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Document Menu ~litenote~═══════════════════════╕ │ │ */Contents,6/Intro,7/Part I,12/ │ WELCOME │ */Part II,58/Part III,71/Part IV,83/ │ │ */Part V,93/Summary,122/Concl,126/ │ to │ */Author,147/ │ │ │ THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF LIGHT, │ │ LITE │ │ │ │ "The Consciousness of Light, │ │ Lite" is copyrighted material, │ │ and is distributed as freeware:│ │ you are warmly encouraged to │ │ copy, upload, and otherwise │ │ distribute it, subject to the │ │ conditions given in the file │ │ (C)RIGHT.TXT │ │ │ │ Ordering information for │ │ obtain the full-length book │ │ from which this article is │ │ condensed--"The Consciousness │ │ of Light: On Physics and │ │ Metaphysics"--is given in the │ │ file ORDER.FRM │ │ │ ╘════════════════════════════════╛ HOW TO READ THIS ELECTRONIC BOOK The text and graphics of this book are hosted by a licensed copy of GRFBOOK, which was automatically loaded when you typed READBOOK at the DOS prompt. 1. Use the PgUp, PgDn, up arrow and down arrow keys to navigate (GRFBOOK accepts mouse commands also: experiment). You can jump to any page by typing the page number (which is displayed in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, and will highlight when user-entered) and pressing <Enter>. When you encounter a "(footnote: nnn)" in the text, typing the number of the page indicated ("nnn") and pressing <Enter> will cause you to jump to the relevant footnote; pressing <Enter> again after reading the footnote will return you to the page from which you jumped. To quit the book, hit <Esc>. 2. Illustrations are displayed only when the page is properly aligned: If a blank space is displayed where an illustration should obviously be, press "A" to align the page. 3. Pressing "/" at any time will display the table of contents along the menu bar at the bottom of the screen. Use the left and right arrow keys to scroll and highlight the desired menu item, and hit <Enter> to jump there. Hitting <Esc> while the table of contents is showing returns you to the normal menu bar. ~litecovr~ THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF LIGHT, LITE, v. 2.0 by Geoffrey D. Falk MystiKali Offerings Box 67 Landmark, Manitoba CANADA R0A 0X0 Manufactured in Canada Copyright (c) 1993 Geoffrey David Falk Copyright as an unpublished work (c) 1989-1992 Geoffrey David Falk All illustrations are by the author. The cover depicts the Hand of God beating the calm oceanic surface of the Cosmic Drum, to produce the basic creational sound of Om in the expanding circular ripples. CONTENTS Introduction .................................... 7 Part I The Essence of Creation .............. 12 Part II Freedom of Will ...................... 58 Part III Om ................................... 71 Part IV Holograms ............................ 83 Part V Rituals and Mythology ................ 93 Summary ......................................... 122 Conclusions ..................................... 126 About the Author ................................ 147 INTRODUCTION It is well known to all who have undertaken a thorough investigation of the quantitative ideology underlying the practice of meditation as a means toward the attainment of higher states of consciousness, that consciousness is the fundamental reality at the basis of all creation. The fact that the only difference between matter, energy and dualistic consciousness is in their respective rates of vibration has also been much emphasized, as has the idea that the amplitude of vibration of consciousness decreases as the frequency or level of consciousness increases, with the limit of zero amplitude and infinite frequency corresponding to the highest (omnipresent) state of consciousness--this highest state of conscious union with God being also the source and ground of ALL lower states. Further, given the nature of matter as a low rate of intelligent vibration or consciousness, and given also the validity of "As above, so below," we must find the behavior of consciousness reflected in the behavior of physical matter; the former qualities being ascertainable through meditation-born intuition or mystic insight, while the latter are measurable in the physicists' laboratories. However, the quantitative relations between the behavior of the physical world and the characteristics of its constituent consciousness have rarely been elucidated. What I have attempted to provide in this book is a non- reductionistic model of the behavior of consciousness as the basic stuff of the cosmos, to explain as many aspects as possible of the expanded or mystical states of awareness; as well as a concomitant demonstration that the principles upon which the operation of the physical world is based occur as a necessary consequence of the characteristics of the inner realms of consciousness; characteristics outlined in the sacred books of all true religions. Such a non- reductionistic model will, therefore, not attempt to explain mystical experiences in terms of Pribram's holographic model of the brain; it might, however, embody a higher universal or archetypal structure, of which physical holograms are merely a lower reflection on the plane of matter. As with any symbolic model, however, it is crucial that one remember that the map- model is not the territory of Reality, but is merely a mental representation of that territory: it is the "menu," not the "meal." Reality itself is uncharacterizable; if we do attempt to express it in symbolic mental terms--for example, in terms of language--this partial characterization will necessarily be paradoxical, or assert that Reality (and thus the highest state of consciousness, being one with God and inclusive of all other states) is both "X" and "Not-X"; e.g., both Being and Non-Being. Any penetrating explanation of the basic creational structure--speaking even in the precise language of mathematics--must therefore include this paradoxical character naturally within itself. God is the "coincidence of opposites," in Whom all polarities melt into unity-in-diversity; and this consciousness- territory of God can be known only through the direct experience OF consciousness BY consciousness, in the non-dual form of experience-knowledge named intuition, not through dualistic symbol-knowledge. The presentation of this model is therefore given not in any way merely to satisfy intellectual curiosities. Rather, it is fervently hoped that the readers with the good fortune to recognize that the correspondences between the structure and behavior of the physical universe, and the inner perceptions of the mystics, are not merely coincidental will carry this recognition to its logical conclusion: that deep meditators of all ages have conscious access to a realm in which all knowledge is eternally present, and that the highest responsibility of each one of us is to become a seeker of this all-compassionate Truth. Such meditation itself involves ever-deepening concentration on guru-given visualizations, etc., the goal being conscious oneness with, or direct knowledge of, the object of one's concentration. As such, meditation is distinctly non-logical: there is no process of reasoning involved in the act of meditation (although giving time to meditation is both supremely logical and reasonable). Obviously, then, mere dream analysis, introspection, or superficial contemplation are not, by any meaningful definition, meditation. If God has created (and continues to create) the universe, He must also actively sustain its operation, and ultimately (and continuously) destroy or dissolve it--creation, preservation, and destruction being indissolubly related in the Oriental philosophies. Thus, any metaphysically tenable theory regarding the ultimate nature of the universe must involve, on a fundamental level, the truth that if the Cosmic Will of God were withdrawn from creation for even a moment, the created worlds would cease to exist; just as, when the illuminating light of a movie projector is removed, there can be no more projected pictures. Further, once we acknowledge that God has created, and continues to create, the unisphere, we cannot avoid asking: How? How is it possible for formless Beauty to bring into being, sustain, and destroy the material forms of creation? How can She be active in creation, and yet be transcendent, untouched by its relativities? The most reasonable answer is that there is a "door" between transcendent Creator and immanent creation, through which these activities are effected, implying that our conscious passage through (or, rather, identification with) this door will result in identification with God beyond duality. Thus.... PART I THE ESSENCE OF CREATION It is a very widely stated tenet of experience- based religion--an idea not specific to the teachings of any one master, but rather common to many independent paths and sources--that creation consists of "ripples on the surface of the Absolute," and that we are "individualized waves of consciousness on the Infinite Ocean"; anyone who is at all familiar with Eastern philosophy will have encountered these phrases before. When the mystics speak in such metaphors, there is often a strong literal or structural truth accompanying the comparison (footnote: 149). We may therefore reasonably hope to gain some insight into the basic nature of creation through consideration of the behavior of waves on an ocean; i.e., it is natural for us to ask how the rippling motion on the surface of the Infinite Ocean of God is initiated, and to expect to find an answer or analog in terms of the behavior of water waves. In the case of our everyday "below" experience, one way in which waves may be created on a calm lake is through the effect of a strong wind passing over the water. However, lacking immediate control over the wind, an easier way by which we may produce such waves is through throwing a stone into the calm water, thus producing expanding circular wavefronts with their center at the point where the pebble entered the water; such circles (of compassion) are the two- dimensional analog of spheres (of consciousness). That is, it is proposed here that the expression "sphere of consciousness" is meant to be taken literally: that the essential conscious awareness of each one of us takes the form of a sphere; in which case an "expansion of consciousness" will be related to an increase in the radius of this sphere. Accordingly, "stones thrown by God into the Infinite Ocean" are held to provide the points of impetus from which the ripples or waves, in spheres of consciousness, on the surface of the Ocean of Reality are introduced. Given the necessity that God, and consciousness united with God, be omnipresent throughout and beyond finite vibratory creation, such rippling consciousness must have the potential to expand to infinity in spherical waves from each such center; however, each such sphere will only actually expand to infinity if it is free of all limitations in thought and body-identification; else its expansion can only be to a finite radius. As everything in Nature is cyclic, we expect to find a rhythmic expansion (though not necessarily to infinity) and contraction of each of our spheres of consciousness. Further, "tuning in" to higher states of consciousness is said to expand one's consciousness. Thus, an essential characteristic of the behavior of consciousness must be that it expands to a greater radius, the higher the level of reality to which is it "tuned in." Now, in order for God to have become all the frequencies of vibration present in creation, He must contain all these frequencies in potential. Given this, the most natural manifestation of God as creation (that is, as a basis for the production of the waves on the surface of the Ocean of Himself) must be that of a "white" consciousness: consciousness containing all possible frequencies of vibration, from zero to infinity, all of equal amplitude. How is it, then, that the potential for the expansion of consciousness to infinity becomes attenuated in mortal consciousness, when there is at the basis of all consciousness only this white light of God? ("Light" here taken, not as physically observable photons, but rather as the waves in spheres of consciousness: yoga, for example, explicitly associates light as the essence of creation ["And God said, Let there be light"] with vibrations of life energy, or waves of the Infinite Ocean.) The answer has to do with the fact that finite self restricts the range of frequencies present in its expanding sphere of light- consciousness. That is, it has to do with our limited conscious frequency response, and the consequent filtering of the white light already within us. The infinity of possible levels to which consciousness may be attuned--each such level being characterized by its own resonant frequency--may be said to form a continuous spectrum of states of consciousness or levels of reality, having resonant or "tuning in" frequencies from zero (at the lowest mineral level) to infinity in God-consciousness (where this highest state is not only the goal of all conscious evolution, but is also the source and ground of ALL states of consciousness): just as the colors of visible light display only a small part or narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum, which stretches from zero to infinite frequency, human waking consciousness expresses only a very small part of the infinite spectrum of consciousness. And, as visible light is bounded below by the infrared, and above by ultraviolet radiation--where infrared light is lower in frequency than visible light, while ultraviolet is higher in frequency--with many still-higher frequency bands of x-rays, gamma rays, etc., existing above the ultraviolet, human consciousness is bounded below by animal consciousness, while above the human waking state are astral realms of energy and visualization, and ideational spheres of thought, extending again all the way to infinite frequencies. Thus, consciousness attuned to, say, the astral worlds (heavens), must be cognizant of higher frequencies of vibration than is consciousness identified with the physical creation; that is, higher states of consciousness involve higher resonant frequencies of consciousness, or the tuning in of one's consciousness-"radio" to receive and interact with higher frequency "stations" or levels of reality: the resonant frequency is effectively a measure of how "close" one is to God, or to perfection in consciousness; we would characterize God- consciousness (and its associated omnipresence and omniscience) or complete identity with Reality as being attained to when one's resonant frequency of consciousness has become infinite. Any system--and we may consider the human body and/or its governing sphere of consciousness to be a "system"--is said to be a "bandpass-filtering" one if it characteristically "tunes in" to a narrow range of frequencies of vibration (centered around its resonant frequency) while "filtering out" higher and lower frequencies; the related "bandwidth," then, is a measure of how narrow the range of frequencies one is "tuned in" to is (the analogous characteristics for a simple electronic circuit--e.g., the "tuning in" section of a radio--are shown in Figure 1). One ~fig_01~ further concept which we shall find to be of significant importance is that of the "maximum frequency": the maximum frequency is the frequency at which the system (e.g., one's sphere of consciousness) oscillates when it is driven or excited by an input impulse signal (more on this shortly), and is a function of the resonant frequency and the bandwidth: for a given resonant frequency, a larger bandwidth of the system will result in a lower maximum frequency. The maximum frequency is always lower than the resonant frequency; except that, if the bandwidth is zero, these two frequencies are equal (so that the impulse-driven system oscillates at the same rate as the frequency to which it is attuned). As mentioned earlier, the Absolute expressing its own potential motion in consciousness most naturally as a primordial "whiteness," will contain all possible frequencies of