Speaking as an ardent Wittgenstein and Heidegger fan and a serious student of metaphysical teachings for more than a decade, I am inclined to regard this very question as the most fundamental philosophical query there is.
However daunting at first, by approaching it with the principle of Occam's razor as well as the 1st law of thermodynamics, some convincing deductions - which in my opinion are of unfathomable magnitude - are closer at hand than one might think.
*
Let's assume both scenarios.
(I) Existence is of a linear nature, it has a beginning and shall come to an end.
(II) All is part of an infinite source, without beginning nor end.
Of the two possibilities, (I) poses us with a direct problem, namely the follow up question: how does nothing become something?
Theory (II) on the other hand, doesn't contain any apparent fallacies.
**
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate
"Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily" is the original rule of simplicity, or if you will, Occam's razor. The principle suggests that out of two competing theories, the simplest one should be favored.
Thus, if one were to use the principle when considering scenario (I) and (II), the latter one is preferable.
***
The 1st law of thermodynamics, which constitute the very foundation on which modern physics rests, says that energy cannot be created or destroyed.
This law falsifies scenario (I) and confirms the infinite nature of existence by proclaiming that energy has always existed.
Assuming the correctness of the law, the conclusion must be made that energy is eternal in nature. Energy therefore can not be finite.
****
If one was to take mentioned results as evidence for the infinite nature of existence, one could further deduce that there can only be one infinity as many-ness is a finite concept. Nothing can truly be separated from infinity.
We ourselves are evidence that consciousness is part of this one infinity.
Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.
-Voltaire
* * *
I believe that meditation is the most powerful and accessible tool for us to grow as individuals and for humanity to prosper. Unfortunately people aren't doing it, perhaps because they have erroneous and confusing ideas about this practice, which in reality demands nothing more than a daily moment of time. As a person who's been meditating on a daily basis for the last 7 years, I can vouch for the gifts this practice has to offer. Gifts like insight, joy and love for all parts of the life experience. However, words are not enough to convey the essence, in order to realize/feel its potential one has to try it out.
Sometimes people ask me how I meditate; positions, breathing techniques and miscellaneous eastern references are often mentioned. As a matter of fact meditation is just about as simple as it gets.
This is how I do it: I sit down on a cushion on the floor, in a comfortable lotus position and keep my spine straight. Then I close my eyes, breathe regularly and relax. Focusing on the breath keeps me in the moment.
That's it.
I sit like this for circa 10-15 minutes every morning before breakfast, and often one more time when I come home from work or before bed. The first years I listened to music (solfeggio frequencies), nowadays I prefer silence.
The key to success is persistence, i.e. every day you can.
What I just said has been said by others before me. The most accurate and striking description of the practice comes from someone calling himself Hatton. This material surfaced circa 1960. It is the foundation upon my meditation firmly rests on.
[…] Proper meditation is of uppermost importance, and I should like to dwell for a moment on this subject, for proper meditation is most important in your growth. First of all, place yourself in a position that is proper for meditation. The best meditation can be had in a sitting position. Sit the body comfortably but erect, with both feet placed firmly before you. Keep the body and head erect and straight. Place the hands open and upward in the lap. Allow those racing thoughts to race. Do not try to force them to stop, but bring yourself into a relaxed feeling. Let your mind relax; do not try to control it, and you shall find these racing thoughts in time will slow, will become slower and slower until they eventually stop. And with practice, my friends, this time shall become shorter and shorter, and in due time you shall reach that state of stillness quickly, and in this state of stillness you become one with Creation and life begins to speak to you. In this stillness you can bring yourself in attunement with whatsoever you wish. In this still, very still quietness, all things can flow to you, for your mind is open and receptive to higher knowledge.
[…] Now to some of you it may seem that it is impossible for you to relax in this position, but I say to you, my friends, that is the only true relaxation. For when the body is in positions for which it was not intended, true relaxation does not come, you cannot be receptive. Much of the Universal Energies comes to you through the spine when you are in the physical and unless the spine is erect, they do not flow. You would be amazed when this art is mastered, at what you can do; how quickly you can attune yourself in this state to anything that you desire. […]
-Hatton, 15/6 -1959
In a later communication the necessity of daily practice gets addressed.
