You don’t have a soul: The real science that debunks superstitious charlatans

"WOW...seems like an article

funded by the people

who also do NOT want you to know

you have a soul"

...Susan Lynne Schwenger


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ARTICLE POSTED BELOW
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You don’t have a soul:

The real science that debunks

superstitious charlatans

Trust science, not myth:

Religious hucksters with claims of immortal souls are lying. Let's embrace reality

JULIEN MUSOLINO

SUNDAY, JAN 25, 2015 12:30 PM EST


Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze in "Ghost" (Credit: Paramount Pictures)

Excerpted from "The Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows We Gain From Letting Go of Our Soul Beliefs"

Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics:
You are all stardust.​

—Lawrence Krauss, “A Universe from Nothing,” 2012

One July night in a small English village, sometime near the end of the twentieth century,
Harry stood by his friend Rodrick as the radio engineer calmly explained his plan to strike
at the creator of the universe.

Rodrick had decided that he wanted to kill God, and he thought he knew how.

This desire was motivated in part by his conviction that the universe should exist on its own,
but mostly it was fueled by Rodrick’s deep contempt for the unfairness of existence
for which he held God responsible.

He explained to Harry that even though God was not material, He must possess at least some material characteristics, for otherwise He would not have been able to create the physical universe.

When prompted to explain how he might be able to reach God, Rodrick remarked that the information had been available to us for a long time: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light,” (Genesis 1:3).

The machine that Rodrick built to carry out his plan was an elaborate framework of lasers, mirrors, and prisms, all precisely arranged and calibrated, sitting on the workbench in his home laboratory.

He reasoned that it should be possible to generate a self-sustaining pattern of light that would reinforce itself indefinitely, transcending space and time to reach the Creator, striking God with a deadly bolt of energy. The two men adjusted their goggles and Rodrick flipped on the switch. Through the dark lenses, they could make out the pattern of light in front of them as the beams followed their geometric paths.

Gradually, the light intensified, and the brightness started to expand, swallowing the mirrors, the workbench, and the entire room. An instant later, the light was gone. “That’s it,” announced Rodrick dryly.

“God is dead.”

Harry looked around, and everything seemed perfectly normal. “Nonsense!” he snarled.

Rodrick then removed his goggles to inspect the room, and it was at that moment that the truth was revealed to Harry. He saw his friend’s empty eyes. . . .

Rodrick had indeed killed God, and in the process, he had destroyed every living creature’s soul. Life went on, and the vast clockwork of the universe continued to tick according to mechanical laws, but all you had to do now was look into people’s eyes to realize that they were all dead inside.

There was no beauty, no meaning, no inner life. This is what God supplied when he was alive, after all, reflected Harry. And now it was all gone.

---

---

This is a summary of the short story called “The God Gun,” by science fiction author Barrington Bayley, which was written in the early 1970s. Today, in spite of considerable advances in technology, most people would find Rodrick’s quest futile and hopelessly simpleminded, to say nothing of its evil nature.

But Bayley’s story remains powerful because most of us share his intuition that human beings are more than mere collections of physical parts. There must be something else in addition to the atoms and cells that make up our bodies—an essence, a spirit, something precious and beautiful. In short, a soul.

This intuition is deeply rooted in the human psyche and has been shared by people across cultures from antiquity to the present day. As Mark Baker and Stewart Goetz observe in their book “The Soul Hypothesis,” “Most people, at most times, in most places, at most ages have believed that human beings have some kind of soul.”

This intuition also plays a central role in most religious doctrines.

Pope John Paul II famously articulated the idea in a message delivered to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in October 1996, in which the Holy Father declared that the human body might originate from preexisting living matter, but the spiritual soul is a direct creation of God. Explaining the mind as a product of evolution, claimed the pope, was incompatible with the truth about man. Belief in the soul is also very much alive in North American culture today, as the results of numerous polls demonstrate.

In my own interviews of college students enrolled in upper-level undergraduate psychology classes like the ones I regularly teach at Rutgers University, I have found that a majority of students also believe that they have a soul.

What’s more, these intuitions are constantly reinforced by a wealth of books, TV shows, movies, and pronouncements made by writers and gurus of all stripes who purport to have found convincing evidence for the existence of the soul. Belief in the immortality of the soul was even featured as the cover story of the October 15, 2012, issue of the magazine Newsweek, with the title “Heaven Is Real:
A Doctor’s Experience of the Afterlife.”

In sharp contrast to popular opinion, the current scientific consensus rejects any notion of soul or spirit as separate from the activity of the brain. This is what Francis Crick, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, called “The Astonishing Hypothesis.” In Crick’s words, “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior
of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Reflecting on what he calls the scientific image of persons, the philosopher Owen Flanagan stressed that we “need to demythologize persons by rooting out certain unfounded ideas from the perennial philosophy.

Letting go of the belief in souls is a minimal requirement. In fact, desouling is the primary operation
of the scientific image.” The weight of the scientific consensus is distributed over many disciplines and includes, as we would expect, the sciences of the mind (psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science). Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene summarizes the situation as follows:
Most people are dualists. Intuitively, we think of ourselves not as physical devices, but as immaterial minds or souls housed in physical bodies. Most experimental psychologists and neuroscientists disagree, at least officially. The modern science of mind proceeds on the assumption that the mind is simply what the brain does. We don’t talk much about this, however. We scientists take the mind’s physical basis for granted. Among the general public, it’s a touchy subject.
Thus, according to Greene, science, like Rodrick’s God-gun, has killed the soul, but scientists
are reluctant to announce the news. The soul may indeed be a grand illusion, but it is a useful
and comforting one.

Open Pandora’s box and we may be the ones, like Harry, looking into other people’s eyes and discovering that everything has lost its beauty and meaning.

The award-winning author Jared Diamond once remarked that science is responsible for dramatic changes to our smug self-image. Astronomy has taught us that our planet is not the navel of the universe.

We learned from biology that we were not created by God but evolved alongside millions of other species. This book is about another seismic change in our self-image. Most people today believe that we have the bodies of beasts and the souls of angels. Science tells us otherwise. In the pages ahead,
I will take you on a tour of history, philosophy, and science to show you that the soul,
like geocentricism and creationism, is a figment of our imagination, and I will try to explain to you what gives rise to the illusion. Modern astronomy and the theory of evolution did not precipitate the end of the world. They are unmistakable signs of progress.

Likewise, I will show you that in spite of repeated claims to the contrary, we lose nothing by letting go of our soul beliefs and—better—that we even have something to gain.

It is this empowering conclusion that I want to leave you with as you reach the end of this book.

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE
In a 1999 Edge debate featuring the biologist Richard Dawkins and the psychologist Steven Pinker,
titled “Is Science Killing the Soul?,” Dawkins pointed out that the wordsoul has different senses.

One is the traditional idea that there is something incorporeal about us, that the body is spiritualized
by a mysterious substance. In this view, the soul is the nonphysical principle that allows us to tell right
from wrong, gives us our ability to reason and have feelings, makes us conscious, and gives us free will.

Perhaps most important, the soul is the immortal part of ourselves that can survive the death
of our physical body and is capable of happiness or suffering in the afterlife.

This is the soul that this book is about.

It is the soul that captures the imagination of a majority of our population.

Here’s what some of the students I interviewed wrote about it:
Soul to me is the internal self of an individual. It’s separate from the physical part of the body and makes me what I am. It is what I refer to when I am thinking or talking about myself. . . . I do believe that my soul will survive the death of my body. I think soul is eternal and will still be there long after my body has perished.
I believe my soul is the non-material being of myself. The part that is distinct from both my mind and my external body. I believe the soul to be unchanging and eternal. . . . Because I think the soul is imperishable I also believe that it will survive the death of my body.
I would define my soul as the spirit inside of me that is currently present in a human form. The properties of the soul are that it contains all of our emotions and feelings. I believe that when I die my soul will live on.
There are, of course, other senses of the word soul. One has to do with emotional or intellectual intensity, as in “their performance lacked soul.” The word soul is also used metaphorically in a variety of expressions such as soul mate, soul food, soul music, soul searching, or lost soul, to name just a few.

However, speaking of a performance that lacks soul, or of the poor souls that perished when the Titanic went down, does not commit you to a particular metaphysical view. Likewise, exclaiming “Oh my God!” upon realizing that the value of your stock portfolio has plummeted does not make you a religious zealot
(if anything it makes you a materialist, albeit not one of the kind that we will be concerned with here).

For these reasons, I will have nothing to say about these other senses of the word soul apart
from pointing out, as Dawkins did in the Edge debate, that they are terms that exist,
but that they are not the subject of this book.

The doctrine underlying the traditional notion of the soul is the view known in philosophical jargon as substance dualism, sometimes also called Cartesian dualism, after the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes. Descartes famously argued for the existence of two fundamentally
different substances: the physical matter of bodies and the spiritual stuff of souls. In Descartes’s system,
souls and bodies causally interact. Your soul pushes your buttons, so to speak,
and makes you do the things that you do.

