Spirituality Guide

By Seeker

Then the Universe followed the ‘expanding as gravity slowed it’ process until about five billion years back at which point, for no reason we can discern, it began to accelerate the expansion. Because we have no explanation for why, once again, our math fails to predict what we see around us, we have ‘Dark Energy’ – a strange property of the universe that adjusts things so what we see matches what our theories tell us.

This has become dogma – anyone who tries to query it cannot get peer review because the ‘peers’ refuse to review it. This means they cannot get funding, they commonly lose their jobs, and the nay-sayers (who DO get peer review) get quoted as experts in fields they refuse to research because they ‘know the truth’ of things.

The problem is, and it can be seen in glaring starkness in the Anthropogenic Global Warming (lack of) debate, Science goes missing and what we get is Dogma and Belief masquerading as Truth.

Like Religion, which began as a codifying of Truth into stories that would pass through time, Science has fallen by the wayside as funding, vested interests and ‘authority’ get to determine what we get told. I imagine there were people with knowledge but not position who watched in horror as the Ancients Priests conned the populace into weird practices on the basis that such would lead them to life in Eternity.

It seems the practice of keeping knowledge ‘where it can be understood’ has led us yet again into the realms where wrong belief will allow people to see other beings as ‘alien’ and not simply as an alternative expression of the same life force of which they are formed.

So, again, what is Religion and from where did it come?

By Seeker

Religion fights a battle of Creation versus Evolution, even though, for anyone with two or more brain cells to rub together, they are clearly not contradictory. (In case you’re wondering, Evolution cannot occur vefore there is a goal-seeking mechanism (ie. Life) to make it work – Creation is about where that goal-seeking mechanism began)

In Science, they are equally ‘authority’ based. The story of creation involves a number of magical events for which we not only have no verbal explanation, we don’t have the math for them. The math says the Universe cannot be as large as it is by now – nor can it be as (simultaneously) homogenous (large scale) or discrete (smaller scale) as it is.

So we invent stuff. Like global cooling with fear of an Ice Age because the Earth was in a cooling cycle from 1940 to 1975, or global warming because it got warmer after that, we seek an explanation that we can tell ourselves is Truth.

The reason for the homogeneity is because a magical force called ‘Inflation’ came along a certain time after the ‘Big Bang’ and somehow grabbed SpaceTime and stretched it instantaneously to the point where the math allows for our universe to be as it is. Then it went away.

We don’t know what it was so we label it as Scalar Field’ and think we have an answer.

Even with this magical field, there are mysteries as to how galaxies formed and why they currently behave as they do. So, the reason for the discrete nature of matter clumps, and to make the math match observations, we decided there must be Dark Matter – strange stuff that only reacts with the normal universe enough to adjust things so what we see matches our theories.

By Seeker

What is going on? Science leads us in strange directions where the basics of Science are being changed to reflect new and strange realities. Millions of people have hung their hats on the reliability and repeatability of Science, yet now it seems the basics of Science are moving towards an unreal reality.

Go to a Science website and ask some basic questions about Reality as expressed by Science – try not to enter your own views in it, particularly if you come from a religious background. Ask in earnesty and you will get earnest replies.

Go to a Religious site and ask the same questions – you may need to rephrase them so as not to trigger the ‘this is a heathen’ reactions, and note if you do this in reverse, you need to change the phrasing with the Science community to avoid the ‘this is a believer’ reactions – and watch the answers that flow.

In both cases you get answers based in Belief.

With the religious sites, you are required to accept their answers (and reject all others) because ‘God says it’ or ‘God wrote it’ or ‘the ancients tell us’ if you so much as query ‘Truth’ as they see it.

With Science sites, you are required to accept their answers (and reject all others) because ‘they have peer review’ or ‘an authority says so’ or ‘we’ve known it since Einstein’ if you so much as query ‘Truth’ as they see it.

In both cases, what you are seeing is Belief – as quoted to me by a Pastor when I was ten years old… ‘the substance of things not seen, the evidence of things hoped for’ …in other words, imagination and fantasy.

