Revelation

One dictionary definition of revelation is:

a surprising and previously unknown fact, especially one that is made known in a dramatic way; the divine or supernatural disclosure to humans of something relating to human existence or the world.

Figure 1: view through Starbuck's window to parked car.
The number plate B 1949 WFN is clearly visible.

Today, on the day before my 70th birthday, I had my own little revelation while sitting in the local Starbucks. I was seated and looking out through the glass windows when I noticed a car number plate: B 1949 WFN. It caught my eye because 1949 is the year of my birth. The car belonged to a male Westerner who had entered the cafe with his son, aged about 11 or 12. It was parked there for a fair while as the two of them sat somewhere in the cafe. My attention kept returning to the number plate and it was only shortly before the guy left the cafe and drove off that I had my revelation. The nature of the revelation gives some idea of how my mind works because I am forever scanning number plates to discern something of their mathematical significance.

Normally, I just try to factorise the number but I know that 1949 is prime and I was looking this time for a deeper significance. To me, the B 1949 represented BORN 1949 and WFN possibly conveyed some information about the date of my death but how can any numerical information be extracted from three letters? Well, to the mathematical eye, it's fairly obvious. When working with number bases higher than 10, the digits 0 to 9 are exhausted and letters are used instead to represent numbers in the higher bases. For example, base 16 uses A, B, C, D, E and F for 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 respectively. W is the 23rd letter of the alphabet and corresponds to a numerical value of 32 in this system and thus the smallest base that WFN could represent as a number is 33. The letters could also represent bases 34 (X), 35 (Y) or 36(Z) but I am only working with the smallest possible base in this case and that is 33.

Figure 2: my tweet for the day when
I turned 25666 days old

What decimal number is represented by WFN in base 33? The conversion is W=32, F=15 and N=23 and 32*33^2+15*33+23 gives the number 35366. How can this number be interpreted as a date? Well, my hobby is to keep track of the number of days I've been alive and to analyse the mathematical significance of that number each morning. For example, today I turned 25566 days old and this was the tweet. So how old will I be on the day that I turn 35366 days and what date does this correspond to? It turns out I'll be almost 97 years old and the date is Tuesday, January 30th 2046. Today (April 2nd 2019) is also a Tuesday. In Figure 3, I've included the information that Wolfram Alpha threw up.

Figure 3: output from Wolfram Alpha
for the input shown

I'm not taking any of this too seriously but with my very significant 70th birthday imminent, I had been thinking a lot about mortality and pondering how much longer I might have to live. This "revelation" from the car number plate has provided me with an indication of how much longer I might have. Only time will tell if it's an accurate indicator. If I do live that long then I hope I can remain strong, mentally and physically. In the meantime, that number:

35366

has been carved into my mind and gives a target to "work" towards. I notice that 366 is the maximum possible days in a year and the number contains all the digits in both 365 and 366. What other properties does this number have? Well, it's biprime, meaning that it has two prime factors: 2 * 17683. The date I turned 17683 days old was Monday, September 1st, 1997. I was living in Singapore at that time with Sylvia. 

Consulting the Online Encyclopaedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS), one entry for 35366 is: 

OEIS A187382: number of 8-step S, NW and NE-moving king's tours on an n x n board summed over all starting positions (where n=9 in the case of 35366). 

The chess reference is interesting because chess has always been in the background of my life since I first saw some family friends playing against each other when I was about seven or eight. The chessboard features in many allusions to life such as this one from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

“Tis all a Chequer-board of nights and days

Where Destiny with men for Pieces plays:

Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays, 

And one by one back in the closet lays.”

Just as I was typing this a Google Alert popped up for Meher Baba. There were three alerts for the day. The first contained a link from Bowdoin College Library to Baba's Discourses offering the book on loan. The second linked to a Meher Baba Meditation Centre is Bhopal. The third link contains a quote from Baba to Rano:

LOVE AND ITS EXPRESSIONS 

Meher Baba 

Never worry about repetitions of the same things in your letters to me. Love never tires of repetition, rather repetition makes words of love all the sweeter. What is there for those who love but only to say, “I love you” over and over again till the very end of life, and it includes everything which more than satisfies both the lover and the Beloved! 

So, dear Rano, go on repeating the same loving tune in all your letters. I love nothing more than love and its expressions, even if repeated millions of times. 

BECAUSE OF LOVE, p. 11, Rano Gayley  

Copyright 1983 Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust

Of course, I noticed that the date of my demise falls a day before the anniversary of Baba's death which at first I was reluctant to comment on in case it was thought that I was comparing the insignificance of my passing with that the Lord of the Universe. However, I took the Baba alerts popping up while I was typing to indicate that I should make mention of it. My coming into the light of Meher Baba has been the single most important development of my life and so it does deserve comment when discussing my life and death.

Tim Buckley's Morning Glory

There's a few songs that for me at least have a spiritual significance and one of them is Morning Glory by Tim Buckley. Here's a video of his singing the song:

Here are the lyrics (there are some slight differences to what he actually sings):

I lit my purest candle close to my

Window, hoping it would catch the eye

Of any vagabond who passed it by,

And I waited in my fleeting house

Before he came I felt him drawing near;

As he neared I felt the ancient fear

That he had come to wound my door and jeer,

And I waited in my fleeting house

"Tell me stories, " I called to the Hobo;

"Stories of cold, " I smiled at the Hobo;

"Stories of old, " I knelt to the Hobo;

And he stood before my fleeting house

"No, " said the Hobo, "No more tales of time;

Don't ask me now to wash away the grime;

I can't come in 'cause it's too high a climb, "

And he walked away from my fleeting house

"Then you be damned!" I screamed to the Hobo;

"Leave me alone, " I wept to the Hobo;

"Turn into stone, " I knelt to the Hobo;

And he walked away from my fleeting house

At first sight, the lyrics may not seem to have any spiritual significance so let's look more closely. The fleeting house is a symbol of our transient physical form. As the saying goes, the eyes are windows of the soul so putting my purest candle close to my Window, hoping to catch the eye of any vagabond who passed it by means putting oneself in a very still and receptive state in the hope of making eye contact with a vagabond. A vagabond is a person who wanders from place to place without a home or job and is free of worldly ties. It serves here as a metaphor for a perfect master, a God-realised being, who has transcended duality and become one with God.

He waits and feels the vagabond drawing near but feels the ancient fear which is the threat of ego annihilation that is a necessary prelude on the path to becoming a spiritually perfect. The fear that he had come to wound my door and jeer is of course the way in which a perfect master methodically demolishes the disciple's ego. On arrival, the vagabond is referred to seven times as the Hobo and seven of course has deep mystical significance as a number of perfection. However, it is the prospective disciple that unwisely decides to set the agenda: tell me stories ... stories of cold ... stories of old.

The Hobo is not about to do this: no ... no more tales of time. Those who have attained union with God have transcended time and exist in eternity. The world of duality in which we are enmeshed however, is a world of time. Any reference to it is pointless from the spiritual point of view. Don't ask me now to wash away the grime: the grime is a reference to the karma (sanskaras) that we have accumulated over the course of our evolution and which bind us to the physical plane. Perfect masters can erase these sanskaras in an instant if they have the whim and if we are deserving of their grace.

I can't come in 'cause it's too high a climb, says the Hobo because the spiritual aspirant has put himself above the master by attempting to set the agenda. He has not shown proper humility, an essential prerequisite to spiritual progress. The perfect master, being one with God, is above everything and thus there is nowhere to climb. The master walks away from the aspirant much to the latter's annoyance, his anger demonstrating further his egotism and unsuitability for spiritual uplifting.

