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.