, slice it, or sell it on Ebay. You cannot trap it, free it, hold it, sleep with it, or speak with it. While the last two are arguable, the essential fact remains, Darkness, in terms of what exists, and doesn’t. It has the characteristics of NOT. Arguing about the virtues of darkness seems a bit like “asking about the marital status of the number 5” (D. Albert, 2008 lectures: Physics & Philosophy). Arguably, Physicists know as much about darkness as Christians know about light, but perhaps there is so much more to be inferred by simply Aristotelian logic:

Darkness is without motion, and still. Being still, it is also quiet – silent. The definition of temperature – in terms of hot & cold is loosely defined as either motion or vibration of substances, such as monatomic gas, solids, and molecular gases. With the exception of ideal monatomic gases, all matter experiencing temperature also experiences vibration. In this sense, vibration is related to heat. Clearly where vibration exists, sound exists. Sound can be defined several ways as well, but heat – the transfer and thus equilibrium of temperature, has a similar characteristic to sound – which is not merely vibration in the strictest sense, but a transmission (of vibration) from one system to the next. For sake of simplicity, let it be said that heat, sound, and temperature are relatively the same effect, and all of them are rooted in something that is undeniable: Motion. The higher the motion, in all systems – even ideal monatomic gases, the higher the temperature, and thus the higher the potential energy for heat transfer, and the higher the potential energy for sound. Anyone with a drum or capable of rubbing two hands together knows the faster you rub your hands together the warmer they get. The faster you strike a drum, the louder the sound.

What do we then know about Darkness? Darkness is Static. It doesn’t move, and it doesn’t change. It is Light that effects a change within the Darkness. Without a light and matter to cast a shadow, the shadow in no way appears to move. Darkness does not seep into the light, or suddenly grow, expand or contract. Light does. Knowing then only one characteristic of Darkness – its static nature, allows us to infer the following:

Darkness contains absolutely no temperature. It is not even slightly warm, but possesses total, absolute cold. On the most natural level, we can experience this cooling by stepping out of a hot summer’s day into the shade, or go exploring deep into a cave. It is the light of the Sun that warms the Earth, and the light of the sun that creates the winds. Light is a kind of electromagnetic energy, like the Aurora Borealis generated by the Earth’s electromagnetic field interfering with the solar winds and storms. We can also infer the darkness is without sound, or vibration, for without motion, there is no vibration. Light on the other hand, is constantly in motion. When it ceases to be in motion, it transforms into something else.

On a subatomic scale, people often ask what substances are composed of. The answer is astonishingly simple: Motion. Creating a theory of vibrating strings in one, five, or 12 dimensions does not make the movement any less genuine. If the nature of light is motion, and the essence of every material is motion, then it follows the essence of every material is the nature of light. The nature of Light is the essence of every material.

The motion of Light is Dynamic Darkness. To say ‘Darkness as Static is merely Darkness, but Darkness as Dynamic is Light’ means what? If a substratum is in vibration, is that vibration is Light? Does this mean the Dynamic aspect of vibration in the substratum is Light? When Light is created in the Darkness of the Substratum, Some part of the Substratum must accelerate. An infinite line is parallel to a circle with infinite diameter. Light moves both as a line and as a wave, and a wave is merely a circle in motion. A circle lacking linear motion but constant torque is in constant acceleration, like spinning in a cyclotron the forces spin outward from the center pulling in every direction.

It is the nature of acceleration, not velocity which distorts the perception of time. A Person who is in a car for a long period at high speeds experiences vertigo when slowing down – vertigo of slow moving objects once familiar. Despite this, people are constantly moving at thousands of times the speed of terminal velocity, and only notice changes when changing directions – this is largely due to relative motion. Acceleration is Anti-Time. Creating Light thus begins with creating Anti-Time and if Light represents Acceleration, and Acceleration Opposes Time, Then Darkness represents Time.

If Light represents Change in the Substratum then Light represents Dynamic in the first principle, first order of the universe; however Dynamic also represents endless Change (and Power) on a persistent, consistent level. In this regard light which does not exist in an orbit and does not change or interact, is no more dynamic than darkness. Philosophically, light experiences change by emanating but the emanation is the consequence of the change of one state to the next, not the essence of change itself. While light appears to emanate in three dimensional space, it’s velocity of emanation is constant. Ironically, it is this constant nature that tells us light is moving outside its dimensional threshold. Light fades at rate of distance squared. If the total disturbance of light accelerated – if the substratum grew hotter with its expansion, it might sweep across the cosmos like a colossal Supernova, never losing its brilliance.

