Ancient Beliefs and Aethertime

Ancient stories represent a wisdom that helps us better understand our reality in these ancient stories like the bible or the dao or the vedas. We do not necessarily need to adopt religious doctrines or divine metaphors in order to benefit from their wisdom and there is useful wisdom in nearly all of the ancient stories of various religions and science. Unfortunately, there can be much less useful guidance in these stories as well and so it is important to use a prism of some kind to refine their useful wisdom.

The beliefs of matter, time, and action are a way of believing in matter as mother earth and time as father time and are metaphors for these many ancient stories. The action of earth and time leads quite naturally to us as progeny and so those metaphors also lead to both to a metascience as well as to a physical universe.

It is a wonder that all human actions are based on the prism of three trimal beliefs:

1) Origin; this can be creation or some other story;

2) Destiny; this can be an eternal life, a reincarnation, or some other afterlife;

3) Purpose; our purpose in discovery decides the future that we select and actions that we choose to journey to a desirable life. Our discovery during a lifetime mirrors the evolution from the seemingly random and chaotic choices of an infant into the complex patterns of adult choice that we call purpose. This recursion is our reality.

The bible has an origin story as the creation of Genesis and a destiny story as heaven or hell. Fine. There are lots and lots of different ancient stories of origin and destiny so take your pick. The prism of matter time provides stories that guide both a rational science and metascience from which a universe now makes better sense to me.

Besides origin and destiny, where there are a great variety of stories, religion then comes down to guiding human purpose. What is our purpose? Do we even have a purpose? Does it evolve? Religions teach that true purpose lies in a belief in a particular metaphor or dao or nirvana and true purpose will therefore result in a “good” future or good qi or good kami. Furthermore religious stories invariably suggest that without some kind of a divine metaphor for the greatest good, humans can not trust their own feelings for guidance in life. 

That is demonstrably not true.

Humans do have a purpose in discovering how the universe works and discovery exists with or without religion. Religions usually associate something like the greatest or highest good with a supernatural agent and that agent guides human purpose and destiny. Nevertheless, with or without religion humans discover and select desirable futures based on feeling and the feelings of those whose lives we touch.

Even without religion, we all share stories about our lives and experiences and as a result, our feelings evolve while we journey to a more desirable life. Our stories allow the evolution of ours and others feelings for an ever larger number of people.

Summum bonum, the greatest or supreme good, is a concept from the philosopher Kant that has had many manifestations. Religions commonly associate feelings that point to the greatest good with a divine metaphor. Immanuel Kant was a philosopher and religious scholar whose 1781 Critique of Pure Reason "proved" that a greatest good divinity must exist.

"Reason tells us that without a supreme good, moral laws would be idle fantasies,"

is my paraphrase of Immanuel Kant.

Pessimum malum, the worst evil, is the logical antithesis of the greatest good and religions commonly associate a worst evil with various lesser divine and thoroughly bad metaphors. Note that arguments about greater and lesser, good and bad, are often not very productive when it comes to bad. Both secular and religious people in society generally acknowledge that positive emotions are desirable and therefore good: joy, pride, love, pleasure, and contentment.

Correspondingly, both secular and religious society generally finds negative emotions undesirable and therefore bad: misery, shame, hate, anger, and fear. Therefore humans align their feelings by communicating with and touching others and that is how we imagine a desirable future for ourselves and for the lives that we touch.

The stories from the bible can be very uplifting and they also can be very depressing. While the poetry of Solomon is very pleasing and desirable, the diatribes of Leviticus can be correspondingly angry and undesirable. Selecting particular stories from the bible without knowing about their historical context and without knowing about their relation to the many other human stories diminishes their value as wisdom.

There are many bible phrases and stories that only make much sense when they are placed in the context of the ancient times in which they were written. Many bible stories have been lifted from Babylonian or Sumerian or Hittite folklore. Others involve a Judean civil war with the losing side not getting its book in the bible, only denigration. Some bible stories were during times that the Hittites and Egyptians were at war and Judea happened to be in between.

The seven-day creation makes so much more sense with the traditions of Babylon that associated each of the week days with one of the seven heavenly bodies of Sumerian and Babylonian astrology. Given the 40 years of captivity in Babylon, it is not a surprise that Judaism absorbed much Babylonian wisdom including the seven day week. After their return to Judea, Judaic traditions were again challenged by the Greek invasion of Alexander the Great, the time of Macabees. It was during this period that the Jewish bible was written in Greek in about 265 BCE, and it is ironic that it is that Greek version that has survived antiquity.

Joseph Campbell wrote extensively about human stories and said,

“I think that it’s important to live life with knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery.”

Noah’s flood story in the bible after all appears in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, told and retold for nearly 1000 years before the bible was conceived. The stories that we create today will be the stories of our future.

Our purpose in life is in knowing our feelings, listening to others, and selecting our journey on that basis. We all journey to a desirable future by actions that best fulfill our destiny and that is our purpose. Religion can either help our purpose or hinder it or they might not be that useful at all.

Emotion, Purpose and Feeling

Matter exists as both objects on isolated objective Cartesian trajectories and as relational matter waves whose exchange of amplitude and phase subjectively relates objects to all other objects and to the universe. Between any two people sharing an experience, there are many different senses in play: sight, sound, touch, etc. The sum total of their experiences represents a state of objective emotions for each person and ends up with what we call a subjective feeling.

A subjective feeling goes beyond any single objective emotion or sense and it is quite certain that there are parts of the inner life of human consciousness that we do not now and never will completely understand. Therefore the subjective feelings between two people are necessarily affected by each other and by those whose lives they touch in ways that we do or do yet not understand and some ways that we never will understand.

