Sunday 17 July 2022

Earth Torsion Hypothesis

 

Earth Torsion Hypothesis

 

The hypothesis that I propose here is the result of much thought over many years seeking to accommodate a number of historical and archaeological facts into a mutually agreeable scheme, facts which are often mostly ignored by mainstream historians, archaeologists and even geologists.

I take as the starting point for my hypothesis the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis being axiomatic.

This event set at about 10,850 BC coincides or immediately precedes a number of major Earth changes such as the melting of the North American ice sheet and the consequent sudden rise in sea levels.  The apparent sudden ending of the YD some 1,200 years later may also be implicated.

Randall Carlson has gone into a great amount of detail on how this would have affected the Atlantic basin and how it might have affected an Azores island that may have been Atlantis.  The subject of isostatic adjustment of sea floor and continental levels following the change in loading on the surface of the planet is crucial to any understanding of how this may have affected the morphology of continents.

Randall Carlson has done and collated an immense amount of work on the evidence for some kind of fragmented cometary impact or airburst over Canada or the northern United States as the cause for the sudden melt of the two mile thick ice sheet that was centred on the Hudson Bay area.

Now this is where some strange issues start to arise.  In the epoch of the last Ice age the thickest ice in the Northern Hemisphere was around Hudson Bay, and even more curiously Siberia was a lush savannah grassland as evidenced by the thousands or even millions of mammoth that have been discovered still flash frozen in the Siberian ice in the present epoch, with undigested dandelions found in their stomachs.  How can this be?  I shall pass by for the present on how such large creatures could be so instantaneously frozen before the dandelions they were eating could be digested, but we must ask how it was that there even were so many mammoth grazing and how what is presently permanently frozen tundra could have grown dandelions and other herbage in such a quantity as to be able to feed them all?

The obvious answer to this which has been staring us in the face for decades and which many people are willing to entertain is that the Earth was at the time this happened spinning in such a way that the Hudson Bay was roughly at the North Rotational Pole, and that consequently Siberia was at a much more temperate latitude than it is today.

But how could this change take place?

The theory which has gone in and out of favour over the decades is that of Earth Crust Displacement, proposed by Charles Hapgood in the mid-twentieth century.  It was famously endorsed by Albert Einstein but there are serious and I would suggest insurmountable obstacles to taking it in an unrevised manner.

The Earth Crust Displacement Theory suggests that such movements of the surface of the planet as Randall Carlson, myself and many others have hypothesised took place at the Younger Dryas Boundary Event happened when the crust of the planet slipped like the loose skin of an orange over the mantle resulting in changes of latitude and thus climate.

The several problems with this model start with what could possibly have caused this?  The absence of a mechanism should not be considered cause for a complete refutation, but one is forced to consider what mechanism might have been involved as we have to come to this eventually.  Some massive mechanical force in an order of scale beyond anything we can imagine in our normal experience of the planet would be necessary.  The trouble is that even a massive comet or meteor impact is unlikely to have affected the crust in such a way.

Consider the Xixilub meteor impact which reputedly put the nail in the coffin of the dinosaurs.  An impact sufficiently large to punch into the crust and cause a huge mass extinction from its effects, but could it have been enough to cause crustal slippage?

Apparently the meteor core is still deep in the crust of the planet near the Yucatan Peninsula.  To cause crustal slippage it would be necessary to impact tangentially to the surface, unlike the Xixilub impact which seems to have been more head on.  But a tangential impact would surely just cause a deep and long scar?  And there would probably be some kind of impact remains evidence.  The fragmented air burst suggested by Randall Carlson and other Cometary Impact researchers would not have any direct effect on the crust.

So we are without a mechanism.  But more importantly there are geological features on the Earth which contradict the crust ever having slipped in this manner at all.  The best example is Hawaii, which sits on a thermal plume hot spot from the mantle.  The crust drifts slowly over this in geological time due to its normal gradual movement.  And there is a trail of extinct volcano islands showing the path of the drift over the thermal plume.  So even if the crust had slipped suddenly at some point in geological history it must have been before the current trail developed, which is some millions of years.  There are doubtless other similar examples.  I was surprised that Graham Hancock, who mentioned the Earth Crust Displacement Theory in his early work later acknowledged the Hawaii evidence as being a conclusive refutation but has apparently more recently gone back to it.  My own view is that the theory as proposed in its original form is untenable due to both the contrary evidence such as Hawaii and what seem to me to be insurmountable mechanical problems in its supposed action.

So what other options do we have?

Carlson has expounded at length on isostatic adjustment of the sea floor especially after a massive download of ice meltwater into the ocean, and how this also affects land levels since the land will tend to rebound when the weight of quadrillions of tons of ice is suddenly removed.

I believe the analogy of a water bed has been used to illustrate this.  Weight on one side of the bed means the other side rises.

Now this is where it starts getting complicated.

There was one video lecture in which Randall Carlson explained what I propose as the mechanism but the segment was very short and something of a side track from his main thread.  I will try and find it again but it is quite obscure.