[...] In the first place, it is necessary to discipline one’s self, to some extent, and set aside a certain time each day for this practice and you will never become proficient at the art of meditation unless you practice consistently. It is not enough to practice this art once a week or once a month, or even every few days, but this should become a daily ritual. For unless you do this, your progress shall be slow in mastering the art. […]
-Hatton, 23/6 -1961
The first couple of months of meditation were challenging for me, but this was also at a time when I had much emotional baggage to sort through. It might be helpful to begin with shorter time periods, just remember that patience is a small price for wonder.
There was a time in my high school years when I considered the idea of a dead and empty universe, sprung from a shady miracle called Big Bang, to be the most rational of stances.
But as I made clear in my last post I find the notion of a happenstance cosmos to be neither probable or logic anymore - a position I've reached through profound personal experience and years of research into the mystical aspects of this world.
However, a relationship with the inexplicable isn't necessary in order to question the world view which the scientific establishment is trying to sell us - Big Bang cosmologists and particle physicists in particular - common sense is sufficient.
In this article, part 1, I will take you on a journey that begins before the existence of the Universe, makes a stop at Big Bang and continues on to cosmic microwave background radiation and quasars.
In part 2 I will examine CERN's Large Hadron Collider and the sad state of affairs that particle physics has reached.
Together they make up the current, ruling theorem of the origin and function of the Universe - and as we shall see, a most doubtful attitude should be maintained towards these ideas.
Before the Beginning
When dealing with the most fundamental question of them all, the origin of the Universe, I believe you only have two options to consider: either something eternal existed before it, or nothing at all.
Rationally the former makes more sense, but for some reason the latter has become the prevalent assumption in the world of physics.
It is however, very difficult to explain how a universe can come into existence from nothing. The famous atheist and astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss tried to do it in his book A Universe from Nothing and failed miserably.
Two prominent theoretical physicists who also have tried are Stephen Hawking and Ulf Danielsson, Sweden's most famous theoretical physicist. Here's what they had to say:
"At the big bang itself, the universe is thought to have had zero size, and so to have been infinitely hot. But as the universe expanded, the temperature of the radiation decreased. One second after the big bang, it would have fallen to about ten thousand million degrees." - Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 1988
"13.7 billion years ago, an expanding emptiness started to have some troubles. Nobody knows how big or old it was, perhaps it had existed for an eternity. It's also unclear whether it was the only one. [...] Anyway, it was completely empty except for dark energy boosting the expansion... Complete emptiness, dark energy ... and small vibrations. Nothing else existed." - Ulf Danielsson, talk at Gyldene Freden 2012
We can easily see how the two statements contradicts each other, one of them talking about no size whereas the other one talks about expansion.
But let's dissect both statements on their own. Stephen Crothers deals directly with the Hawking quote in this lecture, to paraphrase him: temperature is defined by how fast molecules are moving, the faster the hotter. Now, how can the molecules exist in something of zero size? How fast do they have to move in order to be infinitely hot? And exactly how many degrees is it between infinitely hot and ten thousand million?
Ulf Danielssons scenario is just as nonsensical: an expansion, vibrations and dark energy, i.e. two abstract nouns and a factor x. Couldn't one just as easily say: an amplification, beats and a blue force? Or a multiplication, throbbings and shimmering moxie?
Apparently a reputation and a nice degree are enough to keep one's drivel to remain unquestioned.
If it isn't clear yet let me remind you that we're not talking about science here, but rather purely theoretical fantasies, beyond any method of provability.
Seeing red
It has since long been established that the Universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old. This conclusion has been reached through observing distant heavenly bodies. The oldest ones we've seen seem to have a redshift (wave length of emitted light) that indicates that they're situated almost 14 billion years away from us. As we haven't observed anything further away, they must stem from the beginning of time.
That's the logic.
There are problems with this method of dating the cosmos, first of all one has to assume that both the speed of light and time as we know it are constants, and has been so everywhere during the entire evolution of space, but even if they are, another bigger problem is already at hand.
