Supernature
Lyall Watson
(1974
Edition)
Page
108
An
American mathematician noticed that
the earlier pages in books of logariths kept in his
university library were dirtier than later ones, indicating
that science students, for some rea-son, had more occasion
to calculate with numbers beginning with
1
than with any other
number.(261)He
made a collection of tables and calculated the relative
frequency of each digit from
1
to
9.Theoretically
they should occur equally
of-ten,
but he found 30per cent of the numbers were
1,
wheras 9
only occupied 5
per cent of the space. These are almost exactly the
proportions given to these numbers on the scale of a slide
rule, so the designers of that instrument clearly recognized
that such a bias existed. This preponderance of the number
1
may have been
caused by the fact that the tables were not
really random, but bigger tables provide a similar bias. The
ecologist Lamont Cole worked with a
rand
corporation publication that gives a million
random
digits.(262) He
selected numbers at regular
intervals to represent
Page
109
/
the level of metabolic
activity of a unicorn at the end of each hour over a long
period.There should have been no relationship between
numbers and no kind of cyclic pattern, but Cole
is now credited with the shattering zoological
discovery that unicorns are busiest at three o clock in the
morning .(77) It is possible that these discrepancies may be
due to some peculiarity in our way of counting, but it looks
as though the bias follows a natural law. Nature seems to
count exponen-tially. Not
12345,
but
124816, The
numbers growing by a logarithmic power each time.
Population increases in this way, and,
even at an individual level, things such as the
strength of a stimulus and the level of response to it vary
in an ex-ponetial way.This is, however, no more than an
observation; it does not explain the anomalous way in which
numbers behave.
The unexpected groupings
of similar numbers is something like the unusual
grouping of circumstances we call co-incidence.
Everyone has had the experience of coming across
a new word or name for the first time and then seeing it in
a dozen different places in quick succession. Or of finding
oneself in a small group of people, three of whom have the
same birthdays.
Often these
coincidences come in clusters: some days are particularly
lucky while on others it is just one damn thing after
another. Several people have made it part of their life's
work to collect information on coincidence of this kind .
The biologist Kammerer was
one, and it was he who gave the name of the phenomenon
seriality. He defines a series
"as a lawful occurrence of
the same or similar things or events
which are not
connected by the same active course"
and claims that coincidence
is in reality the work of a natural
principle.
(171)
The scribe then writ the
time and date 31st December
2000 3-0
pm
Daily
Telegraph dated
Sunday
the 31st
December 2000 4-0
pm
Page
14
Article
"Guests" Robert Matthews
"
Ramsey Theory.
Named after Frank Ram-sey, a Cambridge Mathemati-cian
clearly destined for great things but
who died in 1930 at the age
of 26 Ramsey Theory focuses on the relationships that exist
within collections of objects -
'
In 1928 Ramsey showed that
when such groups exceed a certain size,they
always contain cliques of mutual interest"
It is when one calculates
the size of gathering required to produce cliques
of a given size that Ramsey Theory reveals its hidden
depths. One can show that in any gathering of six people
there will always be a clique of at least three people who
are either mutual acquaint-ances or who have never met
'
Some years ago,
mathmeticians proved that a gathering of
18
people guarantees a clique of four mutual acquaintances or
strangers, the number needed to guaran-tee a clique of five
is unknown: the best guess is a crowd of
between 43 and 49 people.Whatever the
size of the gather-ing, there is always a chance
that people will find things in common with each
other. Indeed the chances are sur-prisingly high
.For example,a
random
gathering of just five people give better than
evens odds that at least two will share the same star sign.
Among a party of 23,there's a 50:50
chance that at least two
will share the same birthday. Even a gathering of just four
people have a better than even odds
that at least two were born
on the same day of the week."
Supernature
Lyall Watson
(1974
Edition)
Page
109 /
110
".(171) Kammerer
spent days just sitting in public
places noting down the number of people passing,
the way they dressed what they carried , and so on. When he
analyzed these records,he found that there was
typical clusters of /
things that occurred
together and then disappeared altogether."