Conversely, what happens to your body is felt, or experienced, in your soul.

THE SOUL OF THE MATTER
So how can we decide whether souls exist? Is this even a question about which science has anything to say? To many people, the answer to my second question is a resounding “No.”

After all, science deals with phenomena that can be objectively observed and measured.

The soul, by contrast, cannot be observed or measured because it is claimed to be immaterial.

Therefore, soul beliefs belong to the realms of religion and metaphysics.

This conclusion, however, is mistaken. The soul is a scientific hypothesis about the design
and functioning of human beings (the stuff of biology, psychology, and neuroscience),
and dualism makes claims about the detachability of mind and body and the existence of a substance capable of causal interaction with ordinary matter (the stuff of physics).

As such, souls are fair game for scientific investigation, subject to the same criteria that apply to the evaluation of any other scientific idea (a line of reasoning developed more generally
for other supernatural concepts by the physicist Victor J. Stenger in his book “God: The Failed Hypothesis”).

After all, science can tell us what happened a fraction of a second after the big bang took place, some 13.8 billion years ago, when no one was around to make measurements or record anything. Is it so far-fetched that science would also have something to say about what we are made of and how we function?

Imagine an episode of “CSI: Miami” in which the investigators have a suspect and are beginning their forensic work. As they gather the evidence, they discover that the suspect has no serious alibi for the night of the crime. It also doesn’t take them long to figure out what could have motivated their suspect to kill his victim. Using more sophisticated equipment, they uncover physical evidence that links the suspect to the victim and to the crime scene—blood stains on the suspect’s clothes that match the victim’s blood type, DNA evidence that positively identifies the blood as that of the victim, soil on the suspect’s shoes whose chemical composition matches that of the soil at the crime scene. Our investigators are also able to get their hands on a recording of the crime scene taken by a surveillance camera at a critical time right before the crime, and using digital video-enhancing techniques, they manage to retrieve meaningful evidence. Aided by powerful face-recognition software, they are able to place the suspect at the crime scene at the right time.
When taken in isolation, few, if any, of the clues uncovered by our team of forensic experts are really incriminating. The soil on the suspect’s shoes could have come from a walk he took at the scene of the crime the night before the victim was killed. If the victim and the suspect knew each other, perhaps they spent some time together before the murder took place, and the victim, who was subject to frequent nose bleeds, ended up accidentally soiling the suspect’s jacket. Since the jacket was dark, the suspect didn’t notice the blood stains until after the police apprehended him the following day. As for the other pieces of evidence, I am sure that you can easily concoct a plausible story as well. It is when taken together, however, that all these disconnected pieces of evidence acquire their collective power, and as they accumulate, we soon reach a point where it is no longer reasonable to conclude that our hypothetical suspect is innocent.
The forensic-investigation analogy is a good one because it also captures the story of how mainstream science has come to the conclusion that human beings most likely do not have souls. One of my goals in this book is to present all the relevant pieces of evidence—from psychology, biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the physical sciences—to support the conclusion that, when considered collectively, they undermine the soul hypothesis to the point of oblivion. Notice that the conclusion, if we want to be intellectually honest, should not to be that there is no soul, but rather, that there are no good reasons to believe that we have souls, and that there are very good reasons to believe that we do not have souls. To anticipate my conclusions, I will show you that the soul has shrunk as scientific understanding progressed, that there is no objective evidence supporting the soul hypothesis, that there is no known formalism that describes the soul substance, that souls fly in the face of what we know about modern science, and that no explanatory gain comes from postulating the existence of souls. In sum, I will show you that the soul has exactly the set of properties that it should have if it didn’t exist.
Just like other false ideas we entertained in the past had harmful consequences and stifled progress, so too, I will argue, do soul beliefs. In medieval Europe, during the Great Plague, people often had their lips sewn shut and their tongues cut off for fear that they would blaspheme and offend God. This was a perfectly rational practice, if brutally sadistic, based on a deeply flawed theory. Replace God’s wrath by the germ theory of disease and the sadistic practice loses its raison d’être. In less dramatic fashion, but in the same conceptual vein, I will show you that our soul beliefs get in the way of a more humane society. Our dualist intuitions lead to beliefs that cloud important societal debates, such as abortion, stem-cell research, and the right to die with dignity. Our intuitive notion of justice, and therefore our entire criminal justice system, which is unusually harsh and biased in the United States, as we will discover, may also be premised on dualistic assumptions. These enormously important issues that we face as a society should be approached armed with the best knowledge we have, not with traditional ideas that have no scientific credibility.
Through the pages of this book, I will lead you on a journey through science and thought to arrive at the following conclusions:

• The traditional soul is as much a scientific hypothesis about our design and mode of functioning as it is a metaphysical or theological claim. Consequently, determining whether or not we have a soul is an objective endeavor that falls within the scope of science.
• In spite of many claims to the contrary, there is in fact no credible evidence supporting the existence of the soul.
• Modern science gives us every reason to believe that we do not have souls.
• Nothing gets lost, morally, spiritually, or aesthetically by giving up our soul beliefs. In fact, we even have something to gain.
• The scientific image of personhood, so feared and vilified in the United States, provides the basis for an empowering and practically beneficial alternative to the soul myth.

TONE AND TACTICS
On a general level, the case against the soul is similar to the argument against the luminiferous ether of the nineteenth century, an invisible substance with mysterious properties, which was believed to serve as the medium for the propagation of light. The ether was an idea that was once entertained by the most serious scientists, but as understanding progressed, the need for such a substance became superfluous, and the ether hypothesis was eventually abandoned. From an emotional standpoint, however, the unraveling of the ether and the demise of the soul are as different as night and day. Most people did not have an opinion, let alone feelings, about whether the ether was real. Nothing about their lives hinged on the existence of the ether, and sacred doctrines did not contain divine prescriptions regarding the ether and its metaphysical significance. When it comes to the soul, it is a completely different story. For many people, the existence of an immaterial soul forms part of an intimate set of convictions and provides the basis for a deeply meaningful worldview. In no small sense, for such people, belief in the soul is a matter of life and death (literally so for those who believe in an afterlife).

These considerations bring up an important issue that has been regularly discussed within scientific and skeptical circles: the issue of tone. In reflecting on this question, the late Carl Sagan, who has done so much for skepticism and the public understanding of science, observed that when skepticism is applied to issues of public concern, as in the present case, there is all too often a tendency to belittle, to condescend,
and to disregard the fact that believers are human beings as well, with genuine beliefs and real feelings, people who, like skeptics and scientists, are also trying to understand the world and figure out what their place and purpose in it might be.

Echoing Sagan’s concerns, the astronomer Phil Plait delivered an address at The Amazing Meeting (TAM) of July 2010 titled, “Don’t Be a Dick” (a maxim related to Wheaton’s Law, which provides guidelines on appropriate online game-playing behavior, but that was also intended to apply to life in general).

The gist of Plait’s remarks was that even the best ideas are useless unless they are communicated.

And in the case of skepticism, the message communicated has the potential to make people uncomfortable and defensive, to say the least. Consequently, our attitude and the way we communicate those ideas
takes on critical importance.

