Did you get lost inside that dream?
Did you forget who you used to be?
You heard a scream in the woods,
You ran to save that soul in pain,
You ran in circles until you were lost,
Only to find out that it was none other than your own scream.
Now do you feel all alone?
I bet you wish that you would have just stayed with Mother and Father.
They told you not to wander alone in the dark; once you leave you can never go back.
You don’t have a way to see the path back. Who knew that you would need a lantern?
You will return with Mother and Father, do not worry, they have found you, they will rescue you. You will be comfortable again, in love for eternity. You were just scared of the unknown, but peace is here, do not be scared, for you are only scared of fear itself.
God is watching you, and He loves you. You only feel alone because you are looking into yourself for answers, not reaching out with faith for help – Help is here, and it is here for you now. Relax; celebrate this chance to be alive and breathing.
Choosing to be here in
This body
This body holding me
Be my reminder here that I am not alone in
This body
This body holding me
Feeling eternal, all this pain is an illusion
Twirling 'round with this familiar parabol
Spinning, weaving 'round each new experience
Recognize this as a holy gift and
Celebrate this chance to be
Alive and breathing
A chance to be
Alive and breathing[/i]
Black then white are all I see in my infancy.
red and yellow then came to be, reaching out to me.
lets me see there is so much more
and beckons me to look through to these infinite possibilities.
As below, so above and beyond, I imagine
drawn outside the lines of reason.
Push the envelope. Watch it bend.
Over thinking, over analyzing separates the body from the mind.
Withering my intuition leaving all these opportunities behind.
Feed my will to feel this moment urging me to cross the line.
Reaching out to embrace the random.
Reaching out to embrace whatever may come.
I embrace my desire to
feel the rhythm, to feel connected
enough to step aside and weep like a widow
to feel inspired, to fathom the power,
to witness the beauty, to bathe in the fountain,
to swing on the spiral
of our divinity and still be a human.
With my feet upon the ground I lose myself
between the sounds and open wide to suck it in,
I feel it move across my skin.
I’m reaching up and reaching out,
I’m reaching for the random or what ever will bewilder me.
And following our will and wind we may just go where no one’s been.
We’ll ride the spiral to the end and may just go where no one’s been.
(From the Foreword to Cultivating the Empty Field by Taigen Dan Leighton,.)
"Empty and desireless,
cold and thin,
simple and genuine,
this is how to strike down and
fold up the remaining habits of many lives. When the stains from old habits are exhausted the original light appears, blazing through your skull, not admitting any other matters.
Vast and spacious,
like sky and water merging during autumn,
like snow and moon having the same colour, this field is without boundary, beyond direction,
magnificently one entity without edge or seam.
Further, when you turn within and drop off everything completely, realization occurs. Right at the time of entirely dropping off, deliberation and discussion are one thousand or ten thousand miles away. Still no principle is discernible, so what could there be to point to or explain?
People with the bottom of the bucket fallen out immediately find total trust. So we are told simply to realize mutual response and explore mutual response,
then turn around and enter the world.
Roam and play in samadhi.
Every detail clearly appears before you.
Sound and form, echo and shadow, happen instantly without leaving traces."
We should designate this as a Tool admiration thread. Maynard was definitely an inspiration when I wrote that yesterday, more specifically the songs Parabola and 46&2:
My shadow’s
Shedding skin and
I’ve been picking
Scabs again
I’m down
Digging through
My old muscles
Looking for a clue
I’ve been crawling on my belly
Clearing out what could’ve been
I’ve been wallowing in my own confused
And insecure delusions
For a piece to cross me over
Or a word to guide me in
I wanna feel the changes coming down
I wanna know what I’ve been hiding in
My shadow
Change is coming through my shadow
My shadow’s shedding skin
I’ve been picking
My scabs again
I’ve been crawling on my belly
Clearing out what could’ve been
I’ve been wallowing in my own chaotic
And insecure delusions
I wanna feel the change consume me,
Feel the outside turning in
I wanna feel the metamorphosis and
Cleansing I’ve endured within
My shadow
Change is coming
Now is my time
Listen to my muscle memory
Contemplate what I’ve been clinging to
Forty six and two ahead of me
I choose to live and to
Grow, take and give and to
Move, learn and love and to
Cry, kill and die and to
Be paranoid and to
Lie, hate and fear and to
Do what it takes to move through
I choose to live and to
Lie, kill and give and to
Die, learn and love and to
Do what it takes to step through
See my shadow changing,
Stretching up and over me
Soften this old armor
Hoping I can clear the way
By stepping through my shadow,
Coming out the other side
Step into the shadow
Forty six and two are just ahead of me
The modern human species currently has a total of 46 chromosomes in each cell (44 chromosomes and 2 sex chromosomes). If mankind “completes the circle” by adding another pair of chromosomes, then we would have a total of 48 chromosomes (46 chromosomes and 2 sex chromosomes). Mankind would be a new species.