By Seeker

Science has failed us as a tool. Logic was useful for some time and brought a revolution to the way we live, but it has become a tool that kicks back against the user.

Dogma has replaced the ability to think o7utside the box. If you try to open new ways of thinking, you will meet resistance. Science says you should be asked questions, be required to show how what you say provides answers. Instead, new thought is required to fit into how things are currently being seen.

If Einstein had been required to show how his ideas fit within Newton’s world, he would have remained in the Patent Office. Instead, he moved beyond what Newton saw. In this time, even those who try to use scientific method to show new knowledge are castigated and have their reputations attacked by the orthodox.

Rupert Sheldrake has some new ideas about PSI effects – he conducts large scale experiments to try to show ephemeral effects at a scientifically acceptable level – he gets ridiculed for trying.

What are they scared of?

Egypt alone has questions unable to be answered by orthodox thinking. Even if the Egyptologists are correct in their ‘history’ there are questions to be answered. To combat those questions, they remove the questioners from Egypt, they gather in numbers to ridicule the theories, and they ignore the inconvenient questions.

How did people who had only copper and then bronze, carve out granite? How did they make small radius curves in stone seats, or ‘drill’ into granite to make small bowls and vases? How did they align multi-million tone structures so exactly to the meridians? And if you can answer that, WHY did they do it?

Science should be addressing these issues as puzzles; instead, those who raise the questions find themselves cast beyond the boundaries, labeled and ridiculed as cranks or, the ultimate epithet, Conspiracy Theorists.

By Seeker

We have, in our lives, an entire system of living that gears us, trains us and motivates us into chasing the physical. Those who achieve in the physical world are venerated. The God of the modern human is Science – suggest anything that isn’t able to be tried and tested by science and you will meet ridicule and personally derogatory remarks – and this is from those who claim their goal is knowledge!

Don’t get me wrong; I have been interested in both science and used the scientific method for most of my life. But there are things which cannot be tested by science. Science requires the subject to be falsifiable. This means you must be able to propose a situation where, if ‘X’ isn’t true, ‘this’ will be the result. Then you set out to try to disprove ‘X’ and see if it can be done.

God is not falsifiable. This doesn’t mean God is real, just that Science can’t test for God. Equally, the Big Bang is not falsifiable – the theory says that all we know, including the laws of the Universe, came into existence with the Big Bang, so the actual event predates the Universe AND all the laws. Consciousness is likewise non-falsifiable – there can be no experiments that give results where Consciousness doesn’t exist – who would be proposing the experiments? Also, String Theory is currently non-falsifiable as we have no way to test for either the presence or absence of them.

But seeing people supposedly geared to Science, to discovering the new and the meaningful about our Universe reacting with disdain and ridicule to those who dare to think otherwise that orthodox science is disturbing. The system meant to be an alternate to that of a spiritual life, to accepting and working towards an immortal existence, is failing us.

If it is wrong to question the basics, if doing so brings personal attacks and the worst debating tactics to bring down those who question, how is this different from the religious fanatic who derides everyone who doesn’t believe in the same, exact, specific ‘god’ believed in by the derider?

Science has become the new religion.

By Seeker

So, what is religion? This can be broken down further – what is religion NOW and what did it begin as? In Supernatural, Graham Hancock looks into the hallucinatory drugs, how they work (from the inside rather than a chemical treatise on body effects) and why we find similar visions across the world using drugs like DMT or LSD to those painted on cave walls dating back to, as far as we can tell, the dawning of Consciousness.

There appears to be information and answers available in trance state. The ‘Sleeping Prophet,’ Edgar Cayce, would go into trance to find answers for petitioners to resolve problems ranging from illness to a life direction to follow. Shamans down the ages use trance to delve into a person and help their soul on its path through life or lives.

It goes further – Edison and other inventors deliberately pushed what is called the Hypnagogic state to find new ideas and come up with inventions. Societies around the world use various methods from drugs through dance and drums to chanting to find a path into trance. They are all firmly convinced that in trance they can find new information, new paths and ways to follow for the betterment of others.