I credit this to Randall Carlson entirely as without his explanation I would not have been able to arrive at any of this, indeed what I am about to try and explain is all his work, I only have to repeat it because he hasn't published anything about it at any length that I am aware of.  (Perhaps he has and I've missed it.)

So what he explained is that when the two mile thick ice melted, the North American land mass began to rebound.  Now here we come to the geomorphic mechanism.  He has often explained how the Earth is an oblate spheroid and that it bulges at the Equator due to the centrifugal force of the spin and the fact that the inside of the Earth is somewhat plastic, like plasticene.

The Earth is always trying to stay in balance with itself and in its spin.  If a surface load that is sufficient to push down the crust is removed, as in the case of the ice sheet, then when the isostatic adjustment takes place there is also necessarily an adjustment in the planet as the rebounding surface seeks at the same time to move towards the Equator where it wants to go in order to achieve maximum balance or equilibrium.

Imagine a spinning top that has a load on one side.  It will wobble.

When the ice sheet was present it had been there for a long time and the Earth was presumably in some kind of balance which it will have achieved over a long period of time, and was probably around the North Pole wherever it was then.

Now, assuming that the rotational North Pole was in the vicinity of the Hudson Bay the weight of the ice would be on land on one side, but on the other side in what is now the Artic Ocean the ice floated on water, spreading the load.  When the ice melted, North America had its load removed and rebounded, while the oceans had a massive increase in load due to all the meltwater.

Thus the balance of the planet will have been changed and so there is increased loading on the oceans and reduced on the land.  The planet will seek to isostatically adjust not only the levels of land and sea floor but also its spin.  Due to the plasticity of the mantle the shape of the planet will morph.

My proposed mechanism for this, rather than simple slippage, is that there was torsion within the mantle.  Carlson has already explained the mechanism for this when he showed how excess mass in higher latitudes seeks to migrate towards the Equator due to centrifugal force.

Thus we have a model which could account for the twisting of the planetary spin which resulted in the poles of rotational spin migrating as the excess mass seeks the Equator.

 

There are a number of possible sequelae to this.

Had there been a geophysical event which had caused the Earth to undergo a torsional event then it is not impossible that the effects could have extended beyond the local areas in which the ice was lost and the most obvious isostatic adjustment took place.

A postulate I would propose is that since the angular momentum of the planet must somehow be either preserved or expended in some way, that the inertia of the spin would quite probably have caused massive earthquakes during rebalancing.  These earthquakes would probably take place at existing tectonic fault lines, such as the fault line which runs down the west coast of the Americas, one of the most major tectonic fault lines on the planet.

Lake Titicaca in the Andes has numerous properties that are difficult to account for.  Alternate researchers have pointed to facts such as that the lake is apparently tilted from a previous epoch, evidenced by erosional layers which are at an angle and also that it is at much too high an altitude for the crops that were evidently grown there to thrive and that some terraces which were too high had been abandoned and new ones lower down begun.  There are also those who suggest that it may have even been at sea level and accessible from the sea due both to the massive stone wharfs at what look like what used to once be a port although miles even from the lake now, and marine shells and residues.

Given the spin of the planet is from west to east it may be postulated further that when the massive increased loading on the sea floors such as the Pacific took place there would have been a complex geomorphic readjustment which may have led to a huge subduction event that could have resulted in the massive uplift of the Andes, the result of which we see today.  The inertial moment of the American continents is in the correct direction for such an event to take place.

The same is possible for the Rockies.  I have noticed Randall Carlson mention how high and sharp they are and ask whether the uplift is greater and faster than the erosion.  Perhaps they are so high and sharp due to a massive sudden uplift in a recent geological epoch?

A curious item I noticed recently may have contributed to my thoughts about this unconsciously or tangentially.  Jahanna James recently made a short video about whether California may once have been an island.  Interesting old maps that have amazing detail but show it as an island are somewhat confusing but also intriguing.  If Lake Titicaca could have been at sea level in some kind of inlet or coastal setting but was uplifted thousands of feet and tilted at an angle then might it not be possible that something similar happened to raise up an island on the west coast of the northern continent and join it to the mainland?  There is indeed a geographic depression between the northern end of the Gulf of California and Los Angeles where it meets the coast.  This matches the ancient maps that Jahanna showed in her video.

Further possible sequelae from all this isostatic adjustment of levels and even axial spin could include North Africa where it has been noticed that there are sizeable deposits and residues of marine life hundreds of miles inland.  These must either result from having once been covered by sea or else have been washed there by mega tsunamis.  Ancient maps of North Africa indicate that it may well have had an entirely different morphology and coastline, which may seem a lot more probable now that we have considered some of the isostatic adjustments and the effects they may have had such as possibly being to uplift the entire Andes chain in one single catastrophic event.

 

There are other consequences and possibilities from this hypothesis and there are still unexplained things such as how it is that the mammoth were frozen so quickly.  Even if the planetary adjustment only took a short space of time it is still unlikely to have been instantaneous, but that is a question I shall have to leave for another time.

Some of the issues still in my mind raise the possibility of planetary cataclysm and geological upheaval beyond anything yet imagined, but then there are ancient myths that say the stars changed in their course.  One interpretation of this could be that the angle of rotation of the Earth changed.  Indeed, it is hard to think of another interpretation, and if so, then the forces necessary to cause such change in motion would be beyond even those required for the gradual tectonic movement of continental plates, vast as those already must be.

