Scientists are starting to catch up to the toroidal universe model

Here's a very good article describing one scientist's realization that black holes are actually dark energy stars. This is what the Simple Explanation has proposed for the past many years now. Jump to the end of this reprint to read my Gnostic take on dark energy. Meanwhile, here's the reprint:

Are Black Holes Actually Dark Energy Stars?

Why one physicist believes our whole understanding of black holes is wrong.

Nautilus|

• Jesse Stone

Black Hole vs. Dark Energy Star: When viewed from the top down, a dark energy star has a central opening, the donut hole. Chapline believes that matter and energy rotating around the central opening (forming the “ring of fire”) is the source of the astrophysical jets observed by astronomers in the vicinity of what most believe to be black holes.

George Chapline believes that the Event Horizon Telescope will offer evidence that black holes are really dark energy stars. Photo by NASA.

What does the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way look like? Early next year, we might find out. The Event Horizon Telescope—really a virtual telescope with an effective diameter of the Earth—has been pointing at Sagittarius A* for the last several years. Most researchers in the astrophysics community expect that its images, taken from telescopes all over the Earth, will show the telltale signs of a black hole: a bright swirl of light, produced by a disc of gases trapped in the black hole’s orbit, surrounding a black shadow at the center—the event horizon. This encloses the region of space where the black-hole singularity’s gravitational pull is too strong for light to escape.

But George Chapline, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, doesn’t expect to see a black hole. He doesn’t believe they’re real. In 2005, he told Nature that “it’s a near certainty that black holes don’t exist” and—building on previous work he’d done with physics Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin—introduced an alternative model that he dubbed “dark energy stars.” Dark energy is a term physicists use to describe a peculiar kind of energy that appears to permeate the entire universe. It expands the fabric of spacetime itself, even as gravity attempts to bring objects closer together. Chapline believes that the immense energies in a collapsing star cause its protons and neutrons to decay into a gas of photons and other elementary particles, along with what he refers to as “droplets of vacuum energy.” These form a “condensed” phase of spacetime—much like a gas under enough pressure transitions to liquid—that has a much higher density of dark energy than the spacetime surrounding the star. This provides the pressure necessary to hold gravity at bay and prevent a singularity from forming. Without a singularity in spacetime, there is no black hole.

The idea has found no support in the astrophysical community—over the last decade, Chapline’s papers on this topic have garnered only single-digit citations. His most popular paper in particle physics, by contrast, has been cited over 600 times. But Chapline suspects his days of wandering in the scientific wilderness may soon be over. He believes that the Event Horizon Telescope will offer evidence that dark energy stars are real.

This strange toroidal geometry isn’t a bug of dark energy stars, but a feature.

The idea goes back to a 2000 paper, with Evan Hohlfeld and David Santiago, in which Chapline and Laughlin modeled spacetime as a Bose-Einstein condensate—a state of matter that arises when taking an extremely low-density gas to extremely low temperatures, near absolute zero. Chapline and Laughlin’s model is quantum mechanical in nature: General relativity emerges as a consequence of the way that the spacetime condensate behaves on large scales. Spacetime in this model also undergoes phase transformations when it gains or loses energy. Other scientists find this to be a promising path, too. A 2009 paper by a group of Japanese physicists stated that “[Bose-Einstein Condensates] are one of the most promising quantum fluids for” analogizing curved spacetime. 

Chapline and Laughlin argue that they can describe the collapsed stars that most scientists take to be black holes as regions where spacetime has undergone a phase transition. They find that the laws of general relativity are valid everywhere in the vicinity of the collapsed star, except at the event horizon, which marks the boundary between two different phases of spacetime.

In the condensate model the event horizon surrounding a collapsed star is no longer a point of no return but instead a traversable, physical surface. This feature, along with the lack of a singularity that is the signature feature of black holes, means that paradoxes associated with black holes, like the destruction of information, don’t arise. Laughlin has been reticent to conjecture too far beyond his and Chapline’s initial ideas. He believes Chapline is onto something with dark energy stars, “but where we part company is in the amount of speculating we are willing to do about what ‘phase’ of the vacuum might be inside” what most scientists call black holes, Laughlin said. He’s holding off until experimental data reveals more about the interior phase. “I will then write my second paper on the subject,” he said.

