cosmology awakening

"What do belief systems have to do with the end of life as we know it? ...Everything."

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"Ideas are very powerful in their influence over our lives." - Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

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Thank you to my readers in over 50 countries and to new visitors every day. Welcome to Cosmology Awakening. Where there is room for transformation there is always hope.

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"My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement."

- character of Patricia to character Joe Banks in the film "Joe vs The Volcano"

Sleep is my expertise, including the kind performed while walking around. I’ve spent most of my life sleeping in one form or another. As a child I exhibited many of the signs of being autistic though I was acutely aware of things around me, good at solving problems, and sometimes I was simply normal. I’ve always had a deep inner life, and I love sleeping and dreaming. Over my many years of working I have only called in sick a few times and I attribute this fact to being able to sleep well. Occasionally something, such as the above quote, will catch my attention waking me up and everything seems to change. It is not necessarily that I have any deep or profound thoughts, but more just this total amazement, such as when my Eighth Grade teacher explained to me that he did not understand some things he was teaching, like The Big Bang Theory. This was just completely awesome to me. In college as well when I asked the professor how the Amoeba could be alive and move and digest and reproduce with no brain or muscles, etc., and he, again, explained that he did not know. This whole not knowing thing really seemed like the real underlying foundation of everything, or something like that. And, it woke me up like nothing else.

The human brain seems to have an enormous capacity far beyond what is necessary for ordinary day-to-day functions. Even newborn babies have an extraordinary ability to absorb, learn, identify and classify information about their parents and surroundings. There may even be the beginnings of instinct, intuition, automatic response, and sensory functions present even before we are born. In a sense, it is this primal proto state of being that great mystics, gurus, and mediation practitioners strive to attain, or re-attain. Even a state such as that attained in Tantric sex might be considered a primal or base condition of the mind and body. In the beginning, humans are so open and sensitive. And, all babies are atheist as well. It is not until the beginning of training, indoctrination, and being taught a particular set of beliefs that the mind is forced to box in its natural process. At some point a bank of packaged thoughts replaces thinking and the open and natural universe of wonder becomes automatic and regulated. Questions such as “what is the universe” are answered in a fashion something like a vending machine dropping a bag labeled “god made it”, for example, and there is no active thinking process and the rest of the brain is virtually asleep while the pre-prescribed thought object is spit out.

Only a tiny fraction of the brain is “conscious” at any given moment and the subconscious areas of the brain run right along handling countless functions and actions. If this were not the case human beings would not be able to drive a car or walk down the street. Subconsciously you might feel that there is something else going on, something beyond what you were taught and other than what your mind automatically comes up with from your training and belief sets. When things become so rattled that one really does not know what’s going on anymore and there seems to be so much unknown to think over, this might be called waking up. It’s going on all over the world.

At my first couple of talks, I was accosted by a small angry mob at the end and I did not have the slightest idea why. After talking with people in greater detail about this I discovered that the objection was that some people liked the idea of giving up their “box” of preset thoughts (the vending machine analogy) but were unwilling to do so unless a new and better box was provided first. The notion of just living in mystery and sort of freethinking felt like a nightmare of an endless dark void, or some such terrible thing. One young man at U.C. Berkeley explained that he had filled the void of his god belief with the big bang genesis belief and he demanded that I prove that I had a better set of beliefs with which he could fill this void. I could not. He was upset.

Later, it seemed that what might have been happening is that, to run the vending machine analogy one more time, this young man gave up the packages of thoughts but was still inside the dark empty box of the vending machine, and quite rightfully scared. It takes a strange and special view to see that in the absence of this box is the whole entire rest of the cosmos of thinking, ideas, creative models, and visions, and so on and so forth, to explore and experience. We are so convinced that we must comply to a particular system else be left out in the cold, and this unfortunately is indeed often true, in career, relationship, standing in the community, etc., etc., so the terror is not wholly imaginary. Plus there is the fact that to actually see what is taking place in the world is horrible. This entire beautiful vibrant alive and thriving planet is being transformed into one gigantic dump. The analogy in The Matrix films, with one character asking to be plugged back in, is that it is easier to live in false reality than in the real world, and that’s one central theme behind it all. The easier path, though it leads to mass extinction and death, is the one most choose. What else is there to do? That is the big question.

Waking up is hard to do. I think I'll take a nap.

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"Western world view, in general, is based upon disposability. Humans are seen as separate and above the natural world with Earth literally at our disposal. So, as we dispoil nature we destroy ourselves, even though we do not believe it possible. Will disbelief save us? Can we change our minds, or is it already too late?"

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Throughout all of human history, civilizations great and small have come, and gone, based upon ideas and ideals that did not quite match up with reality, and over the centuries each has failed to learn from all the previous ones. There seems to be a sort of blindness that comes with progress and a disconnect with natural powers essential to who and what we are...Earthlings.

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The majority is usually wrong.

Changing our minds, before it's too late....