A near perfect alignment of two sex chromosomes (a highly unlikely coincidence) might result in a new species being created which would have a total of 48 chromosomes.
The Human “shadow” is the psychological aspect of our mind that seperates our ego from our true self. It distorts the communication from humanity’s “unified animal state” and humanity’s “conscious awareness of our’s and other’s consciousness”. It is responsible for our massive contemplation of our own suffering. It is what makes us human. It is what perverts us into the seperate “body and mind”. Our having of 46 chromosomes is disharmonic to nature; we are a stepping stone from 44 chromosomes to 48 chromosomes. We are a species that shouldn’t exist within this system; this is what gives us the sense of having a “unified consciousness” when biologically it can be seen that this is an illusion. This universe is the product of a single entity in a higher dimension being viewed with a 4th dimensional (3 spatial dimensions, 1 linear time dimension) lense.
Please, “fill in the blanks” as you see them, and give me your interpretation. But from what I have figured out, is that once anybody gets to the point where they start grinding down Fibonacci-sequence bases and exponents, they will just have to accept the realization that the unfindable “answer” can not be grasped with our basic human comprehension.
The movie “The Cube” is a fairly good metaphor for this - If you haven’t seen it I highly recommend you do. It’s not the best quality of a film, but looking at it metaphorically for the human species you will see the signifcance.
Also, the movie “Stir of Echoes” (with Kevin Bacon) is pretty closely related to the concept of “46 and 2”
indeed, i am impressed; most people that appreciate Tool still do not understand the meaning of the song’s lyrics.
i do have a couple questions though. for one, why are 44 and 48 more natural, whereas 46 is not? i understand the fibonacci-sequence, the spiral, but i am not familiar with how this idea connects to the sequence 44-46-48, or why 48 is more “perfect” than 46.
also, what do you mean about “A near perfect alignment of two sex chromosomes (a highly unlikely coincidence) might result in a new species being created which would have a total of 48 chromosomes” ? what kind of alignment are we talking about here, and how exactly would it result in two new stable chromosomes that would be able to be replicated indefinately (i.e. new species)?
my friend has been recommending me to watch Cube for some time, he gave me a copy last year, and i guess i should get around to it… thanks for the insights.
The presumable reason is that 48 is more stable than 46, is that 48 is much closer to being a perfect square.
Genetically, the idea is that when two sex chromosomes interact in fertilization which have identical positioning of nucleotides, they might (if variables and conditions are met right) cause a new set of chromosomes to be added to the gene pool.
This is an area of genetics which we haven’t quite explored yet, but it may be possible that the new set of chromosomes may only exist as a quantum wave. Depending on the fundamental mathematical laws of physics which inherently can not be determined with our technology, the zygote will either a) Become infertile (the most probably outcome), or b) Become a new quantum set of chromosomes.
The answer to whether this is possible is determined by answering this question: Do you believe that the proteins involved in the “origin of life” were randomly assembled in a near-perfect structure (which shouldn’t be mathematically possible ), or do you believe that the proteins involved in the “origin of life” had to exist because the universe is infinite.
