I suspected something was wrong with the “facts of life” as they
were presented to me when I was a kid. Sure, I then spent a little
over thirty years trying to be “normal” and make that square peg fit
the round hole, “looking for a reason to believe.”
But then there
was a memorable day when I finally grew up and admitted that maybe - just maybe - the Emperor was naked. And here it is, over twenty
years later, and now - well, now I know that not only is something
rotten in Denmark, I also know there is a dead elephant in the
middle of the collective global living room and I can never NOT see
it again.
During that twenty plus years of uncovering that huge, dead critter
that occupies a central place in our reality, I was driven by the
idea that I just wanted to know what was REALLY going on in this
strange world I lived in where, on the one hand, science was moving
so fast that we would soon be able to destroy our planet, while on
the other hand, the varied religions were telling us not to worry,
God was probably going to destroy it for us and we had better believe
in the “right God” or we were toast.
How can a person live in a world where “the End of the World” is
being predicted every minute? That’s crazy!
But darned if that isn’t what just about every religion on the
planet talks about!
You go to church, get scared to death in an hour and a half, warned
about hellfire and damnation, and then they pass the plate so that
you can pay the high priests to put in a good word for you with God
so that maybe you won’t suffer as much as that jerk down the street
who goes to a different church! And even if you do suffer here on
earth, if you believe hard enough, and prove it by putting your
money where your faith is, at least you’ll get your reward in
paradise.
This was back in 1982 when I had three small children. As a mother,
I wanted to know what to teach my children. I knew that what I had
been taught to believe was frightening. I had grown up in a time
when children were regularly taught what to do in case of an atomic
bomb attack - Cuba was only 90 miles from Florida where I was born - and at the same time, the standard religious teaching of my family
mainstream Protestants - promoted the “suffer on Earth to get
rewarded in Heaven” routine.
I knew I had certainly suffered from the state of the world and the
teachings of my faith. I really, REALLY wanted to know if this was
something that I should pass on to my children.
When I held my babies and rocked them or looked into their sweet,
innocent faces - untroubled by the concerns of the world around,
certain that Mother would make them safe - I had to ask myself “How
can I tell them these things? How can I “break it to them” that this
world into which they have been born is so frightening and uncertain
and full of traps that not only are their lives in constant danger,
their very souls may be in peril?
How could I tell that to my children???
If it was true, I HAD to tell them.
But what if it wasn’t true?
WHAT IF IT WASN’T TRUE?
I knew one thing and one thing only: I wanted more than anything in
the world to tell my children the truth, to prepare them for
whatever might lie ahead of them in their lives. And the question
burned inside me: What if I told those little beings who I loved
more than my own life a LIE? What kind of a mother would I be? What
kind of “Mother Love” is that?
The End of the World is an idea, which has fascinated man for all
recorded history and perhaps beyond. In every religion, philosophy,
and mystery teaching, there are hints, allusions or outright claims
to knowledge of this purported end to man’s current status on the
earth.
Some teachings say that the earth itself will cease to exist. Others
proclaim that man will cease to exist in material form; still others
claim a great judgment day, in which the wicked are wiped from the
face of the planet while the “saved” are rescued in some miraculous
fashion to return and inhabit a new, heaven-like “City of God”. The
persistence of these ideas and their prevalence is centered around
the idea that man began somewhere, sometime, somehow, and will
therefore come to an end somewhere, sometime, somehow.
This assumption is born of the conscious mind’s tendency to think in
linear terms. Scientific materialism has carried this tendency to
the ultimate heights: “The world must have been born, therefore, it
must die”. Also, scientific materialism claims nothingness before
birth and nothingness after death. Scientific philosophies refer to
the “accidental mechanicalness” of the universe and teach us that
the only meaning to life is no meaning at all. “Eat, drink, and be
merry for tomorrow you may die”, and then - oblivion.
Scientifically speaking, for a long time matter and motion were
accepted as the basis of reality and, to a great extent, continue to
be. Yet, in actual fact, matter and motion are unknown quantities x
and y, and are always defined by means of one another. It is an
absurdity to define one unknown by means of another! What this means
is that science defines matter as that which moves, and defines
motion as changes in matter.
