How to understand the universe

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

5:30 AM. All right, boys and girls, ready to go, if you are. Starting to go through the material from December 2005 on, as advised, and I can see that the process itself will give me an overview.

Of course. And it should give you a nice overview of how very much material you have been given, how rich the interconnections.

Very much so. A lot of material in nearly 5 years. And my workmanlike habits in regard to the material – as opposed to much of the rest of my life over the years – is making it possible. A little work, day by day, transcribed, printed, filed by date in the computer, assembled in binders – it’s all there to be used.

A little systematizing goes a long way toward command of material. The things lacking until now have been an idea of a product, and an active sense of what was available. Had you made this kind of summary as you went along, as you made each transcript, you’d be in even better shape.

Yes, what I thought would work, didn’t. My headers were too terse, cryptic. Tried to rush the job, in retrospect.

So now you know what works for you: a deadline, outside encouragement, system in the acquisition, system in transcription and storage, system (after-the-fact, till now) in summation.

Looks like it. Okay, topic for today? What are the higher levels that you mentioned yesterday, that structure the universe?

And just coincidentally, during the day you read some of John Anthony West’s brilliant polemic about how nothing can be built without design.

So I did. Amazing thing, coincidence.

Isn’t it? We find it hard to realize that the point requires exposition or defense. But, we know that it does. So, here goes.

First, remember that we do not know everything, any more than anyone in the body does. Dropping the body is not a passport to omniscience.

Second, remember that you have access to the same understanding that we have. We’ll repeat that: You have access to the same understanding that we have. Should we repeat it a third time, do you think?

I don’t yet understand the point, but I’d say you got our attention.

Very well. Third, the architecture of reality is, as has been pointed out by ancient tradition, “as above, so below.” This is why you have the ability to investigate and extrapolate.

Fourth, at some point you will be downright foolish to try to understand reality without using scriptures as guides, translating as you go but translating carefully, with respect for the difficulties and cautions as to your lack of understanding. Attempts to describe reality are one aspect of what scriptures are.

So, what do these four points add up to? This. We are not omniscient, but we – and potentially you – can understand the whole by careful examination of the part that is susceptible to examination at our level. Working together we have the advantage of our scope and continuity of purpose, your focus and intensity of scrutiny, your embedded, fixed, knowledge has developed by scientific and philosophical examination, and – not least – the record of past understandings left you as your legacy in various scriptures.

Use us – that’s intuition as a key. Use study – that’s induction as a key. Use reasoning and intuition together; that’s synthesis. Adding what we can provide (a sure-footed-ness in research, among other things, as we guide your instincts) to what your legacy provides (fixed records of past thought, inspiration, reportage, and experience) and what your current-embodied-state makes possible to you (intense focus), you have everything you need.

When we say scripture, we should add that what makes a scripture is not the approval of a church after the fact, but something intrinsic to the material. Perhaps scripture is not the best word, and yet, for our purposes perhaps it is. Not that we wish to turn you into Christians or Jews or Hindus or Buddhists or Jains or anything in particular, but that we urgently wish to turn your minds – your hearts, we should say – back to this incredible neglected treasure that would give you what you look for if it were only experienced without the disturbing effects of resistance against churches. You don’t need to be a member of a church to study the scriptures. They are part of the human legacy.

I was going to say, you don’t need to convince me, and I all but heard you say, “we haven’t yet convinced you to actively start looking, though.”

Understand, reading the scriptures without understanding is not the key to anything. Therefore you may need to read them through the filter of someone’s understanding as spelled out in a book, or a film, or a lecture, or a course of lectures. Finding the proper resources would be difficult perhaps if you were trying to do it by logic alone, for how do you know which is a dead end and which is a key? Fortunately, your intuition will tell you, if you will let it.

I well remember buying the book of Sufi wisdom in an airport in California and reading it contentedly and profitably all the way home. It rang true.

It rang true, but it didn’t connect intellectually as, say, these conversations do. Different tools for different tasks. Your brother finds value in Zen. Others find other paths. It is not only in books – is not primarily in books, in fact – that wisdom is to be obtained. Yet books are what you know. They are the tool you know how to handle. Naturally your friends tend to connect with you at that level.

So about the higher levels that structure the universe –

We haven’t forgotten, but there’s little that needs to be said on the subject beyond what we have said already.

It doesn’t seem to me that you have said anything.

We laid out the principles; we gave you a summary of the tools to employ. What else do you need?

How about a conceptual overview?

A conceptual overview. More than we have been providing all along? All right, let’s put it this way. Find the principles that apply in the architecture of reality at the level you can investigate – at the human level – including anything you’d like to include, microscopic level, macro levels, anything your instruments allow you to explore. This is a valid use for science. See what laws seem to apply, trace what interconnections appear, and don’t make wild guesses or invent epicycles to explain away difficulties or obscurities. Compare your data and your tentative conclusions to the reports of mystics and the authors of scriptures and any reports of hidden traditions that may come your way, using them as tentative orienting devices, to keep you more or less unconfused when your data is insufficient to point you in a given direction.

Then remembering “as above, so below,” and we might add, “as without, so within,” and you will be well on your way to having what you need to know about how the universe is constructed. It is particularly in the contradictions that valuable material for thought arises. We give you one example:

On a macro level, you see the planets and the stars and galaxies and they are all of an order that resembles the subatomic level. But – are planets and stars mere probability waves that collapse into particles upon being observed? If not – staying with the assumption that each level of phenomena resembles the other levels – must you then conclude that subatomic matter really is made of particles (even if you know that it isn’t)? And, at the human level between the two, do you function as a probability wave? Are you made of solid particles?

The problem can’t be answered from within itself, which is a good reason for posing it. Yet it may be solved, using data from outside the sphere of strictly scientific measurement, and only by using such data. And by the same token, it is such a scientific investigation that has led your minds and imaginations to see the world as more intricate than the senses would lead you to believe. The trick is to meld the two ways of investigation as they were melded in unitary cultures.

We can see you scratching your heads and saying, “did they answer the question?” Well, perhaps we did and perhaps we didn’t. It depends on what you bring to the answer. Read intuitively, they will read differently than read logically alone.

The short answer, but not too helpful a one (which is why we did not content ourselves with it) is that any structure at any level was organized along principles that must be considered anterior to it, more basic, more primary, in a sense, more real. You don’t build a building and only when you have it partly erected construct a science of stress analysis. You build according to what you know, or rather, only those buildings stand that conform to the underlying laws of their nature. The laws come first; that’s why they are laws.

Well, I know you’re in there pitching, but this is pretty inscrutable.

Keep scrutinizing and maybe it will become less so.

We’ll see. All right, till next time.