General Chat

21. Our world, as is the universe, is full of force-fields and bands of energy running through, along and beneath its surface. These are invisible to us but detectable and measurable with instruments. Human intelligence is, perhaps more puzzling. Why, for instance did two distinct races of people separated by eons of time as well as thousands of miles in distance and uncrossable oceans, more or less at the same time start building pyramids with a ground-plan based upon the stars. And how did they amass such knowledge of astronomy in the absence of technical equipment (such as telescopes) which had to wait until the 1600s for Galileo to invent. They did discover force-fields, which we can now detect and measure. We know they did it as they dubbed the lines of energy “Ley Lines” and built various edifices along their length. However, I digress. The ancient Greeks left a wealth of legend connected with the stars as did most other cultures on earth, from the Australian Aborigines (isolated for at least 40,000 years), the Incas, Aztecs and Mayas of South America, native Indian tribes of North America, South African tribes, Chinese, Malaysian, Asians, and the Babylonians from Assyria - all had this legend of the star group Pleiades. Many of these peoples never dreamed, 8 or 10 thousand years ago, that the others even existed. One legend they all shared was of an obscure cluster of stars called the 7 Pleiades or the Seven Sisters. There is nothing whatsoever in the location or arrangement of these seven stars in the constellation Taurus to suggest girlishness but to the Greeks they represented the 7 mythical daughters of Atlas and Pleione. In another legend, they are maidens pursued by Orion the hunter. Australian Aborigines (isolated for 40,000 years, remember) described a camp of 7 young girls. To the Wyoming Indians of N. America, the stars represented 7 young girls pursued by a bear. How can it be that so many cultures, which may just as well have been on different planets for all they knew of one another, individually evolved the same legend about an obscure and dim bunch of stars? There wasn't a shortage of better constellations about which to create myths. Always sisters, always hunted, always escaping their hunter, the Pleiades are the only group of stars reliably identified in the Bible. “Canst thou bind the cluster of the Pleiades or loose the bonds of Orion” or “Canst thou guide the bear with her train?” (Job 38). There is a similar passage in Job 9, verse 9, “Which maketh the Bear, Orion and the Pleiades and the chambers of the south” There is also reference in Amos 5, verse 8. “Seek him that maketh the 7 stars and Orion and turneth the shadow of death into morning and maketh the day dark with night, that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is his name” It cannot be explained why, of all the stellar objects, this little cluster of insignificant stars should have assumed such importance. The mystery deepens. Only 6 of the Pleiades are really visible to the naked eye. How did the ancients know of the 7th? Each ethnic group has its own version to account for the invisible star. E.g “One of the sisters lost her virginity and hid her light in shame”. These legends pre-dated agriculture so there is no connection with sowing and gathering of crops or marking the seasons. They all go back at least 5,000 years so it is impossible to trace how far back they may go but there is evidence that verbal histories may be accurate over tens of thousands of years. One possible explanation: The Pleiades have been rising and setting over great periods of time and the constellations imperceptibly move forward in position. Could the stories pre-date modern man?. Cro-Magnon (you and me) first arose in Europe about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago and gradually our cousin anthropoid, Neanderthal the previous occupier, became extinct. The latter had a larger brain than modern man. The way he buried his dead and other clues indicate a greater spirituality. Some have suggested he had a poor vocal communication and used telepathic communication. Anyway, it may be that Neanderthal developed the myth (when perhaps in the dim and distant past, the stars were clearer) and passed it to Cro-Magnon before modern man spread all over the earth, taking the legend with him. Another thought: Could these legends be connected with the two main Witch’s Sabbaths (Sabbath from Hebrew “to rest”). These fall on the last day of April and 31st October. If so, we would have a definite link with the paranormal (which was the normal in antiquity).. “Witch” is derived from Wicca (or wicce – Celtic for “wise”). In pre-history, witchcraft was a form of benign shamanism. Its origins are shrouded in the mists of time. Possibl