At the root of every objective human beings can muster, there is only one ultimate unifying factor. Happiness. Happiness can be expressed in myriad ways, among them, the ability to live with ourselves, the ability to go on living in the world, the sense of fulfillment, a sense of having examined one's own life, and becoming a spectator of time and existence - to name a few.

If Happiness is so universally sought after, why do people have so much difficulty uniting to find it? Surely the reason for construction of any government, nation, or community is to enhance the mutual happiness of its members, or at the very least, promises to do so for the majority with the hidden agenda of providing it for the minority. Despite this, in our endless quest for happiness, we tend to fall short. In fact, it could be said it has been far easier to find a saint than a happy man.

After some examination about the nature of happiness, it became a bit clearer. [b]Happiness is rooted in Change, quite literally, rooted in the new experience[b]. Some new age people have rendered the doctrine of I AM as "I am becoming". Oddly, Sin as a precept typically opposes happiness, and it appears there's reason for this as well. Suppose for a moment that sin isn't "evil actions" or "violation of some high laws" as we normally like to think of them. Suppose for a moment that Sin is actually an attachment? Entire civilizations and philosophies say things like money, desire, greed, and so forth are the root of all evil, but what is meant by claiming Attachment as the definition of Sin?

Uncharitable love is attachment, it doesn't have to be lust (but can be) to be a desire for reciprocation. If the reason you are doing something "positive" is to "get gain" then “you have your reward” and in terms of Karma, you really haven’t earned anything. When you do a favor for someone and then expect thanks, you lose any metaphysical benefit the moment they provide gratitude. Some religions have a specific break in their cosmological outlines of the afterlife for good people with, and good people without charity. For some this can be a bit peculiar, but even corporations understand the benefit of appearing generous in the public eye. When then is attachment, aside from attachment to the pride of your own good deeds? Attachment manifests itself in almost every “sin” and unworthy characteristic in an individual. If ignorance is bliss, then attachment to bliss is an attachment to ignorance. Ironically, fear – derived from ignorance is a kind of attachment often manifest as phobia. Obsession manifests as mania, such as pyromania or nymphomania. Greed is the easiest attachment to explain but extends in ways most cannot see. Attachment is not the same thing as use. A person can rent a hotel in Vegas, but it doesn’t mean they plan on staying permanently. I mention this because many ascetics have a false sense of what attachment is, and become attached to non attachment. Such ascetics have been known to lift their arms above their heads to the point of atrophied limbs, to abuse themselves with whips and scourges to abate the desires of the flesh, or even starving themselves to death as new members of the breatharian movement. Siddhartha concluded life was suffering, and the purpose of enlightenment, to reaching Nirvana was to attain an end to that suffering. Unfortunately, this long term objective leads to a completely different kind of attachment, known as escapism. The root of suffering comes in two forms.
The first is deception, and its offspring, ignorance. The second is attachment, and its offspring, slavery. In elementary school, they teach knowledge is power. In college they teach power is the ability to compel others to do what they would not do otherwise under their own volition – i.e., force. While these seem like perfectly legitimate definitions of power, let’s put forward two alternative definitions, and let the reader consider for themselves the benefit of such pursuits.

Power is the Ability to change your own circumstances
If you are alone, the power to convince others to do what you want has no meaning. If you have knowledge of your destiny but cannot change it, you are nothing but a marionette in the hands of fate.

Power is the product of Free Will Multiplied by Wisdom
A person without control over themselves, no matter how strong, fast, rich, or endowed, is still impotent if they do not decide for themselves what to do with it. A golden cord can bind a man to a post as easily as any rope or chain.
Wisdom empowers every opportunity for choice – you can send a wise man to perform a task with no instructions, and he will accomplish your task for you without problems; you can send a fool with precise instructions on how to deal with every conceivable obstacle and he will find a way to fail. If freedom or wisdom ever become completely vanquished, no matter how great the other virtue, the product is still empty and meaningless.

I am fond of saying “we are choice”. As in, the essence of an individual is not necessarily intelligence, or consciousness, but the process of making transitions and selections between existing states and future states. When you kill a person’s body, you are restricting their mobility and power to act, to decide, and in this way, you are injuring their body and limiting their choices. – Scars limit a career at modeling, crippling someone limits choices at labor and athletics. Blinding someone presents myriad problems; brain damage more than even Archimedes would desire to enumerate. Yet stripping someone of their free will has a similar effect on the very essence of a person’s being. If you could imagine your Free Will as a Tree, every law, every attachment, every restriction would be like some landscape artist slicing off another limb. All across the world you’ll see trees totally butchered, wilting, and eventually dying, as people attempt to force them to conform, mutilating their forms with disastrous consequences.