" These "coincidental
"clusters are a real phenomenon .Kam-merer explains them by
his Law of Seriality, which says that working in
opposition to the second law of thermodynamics is a force
that tends towards symetery and coherance bringing
like
and
like
together. In a strange, illogical way, this idea
is rather persuasive, but there is no good scientific
evidence to support it and the theory is not very important
to us here .It is enough to know that there is a discernible
organization of events.Taken together with musical and
artistic harmony, with the non-randomness of numbers, and
with the periodicity of planetery movements, we begin to
get a picture of an en-viroment in which there
are recognizable patterns. Super-imposed on the cosmic chaos
are rhythms and harmonies that control many aspects of life
on earth by a communication of energy made possible by the
shape of things here and their resonance in sympathy with
cosmic themes. "
Fingerprints of the
Gods
Page
490/1
"The novelist Arthur
Koestler, who had a great interest in synchronicity, coined
the term 'library angel' to describe the unknown agency
responsible for the lucky breaks researchers sometimes get
which lead to exactly the right information being placed in
their hands at exactly the right moment."
The Death of
Forever
Darryl Reanney
1991
Page 221
"
consider the
sequence 31415926535897 (1)
This passes all
currently-available tests for randomness.
Now
com-pare it with the sequence20304815424786 (2)
Which also qualifies as a
wholly random number. On the face of it, we
simply have two random numbers. However, if we
subtract the lower sequence (2) from the higher (1), with
the 'wrinkle' that if we get a negative number we add 10 to
the result, we obtain the
sequence 111111111111111
"This is strikingly
non-random.These two 'random' numbers thus have a special
property."
The Death Of
Forever
A New Future for Human
Consciousness
Darryl Reanney (1995
Edition)
Page 25
" One of the most
important branches of physics is called Quantum theory,
because it deals with the tiny packages of
energy (quanta ) that comprise the subatomic
micro world. Light which we normally think of as an electro
magnetic wave, can also be visualized as a stream of tiny
particles-quanta-called photons. Conversely , Subatomic
entities like electrons are commonly considered as tiny
particles but under certain experimental conditions they
exhibit a wave like character. This wave / particle duality
is a cornerstone of quantum
physics
The bizarre side of
quantum theory comes when we try to figure out what a
quantum particle like an electron actually is. One thing it
is not is a particle in the ordinary sense of a speck of
matter which occupies both a defined amount of
space and a defined position in
space Physicists in the 1920s and 1930s
discovered that it is impossible to determine the position
and the velocity of an electron at the same time. This is
not a flaw in in technique. Rather, the electron, in a
fundamental sense, does not have a specific
position
/
Page 26
/
and velocity the
uncertainty is an in built feature of our real world, not a
fault of our instruments
"A deeper
understanding revealed the quixotic fact that a
particle like an electron has only a certain mathematical
probability of being found in any one spot.This
probability has a ripple or wave-like form, but it is more
like a 'crime wave'- a statistical distribution - than a
physical undulation
" The basis of matter
, then , when examined intimately, dissolves into a
ghostlike intangibility ;
the quantum wave
is a mathematical wraith , a ripple of
possibilities."
"The quantum
wave only has
this wraithlike character when it is not being
looked at. When an observer intrudes, when a
scientist for example, tries to measure the properties of an
electron the, the ghostly wave function collapses.The
particle becomes real it can now be specifically assigned a
fixed location, with a probability of 1,i.ea
certainty
This is a staggering
conclusion .It
means that consciousness is not an observer in the dynamics
of the universe; it is an active participant. Consciousness
, literally and factually, creates reality , by summoning
forth material particles,
definable certainties,
from the elusive quantum wave .Objective 'reality' in this
perspective falters on the brink of a profound
ambiguity. Subject and object; mind and matter
are not separate; they interact and
interlock."
When the thats away
the how's will play said Zed Aliz to the
scribe .
The scribe writ simply A cat
is said to have said, 'it is said, that a cat has
nine
lives'.
Page 31
"
In the perspective
of physics the past does not cease to exist simply because
our awareness moves beyond it"
Page 33
" The laws of physics
have no inbuilt time
asymmetery.They
work just as well in the future-to-past sense as the
past-to-future sense.
We see this
clearly when we look at the quantum wave .The wave is a
ripple of possibility, not a real thing
It has neither
past nor future; it can be described as travelling forwards
in time and backward in
time
with equal
validity. This is
true not just of the quantum wave. Subatomic particles
exhibit the same disregard for time. In the last half
century physics has unearthed a garden of so-called
'fundamental particles' - mesons, positrons, neutrinos, etc.
For each of these particles of ordinary matter there exists
an antiparticle of equal mass but opposite 'charge'
(antimatter)
Page 34
According to modern
physics, both the quantum wave and the physical particles
that constitute matter are symmetric with respect to the
direction of time. The spacetime landscape , at least as far
as quanta are concerned, can be crossed with equal ease.
