Dreams: Parables of the Night

Here's an article I wrote in 1990 that was published in a couple of Catholic magazines. Hope this helps! If you need more help with your dream, leave me a Comment here and we can look at it together.
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" When Joseph came to them the next morning, he noticed that they looked disturbed. So he asked Pharaoh's courtiers... 'Why do you look so sad today?' They answered him, 'We have had dreams, but there is no one to interpret them for us.' Joseph said to them, 'Surely interpretations come from God. Please tell your dreams to me.' " (Genesis 40:6-8)

The Bible uses may examples of dreams and their interpretations, yet today's believer has abandoned this practice into the hands of psychiatrists and mystics. Perhaps it is time for us to take another walk down this forgotten avenue of discerning God's will.

The voice of God

In the Book of Genesis, God's will was often revealed through dreams and visions. It was through Jacob's dream of the ladder at Bethel that God revealed himself to his Chosen People and established his lasting covenant. A few chapters later Jacob's son Joseph  was released from prison and raised to a position of authority in the government of Egypt by his inspirational ability to interpret Pharaoh's dreams. In fact, from the patriarch Abraham through the prophet Daniel, dreams and visions were used by God to lead and direct his people.

Early Church Fathers also taught that dreams conveyed spiritual messages. St. Clement wrote that in sleep the soul, freed from sense impressions, can reflect truly on its relationship with God. Emperor Constantine credited his spiritual conversion to a dream. St. John Chrysostom taught that God reveals himself to his people through dreams. And St. Augustine, whose own conversion was foretold in his mother's dreams, believed that dreams revealed both the inner workings of the believer's mind and his or her relationship with God.

"Dreams, more than any other thing, entice us toward hope," wrote Bishop Synesius of Cyrene in the 5th century, "and when our heart spontaneously presents hope to us, as happens in our sleeping state, then we have in the promise of our dreams a pledge from divinity."

Despite such divine authority, dreamwork became reclassified almost exclusively with witchcraft between the 4th and 5th centuries. At that time St. Jerome mistranslated the passage, "You shall not practice augury nor observe dreams" in the Latin Vulgate. Modern translations have corrected this error, leaving us free to examine our dreams in good conscience for their revelation of God's purpose in our lives.

Proverbs and parables

The New Testament records that Jesus spoke only in parables to all but his closest disciples. In the gospels Jesus explains that he speaks in parables so that only those whose hearts are open may understand his message and be healed.

"He said to them, 'Is a lamp brought in to be placed under a bushel basket or under a bed, and not to be placed on a lampstand? For there is nothing hidden except to be made visible; nothing is secret except to come to light. Anyone who has ears to hear ought to hear.'" (Mark 4:21-23)

Dreams too are clothed in the familiar language of parables. Parables and dreams both offer profoundly important insights in the form of simple stories. By learning to regard our dreams as our own personal parables, we may learn from them lessons vital to our education and growth.

A dream needn't have a particularly religious theme in order to be spiritual. Any experience that helps us grow toward personal maturity and wisdom is a step toward wholeness and holiness. While many dreams do reflect specifically on our relationship with God, most dramatize our relationships with family and friends and the important issues we struggle with daily.

Why we forget

Research proves that we dream for about two hours every night. The first dream occurs about 90 minutes after retiring and lasts only five to ten minutes. As the night deepens, our dreams become longer and more detailed, with the final dream of early morning lasting about 40 minutes. It is this final dream that we remember upon waking.

Many people mistakenly believe they do not dreams because they don't remember their dreams. This misconception often stems from their of frightening dreams. Learning to understand and come to terms with dreams rather than ignoring them is a far better way of mastering our fears. If we begin our dreamwork with God's help, we will no longer feel powerless before them.

Another common reason for not remembering dreams is our unwillingness to listen to the message. Dreams can be painful but truthful vehicles of correction. Situations or personal qualities we prefer to overlook in the daylight are often exposed in our dreams.

Mastering dreamwork

Like parables, dreams present truths whose enigmatic lessons can only be discovered by those with an ear to hear. Untangling the messages of these parables of the night involves learning the symbolic language of dreams and recognizing the parallels between your dreams and your waking life.

The first step in remembering your dreams is deciding that you want to remember them. Setting out a notebook and pen by your bed is a good idea for two reasons: First, the notebook is a physical reminder and commitment that you intend to remember your dreams. Second, dreams must be recalled and recorded immediately upon awakening or they will be forgotten.