Science tends to discount the realm of the spiritual or mystical such as intuition, self healing, or the placebo effect, placing itself above and in charge of nature. Religious or spiritual circles tend to discount science as beneath the divine realm of spirit and holy matters. Both are wrong. Humanity is part of the natural world and such things as self healing are part of an integral holistic interconnected continuum between atoms, cells, organs, and the environment and there is no separation between what many refer to as mind, body, and spirit...it's all one thing. Belief in divine immortal souls and separate spirits made by a superhuman diety in an extraterrestrial dimension watching over humankind is just primitive nonsense making a mockery of the amazing mysterious reality of the incredibly complex cosmos. Neither of these "sides" can win. There will be a revolution in thinking and a transformation of consciousness that blends the real natural elements of both into a common sense philosophy. Otherwise it seems the whole world will be lost to human inhabitation and the Earth will be altered into something some other creatures may thrive in.

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The analogy to sleep refers to the central human trait of belief in knowing things which are actually completely unknown and mysterious. Within global belief systems in the areas of religion, cosmology, ecology, etc., are core principles that are totally false yet disguised as basic truths and facts. The big bang creation myth stands out as one of the most obvious of these things. This is not to say that people should walk around in total darkness knowing nothing, but it is necessary for the future of humankind that there be an enlightened appreciation of how much is unknown and how much exploration and discovery is yet to be done. The belief that we are at some kind of apex of higher knowledge is one of the most counterproductive elements of human progress and learning. Appreciation of mystery furthers research and discovery contrary to what may be now believed by many. Waking up means seeing the vast void ahead. Cosmology awakening to new possibilities and yet imagined creative ideas is what is happpening around the world. The old dies and the new is born.

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It might be seen an unfair act of trickery or deception for a series of different people to claim to be a single individual, such as a Shakespeare or Casanova, but that is what The Big Bang Theory has done. Each time it has died or undergone drastic revision it has claimed the same name. (see page #21)

I've been saying since 1964 that the big bang theory is wrong, and later that the speed of light is not constant through time and space, feeling quite lonely in this. Now a critical mass is approaching making these facts common household knowledge. What comes next is up to the kids. It is very exciting and a whole new universe is being born.

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This green ink was a small part of the beginnings of the Green Movement way back when. I spent much of the first Earth Day in 1970 silk screen printing the "GIVE EARTH A CHANCE" symbol I had designed and hand cut on anything that I could print it on. Back then I really had no idea how bad things were and would become. It was just beyond my belief that environmental concerns would be so badly handled or that millions of tons of garbage would be dumped in the oceans, or that rain forests would be cut and burned and so on and so forth. Now, it is up to the new generations coming of age to think in new and different ways. The older generations seem unwilling or unable to shift their perspective. The problem is being passed down and I am ever sorry about this. At least we began the first Earth Day and that's something. What I did not realize back then was that it is not only about what we do but how we think and what we believe.

The great ocean garbage patches, each larger than the state of Texas, contain an estimated 3.5 million tons of plastic and assorted floating trash each representing only a small fraction of the refuse that has sunken to the bottom. They have become symbols of the mass denial of what is happening on the planet. This is just too big a thing to comprehend so it is virtually ignored. If the problem is too massive and nothing can be done then it is made invisible. This is the power of the mind and the influence of ideas at work. Some people refer to climate change and global pollution as something they do or do not "believe in" as though this makes sense.

From the automobile and the internal combustion engine, to rubber, plastic, styrofoam, chlorine, the flush toilet and the myriad chemical cleaners for it, electical power and nuclear power plants, and the atomic bombs, etc., etc., etc....it's all about ideas.

The most important idea related to global devastation is that humans are not Earthlings, and that we are above nature. A major support idea for this myth is The Big Bang Theory proposing that the entire universe popped out of nothing, or another mystical (heavenly?) dimension. This category of ideas has been the most damaging of all.

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dreaming the cosmos

"Cosmology, in general, relates to the structure and nature of the universe, and the nature of "the universe" relates to human systems of seeing, our ways of thinking and perception, and what can be seen, literally and figuratively, by humans in general. It is not only about the cosmos, it is about who we are and where we are going as a species. Our ideas and beliefs about ourselves and about the universe have a great deal to do with what is taking place on the planet."

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Modern science is waking up from the fanciful notion that the entire universe sprang from an central spot in no/space and no/time exploding forth the entire cosmos. In this awakening, new and creative ideas are the things exploding forth and the field of cosmology is coming back from the dead. The nonsense of the big bang theory, in all it's many reinventions and repackaging, has done such damage that it may take decades to recover. In the mean time, millions of dollars are still being granted and spent "proving" this tired old fairy tale. How long will it take to wake up?

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The Helix Nebula NGC 7293

journal entry (1981)
...."It is sometimes difficult to say what is real and what is imagined, what is a new discovery versus vivid imagination.
    Ideas, concepts, inventions, predictions, fortellings of the future, extrasensory perceptions, parapsychology and such things, all involve vivid imagination or a mind set free to roam and accept what things arrive within it, rather than putting them off as preposterous or impossible.
    In the past, it was laser beams and space travel that were among the ridiculous thoughts in a few people's heads that were meant only for the entertainment of dreamers and children. Today's ideas are looked at with slightly more acceptance of possible future reality.
    But there is so much unknown. There will always be "unknown" much vaster than any collection of dubious facts put together by any number of civilizations throughout the infinite past and future of the cosmos. Even this small statement cannot be considered a true fact....."

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"Earth is not the center of the universe,
it just seems that way to some."