vibration, from zero to infinity, all of equal amplitude. The simplest way in which such an unbiased whiteness may become manifest is in the form of a signal which is infinite in amplitude at a single point in time, having zero amplitude at all other times: such a signal--known as an impulse--implicitly contains all possible frequencies of vibration, all of equal amplitude. The potential for the expansion to infinity, or the manifestation of omnipresence, is exactly the characteristic expected of the white light-consciousness of a primordial expression of God, so that such a rhythmically (i.e., cyclic) applied white light would be seen to consist of a succession of such impulses separated in objective time, having the potential to expand to infinity in spheres of consciousness were it not limited or filtered according to the finite resonant frequencies inherent in duality-bound consciousness (Figure 2). ~fig_02~ Now, any bandpass-filtering system responding to an input impulse signal will not yield an infinite- amplitude output, because the system will allow only a narrow range of the frequencies present in the input signal to pass through it with appreciable amplitudes: the output will consist of a sinusoidal oscillation (producing a periodic wavyness in the response) modulated or multiplied by a decaying (that is, decreasing in amplitude with the passage of time) exponential function, as in Figure 3. As imagined mortals, we impose on ourselves a similar fate: although the white consciousness impulse (our input; "driving," or providing the impetus for, the expansion of our individual spheres of consciousness; the "white light of God, already within us") contains all frequencies, all of equal amplitude, our filtered output--expanding spherically as our spheres of ~fig_03~ consciousness--is very limited in its range of frequencies, owing to our conscious identification with the worlds of finitude and relativity (with resonant frequency less than infinity; attunement to the Absolute would again require an infinite resonant frequency of consciousness). Thus restricting the range of frequencies present in our individual spheres of consciousness, we will not realize ourselves as white consciousness expanding instantaneously to infinity, but will rather feel ourselves as oscillating localizations of consciousness, as in Figure 3. That is, the horizontal axis in the output of Figure 3 represents the passage of time, as the vertical axis represents expansion (i.e., an increase in the time-varying radius of one's balloon or sphere of consciousness) into relative space, with the extent of this expansion defining the boundaries of presence of the enclosed metaphysical light or waves of consciousness. Again, consciousness attuned to, say, the astral level of reality, must be cognizant of higher frequencies of vibration than is consciousness identified with the physical creation; that is, higher states of consciousness involve higher resonant frequencies of consciousness. Body-conscious attunement to such higher realities (e.g., in working consciously through one's astral body--the higher frequency "subtle energy" counterpart to the physical body, one aspect of which is one's "aura"), or the ability to "receive" or cognize the wide range of frequencies over which "sensory" information may be transmitted in these higher octaves, can also involve a widening of one's bandwidth of conscious response. This latter attribute is a fundamental characteristic of (physical, astral, and causal/ideational) body- consciousness: sensitivity to the wide range of frequencies over which external stimuli are received and cognized in awareness of the body always involves a large bandwidth of consciousness. Conversely, a narrow bandwidth of consciousness may be cultivated by concentrating deeply on a specific thought, and so transcending the body: when we go deep into concentration, sense-data received by the physical body do not intrude on our conscious thought- processes; they are "filtered out," so that our consciousness takes on a narrow bandwidth. In the response of a bandpass-filtering system to an input impulse signal, a higher resonant frequency of the system will result in a larger maximum amplitude of the response, while a larger bandwidth will produce a faster decay (and will lower maximum frequency, at which the impulse-driven system oscillates; and attenuate the maximum amplitude of expansion); specifically, consciousness of infinite resonant frequency and infinite bandwidth, allowing the white light impulse to manifest through it without limitation, will expand instantaneously to infinity, thereafter vibrating with zero amplitude and infinite frequency. Beings in higher states of consciousness will therefore experience a response (or output, which is again the consciousness that expands, as spheres) to the white consciousness impulses that has a greater maximum amplitude of spatial expansion than does the response of physical body-identified consciousness (Figure 4). This is highly significant: the greater maximum ~fig_04~ amplitude of the impulse response in higher states of consciousness means that an expansion, or raising of the level, of consciousness will lead to an expansion of that consciousness into space. The higher a person's state of consciousness, the farther his-her consciousness will expand, and the less time will be taken to do so, thus the greater will be the velocity of expansion. We now make the reasonable proposition that it is not only the consciousness of sentient beings that takes the form of spheres, but that the most basic mechanism of creation consists of "stones" thrown by God into the surface of the Infinite Ocean, producing rippling spheres of consciousness. Accordingly, consider that if we throw several stones into a calm lake, the resulting expanding circular wavefronts will interact with one another. When the crests of one or more waves overlap, they will add (or "constructively interfere") to produce an even larger wave, whereas when the crest of one wave and the trough of another meet, they will cancel each other out--"destructively interfere"--producing a region of temporary calm. If we were very skilled, we could cause a number of such crests to meet to yield a localized disturbance or "island," surrounded by a region of calmness; we could, in short, create a "particle," or a differentiation of the continuum of the calm lake. Given enough stones, and sufficient skill, we could bring into being and sustain the existence of many such particles simultaneously. And if we were, say, Supremely Intelligent, we could even cause the movements and interactions of these particles to appear to be governed by (e.g., Newton's) laws; but these laws, being of our own creation, could be circumscribed whenever we so chose. And, all particles would dissolve into serene unity if our will, in the form of stones tossed into the pond, were withdrawn: this creation would have no existence independent of our guiding will. This being the case, we can visualize the interpenetrating particles of the various levels of relative reality as arising from the interaction or addition of many colors or frequencies of ripples-- issuing from the centers of many globes of consciousness--of metaphysical light or waves in consciousness. The degree of filtering of each sphere then reflects how hard the stone generating that sphere is thrown into the water: higher resonant frequencies may be related, in analogy, to higher stone velocities. These interacting wave-colors will produce an Ocean surface of constantly trembling excitation. Physically observable particles will then arise as regions of space in which the average disturbance of the Ocean surface is non-zero over a time interval long compared with the period between successive impulses applied to all spheres of consciousness and, specifically, long in comparison with the temporal resolution of physical measuring apparatus (itself composed of such non-zero-average particles). Further, the interfering addition of waves of different frequencies tends to result in the production of islands or particles having vibratory rates of lower frequency but larger amplitude than that of the consciousness underlying them. The waves issuing from these sources of vibration in the Ocean surface may thus be said to compose a universal interference pattern of light and shadow (ripples in consciousness, and calm, resulting from the destructive interference or cancellation of these waves; or, more accurately, non-zero-average particles, and the intervening zero-average vacuum state); a localization and subdivision of consciousness, producing matter as a "condensation," or lower rate (and larger amplitude) of vibration than/of consciousness: all matter is consciousness in various stages of evolution or spiritual unfoldment. We would further expect the ripples of light within each produced sphere of consciousness to be related to the level of that consciousness, with higher resonant frequencies allowing higher frequency vibrations of such subtle light to become manifest. And, because infinite resonant frequency consciousness is spread through all space for only a single point in time in its response to each impulse-motion of God within itself (i.e., it mirrors the input impulse), and so cannot contribute any rippling vibrations within its sphere (as vibration cannot occur in zero time), such consciousness, containing all possible frequencies of vibration, will involve/create no ripples on the surface of the Absolute: pure consciousness, in its omniscient, omnipresent white state, makes no direct contribution (i.e., no contribution without first taking on some measure of ego-limitation) to the disturbances of the Ocean surface. Further, given the discontinuous nature of the universal impulsive basis, it is apparent that relative creation consists of a vast number of "snapshots," or frames in a cosmic motion picture--each one the collective effect of the waves in all spheres of consciousness, produced by countless stones thrown simultaneously with varying degrees of force into the otherwise calm Ocean--shown in such quick succession that their discontinuity is invisible to the delusion-bound mind (which is itself a parcel of these ripples); much in the same way that the dark periods between frames of a motion picture are not visible to the human eye due to the image- retaining ability of the retina. There are additional ways of arriving at the idea that the universe has its basis in rhythmic impulses. The stimulated human nervous system operates in terms of electrical pulses or "spikes" uniformly separated in time, the frequency of these spikes being dependent on the strength of the applied stimulus (Figure 5); this has been characterized as a "Morse code of action and rest." The human anatomy is a microcosmic representation of the universe. Thus, if the human body operates in terms of "spikes" evenly separated in objective time, the cosmos--the body of God--should have a similar structure. Likewise, as we shall see in ~fig_05~ Part III, the nature of Om--the basis of all vibrations--as arising from the "beating of the Cosmic Drum" or the "whirr of the Cosmic Motor," implies that Nature has a rhythmic impulsive basis. Further, the rhythmic series of impulses at the basis of manifestation may be viewed as a Universal Breathing: In the mortal breathing process, the flow of prana (a subtle life current, or life energy, or life force) in inhalation is held to be associated with an expansion or raising of the level of consciousness, while the flow of an opposing current in exhalation is identified with a contraction, or lowering of the level, of one's sphere (balloon) of consciousness. This is then followed by a period of rest in which breath is neither inhaled nor exhaled; an interval of temporary breathlessness. The corresponding period of rest in the Universal Breathing is, evidently, the period between successive impulses or Breaths. The effect of the maximum radius of expansion "peak" of the impulse response of consciousness will, when viewed over a span of time long compared with the period of the Universal Breathing, be to produce an apparently "solid," but actually intermittently- existing, sphere of one's consciousness corresponding to this maximum radius--a sphere which does not oscillate sinusoidally, but rather remains relatively constant in size, varying its radius only when the level of consciousness changes; what we would normally think of as a "sphere of consciousness." The maximum radius increases in higher states of consciousness, so that a raising of one's level of consciousness will again result in an expansion of this maximum-radius sphere of consciousness. Further, in the impulse response, any expansion into space is always followed by a contraction, so that the unconditional expansion of consciousness to infinity should be taken as referring to an unending increase in resonant/maximum frequency of consciousness, hence increase in the maximum amplitude of conscious expansion, rather than as a spatial expansion without a corresponding contraction. God--and so mortal consciousness as a reflection of That--has both an immanent aspect in space and time, and a transcendent nature, "beyond" space and time; spaceless and timeless. We may say that we are bound by time and space whenever our consciousness is identified with the immanent aspect; and that, conversely, consciousness identified with the transcendent nature would not (so long as it remains in this identification) be constrained by time or space. Given the association of the highest state of consciousness--identified with both omnipresent immanent, and transcendent God--with a vibration of zero amplitude and infinite frequency (infinite resonant frequency, infinite bandwidth consciousness can again be considered to oscillate in this manner after its momentary expansion to infinity), consciousness will transcend space and time whenever its amplitude of vibration (i.e., its radius) is zero; that is, when its sphere has momentarily contracted to a point in its response to the primordial impulses. This suggestion is not without precedent: there are explicit indications in some of the Eastern esoteric literature that when consciousness passes through the archetypal Great Point or common center of all consciousness, it comes into momentary contact with all levels of reality, including the Ultimate (timeless) One. The passage of one's sphere of consciousness through the individualized ideal point (of zero radius) at its center may likewise be assumed to grant contact with, or merging in, transcendent God beyond time and space. Conversely, as stated previously, consciousness will be identified with the immanent, and time-bound, aspect of God whenever the radius of its sphere is non-zero. An independent corroboration of this view of the ideal point as being the "door" between transcendent God and immanent creation can be found in the Kabbalistic lore, where the symbol of the first Sephiroth, representing the Infinite, is a point. We shall see later that Revelation has similar ideas regarding the characteristics that consciousness must cultivate in order to pass through the door between creation and God. Compare also A. K. Coomaraswamy: "Moment without duration, point without extension-- these are the...Strait Way leading out of time into eternity, from death to immortality." (I do not claim that Coomaraswamy was referring here to the point at the center of one's sphere of consciousness; nevertheless, valid structural [i.e., archetypal] ideas tend to work on many different levels.) Also, basic laws of wave behavior dictate that in order for the planar wavefronts "entering" creation in the primordial impulses (plane, or straight, waves can be thought of as arising from circular or spherical waves of infinite radius, and so having zero curvature) to be "diffracted" into perfect finite spheres (of consciousness), the apertures, or doors, through which they squeeze must be ideal points, at the centers of the resulting spheres; as will be presented in Part IV. Likewise, in the Christian symbolism of the