 

Issues to be looked at.  These are speculations which doubtless have errors but they are thrown out as points of research and hypotheses to be tested.

Where did the massive salt deposits found in Nevada and Utah originate?  Could they result from massive mega-tsunamis of sea water being swept inland when the proposed uplift of the western coasts of the Americas and the closing of the gap between California and the mainland occurred?

Could the vast salt flats in Bolivia have been caused by a similar event?

Lake Titicaca is however a freshwater lake, so how did it become fresh?  Could the sea water inlet or strait have been so dramatically squeezed out and tipped over the narrow strip of mountains to the east to be later replaced by fresh water, while the Bolivian salt flat Salar Uyuni is in the middle of the widest part of the Andes where it and a number of other small salt flats have settled in lower pockets of land between the two main ridges of the mountain chain at that point.

Examination of Google Earth shows what almost looks like crumpled up land piling ahead of where the salt flats have settled as if forced by a massive indentation of the coast.  If the North Pole had been in the Hudson Bay area this would have been close to the Equator where the greatest inertial moment carried by the crust would be present and thus likely to cause the greatest effect while ploughing to a halt.

While the Eastern Pacific edge of the Americas has accrued a massive uplift, interestingly in the Western Pacific we have the deepest trenches such as the Mariana Trench.  Could these trenches possibly have been left as a result of the slippage of the entire Pacific Ocean floor as it piled up like a carpet under the western edge of the Americas causing islands and inlets to press up against the coast and cause the massive uplift for the mountains and mega-tsunamis as it was subducted leaving basins filled with sea water that dried out, or completely emptied trapped sections of sea inlets which were later filled with fresh water from the sky?

 

Grateful acknowledgement to Randall Carlson without whom I could not have imagined most of this.  Also to Jahanna James whose recent video on Was California an Island? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNFqWc7_BmY was a major inspiration to these thoughts.

Acknowledgement also to Brothers of the Serpent, the Kosmographia podcast team, Ben of UnchartedX, Brien Foerster, Jimmy Corsetti of Bright Insight, Dark Journalist, Dr Joseph P Farrell and Dr Jason Reza Jorjani for their contributions to the background for this hypothesis.

 

 

 

 

Tuesday 23 November 2021

 

Free Will

 

A Misapplied Question

I recently watched Ben Emlyn-Jones' videos on the free will and determinism debate recently and thought I should make a comment on it.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/vPKZENgpYk19/

https://www.bitchute.com/video/bDoUJBvaYGuP/

In this one he reads through my uncompleted draft of this article before I got round to completing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H-pM6xMfIo

He covered the conventional arguments but these are subject to certain logical fallacies which I will detail.

The first one is that the debate is almost always approached from a materialist causality level and so leads to a foregone conclusion.  This is a version of the 'Have you stopped beating your wife yet?' fallacy.

Laplace's Demon is effectively a statement of that foregone conclusion by couching everything in terms of the determinist universe from a point of view of classical mechanics and so forth.  I do not contend the mechanistic argument because the solution to this is outside of that and it is a lost battle before it even starts.

The next step is that the very term 'Free Will' needs to be unpacked before we can go any further.  We all know or at least think we know what is meant by 'Determinism' but there is very little consideration of what we mean when we talk about 'Free Will'.

There are at least three directions of consideration from this.

Absolute randomness and chance

Ethical imperative

Soul 'causality' as outside of physical mechanics.


The first one to deal with is the question of 'What would a free choice be?'

You rightly drew attention to the perpetual regress of the homunculus 'all the way down' which is used to justify determinism.  This is alright as far as it goes, but it is posed as the only alternative to a 'Free Will' which is completely 'Undetermined'.  But how can something be completely 'Undetermined'?  If our actions don't come from some reason then they must be entirely random like how we understand quantum physics.  Entirely without meaning.  This is why I introduce the term reason as distinct from cause.  Causes are mechanical processes, reasons are psychological.  I think this probably has some bearing on Molyneux's willingness to argue for Free Will even though he is an atheist materialist.  Actual 'Free Will', if it does exist or if there is any meaning that can be extracted from the term must involve some kind of meaning being present in the actions that people consider 'Freely chosen'.  The alternatives are complete material determinism which reduce consciousness and the Hard Problem to mere epiphenomena or else completely random and meaningless choices like The Dice Man.  I don't accept any argument which refuses to acknowledge the really Hard nature of the Hard Problem.  In fact, I think the answer lies in accepting the Hard Problem as part of the solution, as I shall explain.

The next stage of my case that I want to lay out is the Ethical Imperative.  It is rightly observed by many that Determinism voids ethical responsibility.  This is a very serious matter.  The social consequences of the two competing belief systems are quite obvious and dramatic.  I would like at this stage to pose an alternate label for what has been up to now called 'Free Will' ~ 'Ethical Responsibility'.

