1. Our Concept of Reality.
Thousands of years ago we thought that our Earth was flat like a platform; with heaven above and hell underneath it. Then we realised that it was spherical and thought that it was the center of the universe. No one had any doubt, because everyone always see the Sun, the Moon and all the Stars rise from the East and set in the West.
Our “reality” was that our Earth is the center of the universe. It is stationary and all the planets, the stars and the whole sky revolves around it.
On closer observation, our astronomers detected that some planets are not moving smoothly together with the rest of the sky. Some times they move slower, as if they are moving backwards, and then suddenly they move faster again to catch up and even passed the others. To explain the puzzling “retrograde” movement of those planets, many Astronomers came up with many theories.
In 270 BC, Aristarchus of Samos came up with a simple solution by putting the Sun at the center, while the Earth and all other planets are revolving around the Sun. Unfortunately, in those days his Heliocentric theory was beyond anyone’s reality. It sounded too absurd and no one took it seriously.
The preferred theory of those days was the one suggested by Ptolemy around 100 BC. Ptolemy wrote three perplexing volumes of books “The Almagest”, which is full of complicated geometrical explanations on how the planets and stars revolve around our Earth.
The days are long gone since we left the Ptolemaic system behind. But surprisingly enough, we realised that we held on to it as the truth for more than 1600 years.
Ptolemy’s geocentric universe
(Youtube video)
2. The Copernican Revolution.
In 1543, 1800 years after Aristarchus, Nicolaus Copernicus came up with the same theory again. He was more fortunate than Aristarchus, because the time was ripe and we were about ready to change our concept of reality.
However, it didn’t happen easily. It took more than a century and many many great thinkers like Copernicus himself, Descartes, Tycho Brace, Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler etc. up until Isaac Newton to refine the Copernican theory and to work on our new concept of reality.
Based on Newtonian Physics, our “reality” is that:
- Time and Space are absolute.
- Atoms are the smallest, indivisible basic building blocks of everything there is.
- The whole universe is made from atoms, and it is functioning according to definite laws like a giant clock-work. (mechanistic)
3. The 20th Century Revolution.
In the middle of the 19th century, the current scientific revolution had started with the discovery of the electromagnetic field.
Michael Faraday, who had no scientific education discovered the electromagnetic field and its induction law, which was beyond any scientific conception at that time.
| Albert Einstein: | It is fascinating to muse: Would Faraday have discovered the law of electromagnetic induction if he had received a regular college education? |
The Newtonian Physics, which is atomistic and mechanistic, could not accommodate the nature of fields, waves and their inductions property (known as “action at distance”). In those days, light waves were considered as travelling through a media called ether (similar to sound waves travelling through the air).
In 1887, an experiment was conducted by Michelson and Morley, trying to measure the speed of light in different directions. The hypothesis was: “if the Earth is moving through the media called ether, the speed of light must measure differently in different directions due to earth’s movement.”
The result of the experiment was very crucial. The speed of light was always the same in any direction. It created a lot of controversy amongst scientists, but at the end, the conclusion was that “Ether does not exist”.
The Michelson Morley experiment gave the death sentence to the etheric hypothesis, and lead to the birth of Modern Physics.
| Albert Einstein: | Matter is regarded as being constituted by region of space in which the field is very intense . . . . . . . . . . There is no place in this new kind of Physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality. |
At the turn of the century, Modern Physics was born, with the Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics as the two major pillars supporting it. The Newtonian Physics was proved to be limited and only valid for macroscopic objects – things we can see, touch and smell.
We started to realise that our mechanistic concept of reality, based on Newtonian Physics, is crumbling, but science couldn’t help us in giving us a clear new picture of reality.
In the last few decades many many theories have come up, but instead of getting clearer, our picture is getting more and more “blured”. Science, especially Physics and it’s language of mathematics, becomes more and more complex beyond layman’s comprehension. On the other hand, we are confronted with more and more phenomena, which science could not explain and prefers to ignore.
History tells us that we haven’t learnt from history, and probably we are now re-experiencing the days of Aristarchus and Ptolemy, before the turn of the millenia more than 2000 years ago.
We rejected Aristarchus and accepted the complicated Ptolemaic system, because we strongly hold our “concept of reality” that our Earth must be the center of the universe. Anything else was simply beyond our imagination.