cross, the horizontal and vertical lines, representing the finite and the infinite, respectively, meet at a point. Interestingly, in Roman mythology the two-faced god Janus is the patron of beginnings and endings, as well as the guardian of portals (i.e., gateways). Is this not reasonable, that the conditional beginnings and endings present everywhere within "two-faced" duality should be associated, both in mythology and in universal structure, with guardianship of, or the preventing of the passage through, a door between transcendent God and multifarious creation, the latter rooted always in polarities? For, as well shall see, it is only the varying-degreed inability of polarity- swayed consciousness to pass through the gateway between transcendent Creator and creation that keeps it bound to beginnings and endings. Because the sinusoidal (periodic wavyness) part of the impulse response oscillates at the maximum frequency, the higher a being's maximum/resonant frequency of consciousness, the more zero-crossings-- the places where the impulse-response graph crosses the horizontal axis, corresponding to the sphere of consciousness described by this graph having momentarily zero radius--or momentary contractions of consciousness to a point, that creature will experience in the rest interval between impulsive Breaths of the Universe (as in Figure 4, page 23: higher states of consciousness oscillate at a higher frequency, or cross the horizontal axis at a higher rate, than do lower states). The impulse response contraction of consciousness to a point is again equivalent to the temporary merging of consciousness in transcendent God. And, although there is only one objective "universal snapshot" per Universal Breath, each successive merging of consciousness in the Timeless One, and its subsequent exit back into manifestation, allows for the experience of one subjective "snapshot"; that is, one element or fragment of thought or visualization. We may reasonably say that specific thoughts are noble to the extent to which they tend to expand one's consciousness, and so contribute to a greater realization of wholeness or goodness. But an expansion of consciousness, as we have seen, implies a higher maximum frequency of consciousness, which is in turn the product of a high resonant frequency and narrow bandwidth. Thus, we are led to associate more noble thoughts, with higher resonant frequencies of consciousness. Further, we would then be led to relate thought and visualization to the vibrations occurring within one's sphere of consciousness--so that more noble thoughts will be associated with a higher frequency of illuminating light contained within this sphere, as well as with a higher resonant frequency of consciousness. This placement of thought is, indeed, a very natural association: where could one's thoughts have their origin, if not within one's sphere of consciousness? (Although it should be noted that thought also flows to some extent throughout the body; Einstein, for example, claimed that he "thought with his muscles.") Since every time consciousness contracts to a point it must "bounce" back into creation immediately afterwards (for then having non- zero radius), the number of elements of thought (or bounces, or "frames" of the subjective motion picture occurring within one's individual sphere of consciousness) in a given amount of objective time is numerically equal to the number of times such consciousness has gone into transcendent God. Thus, the increase in zero-crossings in higher states of consciousness must result in the awareness of a greater amount of subjective time (bounces, or elements of thought) per moment of objective time. Also, since the contraction of consciousness to a point results in momentary identification with transcendent causeless God, these point-contractions must confer proportional free choice and free will on the creatures experiencing them, as will be discussed in Part II. Further, because the nature of God is transcendent Bliss, we will experience Her Bliss in proportion to the degree to which we realize our eternal identity with Her; that is, in proportion to the frequency with which our individual spheres of consciousness contract to a point and so go beyond creation into Her. And, an increase in this rate will come concomitant with a greater maximum radius of expansion of one's sphere of consciousness (because both the rate of "bouncing," and the maximum radius of expansion, are dependent on the maximum frequency), or greater degree of identification with the omnipresence of God within creation, so that the expansion of one's consciousness will be inherently bliss-increasing. (On a lower level, this is also related to why acting unselfishly makes one feel good.) Further, in the Consciousness of Light (of infinite resonant frequency and bandwidth), after the instantaneous expansion to infinity the impulse response is always exactly zero: perfected consciousness is identified always with the "point without extension, moment without duration," and so possesses the transcendent Bliss and Wisdom of God without limitation. (Although the passage of consciousness through the ideal point at its center can be only momentary, there is nothing in principle to prevent the frequency of these passages from being infinite, in which case such consciousness is effectively always in that point, so continuously and fully identified with transcendent God.) We have spoken of there being a "door" between God beyond duality, and relative creation, this door being the point at the center of one's sphere of consciousness. But--and this is very important--this is not to say that God "splits Himself into two regions"--one on either side of the door--in order to effect a mechanism of manifestation; that is, not to say that God exists perfectly on one (transcendent) side of the door but not fully on the other (immanent or creational) side. Consciousness contracted to zero radius does not "pass through" this door to an "other side," as much as, when momentarily contracted to a point in its oscillating response to the Divine Drumming, it exists in the "moment without duration, point without extension"; which, in Coomaraswamy's words, is the "Way leading out of time into eternity," where eternity is not merely an infinite amount of time, but is BEYOND time. That is, when one's consciousness has BECOME the "point without extension, moment without duration," in this state it transcends, or is unbound by, space and time. Thus, the greater the frequency of point-contractions of consciousness (that is, the higher the maximum frequency), the more it will transcend time. Nevertheless, keeping this point firmly in mind, it has been, and will continue to be, convenient in many instances to speak of consciousness as metaphorically "passing through" this aperture. Higher states of consciousness involve an increase in resonant/maximum frequency, and an impulse response oscillates sinusoidally at the rate of the maximum frequency. But a sinusoidal vibration is always half the time above the horizontal axis, and half the time below, regardless of its rate of vibration: it is always non-zero in amplitude, except for the points where the response crosses the horizontal axis; and these zero-crossings, or contractions of consciousness to a point, do not take away from the amount of time spent out of transcendent God, because each such crossing uses up only a single point of objective time. Therefore, all non-perfect states of consciousness spend the same amount of time "out" of transcendent God in the interval between Universal Breaths, so that the amount of objective time perceived in between the initiation of objective events or "universal snapshots" is the same in all states of consciousness/levels of reality: objective time passes at the same rate in all levels of reality. Since the amount of subjective time experienced for a given amount of objective time increases as the resonant/maximum frequency of consciousness is raised, higher states of consciousness will again allow for a greater number (as judged against our matter- identified standards) of mental images and therefore experiences to be condensed in the same period of objective time. And in the Consciousness of Light--the complete merging of heretofore dualistic consciousness in transcendent God, oscillating with infinite frequency--we will have an infinite amount of subjective time per Universal Breath: objective time will "stop." Further, because such perfected consciousness--endowed, through its continuous presence in the point at the center of its sphere, with complete identification with all-knowing transcendent God, and so with omniscience--also expands instantaneously to infinity, and so is omnipresent throughout and beyond finite creation, we see that omnipresence and omniscience come hand in hand. Accordingly, when limitations are placed on one's level of consciousness, willpower and the ability to influence creation through concentration in free will must also be constrained. We may summarize the model developed thus far by returning to the motion picture analogy. Movies are, of course, produced by applying white light, at uniformly separated instants in time, to successive frames of a filtering film. Each small area of the frame in question then bandpass-filters the white light applied to it, according to that area's color or resonant frequency, allowing only a limited range of the frequencies present in the underlying white light to become manifest through it. The God- Ocean becoming manifest(ation), in its potential impulse-movements, may be thus regarded as analogous to the white light projector beam, containing all possible frequencies of vibration; the frequency- limiting effect of finite consciousness is the film which filters the white light, resulting in the appearance of colors and forms; the interval of rest following each Universal Breath is the "dark period" in between movie frames or the initiation of "universal snapshots"; and the Ocean surface is the cinema screen, capable of reflecting within itself all possible colors or rates of conscious intelligent vibration. When the participating audience (as subject), through undivided concentration, merges in the projected picture (hitherto as object), it can be (aware of) its activities directly, without need of the intermediate act of perception. And when, through concentration on the white light producing the picture, members of the audience dissolve their individual contributions to the filtering effects of the film and so merge in the projecting light, they transcend/include the colors and forms of the transitory creation to live eternally in both the picture and in that state in which all possible projected pictures are contained in potential. Further, union of one's individualized consciousness with the infinite beam of the Cosmic Projector has as its proportional companion the ability to modify the collective contents of the film and so the colors and forms projected as creation. The frequency-limiting finite self is the colored glass through which the white light of the Absolute is seen; and when It is seen, it appears as the universe. However, you have the potential to expand as white light-consciousness to infinity with every Universal Breath, because collective delusion (maya) does not directly limit the individual expansion of consciousness. Further, since all vibrations, and so all consciousness, are simply movements of/within the Ocean of Brahman or God, all that is needed to know the basic activities or interpenetrating objects of the universe directly, through conscious oneness rather than through the interactions of sense-organs, is to transfer our identification from body and mind, to the space encompassed by our expanded consciousness. A master who, having spread his-her consciousness through all Nature, is thus directly aware of the true basis of all creation, rightly sees no difference between the essential elements of water and of land: both are built of a multiplicity of metaphysical light rays, or vibrations of life energy; so that, to him-her, all creation is simply a mass of light and shadow of God. In accepting the validity of the motion picture- like impulsive basis of the universe, we have resolved a "controversy" present in the teachings of certain Tibetan Buddhist sects: The tangible world IS movement, say the Masters, not a collection of moving objects, but movement itself. There are no objects "in movements," it is the movement which constitutes the objects which appear to us: they are nothing but movement. This movement is a continued and infinitely rapid succession of flashes of energy. All objects perceptible to our senses, all phenomena of whatever kind and whatever aspect they may assume, are constituted by a rapid succession of instantaneous events. There are two theories and both consider the world as movement. One states that the course of this movement (which creates phenomena) is continuous, as the flow of a quiet river seems to us. The other declares that the movement is intermittent and advances by separate flashes of energy which follow each other at such small intervals that these intervals are almost non-existent. (Alexandra David-Neel and Lama Yongden, "The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects".) In truth, this flow of energy is both intermittent and continuous: intermittent, for arising from separate impulsive flashes; and continuous, in that the wave- disturbances produced by these filtered flashes do not vanish immediately after being created, but rather decrease slowly in amplitude in the "almost non- existent" interval in between impulses. The universe is not merely a collection of moving objects, created once at the beginning of time by God or a big bang and then left to interact according to laws of physics; rather, it is motion itself--indeed, motion of God- Reality Himself--continuously sustained by the will of God in the white light impulses of the Cosmic Projector. The ideas that the only difference between matter, energy and rippling finite consciousness is in their respective rates of vibration, and that the amplitude of vibration of consciousness decreases as the frequency or level of consciousness increases, with-- as noted previously--the limit of zero amplitude and infinite frequency corresponding to the highest (omnipresent) state of consciousness, have been explicitly stated in the quantitative yogic philosophy: the literal translation of yoga is "union"--of the individualized wave of consciousness with the Infinite Ocean of Spirit; anyone who practices meditation with the goal of realizing his- her inherent divinity may therefore be broadly classified as a yogi. (Hatha yoga--the bodily postures which are commonly equated with a "recreational yoga" --is only one of a number of "schools" of the yogic science, and is not the most spiritually efficacious, in that it is not directly concerned with the expansion of one's consciousness.) The tenets of yoga may thus be stated succinctly as: Jesus the Christ was perfect but not unique; each one of us has the potential, and obligation, to manifest the same divine love and perfection as was lived by Christ Jesus. Conscious progress toward this perfection is made through repeated incarnations in human form, and can be hastened through meditation. More specifically, this way of life teaches that the individualized consciousness of each one of us began its created existence inhabiting mineral bodies, evolved--had its frequency of vibration increased--slowly through millions of incarnations in plant and animal forms (in physical and in subtler or higher frequency realities), and will be reincarnated in human forms until it is perfected and retains no vestige of its initial matter-identity: until it melts in God, and so becomes omnipresent, omniscient and limitless; breathless in Eternal Joyous Anticipation. (The soul is covered by many layers of ignorance-clothing; the physical body is merely the outermost of these layers; shedding it at death does not make one naked.) In sub- human states of awareness, such evolution is guided