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 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
|