Page
95
'
1923'
'Kahil
Gibran'
" Forget not that I shall come back to you
A little while, and my longing shall gather dust and form
for
another
body
A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another
woman shall bear me"
Page 209
"At this stage in the
evolution of our minds, our experience of reality is like
that of a shadow, a limited, impoverished ghost-image
projected into the three dimensions of our present (average)
mode of consciousness by the invisible (to us )
four-dimensional 'truth structure' that lies beyond and
behind it, extended in time as we are extended in space. I
cannot stress too bly that it is this four-dimensional truth
structure which is the universe's reality. What we call
objective reality, our everyday commonsense world, is but a
dim phantom construct of the timeless hyperstructure that
exists, in or perhaps as, the 'mind of God', to use
religious imagery. Yet, just as our present
three-dimensional state of consciousness evolved from the
one dimensional mode of our remote ancestors, so there is
abundant evidence that the four-dimensional mode is
struggling to be born in the homo sapiens species at this
human moment in the cosmic story we are almost
there."
"
This seems to
bring us to the end of our quest.Yet one problem remains and
like all final problems, it is the greatest one of all,
sticking like a thorn in the vision of hope which the inner
eye holds out to us. The cosmos is a spacetime continium and
in this regard, the poet's intuition of a timeless state of
consciousness
merely
/
Page 210
/
reflects the facts of
the physical universe as science depicts them.However
timelessness implies foreverness and the same science that
reveals spacetime to us also tells us that the universe will
one day end in fire or ice.
The death of forever.
The fact that the very cosmos in which we live is 'mortal'
This was where this journey started and it is from this
existentialist crisis of truly universal proportions that
this book gets its name.At the finish of the race, we seem
to run head-on into one last, unresolvable paradox, just as
light was dawning. Something that seems to make our
intuition of timelessness as insubstantial as a lovely
vision, dreamed by a dreamer in a quiet time but
dissolving like a snowflake at first contact with brute
fact.
Is this really the case?
In chapter 7, I discussed a recent model of spacetime put
forward by Stephen Hawking"
"
Hawking built a
model of the cosmos which he called the 'no boundary' model
because in his theory, time does not begin at a 'point' nor
does it end in one (Figure 7.3.).From the earlier
perspec-tive of Chapter 7, this model seemed from many
points of view unsatisfactory, because it used imaginary
time, not real time. Chapter 9 gives the model a
new source of credibility for it is characteristic of the
inner eye that it can disregard the 'commonsense' aspects of
experience and penetrate to the inner logic of
nature.
Thus when the inner eye
'sees a circle, a mandela, and recog-nises therein some form
of flawnessness, it is, at a different level, seeing the
endless number 3.1415926
It may be significant we call
such numbers trancendental. Indeed, science builds its
deepest truths using numbers that are, in an important
sense, 'illogical'. The square root of minus one is
imaginary (it is in fact, part of the number system Hawking
uses to build his model ). The square root of 2 is
irrational. And so it goes on.
Moreover, the word
'imaginary', like all symbols invented by the conceptual
mind, confuses the issue by implying that such numbers are
in some way 'unreal' This is fundamentally false. As
Hawking's colleague
mathematician, Roger
Penrose, says cryptically:
Page 211
It is important to
stress the fact that these 'imaginary' numbers are no less
real than the real numbers we have become accustomed
to
the relationship between such real numbers and
physical reality is not as direct or compelling as it may at
first seem to be
We find a similar situation
in particle physics where the so-called ultimate building
blocks of matter (quarks) are given such mythic names as
'strange', charmed etc. At this deep level of reality, the
distinction between scientist and poet breaks down and
scien-tists use the language of song and parable in their
intuitive attempts to seek out the basic structures of the
world.
To return to my point, I
find it fascinating that Hawking
himself recognises that his use of imaginary
time, far from being a ruse or trick, may in fact
be a door to a higher order of insight. Listen to his own
words:
This might suggest that
the so-called imaginary time is really the
real time and that what
we call real time is just a figment of our
imaginations. In real
time, the universe has a beginning and an
end at singularities
that form a boundary to space- time and at
which the laws of
science break down. But in imaginary time,
there are no
singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we
call
imaginary time is really
more basic, and what we call real is just
an idea that we invent
to help us describe what we think the
universe is like.