In addition to the images of the dream, it is a good idea to record the feelings and emotions you experienced in the dream and felt upon awakening.

The next challenge is to translate the language of the parable into a message you can understand. This is accomplished by looking at each element of the dream--people, places, objects, actions, emotions--and meditating upon what each suggests to you. Write these associations down no matter how trivial or unrelated they may see. Once this is done, you can step back from the dream and see what message emerges.

Megan's dream

The following dream and its interpretation illustrates the process and its importance.

"I dreamed I was standing at the kitchen counter making breakfast for my family. I was making Barry and drink in the blender, adding more and more ingredients until the contents of the blender erupted like a volcano and spewed out a horrible green mess all over the kitchen. There was a policeman standing in the kitchen with his arms folded, judging me. I felt very guilty about the mess and didn't know how I could ever clean it up."

Megan, a full-time homemaker, had been married to Charles for two and a half years at the time of this dream. Charles' fifteen-year-old son, Barry, lives with them. Charles, an accountant, is a good provider but quiet and undemonstrative. He expects Megan to provide a stable home and disapproves of displays of emotion.

Megan's first step in understanding her dream was to record the dream as soon as she awakened. She also recorded the emotions that the dream stirred up in her: helplessness, embarrassment, and guilt.

Next, Megan drew a line down the middle of a page. On the left side of the page she listed each element of the dream. Across from each element she wrote down whatever association the element brought to mind.

DREAM IMAGE                        REMINDS ME OF
the kitchen counter                     my workplace
making breakfast                        providing nourishment
my family                                   means everything to me
Barry's blender drink                  blended family. mixed up.
too many ingredients                  couldn't stop in time
erupting volcano                         powerful, out of control (Barry)
horrible green mess                    sickly
policeman                                   enforces order (Charles)
arms folded                                 unfriendly, distant
my own guilt                               it's all my fault

Reading her dream from the right-hand column, Megan saw the family members' roles clearly illustrated for the first time. She saw herself as trying to be a nurturing mother to her new "blended" family; Barry as a pent-up, potentially disruptive force; and Charles as an unsympathetic lawmaker. She also recognized that there was some kind of "sickness" present, threatening to overwhelm their home.

Megan's dream presents the family dynamics in the form of a visual parable. She and Barry maintain an uneasy truce whenever Charles is home, but she fears the lid will soon come off. Like throwing too many ingredients into a blender, Megan fears that saying one word too many will cause a catastrophic emotional eruption.

"The more I thought about this dream, the more I realized why I feel so uncomfortable around Barry," Meagan told me over coffee in the kitchen. "He's been so sullen and moody lately that the least little thing might set him off, and I'm really afraid of that happening. I'd like to be able to talk with Charles about this, but he doesn't approve of such petty talk."

While Megan and Charles both desperately strive to maintain a peaceful home life, the peace lies only on the surface and does not penetrate into their hearts. Lack of acknowledgement of unpleasant emotions cannot bring about true solutions; it can only contribute to an unstable buildup of tension.

"Anyone who has ears..."

Of course not all dreams present such clear-cut messages as Megan's dream. Some "housekeeping" dreams merely deal with the leftover activities and emotions of the day without carrying particularly important lessons. The dreamer can usually feel the difference between dream parables and housekeeping dreams by the sense of urgency and importance a dream parable conveys.

Even embarrassing or shameful dreams are fit subjects for recollection and prayer. The danger in these dreams comes not through remembrance of the dream itself, but by ignoring the dream and denying acknowledgment of our true human condition.

When King Nebuchandnezzar dreamed the frightening "dream of the tree" that foretold his insanity and the loss of his kingdom, Daniel understood that God was issuing a warning to the king. The dream's message indicated that the king needed to acknowledge God, and not himself, as the supreme ruler of his kingdom. Daniel encouraged the king to heed the message of the dream in order to avert the impending tragedy: "Therefore, O king, take my advice; atone for your sins by good deeds, and for your misdeeds by kindness to the poor; then your prosperity will be long" (Daniel 4:24). Nebuchadnezzare chose instead to ignore God's warning and so continued on the path leading to his illness.

Matthew recorded a dream in the very first chapter of his Gospel. It seems there was a man betrothed to a young virgin who learned the disturbing news that his beloved was with child. Not wanting to shame her publicly, he considered sending her secretly away. An angel appeared to him in a dream and told him not to fear marrying her.

"For it is through the holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins" (Matthew 1:20-21).