20. And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: And it was so. The Sumerians were the most sophisticated people in the world, in their day, and the power of their thought was no less than that of modern scholars. They began elementary science although they did lack thousands of years of accumulated data and modern investigative tools. They were well ahead of the other leading cultures of the world, including Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, European etc. There is no other ancient or primitive document written before modern science that is as logical and rational as the book of Genesis. Originally, these histories were written in Assyrian, later Hebrew then Greek after which translations appeared in most languages of the modern world. Even in English there have been various translation from the Hebrew and Greek and many versions have appeared with subtle differences (In the beginning was the word/in the beginning was the sound). Often, in translating a Hebrew word into another language, several words had to be used to make sense. The first Hebrew book of Moses began with “Bereshith”. It was usual in biblical times to refer to a book by its opening word or sentence. “Bereshith” means “In the beginning”. The nearest Greek match for that is “coming into being” or “Genesis”. Other Greek words in common use today are “chaos” meaning disorder and “cosmos” meaning order. The Semitic version of the old testament was Tanakh and Apocrypha. Bible comes from the Greek biblios for books. Early manuscripts did not divide the bible up into chapters or verses. That was the work of a Frenchman in 1560 and is how most English bibles are arranged. We are stuck with the system, though, as all references and commentaries since the sixteenth century are based upon it. The first sentence of the scriptures refers to “in the beginning”, which is as sensible a place to start as any. All things have a beginning. You were born; I was born; all God’s chillun were born…. We do not actually remember the occasion but happily accept the words of others. We are far too trusting. Before birth we did not exist. That was the ancient belief. We now know that is not true as, during the last few centuries, we have gradually become to accept life in the womb as valid and to expect to see pictures of the unborn child. It is difficult in these days of enlightenment and education to imagine that, not so long ago, a civilized young mother may not have connected the birth of her baby with an event of nine month earlier. It had come about by an act of God and being in a state of married grace. My own great grandmother never had any carnal experience, so my sisters informed me, and her three children were Acts of God. The old lady was scared stiff of electricity and, when her house was wired, kept the lights on in case the electricity escaped and filled the rooms. So maybe life starts with conception? That sounds reasonable enough but when pair of disparate cells fuse and start multiplying when do they become a little person. Is the life force in the ovum and in sperm (or one or the other) or does it enter the foetus, say, at 12 weeks when the infantile brain begins to lay down memories? Some say that consciousness (another name for life-force/soul/spirit etc) is a brain function although new science suggests that, although linked to brain, it is independent and may function separately. What goes for the human animal must go for all mammals, perhaps to a lesser degree. At what point does a conglomeration of cells become conscious or intelligent?. At the other end of the scale, all living things die. Sometimes death is not quite definite. Most have heard of living in a vegetative state, when a person’s body is alive but the brain dead. Even in that state, the tissue of the brain may be healthy but something has departed, more often than not, permanently. Len .

19. With reference to the penultimate paragraph in my last essay, it is “fashionable” to take one view or the other, even in the scientific world. Self-image is important and, to some, it may be macho or impart a self-importance to say “I, of course think it’s all rubbish”. Perhaps it would be wiser to align themselves with intellects such as those of Pythagoras, Aristotle and Einstein (not forgetting Hawking) and say to themselves (if not out loud) the words of Stephen Hawking, our greatest theoretical physicist, from his book “Black Holes and Baby Universes” I quote:- “ All my work has shown that you don’t have to say that the way the Universe began was the personal whim of God. But you still have the question: Why does the Universe bother to exist? If you like, you can define God to be the answer to that question”. He also said, elsewhere 'I am in the well-established tradition of hedging my bets by predicting both ways'. The Universe is regularly demonstrating to us that it is evolving and its secrets are still mostly hidden. Reverting to nuclei and energy, referred to in 18 above, physicists are convinced of the existence of particles and energies that “should be there” but have not yet been proven to exist. They are in the 96% of the mass of the universe, “dark matter” that remains hidden and has yet to be identified. An immensely powerful force has held the universe in place over billions of years and religious belief is a conundrum which in an obscure way seeks to give the key. Science, surely but slowly is turning the key and perhaps one day will open the door. To show………..? The Bible mainly deals with the history of Abram (Abraham) and his descendants, (a sort of family history) but the first 11 chapters give a résumé of earlier events from the beginning of the universe to the birth of Abram about 2000 BCE. This period of history is derived from two earlier histories current among the people of Judah and Israel. The older of the two manuscripts known to scholars as the J Document (J for Judean) contains legends that were current among the tribal people of the area. They were probably written down in their present form in about 700BCE in the strongest kingdom in the Tigris/Euphrates Valley in what is now Iraq. This culture dominated Western Asia and the Sumerians, who lived there, invented writing. The Sumerian legends and theories of the Creation spread to all neighbouring cultures. The later ancient manuscript, dubbed the P Document (P for Priest) was gathered together and written down during the period when the people of Judah (the Jews) were in captivity in the Tigris/Euphrates Valley in the 6th century BCE when the dominant culture was Chaldean, whose capital was Babylon. This document tacked together the Babylonian philosophy on the Creation – which was based on some 2000 years of thought originating with the Sumerians, The two documents were merged by later scholars whose main concern was not to detract from either version Len