That's my take on it anyway.

Soybeans Plus (Keledai Plus)

Looking back over some of my past posts, I came across this one about soy beans that resonates with what's happening at the current time. The post is dated Saturday, January 19, 2008 and refers to an article in The Jakarta Post which I'll reproduce in full below because of its importance:

Tempeh and tofu would not have disappeared from the family dining room, as it did this week, if the country's government had listened to Indonesia's scientists. 

The archipelago would have been able to stop importing soybeans from the U.S. and would probably even be exporting a high-yield protein-rich bean to other countries. 

"Perhaps we didn't have the time to pay attention to soybeans then," said Endang Sukara, deputy chairman of the natural sciences department of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI). 

But in 2004 and after successfully breeding "newly improved" soybeans, LIPI scientists invited then-President Megawati and her agriculture officials to see their high-yield harvest in South Sumatra. Endang wasn't joking when he said the soybeans had added value. Kedelai Plus, the new improved variety, was able to produce up to three times the yield compared to regular soybeans and required less than half the amount of fertilizer. 

"We told the government all about it, and they were there during the harvesting at Musi Rawas in South Sumatra," Endang said at LIPI's Center for Biotechnology Research in Cibinong, West Java. "But they never followed it up." 

To create Kedelai Plus, a team of scientists, led by Harmastini Sukiman, isolated hundreds of Rhizobiums, a microbe that binds Nitrogen from the ground for soybean roots to absorb. They then discovered one special string called Rhizobium B64. 

"The strain worked really well for soybeans by boosting productivity and improving the plants' resistance to diseases," Harmastini said. "Soybean plants produce more beans using B64." 

The scientists grew Kedelai Plus in many areas across Indonesia, including South Sumatra, North Sumatra, West Java and East Java, with outstanding results. Farmers in Indonesia can produce on average up to 1.2 tons of soybeans per hectare, but in every harvest Kedelai Plus was yielding 2.4 to 4.5 tons per hectare. The team discovered a way to inject the microbe into the soybean, which meant farmers no longer had to glue the microbe onto the bean skin, or sprinkle it across the soil. 

"Rhizobiums grow abundantly in the soil, so for Rhizobium B64 to survive the competition, we must make sure there are enough B64 cells for the soybean roots to absorb," Harmastini said. 

With the help of a special vacuuming machine, LIPI was able to turn any type of soybean variety into Kedelai Plus with similar results. Endang said he was confident the new technology would see Indonesia end its dependency on expensive, imported American soybeans. 

"All the government needs to do now is up-scale the machine and produce Kedelai Plus in various seed centers so that farmers can purchase them at affordable prices," he said. 

Endang said he has been dreaming of a day when he could drink soybean milk, snack on soybean yogurt and have a tempeh burger for lunch, all made from domestic soybeans. But for the time being, farmers wishing to plant "newly improved" soybeans can bring their own seeds to LIPI in Cibinong to be injected with Rhizobium B64 at a cost of Rp 50,000 (US$ 5.30) for 20 kilograms of soybean seed.

Around the time I made this blog post, there were massive protests in Indonesia over the rising price of soybeans (due to government tariffs) and in another post I made the comment:

Massive protests in Jakarta have seen the Government belatedly remove the tariff on imported soybeans but there is continued demand to abolish the existing system whereby there are only four designated importers of the 1.3 million tonnes of soybeans imported. These four companies effectively form a highly lucrative cartel that is profiting at the expense of the local producers of tofu and tempeh. If the market were more open, the suspicion is that prices would decline as the competition increased. That may not happen. 

At the present time, soybean prices are rising yet again, this time because of the depreciating value of the rupiah. Here is a link September 2018 video about the problem with the caption:

Depresiasi rupiah terhadap dolar AS membuat harga kedelai melambung. Akibatnya, banyak pengusaha tahu dan tempe merumahkan pegawainya that translates to Depreciation of the rupiah against the US dollar makes soybean prices soar. As a result, many tofu and tempe entrepreneurs lay off their employees.

I wonder how much this support this Keledai Plus has received from the Indonesian Government over the past ten years. Back then, Indonesia imported over 70% of its soybean, with 80-90% coming from the United States and the rest from Argentina. The hope that Keledai Plus offered was the Indonesia would eventually become self-sufficient in soybean production.

The following excerpt from this online source shows that this has not happened:

The key phrase of course is local production remains stagnant. Note that in 2010, Indonesia was importing 1.85 million tonnes of soybeans while in 2016 the figure was 2.58 million tonnes, an increase of over 39%. Clearly, for whatever reasons, Keledai Plus has not fulfilled its promise. This Kompas article from January of 2008 emphasised the problem by quoting Deputy for Life Sciences LIPI, Prof. Dr. Endang Sukara:

... actually during the time of President Megawati, soybeans plus this had been introduced, but somehow the results of this research have not been used massively. "This is a matter of policy, a trade system problem that prioritizes imports in the form of finished soybeans, rather than developing soybean farming," he said. In fact, he reminded, the imported soybeans are genetically engineered soybeans while the domestic soybeans plus biodiversity are native. 

It's very disappointing that local production of soybeans in Indonesia has languished over the past decade. The tofu and tempe that are produced from soybeans are an important source of protein for poor people in Indonesia.

Meher Baba and Iran

Meher Baba was born Merwan Sheriar Irani. There is a detailed account of his visits to Iran to be found at this site, including information about his Iranian heritage and his connections with various Iranians. Here is a copy of the map that's presented on the site with the city of Mashhad highlighted with a blue rectangle. 

The significance of this city can be read in the following quote on the same site:

Aloba reports that, in May 1943, Meher Baba stated: “The tree of my divine manifestation is to be planted at Mashhad, where it will grow and spread, ultimately covering the whole world”. This theme for long remained obscure; the rendition has varied, another version being worded as: "The seed of the tree of my universal manifestation is planted in Mashhad." 

There is a strong association here with Meher Baba's third visit to Iran in June 1931, when he stayed at Mashhad, ignoring other cities. There he favoured a major Shi'ite shrine for purposes of seclusion on three nights. This was the tomb of Imam Ali Reza (765-818). That sojourn evidenced both the religious neutrality and incognito policy of Meher Baba, who moved about the streets of Mashhad in disguise. The visitor was only able to enter the venerated shrine because a prominent mulla, who was caretaker, relaxed rules of admission after experiencing a powerful dream which melted his resistance.

Mashhad is a city of three million people described by Wikipedia as:

Mashhad, also spelled Mashad or Meshad, is the second most populous city in Iran and the capital of Razavi Khorasan Province. It is located in the northeast of the country, near the borders with Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. It has a population of 3,001,184 inhabitants (2016 census), which includes the areas of Mashhad Taman and Torqabeh. It was a major oasis along the ancient Silk Road connecting with Merv to the east. 

The city is named after the "shrine" of Imam Reza, the eighth Shia Imam. The Imam was buried in a village in Khorasan, which afterwards gained the name Mashhad, meaning the place of martyrdom. Every year, millions of pilgrims visit the Imam Reza shrine. The Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid is also buried within the shrine. 

Mashhad has been governed by different ethnic groups over the course of its history. The city enjoyed relative prosperity in the Mongol period.

Mashhad is also known colloquially as the city of Ferdowsi, after the Iranian poet who composed the Shahnameh. The city is the hometown of some of the most significant Iranian literary figures and artists, such as the poet Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, and Mohammad-Reza Shajarian, the traditional Iranian singer and composer. Ferdowsi and Akhavan Sales are both buried in Tus, an ancient city that is considered to be the main origin of the current city of Mashhad. 

