There comes a time when you finally get it. When in the midst of all your fears and insanity you stop dead, in your tracks, and somewhere the voice in your head cries out “ENOUGH!”
Enough fighting, and crying, and struggling to hold on. And like a child quieting after a blind tantrum, your sobs begin to subside, you shudder once or twice, you blink back your tears, and through the mantle of wet lashes you begin to look at the world from a new perspective.
This is your awakening.
You realize that it is time to stop hoping and waiting for something or someone to change, or for happiness, safety, and security to come to you, galloping over the next horizon. You come to terms with the fact that there aren’t fairytale endings, or storybook beginnings, and that any guarantee of “happily ever after” must begin with you. Then, a sense of a serenity is born of acceptance. Serenity is security, matured.
So you begin making your way through the reality of today, rather than holding out for the “promise of tomorrow.” You realize that much of who you are and the way you navigate through life, is, in great part, a result of all the social conditioning you’ve received over the course of a lifetime. And you begin to sift through all the nonsense you were taught about
- how you should look and how much you should weigh
- what you should wear and where you should shop
- where you should live or what type of car you should drive
- who you should sleep with and how you should behave
- who you should marry and why you should stay
- the importance of bearing children or what you owe to your family
- the religions and governments that say you are a part of this group but not the other
Slowly you begin to open up to new worlds and different points of view. And you begin reassessing and re-defining who you are and what you really believe in. And you begin to discard the doctrines you have outgrown, or should never have practiced to begin with. You find and reconsider your own convictions. Where did your convictions come from? Are they really yours, or did someone convince you they were your own?
You accept the fact that you are not perfect, and that not everyone will love or appreciate of who or what you are… and that’s ok, because they have the right to forming their opinions, and the beautiful experience of your life has absolutely nothing to do with that.
You stop trying to compete with an image inside your head or agonize over how you compare. You take a long look at yourself in the mirror and you make a promise to give yourself the same unconditional love and support you so freely give others. Then a sense of confidence is born of self-approval.
Through this, a realer sort of love, an infinitely deep sort of love starts growing into being, birthed from within your soul. You find that the more true you are to yourself, and the more deeply you can know and appreciate yourself, the more deeply you can know and appreciate others. You find yourself for the first time understanding kindness, and having a new respect for all humans.
You stop maneuvering through life as a “consumer,” hungry for your next fix— you realize that consumerism has nothing to do with corporations or large power structures. It has to do with the choice of either receiving your life from others, or creating your own life.
Beginning to create your own life brings you in touch with what creativity actually is. As you become an artist of living, you are endowed with unique and beautiful experiences, leading to unique and beautiful thoughts, acquired skills, and material compositions.
You find that whether you create for yourself or another, your soul is improved, and enlightened. Only when you teach do you truly begin to learn, and only when you move do you truly begin to live.
Then, you learn about sex. You find yourself only interested in the hands of a lover who glorifies, and blesses you with his touch (and you bless him with your skin). Sex is unmistakably the first creative act, and the first act to ever, and forever, transcend its own function. It makes you feel more alive than anything.
You begin internally giving thanks for the simple things that life on earth has blessed you with: the warm shine of the sun on your skin, the scent of air (which is truly sweet if you begin to smell it for the first time), the ability to laugh and bare your soul to another. You find pleasure to be a virtue, and that indulgence in the pleasure of living should be the constant state of all mankind.
Love, you realize, is the primal desire to bless. To love a thing is to first know it, and then attribute meaning to it in your world. Truthfully, the developed state of man is to love himself entirely. And to love something completely, is to love the reflection of all things, completely. In every drop of water there is the ocean.
You realize that you are one contiguous being: there is no physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, or sexual “side” to you— there is only you. There is a single consciousness that bends, ebbs, and flows, according to whatever environment it is flowing through.
The time in which you “finally get it” is your entire life, in every step that you walk forward, and every breath and thought you take in. The holy moment is every moment.
You were once scared of death. But you realize that by confronting and allowing death to inform your life, you can see things anew. Over time, fear of death becomes a foreign concept.
And because of that, fear too, becomes a foreign concept. By removing your social conditioning, shame becomes a foreign concept. By living as one whole piece, and not seeing yourself as many separate pieces, guilt becomes a foreign concept.