In recent years Chapline has continued to refine his dark energy star model in collaboration with several other authors, including Pawel Mazur of the University of South Carolina and Piotr Marecki of Leipzig University. He’s concluded that dark energy stars aren’t spherical or oblate, like black holes. Instead, they have the shape of a torus, or donut. In a rotating compact object, like a dark energy star, Chapline believes quantum effects in the spacetime condensate generate a large vortex along the object’s axis of rotation. Because the region inside the vortex is empty—think of the depression that forms at the center of whirlpool—the center of the dark energy star is hollow, like an apple without its core. A similar effect is observed when quantum mechanics is used to model rotating drops of superfluid. There too, a central vortex can form at the center of a rotating drop and, surprisingly, change its shape from a sphere to a torus.  

In the condensate model the event horizon surrounding a collapsed star is no longer a point of no return but instead a traversable, physical surface.

For Chapline, this strange toroidal geometry isn’t a bug of dark energy stars, but a feature, as it helps explain the origin and shape of astrophysical jets—the highly energetic beams of ionized matter that are generated along the axis of rotation of a compact object like a black hole. Chapline believes he’s identified a mechanism in dark energy stars that explains observations of astrophysical jets better than mainstream ones, which posit that energy is extracted from the accretion disk outside of a black hole and focused into a narrow beam along the black hole’s axis of rotation. To Chapline, matter and energy falling toward a dark energy star would make its way to the inner throat (the “donut hole”), where electrons orbiting the throat would, as in a Biermann Battery, generate magnetic fields powerful enough to drive the jets. 

Chapline points to recent experimental work where scientists, at the OMEGA Laser Facility at the University of Rochester, created magnetized jets using lasers to form a ring-like excitation on a flat surface. Though the experiments were not conducted with dark energy stars in mind, Chapline believes it provides support for his theory since the ring-like excitation—Chapline calls it a “ring of fire”—is exactly what he would expect to happen along the throat of a dark energy star. He believes the ring could be the key to supporting the existence of dark energy stars. “This ought to eventually show up clearly” in the Event Horizon Telescope images, Chapline said, referring to the ring.  

Chapline also points out that dark energy stars will not be completely opaque to light, as matter and light can pass into, but also out of, a dark energy star. A dark energy star won’t have a completely black interior—instead it will show a distorted image of any stars behind it. Other physicists, though, are skeptical that these kinds of deviations from conventional black hole models would show up in the Event Horizon Telescope data. Raul Carballo-Rubio, a physicist at the International School for Advanced Studies, in Trieste, Italy, has developed his own alternative model to black holes known as semi-classical relativistic stars. Speaking more generally about alternative black hole models Caraballo-Rubio said, “The differences [with black holes] that would arise in these models are too minute to be detected” by the Event Horizon Telescope. 

Chapline plans to discuss his dark energy star predictions in December, at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. But even if his predictions are confirmed, he said he doesn’t expect the scientific community to become convinced overnight. “I expect that for the next few years the [Event Horizon Telescope] people will be confused by what they see.”

Jesse Stone is a freelance writer based in Iowa City, Iowa. Reach him at jessebstone@gmail.com.

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The Simple Explanation suggests that there is a toroidal force that feeds our universe information and coherence from the Universal Unit of Consciousness. The Simple Explanation hypothesizes that our space is seeded with tiny toruses kicking out information. These toruses are also kicking out coherence in the form of gravity, which attracts ordinary matter to itself. These energetic toruses are the seeds of stars and galaxies, and they throw toroidal patterns into the space surrounding the large objects in which they nest. The dark energy force counteracts entropy and it is causing space to expand at a more rapid rate than before.

Yesterday I ran across an article in National Geographic that expressed confusion over the roles of dark matter and dark energy in galaxy formation. "This Galaxy Has Almost No Dark Matter, and Scientists Are Baffled." Scientists had observed a "halo of dark matter" surrounding all galaxies and had hypothesized that galaxies are formed by dark matter pressing in from the outside and thereby capturing the aggregations of matter that form the galaxy.  But then they found this galaxy with no dark matter halo and that blew the theory of galaxy formation.

My Simple Explanation is that the reason there is a dark matter "halo" (read "torus") around galaxies is because the dark energy torus at the galaxy's center pushes the dark matter outward to the galaxy's edge, like a giant leaf blower blowing the dark matter out of the garden and leaving the carved out impression of the torus at the edge. The dark matter is wispy and easy to push around. The torus at the center is powerful, and it gathers the ordinary material to itself to build, in a coherent fashion, the objects that surround it.