On 30 October 2009 (the anniversary of the death of Imam Reza), Iran's then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared Mashhad to be "Iran's spiritual capital".

Prior to this third visit to Iran, Meher Baba made a fleeting visit in 1924 and a second, more sustained visit in the autumn of 1929, including a visit to Isfahan and a sojourn at the desert city of Yazd. Given Baba's Iranian heritage and his visits, it's not surprising that Iran has been so prominent in the history of the twentieth century and remains very much in the news as this second decade of the twenty first century draws to a close. The country may well play a pivotal role in world events over the coming months and years.

Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness

Does AI (Artificial Intelligence) have the capacity to become self-aware. Even if an AI could pass the Turing Test, so that those involved in the testing could not decide whether the subject of the test were human or not, this accomplishment would not prove self-awareness. Ultimately only a self can know that it is aware of itself. We presume that everyone else that we meet is self-aware. It's a reasonable working hypothesis and serves us well most of the time.

As presently conceived, AI in all its forms has a purely physical basis into which are embedded algorithms that allow it to make sense of inputs and respond to these in an appropriate manner. To be sure, AI is capable of extraordinary feats. AlphaZero for example, with no experience of playing either Chess or Go and knowing only the basic rules of these two games, managed to defeat all human opposition after playing a sufficient number of games against itself. However, no one would claim that AlphaZero was self-aware.

The idea of an astral body, also called a subtle body, as being the lifelong accompaniment of the physical body is not accepted by the scientific community. The common view is that somehow consciousness arises as a result of the physical body, in particular through processes in the human brain. Handicapped by this limitation, it's not surprising that the question is asked as to whether consciousness can arise from any purely physical construction. Once the reality of an astral body, acting as a precursor, organising agent and non-physical double of the physical body, is accepted then the answer to the previous question is an emphatic no.

The astral body in its turn arises from the mental "body", although body is perhaps not the best term to describe it. It is an "essence" that persists after the astral body from the previous incarnation has disintegrated. The astral body does not undergo sudden termination as does the physical body. It more or less fades away but the extracted essence constitutes the mental body. It is this body and its need to gather more experiences on the physical plane that produce firstly a new astral body and then a new physical body.

Without an accompanying astral body, any purely physical body can never be anything but an automaton. It does not matter if it is constructed from organic or non-organic materials or even if it is made from differentiated human cells that have been grown in a laboratory. Not even primitive consciousness, let alone self-awareness, can arise from it. If it were possible to connect a human brain to sensory inputs from a simulated human body, then this "organism" would remain self-aware as it was when it inhabited its former human body. The astral body would remain attached via the human brain. Such a feat is likely to be realised at some point in the future if humanity maintains its current rate of progress. Elon Musk is already onto it: Dawn of HUMAN-ROBOTS: Elon Musk to found new company to merge brains with AI.

Another Silence Day

Yesterday, July 10th 2018, marked the 93rd anniversary of the date in 1925 that Meher Baba began the silence that he maintained until his death in 1969. Normally I remember this anniversary and if possible I try to maintain silence from midnight to midnight of that day. Yesterday I plum forgot until I was sitting in Starbucks around 4pm with my granddaughter and happened to notice an email about Silence Day. Oops.

I didn't say anything to my granddaughter but later, when we were walking back home from the mall, to my surprise she asked "Isn't today Silence Day?" Now my 15 year old granddaughter is not a Baba person and knows very little about him. However, she remembers my efforts to maintain silence during years past but I was nonetheless surprised that she remembered the exact date.

She sees photographs of Baba everyday, there are several in the house, and this has helped to keep him in the back of her mind. She spends a great deal of time in her study (which used to be my study) and there are portraits of Baba there. In the photograph shown in this post, the portrait on the right is a long time one and the other on the left is one that I brought back recently from Australia and that I display somewhere there in whatever temporary accommodation I find myself in.

I had the date marked in my Google Calendar on my smartphone but it wasn't set up to send me a reminder, as I thought it was. I've since remedied the situation and also set up a second reminder in the calendar on my MacBook, where previously there was none (neither entry nor reminder). Hopefully next year I'll be ready to observe a day of silence.

The day after writing the previous paragraphs I watched a talk given by Shireen Bonner, the daughter of Baba's youngest brother Adi, in which she coincidentally made mention of Silence Day. She described the difficulties that she and her husband experienced while travelling on that day from India to Bali on their honeymoon while still observing silence. It really brought home to me how disappointing my own failure to observe silence on that day had been. I felt Baba was giving me a gentle nudge, reminding me that I needed to be more more mindful of him. Next year on Silence Day, I'll be 70 years old and I am making a resolution now to never again forget to observe silence on that day.

I also realise that I should watch more videos from the Meher Baba Archives to help me become more mindful of Baba in my day to day life. I watch a great many movies and it would be embarrassing to quantify the amount of time I spend watching them on a monthly basis compared to the amount of time I spend watching Baba-related videos. This link gives some more information about Shireen.

An interesting addendum to my failure to observe Silence Day is that while at the mall on that day, I tried to withdraw around A$250 from an ATM but the transaction timed out and was cancelled. Unfortunately, the amount was still deducted from my bank account and I'm in the process of trying to reclaim the money. It seems that Baba has fined me for my carelessness! Just joking but the ATM incident is serving to remind me of the day as I fill out an ATM Dispute Form detailing what happened.

Reincarnation

There are lots of misconceptions surrounding the concept of reincarnation. In this post, I'm just attempting some clarification based on what I've read over the years, not based on any personal revelation. Unless something about a past life reveals itself to you, there's little point in pursuing the matter. There's a reason you don't remember your past lives and it's simply that such an awareness would interfere mightily with the life you are currently living. If you don't remember your past lives or you don't even believe you have any past lives to remember, then that's fine. Just get on with your current life and do the best you can. There are plenty of people who will supposedly help you remember your past lives and many techniques that can be applied to this end but I'm not advocating any of that here. 

To reincarnate literally means to incarnate or take flesh again, in other words you get a new body. But are you really reborn? As Barry Long said, you are not reborn. It is only your ignorance that is reborn. Your body, your memories and your personality, everything that you might consider as constituting you, does not return. It was this identification with these false elements of yourself that precipitated your return, according to Barry Long. You were ignorant of who you really were and so you have to return again in an attempt to dispel this ignorance. So who are you really? Well, you are certainly not your body, memories or personality and it doesn't help to have an intellectual conviction about what you think you are. You have to experience who you really are, as Gautama the Buddha did:

Seeking but not finding the house builder,
I hurried through the round of many births:
Painful is birth ever and again. 

O house builder, you have been seen;
You shall not build the house again.
Your rafters have been broken up,
Your ridgepole is demolished too. 

My mind has now attained the unformed Nirvana
And reached the end of every sort of craving.

So, if you can find "the house builder" then you won't be coming back but of course, you - that is the false you - is the builder and while you might even realise that intellectually, you still identify with the builder because who else can you identify with. You still experience yourself as solid and permanent. Of course you are anything but. Solid? You are largely empty space. Permanent? You are have changed from baby, to youth, to adult and sooner or later you will die. You are hardly permanent. Tricky.

Your false you, and all the other false you's who came before you, are part of a vast chain of life leading up to that moment of enlightenment in which Siddhartha Gautama:

... remembered all his previous lives—infinite number of lives—female and male and every other race and every other being in the vast ocean of life forms. And he remembered all that viscerally so his awareness expanded until all the moments of the past were completely present to him. 