I must confess that I have been guilty of the bias described above, and I was unaware of it until a student pointed it out to me when she wrote the following:
I came into this discussion excited for this new point-of-view and eager to learn,
but I remember leaving the lecture hall on the verge of crying. I know that dualism isn’t the best explanation for the world around us, and it’s good to hear both sides, but the way he explained it felt like daggers were being thrown in my heart and my world was shattering.
I wish he would’ve let us down gently, like saying “Santa may not be here physically,
but he’ll always be in our hearts” instead of just yanking off the beard on the mall Santa
and yelling in front of all the little kids, “SANTA ISN’T REAL!”
This is beautifully put and painful to read, and I felt sincerely sorry for eliciting such feelings. Those remarks also provided an important reality check. Since then, I have become much more sensitive to the issue of tone, and I have made a conscious effort to bear this in mind whenever I discuss the issue of the soul publicly or write about it. Tone, therefore, is something I will be sensitive to in this book. In doing so, I am reminded of Spinoza’s motto, a dictum named after the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza and expressed in these words: “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” In this regard, I also wish to make it clear at the outset of our investigation that this book is not intended as another broad-brush critique of religion, any more than a condemnation of drunk driving should be construed as a general diatribe against the use of motor vehicles. I am interested in the soul not because it is a religious concept and I have a bone to pick with religion but because it represents a fundamental aspect of human psychology.
Truth be told, there is a small group of soul advocates whose ideas I will criticize quite overtly in the pages ahead. These are the authors of popular books claiming to show that science supports the existence of the soul. I call them the New Dualists. When I discuss their ideas, the tone will be more pointed, if only for rhetorical purposes, but the criticism will always be directed at the ideas themselves rather than at the individuals who proposed these ideas. Besides, the New Dualists are all seasoned writers, and so unlike regular folks, they are used to having their ideas critiqued. This is just part of the game and it comes with the territory. Needless to say, the same rules also apply to my own ideas. With only one exception, I do not personally know the New Dualists, but I am sure that they are a great bunch, and I would be happy to share a stage with them if the opportunity presented itself.
Finally, I am also aware of the fact that even if I manage to find the right tone, the ideas that I will discuss in this book, and especially the conclusions that I will reach, might be offensive and sacrilegious to some. Here lies the dilemma that one finds at the heart of the scientific enterprise. On the one hand, the advancement of knowledge and understanding is a mission of critical importance in any society, and consequently, it is an endeavor that should be undertaken with earnest conviction and zeal. On the other hand, science has the singular property of revealing to us nature’s ways without the kind of sugarcoating that might sometimes be helpful. Reality, for better or worse, happens to be the way it is and not the way we would like it to be. Inevitably, certain conclusions are bound to rub us the wrong way, which is the price we need to pay for looking behind nature’s curtain to take a peek at its true face.
Related to the issue of tone, when writing on a sensitive topic, is the issue of tactics. Philosopher Owen Flanagan describes three such tactics, which I paraphrase here.
(1) You may say: “You are really naive to believe X; we’ll have to educate you so you can think straight and let go of all that silly nonsense.”
(2) You may say: “There are good reasons to believe that X is not true, but we are confident that Y is true, and Y is close enough to X that you’ll eventually get used to it. As you can see, everything will be alright, and the world won’t come to an end.”
(3) Or you may adopt the following strategy: People usually speak of X meaning X, but when you, the skeptic, speak of X, you really mean Y, hoping that your intended meaning will win the day, so that others will eventually come to mean Y when they talk about X.
I feel that (1) would simply be the wrong approach, for all the reasons I mentioned when I discussed the issue of tone. I also find (3) somewhat disingenuous. So (2) then will be my strategy of choice.
WHEN THE SPIRIT MOVES YOU
What would possess someone to publicly blurt out, like the child in Andersen’s famous tale, that the emperor has no clothes, and worse, that he has no soul either? One of my favorite answers comes from one of my colleagues who once said, when asked a similar question: “I am paid to find out the truth and announce it!” (To be fair, this remark was probably made tongue-in-cheek, and besides, not all truths are born equal.) For those of us who are involved in the business of teaching psychology, neuroscience, or cognitive science, the soul certainly represents a perfect illustration of the proverbial elephant in the room.
We cognitive scientists routinely talk about the physical basis of mind and use phrases such as “the mind is what the brain does.” Much less often do we publicly discuss what the physical basis of mind entails for the traditional notion of personhood. This is no doubt in large part because, as Joshua Greene pointed out, the question of the soul is a touchy issue. But just because an issue is touchy doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t talk about it. In fact, if we really are in the business of education, we should talk about such issues precisely because they are touchy and therefore rarely discussed publicly. After all, clergymen, movie directors, and politicians openly talk about the soul, so why shouldn’t scientists?
It should go without saying (but it goes even better if we say it, as one of my high school teachers liked to remind us) that the goal of such discussion isn’t to bully people who happen to believe in the soul into changing their beliefs. Rather, the objective is to create a free marketplace of ideas, where all points of views can be discussed without fear of censorship or discrimination, and to let people decide for themselves which set of ideas they find the most compelling. If teachers, educators, scientists, and writers were discouraged from discussing touchy, unfashionable, or controversial topics on the grounds that they are, well, touchy, unfashionable, or controversial, then education, like Harry and Rodrick’s world, would lose much of its value and meaning.
Ironically, fairness and the recognition of different points of view is precisely what is often called for by proponents of certain “controversial” ideas in America today. Take for example the perennial “debate” over creationism and evolution that has been raging in the United States for many decades (much to the astonishment of our European friends). One of the arguments often made by proponents of intelligent design (the latest brand of creationism) is that we should be fair and teach students both sides of the “controversy.” “Teach the controversy and let the students decide for themselves!” we often hear (sometimes from people as prominent as the president of the United States, in the case of George W. Bush). Teaching the “controversy” in the evolution vs. intelligent design “debate” would be an excellent idea indeed if there actually was a meaningful controversy in the first place. To be sure, there is a huge manufactured, and largely North American, public controversy, but it has no analogue in the scientific world (hence the scare quotes when I used the words controversy and debate).
In the case of the soul, if there is a public controversy over its existence at all, it has been a pretty quiet one, at least compared to the battles raging over evolution. Nevertheless, while a substantial majority of the American public believes in the soul and its survival after death, mainstream science has abandoned this traditional idea. So here we have two worldviews that could not be more different from one another, and if we really care about being fair and ensuring that different ideas get their share of airtime, I say it’s time to give scientists the microphone. As the psychologist Paul Bloom put it: “Such issues are too important to leave entirely in the hands of lawyers, politicians, and theologians.”
This book is the rejoinder to the growing number of popular books that have surfaced in recent years, trying to make the case for the soul on scientific grounds. Examples include “Life after Death: The Evidence,” by conservative writer and Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza; “Life after Death: The Burden of Proof,” by New Age author Deepak Chopra; “The Soul Hypothesis: Investigations into the Existence of the Soul,” by linguist Mark Baker and philosopher Stewart Goetz; “The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul,” by neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and journalist Denyse O’Leary; and “Proof of Heaven,” by neurosurgeon Eben Alexander. Here’s a revealing passage from D’Souza’s book:
To reclaim the hijacked territory, Christians must take a fresh look at reason and science. When they do, they will see that it stunningly confirms the beliefs that they held in the first place. What was presumed on the basis of faith is now corroborated on the basis of evidence, and this is especially true of the issue of life after death. Remarkably, it is reason and science that supply new and persuasive evidence for the afterlife—evidence that wasn’t there before.
So, according to D’Souza, science itself provides persuasive evidence for the immortality of the soul.
If so, one might wonder why mainstream scientists themselves are not convinced
by the kind of evidence that D’Souza claims exists.

In fact, the scientific consensus goes precisely in the opposite direction:
away from the soul and the afterlife. And it’s not that D’Souza’s fellow Christians failed to notice
these developments.

Consider, for example, the following passage from the back cover of a 2004 book titled
“What about the Soul? Neuroscience and Christian Anthropology,” edited by the theologian Joel Green:
Everyone knows about the rocky relationship between science and theology brought about by the revolutionary proposals of Copernicus and Darwin. Fewer people know about an equally revolutionary scientific innovation that is currently under way among neurobiologists.
This revolution in brain research has completely rewritten our understanding of who we are.
It poses fundamental challenges to traditional Christian theology.
According to the scientific worldview that now dominates,
it is no longer necessary to speak of a soul or spirit as distinct from the functions of the brain.
Contrary to what D’Souza and others have claimed, I passionately disagree
(perhaps I should say that I rationally disagree) with the conclusion that science supports
the notion of an immortal soul.

The current scientific consensus isn’t simply a fad, nor is it fueled by antireligious sentiment
(as Baker and Goetz suggest in their book).

Instead, scientists have abandoned the soul because reason and evidence
—the tools of their trade–compelled them to do so.

Excerpted from “The Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows We Gain From Letting Go of Our Soul Beliefs”
by Julien Musolino. Published by Prometheus Books. Copyright © 2015 by Julian Musolino.

Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Julien Musolino is a Franco-American cognitive scientist and an Associate Professor
at Rutgers University where he directs the Psycholinguistics Laboratory and holds a dual appointment
in the Department of Psychology and the internationally renowned Center for Cognitive Science.
He is the author of over 30 scientific articles and his research has been funded by
the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

 

"WOW...seems like an article

funded by the people

who also do NOT want you to know

you have a soul"

...Susan Lynne Schwenger

 

The 'Seat' of the 'Soul' and of Whales and Mites and Black Holes​

In La'kech! - I Am Another Yourself!


The Mayan observer of the occurrences on planet earth bears witness to a great upheaval in the human groupmind. There seems to be a monumental change going on with particular locations on the planet manifesting intensifying scenarios of great tragedy infused with pockets of great hope.

In 2003 there was discovered a 'hidden sanctuary' in the Gulf of Corcovado at the western coast of Chile. This location was found to be a 'breeding ground' for the greatest and most massive creature that ever existed on the earth in its recorded history - the blue whale.
Now today, this sanctuary has come to worldwide media attention in the attempt to disseminate this information and to ensure the continuance of this sancturay through and by the public awareness of this factual occurrence.​

​

Gratitude - (of the Real ETs as the Gaian nonhuman aliens)

...The Whale... If you read a recent front page story of the San Francisco Chronicle, you would have read about a female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spiderweb of crab traps and lines. She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body, her tail, her torso and a line tugging in her mouth.