The “Big Bang” or Cosmic Firecracker
theory is explained in these terms. A primal atom, (matter), of
incredible density “exploded” into motion. (Where the primal atom
came from, how the space it exploded into came into being, and where
the impetus for this event originated, are still on the drawing
board.) And from this event, our universe and the life within it
just sort of “accidentally” happened. Man is the “amoral end of a
deadly biological evolution”. The mind and soul are inexplicable
byproducts of the struggle for survival.
To the average person, a table, a chair, an orange, is a real
object. They have dimension - three, to be exact - they are real.
But
are they?
The physicist (and the knowledgeable layperson) knows that
the object is composed of atoms. And there lies the rub! The
dissected atom (quantum particles) often displays some very
disturbing properties. Who has really seen matter or force? We think
we see matter in motion, but physics has shown us that what we see
is an illusion. When we try to focus on it, a quantum particle/wave
is an infinite-dimensional entity incapable of being perceived, in
that instant, as a three-dimensional body moving through space. When
we look away, the quantum particle/wave acts like a wave of pure
energy - invisible force.
So, just what is matter? What is this estate in which we find our
existence? Does the physical run out when it becomes invisible?
Obviously not, as we cannot see electricity and other forces in the
universe measurable only by their effect upon “matter”. Do these
forces run out when they become undetectable by our senses or by our
instruments? Do the things we detect with the subtle mechanisms of
our mind and emotions not exist simply because we cannot see or
measure them?
Science hands those questions over to religion and basically, we are
told to “believe what you like” in that area because science isn’t
in the business of describing things it cannot materially weigh or
measure. There is a not-so-subtle implication in such a view that it
really doesn’t matter what a person believes anyway because, as
Danish physicist Niels Bohr put it, “There is no deep reality!”
So, for those people who have the idea that there is something
“deeper”, some “meaning” to life, if you want to put it that way,
there is really only one place to go for answers: religion, of which
there are three major ones in the world today, all of them
“Monotheistic” and based, essentially, on a single religion,
Judaism.
The Bible says, “In the Beginning, God created the heaven and the
earth”. Neither the Bible nor science has much to say about what
happened before the beginning. St. Augustine was once asked the
question “What was God doing before He created the world?”.
The
Bishop’s rejoinder: “Creating Hell for those who ask that
question!”, put a period to such inquiries. Few have asked it since.
There are, of course, various “interpretations” of the teachings of
Monotheism that exist inside and outside of the “orthodox”
explanations. Some interpreters say that the only meaning to life is
in spiritual self-improvement and creating a better future in the
afterlife, or in future lives. Other interpreters say that the
meaning to life lies in working to dissolve the ego into
nothingness.
Among the more recent variations is the idea that the
true purpose of life is to align our “self-created realities” so
that they become as one, and thereby we may achieve a unified race,
which will either “ascend” or will survive beyond predicted
cataclysms for a thousand years before things wind down a bit into
the usual state of decay. Naturally this effect can only be
initiated and maintained by a group effort at consciousness raising.
There are other ideas and combinations of ideas similar to these - all leading where?
Are we, in fact, an accident of evolution in an accidental universe,
on a race to nowhere except oblivion? Or, worse still, are our very
minds - our belief in and desire for knowledge of higher things - our
greatest flaw? Are we damned by our religion for asking such
questions, or ridiculed by science for thinking that they even ought
to be asked? The choice seems to be between a sick joke and a
mistake.
Yet, the question must be asked: why do we live in a world in which
material extinction is a real possibility? Are we truly on the edge
of an abyss, losing our balance, preparing to fall into a hole so
deep and dark that we shall never come out of it?
There are two main theories of the future - that of a predestined
future and that of a free future. The theory of predestination
asserts that every future event is the result of past events and if
we know all the past then we could know all the future.
The idea of a free future is based on quantum “probabilities”. The
future is either only partially determined or undetermined because
of the varied interactions possible at any given point. This idea of
“free will” says that quite deliberate volitional acts may bring
about a subsequent change in events. Those who support
predestination say that so-called “voluntary” actions are, in fact,
not, but are rather the results of incompletely understood causes
which have made them imperative acts - in short, nothing is
accidental.
On the one hand we have “cold predestination” come what may, nothing
can be changed - on the other hand we have a reality which is only a
point on some sort of needle named the present surrounded on all
sides by the Gulf of Nonexistence a world which is born and dies
every moment.