Absolute determinism voids responsibility while 'Free Will' accepts and engages with it.  If one can claim that all your behaviours are the result of external forces and that you can do nothing about them yourself through choice, agency or taking any kind of responsibility, then you can get away without taking any blame for the most atrocious actions, as you described with some of the serial killers you mentioned.

So there is clearly a very different set of outcomes between the two types of belief systems, which is an interesting fact since the determinists claim that everything is determined, but those who accept that at some level they have the choice to take responsibility produce a more satisfactory outcome.  One that is probabilistically more functional.  That's a concept you're going to come across a lot in the book by the way!

 

Now that is interesting.  Something of a paradox that a false belief would produce a more functional outcome would it not be if hard materialist determinism is actually the case.  Which I would suggest it is not!  But also bear in mind that the Determinist is nonetheless making a choice when he claims that his actions are ‘determined’ and that he can do no other.  Yet the one believing in Ethical Responsibility is also making a choice, which is more congruent with their belief.

So now we reach what I have referred to as 'Soul Causality'.  You go into this and say that it is Woo, which is a tacit submission to the materialist paradigm.  Nearly every culture and civilisation in recorded history has held beliefs about the soul, the afterlife, animism and so forth, so I contend that calling this Woo is a serious and unnecessary concession at a conceptual level which isn't justified.

Addressing the eternal regress, homunculi all the way down, we get to the real nitty gritty, the Soul and Consciousness, the Hard Problem.

The fallacy here is to treat the Soul as simply another mechanism which is caused to act according to influences upon it.

But this is not the case.

Firstly it is non material.  The materialist claim that Consciousness (they won't acknowledge Soul, so we have to go with Consciousness) is simply an epiphenomenon or by product of the electrochemical fields created by neurones is merely an assumption.  It's never been proved, and the reason why is because of the Hard Problem.  There is no proven mechanical causal link between brain processes and consciousness because they are different ontological categories.  There literally cannot be a simple causal link.  There may be associated patterns, but correlation doesn't equal causality, this is not merely an assumption but a known fact of psychology and the basis for superstition and gambling addictions amongst other thing.  The brain draws patterns from experience, and they can be wrong!

We need to have recourse to Sheldrake's morphic fields at this stage.  He proposes that the world is made up of countless interacting fields.  Our consciousness is a field and when it is functioning optimally it recognises structure and meaning in its perceptual field.  Meaning simply cannot be reduced to 'nothing more than' a set of material causal events.  What would that even mean?

Meaning is an interpretive field in consciousness.  A gestalt.  Our rational minds are always trying to reduce everything to simple causality which is why we find the ‘Free Will’ paradox so confounding, but if there are larger consciousness fields involved in this then it is a lateral and holistic phenomenon rather than the linear causal sequence that determinism holds to be the case.

This is the point that I have to try and explain very carefully because the reductionist Laplace demon in our own minds wants to try and reduce it to linear causality.

Consciousness is a field which integrates and interprets meaning.  Leibniz's Monads did this.  Each is a unique point of view which is reflected back to the rest of the Universe.  That is why every soul is unique.  There is something to be learnt from every point of view.  Consciousness could be described as orthogonal to material reality.  It intersects it but is somehow perpendicular to it.  But there is that point of intersection.  How do the two interact?  They are ontologically different but they intersect.  They have some things in common but are not identical.

Consciousness or the Soul are not linear causally created things in the way that a brain is.  And reasons, while they have features in common with material causes are not the same and cannot be reduced to them.  Meaning is not something that is materially caused, it is something that only exists in consciousness, which as we have established, is not reducible.

These may seem like fine points, but this is the business of philosophy, to winkle out the distinctions in order to have a better understanding.

So consciousness is at least to some degree outside simple material causality as generally understood.  And yet it has ways of working which make it function so as to be able to respond to meaning which is an interpretive field in consciousness.

What we need to do now is consider and examine how consciousness, or perhaps the Soul behave outside of strict conditions of material causality, while doing our best to avoid slipping back into a materialist causal paradigm.

Consciousness is indivisible and irreducible.  It cannot be deconstructed into constituent parts. 

Now this is where some will interpret me as conceding to determinism, but it is more subtle than that.

Returning to the argument from ethical responsibility, the higher level ethical decisions, which are what we are really concerned about here rather than simple behaviours which may be reduced, are arrived at through a gestalting of meaning derived from holistic reflection, rather like Leibniz's monads.  A ‘monad’ is an ‘entelechy’ as Leibniz calls it something which brings form to potential. the actualization of form-giving cause as contrasted with potential existence.  In other words a point of consciousness that brings meaning into existence.  Thus the argument is that there are inherent qualities within the nature of the consciousness, soul or monad which are uncaused, at least in the material sense, since they are present in that thing which is itself uncaused, at least in a physical sense.  This is the Hard Problem.  Consciousness is uncaused in terms of material causality since it is not a material thing.  This is the ontological paradox we basically face.

The term ‘entelechy’ that Leibniz used derives from the Greek telos, purpose, fulfilment or meaning.  From which we get teleology the study of explanation by meaning.  Not Newtonian causes.

The etymological implications of telos include perfection, completion, unity.  Psychologically speaking consciousness or the soul is seeking that state for itself, one of completion or unity with the divine.  So ontologically we are looking at the universe in terms of consciousness as the primary substrate.