When someone sets up a list of priorities in their lives, they are tying themselves down in ways they cannot possibly fathom. Choice breeds choice, as a healthy tree bears fruit. By setting up priorities, a person begins to lose the ability to be decisive, to “wing it”, to “weather the storm”. The priorities combine with the attachments of obsessions with the self and others, of pride in one’s own good deeds and great accomplishments, of manias that draw us near like a gravitational whirlpool, and of phobias that send us fleeing like a street sign spun from an F-5 twister. These connections, along with our memories, form the lattice of the Eidolon, the Ego of identity that pretends to be conscious, but acts as little more than a few thousand lines of fancy code, incapable of creative or coherent thought. Is it any wonder in finding exactly what we think we need, we rapidly begin to lose interest? Are our attachments so invisible that only in losing them do the chains begin to weigh us down? How does addiction even begin?

Here’s an excerpt from a previous discussion in the winter of ‘05:

Quote:

---

“We learn by analyzing and reflecting upon the consequences of our actions. If we are forced to take all of our actions, our ability to learn about the process of decision making becomes nullified.

When you remove your own choices, you are committing suicide. Why? Because you are killing choice. You are choice, therefore, you are killing your own identity. So when you make a choice that closes off other choices, such as becoming an addict, or getting yourself placed in prison, you are committing a crime upon yourself.

When the actor becomes acted upon, there is a loss of choice.

for example, you begin at an amusement park. There are 22 rides. You first begin by choosing one of them. You enjoy the ride, because it brings you an experience. You then say "I liked that!"... you have stepped forward with a judgment. "Let's do it again!". You have then stepped forward with an addiction.

By generating the experience, you are the actor, you created the action, you are the master of the situation. BY repeating the experience because of Desire,
Desire generates the experience, you become a subject of the object.

The servant becomes the master.

When you repeat an experience, it is valued at a fraction to the occasion of its repetition. For example, when you eat a chocolate bar, the second one of the same variety is not as good as the first, the 4th is not as good as the first two, the 8th is more unpleasant, and the 16th may get you sick.

Acting upon Others
The first great deception is that you are somehow separate from the rest of the universe. The universe is separated in degrees of Choice; the authority of Choice is predicated by Intelligence, Sentience, and Wisdom. These three forces combine to form a measure of Judgment, or "Reason". In the Hebrew, the Word for judges was "Elohim" or "gods".
So when the serpent told Adam and Eve that they would become as God by eating the fruit of knowledge, it meant that they would become capable of being judges between choices, bitter and sweet, creating polarity. Once two options exist, choices can be made, judgment can take place.

A good choice is one which creates more choices.
A bad choice is one which removes choices you already have.”

[large excerpt removed]

Why do people get addicted?

The body and mind have a fading rate of exposure, based upon environment and background. This can be seen as a sort of "evaporation level" such as how long it takes a damp table surface to become dry.

the core of an individual is driven to have experiences, to present itself with learning opportunities. The more intense the experience, the greater the opportunity to learn. Literally, the Higher Self chooses to exist as mortal to have experiences, and the choice to have experiences is made so that Wisdom can be attained.

Wisdom governs the relationship between Truth and Choice, which takes us back to the primordial levels of existence.

So, when you are on earth, or even in space, making choices, your goal is to gather as much experience as quickly as possible, so that greater wisdom can be learned.

Bland foods, for example, have a rapid "fading rate" and a very low "peak" intensity. Stronger flavors leave a deeper impression because of their contrast, after taste remains and generates a second experience. The same applies to adrenaline, to opium, to speed, to sex, to Heroine.

The "high" that people experience, whether from nymphomania, or masochism, is the compressed intensity of experience. When a person fails to properly digest the experience the first time, they wish to repeat the experience. By digesting the experience, we mean "learning all of the wisdom from it".

For example, many people are fools. A Fool is a person who lacks wisdom. When a fool experiences something that should teach a lesson, they exit the experience having learned little or nothing. Addiction is therefore a subconscious attempt at exploring the missed opportunities of the previous experience.

This is the problem of addictive substances and intense experiences: the more intense the experience, the more wisdom potential it possesses, and problematically, the more difficult it is to sort out all the lessons.

You will find that if an addict of a substance were some how kept alive and forced through endless heights of that experience, eventually, they would grow tired of it. The problem with toxic experiences: the tend to kill people before they acquire all that they need to know.