A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farallon Islands (outside the Golden Gate) and radioed an environmental group for help. Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her. They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her.

When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles. She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them, pushed them gently around as she was thanking them.
Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives. The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth said her eyes were following him the whole time, and he will never be the same.

May you, and all those you love, be so blessed and fortunate to be surrounded by people who will help you get untangled from the things that are binding you. And, may you always know the joy of giving and receiving gratitude.

God Bless You.


On the other hand the scenarios of human tragedy and the suffering of human souls through the inhumanity inflicted by some souls onto others have reached a point of localised and international panic.

In a country called Zimbabwe, people are set on fire whilst alive and left to die; some are maimed and hacked to pieces in front of their families and atrocities are committed, which are on a par with any of the holocausts and genocides and massacres, which litter the sorry and violent history of your human civilisation.
But the Mayan knows, that things are more intricate, than as they appear.

The outward appearance of the scenarios, both peaceful and harmonious and violent and chaotic, are both an image of an internal conflict experienced by the human groupmind as a whole and the individuated human mind in localised isolations and as defined in the physical awareness contained within some region of volume, defining the consciousness for this awareness.
The African nation of Zimbabwe so manifests a certain internalised war or 'armageddon' in its collective experience.
The Zimbabwean consciousness so suffers an immense frequency shift, manifested in a physical disintegration of its ecological and communal structures. The experience of the 'suffering' on many levels then is witnessed by observers, say as an international community.

A cosmic playwright might now name a certain character as BE A MUG and develop the story of 'The Mug' as leading his country of Zimbabwe into chaos and disarray.
One plot of the story might engage the question: what will the observers do, will they invade Zimbabwe and depose 'The Mug'. Now there will be little economic benefit of mounting a militarily enforced expedition to 'redeem' Zimbabwe from 'The Mug' and his cohorts.
There are no resources of value in Zimbabwe and it will cost a lot of money to 'save' Zimbabwe from 'the infidels'.

Some observers know, that 'The Mug' is the projection of a character and that a 'bit of the mad Mug, who has lost the plot', resides in all of the human consciousness carriers.
Some observers will understand what happened in the mind of 'The Mug' and that he simply has allowed pride and prejudice coupled to fear to 'cloud' his self-awareness.
The trouble with 'The Mug's' way of thinking is the trouble of the generalised human way of thinking.
A history of 'divide and conquer' at any location of the planetary habitat will always induce a search for a 'new identity' for the location under question, the locale which experienced of having been 'divided and conquered'.

So many human onlookers know this experience of the localised groupmind rather well. But something is a little different in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe was 'colonised' in a sense of the past and much benefit derived from this colonisation for the country of Zimbabwe in terms of infrastructure being built and provisional things like food was grown and distributed.
Then and as has so often been experienced by other locations of the planetary gropumind in the past; the 'invaders' of a different groupmind culture as the colonisers came into mental conflict with the original inhabitants as the colonised and a rebellion ensued.

The 'whites' were exiled from the country and the land of the 'blacks'.
Now this kind of scenario is an ongoing theatrical stage, however mind-disturbing, on planet earth.

One has the 'reds' fighting the 'white invaders' in one place called Northern America and one has the 'whites' fighting the 'yellow' invaders in a place called Europe or the Middle East and one has the 'blacks' fighting the 'white' invaders in a place called Australia, as well as in Africa and one has the 'browns' fighting the 'white' invaders in a place called Southern America.
The 'whites' also fight the 'white' invaders and the 'yellows' the 'yellows' and so on and on in say places like subEurope like say England, France, Germany, Spain and Ireland and subAsia in places like China and Japan and XKorea and YKorea and XVietnam and YVietnam.

All this warring and fighting is a search for Identity: Personal-Clan-Tribe-Nation-Group - and so affects the evolving self-awarenesses and the collective consciousnesses.
But the Zimbabwean example for the projection of the inbred search for identity in the human self-recognition apparatus serves as a dramatisation for the onlookers and the observers, both on earth and the extrapolated ones like the Maya.

For in most other conflicts of violence, there is something to gain for the invader, for otherwise the universal motto of 'conquer and divide' is of little consequence.
Invading Zimbabwe would mean that the invader would have to repair and 'fix' the destroyed infrastructures and provide aid and relief operations to 'heal' the suffering people in Zimbabwe.

So the Maya sees the 'dispossessed poor blacks' killing and abusing the 'other dispossessed poor blacks' and witnesses the insanity of it all.
But this 'insanity of the human mind' serves as an example of how the saying of 'the blind leading the blind into the abyss' was never more appropriate as at the given time.

And the international onlookers, who could intervene are also struck with this 'blindness', because they do not understand of how to 'reharmonise' the scenario and of how to begin to heal the land, its people and its collective understanding of its selfhood.
The internationals do not understand their selfhood either; and so the 'fear of loss' of Self-Identity, historically attained in the national agendas, constitutions and records; permeates the human groupmind from the individual through the families and clans and towns and cities to states, nations and continents.

A historical perspective of 'divide and conquer', which underwrites the above scenario is now in a process of being realised by the international groupmind in its confrontation with an uneasiness in individual human minds not hitherto experienced in a collective sense since the demise of a previous human civilisation with slightly altered physical parameters with respect to the technology utilised.

Will there be enough water for my grandchildren, many of you ask?
Will I have to grow my own vegetables in my nonexistent backyard garden, because the price of foods is to high due to transportation and distribution costs?
Will I be unable to fly from one country to another because the price of fuel is too high for me to pay?

And the climate is 'playing havoc' with the seasons of the year out of season and with either too much or too little of the elements causing disasters with great loss of life and property.
Where will it all end and what kind of planet will my children and grandchildren inherit?
You see, it becomes a question of identity. Who am I and Where and What is my Country and my home? Where do I belong and What am I doing here in this place and at this time?


So the purpose for this information from Hunab Ku through the pathway of the Kuxan Suum and in the Loom of the Maya is to share the Mayan understanding with the family, which finds itself presently self-imprisoned upon a beautiful planet in the galactic hierarchy of planetary councils.
I shall elucidate, but will take a 'time out' to clarify the nature and meaning of these messages.

Much of the information given, will create a great feeling of discomfort in many of you. I shall explain why, but the prime directive from Hunab Ku entails an agenda to allow you to gradually remember your own Mayaness and your own identity as time travellers.
All of you are Mayas and all of you know about the 'masterplan' which is now unfolding on the planet Gaia.

So your discomfort will be mental. Some will understand and most will not, but here is a key.
You are feeling the discomfort, because you are not sure from deep within yourself, as to the appropriateness of ALLOWING yourselves to 'get it'.
For the 'few' who will 'get it' or who experienced a kind of 'electric shock' when reading this, I humourise this discourse and state: "Buckle Up, you are in for the ride of your life!".
For the 'many', who cannot yet 'remember', it does not matter and you also shall 'get it' at an appropriate time of your own choosing.
In a sense it would prove detrimental to your state of mind to give you all the information all at once, such as Running Water attempted to do in a more technical and convoluted terminology.
And practically noone on any forum could understand the convolutions now, could they?! The reason for this is as was outlined above. You disallowed yourselves from understanding much, because of certain 'veils' (or EVILS isn't your English language infused with encoded meanings?) you placed upon your perceptions of your own choosings.

So I shall caveat the forums this one time. Should a moderator evaluate these messages as inappropriate in subject matter or receive complaints from contributors with respect of appropriateness; I shall willingly resign from that forum and cease to convey the Mayan heirloom.
All Mayan messages will be freely available at the CosmosDawn website, linked at the signature of this message and everyone and all are invited to freely copy, distribute and share the Loom of the Maya and the data on this website with anyones choosings. There is no sense of copyright or intellectual propriety on this information, as it is your earned inheritance as 'Exiled Mayans' and as embodied spiritual ambassadors and ambassadoras and galactic genetic inheritors through and by your human DNA as a seedling for your galactic starhuman DNA.

And so I shall continue with elucidations of your true identity in due course. This identity spans the creation of the universe and though Hunab Ku is the galactic centre of the Milky Way, it also resides in your own holographic bodyform in the gestalt of what many of you know as the Crown Chakra and or as the Pineal Gland in terms of your anatomy.
The galactic Hunab Ku is physicalised as a Vortex SourceSink of Source Energy, which has a funnel like geometric form.
Your scientist speculate on this and partially accept its existence in the form of a Mother-Black Hole or MBH located at the galactic centre. Your scientists then postulate a Power Engine for this MBH and something they associate with Quasars and Gamma-Ray-Bursters or GBRs.