In my very first post on this blog I dealt with this troublesome area, here's what I wrote:
The recently deceased astronomer Halton Arp was one of few in this field who maintained a critical stance against the Big Bang-theory. He based his critique on observations he'd made when gathering pictures of galaxies. Many [...] showed seemingly connecting "bridges" between them [galaxies] and nearby quasars. Considering that the most distant galaxies he detected were approximately 200-300 million years away, they couldn't have any connection with each other what so ever - at least according to the Big Bang-enthusiasts.
Arp suggested that quasars derive from galaxies, thus implying a vastly younger age for those objects, and more importantly, that the mechanisms causing redshift aren't fully understood.
Of course you could argue about this and that, but the pictures doesn't lie.
The NGC 7603 galaxy clearly shows a bridge between itself and a quasar.
The NGC 7319 galaxy even has a quasar in front of it.
Wave Race
Moving on to the next problem, much of what we "know" about cosmos today is based on this map supposedly portraying the cosmic background radiation (CMB). Under it you'll find a brief explanation of what it is:
The CMB is a snapshot of the oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when the Universe was just 380,000 years old. (source)
It's easy too see how valuable this information is for astrophysicists who, since it's discovery in the 60's, have been using it as a confirmation of the Big Bang theory. Today even better measurements continue to feed fuel into the fire, so to speak.
The clincher is, the CMB data might very well turn out to be complete junk.
As the methods of obtaining this type of data are very complicated it's not easy for anyone except experts to interpret them. Therefore, when professor Pierre-Marie Robitaille questions the data it's impossible for myself to validate or discard what he has to say, but it's not hard to see where he's coming from.
What he is proposing is that earlier measurements, made by a satellite (COBE) orbiting close to earth, did not take into consideration the microwave radiation emitting from our own oceans. It had nothing to shield off this type of radiation and therefore obtained a map of Earth instead of the Universe.
Looking familiar?
Later experiments with new satellites have been profoundly lacking due to using the previously obtained data as a basis for their own mapping.
In the latest case (called Planck/WMAP) the satellite was unable to distinguish any appropriate signals from background noise (from our own galaxy), which apparently was 1000 times stronger than what they wanted to measure.
Not only did they re-use the questionable COBE data, but they also claim to have removed the contamination signal (red color) even though it's ~1000 stronger than the signal underneath - without having an a priori knowledge or control over the unwanted signal.
I've been trying to find any serious critique against his bold yet reasonable claims, but unfortunately it's mostly the typical skepticist agenda being played out, like "he's a crank", "he doesn't know what he's talking about", "this has been established innumerable times already", "he has other crank ideas, (therefore all his ideas must be wrong)" etc.., instead of any substantial rebuttals.
Which of course gives us all the more reason to believe that he's on to something.
---
Man's appetite for knowledge easily leads him astray. We fear the (intellectual) unknowing so much, that we've actually managed to figure out the entire evolution of the Universe - even without being close to understand the nature of the tool we've used to reach those conclusions with, namely consciousness.
Talk about hubris.
In part 2 we'll have a look at the other ingredients that have contributed to the decline of science: fame and fortune.
Stay put for a visit to CERN and their multi billion dollar search for horsefeathers.
What
if a respectable NASA scientist found indisputable proof of the
existence of alien lifeforms? And how would we react if one of our
Mars rovers came across something that looked suspiciously fossil-like while cruising the red planet?
Dr.
Richard B. Hoover spent 46 years of his life working for NASA before
he retired in 2011. Astrobiology and extremophiles were his areas of
expertise, in which he also made significant discoveries,
earning him the title „Inventor of the Year“ by NASA in 1992.
Considering Dr. Hoovers impressive merits, you'll have to wonder
what's going on when his research is continuously being ignored.
Research that no less than three times, has concluded that fossilized
microorganisms of non-Earthly origin has been found in fresh
meteorites.