18. The early universe must have been a mixture of nuclei (initial particles) and radiation with the radiation component being massively dominant. Calculations suggest that there was only 1 nucleus for every 2 x !0 to the power of 9 (a truly staggering number) of quanta (unit packets) of radiation or photons ( quantum or unit of electro-magnetic radiation energy) . This ratio has held throughout the life of the universe. To get it into perspective, if there are about 400 photons to every cubic centimeter of space, so the calculations imply, there is only one particle (sub-atomic amount) of matter in every 5 cubic meters. So what is electro-magnetism? It is a force or energy, that has a whole spectrum.of electrical or magnetic properties, stretching on a scale of from 1 to 10 to the power of 18, or above. At the lower end there are radio waves above which they merge into heat and infra red then up into visible light and on to ultra violet radiation. Further up the scale we run into x-rays, gamma rays and so on. Each frequency band has its own wave length which is measured in kilohertz. The wavelength of the vibration can be likened to the rollers in the ocean with a certain distance between each crest. Somewhere between VHF radio and Ultra High Frequency radio the wavelength is about 1 metre. From VHF to medium wave goes up to 100metres Very Low Frequency radio has a verylong wavelength, about 10 to the power of 4 metres. The visible light spectrum ranges through all the colours of the rainbow from dark blue up to red, each colour with its own wave length. Variations in the wavelength produce different sensations in the brain which interprets them as colours. It is suggested but not yet proven that life-force, or consciousness, is in the electro-magnetic radiation field, its particle of energy being comparable to that of gravity (a graviton), which is also hypothetical as it has not yet been observed but must exist. There are scientists and others who hold that Homo sapiens is an exclusively material being in an exclusively material universe. Others hold the view that mankind is a spiritual entity in a material body. I am in agreement with the latter as symbiotic relationships (union between two different organisms for mutual benefit) are commonplace on earth. One of Albert Einstein’s favourite sayings was “The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible”. He meant that the basic physical laws which our brains are able to understand have such a broad scope that they apply not to just the physical world but the remotest reaches of the cosmos. So he gives us hope of eventual understanding. Len

Bob: Perhaps he wet himself - hence 'the deep' in 'darkness was upon the deep'. len

Len wonderful thread........... just a quick question, when God was creating the earth, do you think that the ' Big Bang'' was a surprise to him? Bob

Georgina: 'The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science' - Albert Einstein. 'And what, you ask, was the beginning of it all?.... And it is this: Existence that multiplied itself for the sheer delight of being, so that it might find itself innumerably' Anon. Len

Carol. I quite accept that they have to ration space. If they didn't, I would get carried away and write too much and it may become an epistle rather than a post.. Its a good exercise to try and keep it brief . len

Brilliant thread Len. Love the pattern of a questioned answered makes for another question.

Why have they done that? I for 1 enjoy your thread, it does no harm to anyone.

Investigations are being made in Holland, Britain and Canada into “Near Death Experience”. Studies in Holland, particularly by Dr P. Van Lommel of Rijnstate Hospital, whose team have interviewed hundreds of patients (in 10 hospitals across the country), who were resuscitated after being clinically dead, reached conclusions that “pushed at the limit of medical ideas about the range of human consciousness and the mind/brain relationship”. Christopher French of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit of Goldsmith College in London stated “if researchers could prove that clinically dead patients with no electrical activity in their cortex can be aware of what went on round them and form memories, this would suggest that the brain does not generate consciousness”. Sorry to have been too long-winded for GR who docked my above post. len