by and effected through cosmic influences; however, for humans and higher consciousness, possessed of partial free will, this progress toward perfection can be hastened through conscious effort on the part of the individual. Again, subjective time dilates in higher states of consciousness--e.g., in the dream state, which is an altered state of consciousness in which the dreamer is working primarily through his-her astral body. However, we know also that "time flies when we're having fun," where we have not necessarily had an increase in the rate of our conscious processes, but rather sense (subjectively) that less time has been used up than has actually passed; that is, the ratio of subjective to objective time seems to be LOWER than normal. And, while "having fun" may sometimes involve concentration on bodily sensations, and so relatively low states of consciousness, time also flies when we are engaged in more noble activities--in deep meditation, for example--so that this cannot be characteristic only of physical states of consciousness. How is this to be resolved? Well.... Time tends to pass quickly, and we tend to breathe slower and to some extent transcend the distractions of the body, whenever our attention is engrossed in intellectual or delicate physical pursuits. That is, our perception of "time flying" seems to be related more to depth and steadiness of attention (and so to proportional dissolution of the subject/object division) than to specific state of consciousness: whenever we concentrate deeply on an idea or activity, keeping the level of consciousness relatively constant and so calming the mind, time passes quickly. Thus, "clock-watching," by its very inattentive nature, will cause time to drag. And, while (in accord with Einstein's colloquial description of relativity) the company of a pretty girl will not, in general, raise one's level of consciousness, and so will produce no increase in subjective time, it will, in general, favorably occupy one's attention, and so cause hours to pass like minutes. And the placing of one's hand on a hot stove, as with any activity that one considers to be undesirable, will be conducive to large and frequent variations in level of consciousness--we tend not to concentrate deeply on anything unpleasant, for obvious reasons--and so, again with no dilation of subjective time, will cause minutes to pass like hours. And dreams, being the product, usually, of a restless mind, will evidence a dilation of subjective time, but no corresponding temporal "flying." This restlessness is also responsible for the arising of boredom when one's attention is not occupied by some form of entertainment: those who engage sufficiently in the practice of meditation, and so attain to a predominant steadiness of mind, do not get bored. There is no activity that is intrinsically boring: it is only inattentiveness and unwillingness in the performance of our duties that causes time to drag. Mystical experiences will be accompanied by the sensation that "time has come to a stop," because, owing to one's consciousness and attention being wholly engrossed in the experience--even though it may not be the direct experience of Omnipresence--time will fly so much that there will be no sense of its passage: everything will be felt to be happening NOW. When mind is dissolved and consciousness is perfected through undivided concentration on God, subjective time becomes infinite, and we thus experience a full transcendence of time. That is, we realize the timeless Eternal Now..."eternity in an hour." Because duality-bound consciousness is vibratory and finite we can describe WHAT IT IS LIKE (i.e., how it behaves) in symbolic mathematical terms; we do this without attempting to say what it IS, for what consciousness IS is (a rippled region of) Reality, which is in essence indescribable. These oscillations of consciousness, far from excluding intelligence, contain within themselves the potential for intuition and free choice. Further, it is very reasonable that the structure of the created worlds should be based on the idea of the impulse response, because the response for perfected consciousness is of zero amplitude and infinite frequency, containing all larger amplitudes and lower frequencies in potential, with these grosser vibrations being extracted from the primordial instantaneously omnipresent impulse through the placing of frequency response limitations on this elemental incarnation of God (that is, through the concentration on low rates of vibration). Also, the bandpass-filtered impulse is the only signal for which the all-important frequency of zero-crossings is directly proportional to the maximum frequency of the filtering system. The impulse expands to infinity, and then contracts back to zero, all in zero time; that is, consciousness which does not limit the impulse but allows it to manifest fully through itself, is both expanding and contracting, simultaneously. This is rightly paradoxical--nothing in our ordinary experience or logic can both expand AND contract at the same time-- and is a noteworthy indication that our mathematical- symbolic-model-map is "hitting things more on less on the head," in that, whenever we attempt to express the perfectly integrated and indescribable-without- qualities Absolute in terms of words or symbols-- including mathematical symbols--the description must necessarily consist of a pair of mutually contradictory statements (e.g., God is both Being and Non-Being); so that if we attempt to describe the highest state of consciousness, which is one with Reality, this description must likewise be in paradoxical terms. Mathematics, being the most precise language, rightly accords with this. As in the pantheistic and transcendental conceptions, God is present everywhere within, and beyond, His creation. Since an expansion of one's sphere of consciousness takes one closer to omnipresence--omnipresence being granted when one's sphere of consciousness has become infinitely large, to include all finite creation and more, and so transcend duality in passing fully through the door between God and creation--it must result in an increasing degree of conscious identification with God. If we acknowledge that the purpose of existence is exactly this evolution of consciousness from initial finitude and ego-identification to final emancipation through the dissolution of ego in the omnipresence of God, we must then regard good as that which produces an expansion of consciousness. Further, since the contraction of one's sphere of consciousness reduces the degree of one's conscious identity with God and so goes contrary to the highest hope of every heart or purpose of creation, that which produces such a contraction must be regarded as evil. And, that thought or action which results in the greatest expansion of consciousness--and so the realization of the greatest unselfish Bliss--among the creatures of Nature is to be recognized as producing the greatest good. It will readily be seen that this greatest good must correspond to the action advocated by the Divine Will in any circumstance, as the Creator can have in mind no lesser goal for His creation than the eventual, inevitable, unlimited expansion of imagined mortal consciousness into reunion with its Blissful Source. As good is intimately related to the expansion of consciousness to receive Bliss, and evil then concomitant with contraction of consciousness, we must next ask: If consciousness is rightly cognized as expanding by an observer in one state of consciousness, will it be seen to be expanding by observers in all states of consciousness? For, if this is the case, then that which is rightly cognized as good by one state of consciousness is good for all. It is easy to see that only a reversal in the flow of time could result in an expansion being observed as a contraction: If we were to take a motion picture of a balloon expanding, and then play this film through the projector backward--effectively reversing the direction of the flow of time--we would see the balloon contracting. But time never really flows backward, because the Universal Breathing does not reverse itself (alternatively, the level of entropy or disorder in the universe is constantly increasing on an overall scale; this is the traditional scientific basis for the argument that time cannot be reversed). Therefore, what is rightly seen as good by one is so for all, though varying degrees of delusion may cloud individual perceptions, resulting in disparate conceptions as to the true benefits of performed thoughts or actions. Whatever conception of God one accepts, and whether or not one rightly recognizes the validity of visions and other higher-state-of-consciousness experiences-- the existence of which logically implies a highest (infinite) state of consciousness--it must be acknowledged that doing good makes one more Godlike, or brings one closer to God over a period of time, while the performance of evil takes one further away from God--this is so by any reasonable definition of good and of evil. And "going closer to" as time passes is absolutely distinguishable from "going away from" if we can ascertain the direction of the flow of time --which we can. Thus, in any God- or perfection-based view of the universe, good and evil are absolutely distinguishable. And, as soon as one rightly acknowledges that consciousness can be expanded, and that the consciousness of God is omnipresent throughout and beyond creation, it cannot be denied that the expansion of one's consciousness must take one closer to God, just as the contraction of one's consciousness takes one further away from union with Him. The transcendence of good and evil, and of all dualities, is realized in the highest state of consciousness, in which one's consciousness expands instantaneously to infinity, allowing the input impulse to manifest fully through it without limitation. This instantaneous omnipresence, through the taking on of frequency response limitations, has become the expansion/contraction duality. Conversely, the point/infinity duality is resolved by expanding from point to infinity instantaneously, being thus present in both, and in everything in between, simultaneously. (The ideal mathematical point can be considered to be the polar opposite of plus infinity: If we were to expand a spherical balloon indefinitely, it would become infinite relative space, while the indefinite contraction of the same balloon would result in it becoming an ideal point.) This results not in an averaging of the characteristics of the members of the duality, but rather in a return to the Source, of infinite subjective time and space. Duality is thus transcended not by maintaining a dynamic balance between zero and infinity, good and evil, etc., but rather by returning to their transcendent Source through all-embracing compassion. The derivation of dualities from a higher, neutral, integrated state, and the transcendence of duality in the highest state of consciousness, are mirrored in the behavior of physical light, the expression of (the highest state of) consciousness on the physical plane: Any particle and its associated anti-particle (an anti-particle has the same mass as its particle counterpart, but the opposite sign of electric charge; the anti-particle of the electron, for example, is the positron) can be created from light of sufficiently high frequency, by a natural process known as pair production. Light may therefore be rightly said to contain both matter and anti-matter in potential (just as omnipresence contains expansion and contraction, or good and evil, in potential; this duality is again transcended, however, only through unconditional goodness or raising of the level of consciousness). An integrated state is one in which the two apparently opposite members of a duality (e.g., matter and anti- matter) are seen to be merely different aspects of the same source (e.g., light). Matter and anti-matter are therefore differentiated states of the integrated state of physical light, so that light is seen to contain matter and anti-matter in integrated potential: the presence of the qualifier "integrated" indicates that both apparent opposites exist in a harmonious, balanced condition, in the higher state: photons, being pure energy, do not consist of distinct particles of matter and of anti-matter, travelling together. Conversely, when dualistic states (of matter and anti-matter, for example) recombine (in pair annihilation), returning to their integrated state, the result is not nothing, but rather a release of the energy which had become both of the dualistic pair: two photons are produced, which then move away from the point of annihilation at the velocity of light. The simultaneous, spatially coincident annihilation of many particle/anti-particle pairs would produce a burst of photons moving outward in all directions from the point of annihilation, or an expanding sphere of light. If the matter/anti-matter pairs are of all possible energies, the expanding sphere will contain all possible frequencies, and so be white light. Similarly, when dualistic opposites (e.g., possessive love/dispossessive hate) are resolved into their integrated potential state, the result is a release of the Consciousness (e.g., unconditional Love for God in all creation) which had become both of the dualistic pair. The coinstantaneous realization of the underlying integrated unity behind all apparent dualities will therefore result in the perception of consciousness expanding as a sphere of white Light; as we have already seen in the context of the impulse response model of the universe. (It is widely known that, in addition to visions of personal God in the form of the Heavenly Father or Divine Mother, etc., to the devotee whose worship takes an impersonal turn, That which is beyond manifestation may be witnessed within, in the form of an expanding sphere of Light [the Bible makes many associations of God with light; cf. I John 1:5, "God is light"].) Further, according to special relativity, an observer identified with an expanding sphere of (physical) light--that is, one moving in all directions at the velocity of light-- would have an infinite amount of subjective time for each moment of objective time: objective time would "stop." Because of this relationship between level of consciousness and relative velocity--that travel at the velocity of light reflects the characteristics of the highest state of consciousness--this highest state, of infinite resonant frequency, may be referred to as the Consciousness of Light. The structure of the created universes is based on the expansion and contraction of consciousness. The laws of right moral behavior (regarding good and evil) are based on the expansion and contraction of the SAME consciousness: The lawful cosmic order by which the processes of the universe are upheld and regulated is one and the same as the absolute morality by whose standards human destiny is determined. Further, although in both art and science what we measure or see depends on our reference frame--our relative velocity, or state of consciousness--there is again an all-encompassing level of consciousness in which absolute values are defined in all of interrelated aesthetics, morality, and external measurement. Not coincidentally, this state is the only One in which we can see things the way they actually are, without filtering them according to our egoic preconceptions. That is, it is only in unfiltered God-consciousness that we can be impartially and fully aware of the entire infinite spectrum of frequencies of vibration within creation, with our perception of these rates of oscillation being not distorted by the effects of the various colored "sunglasses" of pleasure, pain, like and dislike, which normally interfere with our right perception of reality. A person wearing blue sunglasses will see the sun as blue; one viewing it through red lenses will assert that it is red; they may even "agree to disagree," and settle on saying: "To me, truth is red; to you, it is blue; we are both right, in our own ways"; but he-she who has removed all such distorting discolorations knows that it is white light that illumines all. Isn't this obvious? Even this white light, however, is not itself Absolute Truth: God-Truth is neither black nor white, nor is it gray; however, the resolution of black and white into their integrated state--the all-energetic impulse which, containing all frequencies, is white; and yet, producing no ripples on the surface of the Ocean of Reality, is perfectly calm or black: a lightless light!