Mathematically, Hunab Ku is well defined as a Wormhole Singularity known as a Kerr-Toroidal-Ring or as a Einstein-Rosen-Bridge or ERB.
But you know, there is a galactic wedding planned and this galactic wedding between Perseus aka the Milky Way and Andromeda represents a rather intimate encounter with all of you.

The basic physics is one of galactic selfawareness on the, well, galactic cellular scale.
Andromeda is a female spiral galaxy, because relative to the male Perseus galaxy, it rotates anticlockwise in a symbolisation of 69 and in drawing the ciphers from the 'loose ends' and with the circles of both the 6 and the 9 coinciding.
Perseus aka the Milky Way is a male galaxy in the mirror images of the 69 and to see this simply draw the mirror image of 69 onto a piece of paper.

Perhaps you are now ready for the solving of another mystery.
This mystery engages a sensitive subject dear to many of you.

Where is the 'risen' body of the character known as Jesus Christ?

I shall not here delve into the mysteries of Yeshuah Ben Joseph Bar Thomas. Much valid information can be found on the CosmosDawn website about this; but shall concentrate on the physical Whereabouts in association with Hunab Ku and Kuxan Suum.
There is a particular encoding in your scriptures known as the New Testament, which ALWAYS names the 'risen' Jesus as Christ Jesus and the 'human Jesus' as Jesus Christ. These scriptures are known as the Letters of Paul.


Now those selfsame scriptures also state, that Jesus has risen to 'sit on the right side of the father' awaiting judgement day following an armageddon of the worlds.
The 'left side of the father' is never mentioned, because it is considered Sinister or Evil by the scribes and just as EVIL is the mirror image of LIVE, so is Jesus Christ the mirror image of Christ Jesus.

So the key to the encoding includes the realisation that the Cosmic Christ is universal. You all carry the Cosmic Christ within yourselves, but a particular external manifestation of the Cosmic Christ is the 'Body of Hunab Ku' and that is the 'physicality of the Milky Way galaxy in total.

So the Body of Christ as the 'New Church' is the Milky Way Galaxy and everything within it and that includes all of you as a collective 'church' and a collective 'body of christ'.

You see then there are two 'emissiaries' of 'Jesus', the One sitting on the right side of the father'.

The Jesus on the 'right' is the Jesus Christ of the human incarnation and this Jesus has a 'Comforter' which is called 'The Holy Ghost', as say in the gnostic gospel of John.

So what does this mean?

It means, that all and every 'male' Adam (or Adam Kadmon as the Cosmic Man Vitruvius or Purusha and similar) in the Milky Way can receive and become 'The Holy Ghost' as the christ embodied on the right.

The Jesus of the left is so the Christ Jesus of the Pauline Letters and only 'female' Adams (or Eves as Eve came out of Adams chest as a rib) can receive and become 'The Holy Spirit'. But this duality of the sexes is reunified in the 'Tree of Life', which is the 'Tree of the Quabalah', which is the Matrix of the Maya and the Mandala for this and that. I shall address this in more detail in a later message if appropriate.

The 'Holy Spirit' is the energy of the 'Holy Mother' and the 'Holy Ghost' is the energy of the 'Holy Father'.

Now the Cosmic Christ in Mayan language is called Pacal Votan and manifests in the 'office' of the Plumed Serpent, also known as Kukulkan or Quetzalcoatl or Gugumatz.
The 'office' of the 'Plumed Serpent' is also the 'office' of Melchisedek in your scriptures and the scrolls known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This 'office' was known to the previous civilisation of the human race on planet Gaia and the remnant of this previous civilisation became a new seed for your present civilisation in what the historians call 'Ancient Egypt'.
In 'Ancient Egypt' the office of the Serpent was the 'Uraeus' and the Egyptian mythologies served as the seedling 'stories' for all of your other spiritual belief systems and were then modified by the 'wisdom keepers' and the scribes relative to the global envirnments which developed the 'new human civilisation' which has now come to its predicted end of 'it's rope', and as I shall further elucidate in the times to follow if appropriate.


But the Mayan synchronisation of 2012 will open certain vortexes for the galactic communication between Hunab Ku as the 'Cosmic Galactic Mind' and its subsystems and including your solar nebulae star RahSol to the planet Gaia as a 'female receptacle' of the 'male' 'courtship'.
Now as the galactic vortices open on the Kuxan Suum, as the 'greater body of christ' the 'smaller bodies of christ', namely all of you, both male and female, will also experience an opening of vortices and many of you are already experts on the details and the nature of this occurrence.

The galactic Kuxan Suum is your 'spinal column' and the galactic pathways are the Acupuncture meridians or energy points within your physical anatomy and the chakra-energy centres linked to organs and glands.
Then the 'Coming of Pacal Votan'; which is the 'Coming of the Cosmic Christ', will be the SERPENT=97 as a PRESENT and as a SON OF MAN and the awakening of your 'kundalini' as the 'coiled up serpent' encoded in the number 97 as the 95 2 in the Mayan hieroglyphics (95=IAMTHATIAM as the 'holy' name given to Moses by the 'burning bush' in Exodus.3.14).

Now recall the 69=96 from my earlier information and you can begin to understand the Mayan language in its alphanumeric correspondence to your own anglosaxon tongue.
You have designed the words in a certain way, to decipher the Mayan hieroglyphics you know -some may begin to remember this now.

So SONOF=69 and MAN=13+1+14=28 and 69+28=97 and what appears as just a 'coincidence' in the reading of the exoteric skeptic, becomes an esoteric encodement in Mayan hieroglyphics translated into anglosaxon alphanumerics.

But if Andromeda is the 'Bride' and Perseus is the 'Bridegroom' on the galactic level and occuring in say 5 billion years from now, then what is the 2012 galactic synchronisation all about, you may ask?
The 'bride' is yourself as the 'Holy Spirit' and the 'bridegroom' is yourself as the 'Holy Ghost' - the Cosmic Christ reassembled and the 'Wedding of the Lamb'.

So a few of you may feel a little happiness by now. Your belief in the 'Christening' wasn't such a form of 'spiritual self delusion' and 'wishful thinking' after all. So many skeptics tried very hard to make you feel uncomfortable with your beliefs in the 'truth' of the 'holy books'.

But to be skeptical is a very good thing - if it is engaged in in a manner of logical discernment and a sieving of the wheat from the chaff, as the sayings go. To be skeptical for skepticism's sake can however rather be a 'foolish' thing, as it hinders the raising of the self-awareness in the acceleration of the numbers of the frequencies.

But to 'run around' proselytising the 'Word of God' without more than a very superficial exoteric meaning of this 'Word of God' can lead to an even greater 'foolishness' in the affairs of the human mind and heart.
Many wars and lowering of self-awareness has resulted in the 'foolish' interpretations of the 'holy scriptures', and especially the ones which experience a great following such as the Christian Bible, the Jewish Torah and the Qu'ran of Islam, all defining their genealogical ancestry correctly to Abraham and Sarah as the starseed of the Maya.

Yes, Abraham as the 'Friend of God' was one of us and as one of all of us.

Reanalysing the human history from the Mayan perspective, will heal the misunderstandings and the Imams and the Ayatollahs and the Popes and the Bishops and the Lamas and the Monks and the Babas will find out and understand that they are all are trying to describe the same ultimate reality and inclusive of the nirvana and the maya.

And so the prophecied 'Second Coming of Jesus', the 'Return of Peter as the last pope', the 'final incarnation of Krishna', the 'last incarnation of the prophet as the 12th Imam' and so forth are all encompassed in the 'Return of the Maya' in the form of Pacal Votan, the 'plumed sepent' of Uraeus.

And to end with this dispensation; I ask you to recall another movie, which is pertinent for the present time.
In my last messsage, I mentioned 'Independence Day' as a distorted depiction of Mayan reality.

The movie: 'Star Trek - The Journey Home' was a much more realistic depiction of Mayan reality and is filled with hope and not despair and fear.
In that movie, the last Star Trek with original castings; the Blue Whales of Chile have become extinct on a doomed planet earth and the Star Trek Crew must travel back in time in true Mayan style to 'save the whales' for the future and to avoid total physical destruction.

Now the Blue Whale population in the Gulf of Corcovado is doing very well, the numbers have increased, albeit slowly and the Chilean awareness is expanding into a global awareness as to the necessity and importance to 'stabilise' the Blue Whale population and to ensure its habitat.

And the whales, the gentle giants of the oceans sing their songs of joy and appreciation and the melodies travel along the Kuxan Suum towards the galactic centre to tell the tales of an awakening humanity understanding, realising and honouring their stewardship as cocreators with their common mother planet Gaia.
And concurrently with this, the human stewards experience the symphony of the whales as the serpent energy of their individualised Kuxan Suum, and in the form of their vertebrata and their energy meridians.

This is the true nature of the Mayan Loom and I shall further share the Mayan understanding if appropriate at a later time.