The Gnostic Gospel identifies the dark energy as Logos and the ALL repairing the mess that started out as the Imitation. The Tripartite Tractate describes how the Imitation, the Deficiency, was only step one in creation, with a quick adjustment that halted production of the Dark Ones until a more "reasonable" form of matter could be produced that combined light with matter, leading to the eventual redemption of matter by mind and spirit. This will be simply explained in my continuing Gnostic Cosmology series. But meanwhile, you can see the evidence for yourself in the NASA illustrations included with this article.

By borrowing information from the unlikely source of an ancient wisdom book that lay buried under Egyptian sand for almost 2,000 years, we have generated several scientific predictions that will prove or disprove my hypotheses. This Gnostic creation story claims that the first material objects in our universe were dark matter. Light and ordinary matter followed later and began a never-ending dance with dark matter. And then, much later, about the time of our solar system's formation, the dark energy faucet turned up and began streaming coherence into our universe at ever-increasing rate, expanding the size of our universe. 

Reprint: The healing power of love

Here's an excellent article about the nature and power of love, reprinted from alternative physician, Keith Scott-Mumby.

Love As Healer Love As Killer

Some years ago, Kenneth R. Pelletier wrote a book graphically titled: Mind As Healer Mind As Slayer. Yes, the power of mind can heal. We all know that. And, yes, the mind can kill. Stress is probably the number one killer of all. If you are not happy, balanced, centered and grounded, you are likely subject to stress. Remember my own definition of stress, which “the difference between what you’ve got and what you wanted.” The wider the gap, the more stress you are subject to. We can say the same about love… and there's a science to go with it. Those who are loved, or FEEL that they are loved, live longer and enjoy better health. That’s why we sometimes talk about “vitamin L”! So why not Love as Healer, Love as Slayer? Except that love can never slay. Only lack of love (which is one of the worst imaginable stresses) can hurt you. So we are left with just Love as Healer! That’s what I want to talk about. First of all, what is love? We all think we know... Then on closer questioning, or deeper introspection, the honest ones among us realize we know nothing. Let’s take a shot at defining it. First, what love is not: Love is not need, longing or desire. To need or desire is to WANT. It basically means lack. Love is not lack. Love is a fullness and outgoing, a giving and enfolding. There is no lack. It is a state of abundance. That’s the difference between love in the spiritual or philosophical sense and love in the biological or sexual sense. That kind of “love” can be very needy and demanding. It’s more of a craving than a fulfillment. Lust more than satisfaction. Nothing wrong with lust and desire... Everything in its place; but to consider that to be pure love, just because it’s intense, is probably misleading. If you keep these two poles well apart in your own mind, then a lot of talk and emotions surrounding love begin to clarify somewhat.

Religious Ecstasy The highest kind of spiritual love may have no sexual element but can be extremely intense; ecstasy even. That’s the kind of love those deeply engaged in the pursuit of Being and deeper knowledge are likely to encounter or manifest. It shows as love of God, love of The Buddha, love of The One True God, Yahweh, Aphrodite, the love of Christ, or love of the truth. These are the religious adepts and mystics; Their kind of love is at the ultimate upper end of Being: serene contemplation, thrill, ecstasy and self death. St. Teresa de Avila, Hildegard of Bingen and St. Francis lived many years in close contact with this level of enlightenment. 13th Century poet and mystic, Rumi, wrote of it in his ecstatic love poems (written for a man, Shams of Tabriz.) John Donne (pronounced Dunn), the Elizabethan poet, hovers over it without actually pressing the GO button! Artists can manifest it. Michelangelo’s terribilità (driven force, almost madness) was clearly of that order of ecstasy and engagement. Dance: If you’ve ever seen the “whirling dervishes” (Mevlevi Dervishes), a Muslim sufi sect, you’ll not doubt that a person can pass into ecstasy, simply by prolonged, rhythmical whirling. The Mevlevi, by the way, owe a lot to Rumi. Let’s come back to earth and consider love for the ‘Everyman.’ As I said, need and desire point to a different phenomenon, most typically the “love” that arises from sexual attachment. It has a place, but it can hurt like hell, as we all know. The pain of love is built into a language and proverbs: “You always hurt the one you love,” or “Love is the most beautiful of dreams and the worst of nightmares,” or “Where there is love, there is pain.” [Spanish Proverb]

The Everly Brothers hit it beautifully with their song, which speaks to every tortured teenage heart, sick with love: Love hurts, love scars, love wounds and mars Any heart not tough, nor strong enough To take a lot of pain, take a lot of pain Love is like a cloud, holds a lot of rain Love hurts… Let me sum it up by saying that kind of love is driven by hormones and pheromones. It’s chemical. We are looking for something better. Not just romantic, sexual love.