17. Professor Stephen Hawking (author of A Brief History of Time) Britain’s world-renowned physicist and theorist on multi-dimensional space is to make and star in a film setting out his theories on the origins and fate of the universe. The film, Beyond the Horizon, will be a vehicle for some of his views and the views of other cosmologists with some of their most daunting concepts including that there may be up to 11 dimensions. Most of us can grasp 4 dimensions: length, breadth, depth and time. Perhaps spirituality is another – which I can cope with – but am baffled by the thought of 6 others and look forward to his exposition. Maybe the never-ending patterns, the random accumulation of coincidences into an overwhelming pattern may be a dimension if what he means by a dimension is what I mean i.e. a measurable extent, an aspect or a feature. My favourite quotation is “coincidences happen too often for them to be coincidental” (Köestler). The real star of his film will be the computer-generated images that will try to simplify some of cosmology’s most complex ideas. The scientists are generally agreed that the universe came into being with a Big Bang about 15 billion years ago. The term was coined by Prof Fed Hoyle when he was disputing the now generally accepted theory in cosmology that the universe evolved from one super dense agglomeration of matter that suffered a cataclysmic explosion. In keeping with the laws of physics matter was created in a cosmic explosion of concentrated matter and energy which had coalesced into a form that was unstable and insupportable with the inevitable transmutation of energy into other forms. I once heard it said, in a lecture on the scriptures, that “In the beginning was the word” was a mistranslation which should have been “In the beginning was the sound”; the Big Bang, perhaps? One of the myriad forms of energy resulting was light, the fastest moving of all known particles. It travels in tiny packets of energy called quanta (hence quantum mechanics) of photons (particles of energy). Before the Big Bang, therefore, there could only have been darkness. “And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep” (Genesis 1.2) Whichever way we choose to look at it, there is much in common, these days, between science and theology. But the question “where did it all come from” remains. The question is no more answered by science than it is by the Bible/Torah/Koran. The first act of God recorded in Genesis is the creation of the universe. But since God is eternal, and the universe has been in existence for a mere 15 billion years, what was he doing in the infinity of time before the Big Bang? Perhaps he is the essence of consciousness, creating universes without end. Perhaps the Big Bang was not the beginning but only a pause. It all implies the laws of science and theology are inadequate to explain the creation and we must postulate the existence of an over-riding dimension which, for lack of a definition we might as well call God. “Soul” may be a translation of the Hebrew “nephesh” and its derivation is uncertain but probably means “and man became a living being” which in turn suggests that something entered into a creature to give it the human spark. A common view today of a soul is that it is some form of spiritual essence; a consciousness that enters into a person some time after conception and before birth and leaves at death (but it is becoming doubtful as to whether this is exclusively a human property). It is an immortal component that is neither born nor dies and therefore exists independently of the body. All this is derived from ancient Greek thought and, in that sense, soul is synonymous with psyche or consciousness. From the scientific angle there is no concrete evidence for the existence of soul although there is a wealth of circumstantial evidence in that the body had an undoubted energy field or aura which can be measured and even photographed and there are recent and ongoing studies concerning out-of-body experiences in near-death experiences. A method of recording and photographing the aura of a living being (not only human) is named after the Russian Professor Semyon Kirlian who discovered the technique in 1939. Kirlian photography records the high-frequency energy patterns surrounding living creatures in the form of an aura, resulting in photos of differently coloured coronas of dazzling light and shadow that, it is hoped, one day may be used for diagnostic purposes.

16. Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite’em. Little fleas have lesser fleas – and so ad infinitum. “Fractals are more than stunning visual effects” wrote mathematician Ian Steward, “They open new ways to model nature and allow us to quantify terms like irregular, rough and complicated”. The universe is full of fractals and may even be one. A fractal is more than a pretty pattern, it is a mathematical concept, a geometric form that possesses a detailed structure on a wide range of scales. There are, in nature, all manner of shapes that have a recognizable form: spheres, spirals, rectangles, ellipses, octagons and so on. The earth, moon and sun are spheres although not perfectly so. Galaxies and snail shells are spirals. These shapes in nature, though, are not perfect, as illustrated in text books, but have variations. The earth is neither a perfect sphere nor ellipse. It is fatter round the middle and has lumps, bumps and depressions all over. The moon is more rounded but its surface is very irregular as with every other known heavenly body. However, the facts that no two zebra have identical markings, or snowflakes identical patterns, do not prevent us from perceiving them as all alike. All stars look much the same too. No two snail shells from the same species are absolutely identical but they are in our books and our minds. Models are tailored to suit certain objectives and to help us understand our environment. So what are fractals? As well as illuminating the stunning beauty of the reality of nature from the infinitesimally small sub-divisions of an atom to the mind-bogglingly large galaxies, fractals enable scientists to see the geometry of an infinite number of natural things such as how light reflected from the sea differs from the light bouncing off a mirror. There are practical and commercial uses too which have helped in the technological advances in, for example, mobile phones and analyzing patterns in crowd-surges at football matches and other large public events – also in compressing computer files. Fractals, the computer images of mathematical constructs, have only been available to us since about 1975 when computers made it possible to open our minds to these new concepts. Of course, the maths behind fractals began to emerge with the findings of Newton some 300 years ago but, until the advent of computers there was no sheet of paper large enough for a representation. A mathematician, one Benoit Mandelbrot from Yale University, was the first to use a computer to produce graphical images and use the name fractal. I cannot reproduce a sample here but a site that shows several types is http://www*fractal-recursions*com (replace the asterisks with stops) The universe is full of fractals and may even be one. If so, are there other universes? And are they on the backs of an even larger flea? Len