It might help to think of yourself as part of a team, a relay race if you will, and unwittingly you are passing the baton on to the next runner and any missteps on your part will affect the next runner's fortunes. This analogy conveys the operation of karma. Your actions in this life have repercussions in the next, for the next you. As an illustration, if you run a factory farm in this life that exploits and abuses animals, then you may find yourself drawn in the next life to caring for them and easing their suffering.

So what happens when you die? The following explanation about the purpose of life after death will clarify things further (source):

The purpose of this stage is to extract the essence of the life just lived. We do this by re-living our Earth life, with particular focus on the deeper meaning and finer feelings of each experience. During this process, countless psychic impressions are sifted and reviewed in great detail. Whatever material is no longer needed is cast aside, like chaff from the grain. At the same time, the true value of our life experience is gathered together into a concentrated spiritual essence.

When extracting gold from the earth, miners may collect 50 tons of raw ore to produce a single ounce of pure gold. Likewise, the huge volume of psychic impressions from a lifetime yields only a tiny germ of spiritual essence. The exact nature of this essence is a mystery. It could be called the deepest meaning, or the finest expression of a human life. From another perspective, it represents the accumulated truth, love and wisdom of the Earth experience. Once gathered, this essence ascends to the next plane where it becomes a permanent part of our spiritual body, or soul.

As we distill the psychic impressions, we're actually consuming our astral body, for really they are one and the same. By getting rid of what is no longer needed, we're becoming less. And at the same time we're becoming more, in the sense of more real, true, and eternal.

This process culminates in what could be called a "second death", at which point there are two possible outcomes. If the astral body has been sufficiently consumed through the process described above, then individual awareness makes a "quantum leap" to the spiritual plane where it merges with soul. However, if an astral body remains intact, then residual desires can pull awareness back to the Earth plane for another cycle of birth and death. These desires are like psychic seeds, or DNA, which become the template for a new birth, or so called, "reincarnation".

The term "reincarnation" usually refers to a soul incarnating a human form repeatedly, over many lifetimes. This is a misunderstanding. The soul always remains on the spiritual plane and can neither incarnate nor reincarnate a human form. Rather, the soul participates in recurring human births and the degree of participation, as well as the number and frequency of recurring births, can vary widely. Likewise, a recurring birth may take place soon after death or hundreds of years later. There are many variables which influence this process and the range of possibilities is enormous.

The astral body tends to just fade away rather than to die abruptly as the physical body does. For most of us, our "residual desires" draw us back to the Earth plane and the dance of life continues. Here is Meher Baba's comments on reincarnation (source):

IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

"The worldly man completely identifies life with the manifestations and activities of the gross body. For him, therefore, the beginning and the end of bodily existence are also the beginning and end of the individualised soul.

"The overwhelming importance of death is derived from man's attachment to particular forms, but death loses much of its sting and importance, even for the worldly man, if he takes a broader view of the course of life. 

"In spite of their transitoriness, there is an unbroken continuity of life through these forms, old ones being discarded and new ones created for habitation and expression. 

“The recurring incident of death is matched by the recurring incident of birth.

“Old generations are replaced by new ones; life is reborn in new forms, incessantly renewing and refreshing itself..." 

THE THREE FORMS OF NATURE 

“Immortality of the individualised soul is rendered possible by the fact that the individualised soul is not the same as the physical body. 

“The individualised soul continues to exist with all its sanskaras [impressions] in the inner worlds through the medium of its mental and subtle bodies, even after it has discarded its gross body at the time of death. 

"So, life through the medium of the gross body is only a section of the continuous life of the individualised soul; the other sections of its life have their expression in other worlds." 

“The whole of nature may therefore be conveniently divided into three parts – (i) the gross world, (ii) the subtle world and (iii) the mental world.

“When the individualised soul has incarnated itself in a physical body, it expresses its life in the gross world. 

"When it drops the outer sheath, the physical body, it continues to have its expression of life either in the subtle world through subtle body, or in the mental world through the mental body.” 

SANSKARAS 

“Ordinarily, life in the physical body is terminated only when the sanskaras released for expression in that incarnation are all worked out. 

"When the soul drops its physical body it is completely severed from all connections with the gross world, though the ego and the mind are retained with all the impressions accumulated in the earthly career. 

“...ordinary spirits try to reconcile themselves to severance from the gross world, and conform to the limitations of changed conditions and sink into a state of subjectivity in which a new process begins of mentally reviewing the experiences of the earthly career by reviving the sanskaras connected with them. 

“Thus death inaugurates a period of comparative rest consisting in a temporary withdrawal from the gross sphere of action. It is the beginning of an interval between the last incarnation and the next.” 

KARMA 

“In the successive incarnations of an individual soul, there is not only a thread of continuity and identity…but here is also an uninterrupted reign of the law of cause and effect through the persistence and operation of Karma. 

“The successive incarnations with all their particulars are closely and unfailingly determined by rational law... ” 

“The actions of past lives determine the conditions and circumstances of the present life, and the actions of the present life have their share in determining the conditions and circumstances of the future lives.” 

The Walled Garden of Truth

The film, The Shape of Water, that I recently watched concludes with the following dialogue:

“Unable to perceive the shape of You, I find You all around me. Your presence fills my eyes with Your love, It humbles my heart, For You are everywhere.”

As to the provenance of these lines, there is some debate. "Though he doesn’t remember exactly where the verse came from, del Toro remembers reading it in a book of Islamic poetry, found in a bookstore he’d frequent before going on set to film" ... source. Some have speculated on Reddit that it's from Rumi, another that it's taken from "Divine Eros" by Saint Symeon and yet others by a predecessor of Rumi named Hakim Sanai.

Regardless of the provenance of the lines, the investigation has led me to Sanai and Symeon for which I'm grateful. Of Sanai, the website Poetry Chaikhana: Sacred Poetry from Around the World says:

Sanai is one of the earlier Sufi poets. He was born in the province of Ghazna in southern Afghanistan in the middle of the 11th century and probably died around 1150. 

Rumi acknowledged Sanai and Attar as his two primary inspirations, saying, "Attar is the soul and Sanai its two eyes, I came after Sanai and Attar."

Sanai was originally a court poet who was engaged in writing praises for the Sultan of Ghazna. 

The story is told of how the Sultan decided to lead a military attack against neighboring India. Sanai, as a court poet, was summoned to join the expedition to record the Sultan's exploits. As Sanai was making his way to the court, he passed an enclosed garden frequented by a notorious drunk named Lai Khur.

As Sanai was passing by, he heard Lai Khur loudly proclaim a toast to the blindness of the Sultan for greedily choosing to attack India, when there was so much beauty in Ghazna. Sanai was shocked and stopped. Lai Khur then proposed a toast to the blindness of the famous young poet Sanai who, with his gifts of insight and expression, couldn't see the pointlessness of his existence as a poet praising such a foolish Sultan. 

These words were like an earthquake to Hakim Sanai. He abandoned his life as a pampered court poet, even declining marriage to the Sultan's own sister, and began to study with a Sufi master named Yusef Hamdani. 

Sanai soon went on pilgrimage to Mecca. When he returned, he composed his poetic masterpiece, Hadiqatu'l Haqiqat or The Walled Garden of Truth. There was a double meaning in this title for, in Persian, the word for a garden is the same as the word for paradise, but it was also from within a walled garden that Lai Khur uttered the harsh truths that set Hakim Sanai on the path of wisdom.