There are bonds among people who share their subjective feelings with each other beyond any objective sensation. People are all part of an undulating sea of matter waves whose matter exchange separates objects and binds objects to each other with time delays. These matter waves are both photons of charge force and photon pairs of gravity and so matter wave amplitudes and phases are therefore difficult to measure directly. Since we already live in a very noisy background of rather incoherent electromagnetic, gravitational, and thermal matter fluctuations, this chaotic background makes it especially difficult to measure the discrete aether exchange that is the basis of aethertime.

Coherence among matter waves results in bonds that do stand out from chaotic noise that affects electromagnetism and gravity and so it is true that a coherence between matter waves can persist across the universe. We can measure matter waves as both amplitude and phase under the right conditions and find that these matter waves are consistent with the structure of galaxies and with the periods of the solar cycle and ice age epochs.

Matter waves are also consistent with the complementary images that we see with the multiple reflections of light in mirrors, beamsplitters, and kaleidoscopes.

It therefore appears that we are all entangled not only with each other but also with the stars after all.

Ptolemy began modern astronomy in 150 A.D. by showing in his Almagest a model of the heavens centered on the earth with the complex paths of orbiting planets as epicycles. Epicycles are recursions of circular orbits that embed lesser orbits and show planetary positions that were consistent with the rough observations of the time. Later with improved data, Copernicus and Galileo in 1500-1600 CE showed a different heliocentric model without epicycles. Instead of epicycles, elliptical orbits show the sun as the center, not the earth, with the universe, the earth, planets, and stars all orbiting around the sun.

In the last two centuries, science has further showed that the sun is only a local center. The sun was not after all the center of the universe and rather the sun orbited about another center as a star within a galaxy with 100 billion other stars...and then that that galaxy orbitted yet another center that was also not the center of the universe and our galaxy seems to move as one of another 100 billion galaxies as threads of the universe. According to current interpretation of Hubble's redshift data, the universe expands uniformly from all centers and so ironically, Ptolemy was right after all and the earth is at the center of our expanding (or contracting) universe.

Ptolemy predicted the apparent heavenly motion of stars and planets, sun and moon, in his Almagest that reproduced many of the observations of heavenly bodies over thousands of years of observations. Ptolemy further described in his Tetrabiblos or four books the predictions of human behavior based on a birth date and the corresponding heavenly constellations at that date, which became the metaphysics of astrology.

However, unlike the Almagest that was based on observations of Heracles and Sumeria, Ptolemy never provided any observations for the principles of the Tetrabolis, even though somehow Ptolemy's astrology survives to this day. Many people still believe that the heavenly constellations determine human destiny despite the lack of any objective measurements.

People are certainly bonded to each other in many different ways. They share stories and images of each other and their events, they touch and smell one another, and they touch in more intimate ways as well. People share experiences and have feelings in common about one another that involve their total experience.

When I share an experience of an object with someone, I see the same object as an image from a different perspective. If that image reflects from a partial mirror, I share with someone a complement of the same image, one reflected from and one transmitted through the same partial mirror. Mirror reflections are complementary and coherent images that simple pictures and videos do not have.

What this means is that there are some properties of images and objects that we do not normally perceive directly. Our consciousness does not perceive and record any of the phase information from light, i.e. the exact timing of light's arrival or polarization. Therefore our experience of reality is largely associated with only light's intensity as energy pulses as we gather neural stimulation. We only perceive the phase or timing or coherence of those energy events by perspective even though the timing between events is much less than our ability to discern them.

There are a number of techniques that allow our otherwise slow perception response to resolve events that are much faster or that involve phase as well as amplitude. These techniques compare an unknown event with a known event in a manner that allow us to perceive their coincidence. Such techniques as interferometry, stereopsis, parallax, echolocation, and other sensory timing events allow us to perceive aspects of images and sounds that are otherwise hidden from our senses.

Human feeling, though, is a very complex superposition of emotions and a feeling is often very difficult to completely articulate or explain or communicate. Humans therefore exchange many stories and images and facial expressions and gestures about the nature of their feelings and at any given moment, those feelings represent our feeling and our feeling is our state at that time. Our feeling affects and is affected by those around us: family, friends, neighbors, city, country, planet, solar system, galaxy…and actually the entire universe as well.

As far as we can use our emotions to perceive the phase and amplitude of our reality as well as the observation of reality in time, that feeling extends the context of our reality. Our feeling sometimes allows us to discover a reality that does not always follow Cartesian causality and we would then sense objects without being able to project those objects into a Cartesian space.

Such nonsensical imaginings are a very common attribute of human consciousness. Normally we must reject or at least strongly control nonsense thinking since it can result in injury or even death. If we choose inappropriate actions in order to journey to a future that is impossible, those actions might threaten our very survival. On a mountainside, we must somehow choose to stay on the path and not walk off of a steep cliff adjacent to that path.

Imaginings of apparent nonsense can, however, reveal our subconscious inner life and so we can learn from such imaginings such as dreams and other subconscious experiences. Moreover, our imaginings can be very subtly coupled or entangled with other observations. While these couplings can be very difficult to measure and understand, the coupling between gravity and electromagnetism should in principle be measurable as matter waves as well.

Our observation of a photon or other particle allows us to know that an observer, with whom we are coherent, likewise did not observe it. And yet we cannot conclude that that photon or particle journeyed a Cartesian path from an object to us. Rather we must conclude, because of the quantum interference effects of reality, that that particle was somehow wavelike and existed as matter amplitude and phase on two or even more than two coherent paths until we observed it as matter intensity.