Now beings may move into greater or lesser degrees of harmony with that sought unity or perfection.  Material causes being on a different level may either help or hinder moving into that harmony.  The ethical nihilist sees no greater meaning or telos and so is subject to the vagaries and rigid limitations of an entropic Newtonian universe.  Whereas the person who takes ethical responsibility is choosing to navigate the landscape of meaning that is human existence.  I haven’t read Peterson’s Maps of Meaning but I like the phrase which I imagine he is using in some vaguely related way.

So we are looking at how we as humans fit into a larger context of meaning.  ‘Free Will’ is as I have said a problematic term.  It is as I see it more like navigating across an ocean in a sailing ship.  You can tack or run before the wind in many different ways, some more successful than others, some dangerous and some which might get you wrecked on a rocky shore.  Your destination is your destiny.  I will come back to this.

Robert Pirsig makes a compelling argument for the existence of quality as an objective feature of the Universe in his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, as does CS Lewis in The Abolition of Man for the existence of objective value (not values as such which is a slightly different argument that we don't need to go into here).

Both of these rely on consciousness as the means whereby these things are understood.  So the next stage in the argument becomes simpler.  There is objective value and quality in the Universe which pre-exist our perception of them.  When we experience quality or value we do so in relation to something that already exists.  It is thus the consciousness or soul seed which already has the passive recognition template within itself that recognises the value or quality.

Of course this is a subtle process which is easily overlaid or modified, but as Lewis points out most persuasively in his Abolition the concept of the good has to come from somewhere even for the most ardent social relativist, who is perhaps just inventing some twisted notion of what they think is good, but they still think it good, desirable.

So to return to the earlier point of soul causality and the implied infinite regress of homunculi all the way down there is an alternative, but one which some might find unpalatable.

That alternative is that there is objective value in the Universe.  'What works' is perhaps the simplest way of putting, it although of course that is subject to critique and needs to be defended as 'for the whole' or somesuch; but again, we have a solid foundation in that it must 'work for somebody' or we fall into the abyss of postmodernist power models in which there is no good, and contradictorily all power is bad etc etc.  We can see how these relativist type models are unable to support themselves with internal consistency.

So I return to the alternate model that there is value, it does exist as a quality, even a fundamental quality, in the Universe, beside simple material things and events.  Consciousness or the Soul has some relation to both and thus mediates reality, which is pretty much our intuitive sense of the world as it is.

Reaching the question of choice then, we are left with the question of how Consciousness or the Soul respond to quality or value.  A Soul that is in tune with value will recognise it and try to respond to it, whereas one that is not won't.  The value and meaning are the telos that the consciousness is seeking.

A Soul that is more in tune with the good and value will freely choose those things which accord with it, while those who aren't are more constrained in their actions because their actions will lead to less good, or even harm. 

This is where the random acts as being free falls down.  Freedom must be the freedom to choose good or bad but there must also be a reason or meaning behind it.  Determinists put up a Straw Man argument here because they don’t allow the existence of value, meaning and purpose which exist within the unique entelechy. One other thing Leibniz pointed out about monads or entelechies is that they are each unique since they are perceiving the universe from a unique perspective.  This amongst other possible reasons contributes to the unique characteristics of each soul.

This is why many religions believe in the pre-destination of the Soul, because its path is determined by its own nature.  This in many instances leads on to a reincarnation model in which the Soul evolves and becomes more in tune with the good so that it becomes more free.

There is an interesting turn of phrase in the Book of Common Prayer in which it refers to God 'whose service is perfect freedom'.  So a Soul or Consciousness which chooses the good because it is in tune with it does it freely, but is determined by its own nature to do so.  To choose the good surely must be akin to freedom, open, increasing.  To choose the bad, the opposite.  Constraint, emprisonment, closed, with diminishing options.

The soul potential is explored and expressed through material experience.  It is the seed within the soul that gives the meaning which is expressed in its choices.  This seed is a cause but not in a material Newtonian way.  It is what the mediaeval philosophers called the Final Cause, a term CS Lewis was keen on.  The Great Attractor some might call it.

Soul alignment with the good must inevitably lead to an ever greater and widening field of opportunity, all those things we know to be good.  Health, wealth, prosperity, fulfilment, love and so forth.  Soul alignment with the bad must lead to a diminishing spiral of lessening opportunity ultimately.  The good is ever higher integration with universal laws, while the bad is the opposite, separation and denial.

So 'Free Will' as posed by the materialist reductionists is a fallacy, whether set up intentionally or unknowingly.  Returning to the point that a belief in Free Will produces a more functional society than the one of apathy that would result in a determinist dominated one, we can begin to see why that would be the case.  Because behaving in such a way that is in accordance with actuality is bound to be more functional than behaving in such a way as to deny it.  Although the dark magician will perhaps seek to act against the good as an act of choice, in the end it leads to limitation.

So the Final Cause of our existence is the motivator.  We may navigate in various ways but in the end there is the end goal.  Union with the Divine or Unified Field of Consciousness.