--does result in union with transcendent God, or Absolute Bliss-Truth, beyond all such dualities. When healings of body and/or mind are effected through natural medicines, they generally occur over a period of time. However, instantaneous or "miraculous" changes in health are also very much possible: Every atom of the body is "refreshed" with each Universal Breath--billions upon billions of times every second-- so that their arrangement and constitution can, with sufficient application of God-guided will, be altered with each new "universal snapshot": there is no necessary time element involved in this or in spiritual evolution: be infinite NOW! Likewise, the book you are reading and the room around you are not the same ones as when you last looked at them, being constantly re-created. The atoms and molecules of the universe have no continuous existence independent of the will of God; without His illuminative sustenance, they would melt away into nothingness...which is, in the end, really not so bad a fate: worse things happen at sea. And when this "ever-new" nature of matter is accepted, what objection can be made to the possibility of instantaneous healings of body and/or mind? The success of physical science, and its doctrine of an unintelligent, mechanistic universe, has bred within our society the misconception that any phenomenon which can be described mathematically must be unintelligent. This is most unfortunate: the order implicit in mathematical regularity is the very hallmark of intelligence, not its gainsay. It is only through the omnipresent influence of the Great Coordinating Intelligence underlying all creation that there can be any order and regularity to the workings of the universe; without this Intelligence, the material forms produced from the interactions of the various aspects of differentiated consciousness could have no sustained order. Seen in this light, the teleological argument--the argument from design, or the idea that the clockworklike regularity of the universe infers the existence of a Cosmic Watchmaker-- becomes one of the most convincing arguments of philosophy. In any metaphysically tenable view of the universe, we cannot talk about the basic structure and behavior of creation without necessary recognition and active inclusion of the existence of consciousness, God, free will, and the absolute distinguishability of good and evil. Physical science is concerned with the behavior of matter, while religion deals with the knowledge or perceptions received in higher states of consciousness; and free will implies the ability of consciousness to influence matter; so that the existence of free will necessitates an underlying unity of science and religion. And this basic oneness, as has been demonstrated, goes much deeper than a simple recognition of the fact that the possible validity of today's theories of physics affects, say, a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis; or how the existence of God and absolute standards of moral behavior must govern our political and economic actions. At its root, this common ground necessitates that, again, the principles upon which the spiritual science of meditation is based are the selfsame as those which uphold the existence of all Nature: were it not for the validity of higher and highest levels of consciousness and thought, physical creation could not exist. PART II FREEDOM OF WILL Familiarity with the impulse and the concepts of resonant frequency and bandwidth of consciousness, as presented in the previous chapter, also facilitates a more detailed discussion of the free will problem, as will now be developed. The orthodox philosophical argument against the existence of free choice, the presence of which is a prerequisite to the exercise of free will, runs as follows: Mental and physical processes are all either deterministic or indeterministic. Every mental choice or event that is deterministic has, by definition, a cause or series of causes, and is therefore not free of past influences. Further, any mental event that is indeterministic is, by definition, purely random, and so cannot be considered as a conscious "choice." Therefore, free choice cannot exist. Both determinism and indeterminism relate only to circumstances in which there are temporal distinctions of "before" and "after." However, BEYOND time there can be no divisions of before or after, past or future, so no past causes. Thus, consciousness that is beyond time is neither deterministic nor indeterministic: it is truly free. That is, we can have free choice (and, as we shall see, free will) if and only if it is possible for our consciousness to go beyond time--to go beyond both cause-effect and indeterminism--in some way. Also, the idea that God is not only omnipresent throughout creation, but exists also in omniscience beyond time and space, is a common thread running through all true religions. It is further held to be self-evident that God possesses complete freedom of will. Thus, it is natural to associate the possession of free will with the transcendence of time, even before consideration of the relation of determinism and indeterminism to freedom of choice, and the necessity that we go beyond these constraints if we are to have any conscious free choice. Because transcendent God is entirely free of cause- effect constraints, the impulse response contractions of consciousness to a point, which allow for conscious identification with His timeless nature, must confer the ability to make choices unconditioned by past causes. However, in all non-perfect states of consciousness, one's mergings of consciousness in timeless God are of non-infinite frequency, and so cannot be considered as complete identification with Him. Consequently, a single, isolated point- contraction does not grant one perfect transcendent intuitional knowledge of God or unlimited free choice. The higher one's resonant/maximum frequency or state of consciousness, the higher the frequency of these zero-crossings or point-contractions of consciousness will be, hence the greater the degree of transcendent God-identification and free choice. Free choice is the ability to choose between alternatives unconstrained by cause-effect relations, and is again granted through the impulse response merging of consciousness in transcendent God, beyond time. But free will is more than this: it is the ability to act unconstrained by present external conditions; or, equivalently, the freedom to change one's external environment in whatever way one wishes --to create at will whatever one needs. (Of course, free will is ultimately an illusion, in that in order for will to act upon anything other than itself, there must be a distinction between subject/self and object/not-self; a distinction absent in Reality. "Free will" expresses the ability of deep concentration to effect changes in the distribution of energy, or flow of blood, in the cosmos or body of Christ; an ability which God, and consciousness united with Him, certainly DOES have, and which imagined- mortal consciousness possesses to a much lesser degree.) In order to be able to effect such modifications in objective matter, one must have access to (or be identified/united with) a source of infinite or near-infinite energy. And, of course, identification with the Absolute--the One Light expanding from ALL centers of consciousness--is identification with the Source of infinite Consciousness, hence infinite energy. Thus, the merging of consciousness in transcendent God results not only in the freedom to choose between pre- established alternatives, but also in the ability to reshape material creation according to one's own God- united will; the freedom to condense one's thought- patterns into energy and material forms, creating castles out of thin air. But such castles are created only when to do so is in the best interests of all, because the state of consciousness in which such miraculous works may be effected can, by Cosmic Definition, be reached and sustained only through the renouncing of the personal desires that constrain one's consciousness to finitude and action out of ego: it is only in proportion to the degree of expansion of one's sphere of conscious sympathies that union with the infinite-energy Absolute, and the concomitant ability to influence creation, is effected. Free choice comes through union with the causeless aspect of God, while free will comes with His nature as Infinite Energy. It may appear that if creation can only be miraculously and visibly reshaped in very high states of consciousness, lower states of consciousness must still be constrained to merely choosing with some degree of freedom between pre-established alternatives. However, this really isn't so. Again, in order to exercise complete free will, we need either to be able to act unconstrained by present external conditions, or, equivalently, to be able to reshape material creation immediately in whatever way we wish. In order to exercise limited free will, then, it will be sufficient for us to be able to exercise some partially free influence toward the limited reshaping of creation over a period of time, and so provide ourselves, in later times, with a different set of alternatives than would have existed were it not for the exertion of this incomplete freedom of will. Since the universe has its basis in thought, it is possible to effect changes in it through thought based in limited free choice--to create alternatives merely by thinking deeply and continuously about them. Freedom of choice then implies freedom of will, because the freedom to choose between ideas then implies that we have partial control over the alternatives presented to us at each point in life. The past exertion of limited free will provides us with choices or alternatives now that would not exist were it not for this exertion, and the present exercise of will opens up future options. The point here is that these options are not something that we have no control over--they are not merely predetermined by something external to ourselves. Rather, we have an active choice in the determination of the set of alternatives we shall face and so decide between, so that the "present external conditions" constraining the exercise of our will are already a modified form of the conditions that would have existed were it not for our past exertion of partial free will. The apparent pre-establishment of, or lack of control over, alternatives in lower states of consciousness is simply a result of the fact that in such lower states the channels through which the cause-effect influences and events of the universe flow remain hidden and only partially accessible to our prayerful and meditative appeal. Thus, while for these lower states of consciousness the exertion of will generally does not result in the immediate restructuring of creation, it nevertheless sets in motion lawful channels through which such modifications may, in time, be effected to some degree. We only get "in" to transcendent God to the extent to which we renounce personal desires and work for the greatest good of all creatures (because the increase in point-contractions or mergings of consciousness in transcendent God comes only through an expansion of consciousness to increasingly encompass all creation as one's larger Self: the more one's consciousness is expanded, the less "external" environment there is to constrain one's activities, and the more free choice and ability to exchange energy with the environment one possesses). And there is really only ONE action in any given set of universal circumstances which will result in the GREATEST expansion of consciousness of everyone and everything. So, in this sense, there is little "choice" involved. Freedom of will is not a question of being able to choose to act out of ego and yet still remaining free from cause-effect and karma. What free will is, really, is the freedom to act in the best interests of everyone and everything unconstrained by ignorance, by external conditions, or by your past mistakes; being uninfluenced by previous "bad habits" or selfishness. And any action performed in COMPLETE freedom of will must, by definition, be in perfect accord with the will of God, because the performer is one with God. The state of consciousness, or level of thought, in which actions are performed is ultimately every bit as important as the external behavior which springs indirectly from this thought, owing to the creational structure as rooted in Spirit over mind over matter. It is of little spiritual benefit for us to do the right thing for the wrong reasons; but if we perform our actions in the thought and desire of pleasing God, and then occasionally and unintentionally do the wrong thing for the right reasons, the universe will do its best, through its aspiration toward the greatest good, to minimize the effects of any errors in reasoning or action on our individual parts; cf. Mahatma Gandhi: "I believe that if in spite of the best intentions one is led into committing mistakes they do not really result in harm to the world or for the matter of that any individual. God always saves the world from the consequences of unintended errors of men who live in fear of Him." Creation--as with our earth--is a living, breathing, feeling organism, and is quite capable of assisting in the process of the healing of environmental (in the broadest, universal sense of the word) wounds inflicted through our past errors, so long as we change our ways in both thought and outward activity to encourage this healing. Further, while it is alarmingly true that the dwindling rainforests, global warming, rising ocean levels and deteriorating ozone layer of our earth require our immediate attention, there is no one, not even those heroes involved outwardly in the rescue of our earthly environment, who is so busy that he-she cannot spare an hour every morning and evening for meditation: spending time for God helps immeasurably in promoting the harmonious behavior of Her creation. And...change yourself and you have reformed thousands. In the context of the long-overdue interest in the well-being of our earthly environment, some theologians say: "Why spend time trying to be at peace with Nature? Our duty is to be at peace with God." In a way, this is true...but still, if a woman, say, invests many hours and much love in the fashioning of a vase as an expression of her devotion, and if her beloved, on receiving this expression, dashes it on the floor, saying "I do not want this vase; I want only your love," is this likely to make her happy? We should similarly regard Nature as an active expression of the Love of immanent God, and treat it accordingly with respect and tender loving care. The knowledge that human consciousness has evolved from animal and lower consciousness, and moreso that the oceanic consciousness of God-Reality is present everywhere in creation, further rescues us from the folly of believing that this universe is something separate from immanent God. What we do to animals and to the environment, we do to ourselves and to God, in every sense of the phrase: since God is present everywhere within creation, templed not only in humans but in animals and trees also, humans do not have license to treat animals and the environment in whatever way they choose, divorced from moral responsibility for this behavior and the associated lawful retribution: the universe has not been given to humans simply as a "toy" or learning instrument which lawful God, while preferring that we treat it responsibly, will forgive us unconditionally our unremorseful trespasses against at the time of death and entrance into the astral heavens. You cannot be at peace with God so long as you knowingly and intentionally mistreat Her creational creatures. She lives through them, too. The birds, the sky, the trees, the grass under your feet, the stones on the gravel path, your shoes, your feet, your entire body, your mind, your consciousness; all of it--ALL!