Hancock is not saying drugs equal religion or god, he is suggesting they offered one path very early in our development to open up a facet of ourselves that we have been exploring ever since. The Indian experience, both recent and from the Vedic times, tells us that people can be happy, or at least content, with very little in the way of material things if they are actively pursuing a spiritual path in life.

Reading across the internet it is fairly easy to find references to the fall of Atlantis 12,000 years back – the tale is one of spiritual beings becoming enamoured of the flesh, finding overmuch attraction in the things of this world and seeking power for its own sake. The bible and other religious texts also talk of the Fall of Man. It can, on one level, be talking about the destruction of the ‘golden age’ of Man by consecutive cataclysms that wiped out civilization not just once, but possible 3 times within eight or nine thousand years, but it could also be talking about a more spiritual fall.

If Man was once focused on the life beyond this, on the pursuit of the development of an immortal Consciousness, and somehow we lost that focus and started to think the merely physical was all that mattered, maybe having such a view triggered by the disasters around us followed by the herculean efforts needed to regain survivability for the race, this could be a Fall from the heights.

By Seeker

Were the people of olden times any happier than we are today? (if, that is, you can describe the modern condition as happy) We have no direct evidence of those times, and from the Vedic tales from India, the Pyramid texts from Djoser’s tomb in Egypt, and the later fragments and myths from Sumer, Egypt and other locations, we find that those civilizations fell from three main causes.

1. Disaster. Flood and Deluge mostly. Empires at their height, brought down by ‘the Gods’ for hubris and arrogance.
2. External nations. People dying out or moving away (taken into captivity) because of strife with warlike neighbours
3. God-strife. The ‘Gods’ misbehaving like the worst of spoiled brats, causing internal strife and bringing down their own empires.

Over and again in the historical evidence we find civilizations that came from nowhere, full-blown in skills, lived pretty much as is with little later innovation except for growing in size, then suddenly vanishing from the record with no trace.

Whatever the reasons for the demise, (and it seems often associated with climate change as the Earth warmed and changed after the end of the Ice Age) what we don’t see in the record, with extremely rare exceptions, is the population revolting against their governments.

It is a truism that people get the Government they deserve, but when things get bad enough, recent history has told us the people get up in arms and revolt. What they get may not be much improvement, but they will storm the cannons barehanded if needed to replace what they see as unfair.

The White and Red Russian parties started a bitch-fight to see who would rule Russia and their depredations were so intolerable, the people brought in Communism – yet at the start of the violence, there were maybe 80,000 communists in Russia. It cost 20 million lives but the people got, in spite of what the West saw it as, a better regime than what the Tsar gave them.

So it seems, the people not only didn’t suffer enough to revolt, but they gave wholeheartedly to projects that must have required massive commitment and resources from everyone in the nation or empire. How many of us would give up our TV’s to fund a giant statue, accept a reduced ‘standard of living’ to help George Bush find immortality or even stop buying imports so our country could build a monument to stand down the ages so people knew we had been here?

by Seeker

We have evidence of a civilization that could build megalithic monuments and buildings that defy even modern abilities to duplicate. But in orthodox history, there is no trace of such people.

We have anomalous ruins across the world, built using skills we thought were modern inventions, constructed for unknown purposes. (eg. The major pyramids in Egypt provide literally no evidence they were ever used as tombs; no bodies, no funerary arrangements, and with the exception of some red paint daubs above the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid, currently disputed as forgeries, not one scrap of writing has been found in them)

There are scores, or hundreds, of myths and creation stories that tell of a world disaster, commonly a flood and deluge, that destroyed the previous world and reduced man to savagery. A savagery that ended when strangers came from the sea, with (usually) knowledge, powers and seeds, to rebuild a civilized world using the local tribe as a nucleus.

Now that we can go beneath the waves, we are finding more and more ruins, megaliths and structures, once again without any ‘normal’ historic explanation, that have to have been there for ten thousand years or more.

And all the stories, the myths and mystics, as well as what we can decipher of the lives led by those back at the purported dawn of civilization, point to the importance of a spiritual existence, of following a life that leads, not to increased possessions and money, but towards growth into immortality.