Uninhibited by shame, guilt, and fear, your consciousness grows and becomes something stronger. You are like an adult inside a child’s body. You can lift yourself up. You can cajole yourself through sufferings that previously seemed to throw and push you around.
Like a child quieting after a blind tantrum, your sobs begin to subside, you shudder once or twice, you blink back your tears, and through the mantle of wet lashes you begin to look at the world from a new perspective. You are being lifted up.
You realize you are reading this article, and that this article is about your life. You are suddenly aware of all that is going on around you, every sound, every texture, and temperature of the air against your skin, the saliva in your mouth. You are blinking your eyes. You are breathing.
You are alive, and growing.
Purchase and intentionally age soft drinks before giving them to someone. The drinks will retain their bubble and taste, all the while becoming cerebrally carcinogenic dietary saboteurs.
Using images from the SELENE craft, Moon researchers have found a giant hole (hundreds of feet wide and hundreds of feet deep) in what they think is a lava tube. The lava tube provides protection from meteorite strikes, cosmic rays, UV radiation, and harsh temperature variations, so it is an excellent candidate for further exploration inhabitance. Although the hole is probably the product of a tube collapse approximately 3.5 billion years ago, today the lava shield does not appear to be prone to collapse.
Epistemological Problems in Big Bang Theory
“Hypotheses non fingo.” — Isaac Newton
“Epistemology” refers to study and thought about episteme, the Greek word for abstract knowledge, or concepts. The word “rationality” comes from ratio, or “comparison” or “relation.” When Aristotle refers to man as “the rational animal” he refers to the human ability to take abstract knowledge or concepts, and compare and relate them together in a logically valid system.
What originally drew me to an epistemologic critique of big bang theory was knowledge of the ancient and silent dichotomy between Eastern and Western metaphysics. Each has fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality and existence that coat and color a person’s biases, expectations, and unconscious patterns of thinking.
The depth at which Eastern and Western metaphysics can be discussed is a level which may not be discussed here. Instead, hold the following assumptions: the Eastern perspective says that reality is inherently a continuous flow, or a waving. The destructibility or timescale of the flow are meaningless concepts. In terms of physics, this means matter and energy may trade manifestations, but neither may cease to exist, nor begin to exist. There is no assumption that because something exists, it had to be have come into being.
The Western perspective is just the opposite on all issues: it expects particles, well-defined boundaries, and that if something exists, it had to have come into being, i.e., there must have been a time when it did not exist.
Albert Einstein, at 1935’s Solvay conference was quoted as saying, on big bang theory: “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened” (note the expectation of a “creation” moment) and Robert Millikan publicly expressed his thought that cosmic rays were the birth cries of new atoms that were continually being created by “our beneficent Creator” in order to counteract entropy and prevent the heat death of the universe.
What came to be called “the big bang theory,” perhaps tellingly, was proposed in 1931 by George Lemaître, a Catholic priest. Initially, leading advocates were explicit about favoring a creation theory on philosophical grounds, but they did make attempts at scientific arguments. Lemaître argued that (1) the big bang was the only possible source of cosmic rays; Sir Arthur Eddington argued that (2) the law of entropy implies a universe that has been degenerating from an initial state of simplicity at the moment of creation; George Gamow argued that (3) the high energies required for nucleosynthesis of heavy elements could exist only in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang. All three arguments have been decisively refuted.
The theory itself though, manages to survive. Today it is justified on the basis of three completely different pieces of observational evidence: (1) the observed redshifted light from distant stars and galaxies is allegedly caused by the “expansion of space” that began with the big bang, (2) the relative abundances of light elements (deuterium, helium, and lithium) are explained by the theory, (3) the microwave background radiation that was first detected in the 1960s is supposed to be a relic from the big bang.
In order to account for these phenomena, however, proponents of the Big Bang have been compelled to modify the theory with a growing list of unsubstantiated hypotheses. Contrary to expectations, the redshift data seem to imply an accelerating expansion rate, which is supposedly caused by a repulsive force associated with “dark energy” (a mysterious form of energy that is unrelated to matter and allegedly makes up more than 70% of the energy in the universe). The observed mass density of the universe is far too low to account for the relative abundances of light elements, so the missing mass is assumed to exist in the form of “dark matter” (an unknown form of matter that makes up more than 80% of the mass in the universe). The distribution of the microwave background radiation is too uniform, which is explained by a superexpansion called inflation, that allegedly occurred during the first instant of the Big Bang. The distribution of galaxies is too nonuniform, which is explained by quantum flucutations at the first instant. In short, Big Bang Theory relies on energy, matter, and unique events that are inaccessible to observational astronomers.
