Sunday, November 30, 2008

Life From Lightning

It's easy, in any age, to think that we've got it all figured out; that, regardless of how much remains to be discovered, what is known rests on a fairly firm foundation. At the risk of singling out the present as somehow unique, however, these days it seems that mankind is particularly prone to this illusion. Our scientific knowledge is so vast that to imagine that any one part of the edifice rests on the infirmity of illusion is, for many, unthinkable.

Take DNA: the hereditary molecule, repository of a species' history, determinant of an organism's attributes, blueprint by which the cell and ultimately the body is constructed. Deterministic, Darwinian theory relegates DNA to the status of historical record and blueprint ... whilst demoting living beings to no more than the machines constructed by it. The process of evolution is thought to be nothing more than the happenstance 'improvement' (if such a word can be said to apply, which committed Darwinists insist it doesn't) of the organisms built by DNA: random changes in the genetic code, tested against a randomly shifting fitness landscape over geologic spaces of time, stretching from the now back to a chemical mud puddle somewhere on the Earth's surface 3.8 billion years ago, when a set of molecules just happened to accidentally fall into a self-replicating configuration.

Well, that's the story according to mainstream biology, and so the one the man on the street knows, more or less vaguely, as the truth. Within the confines of official culture Creationism is peddled too, as a sort of jester at the feet of dignified science, its bald-faced denial of reality and wide-eyed innocent credulousness in the face of the most ridiculous of Biblical stories held up now and again for public ridicule. There are those who believe the Creationist line, but in truth, its cultural function is primarily to prop up Darwinian biology by providing a false - and by necessity absurd - alternative, one that cannot possibly survive inside the halls of academia. It's the hoary old dynamic of cultural polarization all over again, analogous in both form and function to the left-right political function: by gesticulating at caricatures of the opposition, either side is able to keep its followers from straying too far from the official line.

Then there's Intelligent Design. Darwinian apologists often try to connect ID to Biblical creationism, but it's been a tough charge to make stick because ID isn't a coherent theory so much as a stance: a growing community of scholars who, having looked at the fantastic intricacy and sophistication of molecular biology, and having been told it all arose according to chance fed through a recursive algorithm, shake their heads and shout, laughing and incredulous, "No fucking way, man!"

You won't find many books by ID proponents that lay out how, precisely, life was created; rather, most of the literature consists of a catalogue of inconsistencies, improbabilities, and anomalies that, taken together, produce quite a bit of negative evidence against standard evolutionary theory, but very little positive evidence for any alternative (a charge Darwinists make frequently, often stating sarcastically that the implication is that God fits into the blank spots.) So, into this theoretical vacuum I'll throw out my own speculations.

It starts with an interesting experiment conducted in 2003 by Romanian biophysicist Mircea Sanduloviciu at Cuza University, in which an electrical discharge inside an argon plasma caused cells to form, dubbed 'plasma blobs'. The plasma blobs contained no complex structure - at least, none has yet been observed - but they did possess properties of growth (by absorbing gases), replication (by dividing in two), and communication (by emitting electromagnetic waves, causing the atoms in other plasma blobs to vibrate.) So right here we have a possible origin for cellular life, taking place not in a puddle of slime but in a plasma. The early atmosphere of the Earth was a highly charged environment, in which plasmas were very much dominant, so if such structures could form there - and form naturally - this would be a worthy line of inquiry.

Now, let's jump ahead and look for a moment at some of DNA's largely unsung properties. Everyone knows about DNA's hereditary attributes, but few outside of the New Age community have heard about DNA's amazingly sophisticated function as a transceiver for biophotons. Outside of a few scientists - who over the decades since their discovery in 1923, and largely under the public radar, have advanced the understanding of the phenomenon - mainstream science has largely ignored biophotons, leading them to dismiss the parts of the molecule that function as a transceiver as 'junk DNA'. What is known is this: DNA molecules continually emit and receive photons of coherent light in a highly sophisticated fashion that indicates the photons may well serve as a communications medium, linking perhaps not just the cells within an organism but potentially organisms throughout the biosphere. Many researchers speculate as to an identity between biophotons and ki energy, suggesting that techniques such as acupuncture work by manipulating this photonic communications web. At any rate, we see that DNA and the cellular plasma blobs communicate in much the same fashion: with light.

