For the last couple of years I've been developing a theory in parallel with the Unified Reality Theory (URT). Where the URT was based on material and semi material physical concepts, Lucid Awareness is meant to represent the non-physical counterpart. It can be used interchangeably with my former term, Metaphorics. In many ways this blossoming concept is more real that the URT because it is meant to represent Spirit Reality. And we are told that the spirit is more real than our material world seems to be.
In this essay I will strive to blend the metaphysical ideas of many different non-Urantian theories, so that they might be more consistently adapted to the ideas represented in the Urantia Papers.
We will go through the following sources, taking the best from each, in order to create a tapestry that can begin to explain the unique quality of spirit in reality...
- ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD - NOVELTY AND SUBJECTIVITY
- TERENCE MCKENNA - NOVELTY THEORY AND THE TIME WAVE
- MAYA CONCEPTS - NUMBERS AND CYCLES
- I-CHING CONCEPTS - PATTERNS AND COMPLEXITIES
From Richard Lubbock.
Whitehead on Physics...
Whitehead says that the first thing you've got to understand is that science is deluded: the world isn't made of atoms, electrons, gravity, or whatever. There is only one kind of entity; and even that perishes as soon as it comes into being. That entity is an aesthetic moment of choice, of feeling.
There are no fundamental "things," or "objects" in the world of Whitehead. Witehead's ontology, or parts-list of the universe, contains only processes.
Life, the Universe and Everything consists of myriads of little emotions. Only feelings exist; no particles exist; and all the feelings have the same form: that of the human mind. Atoms, electrons, bodies and brick walls arise later. He once remarked to a friend that Immanuel Kant had written his books in the wrong order: he should have started with his aesthetic Critique of Judgment. Whitehead follows his own advice. He founds his world on aesthetics, and treats physics as superstructure.
Whitehead on Novelty...
We seem to be running into an infinite regress of patterns. In order to stop the rot, Whitehead proposes a primordial First Stuff. He sets up a Category of the Ultimate; and he names just three members of the ultimate: The Creativity, the Many and the One. 'Creativity' is his name for the ultimate process. It's the wave of goings-on that turns everything into something else. The Creativity has no properties of its own. His creative ultimate is the bare desire to enjoy something new. Creativity is passion, but as yet without a pattern. Whitehead puts it this way:
"'Creativity' is the principle of novelty. It is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity. The many become one and are increased by one. This Category of the Ultimate replaces Aristotle's category of 'primary substance'".
Whitehead and Richard Feynman...
As the late Richard Feynman put it, physical science comes down to a question, not of logic, but of taste. Whitehead's cosmology rests on an aesthetic set-up beyond reason, which makes sense of everything else.
Whitehead on objectivity and subjectivity...
Whitehead insists that unless we take account of the absolute, final enjoyments, or values, volunteered by God, we cannot make sense of our objective experience. Every pulse of the mind gobbles up all the fixed, objective facts that have been, along with all the eternal values that might-be, and digests them.
Whitehead pictures the mind as a society of free agents. Each agent, itself a society of lesser agents, specializes in a certain type of decision. In a timeless moment the whole society of mind (as Marvin Minsky calls it) weighs its options, and satisfies its desires by choosing just one target. In so choosing, the subject must sacrifice an infinite number of might-have-beens.
In their own way sub-atomic particles copy the action of the human subject. Quantum theorists describe how the electron consults its table of transition possibilities, chooses one actual value, and makes it real. The electron's decision, like the human being's, is free and unpredictable, although limited by objective fact. Just as non-local effects modify the electron, so do non-sensuous and conceptual prehensions enter our own decisions.
By Truth, he means the conformation of appearance to reality. Objective reality cannot be true: it is simply itself; but appearance can conform to reality to a greater or lesser degree, and in different ways. By Beauty he means the quality that arises when the members of a society of occasions act so as to conform and contrast harmoniously with one another's purposes. To create and enjoy beauty is the final cause and purpose of every society. Art is the unending human effort to produce the appearance of truthful beauty; and a work of art is a finite fragment of that effort. Our chief cause is to aim at and enjoy truthful beauty. He adds Adventure as a prime quality because he believes civilization will fade into tameness and vapidity unless we seek freedom, discord and risk in the search for novel joyments.
Wiki's account of Terence McKenna's Novelty Theory...
The timewave itself is a combination of numerology and mathematics. It is formed out of McKenna's interpretation and analysis of numerical patterns in the King Wen sequence of the I Ching (the ancient Chinese Book of Changes). This concept first took root in his entheogenic experiences shared by him and his brother Dennis McKenna as documented in the book True Hallucinations. The theory is clearly[citation needed] based in numerology and takes shape out of McKenna's belief that the sequence is artificially arranged as such purposefully. Mathematically, the sequence is graphed according to a set of mathematical ratios, and displays a fractal nature as well as resonances[citation needed], although it was not captured in a true formula until criticism from mathematician Matthew Watkins (see below). McKenna interpreted the fractal nature and resonances of the wave, as well as his theory of the I Ching's artificial arrangement, to show that the events of any given time are recursively related to the events of other times.