I managed to locate and download a sparse 14-page translation, in PDF format, of The Walled Garden of Truth from this website as well as a far more expansive 134-page translation, also in PDF format, and commentary from this website.

Of Symeon, I have this commentary from John McGuckin (forming part of a 21-page commentary):

The Byzantine saint and poet Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022) is one of the Christian world’s greatest mystics, if such a term can properly be used of ancient writers. It is here applied for the sake of convenience, and in order to unveil the author, as it were, who is not only a visionary of the highest order within the Eastern Orthodox tradition, but equally one of the Christian world’s most lyrical and rhapsodic writers. It is a startling fact that it is only in recent years that his works have become available in English translation, and a sadder one that his name is still largely unknown to a wider public who would otherwise undoubtedly be interested in a spirituality suffused with light and hope and one of the most profound senses of the mercy and compassion of God. 

I haven't yet located a copy of Symeon's Hymns of Divine Eros but this is what McGuckin says of the hymns:

There are a total of 58 Hymns in the authentic corpus, amounting almost to 11,000 verses. They are all written in liturgical style (probably with perfor- mance in mind not merely private reading) in a strongly pulsed rhythm that uses the metrical devices of either eight, twelve, or fifteen syllables to the line. Sometimes end rhymes and half-rhyme are used. Several have the poetic pulse that is comparable to Longfellow’s epic Hiawatha, and they run into similar problems (for most are long) in sustaining the drive of the sense over against the soporific beat of the line: though in some cases the juxtaposition of the startling contents (visions, revelations, denunciations of enemies, and lurid confessions of sins), are exactly balanced by the mantra-like beat. No existing translation has attempted to render this either exactly or impressionistically so far.

The Illusion of Time

Imagine a video file. The frames that comprise it constitute a linear sequence of events that can be viewed from start to finish. As we watch it at a frame rate of 60 frames per second or higher, the illusion is created of smooth motion along a time line. Once we've finished watching, the video remains on a storage device somewhere and can be watched again if desired. Until that time however, it simply exists and the illusion of time is created only when we open the file and traverse the frames contained within it.

I'm using this as an analogy to describe the human perception of time. Suppose the universe is a series of configurations, each configuration being a unique arrangement of elements that differ only slightly from the related configurations that precede it and follow it. As we move or are carried from one configuration to the next, the perception of time is created but in reality all the configurations already exist. They simply are. Eternity is experienced when not caught up in the configurations. If this is achieved, the perception of time vanishes and we see that the configurations were always there. There was no beginning and no end, just the totality of configurations.

This is not an original idea. I first read about it in Julian Barbour's 1999 book titled The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe and it came as quite a revelation. Here is a summary from Good Reads:

Time is an illusion. Although the laws of physics create a powerful impression that time is flowing, in fact there are only timeless `nows'. In The End of Time, the British theoretical physicist Julian Barbour describes the coming revolution in our understanding of the world: a quantum theory of the universe that brings together Einstein's general theory of relativity - which denies the existence of a unique time - and quantum mechanics - which demands one. Barbour believes that only the most radical of ideas can resolve the conflict between these two theories: that there is, quite literally, no time at all. The End of Time is the first full-length account of the crisis in our understanding that has enveloped quantum cosmology. Unifying thinking that has never been brought together before in a book for the general reader, Barbour reveals the true architecture of the universe and demonstrates how physics is coming up sharp against the extraordinary possibility that the sense of time passing emerges from a universe that is timeless. The heart of the book is the author's lucid description of how a world of stillness can appear to be teeming with motion: in this timeless world where all possible instants coexist, complex mathematical rules of quantum mechanics bind together a special selection of these instants in a coherent order that consciousness perceives as the flow of time. Finally, in a lucid and eloquent epilogue, the author speculates on the philosophical implications of his theory: Does free will exist? Is time travel possible? How did the universe begin? Where is heaven? Does the denial of time make life meaningless? Written with exceptional clarity and elegance, this profound and original work presents a dazzlingly powerful argument that all will be able to follow, but no-one with an interest in the workings of the universe will be able to ignore.

It's tempting for me at least to connect these configurations with the Akashic Records, described by this site as:

The Akashic Records, or "The Book of Life," can be equated to the universe's super-computer system. It is this system that acts as the central storehouse of all information for every individual who has ever lived upon the earth. More than just a reservoir of events, the Akashic Records contain every deed, word, feeling, thought, and intent that has ever occurred at any time in the history of the world. Much more than simply a memory storehouse, however, these Akashic Records are interactive in that they have a tremendous influence upon our everyday lives, our relationships, our feelings and belief systems, and the potential realities we draw toward us.

On this same website, there is an excerpt from one of Edgar Cayce's readings (Reading 294-19) in which he vividly describes accessing these records:

I see myself as a tiny dot out of my physical body, which lies inert before me. I find myself oppressed by darkness and there is a feeling of terrific loneliness. Suddenly, I am conscious of a white beam of light. As this tiny dot, I move upward following the light, knowing that I must follow it or be lost. As I move along this path of light I gradually become conscious of various levels upon which there is movement. Upon the first levels there are vague, horrible shapes, grotesque forms such as one sees in nightmares. Passing on, there begin to appear on either side misshapen forms of human beings with some part of the body magnified. Again there is change and I become conscious of grey-hooded forms moving downward. Gradually, these become lighter in colour. Then the direction changes and these forms move upward and the colour of the robes grows rapidly lighter. Next, there begin to appear on either side vague outlines of houses, walls, trees, etc., but everything is motionless. As I pass on, there is more light and movement in what appear to be normal cities and towns. With the growth of movement I become conscious of sounds, at first indistinct rumblings, then music, laughter, and singing of birds. There is more and more light, the colours become very beautiful, and there is the sound of wonderful music. The houses are left behind, ahead there is only a blending of sound and colour. Quite suddenly I come upon a hall of records. It is a hall without walls, without ceiling, but I am conscious of seeing an old man who hands me a large book, a record of the individual for whom I seek information.

Of course, the author of The End of Time, as a reputable scientist, would probably be outraged at any connection being drawn between his concept of timeless "configurations" of the physical universe and the Akashic Records. However, it seems to me that everyone has her or his own configuration file or Book of Life. The contents of this book are hidden from us and of course we are still writing in our books as we live our little lives. The Avatar, Meher Baba, could read this book for any individual who entered his circle and thus he knew exactly what was needed for that individual's spiritual advancement. With enlightenment comes full access to the book of oneself and of others:

Nowadays scientists deal with physical matter as well as so-called dark matter. They have only the vaguest notions about what dark matter might be composed of but they happily accept its existence on the basis of its observed effects on physical matter. In my previous post, I proposed a connection between dark matter and either the astral plane or more likely the subtler states of physical matter comprising the etheric planes. I propose that the configurations have a gross physical (solid, liquid, gas), a finer physical (etheric) and an astral dimension. Each configuration has, is and always will be because of the illusory nature of time. Each action produces an impression. On the gross physical level, my footsteps in the sand are always there, they always were, they always will be. Just as my feet leave an impression in the sand, likewise my thoughts and feelings impress themselves on the substance of the etheric and astral planes.

As a physical being I am constantly disturbing the equilibrium of the physical world that I live and move about in. Even sitting in meditation, my weight is upon the surface of the Earth, I am radiating heat and chemically interacting with the atmosphere as I breathe in oxygen and breath out carbon dioxide. The disturbances I am creating in such a situation are very slight and quite unavoidable. Travelling to and fro however, produces far greater disturbances as, unawares, I trample ants to death underfoot as I walk about. It's for this reason that Jain priests don't travel very much. They are sensitive to the damage that they will necessarily cause as they do so. Similarly, thinking and feeling disturb the equilibrium of these non-physical realms. A positive thought and a negative emotion both leave an impression in the same way that my foot leaves an impression in the sand. Looking at an individual's Book of Life, all the recorded impressions can be read, including the footprint in the sand, the positive thought, the negative emotion.  