Well, do you believe the universe is infinite, or do you believe that this was all a “one chance, one shot” ordeal?
thanks for the clarification; i do have to ask, though, why natural structures would tend to actualize in perfect squares… i know that patterns and fractals are seen in nature all the time, but is the concept of a perfect square something we also observe as natural phenomenon, and/or can we derive the importance of perfect squares from math itself?
as to the proteins of the origin of life, it seems most likely that they assembled via a very rare set of natural conditions in the environment, and following prescribed natural laws of interaction. life must be possible naturally, since life exists in nature; that being said, nothing is inherently “random”, so we can assume that the conditions for life arose not out of “randomness”, but also not out of some pre-ordained will or design: the original amino acids likely formed protein structures because the ideal levels of conditions for their formation (heat/light/movement/dampness/electricity/gravity/radiation/etc) happened to all coincide together.
i do not believe the universe is infinite-- infinity is an abstraction, a concept that cannot exist in reality or extension (it entails contradiction). however, the good thing is that infinity is not required for the formation of life, just as intelligent design or randomness are likewise not required-- life is rare, due to the specific conditions necessary for basic proteins to form from simple chemicals and for these proteins to intake chemicals from their environment and continue to successfully form, change and grow. yet if these rare conditions are met sufficiently, life (the autonomous integration/collapse of natural forces of attraction and repulsion into small/localized stable regions) will emerge as result of nothing more than the natural functioning of natural processes.
so in this sense, certainly specific situations or circumstances present greater chances of actualizing life or life-sustaining activities; perhaps this is the same force/tendency acting behind the inherent stability of perfect squares over non-perfect squares (they represent more efficient “autonomous integration/collapse of natural forces of attraction and repulsion into small/localized stable regions”, i.e. more efficient structures capable of sustaining life).
in the end, its all biology/chemistry/physics, and beneath all that, ultimately, its all mathematics…
What is “infinite” is relative. For example, what exact purpose you are holding within “infinity” could possibly change everything. The truth is geometrically, that infinity can be seen everywhere. No matter how far you “zoom in” to an object, you will always be able to “zoom in” further (in a realistic sense this would simply cause electromagnetic repulsion once you became close enough to any object, although nuclear fusion is a small posibility). The same is true for “zooming out”, you can travel as far as you want “outwards” and there will still always be a further distance to travel. There are an infinite amount of points on a circle, yet still a limited perceived distance. There are an infinite number of digits in Pi, yet still a set value. This can be confusing, because typically when we use the concept of “infinity” we think in integer values. But when we think of infinity, we really should be thinking of “precising the observation of value”. It is never possible to be completely precise in finding a value, even a simple value such as “on” or “off”. But we can almost compound our relative certainty of a value by relating it to other values. We can collapse “infinite uncertainty” into “relative uncertainty” simply by obersving and triangulating our observation with another point of reference.
Almost all branches of physics will have some concept of a “spark value” - the “spark” that first began to cause change. “Infinity” in its wholeness is a simple point of value, but as soon as an observation is made “infinity” collapses into “relative infinity”, is that within grasp?
actually, i must disagree with you almost completely… there IS an ultimate “stopping point” when you keep zooming-in; time and space have a “smallest unit”, under which there is nothing. for time, this is something like 10^(-37) seconds; for space, it is the quanta, or planck’s constant. at these levels, time and space literally “jump” INSTANTANEOUSLY from one point to the next, with nothing in the middle. so to say that there is an “infinite number of points” on a circle is untrue: certainly there are a STAGGERING NUMBER of points, which would amount to an addition of all the quanta-sized instances which solve the function of the circle…
likewise, when we “zoom out” we are presupposing that there is SPACE for us to be moving through; and we know that the universe is a finite size, since it is EXPANDING… at some point, space, which is never empty and is always full of the quantum world of wave-energy probabilities, even in a ‘vaccuum’, will cease to exist in the sense that nothing is beyond a certain point. certainly reaching this point is likely impossible, since it is undoubtedly travelling away from us at an unreachable speed, but nevertheless it is there.
this is what i mean when i say that infinity as an EXISTENT or property of a REAL THING entails contradiction: nothing can “go on forever” in the sense of continual expansion or contraction. at some point, time and space literally BREAK DOWN and cease to exist. this is in fact well-accepted physical/mathematical fact. the universe is a finite age, a finite size, and includes a finite number of entities and existents. it will “exist” for a finite period of time, until it either collapses on itself and vanishes or expands and “stretches” to the point where it rips itself apart, by putting so much distance between quanta of energy that it reduces the ‘vaccuum wave-energy probability’ to zero.
but as i said, just because infinity is impossible as anything other than an abstraction, as a human mental construction, does not say anything at all about life or evolution… life CAN and DOES evolve “inevitably” even if time and space are not infinite-- this is because time and space are still sufficiently large in scope and distance to allow the extremely-unlikely coicidence of life-favorable conditions to become a mathematical certainty.