During those early days of asking questions outside of my “standard
religious faith”, I came across an idea put forth by P.D. Ouspensky
in his book Tertium Organum:
“At every given moment all the
future of the world is predestined and existing, but it is
predestined conditionally, i.e., there must be one or another
future in accordance with the direction of events of the given
moment, if no new factor comes in. And a new factor can come in
only from the side of consciousness and the will resulting from
it. In the past, what is behind us, lies not only in what was,
but also in what could have been. In the same way, in the future
lies not only what will be but also what may be.”
In other words, there was the
possibility - just a suggestion, mind you - that human beings might be
able to choose something different than the future that was
obviously developing all around us. It was clear to me that such a
choice could only be made if one made an effort to “predict” the
future. In other words, the only way to know the right choice of the
moment was to have some idea of the consequences.
Of course, the “standard religions” all around us are suggesting
something of that sort all the time: their solution is that the only
change human beings can make is to “choose the right God” and
believe in him strongly enough that this God will step in and fix
things right up, either by miraculously intervening in reality, or
at least hauling the good people out of the soup at some future time
when they have proved themselves AND, at the same time, making all
those nasty people who bet on the wrong horse suffer!
It was at this point that I decided that I really ought to check out
all the various religions and their “track records”, so to say in
order to determine which was the “right God”, After all, since there
exists such diversity of beliefs around the globe, the assumption is
that either somebody is right, excluding all others, or that nobody
is right, including all.
With the world in an obvious mess, with every preacher in just about
every church across America passionately declaring that “The End is
Nigh”, I decided that I had better get moving on this project. After
all, I had these small beings in my care and above ALL things, I
wanted to tell my children the Truth as far as I was able to
determine it. And that certainly meant that I should put forth all
efforts to determine what that truth was before I gave it to them.
After all, if your child asks for bread, will you give him a stone?
If he asks for fish, will you give him a serpent? I wanted to give
my children the very best I could, and that was, at the foundation,
the primary motivation for my search for the truth: Love for my
children.
You could say that Love for my babies gave me the courage to begin
to look at my own faith in a critical way, and then to search for
the answers to their questions.
And so it still is.
What this amounted to was to apply the scientific method to the
study of religion and “deeper realities” - things that went beyond
the physics of materialism.
I discovered that I wasn’t the first one who had thought about doing
this and so there was certainly a large body of material to go
through. And I have been doing it in a concentrated and systematic
way for over 20 years now.
The Cassiopaean Communication was only a part of this process.
Looking back on this experiment in accessing “higher consciousness”
which, at that point, I only theorized might exist, there is a lot
to be said for the idea that most of what has come “from the C’s”
could very well have come from my own subconscious. After all, I had
spent nearly my whole life reading everything from history to
psychology.
The phenomenon of the scientist working on a difficult
problem who then, after he has examined all the parameters, dreams
of a novel way to put the different parts together that solves the
problem is well known in the history of science. The discovery of
the benzene ring is a case in point. So it isn’t too much of a
stretch to say that the material that came “from the C’s”, who
clearly stated “we are YOU in the future”, was merely a similar
process.
The attentive reader may notice that
most of the C’s material has to
do with history and the hidden motivations for the events in our
world. These were certainly the things that concerned me - events and
choices of action and being that could lead to a positive future or
a negative future - and so, perhaps my vast reading was sorted and
assembled in novel ways by my own subconscious mind or superconscious mind.
Be that as it may, it does not, in my opinion, at all detract from
the usefulness of the material. The discovery of the benzene ring
came from a dream and led to a breakthrough in science. And so it
has seemed that the concerted effort to examine all the parameters
of reality, and then to “allow” it to sort itself and “come out” in
a novel process of reassembly, has proven very fruitful in many
respects.
Ark discussed the essential nature of this approach recently in an
exchange with Robin Amis, the editor and commentator of Boris Mouravieff‘s
Gnosis: Ark to Robin Amis:
You stated that:
-
Scientific method has its
limitations.
-
Knowledge should be understood in
broader terms so as to include, for instance “noetic knowledge”.
In particular:
-
there is a true form of
knowledge that is normally associated with religion
-
those with intellectual
training tend to regard it as not being knowledge at all
-
That you - Praxis - teach this other
form of knowledge, and the conditions under which it can be
understood.