This goes to the heart
of the matter for the defining quality of the inner eye in
its most highly evolved form is that it can 'see' the
deepest hidden structures of reality without
impediment. If timeless-ness is an authentic feature of
consciousness - and the evidence I have summarised in this
book very bly suggests that it is
-
then consciousness may just as well 'exist' in what the
mathematicians call 'imaginary time as in 'real time. Indeed
it may be precisely because the ego-self lives in real time
that it 'knows', death. While it may be precisely because
consciousness lives in imaginary time that it 'knows'
eternity.
I now want to build on
Hawking's model, but I want to do so in a particular way. I
want to use it in the poetic sense of a metaphor not in the
rigid sense of a mathematical model. There are three reasons
for this:first, Hawking's model presupposes that the uni-
/
Page 212 /
verse is closed (that
spacetime is positively curved ) and this is as yet
unproven. Second I do not believe Hawking's model (despite
the credentials of its creator) is science's last word on
the subject. Third, we are, by any definition, crossing into
uncharted psychological territory by thinking
about human hopes for the future in terms of imaginary time
or any other mathematical representation of time that
science may discover.
The key feature of the
Hawking metaphor is that time closes back upon itself to
form a loop. This is why
in this metaphor we cannot
talk of a beginning or an end to time,for a circle has
neither except for the arbitrary points we choose to mark on
it. It may be no accident that the inner eye has for long
sensed that reality is eternal, for in this higher-order
understanding, foreverness is restored to its ancient
position as the foundation stone of
consciousness.
The most fascinating
consequence of the 'loop of time ' meta-phor is summed up in
Figure 7.3. Here, we see evolution starting with the 'north
pole'(the Big Bang) and progressing around the circle to
'now', represented by the
18
th line of latitude (say )
At this point Alizzed said
the
'18th
line of latitude' ocurrs on the
18th
line down of page 212
The scribe writ, not
including title heading The Death of
Forever
Page 212 continues
/
From this 'now'
perspective, we can look 'back' at our past, hidden behind
the 'southward' spacetime rim .Yet this is illusionary , a
hangover of the flawed way we look at time through the
ego-self window. The loop of time metaphor shows that when
we look forward into the future we are also looking back
into the past because the arrow of time traces out the full
circumference of the circle, eventually coming back to
itself.
In this 'song of reality'.
The distinction between past and future vanishes. The
process of 'seeing'is then symetrical in both directions.
In T.S. Elliot's apt words:
Time present and time past
are both perhaps present in time future
and time future contained in time past
If this is what
consciousness 'sees' it is 'timeless' in a deeper and
different sense than we ever dreamed possible. In real time,
such a closing of the loop would play havoc with our notions
of causality, cause becoming effect and effect
cause."
"
The unexpected
feature of the loop of time metaphor is that a signal from
the future becomes a signal from the past. Nothing is
/ Page 213 /
wholly new, for
information is always travelling where it has been before.
This is why I find the loop of time parable so satisfying.
It resonates deeply with a poem cited earlier
-
T.S. Eliot's 'Little Gidding':
we shall not cease from exploration
and the end of our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time
through the unknown, remembered gate
when the last of earth left to discover
is that which was the beginning
The famous line 'know
the place for the first time' is critically significant
in the context of this book."
"
It is said of the
renaissance artist Michaelangelo that he approached a block
of marble believing that the perfect sculpture he sought to
create already existed in the unhewn stone. The artistic act
was thus an act of discovery not creation, and the long
hours of painstaking work were devoted to revealing what was
already there."
"
This is I believe,
the stamp of an authentically creative act : one discovers
what is already true.
When a human being 'sees' a
pre-existing truth, already known to
/
Page 214
/
the cosmos, in a very
deep sense, the universe recognises part of
itself,comprehending it at a higher level of understanding.
This kind of incremental knowing is the self-realization of
the cosmos
In other words, there is a
deep knowing about consciousness that is utterly distinct
from mere intellectual comprehension. This deep knowing is a
remembering of what is already there. One becomes, in the
full sense, conscious of what one has always subconsciously
been aware of. In terms Eliot's poem the 'gate'is remembered
even though it is unknown. We arrive before we started and
know the place for the first time!
We do not create the future,
we discover it.
Roger Penrose captures
something of the flavour of the mode of knowing in The
Emperor's New Mind, when he says:
Recall my proposal that consciousness, in essence, is the
'seeing'
of a necessary truth: and that it may represent
some
kind of actual contact with Plato's world of ideal
mathemati-
cal concepts. Recall that Plato's world is itself timeless.