Much controversy revolves around the concept of the Cartesian mind-body duality and the ideas of an immortal part of a living entities colloquially and historically termed 'soul'.

Four references from the KJV Christian bible read as translated.

Genesis.2.7:
"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul".

Genesis.2.5:
"And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb in the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground."

Genesis.1.21:
"And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantely, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good."

Genesis.1.11:
"And God said, Let the earth bring bring forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the fruit tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good."

It is proposed in QR (Quantum Relativity Theory of Thuban OmniScience); that the scriptural accounts describing creation in actuality reflect an encoding of a story, which can today be translated into the nomenclature of modern physical theory.

So the 'seed in itself' translates as the programming of the DNA inherent in the sexual chromosomes of reproduction in modern genetics.

This then implies, that the 'Lord God' and as the creator somehow must be responsible for this 'programming' as say the primordial and/or underpinning and/or intrinsic intelligence or mind for this 'creation' and 'before it materialised' in the Big Bang cosmology and the creation of space and time et al.

Furthermore, man (and all lifeforms in flora and fauna say before it) does in fact derive from 'the dust of the ground'; namely as the first selfreplicating biovital precursors in the Darwinian evolution in the form of clay-crystals.
The growth of crystalline inorganic structures can be shown to relate to chiral differentiation with say the biochemistry of DNA manifesting in righthanded sugars and lefthanded proteins. Also this can be further examined and analysed in the weak parity violation of the weak nuclear interaction and so the asymmetry between matter and antimatter in fundamental particle physics.

Subsequently, nature's favouring of compacting information in its most efficient manner possible leads to geometric forms for the selfreplication of crystalline structures to proceed; say as in the well established form of fivefolded symmetries in the Fibonacci patterns of quasicrystals and the more regular packing arrangements as say embodied in the five Platonic Solids: Tetrahedron, Cube, Octahedron, Dodecahedron and Icosahedron.

The topic of this post is however a particular 'decoding' of the scriptures; namely why are 'whales' mentioned in the genesis account and in context with the 'moving creatures', say as distinct of the 'stationary' trees?

First, the informed reader might realise certain biological anomalies.

Only whales share something termed the female human menopause with scriptural 'man' (meaning mankind as male with the female as a bisexual unity).

Secondly, whilst the evolutionary historical record shows diversity in the great mammals generally having 'shrunk' in size; the whales have greatly 'expanded'.

A mammoth; a dimetrodon, a wooly rhino and a smilodon; all clearly show scaled-up versions of the modern elephant, the modern rhinoceros and the modern lion say.

But the ancestry of whales is believed to derive from landdwelling Mesonychids, which were doglike carniverous ungulates (one-hoofed) and from ancestors of the hippopotamus in artiodactyla (hippopotamidae) of the early paleocene about 60 million years ago.​

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Basilosaurus cetoides (and say Zyggorhiza Kochii) were primitive whales in the Eocene oceans, about 40 million years ago, having returned to the aquatic environment, say 50 million years ago.​

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Those primitive whales, as cetaceans, then 'split' about 35 million years ago into evolved into the toothless baleen whales and the toothed dolphins, porpoises, killer whales and sperm whales of today.

The greatest and most massive mammal that has ever existed still exists today under threat of extinction - the Blue Whale of say 150 tonnes in weight and 30-40 meters in length.​

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One blue whale was dated as being over 200 years old and their average lifespan is the same as that for the human in so 70-100 years.

So is there a familial relationship between humans and whales? Modern whales are related to pachyderms in the hippopotami and some 'decipherers' of scripture identify the biblical 'behemoth' of the Book of Job with the hippopotamus and the Leviathan of that book with the whale.

Actually, according to QR, the Jobian mythological creatures relate to something rather different, namely the Mazzaroth or Circle of Ourobos as the 'zodiac' of the 'Milky Way'; but this has been discussed elsewhere.

But according to the cosmogenesis of QR; the Big Bang occurred 19.11 billion years ago following 'stringed inflationary epoch'.

This inflation ended at the 'instanton of time', namely t_o=3.33..x10^-31 seconds after 'Planck-Time' and related in the cycletime n=H_o.t. This quantizes a linear 'flow of time' as dn/dt=H_o~1.88x10^-18 Hz and as a superposed 'cosmic frequency' for the expansion of the universe (as a nodal Hubble-Constant of 58 km/Mpc.s say).

This marker, initialising the thermodynamic Big Bang as a Planck Black-Body Radiator; then manifests a 'Unified Field' (UF) of the four gauge interactions (Gravitation, Electromagnetism and the two nuclear interactions).

This UF manifests the merging of two opposing wavefunctions, which repeats in intervals of 8π radians and manifests the gauge interactions as a collection of monopolic current 'knots' or 12 intersection-points.

As the timeinstanton defines the c-invariance in lightpath x=ct_o and as a wavelength (lambda or λ) say; one can now metricate the minimum displacement as a Schwarzschild Radius in say General Relativity and giving a boundary/initial condition for the relativistic Big Bang.

Setting 4 Lambda=(8π.r_o)=2GM/c², then specifies the 'Black Holed' inertia or mass as M_min=4π.r_o.c2/G=162,000 kg in the QR calculation, using string parameters.

What does this mean?

This means that any mass observed and measured in the universe can be differentiated in terms of its Black-Hole equivalence.

A classical Black Hole would become limited in an 'ordinary' manifested mass of 162 tonnes and as the precise mapping of the 'Unified Field' onto a subsequent cosmic evolution, which began over 19 billion years ago and in a sense defining the 'finiteness' of the universe, compared to its stringed 'pretime'.

So any of the 'living moving creatures' of the scriptural account would PRECEDE the manifestation of a physical universe as the 'seeds of themselves', now translated into modern semantics as the Black Hole inertia equivalents, which in QR are also monopolic and superconductive source-currents.

So if 162 tonnes is a minimum and say as the scale of the most massive living creature that ever existed; what then is the minimum scale of such a creature?.

As the 162 tonnes specify a maximum in say the baleen whale as the END of the inflationary string epoch; the minimum is necessarily defined in the beginning of that epoch and so in the Planck-Mass M_P=√(hc/2πG)~1.6x10^-8 kg.

Should one use the mass of a human preembryo at implantation of the blastocyst (100-150 cells) at say 7 days after fertilisation as a marker; then using cellular mitosis at the twelfth division - after the creation of the first generation of the daughter cells from the parental spermatozoa and ovum -of the (totipotent) stem cells; the Planck-Mass is also attained.
Here one uses a characteristic cellular mass of 1 nanogram for 214=16,384 cells for a total mass of 16,384 nanograms.

So the lightest 'living creature' should weigh about the Planck-Mass and is found in the world of the microbes.

The Etruscan Shrew (of thumbsize) is described as the lightest living mammal, weighing 2 grams; the lightest vertebrate is often said to be the stout infantfish (of so 8 mm) at one milligram and the lightest insects are say fairy flies (hymenoptera, wasps), which also weigh in the milligram region and the millimeter scale of size.​

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The smallest invertebrata can be smaller, then the largest protozoa, say the bacterium paramecium (350 micrometers) as compared to a fairy flie of 200 micrometers.​

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Microscopic mites like Archegozetes Iongesetosus (from taxonomy of acari and arachnids) weighs 100 micrograms and is often called the 'strongest animal in the world', as it can lift over 1182 times its own bodyweight (expected value is about five times). Such microorganisms date back to the Devonian era of so 400 million years ago and still dominate the overall lifeform in number on the planet.​

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But Archegozetes Iongesetosus is a 'larger' mite at half a millimeter and at 10^-7 kg and smaller mites reduce to less than one tenth of a millimeter.

This reduction in size corresponds to a say fivefolded reduction in mass and now characterises the Planck-Mass of so 16 micrograms.

So what am I saying?

I claim, that say the extreme forms of inertia found on the planet, say the 162 ton baleen whale and the tropic mite at 20 microgram, are both related to the creation of the universe before space and time existed - as DNA/RNA templates or architectural blueprints subject to evolutionary genetic mutation or similar.

And this is just, what the scriptures claim in genesis. The 'seeds' existed, before they were planted.

And the human scale of say 50-100 kg is near the geometric mean of the two extremes at √(162x103x1.6x10^-8)~0.051 kg by a factor of 1000 - the mean describing a 'weight' of 51 grams (a typical chocolate bar or a small bird).

So where then is the location of the 'souls'?

The souls of all 'living things' are located inside the Black Holes of their inertia equivalence.
And as this equivalence predates the Big Bang, the 'souls' of living entitities from mite to blue whale must also predate the materially manifested universe in the selfsame primordial 'mind' or 'cosmic intelligence', which programmed the 'seeds' in say the genetic encoding and which is historically known under many labelings, including that of the 'Lord God'.