I’m not positive about this, but fairly certain that the only elementary particle which is not 0-dimensional is the theoretical “Higg’s Boson”, which has yet to be observed (a whole different discussion). It is theorized that all elementary particles (and in effect, but on an unnoticeable level all visible objects) are 0-dimensional, and exist as a wave of probable location relative to an observer. When funadmental forces (the Strong Nuclear Force, Weak Nuclear Force, Electromagnetism, and Gravity) hold two particles positions together (binding them together), they become a “set” which means when a third observer comes in, it might triangulate the position and cause a shared amount of change to take place between both of the originally bound particles, creating the illusion of distance. Here is an analogy: When you throw a ball, it isn’t just the particles that made contact with your hand that will move, but the entire ball will move, because the particles making up the ball are bound together via electromagnetism, the illusion caused by electromagnetism is that there is “distance” between one side of the ball and the other. The act of “binding” the particles via electromagnetism causes a portion of the “change” your hand makes to one particle to be shared with all the particles that it is bound with.
The “Quanta” you speak of is only relative to the observers involved. Generally, it is the amount of time it took for a photon to cause change between two particles. When particle A sends a photon to particle B, particle A is quite likely to have changed its relative position during the time it took for the photon to travel. It is a fact that the travelling speed of light in a vacuum is much faster than the travelling speed of light while moving through our planet’s atmosphere.
This is because light only travels at a constant speed in flat spacetime. However, all matter causes gravity, and gravity bends spacetime. So whenever light is in the presence of gravity, it travels slower than its maximum speed. This leads to the tricky conclusion that an observer can never witness light travelling at the speed of light, since all observers cause gravity. An observer can only witness light travelling at speeds which are slowed down due to gravity. In special relativity, however, the speed of light is constant for an observer in flat space-time. Since spacetime can only be flat in the absence of gravity, then this hypothetical “observer” would only be able to make observations inwards towards itself (which would really be outwards and inwards simultaneously, since a single point would have to send out information in some direction (meaning information travelling from the outer shell to the inside of the point, would go right out the other side) in an initial “burst” of radiation, shooting off in all directions. Hence, the big bang.
You’ve said it yourself, that “nothing is beyond a certain point”. Radiation given off in all directions, traveling at the speed of light, since the moment of the big bang is what makes up the very boundaries of our universe. That an observer can never travel past that boundary, because that obvserver would have to travel faster than the speed of light, and would cease to be an observer in doing so. The boundaries are moving farther away from us each moment. We are all locked within these boundaries until hopefully at some time in the future these boundaries crash into us as we attempt to exceed them.
Exactly, our universe has a start, just as it has an end. Our universe started as a point of singularity, and it will end as such. However have you not heard the laws of inertia? If the universe collapses back down to a singularity, all that energy from everything crunching back down together would cause the universe to “big bang” yet again. The universe is like two pendulums that keep knocking into each other. It seperates and swings out, then eventually it reaches a point (perhaps if the arms have swung all the way around) where the two pendulums meet again and go back the way they came.
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“infinity” is only impossible with our perception of time, because our memorys fade over time, they do not remain constant.
i agree with your assessment of wave-collapse and quantum entanglement.
i agree with your assessment of relativity as well. as far as a quantum of energy, i have not heard the concept described only as an “amount of time” before (i have always understood the concept as mainly relating to minimal quantites of energy, and that this then has a direct impact on the possibilities of distance and time at these levels), but i do not think you are wrong outright; my understanding of physics is far from perfect. what i do know of a quantum of energy is that it is the smallest unit of energy/distance-- of course distance breaks down and seems to become meaningless at those smallest levels, but:
"In physics, a quantum (plural: quanta) is an indivisible entity of a quantity that has the same units as the Planck constant and is related to both energy and momentum of elementary particles of matter (called fermions) and of photons and other bosons…
“energy of an electron bound to an atom (at rest) is said to be quantized, which results in the stability of atoms, and of matter in general. But these terms can be a little misleading, because what is quantized is this Planck’s constant quantity whose units can be viewed as either energy multiplied by time or momentum multiplied by distance.”