Joseph heeded the message of his dream and took Mary to be his wife.

What lessons might God be holding for you in your dreams? You will never know unless you listen.
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For more on Dreams, look at these two other articles from this blog:

A Simple Explanation of Dreams

Personal Note: A Childhood Dream of God         

Some Beautifully Rotating Tori from the Web

One of the blog's readers shared these lovely images with us. Thanks, Tony!

www.abzu2.com

The rotating torus gif above closely resembles the torus I see in my mind. This is the flow direction indicated by my drawings. Up over the equator and down into the singularity from the top. Looking through the middle, you can see the energetic center point (what I call "ananda-joy") exploding outward onto the skin to roll back around again. In my Simple Explanation model, some of the force explosion is also diverted into the torus's interior, creating ordinary matter.  Looking at the flow, you can see how the information coming in from the top is all "potential" while the energy exploding out the bottom is "history." The center point is "here and now" aka "observation."

http://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com/2011/11/simple-cosmology-of-universe.html

http://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com/2011/11/simple-cosmology-of-universe.html

http://s579.photobucket.com/user/taffgoch/media/Torus_Spiral.gif.html

The above inside view of the torus is interesting to me because I haven't thought of the energy spirals as riding up horizontally like that. In my diagrams, the energy always comes up the sides in straight lines or lazy spirals, the same way patterns wrap around fruit. One thing I really like about this view is that we are standing "inside" the torus, looking from one wall over toward the other wall. In my writing, I call this area the "chewy blue middle." 

http://www.horntorus.com/illustration/torus_gifs.html

Here we see the straight lines of historical information emerge from the bottom and wrap around to the top to reposition themselves as potential for the next go-around.   The page where this gif came from has several beautiful tori gifs, if you want to go and see more. 

Thanks again, Tony!

Process Notes: Cyd's Psychic Test Results and Upcoming Book Talk

I'm giving my first San Diego-area book talk on Saturday, January 24th, 1 PM. It will be at a place called Kindred Journeys, at 510 North Coast Highway, in Oceanside, California. Come on out and bring your friends!

Meanwhile, I was poking around Kindred Journey's website and came across this Free Psychic Test. I guess I passed. Here are the results:

 

cyd's Result: Shaman / Healer / Empathic on quiz: Free Psychic Test

You are a natural healer. The Shamanic path is a connection to nature and the spirit energy of the universe. The Intuit sense to connect all to space and time while being grounded is the Shaman healers greatest gift. The Shaman knows how to use the universal energy links for healing and vision while remaining balanced and in tune to Mother Earth. If you have the Shamanic gift you can increase it by exploring animal totems and their spiritual lineage to all that exist. You may even want to pursue the holistic healing path connecting mind, body and soul to the benefits of natures remedies such as herbs, oils, toning and meditations
The Empathic person will have the ability to feel and sense knowledge through an energy exchange. You may even see colors in a person's Aura or be able to pick up their moods and thoughts while standing near them. This gift can be a benefit by bringing wisdom and energy to you, but this gift can also absorb other peoples problems and negative emotions. The Empathic person must constantly cut etheric cords of energy in order to remain grounded and balance their own spiritual being. One way is to understand energy healing and touch. A great avenue for this gift would be as a healer or spiritual counselor. You can gain knowledge in this area by studying holistic medicine.

Quiz School

Take this quiz & get your result

Free Psychic Test » Quiz Maker

Here I am with my two favorite animal totems--my very own fu-dogs, Franny and Zoey. With husband, Gary.

 

More Slinky Art

More photos from my iphone. Slinkys nested together make a great model for nesting tori. Torus is another word for donut. Aren't these lovely?

nested slinkys; cyd ropp

nested slinkys; cyd ropp

nested slinkys; cyd ropp

nested slinkys; cyd ropp

nested slinkys; cyd ropp

Yeah, that's me with the art on my head. I call it "Toroids on the brain."

Simple Explanation of Alignment of Quasar Polarization with Large Scale Structures

As reported in Science News November 20, 2014, "Galaxies may be aligned across 1 billion light-years," raising questions about the formation of large scale structures in the universe. 

ESO/M. KORNMESSER

Here is their report:

The cores of several distant galaxies, spread out across roughly 1 billion light-years, appear to mysteriously align with one another. If confirmed, the new observations could be a hint of some unknown mechanism that shapes the largest structures in the universe.