From the earliest times, painted in primal colours on cold rock walls, a spiritual theme has shown up. Among the very first messages to come from the dawn of sapience are those dealing with a world beyond, a world that extends and makes sense of the one we see around us.

The buildings, the temples, the reverence for the patterns of nature and the awe at the existence of Consciousness have all been pointed to the Immortality of Beingness and highlighted the shallowness of the purely material.

We look around us at a world that glorifies the materialistic, the ‘owning’ of things and the consuming of resources. To view our world, one would think we should be the happiest of peoples – after all, we are the pinnacle of all time, the apex of humanity in all our pride and glory.

Yet, in this age, in these circumstances, it is almost impossible to find people who don’t have an escape from life. Be it alcohols, drugs, rage, TV or handing it all to God in abnegation of self-responsibility, we all find ways to turn away from living our lives to the full. As a race, as a civilization, as individuals, we are quite apparently not happy in our lives.

by Seeker

Some of the new knowledge we have come to from science tells us that the Earth is in flux. The surface of the planet is still recovering from the Ice Age, both in climate and in physical effects. The mass of ice, particularly in the Northern hemisphere, was enormous; when that much water is concentrated in one area, the excess weight can change landscapes, alter the albedo of the planet so that more sunlight is reflected away from the surface, and even press the continental plates down into the magma underneath.

The Antarctic is made up of two islands, something not many people realize, with a channel between them. One island is pressed down below what would be sea level by the ice on it. Were the ice on that island to slip and slide into the ocean, not only would the mass of water alter the sea level rather rapidly, there would be a surge back from the island as the magma below ‘popped’ the dimple back out to the normal surface.

As well as the weight stress on the continental plates, there is the effect of huge masses of ice entering the sea in a very short space of time. For example, recent findings show an increase in liquid water under the ice on the Antarctic islands – it isn’t hard to see this water as a lubricant, allowing the sudden slip of a large mass into the ocean.

Not only would this raise the sea level, a sudden mass slippage would cause a tsunami, the size of which would depend on how much ice moved. There would also be climate change as the fresh water altered currents in the ocean and even changed precipitation rates and distribution.

There’s another effect as well; huge amounts of water can be trapped behind ice masses and when the ice lets go, the water releases all at once. Canada was once almost covered by a large lake held back by an ice dam. When it released, possibly due to an atmospheric air burst of a comet, (of which they are finding traces in excavations across North America) it scoured across the US, entering the Gulf of Mexico in such an amount it altered the salinity enough that the life forms changed from marine to freshwater for a time.

Ice dames are dangerous even today – in India there are often unexpected floods as valleys in the Himalayas, flooded for centuries, suddenly empty as the ice holding them back is swept away.

So, it is certainly feasible that the end of the Ice Age brought about massive cataclysms that altered the world. Even today, most of our civilization lives in the lowlands, close to the sea. Were the sea to rise within a day or so, by (say) twenty metres, how much of our world would change forever?

by Seeker

There is other knowledge that is out of place in Time. We are taught about Pythagoras, and how he came up with Pi, the relationship between the circumference and diameter of a circle, yet we have evidence, set in stone, (literally) that shows others knew of Pi.

We have the incredible accuracy of placement of the Great Pyramid and the other monuments on the Giza Plateau – aligned more accurately to the meridians than we could achieve today. Yes, we have accurate ways to measure such things, but to build such a large structure in multi-tonne blocks of stone and have it align so accurately is a task to quail the finest engineers.

Building at all from blocks weighing into the hundreds of tones is not something we do, nor would it be easily achieved, yet the Osieron and other temples in Egypt are built from such massive blocks. And worse yet for the poor engineers of today – imagine if we told them to go build with blocks weighing more than a hundred tones, coming from up to fifty miles away, using no wheels nor machinery, and they had to do it at a height where just breathing is an effort for most people. Tiahuanaco seems to have had super-human engineers.