Broken Heart Syndrome Have you heard of broken heart syndrome? It’s real. Its other name is ‘stress-induced cardiomyopathy’ and a new study shows that an actual heart attack can result from life tragedy, such as losing a loved one. Imran Arif, MD, UC Health interventional cardiologist, says the symptoms of broken-heart syndrome may be brought on by the heart’s reaction to a surge of stress hormones, and as a result, part of the heart muscle suffers damage. The newest study by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston shows that the day following the loss of a loved one, a person is 21 times more likely to suffer a heart attack, and the spike occurs even in people at a low risk for heart attack.[1]

The Healing Power Of Love We’ll pass on from sexual love to the “real” thing! Perhaps it is, as Ethel Specter Person tells us, “An act of imagination.” For some of us, it will be the great creative triumph of our lives. In its very nature as an act of the imagination lies the source of its power for both good and ill, for it can indeed exploit the lover’s illusions or delusions, but alternately can lead the lover to transcending truths.” [Love and Fateful Encounters, 1989] This is the kind of love that can heal, can save lives, can create wonder and delight. It’s true! I’ve quoted several times previously the interesting bit of research: In a Harvard study, researchers discovered that married men who felt loved by their wives experienced 50 percent fewer heart issues, despite having high risk factors like high cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes.[2] Not just men, either. A study from the University of Pittsburgh found that women in happy marriages have a much lower risk of cardiovascular disease than those in high-stress ones. Love really is good for your heart.

Prevention online magazine tells us that the benefits of love are explicit and measurable: The National Longitudinal Mortality Study, which has been tracking more than a million subjects since 1979, shows that married people live longer. Plus, they have fewer heart attacks and lower cancer rates, and even get pneumonia less frequently than singles.[3]

Put another way, a study done by UCLA researchers found that unmarried people had a "significantly higher" death rate than married couples who live together. Harvard University researchers also found that married women are 20 percent less likely than single women die of stress-related causes like heart disease, suicide and cirrhosis of the liver. As for married men, they're 100 to 200 percent times less likely to die of these causes than single men are. Love is healing! Some experts think it won't be long before doctors prescribe steamy sex, romantic getaways, and caring communication! That’s a whole lot better idea than pills and exercise! Yay! Have fun! (wink!)

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby The Official Alternative Doctor

Sources: 1. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-emotional-grief-heart.html 2. https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/marriage-and-mens-health 3. https://www.prevention.com/sex/relationships/a20435514/how-love-keeps-you-healthy/#ixzz2Zt8bXeaV

Reprint: The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

This is a good article about people who delve deeply into the nature of consciousness and reality. You may recognize yourself or someone else, perhaps a Gnostic or a philosopher of your acquaintance. Reprinted from the website known as "Aeon." 

‘Hypersanity’ is not a common or accepted term. But neither did I make it up. I first came across the concept while training in psychiatry, in The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (1967) by R D Laing. In this book, the Scottish psychiatrist presented ‘madness’ as a voyage of discovery that could open out onto a free state of higher consciousness, or hypersanity. For Laing, the descent into madness could lead to a reckoning, to an awakening, to ‘break-through’ rather than ‘breakdown’.

A few months later, I read C G Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), which provided a vivid case in point. In 1913, on the eve of the Great War, Jung broke off his close friendship with Sigmund Freud, and spent the next few years in a troubled state of mind that led him to a ‘confrontation with the unconscious’.