--is God: it is all waves on the surface of the Infinite Ocean, and the Ocean is none else than God Himself. Everything you can touch, taste, smell, see, hear, and more than this, IS MADE OF GOD; it is all pure Reality, churned into waves and then seen as object separate from oneself as subject. There is nothing existing that is not Reality, so that the world is inherently divine, not just because the white light of the creational mechanism underlies the production of its every wave, but because the Ocean Itself is what God IS. It is God looking at you through all eyes, for God IS all eyes, including your own; He sees every sparrow fall, because He IS every sparrow. If you drive in your car from here to there, you are merely moving from one rippling region of God to another rippled region, in a vehicle made of ripples of God, over a road made of a different frequency of ripples: it is again ALL inherently divine, when seen in right perception-oneness. The effect of free will is such that, whatever we concentrate on, we bring closer to ourselves. And this implies karma, or the reaping of the fruits of past thoughts and actions: "karma" is simply thought- boomerangs that have been brought close enough, through depth and continuity of concentration, in this life and in past lives, to demonstrably affect or "hit" us. Given this relation of karma to boomeranged thought, any creature possessing self-awareness--which involves also (partial) free will: the outward, volitional expression of free choice--must be subject to the effects of past individual causes. Conversely, animals, having no individual free will, although subject to external cause-effect laws, cannot be subject to individual karma: having no sense of egoic individuality, they cannot bring things closer to "themselves" through thought and action. The nature of karma as a retributive expression of our thoughts and actions also explains why actions performed in the thought and desire of pleasing God in the greatest good can only produce good karma (though, again, not always short-term "happy" karma): whenever you act in the consciousness of unselfishness, you draw unselfishness toward you. Impulse-driven consciousness again oscillates, not at the resonant frequency of the system--the frequency at which the system exchanges energy most efficiently with its environment--but at a lower frequency (the maximum frequency) which is dependent on the bandwidth of the system: larger bandwidths will produce lower values of the maximum frequency for the same resonant frequency. These two frequencies are equal only if the bandwidth is zero; further, in this case of zero bandwidth, the system cannot dissipate energy as heat or friction, so that any energy introduced into the system will oscillate but cannot dissipate or decrease in amplitude of oscillation. Also, for any level of consciousness, the maximum radius of expansion will be greatest when the bandwidth is equal to zero; for all non-zero bandwidths, such consciousness will decay in amplitude of vibration (with the passage of time) more quickly, while its maximum radius of expansion will also be decreased. In order interact with any level of reality, we will need to have a non-zero bandwidth of consciousness: while a bandwidth near zero is beneficial in the transmission of thought energy (e.g., in free will), the reception of such energy requires a bandwidth wide enough to be sensitive to all the frequencies covering the range within which such "data" may be transmitted; e.g., in order to interact directly with all levels of the external physical world, we would need to be consciously sensitive to frequencies from zero to the frequency defining the boundary between the physical and astral realities. Likewise, body-identification, or sensitivity to the wide range of frequencies involved in the simultaneous awareness of visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile stimuli, will result in a large bandwidth of consciousness, and hence a very low maximum frequency. Conversely, diving deep into concentration will "filter out" the distractions of the body, yielding a narrow bandwidth of consciousness, and so a high maximum frequency of consciousness--with its associated high degree of freedom of choice--when concentrating on noble thoughts. PART III OM To the meditator versed in the art of deep concentration, a light will appear at the point between the eyebrows--the place of the ajna chakra. A dark spot or area will form in the center of this light, surrounded by luminous rays. As concentration deepens, the golden luster of the surrounding luminous halo increases manyfold, and the dark central area becomes resolved into a sphere of opal blue, centered with a white five-pointed star. Through this luminous tunnel of gold, blue and white, the deeply meditating yogi may behold, with infinite spherical vision, every point of creation--it is the window to omnipresence. As the meditator is counselled always to face toward the East in his-her practice of the universal methods of yoga meditation (this is the direction from which subtle spiritual currents are averred to be constantly flowing) this spiritual diadem, being seen most often in the East, is called in the Biblical idiom the star of the East. In the yogic lore it is named Kutastha Chaitanya--the Christ consciousness center, or spiritual eye. The three forms and colors (the golden ring, blue sphere, and white pentagonal star) of this single eye of light represent, microcosmically and respectively (i) the vibratory realm of creation (Om, the Holy Ghost). The sound of Om is omnipresent throughout the vibratory sphere of creation, and is said to be the root of all other sounds--that is, the basis of all matter and all vibrations--implying that this sound must proceed from a state containing all possible frequencies from zero to infinity: in order for such a cosmic sound to serve as the basis of every possible vibration, it must, at some point in its generation, be derived from a state containing all these possible rates of vibration. More specifically, Om is the sound of the ripples of all light on the surface of the Infinite Ocean, arising from limitations placed on the primordial impulses of the white light Cosmic Projector. Consequently, we may say that Om oozes as spherical beads of oil from the pressed olive, from every pore of space. Om has also been spoken of as the "whirr of the Cosmic Motor" and as arising from the "beating of the Cosmic Drum." Drumming, in its simplest form, consists of a series of impulsive strikes of a drumstick against the surface of a drum, these hits being uniformly separated in time; the loudest or hardest example of such drumming would consist of a series of infinite-amplitude impulses, as in the Universal Breathing. Gasoline-run motors produce similar sounds, but in such quick succession that they blend into one another to produce a continuous drone; (ii) the universal intelligence of God underlying all vibration, which is Christ consciousness, the only Son of God (the sole reflection of God the Father, within the finite vibratory sphere; vibration or coherent motion implies guiding intelligence). The Christ intelligence structures the formation of the ripple-based particles of phenomenal creation through the impulses underlying Om--that is, through the beating of the Cosmic Drum--so that the sound of Om emanating from the impulsive basis may be rightly spoken of as the sole causative force within creation; the only Doer of all creational activities. Christ and Krishna (Christna) are titles; they denote one who is united with the universal consciousness of Spirit reflected omnipresent in vibratory creation. Krishna is thus often shown blue-skinned in East Indian religious art; and (iii) the cosmic consciousness of God the Father beyond creation. Om, Christ consciousness, and cosmic consciousness are experienced successively as the devotee's consciousness penetrates the spiritual eye into the sahasrara--the "thousand-petaled lotus" in the astral brain. Consistent with its representation in the spiritual eye, finite vibratory creation in its entirety is said to take the form of a luminous blue sphere. Creation may therefore be validly characterized as a "cosmic motion picture in the sky": as consisting of filtered rhythmic white light, the resulting pictures being projected within a blue sphere, or sky; all perceivable forms are then "frozen" sky, or condensed vibrations of consciousness in the opal sphere. This sphere of vibratory creation is surrounded by vibrationless, motionless, infinite space. And any finite sphere, when seen from the farthest reaches of infinite space, will shrink in perspective to a point, so that, on this level too, we find a point/infinity duality. The idea that the entirety of creation is spherical is not mere philosophical conjecture, based in an assumption of universal symmetry: the cosmos is finite; so that when one's consciousness is expanded to infinity, enclosing all of vibratory creation and more, its shape can be directly known. Further, the sky is blue because, from the earth's point of view, it forms a spherical region studded with stars--as with the third eye...and you'd be blue, too, if your ozone layer was depleting. Owing to the impulsive nature of creation, the motions of all rippled light on the Ocean surface will be greatest just after the initial all-pervasive, energetic throb of each Universal Breath, with this amplitude of motion decreasing afterwards until the next Breath. Thus, any graph of the motion of these vibrations or waves of light will have the same general shape as do the rhythmic semi-impulses of motors, drums, and heartbeats. (When the flow of breath is stopped for limited periods of time, the [electromagnetic] waves produced by the heart assume a shape nearly identical to the bandpass-filtered impulse.) And these motions, or constituents of the sound of Om, are present in all regions of vibratory space. Thus, we can have conscious union with Om simply by becoming the vibrations in the space encompassed by our sphere of consciousness: these vibrations are the product not only of our own individual thoughts, but moreso of the vibrations of light underlying the physical and subtler matter in that region. That is, all identification with one's sphere of consciousness and the activities encompassed therein is union with (a region of) Om. "Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come into him, and will sup with him, and he with me" (Revelation 1:16). God stands on the "other side" of the point-door between Creator and creation, "knocking" through the Om sound, and through the impulses underlying this sound: knocking, as with drumming, etc., consists of a series of impulsive sounds, rhythmically separated in time. If we will but make the effort to open this door (i.e., the spiritual eye, and/or the point at the center of one's sphere of consciousness) He will come into us within creation, carrying us on waves of expanding love to infinity...blissful waves breaking on endless calm shores...and we will go through this door to be (with) Him beyond time and space. Om is not merely a word or name--although it is the Word and Name of God--but is again rather a sound produced by the ripples of light at the basis of creation, audible to one's inner consciousness: an "intuitively audible illumination." Being related to the ripples on the surface of the Infinite Ocean, Om is also referred to as the "noise of many waters" (Ezekiel 43:1-2). AUM is the philosophically preferred spelling of this Name; however, the proper pronunciation is "Ommm," not "Aauuummm." Were the Supreme Intelligence guiding these vibrations to wish to impart directly revealed or intuitively heard "words of wisdom"--clothed even in human language--to the inner consciousness of one in such attunement (as is said to be the origin of the Vedas), It would have simply to alter, or modulate, these subtle vibrations accordingly to produce the required intuitively audible phonetic variations; cleaving many words from the One Word of God. Whether or not the Vedas and similar works originated at the times and places claimed by their present editions is not of utmost importance; the important thing is that it IS possible for such scriptures to be "directly heard." And by No Coincidence, the knowledge contained in the Vedic scriptures, etc., when rightly understood, is in full accord with the eternal structural truths of the cosmic motion picture mechanism directly knowable by each one of us, given sufficient meditational effort. Is there then a better explanation for their origin than direct revelation? The basic creational production of the sound of Om again involves rhythmic filtered impulses driving the expansion of spheres of consciousness or circles of compassion, followed by the (exponentially-decaying) contraction of these spheres/circles to a point: in the impulse response, the pitch or rate of oscillation is equal to the maximum frequency, while larger bandwidths cause the spherical aperture or "mouth" of consciousness, through which this vibration is forced, to close faster, via the exponentially- decaying modulation. Compare this with the fact that, in chanting Om audibly (which is generally done ONCE per BREATH), the first step is for one's vocal cords to produce a sound of a certain pitch (where the simplest sound of a given pitch would be a sinusoidal vibration of that frequency); then, in modulating this sound, one's mouth is initially open and (nearly) circular, in producing the vowel "o" sound, and closes (i.e., the circle contracts to a point; slowly, as with the exponential modulation of the filtered impulses) to vocalize the "mmm" aspect. (Of course, some mouths open more towards infinity than others.) Understandably, then, the human voice is considered, in India, to be the finest musical instrument: of all means of musical expression, singing most closely emulates and so expresses the basic structure of the universe. Also, just as the chanted word "Om" originates in the back of the throat, and issues forth from the human mouth, the Holy Word, or Voice of God, issuing of course from the mouth of God, has its seat in the human body in a chakra in the medullary region, opposite the mouth, connected by polarity with the spiritual eye. And just as material food enters the physical body through its mouth, the subtle nourishment of finer-than-physical cosmic radiation enters the astral body through the mouth of God in the medullary chakra: material foods do not directly sustain the body; there is no essential cosmic reason for us to have to ingest material nourishment (or to breathe), when we can eat subtle light or cosmic radiation ("bread from heaven") directly through the mouth of God. Also, in the physical human body, the mouth serves as both the means of eating or drawing energy into the body, and of broadcasting our thoughts, or speaking. Similarly, in the astral counterpart to this body, energy is again eaten through the medullary chakra or mouth of God, while the spiritual eye, connected by polarity with this mouth, serves as the means of broadcasting thoughts in free will. Further, human speech is made possible through the effect of air being exhaled from the lungs, and as such is intrinsically associated with the breathing process. Thus, since the human body, being made "in the image of God" (by "As above, so below") is again a microcosmic representation of the body of God in the cosmos, we should verily expect, or at least not be at all surprised, that the process of Divine speech, in the production of the sound of Om, should be inherently associated with a cosmic Breathing process: that the Cosmic Word of Om should be produced by a rhythmic Divine or Universal Breath, being forced through many "mouths of God" in the spatial fabric of