Back to maps – Admiral Piri Reis set off exploring with a map which is in a Spanish museum now. It has his note on it proclaiming he copied it from older sources, and it shows the East coast of South America, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic coast of Africa and what has to be the coast of Antarctica.

The problems are – it’s quite accurate in latitude and longitude, in a time two hundred years before an accurate chronometer was devised, (essential to get accurate longitude) it shows coasts not yet visited and it shows Antarctica – yet to be discovered. It’s not alone by any stretch – there are a number of such maps which show, accurately, things they couldn’t, by orthodox history, have known.

There’s even maps which show the coast of Antarctica… without the ice! That’s something we only learned in the 1950’s and 1960’s when we did seismic testing to determine where lay the land under the ice.

So how can all this information come together? Is there a way to make sense of multiple mysteries and contradictions?

by Seeker

A brief overview of things so far…

Mankind seems to have a capacity for accepting that there is more to this universe than just the mundane. That the physical world has a counterpart, or perhaps alternate, reality alongside or at the base of what we can see, feel, hear, smell and taste.

We have literally no evidence that there is a ‘solid’ reality out there as everything we know, we know via little electric impulses that activate our brains and inform our minds.

Science teaches us there isn’t such a thing as a ‘solid’ world – at the smallest scales we are hard put to find anything at all, let alone anything solid.

Awareness or Consciousness seems to be integral to Reality.

The spiritual awareness of Man goes back to the very first records we have, the cave paintings and has been present all through our history, yet the start of it is lost in the mists of time.

There are puzzles about our history which are difficult to reconcile with the idea that Man’s progression has been an ongoing steady improvement from caveman to nightclub man. These include the suddenness with which ‘civilisation’ appeared on the scene after Man settled down from the hunter-gatherer life, the common ‘disaster’ themes from around the world, the megalithic buildings and monuments left scattered on both land and sea and the anachronistic knowledge we find from the past.

I can hear you asking… what anachronistic knowledge? It turns out there’s quite a lot, but let’s start with one that everybody knows. According to what we were taught in school, Christopher Columbus proved the world to be a ball by sailing to America. Of course, he supposedly wasn’t aiming for America, nor did he actually find it. He thought he was going to the Orient to find a new spice route, and what he found were the islands off the mainland.

But Chris didn’t just sail off into the briny West; he was using maps. And interestingly, when you delve into the maps that were in use by the sailors of that time, a number of them were maps of a globe mapped flat… our Atlases use a Mercator projection to do this, but there are other ways.

by Seeker

As one looks into the past, over and over we find ‘religious’ views. The Ancients were like you and I, pragmatic people, quite capable of reasoning, (even if a lot of us don’t now indulge in the practice) and oriented towards survival. Why would they hold things spiritual so close to their lives? Was it really just a need for a security blanket or a wish to believe in fairy tales?

In the bible we have some rather mysterious stories – the Old Testament contains things that don’t sit easily within the Christian churches. We have people living for hundreds of years – Noah was supposed to be six hundred years old when he started to build the ark. There are giants, and strange beings who come down to Earth and find human women attractive and breed with them. And there’s the flood.

There’s a problem about the Flood – several actually. One is that there’s no evidence that, around the time Noah was supposed to be extant, there was anything like a flood that could be considered big enough to wipe out the known world – and let’s leave out the idea it was the whole physical world.

There is however, evidence of at least one flood and deluge event, and fairly good evidence of more, but the timing is wrong. These floods predate even the Sumerians – we’re talking about events that occurred because of the ending of the last Ice Age.

Another problem is that, across the world, many cultures talk about a flood and deluge event. For all of them it seems to have been a pivotal time. They tell in myth and history of how their civilization got its start after the Flood. Over and again there is a tale of strangers coming from the sea, teaching them the rudiments (and sometimes more) of how to live in a civilized way, and then leaving – usually back to the sea.

If the Noah story is so unique to the bible, (after all, God wiped out all mankind because of the evil in Men) then why do we find essentially the same story across the world? And in tribes and nations which have had literally no connection with the Middle East as far as we can show? And in tribes and nations which clearly predate that of the Hebrews?

by Seeker

It may seem I am straying far from the path of Spirituality, but be patient with me, it does come together. There is more evidence of things lost in the mists of time. You may have heard of the ‘road’ they found off Bimini near Miami in the US. There’s more of this type of discovery.