As Europe tore itself apart, Jung gained first-hand experience of psychotic material in which he found ‘the matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from our rational age’. Like Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Heracles, Orpheus and Aeneas before him, Jung travelled deep down into an underworld where he conversed with Salome, an attractive young woman, and with Philemon, an old man with a white beard, the wings of a kingfisher and the horns of a bull. Although Salome and Philemon were products of Jung’s unconscious, they had lives of their own and said things that he had not previously thought. In Philemon, Jung had at long last found the father-figure that both Freud and his own father had failed to be. More than that, Philemon was a guru, and prefigured what Jung himself was later to become: the wise old man of Zürich. As the war burnt out, Jung re-emerged into sanity, and considered that he had found in his madness ‘the primo materia for a lifetime’s work’.

The Laingian concept of hypersanity, though modern, has ancient roots. Once, upon being asked to name the most beautiful of all things, Diogenes the Cynic (412-323 BCE) replied parrhesia, which in Ancient Greek means something like ‘uninhibited thought’, ‘free speech’, or ‘full expression’. Diogenes used to stroll around Athens in broad daylight brandishing a lit lamp. Whenever curious people stopped to ask what he was doing, he would reply: ‘I am just looking for a human being’ – thereby insinuating that the people of Athens were not living up to, or even much aware of, their full human potential.

After being exiled from his native Sinope for having defaced its coinage, Diogenes emigrated to Athens, took up the life of a beggar, and made it his mission to deface – metaphorically this time – the coinage of custom and convention that was, he maintained, the false currency of morality. He disdained the need for conventional shelter or any other such ‘dainties’, and elected to live in a tub and survive on a diet of onions. Diogenes proved to the later satisfaction of the Stoics that happiness has nothing whatsoever to do with a person’s material circumstances, and held that human beings had much to learn from studying the simplicity and artlessness of dogs, which, unlike human beings, had not complicated every simple gift of the gods.

The term ‘cynic’ derives from the Greek kynikos, which is the adjective of kyon or ‘dog’. Once, upon being challenged for masturbating in the marketplace, Diogenes regretted that it were not as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing an empty stomach. When asked, on another occasion, where he came from, he replied: ‘I am a citizen of the world’ (cosmopolites), a radical claim at the time, and the first recorded use of the term ‘cosmopolitan’. As he approached death, Diogenes asked for his mortal remains to be thrown outside the city walls for wild animals to feast upon. After his death in the city of Corinth, the Corinthians erected to his glory a pillar surmounted by a dog of Parian marble.

Jung and Diogenes came across as insane by the standards of their day. But both men had a depth and acuteness of vision that their contemporaries lacked, and that enabled them to see through their facades of ‘sanity’. Both psychosis and hypersanity place us outside society, making us seem ‘mad’ to the mainstream. Both states attract a heady mixture of fear and fascination. But whereas mental disorder is distressing and disabling, hypersanity is liberating and empowering.

After reading The Politics of Experience, the concept of hypersanity stuck in my mind, not least as something that I might aspire to for myself. But if there is such a thing as hypersanity, the implication is that mere sanity is not all it’s cracked up to be, a state of dormancy and dullness with less vital potential even than madness. This I think is most apparent in people’s frequently suboptimal – if not frankly inappropriate – responses, both verbal and behavioural, to the world around them. As Laing puts it:

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last 50 years.

Many ‘normal’ people suffer from not being hypersane: they have a restricted worldview, confused priorities, and are wracked by stress, anxiety and self-deception. As a result, they sometimes do dangerous things, and become fanatics or fascists or otherwise destructive (or not constructive) people. In contrast, hypersane people are calm, contained and constructive. It is not just that the ‘sane’ are irrational but that they lack scope and range, as though they’ve grown into the prisoners of their arbitrary lives, locked up in their own dark and narrow subjectivity. Unable to take leave of their selves, they hardly look around them, barely see beauty and possibility, rarely contemplate the bigger picture – and all, ultimately, for fear of losing their selves, of breaking down, of going mad, using one form of extreme subjectivity to defend against another, as life – mysterious, magical life – slips through their fingers.

We could all go mad, in a way we already are, minus the promise. But what if there were another route to hypersanity, one that, compared with madness, was less fearsome, less dangerous, and less damaging? What if, as well as a backdoor way, there were also a royal road strewn with sweet-scented petals? After all, Diogenes did not exactly go mad. Neither did other hypersane people such as Socrates and Confucius, although the Buddha did suffer, in the beginning, with what might today be classed as depression.