-
The reason that Praxis (and other
religions) depends on a suspension of judgment is “that
newcomers studying this material, despite quickly getting
confirmation of its reality, will not understand it deeply
enough”.
I will try to address and expand the
above points and, perhaps, try to add some new ideas, if only for
the future discussion.
Point 1) I agree. I agree completely. In fact it takes a scientist
to truly know the limitation and the weaknesses of science, as many
of the tricks and games and even lies are known only to the insiders - scientists.
Point 2) I agree that there is such a knowledge; I agree that is
important and, in fact, is crucial. And it is because of this fact
that we stress on our Website and in our publications the importance
of “knowledge”, not just “science” or facts. It depends on whether
you start with a fact and follow the clues to real knowledge, or
whether you start with an assumption, and interpret all facts based
on what may, at the very beginning, be a lie.
a) Whether this “true knowledge” is, was, or should be “associated
with religion” is disputable.
The term “associated” is somewhat vague and can lead to
misunderstandings. Science is also associated with religion. The
Pope has scientific advisers; the Vatican supports scientific
research.
On the other hand the greatest crimes of history have also been - and
probably are still - associated with religion, one way or another.
Religion, if analyzed sincerely and critically, has many dark spots,
and analyzing the reasons for this is not an easy task.
But I hope you will agree with me that one of the reasons why
religions have these dark spots is that people were lulled into
believing that they have (in opposition to others) the “true
knowledge”.
So the very concept of “true knowledge” is risky. It is easy to
imagine that two different people will have different, orthogonal
truths. For one, the truth may be that he needs to kill the other
man, while for the other man, the truth may involve avoiding being
killed. Every noetic truth has down-to-earth implications. Or so I
think.
b) Though I agree that what you wrote may describe a general
tendency, yet there are exceptions. History knows scientists - great
scientists - that were “mystics” at the same time. Pascal, Newton,
Poincare - just few examples. So, indeed, the term “tend to regard”
that you used seems to be appropriate. But for this present point,
it is important to know whether there is a real contradiction
between being a scientist and appreciating other forms of knowledge
at the same time. It seems to me and, I believe, you will agree,
that there is no intrinsic contradiction.
Point 3) Here of course you are assuming that Praxis is already in
possession of such a knowledge. Perhaps this is the case or,
perhaps, Praxis has only “fragments of unknown teachings”, and not
the complete picture.
Being a scientist I am always careful and I would never state that I
have the full and complete “knowledge” of something. I may know
about tools, theories, formal structures, data etc. But one day, all
my tools, data, theories and formal structures may prove to be wrong
or useless with the uncovering of a single datum that shifts the
entire structure. A true scientist MUST be open to this. What is
important in science is being always open to surprises, to new
paradigm shifts etc.
So, I think, you - Praxis - are teaching what you BELIEVE to be, at
the present moment, “the true knowledge”, and you may have very good
reasons for such a belief. You may have very important pieces of
knowledge - as we think based on research - but, perhaps, you are
still lacking some of other important pieces - which we also think,
based on research.
How can we know in advance where the next unexpected discovery will
lead us?
And here I would like to make some constructive - or so I think - comments.
Looking at the history of “our civilization”, religion seems to have
been in existence much longer than “science”. And yet we see that
religion has failed. In spite of its teachings people are still
constantly at war with each other. Human beings have not become
better, and they are often much worse than animals. Gurdjieff
described seeing the truth of our condition - the condition of our
reality in general - as the “terror of the situation”. It is terrible
because, when you really SEE it, you realize how great a failure
religion or the “powers” of the various versions of God really are.
Science, which came later and has exploded in the last millennium,
has failed too. It has brought mankind to the edge of
self-destruction. Advances in mathematical, physical and computer
sciences have brought about “applied game theory”, where “wars” are
called “games”, and to “win the game” is to kill as many people as
possible with as little cost as possible.
-
Is there any hope at all?
-
And if there is, then where?
-
Perhaps it is time to try something new?
-
Perhaps a “marriage of
science and mysticism” has a chance?
-
Why not take what is good from science and what is good from
religion, and discard what is wrong?
-
What is the best thing about religion?