'Soul Determinism' may not be the kind of 'Free Will' model that some would like to see, but it steps outside the two main problems with the conventional debate, the causal prison of the perpetual regress all-the-way-down model and on the other side the meaninglessness of completely random behaviour.

The single biggest problem that we seem to face as a feature of living in the material world is being ourselves in the face of external pressures.  Certainly we must accommodate material existence, maintain the body as Krishna has it in the Bhagavat Gita, but to achieve some kind of happiness and fulfilment we must also bring forth that which is within us and unique, else what is the purpose of human existence?

So we have through our gestalt field a means of synthesising meaning from the impression of the material senses on the monad which has an inherent sense of meaning.  This is most definitely not causal determinism in the conventional sense but the means of ingress into the material world of meaning and value through consciousness, which are factors entirely orthogonal to the linear sequential action of material causality.

Determinists will not like this argument because they are unwilling to address the Hard Problem.  But it is central.  It is a paradox because we live in a material world and they want material causes. 

The only way that meaning and causality can be reconciled is if they are part of the same thing. What I mean by this is that consciousness, the Hard Problem is a property of matter. Materialism denies meaning to consciousness but if consciousness is actually an inherent property of self-organising systems as Sheldrake postulates the entire problem collapses.

 

I posit Sheldrake fields mediated by cymatic resonance, stepped down in frequency by such organs as the pineal gland, thus creating organisation at the quantum level of neuronal firing.  Penrose and Hammerhof have done extensive work on quantum tubules which are involved in neuronal firing.

But I must emphasise that these material responses originate in the realm of meaning and relation to the telos of the soul.

Consciousness is often conceived of as an eye, or more specifically, as a lens.  It is the lens between the material world which it perceives and the world of mind in which representations and interpretations of it are elaborated.

Thus if there is a continuous integral spectrum of being that is matter, but spirit is a characteristic of it inherent to what it is, then in its very existence a living being has some degree of autonomy. Indeed, looking at primitive life, isn’t that one of the most important distinctions between animal and plant or inorganic matter? Life interprets as a monad or entelechy from its unique position and trajectory in time and space and responds. The more developed the life, the greater the freedom. Matter simply reacts.

As with so many philosophical problems the question of ‘Free Will vs Determinism’ is a false dichotomy created by the assumption of division between mind (will) and matter (determinism).

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday 31 March 2021

Waking The Monkey! Top Review

Waking The Monkey! Top Review  


My publisher Lulu.com sadly deleted all the reviews of my book when it rebooted its website recently, and when they restored them my top review had been shortened to about half its length, so I shan't be publishing future books with them.

Fortunately I managed to have the best one saved, so here it is.
Many thanks to RB who wrote this review.
****************
Absorbing and enlightening with an important message for our times
This book works on at least three levels. Most simply it is a very readable account of the life of a new-age-style camp, bringing back my own memories of camps in the 1980s, some of which featured the 100th Monkey Camp’s convenor, Palden Jenkins. I recall Palden leading a guided visualisation into the inside of Glastonbury Tor, where we met and received gifts from our spirit guides – unforgettable.

Claire Randall takes us through the day to day hassles of communal living with some powerful individuals and with little opportunity for privacy. She does this frankly and sensitively and in delightful detail. I can almost smell the trodden grass under the heavy canvas of the marquees and the whole-food cooking from the camp kitchen.

On a second level we join Claire on an odyssey of self-realisation, exploring how to live as a physical being in a spiritual reality, a dilemma common to most religious faiths. Claire gives us her own credo on p213. What appear at first as the usual squabbles among relative strangers living in close proximity are then seen as psychic struggles between personalities in a temporary community whose express purpose is to use the power of shared consciousness for the good, and this with the background of a real brutal war that was raging in the Balkans at the time.

Claire’s own battles are presented honestly and reflectively, with empathy for her fellow campers and with an implicit belief that living through interpersonal conflict can lead to personal growth and perhaps indeed ultimately to world peace. It is a big book but the reader is constantly spurred on to find out what happens next. I felt that I got to know Claire quite well, though at times she sprang a real surprise.

At a third level Claire draws on a variety of concepts from religious and metaphysical thinking, from Wicca and alchemy to Buddhism and quantum theory, in search of explanations for the ongoing development of the camp’s mission. It can be frustrating that there are no footnotes – sending me scurrying to the internet – but where is the harm in that?
I can’t always tell from the text when Claire is directly reporting the discussions at the many camp meetings and when she is presenting her own reflections on these discussions. I’m not sure that this matters. The vividness of the account left me feeling that I had been there myself and the ideas still bouncing around in my mind are potentially consciousness-changing if I can only open the door wide enough. R.B. Headingley, West Yorkshire
Buy Waking The Monkey! ~ Becoming the Hundredth Monkey (A book for Spiritual Warriors)
http://www.lulu.com/shop/claire-rae-randall/waking-the-monkey-becoming-the-hundredth-monkey/paperback/product-22175832.html






Friday 12 January 2018

Review: Prometheus and Atlas by Dr Jason Jorjani

Review: Prometheus and Atlas 
by Dr Jason Reza Jorjani

The importance of Dr Jorjani’s work here is such that one must hope and pray that it will not be ignored like that of Roger Bacon only to be discovered and recognised centuries later when others have repeated his work and achieved the same understanding.