Damien Hutsemékers, an astrophysicist at the University of Liège in Belgium, and colleagues used the Very Large Telescope in northern Chile to measure the orientations of 19 quasars, blazing disks of gas that swirl around supermassive black holes in the centers of some galaxies. Each of the quasars lives in one of four groups that are about 13 billion light-years away and centered on the constellation Leo. Within the groups, powerful jets of charged particles that spew from the quasars seem to point in nearly the same direction, the researchers report November 19 in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The conclusions are on shaky ground, says Mike DiPompeo, an astrophysicist at the University of Wyoming. With only 19 quasars, the alignments could be just a coincidence. But even with a small sample, he finds the results intriguing and worthy of further investigation. It would be surprising, he says, if quasars knew how their neighbors were aligned. 

Citations:  D. Hutsemékers et al. Alignment of quasar polarizations with large-scale structures. Astronomy & Astrophysics. Published online November 19, 2014. doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/201424631.

For my own Simple Explanation of a toroidal mechanism that can explain this alignment of quasars, please read my article concerning a similar puzzling alignment of planetary nebulae in our own galaxy.

A Simple Explanation of Starless Galaxies

I have thought for some time that “empty” space is actually populated by a matrix of dark-energy vortices scattered throughout our universe. These dark energy vortices have weak gravitational fields that can attract ordinary interstellar material. Sometimes these vortices and their associated toroidal bubbles remain small and dark. Other times the dark-energy bubbles grow into gigantic proto-galaxies of weakly captured intergalactic dust which eventually form standard galaxies once the matter redistributes itself into stars and their satellites, in accordance with ordinary gravitational laws and fluid dynamics. 

The nearly starless galaxies referred to in the following article could be these very proto-galaxies observed during the process of formation. This observation is more evidence for my hypothesis.

Here is a reprint of an article published this week in Science News.

BARELY THERE  A faint galaxy, seen in the center of a Hubble Space Telescope image, is about the same size as the Milky Way but has relatively few stars. K. Cook et al., NASA, ESA

News

Astronomy

Nearly starless galaxies found in nearby cluster

New class of galaxy could lead to better understanding of dark matter

By Christopher Crockett

1:24pm, November 5, 2014

Not all galaxies are filled with stars. Astronomers have discovered a horde of nearly starless galaxies each about the size of the Milky Way. How they formed is a mystery, and they imply that there are more ways for a galaxy to evolve than previously imagined.

Pieter van Dokkum, an astronomer at Yale University, and colleagues stumbled across 47 galaxies that stopped forming stars long ago. The stars in each galaxy that remain— about 0.1 percent of the number in the Milky Way — are spread throughout a sphere roughly the size of a typical spiral galaxy. A stargazer living in one of these galaxies might see only a few stars at night, says van Dokkum. “You need something unusual to create a galaxy like this.”

read original article here

Fractal Cloud of Monarch Butterflies

A massive cloud of monarch butterflies heading south for winter through St. Louis, Missouri, looks like a giant butterfly. A nice example of nature replicating patterns up and down scale. The small white lines on the chart indicate counties. This butterfly cloud is huge.

Gigantic cloud of monarch butterflies crossing Missouri.

In fractal terms, you could say the cloud is a fractal iteration upscale of the butterfly. The wings are obvious, and it even replicated the antennae and body! In the third panel where you can barely see the cloud, the butterflies are probably wings down in unison flapping and not reflecting the radar.

Laniakea Supercluster New Home for Milky Way

Look at how beautiful this imagery is for the latest ginormous bubble discovered in our neck of the universe. Looks a lot like a giant breast with milk ducts, doesn't it? Gives another meaning to "milky way."

According to the Simple Explanation's story of creation, there are torus-shaped eddies of gravity and energy scattered throughout the universe, ranging in size from tiny to gigantic. This Laniakea would be one such example of a giant vortex that grabbed interstellar particles from the earliest expansion and pulled them into this local system. The toroidal vortex for this large system can be seen on the surface.

Here's a short animation of the cluster provided by nature video. It's stunning!

Below is a graph of the stellar material distributed throughout Laniakea. Now you can see how the matter was attracted to this region by the gravity well at the middle of its torus shape. There are also other gravity vortices scattered throughout, which cause galaxies to form.

According to James Cave's article in Huffington Post (9/5/14), 

"Until now, the Milky Way was believed to be one galaxy in the 2,000 that make up what's known as the Virgo "supercluster." But as the new map shows, the Milky Way's 100 billion stars are actually part of something 100 times bigger: a supercluster of galaxies astronomers have christened Laniakea, meaning "immense heavens" in the Hawaiian language.