Religion teaches us to be open minded and accepting of possibilities
which are far from being “rational”. Religions teach us to pay
attention to singular events, miracles, phenomena that are fragile
and hardly repeatable. Finally religion teaches us to look inside as
much as outside: know thyself.
The strengths of the approach of religion just happen to be the weak
points in science.
Science is often narrow-minded and conservative restricting
everything to what is material and rigidly repeatable. Science
teaches us that what is “out there” is not connected to what is “in
here”, that it must be captured, weighed, measured and manipulated.
That is why new paradigms are so painful when they come - but they DO
come in science, and they seldom come in religion which is “fixed”
and dogmatic and not open to discussion.
What is the best thing about science?
Science is open to criticism and discussion. Even if many forces on
the earth try to make a sort of religion of science, in general,
scientific theories must be published and publicly discussed. We can
find an error in Einstein’s papers because these, as well as other
papers, are publicly available. Everyone can learn mathematics, as
advanced as you wish, from reading monographs, articles, going to
conferences, and discussing with other scientists.
The strength of science just happens to be the weakness of religion.
Religions are always “secret” in one respect or another - even if
that secrecy is only the declaration that no changes can be made, no
questions asked, because the ultimate truth about God is a
“mystery”, a “secret”. That is why the teachings of religion are so
easily distorted and misunderstood. It is so easy for the central
“authority” to achieve the “pinnacle” of the religion and declare to
the followers the correct interpretation and that no other is
permitted.
Point 4) What you say about students not being able to judge for a
long time is certainly true. But whether discouraging them from such
judgments is the only solution - I am not sure.
Certainly that was the way it was done in the past. Groups were
usually small, whether exoteric or esoteric. Travel and
communication possibilities were severely restricted. But today a
qualitative change has occurred: we are now in the era of networking
and instant communication on a planetary scale.
Therefore a different approach is possible: instead of having few
students and “teach them even when they are not yet ready”, we can
address ourselves to those who are ready.
This was not so easy to do in the past when teachers communicated,
at best, to merely hundreds of potential students. But it is
possible now, when we can communicate with millions.
Whoever is not yet ready for the next stage, let him stay where he
is or go back where he was. Those who ARE ready, will find you - if
you take care and NETWORK efficiently.
So, I would not discourage students from making early judgments and
discussing subjects for which they are not prepared . If they come
to the wrong conclusions and go away or attack you, that is their
free will. Let them go where their minds and their hearts lead them.
That is, at least, our approach in QFS1. Perhaps we are making a
mistake here, but it is always good to try different methods - if
available.
1
Quantum Future School
So it is, we seek to combine science and mysticism for the few who
are colinear with this approach. And this was uppermost in our minds - to convey this effectively - when planning the look and emphases of
the new and revised Cassiopaea Website. We understood clearly that
there are many “seekers” in the “New Age” milieu who would be turned
off to this approach. They are seeking a guru, to be underwritten in
their choices, a messiah. As Ark has written: those who are not
ready for this stage of Becoming Free, let them stay where they are
or go back to where they were. Therefore, if readers form
conclusions based on their illusions, that is their free will and we
have no quarrel with that. Each individual should be where their
minds and hearts lead them.
Of course, there are still some items that the C’s have come up with
that obviously could NOT come from a “reordering” of the masses of
material available to my subconscious from years of reading. In that
respect, due to the novel way in which the material was obtained as
a “group effort”, perhaps some of the material was extracted from
the subconscious databanks of the other participants? And perhaps
some of the data was nonsense - my own and others? These are all
questions we consider when we analyze the material and subject it to
verification or testing.
There is still another category of material - that which later proves
to be insightful in ways that simply could not come from the
subconscious data of ANY of the participants.
Or could it?
Perhaps an awareness of what is going on politically and socially
can be “sorted and reassembled” in the subconscious the same way the
information that led to the discovery of the Benzene Ring was?
Perhaps probabilities are calculated in the subconscious mind based
on vast collections of data that we don’t even realize we have?
Perhaps lifetimes of observations of the world “out there”,
consisting of billions of databits can be stored in our subconscious
and lead to very complex “data sorting” and “probability
estimation”?