Finally, I'll draw your attention to an interesting morphological correspondence. Look at these two images:


The first you no doubt recognize: the familiar double helix of DNA. The second is a Birkeland current, that is, an electrical current that naturally arises inside charged plasmas under the influence of magnetic fields. Birkeland currents are interesting beasts: they scale through at least 14 orders of magnitude, ranging from the planetary to the intergalactic, representing one of the only phenomena in the universe exhibiting an essentially fractal dynamic over such a broad scope. So far as I know, at present it's unknown whether or not Birkeland currents can form at molecular scales, though I myself would not be at all surprised to find that they do.

In that case, we'd have a situation whereby not only cellular analogues arise in high energy plasmas, but DNA analogues as well.

So, here's my theory: that's exactly what happened, and it happens everywhere throughout the universe, more or less continuously and entirely naturally, though absent certain very specific conditions the structures remain more or less ephemeral. However, the early earth, with its preponderance of solid and liquid state matter in close contact with high-energy plasma, provided exactly those conditions. By a mechanism as yet unknown, the plasma blobs cooled and precipitated as cellular membranes; whilst the Birkeland currents wound amino acids into ropes of DNA, drawing them into place through electromagnetic influence, then leaving the structures frozen in place as energy levels decreased and the currents ceased.

From this point, the initial 'programming' could well have been random; evolution might have picked up from there, and moved things along in an entirely conventional Darwinian way. However, there's reason to suspect that this, too, is not the whole story, for DNA's primary function appears to be as a transceiver rather than a simple historical record. Evidence suggests that 98% of the structure - the so-called 'junk' DNA - fulfills just this function. I'm getting quite a bit more speculative here, but as I noted in Electric Astrology an energy conduit can also transmit information, meaning that early earthly life may well have received programming instructions from cosmic sources. If this is the case, the first cells might have been created as nothing more than simple cellular membranes together with molecular antennae. A cosmic intelligence, reaching down to the earth's surface with fingers of lightning, would be able to program these early cells with the data necessary to make use of the self-organizing properties of the ambient building blocks - ranging from simple molecules such as methane and ammonia up to the more complex but still abundant amino acids - in order to bootstrap the construction of appropriate proteins.

Is this what happened? Hey, I don't know. As always with anything you read on the internet, caveat emptor. This much I do know: if God exists, and permeates the universe, then there must have been some physical mechanism by which She created life. The above, at the moment, is my best guess at what that mechanism is.

Saturday, November 29, 2008

A Prayer

Cosmic Father who art the Heavens,
Hallowed be Thy Infinite Names,
Teach me today my daily lesson.
Grant me the wisdom to seek Truth,
The discernment to see it,
And the courage to act upon it,
That Your Will may become mine,
And Your Hand act more perfectly through me.

Divine Mother who art the Source of all Life,
Whose Boundless Love encompasses All,
Guide me along the true Way,
That I may this day grow closer to You.
Grant me to drink deep of the water that flows from Your bottomless spring,
Filling my cup with Your inspiration,
And make of me Your instrument,
That with me You might shape the world yet more fully
With Your immeasurable Beauty.

For Thou art the Beginning and the End and All in between,
The Matter and the Light,
The Power, the Will and the Way.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Conversation With a Baptist

Our electrician came over yesterday to hook up a 400W metal halide lamp in our workshop (so bright it leaves a green afterimage on your eyes, even when you don't look directly at it.) At one point he needed our stapler.

"Ask, and ye shall be given," I intoned, handing it to him.

"Hey, pretty good, do you know any other Bible verses?"