In short, he has found fossilized microorganisms in meteorites that we know for a fact hit Earth within the last 200 years. The fossilized samples in these space rocks lack any trace of oxygen, a process that takes many hundreds of thousands of years to happen. His findings therefore suggests that the specimens are ancient (not from here) and definitively not a result of contamination.
In spite of these highly scientific evidence, he is being widely criticized by his peers who insists that some form of Earthly contamination must have occurred [sic]. NASA on the other hand are playing the Kafka card saying that nothing can be taken into account before a certain level of peer reviewing has taken place - peer reviewing which no one are willing to do.
--
But where could these fossils come from? As it turns out, Mars is a good candidate. Our rover Opportunity did indeed 2004 find some very suggestive irregularities on one of it's many rock encounters. Irregularities with a strong resemblance to crinoids, and would probably also be interpreted as such, were they found on Earth.
Zoom in on the "crinoid". <---> A specimen found on Earth.
Unfortunately all we can do is speculate, since they only lasted for approximately 3.5 hours before someone in a NASA control room decided that they should all be sanded down to dust.
Dr. Hoover probably isn't alone in questioning the bizarre decision-making. Just imagine an archaeologist reaching for a hammer and smash the newly found discovery to pieces as soon as she laid her hands on it. The logic simply doesn't add up.
3,5 hours after the spectacular find the three potential candidates were literally turned to dust.
Hardly eyebrow raising, NASA chooses silence when called into question. Dr. Hoover however claims that an unofficial explanation was given to him by a colleague who stated that they were looking for remnants of coal in order to ensure that they were fossils. But why look for coal traces when [according to the video] it's not necessary to determine whether they are fossils or not? And even if this was the case it certainly seems rather drastic to settle for this method knowing the samples would be forever annihilated in the process.
Personally I don't see any good reason to doubt Dr. Richard B. Hoovers research and of course have to concur to the fact that other non-Earthly life indeed is a reality. However, what I find even more intriguing is the insinuation that there appears to be forces that not only oppose the idea of other-wordly life, but actively suppress it, regardless of the increasing amount of good data that favors a living cosmos.
The mainstream cosmological model, widely referred to as the Big Bang-theory, tells us that the Universe is roughly 14 billion years old. A number that doesn't exactly make sense both according to science, as well as from a philosophical point of view, as we shall see.
The datings are, among other things, based upon our understanding of
the properties of light. Mainly the concept of redshift, which means that the
distance of a stellar object, can be estimated by the wave length of the light
it emits.
Some of the most remote objects in the visible Universe are called
quasars. These objects have redshifts which put them 10 billion light years
away from us. On top of that they are extraordinary bright, which suggests that
they are several hundred (even thousand) times more energy containing than the Milky Way
galaxy. Go figure.
A quasar.
The recently deceased astronomer Halton Arp was one of few in this
field who maintained a critical stance against the Big Bang-theory. He based
his critique on observations he'd made when gathering pictures of galaxies.
Many of the galaxies he observed showed seemingly connecting
"bridges" between them and nearby quasars. Considering that the most
distant galaxies he detected were approximately 200-300 million years away,
they couldn't have any connection with each other what so ever - at least
according to the Big Bang-enthusiasts.
The NGC 7603 galaxy clearly shows a bridge between itself and a quasar.
The NGC 7319 galaxy even has a quasar in front of it.
Arp suggested that quasars derive
from galaxies, thus implying a vastly younger age for these objects,and more importantly, that the
mechanisms causing redshift aren't fully understood. He proposed that inherent
characteristics could be responsible, although unsure of what exactly.
Furthermore, independent
observations indeed support a new take on the nature of quasars. Early last
year a large quasar group was detected in a rather concentrated area of the
night sky; and if we are to believe that these objects are as massive as
mainstream cosmology suggests, they constitute 5% of the visible Universe. A
fact that directly contradicts the Cosmological Principle which states that
matter should be evenly distributed throughout space.
...
Regardless of what's true, I'm intuitively inclined to favor an ancient
Universe. The whole notion of dating the Universe through our puny
Earth-perspective is not only naïve, but also absurd when we
obviously haven't a clue about the nature of time in the first place.
Besides, it's only fair to assume that Existence foregoes Time.