Laniakea spans some 520 million light-years across. As you might imagine, all those stars contain a lot of mass. In fact, astronomers say the supercluster is as massive as 100 million billion suns.

How was this supercluster discovered? Researchers used an algorithm to translate the velocities of 8,000 galaxies that surround the Milky Way to show where they are in relation to one another and also how gravity from areas of dark matter causes them to move."

Simple Explanation Blog About to Hit Stats Milestone

It looks as though the Simple Explanation blog is about to pass the 100,000 hits mark. Thank you all.

Stay tuned for more frequent articles before too long. Our bed and breakfast has sold and so I will have more time available for writing very soon.

Simple Explanation Videos

I was just noticing that there are a lot of Simple Explanation videos over at youtube that don't show up here on the blog's index. So, let me pull some of them into this one article for you, so you can jump into them more easily.


Here's the longest and most comprehensive video. It's called "A Simple Fractal Model of the Conscious Universe." The talk takes 10 minutes, with 10 minutes of questions and answers.

This next video is a short parable I call the Miracle of the Spinach Leaf.

Whenever I walk in the woods with my dogs, I am happy to observe the way the trees grow. Consequently, I've recorded a series of videos that are parables/metaphors for human lives, as seen in the growth patterns of trees.

Here's episode 1:

Episode 2 of Life of Trees--another parable from trees about life course corrections.

Here's another short video talking from the Lessons of Trees series about a madrone tree's early life giving strength for later struggle and growth.

This next video is about how watching a waterfall reminds me of the way that material instantiates into our universe out of the zero point field.

The next video is about how my kitchen blender is another great metaphor for material instantiation, but this time with a focus on the vortex that falls into the singularity at the center.

Lastly, here's a little cooking demonstration that lasts about twelve minutes.
This isn't about the Simple Explanation in particular, but it was during this fruit salad preparation process that the Simple Explanation occurred to me.

Process Note: The Albion Inn is in escrow

Our bed and breakfast here in Ashland, Oregon, has found a buyer and entered escrow. If the deal continues forward, we'll be vacating here October 15th. 

Our first plan is to travel around a bit in the motorhome with the husband, dogs, and cats, stopping at bookstores along the way. I'm working on a lecture series of The Simple Explanation and hope to expound upon it to anyone who will listen. Stay tuned for further developments. Meanwhile, if your bookstore or group would like to invite me to speak, I'm ready.

Torus Videos from Cyd's Kitchen

The fruit and vegetables are great examples of toruses and toroidal flow. Here are a couple of short videos I shot in the kitchen this week. Enjoy!

A Simple Explanation of the "Hot Bubble" Around Our Galaxy

The galactic X-ray background is superimposed on an image of infrared sources in this image. The X-rays (white contour lines) were detected by NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer. White knots show very bright X-ray sources, mostly from black hole and neutron stars. | NASA/RXTE-COBE/Revnivtsev et al  

I've been developing the Simple Explanation's cosmology for five years now, here at the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything blog. I'm happy to report to you that the various assertions made by the Simple Explanation continue to be upheld by recent scientific discoveries. Now and then I pass these along to you so you can see the Simple Explanation's utility in understanding science.

The image above is a side view of the Milky Way galaxy, showing the galactic X-ray background in red and a number of bright, white X-ray knots. The accompanying article, reprinted below, describes how the red bubble surrounding the plane of the Milky Way was recently proven to exist. 

The Simple Explanation not only predicted this bubble, but further claims there is a bubble surrounding every object in the universe. Conventional astronomers believe the galaxy predated the bubble and that the bubble was created from an extremely powerful explosion near the center of the Milky Way. The Simple Explanation, on the other hand, thinks they've gotten the cart before the horse. According to the Simple Explanation, since its inception, the universe has been riddled with toroidal-shaped vortices of electromagnetic energy. It is the pre-existing torus that pulls particles together to form galaxies, stars, planets, and you-name-it. The gravitational disturbances predate the celestial bodies, they are not the result or by-product of the bodies, but the other way around.

I'd be surprised if astronomers don't find these bubbles everywhere they look, once they begin looking for them. I'll further predict for you right now that the bubbles will be found to be associated with the strange alignment of galactic axes already noted throughout the universe. 