The
perception of Platonic truth carries no actual information
and
there would be no actual contradiction involved if such
a
conscious perception
were even
to be propagated backwards
in time
The loop of time
metaphor goes a long way towards explaining a puzzle that
many readers will have picked up as they worked their way
through the pages of this book.
The argument I
put forward in Chapters
8
and 9
"
At another
moment in the now of know time the scribe noted
that the line containing
' The argument I
put forward in
Chapters
8
and
9'
had
9
further words in the line.
As in
' that ego cages consciousness, is not a novel one
-'
Further the scribe
added 8
x 9
is 72
Page 214
continuing /
" The argument I put
forward in
Chapters
8
and
9,
that ego cages consciousness, is not a novel one
-
it is an ancient tenet of
many religions. In particular, much of what I said in those
chapters could be described as a scientific interpreta-tion
of a set of beliefs mapped out in the Hindu
Upanishads thousands of years ago. Hindu belief,
for example, sees the ego as a deception (maya) which
seperates the ' I ' from the ultimate. When the mirage of
ego is dissolved, the underlying union is made plain
-
Thou art
That (tat tvam asi) is the illuminating
recognition of this oneness. This is essentially the message
of Chapter 8.
Even the metaphor of the
ego-smudged mirror of consciousness that I have used
repeatedly (
Chapter
8
to
10 )
has a Hindu parallel. Yoga
teaching uses the simile of wind blowing across water to
describe the relationship
between self and reality.
While the wind blows , the water's surface - the mirror
-
is fragmented, shift-ing, the 'reality' it reflects
continuously disrupted into half-truths
/
Page 215 /
and confusing images.
However, when the wind stops, the surface of the
water like that of the mirror, becomes still and perfect,
reflecting the wholesome majesty of God, beheld in
motionless
serenity.
Hence, the origin of the
much misunderstood word 'nirvana', ( nir =
beyond; vana = wind ).
Moreover, Eastern religions
seem to have arrived by mystical contemplation and insight
at an understanding of the deep structure of physical
reality that Western science has only recently been able to
formulate in empirical mathematical terms . Consider these
two descriptions of the nature of time, as quoted by Fritjof
Capra in his well-known text, The Tao of
Physics
It is believed by most that time passes; in actual fact
it stays
where it
is.This idea of passing may be called time, but it
is an
incorrect idea,for since
one sees it only as passing,one cannot
understand that it just
stays where it is.
Zen master
Dogen
This passage captures the
essence of the relativistic picture of time.
A further insight into time
comes from a Buddhist text:
It was taught by the
Buddha oh Monks that
the past, the
future
physical space
and
individuals are nothing but names, forms
of thought, words of
common useage, merely superficial
realities.
This passage not only enca
psulates the modern scientific view of our subjective sense
of time , with its false tense structure (past present
future); it also aptly summarises the formative role of
language in the creation of the ego-self.
Is all I have done in this
book retell, in the imagery of science, a story of reality
that has been known to mystics for centuries? In one sense
the answer is no. I have tried to derive my argument
entirely from known scientific premises, attempting at all
times to keep my logic internally consistent. However, in
another sense the answer is yes. I have already said that
the linear logic of the left brain has, from one point of
view, been compelled to create science so that it could
'see' in its own conceptual way, the image of unity that the
right brain had, through intuition, glimpsed aeons
ago.
This leads me to an
adventurous speculation. The time when many of the 'deep
myths' of our species crystallised out - about 5000 to 3000
years ago in the West - corresponds remarkably with the
period of the Fall, the emergence of the ego-self. At this
/
Page 216 /
transition stage of human
evolution, consciousness was by the definition of my
argument, ber in highly evolved individuals because the
confounding distractions of the still evolving ego had not
yet hardened into their final form. It is not surprising
that the visionaries or prophets of that period possessed a
more powerful insight than we do today, submerged as we are
in the fallacy of our tick-tock time.
What I am suggesting is that
the prophets who formulated the deep intuitive insights
common to the major religions of humanity were in some sense
tuned in to the future,'seeing the dim and far-off image of
knowledge still unborn, listening perhaps to the holistic
message of a science thousands of years away, in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries of the modern era I
propose that this is precisely what consciousness
recognises, not just a premonition of the past but a memory
of the
future.
|