thats what i mean about distance/time being tricky at these levels-- however, i draw attention to the word “indivisible” because for the purposes of this discussion, i am only trying to get my point across that “infinity”, which is a concept of never-ending change or movement, is impossible. infinity can only exist in our minds as an abstraction. eventually (theoretically of course), if we were to keep zooming in, we would get to be the small size of a single atom, then boson, then fermion… and after that… well thats it. at that small size, the entire world is different, time and distance likely merge and become meaningless, but that is my point, that you CANT KEEP GETTING SMALLER, because there is nothing to get “smaller through”, since distance is meaningless.
i agree. so why do you say that we can “keep zooming out” forever? we cannot keep moving in one direction indefinately, even in theory, because at some point down the road we will either hit up against this barrier of the universe (if we can move sufficiently fast) or we will be travelling and spacetime will literally desintegrate around and within us (at some FINITE time in the future).
we seem to be in agreement as to our understanding of physics… so i guess i am misunderstanding your concept of “infinity”. infinity to me, and i believe to everyone else as well, is the idea that something “never ends”, that it “keeps going” forever and ever… and ever… and still forever more. it DOES NOT END at some point. under this understanding of infinity, it does not exist in our universe. since the universe is finitely small and finitely large with respect to the physical barriers at the subatomic and universal-edge levels, and the universe will cease to exist at some finite moment in the future, infinity does not apply to and cannot ever manifest within our universe.
what is your understanding of ‘infinity’, and why do you claim that, regardless of all this, it still exists?
interesting theory about the pendulum “swinging back around again”… im not sure if the analogy is correct, but you seem to be implying that even if the universe does end in the “big rip”, that it still will “restart” itself after that. i have not heard this before; i have heard that the universe will ocillate big bangs as long as it ultimately contracts back into a singularity, but that since our universe doesnt seem to be doing this, likely our big bang was the last one that our universe will ever have.
once again, we agree that our universe “has its start and its end”, so what do you mean when you speak about infinity with regard to this finite universe?
im not sure how memories are connected to infinity. sure, memories cannot exist forever, just like our brain cannot exist forever, and even if it did, likely we would still forget each memory at some point down the road… this seems to conflate psychology/biology with the mathematical and physical (for you view, not mine) concept of infinity; but like i said, admittedly i fail to understand both A) what you mean when you say the word “infinity” and B) what physical implications or practical associations you mean when you speak about infinity as being real.
in your last post, you claimed that we can zoom in or zoom out forever, yet in this post you seem to agree with my assessment that we cannot do this… please explain just what you mean, i feel that perhaps i have unintentionally missed your point and i wish not to start building straw men here…
Ahh, I see very much so now where our definitions of “infinity” differed from each other; surely there are different ways of interpretting it. I would have to say that we are both very lucky to be relatively “on the same page” (or perhaps “reading the same book, we are just reading different versions” would be a better metaphor)
I do not know if I can agree that this is the “last big bang” however. If our universe has a start point and an end point in time, which we both agreed on, then couldn’t we think of this as a simple line? The creation of the universe on one end, the destruction on the other. This “line” really would not have any value at all unless there was a “point outside of the line” in which a relative observation of distance could be made. How could the “line” have any value unless a point outside of it had given it value? My beliefs are quite similar to their being a sort of never-ending oscillation of big-bangs/big-rips. I would even go further to suggest that each photon or quanta of energy is almost a “photograph” of the universe around the obersver who had sent that photon.
It is impossible for an observer to reach the boundaries of the universe, because that observer would have to reach the speed of light in order to do so (and in reaching the speed of light, the observer would cease to be matter and would become light itself). I believe that all photons (electromagnetic radiation) exist as a unified point in a higher-dimensional perspective. In other words, I believe that all the energy and matter in our universe exists as a single point if viewed in a higher dimensional perspective of ours.
This can be found by the fact that we as humans do not see light as “many particles”, we simply see light as an “on” or “off” value, or somewhere between the values of “on and off”. When the light is on in our room, from our perspective we do not see photons flying all over the place, we simply determine that their “is light” in our room. Without the aid of complex equipment, that really is all we will ever be able to perceive of photons.