As the theory was never published in a peer-reviewed journal and McKenna's sources and reasoning were primarily what would be considered numerological rather than mathematical by professional mathematicians and scientists, the theory has failed to gain any (scientific) credibility or much recognition. However, McKenna was highly critical of such fields for adhering to what he saw as a flawed Occidental paradigm, and did not seek to create a theory acceptable to the mathematical community. The theory was, however, revised by nuclear physicist John Sheliak after a flaw was discovered by Matthew Watkins. The new revision is often referred to as Timewave One, but is also included in the set of alternate waves in the Timewave Zero software. It is claimed that this new version is more closely matched to history.[citation needed]
Timewave Zero received a great deal of its public attention through the publications of R. U. Sirius, particularly the cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000.
Novelty theory has a few basic tenets:
- That the universe is a living system with a teleological attractor at the end of time that drives the increase and conservation of complexity in material forms.
- That novelty and complexity increase over time, despite repeated set-backs.
- That the human brain represents the pinnacle of complex organization in the known universe to date.
- That fluctuations in novelty over time are self-similar at different scales. Thus the rise and fall of the Roman Empire might be resonant with the life of a family within a single generation, or with an individual's day at work.
- That as the complexity and sophistication of human thought and culture increase, universal novelty approaches a Koch curve of infinite exponential growth.
- That in the time immediately prior to, and during this omega point of infinite novelty, anything and everything conceivable to the human imagination will occur simultaneously.
- That the date of this historical endpoint is December 21, 2012, the end of the long count of the Mayan calendar. (Although many interpretations of the "end" of the Mayan calendar exist, partly due to abbreviations made by the Maya when referring to the date, McKenna used the solstice date in 2012, a common interpretation of the calendar among New Age writers, although this date corresponds to such an abbreviation rather than the full date. See Mayan calendar for more information on this controversy.)
Originally McKenna had chosen the end of the calendar by looking for a very novel event in recent history, and using this as the beginning of the final 67.29 year cycle; the event he chose was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which gave an end-date in mid-November of 2012, but when he discovered the proximity of this date to the end of the current 13-baktun cycle of the Maya calender, he adjusted the end date to match this point in the calendar.
This End of History was to be the final manifestation of The Eschaton, which McKenna characterized as a sort of strange attractor towards which the evolution of the universe developed.
His predictions for this transcendent event were wide ranging and varied, depending on his audience, and different times he conjectured the following: the mass of humanity would, by means of some technology, become mentally conjoined in a great collective; the moment in which time travel became a reality; the birth of self-conscious artificial intelligence; a global UFO visitation; and occasionally he even expressed doubt whether anything at all would happen. However, McKenna claimed that there was no contradiction between these scenarios, as they might all happen simultaneously.
The 20 Day Maya Calendar
Maya History
Maya Collapse - Spanish Conquest of the Yucatán
The Maya calendar is a system of distinct calendars and almanacs used by the Maya civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and by some modern Maya communities in highland Guatemala.
These calendars could be synchronised and interlocked in complex ways, their combinations giving rise to further, more extensive cycles. The essentials of the Maya calendric system are based upon a system which had been in common use throughout the region, dating back to at least the 6th century BCE. It shares many aspects with calendars employed by other earlier Mesoamerican civilizations, such as the Zapotec and Olmec, and contemporary or later ones such as the Mixtec and Aztec calendars. Although the Mesoamerican calendar did not originate with the Maya, their subsequent extensions and refinements of it were the most sophisticated. Along with those of the Aztecs, the Maya calendars are the best-documented and most completely understood.
By the Maya mythological tradition, as documented in Colonial Yucatec accounts and reconstructed from Late Classic and Postclassic inscriptions, the deity Itzamna is frequently credited with bringing the knowledge of the calendar system to the ancestral Maya, along with writing in general and other foundational aspects of Maya culture.
The most important of these calendars is one with a period of 260 days. This 260-day calendar was prevalent across all Mesoamerican societies, and is of great antiquity (almost certainly the oldest of the calendars). It is still used in some regions of Oaxaca, and amongst the Maya communities of the Guatemalan highlands. The Maya version is commonly known to scholars as the Tzolkin, or Tzolk'in in the revised orthography of the Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala[2]. The Tzolk'in is combined with another 365-day calendar (known as the Haab, or Haab'), to form a synchronized cycle lasting for 52 Haabs, called the Calendar Round. Smaller cycles of 13 days (the trecena) and 20 days (the veintena) were important components of the Tzolk'in and Haab' cycles, respectively.