Roxanne. I find it interesting too. On 31st October there was a large report in the press about elephants joining the select band of mammals that can recognise themselves in a mirror and therefore have self-awareness. Did you see it? I once read of an account of some tribal humans who could not do this or recognise photos as being images of themselves. Thinkers as diverse as Freud, Engels and Carlyle once pointed to the use of tools as being a defining behaviour of humans ('Man the tool-maker') but now it seems that heaps of animals, including birds are at it. There again, research into and analysis of birdsong shows that their song has an intricate structure with grammar and syntax. What is the world coming to? len

Carol: I haven't thought of doing anything with the pages. Probably nothing. I am just crystalizing my own thoughts - and one thought leads to another. I do a bit more research then write it down which gives me a fresh lead, which is why it meanders somewhat and doesn't appear regularly. Sometimes a question sets off a new train of thought. Today I spent hours in the CERN (Large Hadron Collider) website, after reading an article about it in New Scientist. Its worth a visit if you enjoy brainstorming. len.

Hi Len,Once again,very interesting reading.

15. Dr Rupert Sheldrake, author of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home (Three Rivers Press, 1999), believes that animals have abilities that humans may have possessed at one time, but somehow lost. Through his extensive research, he has concluded that there are three major categories of unexplained perceptiveness by animals: Telepathy - a psychic connection that some pets may have with their owners through connections Sheldrake calls 'morphic fields.' It is this ability that enables pets to 'know' when their owners are on their way home; The Sense of Direction - this ability accounts for the 'incredible journeys' some animals make to be with their owners, including homing pigeons. Extensive studies on homing pigeons, which can be electronically tagged, show that they use sight, smell, memory, sensitivity to electromagnetic lines of force and also, apparently, telepathy. Premonitions - which may explain why some animals seem to know when earthquakes and other events are about to occur’. It was officially recorded that after the Indonesian tsunami, in which thousands of humans died, air-searches revealed thousands of bodies of people but none of animals. One interesting observation is that before a major earthquake or Tsunami, the animals start behaving differently. The amazing effect of this electric field variation in the atmosphere can be very well seen on animals, which start showing anomalous behaviour before and at the time of earthquakes because of their sensitive nature towards minor electric field exposure of the earth. Simply put, they understand the root cause of earthquakes that we humans are just realizing through scientific quest. This also confirms the relationship between earthquakes, volcanoes and change in earth’s electromagnetic force-fields. Dogs and other animals have demonstrated psychic ability, which is termed 'anpsi' (an Italian term roughly to be interpreted as “animal extra-sensory perception) which is part of the paranormal realm. The sixth sense of dogs has been demonstrated, tested and documented many times. They have sensed the imminent arrival of a loved, even when the loved one is about to leave the office and head towards home; when a loved one is about to die. They have sensed natural and other disasters before they happen (precognition). Dogs have sensed people's seizures, heart attacks, strokes and have detected cancer. They have anticipated and given their owner warning of an impending epileptic fit which no doctor or electronic equipment can do. They have found their loved ones when the humans have moved far from home to a place the dog had never been to. They have found their way back home from long distances after having been transported in a box, in a car over maybe hundreds of miles. They have reacted to the presence of a ghost. They have become ghosts. Dogs have located their owners when the latter have moved far away. There is a documented account of this when, in the First World War, a dog managed to ship himself across the channel and locate his owner, a soldier in the Flanders trenches. Len

Just now, re-reading part 6 of my spiel, I noticed that GR had deleted an unmentionable word that I had used, which made the sentence meaningless. The word was of three letters beginning with D and ending in T. The one in the middle was O. Why tod, spelled backwards, upsets them I can't imagine but they wont have it, So I substituted the word 'zero'. Can't read the whole thing through but if anyone else spots an oddity, please PM me. Len

It's what I have been banging on about here, Susan. I mentioned Dr V.P. Lommel and Near Death Experience (in my post number 10) and intend to return to him. There are many other sites worth a look-up including J.B. Rhine Foundation and P.E.A.R.(Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) Thanks len

I was browsing earlier and found an interesting site. (remove brackets) http://iands(.)org/research/vanLommel/vanLommel(.)php I think you'd find this fascinating.........I did. Sue