the universe, which must rhythmically expand and contract to a point, in vocalizing the vowel "o" and "mmm" aspects of the Word of God; the word by which "the heavens and the earth...are kept in store." Concentration on, and the ensuing oneness with, the Om sound, tends to expand and so to raise one's consciousness, because the Om sound itself has no boundaries (other than being bounded by the surface of the blue sphere of creation). And yet, concentration on the Om sound is only concentration on the phenomenal WAVES of creation; the next step would be to realize that beneath-become the waves is an Oceanic Intelligence: Reality IS consciousness IS intelligence. This state, in which one is identified with the Intelligence that has become the waves of Om in all creation, is called Christ consciousness. Thus knowing non-dually the Reality-Intelligence-Ocean of which all things are made, we know the Essence, of which all abstract facts (of symbolic-map knowledge in language and mathematics) are mere reflections. (It is not, however, entirely obvious how consciousness could realize oneness with the waves of Om but not simultaneously with the Ocean that is their basis; nevertheless, it is widely stated in yoga that Om and Christ consciousness relate to the waves of light, and to the cosmic Intelligence, respectively.) But why stop there? The Infinite Ocean exists not only with the finite blue sphere of the cosmos, but everywhere around it to infinity also. (Note that, while we often refer to all of infinite space as the [surface of the] Infinite Ocean, we may also refer to the finite spherical cosmos as being a blue ocean or sea, existing within the Infinite Ocean. It should always be obvious from the context which aspect of creation the oceanic imagery is meant to point to.) When one's conscious identification thus expands to include the entire Infinite Ocean of God--when it pierces the blue sky of the cosmos to touch the star of infinity--this is cosmic consciousness. The bandpass-filtered impulse, when mirrored with itself and rotated ninety degrees clockwise, bears a strong resemblance to the caduceus--a staff with two serpents coiled around it; the symbol of healing adopted by the Western medical profession (Figure 6). This symbol has its origins in Eastern esoteric thought--Mercury notwithstanding--and depicts the intertwining of subtle nerves around the astral spine; so that, again, we find the structure of the cosmos, ~fig_06~ or body of God, reflected in the human body. The life currents which flow in these and other subtle nerve passages are sometimes spoken of as astral electricities. And the action of these electricities (flowing with the breath, in inhalation and exhalation) on the Infinite Ocean is to "release" finite spheres of consciousness from it--the spheres being composed of the same stuff as the Ocean. Likewise, when we pass physical electricity through water, it releases bubbles (i.e., small spheres) of oxygen--one component of water--the material on which our physical breathing is dependent. Further, given the nature of the caduceus as derived from the filtering of the primordial impulses, it is evident that the body's pranic life currents are an expression of the omnipresent Om vibration of the perfect consciousness of the soul. PART IV HOLOGRAMS Holograms are a means of visual information storage, similar in some ways to photographs. The two means of storage differ in that every piece of a hologram plate contains information about the entire three-dimensional scene being holographed--and can be made to project a light-formed "duplicate" of its objects in three dimensions when illuminated with a proper source of light, usually a laser--while photography "collapses" this information irretrievably into a two-dimensional planar view of the object(s), so that a slide transparency can only project a two- dimensional view of its contained scene. The means by which holograms are made may be easily described. The light emitted by a laser is said to be "coherent"; that is, its light waves are all in step with one another, giving rise to what are called plane waves. (The waves produced when a pebble is dropped into a pond are circular/spherical, while plane or straight waves could be produced by rhythmically raising and lowering a long stick in the water.) Such ~fig_07~ wavefronts have the desirable property that, since they are all "going in the same direction," they do not spread out much as they travel farther from their source. If ever such a plane wave tries to "squeeze through" an aperture of width much smaller than the waves' wavelength, a source of circular or spherical waves, having the same wavelength as the incident waves, is effectively produced, as in Figure 8. Now, any physical object is made visible through its ability to reflect visible light. And any ray of light, when allowed to reflect off of an object, is effectively converted by this reflection into a point ~fig_08~ source of spherical light waves (as if it were squeezing through a very small aperture), which then spread outward from the object; the spherical waves having their center at the point where the particular ray met the object, with their intensity being determined by the color and reflectivity of the object at that point. If and when some of these light waves impinge on an eye, the sensation of sight of that part of the object is produced: when you "see" any object, you are not seeing the object itself, but are rather cognizing a sphere-of-(physical)-light representation ~fig_09~ of it; the information from these expanding spheres of light being carried from the sense organs to your brain by means of impulsive spikes of electricity, which are then decoded to produce the idea of the object within your own sphere of light-consciousness. That is, visual perception is based in spheres of light and impulsive spikes. And holograms are made by allowing these reflected spherical waves to interact with the reference or unreflected plane waves, and recording the interaction on a piece of film, which plays the part of an "eye." (Likewise, there are indications in neurological research that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the areas of the brain and the places where our past thoughts or memories are stored; that is, that our memories are stored in holographic, rather than photographic, form by the brain.) Because the waves, after having been reflected by the object, travel as expanding spherical wavefronts, they diverge rapidly as they leave the object, and so spread out to interfere with the reference beam across the whole surface of the photographic plate (Figure 10). This whole-surface- interaction will occur for every sphere of light reflected from the scene, so that every area of the ~fig_10~ holographic plate will contain information about the entire object/scene. Now, if we illuminate the entire developed plate (with a reproduced reference beam), we will recover a very sharp and clear picture of the object. However, if we illuminate only a small area of the photographic plate, although we will still be able to recover the three-dimensional picture, the sharpness of the image will depend on how much of the plate we have illuminated: in illuminating only a small area of the plate with the same intensity of laser beam, less total light energy is incident on the plate--the small area of which further contains less precise information as to how that light should be diffracted--so that less light can be diffracted by the hologram, and consequently the image produced, though still being three-dimensional and of the same size as the original object, will appear dimmer and fuzzier than the original object (Figure 11 [a]). In illuminating a hologram with a reproduced reference beam of coherent light, as these plane waves pass through the hologram film they are diffracted by the recorded interference patterns on the film into myriad spherical waves, which continue on through the film and interfere with one another, effectively reversing or undoing the procedure through which the hologram was encoded: the illuminated holographic film reproduces the same pattern of centers and intensities of expanding light-spheres as was generated by the ~fig_11~ original object, producing a three-dimensional light- formed image of the object, suspended in space (Figure 11 [b]). Thus, holograms reduce to the interaction or interference of point-source spheres of light, with plane light waves of the same frequency. But plane waves are simply special cases of spherical waves: any plane wave may be regarded as arising from a spherical wave of infinite radius (and so having zero curvature). That is, holograms are formed through the interaction of finite spheres of light with infinite spheres of light! It looks suspiciously, then, as if creation is structured as a cosmic hologram, where the infinite beam of perfected consciousness contains all frequencies, and so can serve as a reference for all possible vibrations in finite spheres of consciousness: every piece of a hologram contains all the information present in the entire hologram; just as, in the mystic's view of the world, information about the entire interpenetrating universe is present in its every localization (which must be the case, holograms or no holograms, for all interpenetrating things are made of Reality: the clay from which all creational activities, symbolically abstracted as "objects" are composed; the one undivided stuff of God). For light everywhere meets with light, since everything contains all things in itself and sees all things in another, so that all things are everywhere and all is all. --Mystic saying Each person, each object in the world, is not merely itself, but involves every other person and object and, in fact, on one level IS every other person and object. --Buddhist Avatamska Sutra Again, whenever a plane wave tries to "squeeze through" an aperture of width much smaller than its wavelength, a source of spherical waves, having the same wavelength as the incident waves, is effectively produced, as in Figure 8 (page 85). Similarly, in the universal structure, finite spheres of consciousness are produced in the Infinite Ocean wherever the infinite undivided ("planar") omnipresence of God tries to squeeze into creation through its apertures or pores of space; the finite spheres having the same rhythmic frequency of recurrence as does the incident planar signal of the Universal Breathing (Figure 12. With regard to this ~fig_12~ picturesque "squeezing in from outside," however, recognize that each impulse of the Cosmic Projector is merely a potential movement of the Ocean; it is not something separate from those waters). Since our visual perception of any object is based in the cumulative effect of many closely-spaced spheres of light, of differing colors (frequencies) and intensities, it is very metaphysically satisfying to propose that the ultimate nature of all objects has a similar basis, in consisting of closely-spaced spheres of light-consciousness, of many colors or rates of vibration; which is, of course, what the impulse response or motion picture model of the universe is about. PART V RITUALS AND MYTHOLOGY We have seen that many of the predictions of the impulse response model of the universe are in exact accord with the direct perceptions of meditators in higher states of consciousness than the waking awareness. These truths are held as eternal--as realizable by anyone, at any time and place, given sufficient meditational effort--and yet we seem to find little explicit exoteric mention of such "eternal truths" (e.g., the drumming nature of Om, or the cosmic motion picture nature of creation) in the world's great scriptures, giving perhaps the impression that such ideas have been little known prior to our recent generations. Or is it possible that such perceived truths have been quietly embedded in aspects of our culture and religion so common as to escape our analytical attention? A few detailed examples will demonstrate that this is indeed so. The attainment of conscious union with the Eternal Beloved, one's consciousness having passed through the golden ring of the spiritual eye, is often referred to as "mystical marriage." Compare this with the emulative human wedding custom of exchanging, or passing (the ring fingers) through, gold rings: the Yogis associate the fourth or ring finger--as well as the fourth, or heart, chakra--with an "air" (cf. breath) element, so that the passing of this finger through a golden ring symbolizes the passing of the breath through the golden ring of the spiritual eye into union with God in mystical marriage. Why then does the human bride wear a veil? To symbolize the veil of maya separating God and creation; when this veil is lifted, lover and Beloved are united: you may kiss--that is, go into the MOUTH of--the Bride. (Puckering also emulates the "mmm" aspect of Om; as in the Catholics' KISSING of the Pope's RING, symbolically uniting one's own mouth--and the medullary chakra at its back--with cosmic omnipresent Om or the Holy Ghost, through this once-infallible papal "representative" of God on earth. Doubtless the wizard's high regard for rings and bracelets as potent objects of magic derives from their higher root in the golden ring of Om as the source of all power in creation.) Also very plausible is the idea that the wedding cake--traditionally having miniature figures of the bride and groom on the uppermost of several circular tiered "slabs" of cake--is symbolic of the union of God and soul on the highest level, or highest sphere, of reality. (Round stone slabs, as symbols of the Infinite--of circumference beginningless and endless--can be found in some Hindu temples.) The cutting up of the wedding cake at the "marriage supper," and its being eaten by (that is, being put into the mouths of) the guests, would then represent the individuation, into form, of the Infinite sphere, manifesting in the mouth (of God: medullary chakra) of each one of us. The element of sympathetic magic enfolded here, one would suppose, is the hope that, in eating of this symbol of union, we too will be brought closer to the mortal marital state of "wedded bliss"; but there is also a deeper meaning: in each of our individual mouths (of God) is present a spark of the ecstasy of God-union. Mythologists would add that rice/confetti/corn--thrown over the newly married couple--is a fertility symbol; but this is secondary, and is really not very profound. And why should the bride wear white? That is, why should white be associated with purity? Why does purification from our sins make us "white as snow"--Snow White? You can guess that it has to do with the sphere of white Light--with the unfiltered omnipresence of union in mystical marriage being free of any desirous impurities or finitude-producing attachments: the bride who may "justifiably" wear white has traditionally not experienced certain dualistic pleasures, and the balancing karmic pains. And why does any tasteful groom wear a black tuxedo? To symbolize the union of black and white--of all dualities--in the unfiltered impulse of divine matrimony; the presence of all possible rates of vibration resulting in perfect calmness. The two lovers, before passing through their golden rings into union, pledge to remain together "for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health"; so say the saints: "In the midst of all changing dualities, my love for Thee will ever be unchanged! In this love we shall ever be united." Further, in Catholicism, unlike its Protestant derivatives, the officiating priest is not merely a minister, but one's parochial link with God; being vested with the power to join man and woman in marriage through this "divine right" as a representative of God on Earth. In this sense, the Catholic priest plays a role similar to that of God, or a God-realized guru in the latter's "officiating" of mystical marriage: it is only through the grace of the guru--this grace being got from God in oneness-- that lover and Beloved are eternally united; and this union comes only after all restless thoughts--the gossiping witnesses