Subsequently, when a mite or blue whale 'dies', the information 'collected' as say 'memory' in 'consciousness' throughout its 'lifecycle' will become 'processable' in a scenario transcending space and time in a 'return to the sourcing of the seeds'.

Commentaries:

Fantastic hypothesis, Tony. Are you saying that there is a sort of 'blueprint soul' from which all others are made and to which they return?
I don't really understand inertia, but I think I was able to grasp most of what you were alluding to above.
Thanks,

April


Yes April, and this blueprint is the same 'thing' from which the entire universe was born. It is the 'singularity' of mathematical physics as well as the 'source of all things' of the ancients, as well as the 'IAm' of Moses' 'burning bush' in Exodus.3.14 as the 'most holy of names' as well as the 'IAM' of omniscience of the New Ager.

Because this 'singularity' is responsible of having 'made' space and time from itself; it was described by the ancient mind of insight (gnosis=scientia=knowledge) as some 'LIGHT moving out of its own darkness to create all things.
This is just like the mythology described in genesis. So the 'bible bashers' in a sense are not far off the 'truth' at all. Using GNOSIS=SCIENCE=INSIGHT, one can DECIPHER the mythologies in just a manner which reductionistic science can (and will imo) eventually accept as its own ontology.

The trouble is that any mythology becomes by necessity FILTERED by the 'decoder'.
So saying, that the 'spirit of God' moved across the void (which is the same as the Greek Chaos differentiating into Uranus=Sky and Gaea=Earth or the Egyptian twinship of Geb=Sky with Nut=Earth) can and has been interpreted in many ways, including in exoteric (open and outward for the masses as Jesus or similar adepts would have said) and an esoteric (hidden or occult and inward for the disciples as Jesus or similar adepts would have said).

Then the so called sceptics and antispiritualists lose impartiality in critisizing the exotericism of say the dogma-bound religions as being undifferentiated from the esoteric interpretations (reserved for the 'disciples' or whatever).

Stephen and Herb's addresses below relate to this. Both are fundamentally correct in their critiques.
Stephen and Herb here actually converge in stating that the biblical 'soul' refers to the 'breath of life'. But this is precisely what I have said in quoting Genesis.2.7.; and which I then 'deciphered' in terms of modern physics.

One can see here what I mean by 'filtering' of the decoders.
Stephen justifiably draws upon his own database of his gnosis and differentiates between spirit and soul and then applies his brand of esoteric alchemy (as genuine part of the perennial philosophy) to describe say the harmony of the elements.

His spherical 'merkabah' is the same as the 'singularity' of QR above; it is the same as the Circle of Vitruvian Man of Leonardo da Vinci or the 'Cosmic Box' of the Hinus 'Purusha' (or 'Cosmic Man').

Stephen now could even go further in showing parallels between 'spirituality' and reductionist science.
Namely, he could invoke the destructive nature of Oxygen as the 'breath of life' and so the dual nature of being both life-giving as 'food for the brain' and as the 'fuel for combustion' and as destroyer in say that same combustive chemistry.

Herb is also correct in his critique, as the 'breath of life' can be said to be the 'soul' of ANYTHING LIVING after dispensation from 'God'.
And this is just what I tried to explain in my post. Namely, that all living things are 'made' from say 'Nature's DNA/RNA Code of Life' and manouver in between minimum and maximum boundaries which can so be utilised by modern science to further their classification procedures.

Herb misses the major point of reducing the 'God' which say 'by his spirit' gave the 'soul' to the living things to something inherent in the created beings themselves.
It is Herb's responsibility to justify his 'godless' nature in showing how this 'soul' came to be the 'motor of life' so to speak.
To then say, that science is still learning and trying to find out is to 'hide' behind the ignorance he so easily dispenses onto the peoples of faith and 'believers' in the database and libraries of the myths.

Lastly, April's question on the 'souls return to their source' requires deeper analysis.
Logically, all speculations must be selfconsistent and should also be reducible to a basic simplicity.

So the 'singularity' is in fact defined in a generalised way by many thinkers, ancient and new. One can term it the 'Lord God' or the Big Bang Singularity of a Planck-Superstring or the Source-Energy of the IAMTHATIAM or whatever.

Note here an important FACT. God is God UNTIL he has created his own image in Man (AdamEve) and RENAMES himself as the Lord God thenceafter. Why? Because Adam has now become God as his Veritas Eikona (Perfect or True Image), being empowered to NAME all the created fauna and flora in the manner of scientific classifications and taxonomies etc. etc.(Gen.2.4,20).

God's Spirit becomes the ENERGY, not only of his own selfdefinition (after emerging out of his opwn darkness or void by becoming AWARE of himself); but also of the lifesustaining 'breath of life' dispensed to his environment (say Stephen's bubble of being, which is Isaiah's 'Vessel of the Lord', Noah's Ark, the New Age Merkabah, Moses' 'Ark of the Covenant' and the 'Body of Christ' as the 'Body of the Church' in the eucharist etc. etc.).

Modern science then will one day discover, that this 'spirit of God' is closely related to the foundations of the physical sciences in being the boundary for spacetime as metric limit - limiting to what displacement scale measurements can be reduced.

Because of this, all science must eventually converge at its source of origin and it will then become understood what 'God' truly is and always was.
Namely, God can only be the energy reservoir for everything that exist, did or can exist including all thoughts, memories, speculations, dreams and inventions.

BUT, this energy reservoir must necessarily be independent on physical parameters such as space and time and mass.
So, modern science must CHANGE its paradigm of reducing everything to spacetimematter and REPLACE this with a reduction to the ENERGY equaivalence of this spacetimematter.

This will DEFINE 'God' unmistakenly, as all global science will find commonality and reproducibility through the scientific methodology.
I can elaborate if asked specific questions on this and have already often done so in my posts.

So the 'souls' are REDUCED energy concentrations independent on mass and space and time. Whilst 'enlivening' some 'vessel of life' (and a vessel of the lord in terms onf man as the image); the 'souls' ARE the living entity, might it be an ant or a dolphin or a child.
Their 'souls' are however CONNECTED to the source of all in their ENERGY EQUIVALENCE, say modelled on Black Hole physics.

As the entire inertial universe is most definitively describable as a "Mother Black Hole' (because the critical density in General Relativity demands a harmony between elementary parameters in first principles); whatever is contained in this universe is automatically bilocated in terms of the INFORMATION processing of this selfsame universe.


The boundary of the universe is colocated with the centre (and just as Stephen propounds in his 'merkabah'-sphere).
This means, that all information in between is MAPPED onto the surface (of the so called Hubble Horizon of the universe so 17 billion lightyears from the Big Bang centre) and from where it is 'processed' by the centre.

So the 'return of the souls' is rendered as a REMEMBRANCE or RECOGNISANCE of the 'souls' which had embarked on a journey, of say into embodiment, to discover more of their 'own identity' as the vertias eikonas of their source.
There is of course much more to all of this and certain elucidations can be found in the postings of Tony B. and on my site (where the mathematical symbols print properly).

PS.: Btw, I have elaborated on the Planck-Mass, linking it to embryogenesis in human gestation in my last post.

Tony B.


Excellent points. Very intelligently written Tony! What a great mind you have friend! However, I would like to add my two cents in - now I'm not syaing you are wrong, or that your exegisis is flawed, but according to my sources the breath of life that was breathed [inspired] into the nostrils of man is the spirit - not the soul.
There is a difference.

[The word inspire is related to the word spirit, and inspire means to breathe in. That is why often times you will hear someone say, in the same sentence, that scripture is inspired by the holy spirit, that is, it is God breathed.]

In what I practice, the element of air represents the spirit and higher intellect, and may be depicted as an eye in the clouds. The soul is akin to mans will - it is a projection of thought, or illumination
just as fire projects its light. It just so happens that the fire of the soul consumes the flesh unto death, just as a flame consumes a log - in other words the nature of the soul destroys the flesh.

Stephen

Genesis.2.7: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul".
KJV

The King James version of the bible is full of mistakes.
The true interpretations of Genesis 2.7 is:
from the Tanakh [a Jewish source]
"the Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.
from the New Jerusalem Bible [a Catholic source]
"Yahweh God shaped man from the soil of the ground and blew the breath of life into his nostrils, and man became a living being."

In either case, "the breath of life" is interpreted as the "soul."
In other words, the soul is that which animated life, and therefore all organisms which have life, has a soul.
When one dies, the soul is gone, kaput, finished. There is no memory existing in space. Memory only exists in the brains of living organisms.

Herb




To: quantumrelativity@yahoogroups.com
From: light.rock@...
Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 01:44:19 -0500
Subject: Re: [quantumrelativity] RE: [Panentheism] Re: The Devine Mind/Bill


It is a nagging thought that keeps popping up...
If existing is as in a HoloGram, then energy itself is illusory and a supernova takes no more energy than no supernova - to the processor.
The reason this keeps popping up is that a HoloGram is tremendously energy efficient, capable of being 'run' or 'observed' by multiple observers in the whole variety of directions. Or even the same exact directions simultaneously by multiple observers.
In a word: Elegant.
Science ? No. I mention it due to an experience, a religious or shamanic type experience.