Here's the reprint from today's Huffington Post Science blog, by Joseph Castro:

There's an eerie glow that fills the sky but is visible only to X-ray detectors, and now, scientists have discovered the sources of it.

About 60 percent of the mysterious glow, called the "diffuse X-ray background," comes from X-ray-emitting hot gas located within a large cavity of space that extends out more than 300 light-years from the sun, new research shows. The rest of the glow comes from phenomena within the solar system.

The finding may help scientists better understand the local environment around the sun, researchers say.

Scientists discovered the diffuse X-ray background more than 50 years ago. They later determined that the high-energy X-rays with energies higher than 1 kiloelectronvolt (keV) come from the active cores of other galaxies, but the origin of the low-energy X-rays (0.25 keV) has long been debated. [Strange & Shining: Photos of Mysterious Night Lights]

Initially, astronomers thought the low-energy X-rays in the sky must originate outside the solar system, from a very hot cavity of gas dubbed the "local hot bubble," which likely formed from a supernova explosion that occurred 10 million to 20 million years ago. But in the late 1990s, researchers discovered a phenomenon called the solar-wind charge exchange, which produces 0.25 keV X-rays within the solar system.

Many scientists believed this new X-ray source could explain all of the diffuse X-ray background, thus casting doubt on whether the local hot bubble really exists. "Whether the sun is surrounded by a big bubble or not makes a big difference for our understanding of the structure of the local region of our galaxy," said Massimiliano Galeazzi, a physicist at the University of Miami and lead author of the new study, published yesterday (July 27) in the journal Nature.

Galeazzi and his colleagues set out to see if the sky's low-energy X-rays came from sources inside or outside of the solar system. "Basically, what we needed to find was a way to identify one source from the other," Galeazzi told Live Science. "What is something that is particular to the solar-wind charge exchange to separate it from the local bubble emission?"

The sun produces a continuous stream of charged particles called the solar wind. When these particles collide with hydrogen and helium atoms in the solar system, the atoms absorb the electrons and release X-rays — this is the solar-wind charge exchange. But unlike with the local hot bubble, there is a seasonal variation to the X-rays produced from the solar-wind charge exchange.

As the sun moves through the galaxy, hydrogen and helium atoms from the interstellar medium — the region of space between star systems — enter the solar system. The helium atoms form a kind of high-density tail, or trailing cone behind the sun, from the movement. This results in a correspondingly higher X-ray production from the solar wind. During December, Earth is downstream of this tail; by analyzing the X-ray production of the cone, scientists can determine how much the solar-wind charge exchange contributes to the overall diffuse X-ray background that's recorded by an all-sky survey of X-rays.

To analyze the signature of the tail, Galeazzi needed a special X-ray detector not used in traditional satellites. He and his colleagues refurbished and modernized a detector last used in the 1970s to map the soft X-ray sky, and used a rocket to launch it into Earth's atmosphere for 5 minutes.

They compared their data with old readings from the now-defunct ROSAT satellite, which produced an all-sky map of 0.25 keV X-rays in the 1990s. They found that the solar-wind charge exchange contributed about 40 percent of the X-rays in the ROSAT survey.

"The rest must come from the local bubble," Galeazzi said. "What is important is that we now know that within the galaxy, these bubbles exist, and they contribute to the structure of our local region in the galaxy."

Process Report

At the start of our off-season I promised plenty of blog articles. That didn't happen to the extent I had anticipated. Ah well. My husband retired in December and now I find my spare time occupied with tandem activities rather than contemplation and writing.

We bought a motorhome, for example, and travelled with the cats and dogs for three weeks this winter.

Cyd and Gary's mini-Winnebago 31' motorhome. Plenty of room for people, dogs, and cats.

The bed and breakfast is for sale, so even bigger changes are coming as we decide what's next. I'm trusting the universal UC to keep this Simple Explanation ball rolling. I'll be as interested as you in where it all winds up.

I recently gave a book talk at a bookstore in Roseburg, Oregon. Had a small but delightful crowd. They told me about Marko Rodin's toroidal geometry. Gary and I are looking at his math system now. Any of you have familiarity with it?

Onward and upward!

cyd

New Gravitational Waves Discovery Refuted by New Analyses

Ah well. The Gravitational Waves Discovery has been refuted by new analyses that say the data can be explained by the confounding effects of galactic dust. I'll reprint the refutation article so you can read it for yourself. Here is a reprint of the blog post that disputes the findings: 

By Ron Cowen

Posted: 06/04/2014 9:57 amEDT Updated: 06/04/2014 9:59 am EDT

The astronomers who earlier this year announced that they had evidence of primordial gravitational waves jumped the gun, two independent analyses suggest.