"Just a second ... 'From he who hath not, even what he have shall be taken, while to him who has shall be given'." (I paraphrase.)

Thus launched the first conversation I've had in I don't know how long - years, likely - with a real-life, died-in-the-wool believing fundamentalist Christian, a man who takes his Bible so seriously he homeschools his kids (not that I've anything against homeschooling. Based on a reasoned critique of the public education indoctrination system, it's an admirable act. Which doesn't apply in this case.)

It was an amusing conversation. He was thrown for a loop, it seemed, by my statements, questions, and responses; obviously not a practicing Christian of any sort, he expected me to be your usual godless heathen atheist, I think. For instance, I could tell he was expecting an eyeroll when he put forth that the world was of the devil; when I agreed with him unconditionally, he wasn't sure what to say next. When I suggested further that the devil, too, was ultimately of God, and should be seen as a part of God's plan ... well, he wasn't sure what to say to that.

We discussed the gnostic texts, and I explained to him my views on the origins of the Bible, both the pentateuch and the gospels. He of course took them as the literal view of god, and was perplexed - though not angered - when I suggested that Christ's original teachings were likely suppressed, and that furthermore much of the Bible, though ultimately based in historical fact, consisted of mythologized oral history recrystallized into written 'history' along lines intended to materially benefit a small priestly class, not to elevate the consciousness of the masses and thus bring them closer to God.

When he said, Jesus was the literal Son of God, born of a virgin, descended from heaven to save mankind, and that only by taking Jesus into our heart could we be saved ... again, I agreed, and pointed out that the Christ figure is unique in any era but not in history (being the Son of God he manifests wherever and whenever he is needed most), that the virgin birth could well be an allusion to a personal rebirth inside the Kingdom of Heaven (an internal state of consciousness in which one is in direct contact with the Absolute), and that accepting Jesus in our heart amounted to achieving inside ourselves what Jesus achieved inside himself (namely the Kingdom of Heaven.)

At one point, clearly perplexed, he remarked that I seemed to believe a bit of this and a bit of that (i'd been throwing some vedic ideas into the discussion), and how did I decide what was true? Obviously, for him, he took the Bible as being true and everything external to it as part of the Lie, which greatly simplifies things. So, I admitted to more or less following my own gut instinct, to which he replied, but how can you trust yourself? Of course, I don't, not entirely, and so I alluded to the Cassiopaeans, telling him that I participated in an online group whose main focus was holding up mirrors to one anothers' beliefs in order to detect falsehoods arising from wishful thinking or psychological shortcomings, a task no man can accomplish alone.

I'm sure he still thinks I'm a lost and damned soul, and the jury's still out on that one so I won't say he's wrong. I could as easily tell him to open his mind and question things, for when you're exploring the most important matter in life (which we both agreed this was), you want to proceed with care. Yet at the same time, God is a merciful type; to those who ask - sometimes even without knowing they're asking - he shows the way. Especially in this age, as the veil lifts, the way becomes increasingly clear. And though knowledge might hasten the journey, God doesn't care in the end what words or ideas one of his appendages uses to grow closer to him; in the end, it is only the growth that matters.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Life Becomes Art

Remember the movie The Abyss, where deep-sea oil drillers fall so deep they encounter an alien civilization of bioluminescent invertebrates with a water-based technology?

I couldn't help but be reminded of that by this video at National Geographic (shot by an oil-rig ROV, no less! Just like in the movie!) Of course the Magnapinna squid featured there isn't thought to be an intelligent creature, so much as either a living bottom-dredger or a passive ambush predator (or both), neither of which is an ecological niche likely to earn a species intelligence.

So the search for the deep ocean squid cities continues....

Another Letter From the Devic Realm

At last! I've been waiting for this one for months, now. Be still my beating heart.

Another chapter of Les Visible's invaluable primer, Spiritual Survival in a Temporal World, has just gone online.