The paradigm shifting ideas and arguments which he presents escape the limitations of strict materialist objectivism while at the same time avoiding the regress of postmodern subjectivism.

By the application of concepts such as techne and the spectral, Dr Jorjani weaves a new way of looking at the world around what works (techne) and a recognition of the fact that that world in which we live has unplumbed, and probably unplumbable depths, but depths nonetheless which we can explore and thereby increase and improve our interactions with nature, to the advantage of both.  As Professor Dawkins has postulated ‘The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but is probably stranger than we can imagine’.

These are where the archetypes of Prometheus and Atlas come into play.  Prometheus plumbs the depths, reaches for the heights and claims the knowledge of fire which some claim is forbidden.  Atlas on the other hand, holds up the sky and thereby maps the Universe of those things his brother among the Titans has explored.

In our present world mythology these two are still in danger of being bound into servitude, but we have come to a juncture in history in which we ourselves, insignificant mortals, may be able to unleash the power of these archetypes which live within us.

Techne is skill.  What works through the application of practice, and Dr Jorjani makes the astute observation that techne precedes theory.  In other words, science as we know it today has only arisen from the trial and error of the past, from the skill of artisans and alchemists who acquired the skills to manipulate materials to produce the results which have built our modern world.

Theory comes later, when the mapping of the interaction between the skill of the Promethean investigator and his materials allow the projection of the hypotheses out of which theories can be built.

The Spectral realm which Dr Jorjani postulates is no more than an extended world of the unknown, the unplumbed and more subtle aspects of nature which we have yet to properly grasp.

His rigorous examination of the giants of modern Western philosophy, Descartes, Kant, Heidegger et al, demonstrates that the materialist model of reality only satisfies up to a certain point.  Add to this the cutting edge work of the likes of Lyle Watson and Rupert Sheldrake and there is what I consider to be an incontrovertible case that there are aspects and dimensions to reality which, while not fitting into a strict materialist model, nonetheless cannot be denied.  Thing in Itself is more than our sense perceptions of it.

The adoption of the term Spectral is the conceptual master stroke which pulls all this together under one umbrella.

Knowledge often proceeds through the application to the material world of analogy and metaphor.  The Spectral Realm evokes a sense of being that can accommodate consciousness, the afterlife and parallel universes.  Doubtless these have each in their own right immense depths and divergent possibilities, but to have opened the door in our minds to the conceptual possibilities is the first step, and this term anchors it, putting a wedge in under the door to prevent it from closing.

I don’t think Dr Jorjani used Egon Brunswik’s term probabilistic functionalism, but he could have done.  Our skills, our techne, our practical interactions with the world are based on doing what will probably function, just in the same way as when the term was originally applied to perception, whilst always allowing for improvement in that, dependent on feedback from results in the external world.

The immense importance of this work to the History and Philosophy of Science is such because Dr Jorjani (successfully in my view) shoots the rapids between the hard objectivism of physical science, and the solipsistic radical subjectivism of postmodern critique, forging a solution from the problematic anomalies of both, coming out the other side to form the basis for a new paradigm in philosophy which whilst rooted in the incomprehensible existential and subjective thrownness of Heidegger nonetheless faces the practical realities of the material world with which we all must deal. 

Purchase a paper or e-book version of my account of my rite of passage at The Hundredth Monkey Camp ‘Waking The Monkey! ~ Becoming the Hundredth Monkey’ (A Book for Spiritual Warriors)

Tuesday 25 July 2017

The Hero's Journey

Extract from my paper on which I based my talk at New Horizons, St Anne's, in October 2016.

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[Some of the images from the pdf version are missing from this text.  To see them all, get the full pdf)


......The Truth movement has been wearing away at the world
of corporate power and corruption since the early days of the
internet and 9/11, building a solid, but regrettably still small,
core of awakened souls who have sought to expose the dark
underbellyof our enemy.
But in the last couple of years things have begun to move,
and not just from the work of the Truth movement.
It is my firm conviction that the core process should be
seen as a battle between evolutionary drives and the attempted
social conditioning and control of the globalist elites. The
evolutionary drives must win or we are lost.
In the nineties I was involved in a project known as the
Hundredth Monkey Camps. These were a series of three
meditation camps held over consecutive years seeking to build a
‘morphic field’ of international co-operation and reciprocity.
You are probably familiar with the ‘Hundredth Monkey’
concept, the idea that when a certain critical number of people
with an idea or understanding is reached, that this idea will
spread through the collective unconscious and others in distant
parts will pick it up. ‘Nothing can stop an idea whose time has
come’ sums up the aspiration of this concept, if I may
paraphrase Victor Hugo, although it is perhaps not so simple.
My book ‘Waking The Monkey! ~ Becoming The
Hundredth Monkey (A Book for Spiritual Warriors)’ details my
experience of the first camp of 1995 in a stream of
consciousness.