Besides Jung, are there any modern examples of hypersanity? Those who escaped from Plato’s cave of shadows were reluctant to crawl back down and involve themselves in the affairs of men, and most hypersane people, rather than courting the limelight, might prefer to hide out in their back gardens. But a few do rise to prominence for the difference that they felt compelled to make, people such as Nelson Mandela and Temple Grandin. And the hypersane are still among us: from the Dalai Lama to Jane Goodall, there are many candidates. While they might seem to be living in a world of their own, this is only because they have delved more deeply into the way things are than those ‘sane’ people around them.
Neel Burton

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Fractals and Dill Weed

A fractal pattern is one that replicates itself at larger and smaller versions of itself. It's the same story, only bigger, or smaller, over and over again. In that way, fractals are like myths. Some myths are God-sized and angel-sized, other myths are replicated at a smaller, human level.  The Fall and Redemption of Tiger Woods is a recent, newsworthy version of a  myth at the human level. But every person replicates fractal myths in their lives; every archetypal story is a fractal. Young love, tragic breakups, Falls from grace and favor, triumph in sport and war--these are fractal myths played out in every life.

The dill weed below shows us several levels (iterations) of fractal patterns that looks like an explosion of golden fireworks. The first iteration is the mother plant and all of her branches of flowers. 

The Second iteration of the fractal is the explosion at the tip of each branch, producing a bundle of fireworks flowers

The Third iteration of the fractal is the explosion of each flower.

The Fourth iteration of the fractal is the little flower at the tip of each bundle.

The Fifth iteration of the fractal is the tiny spike coming out of each little flower. 

A possible Sixth iteration is the flattened spatula at the tip of each spike that may flower out in the explosion.

My Appearance on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio

On Friday, June 28, I was the guest of Miguel Conner on his Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio program. Aeon Byte can be heard on all popular podcast platforms as well as on youtube. 

This was my first interview regarding my new book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated. It's good to watch it on YouTube, because we run the illustrations during the program and I explain the visual symbology.

If you have any follow-up questions regarding The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated or The Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, please feel free to leave me a comment here.

Gnostic Gospel Illuminated and Animated

Four years ago I posted this Power Point "animation" to youtube. Hard to believe I  had made these illustrations by then and put them into this animation. It is as if someone else did all of this work for me and now it's here and ready to go. 

Now that I have written the book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, I can assure you that if you read the book, you will be able to follow the animation above. I've used the same conceptual illuminations throughout the book. The only difference is that in the book the words don't fly onto the page and there are more of them, with plenty of time to ponder their meaning.

This animation is slightly edited from the version that has been up and running since 2015. Only today I noticed one single illustration that has evolved over the past four years, and so I made the change. I won't tell you what it is, in case you would like to view the previous video and compare to this one. It will be like a "Where's Waldo?" of Gnostic visions. How's that for an esoteric challenge?

A Gnostic Perspective On Consciousness and Christianity

I just wrote and posted this as a comment on consciousness and Christianity over at the Skeptiko forum, but it seems too juicy to keep it from here. 

Is it possible for the Christian mythos to be in any way truthful and factual? Sure. But I'd say the Christian mythos that most closely resembles reality as we know it would be the Gnostic mythos, and it was weeded out of the canonical Bible and thrown away in 300 AD. I used to think the Pope and Emperor weeded it out for the good of the faithful, but now I realize they weeded it out for their own power to reign supreme. Yes, they left a lot of good in, but they weeded out the logos that makes the religion reasonable. So no wonder it looks superstitious and shallow. Thank God the Gnostic truths were buried out in the Nag Hammadi desert and resurrected intact during WW2. They have literally been protected from hundreds of years of theological misinterpretation.

I've been chewing this particular Gnosis over for about 50 years. See if this intrinsically coherent Gnostic Christian narrative is more satisfying to the Skeptik than the Orthodox view. I think it is, but it is no less Theistic, so if that's your quibble, I can't help you there. I think in order to understand Gnosis, one must start with a willing heart. If you hate God, then it is very difficult to appreciate Gnosis. Here goes:

According to the Tripartite Tractate Nag Hammadi book, we start with an underlying matrix of consciousness. (So, right off the bat, this ancient book acknowledges transcendent, undifferentiated consciousness.) This illimitable consciousness thought of a particularity, which became a fractal representation of the illimitable. This first fractal is called The Son. The Son immediately fanned out like rays from a light into an infinite number of particularities. The moment the particularities became conscious, because they, too, were fractals of the illimitable consciousness, they named themselves in order to know themselves. This naming had the effect of sorting themselves into a hierarchy of names, stations, ranks, positions, and powers. These are the Aeons, also known as the Pre-existent Church and the Elect, also called the First Order of Powers. The Aeons live in a place called the Pleroma, or the ALL, or the Fullness. Altogether, the Aeons of the Fullness represent the infinity of potentialities. They are of one accord, being simply the names of the qualities of their Father, who is called the Son of the originating One. This is the entire sum of the hidden knowledge of Gnosis that so frightened the Emperor and the Pope. We can catch glimpses of this cosmology, the Father, the Son, and the Aeons, in the canonical Bible, but not enough was left intact to make sense of it. Now we know.

The Aeons of the Fullness dream one dream that they ALL share. This is the dream of Paradise, which was the original Thought that set the whole ball rolling. The Aeons dream exactly as we dream, except they all share the same dream. This is a place we are also familiar with, we humans in our dreams. It is the foretaste of Heaven. It is the fragrance of Utopia. It is the place where we can fly. We all know it, according to the Tripartite Tractate. 

Then various things happen, an Aeon overreaches and wisdom becomes presumptuous thought. The Aeon Falls from the perfection of the Fullness. The Aeon breaks apart and little pieces of it become the seed of our material universe. The Aeons above in the Fullness dream up a Second Order of Powers that carry their Aeonic traits into this material plane. All archaea of our planet are Second Order Powers. It was decided that all of the Aeons would come to earth to clean up the mess and restore perfection to this creation that occurred because of the Fall. Every thing on earth contains innumerable Aeons instantiating consciousness into the mud. Our fables and Bible stories tell fractal stories of all lives; the same stories over and over and over again. They are real and they are metaphors. We are the children of angels; we are angels. We are all Fallen and need redemption.

The Christ Consciousness, according to the Tripartite Tractate, is the Third Order of Powers. The Christ Consciousness was designed to be the correcting algorithm for the Second Order Powers who'd been ensnared in the deception of the material delusion, also called the Imitation. Imitation of what? Imitation of the Paradise dreamed by the Aeons of the Fullness. The Christ is like a computer clean-up code that must be inserted in order to do its work of Redemption. Every soul needs to remember their eternal heritage in order to shake off this material plane and return to the Fullness. 

Here's where Jesus of Nazareth comes in--this was a human who carried the perfected Third Order Power of Christ into our material plane, and co-existed with the human genome donated from the mother. Fully God. Fully Human. First Adam perfectly incarnated. In this manner, all of the infinity of the ALL was at last incarnated, completing the cycle of coming one-by-one to our material plane. It wasn't so much Christ's sacrifice on the cross that took away the sins of the world, but his incarnation as a human and his personal Aeonic experience of separation, despair, and death. I think the emphasis is on the cross as a shape of top-to-bottom/spirit-to-mud and side-to-side/ALL inclusive.And what it means to be Redeemed by Christ as a pre-requisite to going to Heaven, well, yes, the Christ incarnated for the salvation of the ALL, and that includes us, but also the dogs and cats, and the trees and grasses. You name it. Jesus saves. Obviously the mission is larger than our belief in it or our capacity of comprehend the fullness.

You can read a much more detailed and coherent account (fully illustrated) in my own book called "The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated". It's all there.

A Simple Explanation of the Multiverse--"What is possible is actual"

My brother, Bill, and I have been kicking around the implications of an infinite set of multiple universes. The discussion began with his discomfort over the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics--that infinite multiple parallel universes branch off from every random quantum outcome of our universe. 

My reply was that it didn't bother me to think of infinite dimensions branching off of what we call reality, because the metaverse is infinite, and we rest inside of it, so there's plenty of room, so to speak. Also, since there are infinite dimensions wrapped around us, any point in our universe can map outward wherever it wants to go.

After a couple of days and a couple of phone calls, Bill called me all excited after experiencing an Insight. "Modal logic!" he declared. Then he proceeded to tell me many things about modal logic that I barely followed, because I majored in Rhetoric rather than Philosophy. (I manipulate words and diagrams as symbols, while he is comfortable manipulating logic and math symbols.) 

Once he started speaking English again, Bill said, "Modal logic talks about possibility and necessity. I realized this morning a new proposition that answers our inquiry! It's: 'What is possible is necessarily actual under an infinitely many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics!'"