If you haven't read the first 12 chapters, they're still available at JustGetThere.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Electric Astology

The electric universe theory postulates the existence of vast interstellar networks of electricity carried by helical plasma structures known as Birkeland currents. Spanning so-called empty space, these currents power the very stars, the planets, and ultimately connect every piece of matter in the universe.

Now, where energy can be carried, so too can information (just see your USB port!) Indeed, the one virtually presupposes the other; in physical theory, 'energy' and 'information' are mathematically synonymous, as various theories of quantum information demonstrate. The universe can be described as a vast hologram projected inside a quantum computer that is continually computing its own existence, a description that is completely compatible with the electric universe model, discussing as they do complementary rather than contradictory aspects of reality.

Conventional astronomy, predicated on a Newtonian world-machine of gravitational force, posits that every body in space is ultimately nothing but isolated matter, cut off from any surrounding system. Stars are vast nuclear reactors, slowly consuming their own small store of fuel until one day they die; their movements inside the vast clockwork machine governed by nothing but impersonal laws that render any evolution ultimately purposeless. Save clumsy destruction such as a nearby star going supernova and inundating the earth with radiation, or a random comet slamming into the ocean and initiating an ice age, events far removed from one another in time and space can have no mutual influence whatsoever.

The ancients studied the skies, too, and their traditions are kept as the various forms of astrology. Whatever their many and varied particulars, one axiom every system held in common was that all astronomical events had real effects on the lives of humans and every other being in the universe, for the cosmos was seen ultimately a single whole. To the modern, scientific mind the idea that Mars being in the house of Scorpio might cause a man born at one time of year to meet his future wife and another woman born a different time of year to lose all she owns seems a laughable superstition, for no plausible causal connection could possibly exist....

Unless, that is, one brings to mind the electric universe's fractal web of electric charge, connecting all things in the universe with currents ranging in size from vast intergalactic trunks that power quasars to the filamentary sparks that forms the conversation of the atoms. Stars, planets, moons and asteroids and the smallest grain of interstellar dust: all are hooked into the same web. The shape those connections take - the double helix of the Birkeland current - is even suggestive of a certain famous molecule, one whose hereditary and even computational properties are well known, but whose function as a sophisticated electromagnetic transceiver is generally not.

By this vast web, information as well as energy can travel. One wonders if the various astrologies - either as the disjecta membra of a lost civilization, the misunderstood teachings of visiting aliens, or the philosophical inductions of inspired minds - had this in mind when they took it as obvious that all was connected. I am not saying that any of these traditions are necessarily correct in the particulars, for no art that studies so complex a system can ever hope to divine all its secrets; that many, if not all of the traditions are fragmentary and corrupted, reduces their reliability still further. Nevertheless, there may well be something to them, not on their own individual merits as fully developed theories, but in terms of the way that they look at the world.

The exclusive focus on solid bodies moving through space that has preoccupied astronomy since the days of Newton is akin to considering exclusively the skeleton of a body; and when the skeleton only is studied, the study can be of nothing but death. This is reflected in the grim picture painted by modern astronomy: the stars live solitary existences, burning up their own small supplies of fuel until one day, either in a spectacular explosion or with a gentle sigh, they die. On some of their planets life may. perhaps, by some accident, arise, but that life too is doomed by its star's inevitable fate; its history shall amount to no more than the clever re-arrangement of some small fraction of the matter around the star, with no wider significance for the universe at large. In the end, as the universe's expansion continues, all matter will eventually disperse into a thin atomic cloud, dim and dark for all of eternity.

If gravitational astronomy amounts to a study of the bones and nothing more, the electric universe theory offers up for our consideration the connective tissues, the circulatory system, and perhaps the nervous system of the universe. In short, it provides the parts of the universe's body necessary to bring it to life, on a cosmic scale. No matter the seeming gulfs that separate the parts, nothing is ever even for a moment separate from the whole.

Might it not be that the universe is at once a vast living being, and the living dream in the mind of god? Where actions taken at any one point, no matter how seemingly insignificant, can have repercussions of cosmic dimensions, whilst movements of the remotest of heavenly bodies reach down to influence the lives of the smallest of its inhabitants?