Perhaps there is, after all, a completely scientific and material
explanation for the Cassiopaean Material; except for just a few
items that I am certain were NOT part of the conscious or
subconscious data of any of the participants - items that were known
to only a few people on the planet and which we had to dig deep to
verify. But then, that is only evidence of an ability to access
information that may be in the databanks of unknown others at a
distance...
But, isn’t that the point? That we search for that tiny clue that
there IS a reality beyond that which the materialist scientific view
accepts as measurable?
Just as certain mechanical aids can augment the perception of
certain ranges of light such as infra-red, ultra-violet, x-rays, and
radio waves, so might our so-called psychic perceptions be similarly
augmented. This was my theory at the beginning of the Cassiopaean
Experiment, though I never thought it would evolve into a dialogue
with “myself in the future”.
The brain is an instrument devised to focus reality in mathematical
constructs - interpreting waveforms as material objects. What I had
in mind from the beginning was a process of not only being able to
perceive those ranges of energies that are normally beyond the range
of three dimensional perception, but to be able to do so in a
repeatable way with practical applications. By developing such a
process, the implication is that we can not only perceive the
effects of myriads of waveforms, but also, depending upon the
amplitudes and energies, predict the outcomes of certain motions,
even, perhaps, in very precise terms.
Of course, it seems that the descriptions of the greater reality
beyond three dimensional space and time must be, in an essential
way, difficult to describe except metaphorically. So, I think we can
assume that the finite nature of our minds is self-limiting in a
certain sense. It seems that all the instruments we can create and
build are probably incapable of penetrating into such realms because
of the simple fact that they are three-dimensional. The only
material way we may be able to go beyond our reality is through
mathematics, which seems to transcend time and space.
There is, indeed, a lot of research in physics that sounds
provocatively like ancient mystical teachings, yet the possibility
is that the true nature of the reality behind our world is beyond
quantum mechanics and theory.
Ark:
As Wheeler so succinctly points it out: We have every right to
assume that the universe is filled with more uncertainty than
certainty. What we know about the universe - indeed, what is knowable - is based on a few iron gateposts of observation plastered over by
papier-mâché molded from our theories.
Popper makes these important observations:
“... all explanatory
science is incompleteable; for to be complete it would have to give
an explanatory account of itself. An even stronger result is
implicit in Gödel’s famous theorem of the incompletability of
formalized arithmetic (though to use Gödel’s theorem and other
mathematical incompleteness theorems in this context is to use heavy
armament against a comparatively weak position).
Since all physical
science uses arithmetic (and since for a reductionist only science
formulated in physical symbols has any reality), Gödel’s
incompleteness theorem renders all physical science incomplete. For
the nonreductionist, who does not believe in the reducibility of all
science to physically formulated science, science is incomplete
anyway.”
“Not only is philosophical reductionism a mistake, but the belief
that the method of reduction can achieve complete reduction is, it
seems, mistaken too. We live in a world of emergent evolution; of
problems whose solutions, if they are solved, beget new and deeper
problems. Thus we live in a universe of emergent novelty; of
novelty which, as a rule, is not completely reducible to any of the
preceding stages.”
Then he adds:
“Nevertheless, the method of attempting reductions is
most fruitful, not only because we learn a great deal by its partial
successes, by partial reductions, but also because we learn from our
partial failures, from the new problems which our failures reveal.
Open problems are almost as interesting as their solutions; indeed
they would be just as interesting but for the fact that almost every
solution opens up in its turn a whole new world of open problems.”
We may find that much truth was known by the peoples of the past and
that they did, in fact, express deep, mysterious, realities in their
poetic and obscure messages. Mystics and seers - even in terms of
communicating with “myself in the future” - seem to perceive quantum
states, which are demonstrably difficult to translate into language.
The experience of viewing simultaneous, cause/effect reality is
extremely difficult to maintain when one is constantly being
bombarded by three-dimensional interpretation.
Imagine the difficulty of explaining to a snail the expanse of an
acre of ground?!
Mystics and Seers have attempted to do just that
for millennia with the result that the vast majority of mankind have
absolutely and totally misunderstood these concepts.
And, there is
no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it:
the
greatest lies are the dark and evil systems of religion created by
those who do not understand.
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth
or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death. It is easy to say
you believe a rope is strong as long as you are merely using it to
cord a box. But, suppose you had to hang by that rope over a
precipice? Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really
trusted it?
(C.S. Lewis)