Dark Matter

I've just acquired a copy of Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs by Lisa Randall after reading an excerpt from it in Nautilus Cosmos, dated February 2017. In the Nautilus article she writes:

In the usual scenario, dark matter lacks this type of interesting influence and structure. The common assumption is that dark matter is the “glue” that holds together galaxies and galaxy clusters, but resides only in amorphous clouds around them. But what if this assumption isn’t true and it is only our prejudice—and ignorance, which is after all the root of most prejudice—that led us down this potentially misleading path? 

If we were creatures made of dark matter, we would be very wrong to assume that the particles in our ordinary matter sector were all of the same type. Perhaps we ordinary matter people are making a similar mistake. Given the complexity of the Standard Model of particle physics, which describes the most basic components of matter we know of, it seems very odd to assume that all of dark matter is composed of only one type of particle. Why not suppose instead that some fraction of the dark matter experiences its own forces? 

She goes on to say:

Perhaps nuclear-type forces act on dark particles in addition to the electromagnetic-type one. In this even richer scenario, dark stars could form that undergo nuclear burning to create structures that behave even more similarly to ordinary matter than the dark matter I have so far described. In that case, the dark disk could be populated by dark stars surrounded by dark planets made up of dark atoms. Double-disk dark matter might then have all of the same complexity of ordinary matter. 

Partially interacting dark matter certainly makes for fertile ground for speculation and encourages us to consider possibilities we otherwise might not have. Writers and moviegoers especially would find a scenario with such additional forces and consequences in the dark sector very enticing. They would probably even suggest dark life coexisting with our own. In this scenario, rather than the usual animated creatures fighting other animated creatures or on rare occasions cooperating with them, armies of dark matter creatures could march across the screen and monopolise all the action. 

But this wouldn’t be too interesting to watch. The problem is that cinematographers would have trouble filming this dark life, which is of course invisible to us—and to them. Even if the dark creatures were there (and maybe they have been) we wouldn’t know. You have no idea how cute dark matter life could be—and you almost certainly never will. 

Scientists have long dismissed the notion of an astral plane, a plane supposedly as real and diverse as our own physical plane but composed of a finer state of matter. The justification is that it can't be seen or felt and that it is totally invisible and undetectable. With dark matter however, scientist are admitting the existence of a state of matter that "can't be seen or felt and is totally invisible and (largely) undetectable". What if this dark matter harbours dark life that is as real and diverse as the life we experience here on the physical plane? What if dark matter is in fact what constitutes the substance of the astral plane?

While the two planes usually remain distinctly separate, there is overlap as for example when a person has an out-of-body experience during a medical emergency. In such a case, the consciousness of the person is resident in the astral body that is usually floating above the physical body.

As Randall says:

Dark objects or dark life could be very close—but if the dark stuff’s net mass isn’t very big, we wouldn’t have any way to know. Even with the most current technology, or any technology that we can currently imagine, only some very specialised possibilities might be testable. “Shadow life,” exciting as that would be, won’t necessarily have any visible consequences that we would notice, making it a tantalising possibility but one immune to observations.

Proponents of an astral plane describe it as being "very close", interpenetrating our physical plane but not having "any visible consequences that we would notice" and being "immune to observations". It's tempting to suspect that such a "shadow" plane and the "shadow life" that it supports are composed of dark matter.

For a long time I've dismissed the notion of dark matter and dark energy as representing an inadequacy of the Standard Model of particle physics to explain what's really going on in the physical universe. At the same time, I've fully accepted the notion of the astral plane made up of a finer state of matter than is found in the physical plane. Dark matter seems to be a way of reconciling my doubts about the Standard Model with my belief in the astral and higher planes.

There's confusion about the difference between the astral plane and the etheric plane, just as there is about the difference between the astral body and the etheric body. However, these words of Max Heindel shed some light on what the ether is:

According to the Rosicrucian writings of American occultist and mystic Max Heindel there is - in addition to the solids, liquids, and gases which compose the Chemical Region of the Physical World - a finer grade of matter called ether that permeates the atomic structure of the earth and its atmosphere. It is disposed in four grades of density and is considered to be a kind of physical matter. Source.

In this conception, the first three subplanes of the physical are solid, liquid and gaseous whereas its four higher subplanes are comprised of finer matter in four grades of density. Could this finer matter be the elusive dark matter? To quote from Max Heindel again:

According to Max Heindel's Rosicrucian writings, the etheric body, composed of four ethers, is called the "Vital Body" since the ether is the way of ingress for vital force from the Sun and the field of agencies in nature which promote such vital activities as assimilation, growth, and propagation. It is an exact counterpart of our physical body, molecule for molecule, and organ for organ, but it is of the opposite polarity. It is slightly larger, extending about one and one-half inches beyond the periphery of the physical body. Source.

These four uppermost subplanes, as conceived by Max Heindel, are still comprised of physical matter, "finer matter" if you will, and maybe it is this that constitutes dark matter. An excerpt from an article at this site tries to clarify the difference between etheric and astral:

The etheric body is usually divided, for clarity, into two parts. The first of these is the etheric double; this closely resembles the ordinary body of matter, extending out perhaps an inch beyond the surface of the skin, and provides the framework of subtle formative energies on which the material body is built. It contains a series of channels (the meridians of Oriental medicine) and energy centers, which have an important role in mystical work. 

The second part of the etheric body is called the aura or, in another context, the Sphere of Sensation. This is a roughly egg-shaped field of energies surrounding the etheric double, extending out several feet from the physical body. It serves as the interface between the etheric body of the individual and that of the cosmos, and all the forces of the universe are reflected on its surface. 

The astral body cannot be so easily mapped out in this kind of spatial language. A body of consciousness, it comes closer to the modem idea of "mind" than to that of "body," although neither of these too-rigid categories fits well anywhere in the mystical view of the Soul. The astral body can be thought of as a field of energy occupying roughly the same space as the aura, but constantly shaped and reshaped by patterns of thought and feeling. All images, words, and sensations affect this body, and are affected by it in turn; it interacts freely with the astral level of the cosmos, and with the astral bodies of other human and non-human beings. It contains most of those parts of the self we normally think of as "mental" or "inner"— intellect, emotion, imagination, will, and memory, the instruments of concrete consciousness — and it is also the basis for the individual personality.

Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond

 

"All we really yearn for is our own absence, after all, we yearn for what happens at death. Ahhh ... I don't have to worry about that anymore."

Nice quote from Jim Carrey in the film "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond" watched on Netflix. We put so much energy into building ourselves, being ourselves, a lifetime of input to build our egos and associated empires. As the Buddha purportedly said according to Vipassana meditation:

In this flow of the world I have taken so many times birth ... birth after birth for so many lives, countless lives. And every time I have taken birth I kept running incessantly. And some wise people in some lives told me that I can get out of this cycle of misery provided I can witness the Creator. Many lives I kept searching for the Creator, the Creator of This House. In search of the Creator of the House, again and again I kept getting birthed full of misery. Oh builder of the house, now I have seen you. You can't build any house for me anymore. Now, I have destroyed everything. I have destroyed all the building materials. You can't make a building for me. My mind is now free of all sankhara [wandering thought-forms] and the craving is rooted out. 