Historically, theories that have been reached by a proper application of logical method, for example, Newtonian mechanics, atomic theory, and electromagnetism, have quickly led to accurate quantitative predictions for an impressive range of new phenomena. But the history of big bang theory is different— it is a history of observational astronomers consistently finding unwelcome surprises (such as the “evil” axis: discussed in a minute), and then cosmologists scrambling to adjust the theory.
Instead of inducing concepts from reality, whatever is required for the big bang story to be correct is invented, and then looked for in order to prove the theory. The central question asked by these physicists is not: What is the nature of the universe?, but rather What must the universe be like in order to conform to Big Bang Theory? It is this unstated assumption that rides in the minds of physicists when they create webs of arbitrary concepts like dark matter and dark energy. They are theorizing in order to preserve the legitimacy of their perspective, rather than conforming the legitimacy of their perspective to reality. Epistemologically, they are resorting to the invention of unintelligibles.
In general, reasoning is the process of inferring a conclusion from earlier knowledge. In valid reasoning, one’s premises are not the takeoff point for a flight of imagination, or round pegs to fit into the square hole of a pet theory. In reasoning, the conclusion follows from the premises necessarily. Nothing else is possible. If it does not follow necessarily, the argument is a non sequitur (Latin for “not in sequence”) and the inference is invalid.
In the classic example:
Antecedent 1: Socrates is a man.
Antecedent 2: All men are mortal
Required conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
we see that if we hold the antecedents to exist, the conclusion is obviously and directly required and undeniable.
What is interesting is that if we were to, for a second, forget the assumption that the universe must have “began,” and forget that big bang theory exists and most physicists in the world agree on it, and we just took the data and laid it out on a table we would see this:
In order to follow reason, we must only derive a conclusion that is required necessarily by the evidence.
Big bang theory is a story that, when believed, is self-confirming in the mind of the believer because it successfully integrates many observations into a single story. However, the reasoning is backward: instead of pulling related pieces from our data to assemble a logically necessary verdict, we start with a verdict, then pleasure ourselves by noticing pieces of data that “fill it.”
No piece of data alleged to support the truth of big bang theory actually suggests that there was a creation moment in the universe, or as George Lemaître said, that “the universe is a Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of creation.”
The truth is, George Lemaître began with a story in his head and found data to support it. And the larger truth is: all of Western culture has a story in its head, and accepts big bang theory not because it is logically consistent or necessary, but because it follows their own expectations of metaphysics. A positive feedback effect is that, consensuses have nearly unstoppable momentum when preserved within the sanctity of institutions, whether academic, governmental, or religious.
Ptolemy’s theory of epicycles began inside the academic institution and every new observation that seemed to undermine it was seen as simply a reason to add a new parameter or new assumption about reality in order to keep holding onto the pet theory. The theory managed to gain an incredible amount of mental inertia in the minds of academics, and was held as true for centuries despite having obviously invalid reasoning and a lack of direct evidence.
Isaac Newton’s most radical step in his work never consisted of what he said, but of what he refrained from saying. He famously reasoned as far as the evidence could take him—and no further, saying hypotheses non fingo, Latin for, “I feign no hypothesis.” It is the greatest courage a man of science can take, and the essence of science itself, to admit that one does not yet know.
I may not have the mathematical background to substantiate any alternative ideas, but I’d like to point out that far simpler ones are possible that do not require the existence of quintessence, phantom energy, dark matter, or any of the various arbitrary concepts that have been proposed in order to preserve big bang theory. For example:
Resonance is a common phenomenon of things. If the universe were to resonate, it would wave with a wavelength on the order of the cosmos. This resonance would distort the microwave background radiation with a peak along an axis. By Einstein’s equivalence principle, the effects of gravity on an object are not distinguishable from an acceleration. So, if there were very long wavelength spacetime waves moving through the universe, objects normally moving with constant velocity simply by inertia, would be affected by a gravity wave and appear to be accelerating. From a chosen vantage point, all objects would appear to be accelerating in the same direction, either away from or towards.