Monday, November 3, 2008

Secret Histories: A Tale of Two Books

It's been a while since my last post. Not coincidentally, it's been a little over a week since my copy of Laura Knight-Jadzyck's imposing tome The Secret History of the World (and how to get out alive) arrived in the mail. I spent my last forty bucks ordering it, so you'll understand my excitement, and perhaps forgive me that my internetting (particularly the blogging) declined precipitously while I read my way through it. And a fascinating read it was, too.

Now, here's a strange thing: I'd already read The Secret History of the World, several months ago. The volume remains on my bookshelf. So why would I be so excited to reading it again? Well, to start with, they weren't the same book. Before I'd even heard of Laura Knight-Jadzyck, Mark Booth's (much slimmer, much less scholarly) volume - The Secret History of the World As Laid Down by the Secret Societies - caught my eye at a bookstore in Japan, and for some reason I just had to read it. At the time I found it extremely interesting, although not entirely credible ... for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on. I knew (and know) very little about secret societies and other esoteric matters (a statement I make, not in comparison to the great mass of Other People, but to the Great Sea of knowledge); and yet, something about Booth's book struck me as, well ... not quite right. He makes an incredible list of claims, including: Adam and Eve were vegetables; the Sphinx was built in 10,000 BC; Jesus came to Earth in order to spread a new kind of consciousness, and had a twin brother who lived in Mesoamerica.

And yet, for all that, in a stunning lack of discernment on my part ... I actually kind of liked the book. Many of its ideas spoke to me.

Then I found out about the real (and original) Secret History, and, well ... there's just no comparison. Knight-Jadzyck's book is based on a lifetime of research into, well, everything; the things she uncovers are incredible, every bit as incredible as Booth's, with the crucial difference that she provides footnotes whenever she can. Her method is that of a proper historian: to drill down to primary sources, and then consider whether or not those sources can be trusted. She takes the rigorous methods of academic historians, and applies them to topics that are far outside the purview of respectable academics: Atlantis, hyperdimensional beings, cyclical catastrophes, ancient technologies ... all within the context of trying to understand how, and why, we have gotten where we are (and where we are likely to go next.)

The picture she paints is far from a reassuring one. Our distant ancestors made an unholy pact with hyperdimensional reptoid beings that feed on our negative emotions, and manipulate our reality in order to maximize their food source. Since then, at least one major global civilization (Atlantis) and possibly others, have come and gone, reaching as high or higher than our own civilization only to be dashed to pieces by the arrival of periodic cometary swarms. Most of our mythology is the fragmentary memory of lost technologies, warped beyond recognition after endless millenia of history's longest game of Telephone. And the same fate is in store for us ... unless we Ascend spiritually, and get out of the Matrix in which we live. It's paranoia of a spiritual depth, and written here - in such brevity - it looks like a psychotic's dream castle.

Well, except ... she isn't just pulling all this out of her ass. It's based on decades of careful research, pulling together threads from comparative mythology, archaeological anomalies, and virtually every science you can name. Her 'wild claims' are arrived at after looking at a great deal of evidence, and are stated with much qualification for - as she would be the first to say - if our history has been intentionally falsified, getting to the Truth is, as a physicist would say, a nontrivial problem.

Now, it's curious, don't you think, that a few years after one Secret History is published, another appears. The first is dense, scholarly, well-researched ... and presents in the end a way of looking at the world that would rock the powers that be to their very core, should its message be widely received. The second is superficially interesting, but on closer examination falls apart into a big pile of intellectual junk food. They both have the same name, and similar-looking covers; but while you'll never see the former at Indigo or Barnes & Nobles, the latter was widely released (and critically panned.) It's almost as though someone wanted the second book to be associated with the first; the Control System going into damage control mode, patching up the little hole in the carefully constructed Matrix that had been opened by Red Pill Press.

I consider myself fortunate to have come across the real thing.