Hollywood is saying of course that Jim Carrey has lost it but what he's saying is no different from what I've been thinking about these past couple of years ... that I'm just a figment of my imagination. Figment meaning "something made up, invented, or fabricated". It's similar to playing the part of a character in a play. However, I have a physical body, This House as the Buddha put it, and it is in that body that the drama is played out.

The Prevailing Manichaean World View

While looking for a word to describe a dualistic way of viewing things, I remembered the word manichaean and thought I'd investigate the origin of the term. I was surprised to learn that it was a syncretic religion and had once been a rival to Christianity. This is a quote from Wikipedia:

Manichaeism was a major religious movement that was founded by the Iranian prophet Mani c. 216–276 AD) in the Sasanian Empire.

Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process that takes place in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came. Its beliefs were based on local Mesopotamian gnostic and religious movements. 

Manichaeism was quickly successful and spread far through the Aramaic-Syriac speaking regions. It thrived between the 3rd and 7th centuries, and at its height was one of the most widespread religions in the world. Manichaean churches and scriptures existed as far east as China and as far west as the Roman Empire. It was briefly the main rival to Christianity in the competition to replace classical paganism. Manichaeism survived longer in the east than in the west, and it appears to have finally faded away after the 14th century in southern China, contemporary to the decline in China of the Church of the East during the Ming Dynasty. While most of Manichaeism's original writings have been lost, numerous translations and fragmentary texts have survived. 

An adherent of Manichaeism is called, especially in older sources, a Manichee, or more recently Manichaean.

it's interesting that St. Augustine was a Manichaean for nine years before he converted to Christianity. Here is a brief article about Augustine and Manichaeism:

AUGUSTINE AND MANICHAEISM

(by Gillian Clark, from the introduction to her Cambridge Latin edition of Confessions, Books I-IV)

Augustine encountered Manichaean teaching soon after the impact of the Hortensius, and remained an adherent for nine years. His subsequent attacks on Manichaeism are a major source of information, but of course they are polemic against the system, not exposition of it. In the Confessions he is concerned with the effect of Manichaeism on his own relationship with God. Instead of explaining what he believed as a Manichaean and why, he denounces the aspects of his belief which, in the light of Platonist philosophy and the preaching of Ambrose, he had come to see as its major confusions. But it is now possible to give a general account of western Manichaeism which does not depend chiefly on Christian polemic. 

Several Manichaean texts have been discovered this century: the Coptic texts from Medinet Medi in the Fayyum include a book of psalms, and the Greek Mani codex, a tiny papyrus volume, is an anthology on the birth and early life of Mani. Mani, born in 216 in southern Mesopotamia, was brought up in an ascetic Judaeo-Christian sect which he left in his mid-twenties. He believed himself to be the Paraclete, the Advocate who, as Jesus promised to his followers (John 14:26), would lead them into all truth. Revelations from his divine twin taught him the doctrines and the organisation of Manichaeism, and instructed him to travel and preach. His teaching spread eastward and westward, adapting to existing religious beliefs and practices: some of the most important Manichaean texts, written in various Central Asian languages, were found at Turfan in China. 

In the Roman empire, Manichaeism was regarded by Christians as heretical and by the state as a dangerous import from the rival power, Persia (Iran). In Persia there was religious toleration until the death of Shapur I (c. 272), but under his successor Zoroastrianism became the most influential religion, and Mani was imprisoned and died after torture. His death was commemorated in the festival of the Bema, which western Manichaeans celebrated rather than Easter. 

Mani's claim to a new revelation was not a new phenomenon in the west. Jesus had told his followers (John 16:12-13): "I still have many things to tell you, but you cannot handle them now. But when the spirit of truth comes, he will lead you into all truth." He had said that the Paraclete was "the spirit of truth which the world cannot receive, because it neither sees nor knows it; but you know it, because it remains with you and is in you" (John 14:17). Several religious leaders had convinced their followers that they had the truth, the gnosis (knowledge), which most people could not see. 

The knowledge took the form of a deeper understanding of what is really happening in human lives. Gnostics believed that the physical world is of no value: it is the temporary, illusory stage for a struggle of spiritual powers, and all that matters is the release of the divine spirit within us from the contamination of the material body and its return to its true home. They produced complex mythologies of angels and demons to explain the workings of the universe. They refused to accept the affirmation of Genesis that God made the world, "and God saw all the things that God had made, and they were very good" (Genesis 1:31). Consequently, they also refused to accept the Incarnation, the union of God and human in a human body, and taught that Christ was a divine spirit in the appearance of a human body, and that his death on the cross was an appearance of death. 

Gnosticism recurs through the history of Christianity, but Gnostic sects tended to fragment. Mani combined impressive teaching, reinforced by hymns and splendidly produced books, with effective organisation. He taught that Good and Evil are equal powers, and both have always existed. Each has a kingdom, Good the kingdom of Light and Evil the kingdom of Darkness. Darkness invaded Light, and fragments of light are still entrapped in the darkness; this world was created in order to free them. Jesus of Light, who is pure spirit, shows humans how the light may be freed, and the Suffering Jesus is the Light which is entrapped in this world. The human soul is a fragment of Light which has fallen from its home, the kingdom of heaven, and is trapped in the body. It can escape by disciplining the body and with the help of saving powers. 

There were two kinds of Manichaeans, the Elect Saints and the Hearers. The Elect, who formed the nucleus of a Manichaean cell, were committed to a missionary life of poverty and celibacy. They were strict vegetarians, drank no wine, and were forbidden even to harvest or prepare food, because Mani had a revelation that it is a kind of murder to damage plants by harvesting. The sect survived because the Hearers incurred the sin of preparing food, and were released from sin by the prayers of the Elect who ate it: Mani taught that fragments of the divine which were trapped in plants could be released when ingested by the pure body of the Elect. The Hearers were also allowed a wife or concubine, but were taught to avoid procreation because it entraps more divine spirits in matter. Manichaean cells, like Christian churches, were kept in touch with one another by a hierarchy analogous to the Christian clergy, so when Augustine left Carthage for Rome he was able to stay with another Hearer and meet some of the Elect (5.10.18-19). 

Manichaeism offered Augustine a way to accommodate his conflicts: he could pursue his career, and retain his partner, while purging his sins through his service to the pure Elect (4.1.1); and he could blame those sins on his lower, alien nature, which like the material world had been made by the power of evil, but which his true self would eventually shed (5.10.18). Manichaeism also responded to his need, instilled by his childhood, for the name of Christ, and his initial distaste for the Christian scriptures (3.4.8-6.10). He could regard the Bible as a crude and contaminated attempt at the truth, whereas the Manichaean scriptures offered both the name of Christ and what seemed to be a profound understanding of the universe and of human life (3.6.10).

It would seem that Manichaeism influenced the Christianity of the time as the latter religion seemed obsessed with dualism: God versus Satan, Good versus Evil, Mother versus Whore, Matter versus Spirit, Heaven versus Hell and so on. There was a decided tendency to deny shades of grey. This influence persists it would seem in current views about topics as diverse as gay marriage and Adolph Hitler. The pressure is on to take a side. In the West, it wasn't so long ago that opposition to gay marriage was culturally dominant. That's now changing. Before World War 2, Hitler was lauded by many outside of Germany and the few would have shared the current, dominant cultural position that he was a despotic maniac. Nowadays, if you don't dismiss Hitler as an evil tyrant who master-minded the attempted extermination of the Jews, then you're a Fascist. There is no middle ground. Similarly with gay marriage, if you oppose it, for whatever reason, then you're likely to branded a homophobe.