One and a half centuries ago, Faraday introduced us to the reality of electromagnetic field and waves, which propagates at the speed of light – The reality of light. Einstein has proved that our time-space is relative, while Quantum Physics states that the whole universe is basically indivisible.
| Paul Davies: | The Universe is not a collection of objects, but is an inseparable web of vibrating energy patterns in which no one component has reality independently from the entirety. Included in the entirety is the observer. (Bell’s theorem on the indivisibility of the Universe.) |
Unfortunately, the physical world as we know it, with physical matter in our time-space continuum, is our nowadays “reality” and we are also holding it very strongly.
We have learnt that atom is no longer the smallest indivisible building block of nature. But it seems impossible for us to shed away our “atomistic” view, which has been the basic of our conceptual thought since we started to think thousands of years ago.
Instead of taking on the new concept of reality, we just replaced atoms with sub-atomic particles to keep our atomistic or now “particle-istic” view intact.
4. Breaking the barrier
Turning the “Frame of Reference” around.
2000 years ago, Ptolemy tried to explain the “heavenly” phenomena in a very complicated way based on the “geocentric” view. It was accepted as the “Truth” for 1600 years, only because it came “in-line” with the contemporary common “reality”.
In 1543, Copernicus made the break-through, simply by turning the “reality” around and “viewed” at the whole planetary movement from the the sky down. By doing this, he came up with a very simple answer.
Similar to Ptolemy, we are now trying to understand the cosmos based on our physical view, which is materialistic / atomistic and time-space confined.
To break through the barrier, we shall try to turn our “reality” around and look at our physical world from the reality at the speed of light – from beyond our time-space continuum.
Maybe we will find that there is a much simpler explanation.
Light is free energy whereas matter/particle is confined energy.
The “pattern-istic” instead of “atomistic” view.
At the speed of light, there is no such thing as “matter” there are only “patterns”.
Imagine the nature of light as in an optical telephone cable. There is a bundle of light travelling through the optic cable containing thousands of individual phone conversations at the same time.
As a bundle of light, they are all indivisible, but each phone conversation has a certain distinct pattern, so that we don’t hear thousands of conversations at once while we are on the phone.
Scientific Spirituality 
I’d like to raise a challenge that will at first be difficult to address, but should lead to greater depth of insight.
THERE IS NO SUCH “THING” AS ENERGY.
Consider the definitions of energy in terms of mathematics. First and easiest: kinetic energy is the product of mass and the square of the velocity:
E = 1/2 m v2
Now mass is manifestly real, as are motion, time and distance; that is, they are “things”, more accurately “observables”. Energy, being a product of these things, is only a concept, a relationship, a mathematical entity THAT HAS NO PHYSICAL REALITY. In other words:
ENERGY IS A CONCEPT IN THE MINDS OF MEN, NOT A PHYSICAL REALITY.
Perhaps the most important insight to be gained from this is just how many of our “scientific realities” are merely ideas, but are now so familiar that we have gradually come to believe that they are real. This is even more true when Einstein claims that “… the field is the only reality.” A field is a PURELY mathematical construct, and whilst electrically charged particles certainly BEHAVE as though moving within a field, every attempt to detect or explain the field itself has failed. Electric and magnetic fields are merely concepts used to model – and thereby “explain” – phenomena, but have NO PHYSICAL EXISTENCE OR REALITY.
It is possible, however, to explain electromagnetic phenomena without using the field concept, but this requires a far better understanding of the nature of space and time.
It is also true that when we speak of “energy” we often mean different things. “When I got up this morning I was full of energy!” Maybe; but not kinetic energy, perhaps potential energy, but not because you were perched high on a cliff, only because your psyche – your consciousness – was alive and full of beans. So our use of the word energy is often just a mode of speech. Everyone “knows” what it means to be “full of energy”, but very few can explain it.
I believe that it is time for modern Physics to take a far more critical attitude to these loose habits of speech if it sincerely wishes to advance.
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You are right indeed. Have a look at what Albert Einstein said about physical concept cited in Metascience: about Concepts, Theories and Map of Realities
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So if, as stated in the your-ticket-to-ride-summary, ‘there is no such thing as “matter”, but an inseparable web of vibrating energy’, and energy is not real, then …
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then . . . . nothing is real ???
According to Vedic tradition it’s “MAYA” (our common illusion)
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Sorry. I prefer a philosophy that agrees with commonsense: that matter both exists and is real; because if MATTER (sc. Tamas of the Gunas) is not real, then the word “reality” has no meaning.