The papers, published on the arXiv preprint repository, propose that the original analysis did not properly account for the confounding effects of galactic dust. Although further observations may yet confirm the findings, independent researchers now say they no longer think that the original data constituted significant evidence.

"Based on what we know right now, we have no evidence for or against gravitational waves," says Uros Seljak, a cosmologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of one of the latest studies.

Astronomers using the BICEP2 radio tele­scope at the South Pole announced in March that they had found a faint twisting pattern in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the radiation left over from the Big Bang. This pattern, they said, was evidence for primordial gravitational waves ripples in the fabric of space-time generated in the Universe's first moments. The findings were widely hailed as confirmation of the theory of cosmic inflation, which holds that the cosmos ballooned in size during the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

But the new analyses suggest that the twisting patterns in the CMB polarization could just as easily beaccounted for by dust in the Milky Way.

The papers follow a presentation three weeks ago by Raphael Flauger, a theoretical physicist at New York University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, who re-examined a map of galactic dust used by BICEP2. Flauger concluded that the BICEP2 researchers had probably underestimated the fraction of polarization caused by dust in the map, which was compiled from data from the European Space Agency's Planck spacecraft. Flauger says that when the dust is fully accounted for, the signal that can be attributed to gravitational waves either vanishes or is greatly diminished.

"I had thought that the [BICEP2] result was very secure," said Alan Guth, the cosmologist who first proposed the inflation concept in 1980, after learning about Flauger's talk. "Now the situation has changed," added Guth, who works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

The BICEP2 researchers have argued that the Planck map figured in only one of the six models that they used to examine the role of dust. But in a paper posted to the arXiv server on 28 May, Flauger and his co-authors David Spergel and Colin Hill, both of Princeton University in New Jersey, say that the five other models are based on a low estimate between 3.5% and 5% of the fraction of total polarization caused by galactic dust. Extrapolation from a more detailed map, released last month by the Planck team, suggests that the fraction is closer to 815%, Spergel explains.

With those updated numbers, he says,there's no evidence for the detection of gravitational waves. But a final determination cannot be made until a more precise dust map, expected to be released by the Planck team in October, is available, he adds.

In the other analysis, Seljak and Michael Mortonson, a cosmologist also at the University of California, Berkeley, re-examined BICEP2 data on how the polarization signal varies with the frequency of the microwaves it detects. The BICEP2 team had checked its results against data recorded at lower frequency by an older telescope, BICEP1. They found that the intensity of polarization did not change from one frequency to the other in the way expected if it were caused by dust, and concluded that the data favoured gravitational waves over dust by an 11-to-1 margin.

But Seljak and Mortonson say that the BICEP2 analysis did not exclude data on small spatial scales, or fractions of degrees of the sky. That is a problem, Seljak says, because on these small scales, gravitational lensing in which the path of light bends around massive objects exactly mimics the twisting polarization pattern that gravitational waves imprint on larger spatial scales.

Accounting for lensing,the primordial gravity-wave signal is preferred to dust with odds of less than two to one in other words, not significant odds at all, says Seljak.

BICEP2 co-leader James Bock, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, says that although his group's main paper has been revised based on many referee comments and resubmitted for publication, the evidence for gravitational waves is certainly not being retracted. The BICEP2 results are basically unchanged, he says.

Further observations may yet see the cosmic ripples emerge from the dust. It is possible that forthcoming data from several observatories including the Keck Array, a telescope at the South Pole built by the BICEP2 teamand the Planck team's full-sky map of CMB polarization will confirm that a signal is there, although perhaps not as strong as first suggested.

This story originally appeared in Nature News.

The article below has been refuted, although my Simple Explanation cosmology is unaffected by the news. So you can skip this part of the original article if you want to and go to the Simple Explanation at the end.

I'm pretty excited about this new gravitational wave discovery. On St. Patrick's Day, astronomers working from an observatory at the earth's South Pole announced they had captured the first clear images of gravitational waves that were generated a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

Simply put, astronomers have previously been able to "look back in time" by looking as far outward into space as possible. Here's what that means. Light waves travel at 186,000 miles per second. When you trace a light beam back to its original light source--a star, for example--you are seeing its emitting source as it looked when it sent the light beams forth, all those miles and years ago. Using telescopes at the South Pole, astronomers have looked to the edge of the universe and have been able to see back to the very first light beams generated by the Big Bang. These photons that are hitting the telescopes were generated about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. That's pretty exciting in itself.