A different form of calendar was used to track longer periods of time, and for the inscription of calendar dates (i.e., identifying when one event occurred in relation to others). This form, known as the Long Count, is based upon the number of elapsed days since a mythological starting-point.[3] According to the correlation between the Long Count and Western calendars accepted by the great majority of Maya researchers (known as the GMT correlation), this starting-point is equivalent to 11 August 3114 BCE in the proleptic Gregorian calendar or 6 September in the Julian calendar.
The Goodman-Martinez-Thompson correlation was chosen by Thompson in 1935 based on earlier correlations by Joseph Goodman in 1905 (11 August), Juan Martínez Hernández in 1926 (12 August), and John Eric Sydney Thompson in 1927 (13 August).[4][5] By its linear nature, the Long Count was capable of being extended to refer to any date far into the future (or past). This calendar involved the use of a positional notation system, in which each position signified an increasing multiple of the number of days. The Maya numeral system was essentially vigesimal (i.e., base-20), and each unit of a given position represented 20 times the unit of the position which preceded it. An important exception was made for the second place value, which instead represented 18 × 20, or 360 days, more closely approximating the solar year than would 20 × 20 = 400 days. It should be noted however that the cycles of the Long Count are independent of the solar year.
Many Maya Long Count inscriptions are supplemented by what is known as the Lunar Series, another calendar form which provides information on the lunar phase and position of the Moon in a half-yearly cycle of lunations.
A 584-day Venus cycle was also maintained, which tracked the appearance and conjunctions of Venus as the morning and evening stars. Many events in this cycle were seen as being inauspicious and baleful, and occasionally warfare was timed to coincide with stages in this cycle.
Other, less-prevalent or poorly-understood cycles, combinations and calendar progressions were also tracked. An 819-day count is attested in a few inscriptions; repeating sets of 9- and 13-day intervals associated with different groups of deities, animals and other significant concepts are also known.
With the development of the place-notational Long Count calendar (believed to have been inherited from other Mesoamerican cultures), the Maya had an elegant system with which events could be recorded in a linear relationship to one another, and also with respect to the calendar ("linear time") itself. In theory, this system could readily be extended to delineate any length of time desired, by simply adding to the number of higher-order place markers used (and thereby generating an ever-increasing sequence of day-multiples, each day in the sequence uniquely identified by its Long Count number). In practice, most Maya Long Count inscriptions confine themselves to noting only the first 5 coefficients in this system (a b'ak'tun-count), since this was more than adequate to express any historical or current date (with an equivalent span of approximately 5125 solar years). Even so, example inscriptions exist which noted or implied lengthier sequences, indicating that the Maya well understood a linear (past-present-future) conception of time.
However, and in common with other Mesoamerican societies, the repetition of the various calendric cycles, the natural cycles of observable phenomena, and the recurrence and renewal of death-rebirth imagery in their mythological traditions were important and pervasive influences upon Maya societies. This conceptual view, in which the "cyclical nature" of time is highlighted, was a pre-eminent one, and many rituals were concerned with the completion and re-occurrences of various cycles. As the particular calendaric configurations were once again repeated, so too were the "supernatural" influences with which they were associated.
Thus it was held that particular calendar configurations had a specific "character" to them, which would influence events on days exhibiting that configuration. Divinations could then be made from the auguries associated with a certain configuration, since events taking place on some future date would be subject to the same influences as its corresponding previous cycle dates. Events and ceremonies would be timed to coincide with auspicious dates, and avoid inauspicious ones.
The completion of significant calendar cycles ("period endings"), such as a k'atun-cycle, were often marked by the erection and dedication of specific monuments such as twin-pyramid complexes such those in Tikal and Yaxha, but (mostly in stela inscriptions) commemorating the completion, accompanied by dedicatory ceremonies.
A cyclical interpretation is also noted in Maya creation accounts, in which the present world and the humans in it were preceded by other worlds (one to five others, depending on the tradition) which were fashioned in various forms by the gods, but subsequently destroyed. The present world also had a tenuous existence, requiring the supplication and offerings of periodic sacrifice to maintain the balance of continuing existence. Similar themes are found in the creation accounts of other Mesoamerican societies.
Some Mayanists employ the name Tzolk'in (in modern Mayan orthography; also and formerly commonly written tzolkin) for the Maya Sacred Round or 260-day calendar. Tzolk'in is a coined in Yukatek Maya, to mean "count of days" (Coe 1992). The actual names of this calendar as used by Precolumbian Maya peoples are still debated by scholars. The Aztec calendar equivalent was called Tonalpohualli, in the Nahuatl language.
How 13 Works Into 20
64 Hexagrams of the I-Ching
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