Off the west coast of India they’ve found a number of submerged structures that are very hard to dismiss as anything natural. At least one site shows as a town several kilometres long. Down around Sri Lankha they’ve found more underwater structures that appear to confirm Tamil myths of cities that once existed on the land bridge to India. It would also confirm Marco Polo’s assertion about the modern island being much larger in the past.

Off Cuba, an engineer named Paulina Zelitski found structures at 800 metres depth that show pyramids, walls and buildings that, by orthodox history, cannot exist.

Near Taiwan, at the Japanese islands of Yonaguni, a number of underwater structures have been found and are being investigated. And there are others…

The problem with all of these is that we know, with as much certainty as science can give us, that the waters covering these structures have been there for thousands of years. This means the structures were covered by the sea before conventional history says anyone was around to build them.

Tiahuanaco has wharves carved in stone to take advantage of the opportunities trade and development offered by Lake Titicaca. The problem here is, the lake moved away something around 10,000 years ago.

There aren’t meant to have been any civilized humans at that time.

by Seeker

SO just what is it that started us on the spiritual path as a race? Graham Hancock started as an investigative journalist and has a string of books behind him that have a common thread – that we have, as a race, a history that has been forgotten.

He has travelled the world looking for clues to what we have lost, and he seems to have found them all over. Geologist Dr. Robert Schock has cast a skeptical eye over the Sphinx and provides convincing expert testimony that the erosion on both it and the cutting in which it stands (or crouches) has been caused by long term heavy rainfall. This erosion also interestingly calls into question the face and head of the sphinx – it shows much less weathering than the rest of the monument.

This immediately moves the sculpting of the sphinx back prior to the last time Egypt had such weather – prior to about 6,000BC – and given the heavy weathering along with the evidence it has been restored a couple of times, probably a long time before 6,000BC. You can see the erosion and some of the old restoration work in the photo above.

Hancock, Ralph Ellis and Robert Bauval, among others like Charles Hapgood and Christopher Dunn have caused controversy and name-calling among the orthodox historians and Egyptologists by pointing out, with what must be agrannoying insistence, the inconsistencies in the ‘normal’ historical view of the history of Man.

There are mysteries about the Giza plateau pyramids, about Stonehenge and the knowledge they encode, with Tiahuanaco on the shores of Lake Titicaca and the pyramids at Teotihuacan in Mexico; some of these are known about by most people, even if not in detail. But there are many other places and mysteries that seem to point as well to a forgotten history, as well as reasons why we may have forgotten. And consistently we find these mysteries and histories tied up with a interwoven thread of spirituality and the quest for immortality.

by Seeker

Now all of the above doesn’t really have much to do with the title of these posts. Religious thought gestated in the darkness of the hidden past of mankind; we know little about the time before Man started to record his life and thoughts, but when s/he did get around to it, spirituality was there.

How do we know? Well the first records we have of Man aren’t books or words at all. Cave paintings have been found across the planet, showing all manner of diagrams, animals and strange part human/part animal images that seem to have little basis in reality.

The orthodox view of the paintings is they started very simple a long time back and got more sophisticated as the artists became more ‘modern’ and sophisticated. This fits nicely with the extant view around the world that we live in the highest (read smartest) civilization that ever was, that with all our problems, we have come far beyond anything our ancestors could achieve.

Unfortunately for that view, science says it’s wrong. Some of the most artistically sophisticated images are from right at the dawn of time as far as Humanity is concerned – more than 40,000 years ago, men and women, just like you and I, sat in the dampness and coolth of the caves and painted down their thoughts or memories.

Graham Hancock has a book worth reading about this subject – Supernatural is a book about his journey to find out just what our spiritual sense, our wonderment of things beyond our mundane lives, is about and from whence it came. He has some very interesting things for anyone interested in spirituality to think about.