The adjective manichaean has come to refer to a world view where distinct notions of good and evil prevail. Many people in many different contexts seem to adhere to such a view. Those contexts include religion (of course), politics, team sports etc. Admittedly, in some situations there seems to be no middle ground. For example, did American astronauts walk on the Moon in 1969 and in the early 70s? Even here it's preferable to simply survey the evidence and put forward the PROs and CONs. Being selective about what evidence is admitted however, can skew the decision-making process. Evidence from all known sources needs to be acknowledged and considered. Evidence can fall into both the PRO and CON category. For example, evidence suggesting that the photographs and videos of the landings were fake don't necessary mean the landings were faked. It could be that the landings took place but photographic and film equipment could not capture the events and so had to be "recreated" on Earth. It could also be that the landings never happened and the photographic and film evidence was simply faked to make it look as if they had.

Incidentally, one of the world's leading authorities on Manichaeism is Jason BeDuhn. Here is a link to his Wikipedia entry and to his entry on the University of Arizona website. Here are links to his Manichaean works:

Augustine's Manichaean Dilemma, Volume 1, Conversion and Apostasy, 373-388 C.E

Augustine's Manichaean Dilemma, Volume 2, Making a "Catholic" Self, 388-401 C.E.

The Manichaean Body: In Discipline and Ritual

Darwinism

It's a poorly kept secret that eugenics enjoyed widespread support amongst intellectuals and politicians in the decades before World War II. It got a bad name due its enthusiastic support by the Nazi Party in Germany. After the war, it never went away but was simply euphemistically rebranded using terms like human biodiversity (HBD). Here is a description of HBD from Forward:

“Human biodiversity” appropriates scientific authority by posing as an empirical, rational discourse on the genetically proven physical and mental variation between humans. It uses the language of genetics to underscore, for example, the prevalence of Mongolians in sumo wrestling, the IQ scores of black people or the inbreeding patterns of Ashkenazi Jews. The refrain of HBD bloggers and forum commenters is that the (gene-driven, according to them) dissimilarities they outline are “non-negligible” or “non-trivial” and have, accordingly, social policy implications. Though it has a rational, policy-wonk zing to it, that’s just Internet forum-ese for “you’re genetically distinct from us and should be treated differently.”

Having recently read The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin by Benjamin Wiker, I've realised that the rise of Darwinism in the nineteenth century fuelled the eugenics craze of the twentieth century. To quote from the book:

As biographer Janet Browne notes: in the decades following the publication of the Origin, Darwin’s defenders came to occupy influential niches in British and American intellectual life. Together, these men would also control the scientific media of the day, especially the important journals, and channel their other writings through a series of carefully chosen publishers—Murray, Macmillan, Youmans, and Appleton. Towards the end they were everywhere, in the Houses of Parliament, the Anglican Church, the universities, government offices, colonial service, the aristocracy, the navy, the law, and medical practice; in Britain and overseas. As a group that worked as a group, they were impressive. Their ascendancy proved decisive, both for themselves and for Darwin.

The triumph of Darwinism had major implications for the twentieth century but it was just one approach to what powers evolution, "a reductionist, materialist approach". To quote again from the book:

The truth of the matter is this: the methodical exclusion of divine causation was an assumption deriving from the particular secular Enlightenment goal of systematically excluding the divine as a matter of human progress. Darwin shared that vision and hence that goal, and it determined the way that he defined evolution. That was the problem with Darwin’s theory, and that is the problem with Darwinism. Darwinism is not a synonym for evolution. Darwinism is a particular approach to the evidence for evolution, a reductionist, materialist approach that excludes the Divine on principle. Evolution is a complex and difficult thing we are still trying to understand. 

Edgar Cayce

Having just completed (except for some of the appended case studies) THERE IS A RIVER by Thomas Sugrue, I am now aware that the trance diagnosis and treatment of people's physical problems displayed by Edgar Cayce was not a phenomenon unique to him. It came into prominence in the late 18th century. To quote from the book:

In the eighteenth century, before the discoveries of Mesmer and de Puysegur, a pioneer named Maxwell said, “There is no disease which is not curable by a spirit of life without help of a physician . . . The universal remedy is nothing but the spirit of life increased in a suitable subject.” Mesmer found a means of stimulating this natural healing force and called the process “magnetism.” In 1784 de Puysegur, attempting to magnetize Victor, the shepherd boy, discovered hypnotism: Victor, falling into a deep trance, began to speak and diagnosed the ailment of the person next to him. During the next generation persons with similar sensitiveness were found in France, Germany, and England. They were studied carefully; the best men of science gave them their attention and wrote books about them. Somnambulism became fashionable. People went by preference to a somnambulist rather than to a physician, and the results apparently were as efficacious as they were amazing. The somnambulists seemed infallible in diagnosis, and the remedies they suggested were simple and, according to the evidence, helpful.

Predictably the medical mafia, even though enjoying nowhere near the terrifying monopoly on human health that it holds today, managed to debunk, discredit and finally destroy this burgeoning threat. To quote further:

As the books on somnambulism rolled off the presses, orthodox medicine rallied to the opposition. Mesmer was condemned as a fraud, and the diverse phenomena discovered by other investigators were damned along with him. The hope for a new system of diagnosing physical ills—a system already inherent in man and magically sure—began to fade.

I managed to get a hold of a book by Richard Harte called HYPNOTISM AND THE DOCTORS, published in 1902, that deals with Mesmer and Puysegur. I also managed to find MAGIC STAFF: An Autobiography of Andrew Jackson Davis To quote from the Wikipedia article about Davis:

He had little education, though probably much more than he and his friends pretended. In 1843 he heard lectures in Poughkeepsie on animal magnetism, as the phenomena of hypnotism was then termed, and found that he had remarkable clairvoyant powers. In the following year he had, he said, spiritual messages telling him of his life work. He eventually became known as "the Poughkeepsie Seer".

Both these books should be interesting reads. All this has rekindled my interest in hypnotism which I dabbled with earlier in the year when I was having trouble remembering my dreams. I used an hypnotic suggestion method outlined in a book and had immediate success. The technique can be used to facilitate lucid dreaming.

I prepared a self-hypnosis walk-through to improve my dream recall and activate lucid dreaming. It's a bit rough but it's a start. I played it through once tonight so we'll see if there are any immediate results. However, it will definitely need refining, possibly using Garage Band.

Interview with Don Stevens

The first book that I ever read that was written by Meher Baba was God Speaks (link to Part 1, link to Part 2) but the first book about him that I ever read was Listen Humanity by Don Stevens. Though an accomplished author, Don was also very personable and articulate as can be seen in this recent (14th April 2007) upload to the MeherBabaArchives YouTube channel:

There is great information about Don Stevens on Meher Baba's Life & Travels website. Don died in London on April 26th 2011, having being born in Nevada in 1919. It was interesting to hear him mention that after deciding to leave the oil industry, he considered training as a Jungian psychotherapist. Of course, Baba made it quite clear to Don that his involvement in the oil industry was needed to expiate his karmic dues and he did not want him to leave it.

Returning to that first book about Baba that I read, I came across Listen Humanity in a little bookstore in a small town (Nowra I think) south of Sydney. At the time, I was with my second wife Sylvia who shared in a number of serendipitous discoveries relating to Meher Baba. It must have been late 1993 or early 1994. It was Sylvia who found the book, bought it and wrote the date and a comment inside it. The physical book is in Jakarta, while I'm currently in Brisbane.