We humans say it all the time: "What can be done will be done." As if it were a universal law. And of course it would be a universal law, because it's a fractal meme, isn't it? After all, if it can be said, it has been said--again a universal fractal meme.

If the universal consciousness thought up the algorithm that became our bounded universe, and that originating consciousness is infinite and illimitable, then there is a necessity for the infinities of consciousness, time, and space to be expressed in infinitely branching possibilities. 

This interpretation fits nicely with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and complements string-theory notions of Hilbert space.

Read the Simple Explanation of the Fractal, Conscious Universe here.

Simplicity is not Reductionism, repost from 2015

This article was originally posted in August of 2015, but I think maybe it was left off of the Topical Index, so you may not have read it. I've slightly updated it today by adding a couple of sentences.

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Every once in a while, someone I'm talking with reacts poorly to the very notion that complex concepts should or could be simplified--as if this Simple Explanation blog contributes to "dumbing down" science, philosophy, religion, and metaphysics. "Your theory is nothing but pure fantasy and speculation," I hear them say.

Well, I've got news for them-- All axioms are fundamentally unprovable. This is true in science, in logic, and in math. Fundamental propositions are assumed to be true. All of these axioms are in fact intuitive. So the criticism that the Simple Explanation is intuitive is a false criticism, as the same can be said of all science, logic, and math. According to U.C. Berkeley's Understanding Science website: 

"All of science is based on a few fundamental assumptions that transcend any individual experiment or study."

Understanding Science goes on to explain that, while the fundamental propositions may be assumptions, they generate testable hypotheses that can verify the assumptions. The Simple Explanation is not unscientific--it verifies its hypotheses through observation and by mining other people's research findings, amply demonstrating its theoretical robustness.

I talked this over with my brother, Bill, the philosopher, and he felt it was very important to explain the difference between "simplicity" and "reductionism." So here goes.

Simplicity is not reductionism. 

Simplicity as I use the term involves stripping away layers of linguistic and cultural particulars to reveal underlying universal patterns. According to the Simple Explanation, once memes are lifted out of their familiar linguistic and cultural expressions, their universal applicability can be readily discerned.

I have found that limiting the specificity of nouns raises the applicability of the concept. For example, I could say, "All people reach out to others to work together on projects they could not accomplish alone." But when I word it as "All units of consciousness reach out to others to work together to build the next level up," suddenly the Simple Golden Rule applies to atoms and cells as easily as it does to people.

Reductionism, on the other hand, narrows the focus of exploration by pursuing information from smaller and smaller objects, as in the way physicists look for ever smaller particles and wave forms to explain the composition of our universe. Hand in hand with this pursuit is the assumption that an object can be reduced to its tiniest components and that this will reveal its underlying nature.

I'm happy to see that according to wikipedia, Bill and I are not alone in our distrust of reductionism. Apparently reductionism doesn't go over so well with ecologists or systems theorists, because interactive systems can't be described by their smallest objects but must be described in terms of relationships and interactions. From the wiki article on reductionism: "Disciplines such as cybernetics and systems theory embrace a non-reductionist view of science, sometimes going as far as explaining phenomena at a given level of hierarchy in terms of phenomena at a higher level, in a sense, the opposite of a reductionist approach.^[24]"

So, while conventional science believes itself to be thoroughly pursuing truth through reductionism, the Simple Explanation would say it is more like they are trying to describe the haystack by counting the number of its molecules. Yes, it is a measurable result, but meaningless.

Again, from wikipedia: "Methodological reductionism is the position that the best scientific strategy is to attempt to reduce explanations to the smallest possible entities. Methodological reductionism would thus hold that the atomic explanation of a substance's boiling point is preferable to the chemical explanation, and that an explanation based on even smaller particles (quarks and leptons, perhaps) would be even better. Methodological reductionism, therefore, is the position that all scientific theories either can or should be reduced to a single super~theory through the process of theoretical reduction.

Here at the Simple Explanation, simplicity means "elegance"--the simplest theory that explains the most evidence. But unlike methodological reductionism, the Simple Explanation does not restrict truth to the tiny.The simplicity pursued by the Simple Explanation is of an entirely different kind--a true theory of everything looks for the underlying reality of our cosmos, irregardless of where it is to be found.