But the big news is that scientists have now been able to see the effects of gravitational waves upon the earliest light beams--from before light beams even existed. Looking to the farthest edge of space and examining what is called the "cosmic microwave background," a kind of background noise left over from the Big Bang, astronomers have seen the impressions of polarized wave forms impressing themselves upon the newly born light rays, wave forms which must have preceded visible light and originated, not 380,000 years ago, but 10 to the minus 35 seconds, also known as a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Not only have they seen the visual patterns of these polarized pressures exerting themselves upon the very first light rays, they have been able to measure their size and their energy, as well as the size of the space that surrounded them. Here's the image:

Gravitational waves from inflation generate a faint but distinctive twisting pattern in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background, known as a "curl" or B-mode pattern. For the density fluctuations that generate most of the polarization of the CMB, this part of the primordial pattern is exactly zero. Shown here is the actual B-mode pattern observed with the BICEP2 telescope, which is consistent with the pattern predicted for primordial gravitational waves. The line segments show the polarization strength and orientation at different spots on the sky. The red and blue shading shows the degree of clockwise and anti-clockwise twisting of this B-mode pattern.   CREDIT: BICEP2 Collaboration

One of the most fabulous things about the measurements is that the waves are very tiny, small enough to be quantum scale. At this point in the beginning of time, the universe was expanding rapidly from the size of a single point to about the size of a small grapefruit. Theorists say it now looks as though those tiny quantum-sized pressure waves are the quantum parents of the cosmologically super-galactic gravitational waves predicted by relativity theory.

The quantum-sized gravitational waves are the physical proof linking quantum mechanics with the very large scale space dealt with in Einstein's general relativity. These two scales have been mathematically difficult to write into a single, unified theory. This newest finding of quantum-sized gravitational waves proves the universe of the very small and the very large comes from the same actual space and time and both contain the same basic forces, therefore the very small and very large must be fully compatible and able to be expressed in a single, unified theory.

This news is currently awaiting verification by another source. If proved true, this is the discovery of a lifetime, one that mathematicians and physicists have been seeking since Einstein. Cosmologists admit their confusion in the face of this news. The Standard Model needs amending to accommodate new findings concerning the universe. Primarily, it is time to figure out how gravitational waves could have propagated outward from the Big Bang--what propelled them in the first place? What exactly is it that "Banged"? And how does gravity turn from a repulsive outward force to an attractive force?

The Simple Explanation of Gravitational Waves: 

Please have a second look at the Simple Explanation's unified cosmological theory. I am happy to report to you that my theory continues to hold up as all of this new data comes in. The news is not upsetting this applecart the way it is upsetting mainstream cosmologists. Yes, I realize the Simple Explanation vocabulary doesn't sound particularly scientific, but if you can get beyond the language to the mechanism, you will see that this physics works. From the Simple Explanation book:

"Particles rush into our universe from the zero point field at the center, exploding outward, filling our universe from the middle. The outer fractal membrane presses inward to contain the energy exploding outward. Matter flows outward from the middle, repulsed by the energy streaming into the universe from the center, and coherence presses inward from the outer universal boundary."


This chalk drawing represents the way that an inwardly imploding force (like gravity) becomes an outward exploding force (like the Big Bang), and vice versa. Imagine that the outside skin of the figure above not only presses inward on the blue interior, but it attracts others toward itself, as it would if it were a graviton particle. Add a toroidal circulatory flow, as represented by the white arrows, flowing upward from the equator and over the lip into the funnel of the singularity. Can you imagine these forces in motion? Now get this, all of the force associated with the outside skin of the torus is concentrated down from the area of the exterior of the figure to a singularity at the tip of the inward funnel. If you are able to visualize this along with me, you will understand the extreme pressure of that type of concentration. 

In the Simple Explanation's model, the pressures exerted at the middle take a little hyperspatial twist there at the middle and explode outward into the interior of the torus. Here is the source of the Bang, as all that pressure pushes into our space-time continuum.

The Simple Explanation cosmology proposes that this primordial toroidal twist arising out of the singularity is the source of the Big Bang. This toroidal pattern has imprinted itself throughout our universe. It's my expectation that the theory of everything will be found to involve toroidal forces affecting all known relationships, from ordinary matter and energetic exchanges, to dark matter and dark energy.