I would like to be able to say that the project was a
‘success’,but some of the outcomes were perhaps unintended,
as indeed often happens with experiments, and the organisers
had this billed as ‘An experiment in consciousness’, so these
unintended consequences need to be considered.
2
The seeking of agreement through dialogue to create the
morphic resonance thought necessary for the ‘Hundredth
Monkey Effect’ was a key part of the ‘Allting’ (from the Norse
term Allthingi meaning a moot or Parliament) process that we
went through, the sharing of inner experiences and feelings from
our meditations on world issues.
It would be a long time before I faced the conclusion that
universal agreement cannot ever be fully achieved without
coercion. There will always be different interests, and these
may conflict. A point we are obliged to face now, at this crucial
time, and one to which I will return.
But my own process during that seminal week was one
that became a Rite of Passage in which I faced my own demons
and made some progress in both mastering them and finding my
own Agency, as it is termed in the psychological sciences, the
sense that one has the power to effect change in one’s life andthe world through insight, choice and action. The understanding
that you are a force of nature.
But how can Agency be found? And how does it relate to
‘World Healing’?
It was not until much later, and after I had completed my
book that I looked in detail at the Hero’s Journey, as it is named
by Joseph Campbell, the late mythologist and philosopher, and
realised that my own experiences at each of the camps had
followed this arc.
This proto- or Mono-myth in its simplest form can be
summarised as ‘Fate chooses naïve stripling to face challenges
or danger, stripling despite inner doubts and actual failings
achieves the goal, slays the dragon, usually with a little bit of
advice and assistance from a wise elder, who can’t do the job
himself because it is as much about the stripling finding his own
inner power as it is about killing the external dragon.’
In the infinite elaborations which different versions have
made of this arc there are usually included unexpected setbacks
or reversals of fate, failures after apparent success which have to
be fought back from, nemeses who appear to win and have to be
overcome, visits to the Underworld, the Dark Night of the Soul,
magical spirit guides who give healing, and mystical inner
worlds of the Hero himself.
A little graphic of this I found on the internet.
The overcoming of these challenges will in the end
empower the Hero with confidence and self belief ~ Agency ~
although this has often been gained at a price that has been paid
through the pain of the ordeals that have been endured. Odin
had toto hang on a tree for nine days and nights, as well as give an
eye as the price of wisdom for a draft from the Well of Mimir.
Often the Hero’s final journey will be to the Otherworld where
he is healed by the powers of that realm. We see this in the
hobbits as they return to the Shire and then in Frodo who leaves
Middle Earth for Eldamar after the successful quest of the Ring
and the Fall of Sauron.
4
My own early interest in Heroic literature such as the
Arthurian cycles, the Odyssey and Tolkien had led on to what
one might now call ‘New Ageism’ in the late eighties and early
nineties which had deep roots in Theosophy and the Occult
Revival of the 19thC fin-de-siecle a century before, but also
spiced up with input from the post-psychedelic ‘Human
Potential’ movement, and ‘channelling’ material, which also had
links, not fully recognised by me at the time, into social
engineering and military intelligence agencies.
The ‘Hundredth Monkey’ events were amazing, intense
events in which to participate, but it eventually came to seem to
me that there was an element of this social engineering
embedded into them. Some of the organisers had participated in
Erhardt Training Seminars (EST), a controversial and
challenging training program which some have criticised as
being akin to brainwashing in the way in which participants are
forced to conform through extreme social pressure.
This was a thread which seemed to have found its way into
the Monkey Camps. Now, I will acknowledge that a certain
degree of organisation and procedural integration are necessary
when you have a hundred or more people in a field for a week
trying to perform various group activities. And this is fine.
Rather it was on the meta-levels of aspiration and intention
that the assumptions were embedded.
Ruminating on and digesting as many sides of a major
world issue as possible in a formal meditational and ritual
setting is an activity which may have subtle effects on that issue
and indeed the world; but my own feelings about this are that
those effects are at least as likely to be worked out through the
participants involvement in the world over time, as they are
through direct resonance immediately on the particular situation
which is focussed upon.
Certainly this is the manner in which I have found my own
experience progress, and the principle thrust of my book.
However, there do appear to have been some rather unexpected
consequencesof the group meditational work that took place,
5
and the importance of these, subtle though they may have been,
has grown in my mind over the years, but also more recently.
Firstly, let me pose my principle hypothesis.
Although the ‘2012 Node’ as I shall call it was vastly
overhyped and misrepresented by frauds and well meaning
amateurs alike, it is my firm conviction that we have been going
through, and are going through, a ‘fractal time event’ in our
recent and current time frame.
While on the one hand the predictions, which ranged from
catastrophe (such as portrayed in Roland Emerich’s ‘2012’) to
mass awakening or enlightenment (as suggested by such as Ken
Carey, of ‘Strarseed Transmissions’ fame, and many others in
the New Age fraternity) have all signally failed to come to pass,
nonetheless 2012 was still the end date of the Mayan calendar
Long Count which began in 3113 BC. Interestingly researchers
have concluded that the Long Count was not first instigated on
that date, but that it was retrofitted, one might say, some time
perhaps a couple of thousand or so years later.
Thus one might say that the Mayans, or proto-Mayans.....

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