When a person surrenders themselves to an experience in a quest for wisdom (such as pleasure or pain) they lose free will. Part of losing their choices comes with the consequence of failing to accomplish other experiences through other choices and opportunities.

So when you wake up, wishing to go back to the dream, possibly quite emotionally disturbed, it represents an extremely intense experience and opportunity for wisdom, possibly through pleasure or pain - BUT, you have woken up, and have to move on with your life.

Herein, a person has to "Let Go"

---

Obviously, happiness being the offspring of change, has very little to do with an addiction – the attempt to extract a new experience out of repetition. Likewise, attachments in general create difficulty in changing, because we become both physically and spiritually sedentary. People, who mistake their perfect worlds – Republics, Utopias, Cities of God and so forth – for happiness, do so because it is such a drastic change from their current experiences. Young children play at evil with good parents, just as young princes turn against their wicked parents becoming rebels and saints. Old men dwell on suicide and perversion because Ennui consumes them with monotony. Thrill seekers diverge into two categories – those who have seen and done it all, and grow tired; and those who become addicted to adrenaline, endorphins, and other neurological or even dietary chemicals found in extreme doses surging through the bloodstream.

Even the notion of “be happy with what you have” is a loaded statement – while it is entirely possible to be happy with what you have, unless you actually do something to change, your ecstasy will twist eventually from bliss to torment. While a circle has in it’s boundary infinity, orbit, and acceleration representing some measure of change, a circle also represents continuity, eternity, and stasis. A circle thus represents something which never explores anything but itself – the microcosm, while a line stretches infinitely in two directions, but never changes, never exploring itself, representing the macrocosm. Many of you already know, the circle is the feminine counterpart to the masculine line.

So what is the product of a Spiral? It expands outward from its own bound, and accelerates as it changes, but it always repeats the cycle of returning, yet in each return, it has changed. Sacred Geometry illustrates this spiral and mathematically it is called Phi, or Fibonacci’s Sequence. Understanding the divine proportion is the first step to understanding the implications of coincidentia oppositorum of the internal and external worlds. The exploration of the outer world is one kind of happiness, the exploration of the inner world is another kind of happiness. The delusion of the inner world is ego; the delusion of the outer world is materialism. The Grail of the inner world is Gnosis of the Daemon, or Knowing the Aatmaan, the Grail of the outer world is uniting with others and Gnosis (in the Sufic sense) with the Highest.

Your use of darkness as immobile is flawed, it has a velocity relative to the light, it is moving - entirely dependant upon what reference frame it is judged in.

Furthermore, I would posit that a void and darkness are similar in this belief system. Metaphysically, however, a void is a strange concept. To have a void as formless would be to assign a property to the void, our minds, as you know, cannot comprehend true nothingness, just as an ant has the illusion of travelling in a straight line when traversing a Mobius Strip whereas in reality it is also travelling in the dimensions above - we too are bound by our perceptions.

Even our logic, in fundamental terms we can express any thought process through symbols

A -> B, A -> (P AND NOT P) -> NOT A -> NOT B.

(That is a slightly expanded form of the argument reductio ad absurdum in as close to proper notation as posting will let me)

It requires the base assumption that one thing can follow another through some metric, of course it can, but said metric is arbitary. Our system of thought is not based in any intrinsic universal value, but is merely the self calibration of our evolved pattern recognition abilities. As such we will never be able to comprehend patterns we cannot recognise.

A true void is nothing, not even nothing. And our petty language cannot express that, nor can our minds - truly or succinctly.

To try is madness (and/or Sparta), to forgo making conclusions is ignorance.

By my reckoning, we're screwed.



The use of symbology to convey these ideas is admirable,

A void cannot exist :) because if a void means nothing and existence is something i don't think nothing can exist anywhere.
But a void could be explained as the lack of something,for example dark is not something is the lack of light and so on.A void could be the lack of energy in any form(just my opinion).

Shintashi let me ask you something :),what is the shadow made of?
We know how it appears we now how it manifests but from what is made,we have theories about the elements that compose light but what is shadow made of,shadow is not darkness because it doesnt disappear or is very affected if you use light on it.So pls answer me this :) what is shadow made of all the definitions of shadow are the way it manifest and appears but nothing of it's composition.

People confuse conceptual and physical voids. By a void I mean something akin to a propertyless nothing, not a physical vacuum.

It's been a while since I wrote this material. I'm rather surprised it's still here, and will be happy to answer some questions after I review the whole.