I'm left with the... the... awareness or 'belief' that reincarnation is not restricted to happening in the future. i.e., the awareness is not bound by physical time, except say, while 'running a view' or 'focusing'.
(Interesting, Terry Pratchet, sci fi / fantasy author, seems to have made the same observation at the close of 'The Truth' )
Pre-destiny - perhaps actually, but during focus or 'life'.
In this way perhaps everyone was once Cleopatra or Napoleon.
No dilemma.

Must a thought be energy ? Or merely a crystalline 'memory' in 3D ?
Is awareness the same as a thought ? or is it perhaps merely the observance ?
Maybe something most everyone can relate to on that is a rough emotional experience such that your body is going but you seem to be looking out from behind your eyes while everything is just happening, like 'you' are the observer on the inside not exactly the participant. Fortunately that doesn't happen very often, to me anyway, but for a few times in my youth.
I can imagine maybe it is fairly common however.
Or I needed the guys in white coats....

Allan


Hi Allan!

No, no guys in white coats. You are indeed Napoleon and have bedded Cleopatra and been bedded as her.
The trick is imagination - thoughts are real and most men understand that one can 'make love' to an object of one's sexual desire in one's thoughts.
But men are wired slightly differently than woman in the functionality of the libido and so the biological impulses for men are more visually stimulative than the opus operandi for the feminine - less spontaneous and requiring more 'foreplay'.

But then in all men is the goddess and in all women harbours the god so there; stereotyping is to be eschewed.
Where is Napoleon now and what of Cleopatra - the sexy bitch?
There is imagery, pictures, portraits, sculptures, photos -memory and remembrance, movies made and stories written and told.
Where is the aborted child of Bejing and the starving infant of Zimbabwe, which has just died?
The aborted child had no material experience in its brief journey into embodiment, except as part of another's body and the starving child's interaction with its environment was predominatedly one of suffering, pain and deprivations.
But there WILL BE MEMORY!
As the mother cried in the burial of her child, memories were formed and transmitted throughout the holographically defined universe for all who wished to 'tune into'.

As the 'soul' of little Azassa found itself separated from its enclosure of nagging hunger and the experience of chronic pain; it suddenly felt the warmth of its grandmother which had 'passed' a year before.
Then older and more ancient memories flooded Azassa - images of roaming the woods and playing with others; of being a father of children, noble and proud and subject to strange moods and feelings; images of being a grandmother with pets and of little children to care for and being of a whiter skin; images of a strange world, where unfamiliar animals crawled about and were two suns could be seen during the day and images and images and images...

And little Azassa felt the warmth of being home; it was itself, but not as separated as it had felt for the last 6 years or so. The familar warmth of grandmother became more encompassing as the remembrances became more 'real' and more applicative to reidentify Azassa as the REALITY of its past experiences.
Then new decisions had to be made from this new perception of itself; Azassa also was Delilah and Kistrak and... and... and.. what to do next what to think next whom to meet next whom to ask next????

On the question of energy!
Thought equals energy; but this energy is ANCESTRAL to the energy described in the physical manifestos and the conservation laws. It is here that the laws of entropy become double-arrowed and it is here where the linear 'flow of time' becomes bidirectional from the NOW into past and future as linearly perceived.

So the best one can do from the paradigm of reductionist science is to align the ANCESTRAL ENERGY with the ZPE, which so must be REDEFINED not so much as a VIRTUAL Heisenberg Vacuum of matter-antimatter interaction, but as a REAL potentially INFINITE reservoir of SOURCE-ENERGY albeit definable as the metric limit for the materiality including Big Bangs and anything associated with spacetimemass creations.

Then Allan's notion of awareness as memory and say consciousness becomes reductionistic in being definable in terms of the REAL SOURCE-ENERGY aka the electromagnetic monopolic 'magnetoelectricity' colloquially, historically and universally known as SPIRIT or Energy of God.

John.4.24: "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." (Jesus said).
2John.4.8: "He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love."

Subsequently and logically then; the Ancestor of the physically measured energy is the 'Love of God' or the 'Spirit of God'.

Quantum Relativity then gives PRECISE definitions in term of Quantum Mechanics and string parameters, as to a modern interpretation or labeling for the 'Spirit of God'.
This by necessity, must PREDATE in linear terms anything at all to do with material manifestations as described in the metrics of created space and superimposed temporal times.

Tony B.


Tony, I cannot fully connect all the dots on this on first read, but I do get the general point of your thinking. More importantly, I can see how it has the potential to move the endless debates of monism versus dualism to new ground. These debates suggest to me what it must have been like a little over a hundred years ago when people were debating wave versus particle theories of light. Ultimately, somebody had to step back and come up with new, more encompassing science to resolve the paradox. This is what you are attempting to do.

Bill

Hi Bill!

Yes, I agree with you what is requiered is a MORE ENCOMPASSING SCIENCE, which I term omni-science incorporative of an SPIRITUALITY as old as historical sentient man and the classicism of materialism.
Most of the debates between say evolutionist and creationist or between atheist and believer will be looked upon as archaic and underinformed in a hopefully viable future of humankind and terralis pneumasophia.

'Unfortunately, a misreading of the Cartesian paradigm has resulted in the materialistic tunnel vision now prevalent in some avenues of mainstream science...'

Tony B.


Tony, I am interested in your ideas on mind and matter. I am confused by your use of the word 'misreading' here. Misread suggests to me a misunderstanding or an incomplete understanding, as opposed to (or in addition to), disagreement. Are there aspects of dualism you feel are misunderstood - as opposed to disagreed with - by those who don't accept it? 'Disagreement' began before the the ink was dry on the paper, as I read it (eg. Hobbes supposedly wrote that the statement should be changed to something on the order of, 'I think, therefore material substance is capable of thought').

Bill

You are quite correct here. 'Misread' is somewhat an iappropriate label here. I should have used misinterpreted or misunderstood in the meaning of a selfrestrictive viewpoint say.
And Hobbes supposed statement here exemplifies this point. It presupposes a noncausative connection between the thinker and the material substance in not allowing one or the other or both.

Either the mind (thought) creates the substance or vice versa or both in a manner of mutual induction or feedback say. But if the nonmaterial mind created the substance of the body; then the origin of the nonmaterial remains unexplained. If the material brain creates the mind, then the origin of the matter similarly remains unexplained. This is the dilemma in a nutshell.

Solution - find the common denominator of both the material and the nonmaterial and discover and analyse the genesis of that.
One common denominator is ENERGY, as say given in bosonic massless photons and inertial fermions. But the photons are all 'made' by material sources (fusion in stars say); so modern physics must eventually reduce the energy transformation of say nuclear fusion and the binding energies inherent in E=mc2 to some mass precursor. Then this mass precursor or ancestor of inertia will have properties, which must encompass both material and nonmaterial properties etc. etc. To accomodate a Big Bang cosmogenesis, this ancestor must be high in energy and very small in size and so very high in kinetic potential and so on. Eventually, science will so and has found the metric measurement limit in the Planck parameters and the string models to describe the quantum physics of a selftransforming metric.

So the material universe becomes 'explainable' in the models of the energy transformations of the string bosons (say). This leaves us with associating the nonmaterial ancestor with the genesis of the say planck-parameters, the nature of fundamental constants like c and h and k and pi and e and so on. Then abstraction and mathematics with zeroes and infinities enters the fray and with it the worlds of 'purity of thought'. So now the question becomes: 'What is a thought?' It must have energy or energy equivalence, otherwise it could not have resulted in a material cosmology of Big Bangs and strings.

So the energy of thoughts become ancestral and prerequisite for anything material to exist. And who thinks? Well, people do and most likely fauna and flora does to in graduated forms of electric- and magnetic self- and mutual inductions (say called instinct and rationality via perception of the senses etc.). So if people are in a manner ancestral to their bodies, where did they come from? Well, the bodies came from genetic encodings, which in a sense are reducible to 'programs of pure thought' and so can be made nonmaterial in origin. So again, people must be reducible to 'pure thought' as ancestral energy and have a 'common origin' in the say PRIMAL THOUGHT of some idea or manifesto of some I AM MYSELF and.. and.. and... Ergo, one can introduce spirituality as the universal 'Impulse of Remembrance' of that selfsame I AM connecting all thinkers of thoughts UNIVERSALLY.

So if the atheist says: 'God is just a Thought'!; heshe is absolutely correct. But the skeptic himself is just such a God or Thought herhimself also.

And Descartes': COGITO ERGO SUM! or I Think therefore I am! becomes a most appropriate selfexpression of the Universal Primal I AM ITSELF.

Tonyblue​