This is why I reject all unification theories. Phenomena as disparate as the Physical, Psychic and Spiritual Realms cannot be “unified”. Each constitutes a distinct, semi-autonomous reality, with its own “laws”, perceptions and experiences. Seen from either the Psychic or the the Spiritual Realm, the Physical Realm DOES appear as an illusion, and the same is true vis-a-vis the others; but when you are incarnate in the Physical Realm, THAT IS your reality, like it or not. To deny this in preference for a half-formed philosophical notion simply renders you a victim of your own delusions.
Unless, that is, you are the Supreme God of religious fiction and created them. I have no such pretensions.
Physicists, on the other hand, deny the very existence of the psychic and the spiritual, and are delighted to play God for anyone foolish enough to listen to them. I do not. Men have pursued this and similar follies throughout history, and have endured the inevitable consequences. We’re most unfortunate to be living at a time when the consequences of many centuries seem doomed to appear.
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Thank you for stating your “reality”.
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@Viteny,
Further to my short answer above, “reality’ is subject dependant. It is what the subject patterns perceived from its interactions with the surroundings (the objects), based on the principle of resonance and inductions.
As human beings, our five physical senses have the same resonance bandwidth, hence we all perceive our ‘newtonian’ world the same way. It is our common ‘reality’.
Beyond our five physical senses, we all have different emotional and thought experiences hence different perceptions and beliefs that contribute to the makeup of our ‘map of reality’.
Our contemporary / academic science limit itself to our ‘objective reality’ hence Psychic and Spiritual realms are beyond their range of observation.
At the bottom of Chapter *Your ticket to ride” you’ll find “Balancing the Axis” between Exoteric><Esoteric. Understanding where our commonality stops and our differences starts is the key for our next evolution towards a harmonious cooperative coexistence.
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The sternest test of any philosophy is its successful application to practical ends. Following the overthrow of Western philosophy by science in 1927, Physicists adopted mathematical analogues as replacements for Physical Theory. The most stunning result of this was the atomic bomb, the groundwork for which had been laid prior to 1927. Following the Hitler War, Mathematical Physics quickly replaced Physical Theory, and promised further developments. Atomic fusion of heavy hydrogen would soon replace uranium fission as the world’s power source, providing electricity “too cheap to meter”, and would arrive within fifteen years.
Today, fusion enthusiasts are still insisting that fusion power is only fifteen years away; atomic arsenals have never disappeared; further accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima are inevitable; and the whole world has been persuaded by Scientists that materialism is the only valid philosophy. Many regard these outcomes as demonstrating the success of Scientism, the pseudo-religion which Modern Western Science has become. Personally, I demur.
Your last sentence proposes a way forward along a new philosophical path. Could you suggest how this can be developed into a program of practical activity?
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@Vitency,
This is the million dollar question and I do not pretend to know the answer.
The issue is million years old. The symbols on the Secret Doctrine we are dealing with is believed to be the 18 million years old teaching given to the Agarthan by their Guardian, The Ancient Builder Race. (According Corey Goode they are now here / in our Solar system, known as The Sphere Beings).
It is basically about the Law of Nature (read: Cosmos) and the closest but less ancient teaching is Taoism (Tao = The Way = The Way Nature/Cosmos works). Taoism is actually much older than Lao Tzu. It is a link to a certain Agarthan tribe, the ancestors of the Chinese.
During the Tang and Song Dynasties Chinese philosophers have combined Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism into a syncretic philosophy called Neo-Confucianism. (Taoism as their Cosmology, Buddhism as their Spirituality and Confucianism as their Ethics/Morality)
This Neo-Confucianism has become the “Way of Life” for most East Asians, and the overseas Chinese. Unfortunately it was banned in mainland China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but I think it is now being revived.
So probably the spread of this ideas will generate more resonance in China and Southeast Asian countries rather than Westerns countries.
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I’ve always wondered about the origins of the Chinese. They differ so markedly from Westerners that I don’t find linear Darwinism (viz. an origin from the “Original African Mother” of Western academics) at all plausible.
I spent a few months in China (Beijing and points north) in 2007/8, partly to investigate the reported re-emergence of Buddhism now that it’s officially accepted. What I saw was not encouraging. Many of the old temples are being refurbished, but often this is to attract tourism. Their understanding of its teachings that I encountered was superficial, dogmatic, and religious. I’ve always viewed it as a philosophy, NOT a religion, and believe that Prince Siddhartha would be horrified to find that people are worshipping him. What he would make of giant gold-plated Buddha statues and jewel-encrusted jade Buddhas I prefer not to think.
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