of one's past mistakes, or karma-- objecting to this union, have consented to "forever hold their peace." (The role of the priest in giving Holy Communion, and in possessing the power to grant absolution from sins in confession, likewise indicates an imitation of the role which can really only be played by God, or a true guru; this role-playing again in accord with the supposed divine right of the Roman Catholic Church: the dispenser of divine grace through prescribed channels; the perpetual extension of Christ's incarnation, or mediator between Man and God.) The best man likewise plays some of the guru's part, in being the custodian of the ring (both the key, or meditational technique, by which God is realized, and the giving of samadhi or the superconscious state, upon which the consciousness of the "groom" passes through the golden ring of the spiritual eye into union with the Bride); in fact, in John 3:29, John the Baptist (Jesus' guru in their previous lives as Elijah/Elias and his disciple Elisha/Eliseus) compares himself to the friend (i.e., best man) of the bridegroom, Jesus. And why should such (divine) union take place in a church--that is, a chakra--in the sight (i.e., spiritual eye) of God? And why is it appropriate for women to wear black to funerals? I don't know. But it might be profound. In the Roman Catholic Mass-given Communion, bread and wine are consecrated and received as the (actual) body and blood of Jesus Christ (or, nowadays, as symbols of them), in the hope of following Jesus' words: "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you...He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him" (John 6:53-56). In this ceremony, every crumb of the transubstantiated wafer or Host is held as the entire body and blood of the sacrificed and resurrected Christ; that is, communion (with the Divine) involves eating (through the medullary chakra and its polar spiritual eye) the body and blood of Christ (the Om-based cosmos and its inner channels of energy re-distribution; the laws of physics, for example, express the allowed avenues of energy re- distribution on the physical level of the body of Christ). Further regarding this "eating": Energy can be brought into a system either by transporting it across the fixed boundary of the system (i.e., into its body, through a suitable opening or mouth), or by enlarging the system--that is, one's consciousness--to enclose, or swallow, ever-more energy. Since eating Om raises/expands one's consciousness, these two methods go together. Further, consider the practice of throwing coins into wishing wells. As we know, when a coin or stone is thrown into calm water, it produces expanding circular wavefronts or ripples; as with the basic structure of creation: God is constantly casting wishing stones into the otherwise calm waters of the Ocean. The symbolic hope, then, is that the waves on the Ocean of creation will deign to sympathetically mimic the ripples of the idea or wish being held in one's mind at the time of casting the stone, that the object of one's wish may become manifest; just as creation's waves conform to the ideas in the mind of God. It is thus evident that many of the common aspects of human religious mythology and ritual are not merely arbitrarily assumed superstitions having a shared pagan ancestry, but are rather imitative of higher levels of reality than are generally scholarly analyzable. It would be good, then, to recognize that the archetypal themes which appear and reappear as valid mythological elements--those based not merely in superstition but in higher truth--of the earth's many cultures should be understood, not only as having a psychological manifestation (expressed in myth), demonstrating the collective subconscious desire for return to the lost state of Perfection, but as having a structural manifestation also; the metaphorical nature of creation in "As above, so below" (where matter crystallizes out of mind and consciousness, expressing many of the same symbols on the planes of matter, mind, and higher realities) implies this. To state this metaphorical basis succinctly: Pun, pun, pun, 'till her Daddy takes the P-Bird away. (That is, live in the metaphorical structure of creation until baptism in the waters of Om and perfection in the Heavenly Father douse forever the otherwise persistent flame of the reincarnating Phoenix Firebird.) Whatever the flaws of the Christian Churches, their rituals are a rich representation of basic creational truths-- truths in perfect accord with the directly known tenets of yoga. There is an inevitable conclusion to be drawn from this: The beautifully precise teachings of Jesus Christ (and, indeed, the creational and Edenic accounts in Genesis, and the second coming of Christ--within each one of us--in Revelation, when given their intended symbolic and structural, not strictly literal and historical, interpretation) are pure yoga, and were originally directly revealed, not culled merely from permutations on primitive mythologies. Comparative mythologists--at least those with a bent towards reductionism--would account for the common ground of Christianity, yoga, etc., through the presence of cross-cultural assimilation in various forms; but, while this undoubtedly has played some role in imparting similarities in form to the world's scriptures, it leaves unresolved the question as to how it is possible for so many of these scriptures to give quantitatively true accounts of the basic cosmic structure; how else but in being derived, in the first, from direct perception? (Not that every primitive culture that speaks of a "Spirit in the sky" has its religion based in conscious oneness with God: as physics is discovering, it is possible to speak in what seem, on the surface, to be very mystical and profound terms, without meaning to, in that the physical level too is molded by universal archetypes. But when considering the common, independent perception of Truth underlying the Self-realizational teachings of Christ, Krishna, Buddha, etc., cross- cultural assimilation is irrelevant.) The mythologies of many peoples consider creation (or creative power, i.e., free will) as being based in the power of words (thought-forms uttered with deep concentration) spoken by God; mythologists date this idea to 2850 B.C. or earlier, chuckling occasionally at this apparently simplistic view which is, in fact, very significant and profound. For what is a word? It is a certain pattern of vibration. What, then, is the Word (Vibration) that contains all other words (rates of vibration)? And does the presence of such a Word infer the existence of a mouth (of God)? And what is the function of the human mouth? humans being created "in the image of God." Mouths are simply means of speaking, and of eating or drawing energy of differing vibratory forms into one's body. And what, further, is blood, but a means of distributing this energy within one's body? The individuation of soul from Spirit has been compared to the one underlying pilot flame of a gas burner manifesting, through the holes of the burner, as many smaller flames; while meditation is said to act as a pickaxe, slowly penetrating the rock of indifference, to unleash the geyser or fountain of Bliss within. In both cases, the structure is that of an underlying undivided immensity, which can become manifest to various degrees in the individuation; and, of course, we know that meditation, in raising one's level of consciousness, does open the door--or slowly penetrate the rock--between dualistic consciousness and Bliss. And in the case of the gas burner, the individuation is effected through a pattern of discrete openings, or pores. Similarly, all finite activity can be considered--and is considered in some creational myths--to arise as sweat (finite beads/spheres of water) from the Creator: Infinity manifests as spherical finitude through discrete openings or pores; as with the metaphorical structure of the motion picture model of the universe. The importance of water in human mythology derives, of course, partly from the structural inherence of the sound of Om as the drum-beaten vibration of the ripples of all light on the surface of the Infinite Ocean...never more than a stone's throw away. Accordingly, the presence of sun- and water-gods in the mythologies of so many of the world's cultures, though no doubt based often in superstitious awe of simple Nature spirits, pays homage to the fact that the sun is a sphere of light, and that creation is ripples on the surface of the Infinite Ocean: if you control light and/or water, or can appease these elements to dance in accord with your wishes, you have control over all creation. Further with the impulsive nature of the "beating of the Cosmic Drum": The stones being thrown by God to break the surface of the Infinite Ocean and so produce rippling spheres of consciousness, may alternatively be thought of as the tips of Cosmic Drumsticks, beaten by the Divine Drummer against the ethereal skin stretched across the Infinite Hemisphere, to mark the basic rhythm of creation. (When a drum is first hit, the disturbance travels as expanding circles of waves across its face.) Thus, beaten drums--consisting, of course, of membranes stretched across cylinders or hemispheres-- mimic the basic rhythmic structure of creation; hence their reasonable inclusion in musical-ritual dance. Since all vibrations on the Ocean of Light dance to the fundamental rhythm of Om (in that the ripples of all light are greatest in amplitude just after the application of a universal impulse, with decaying amplitude until the next Breath) we see that the Divine Drumming of the Universal Breathing is the rhythm by which the Dance of Shiva--the continuous creation, preservation, and destruction of matter at the basis of the universe--is performed. The fact that all manifestation is produced from a rhythmic impulsive (drum-beaten) basis demands that the Om sound arising from this drumming be present everywhere within the sphere of creation, while the varying resonant frequencies of consciousness with which this basis is filtered--i.e., the varying intensities with which the Cosmic Drum is beaten by its myriad drumsticks, or stones thrown to break the surface of the Infinite Ocean--allow for non-homogeneity in the production of matter: the Om sound can be present everywhere within creation's sphere, and be the basis of all matter, without this presence giving rise to creation being "the same everywhere." "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God....All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made which was made" (John 1:1-3). The "Word of God" is the very basis of all created things, and is the linguistic means by which God introduces distinctions in (the vibratory rate of the waves of light on the surface of) the Ocean of Reality, this giving rise to localized wave- disturbances or particles, and thence (through the rise of the subject/object distinction) to apparently separately-existing objects, seemingly divorced from the Ocean of Light which permeates and surrounds, and IS, they and I. It is easy enough to see that, since consciousness must pass successively through the golden ring and blue sphere of the spiritual eye before it can pass through the white star as the door to the kingdom of God of the soul as an individualized spark of joyous Spirit, templed in the sahasrara, "no man cometh unto the Father but by [the Christ consciousness]," and no one can enter the kingdom of God without passing through union with the golden ring of Om--being baptized in these sacred rippling waters. And, of course, since the Christ consciousness is the consciousness of God reflected in the sphere of creation, and since we too are in creation, it would make sense that we would have to realize our oneness with the (Christ) consciousness in creation, before realizing union with the "same" consciousness beyond creation; that in order to reach the star of cosmic consciousness--the Star of the Sea (the sea again being a blue sphere), within which the Christ child- consciousness is born--we would first have to pierce through the blue sky of the cosmos. And we can readily recognize that the organism of creation, or body of Christ, must, by "As above, so below," have a governing spherical intelligence, or sphere of Christ consciousness; and that it is only when motion is guided by intelligence that it can be rhythmic or harmonious; and that since the Om sound is (intuitively) audible, it must be of non-infinite frequency, so that concentrational oneness with it would not itself raise one's resonant frequency of consciousness to infinity. Possessing this knowledge, we may attempt to delineate the quantitative boundaries between the successive realizations of Om, Christ, and cosmic consciousness, within the context of the impulse response model of the universe, as follows. First, we must distinguish between the rippling Om sound, and the white light impulses underlying this sound--containing this sound in potential, as it were; just as the white light of the movie projector contains all pictures in potential, but does not produce any until it has been filtered by the film. That is, the primordial impulses themselves do not produce a sound; it is only when they are limited that they give rise to waves of finitude on the surface of the Infinite Ocean, or an intuitively audible whirring of the Vibratory Motor. Thus, we again associate the sound of Om with the ripples produced on the surface of the manifest Ocean by the filtered impulses of the Cosmic Drumming, rather than with the impulses themselves: union with the sound of Om consists of feeling oneself as this sound in every unit of space within the cosmos, for it is present everywhere within the vibratory sphere: Om consciousness is the feeling of oneself as all the waves on the Infinite Ocean. This Breath-inspired Voice of God, through phonetic variations in ripple vibration, can again impart any relative knowledge it wishes, or is wished for, to consciousness in attunement with this cosmic sound. Consider also that impulsive Om could be characterized not only as arising from the beating of a Cosmic Drum, but also from the rhythmic clapping of Divine Hands. The impulses underlying the sound of Om again arise wholistically as white light from a single Cosmic Projector; or, alternatively, from the clapping of One Hand. That is, Om is the sound of one hand clapping. Alternatively: What is the sound of one hand clapping? It is everything and nothing: for the sound of Om produced by this clapping is, or has become, all manifest creation; and yet the clapping itself, existing in zero time and so being vibrationless and transcendent, is no-thing, beyond all finite vibratory things. (Having made these observations, it must be said that koan meditation rightly consists not in intellectually analyzing the koan, but in completely merging with it; the goal, again, is the dissolution of the apparent separation between subject and object.) "These things saith the Amen [Om], the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God....Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice...." As we know, very loud knocking consists of a series of impulses, while the spiritual eye--as well as the ideal point at the center of one's sphere of consciousness--is the "door" in the creational mechanism, through which consciousness realizes its full union with transcendent God in cosmic consciousness. Further note the association of this knocking with a voice: this would be an unnatural alliance--normally, we do not knock with our voices, but rather with our closed hands or knuckles--were this knocking not to be inherently associated with a mouth and a Word (and with Breath). We must, however, be careful to distinguish between the state that DOES this knocking, the knocking itself, and the sound of Om PRODUCED by this knocking; that is, between the Drummer, the Drumming, and the sound of the Drum: Om is not the knocking, but the sound PRODUCED by the knocking. This (Om consciousness) is, then, the first natural division of Divine Consciousness. Direct intuitional knowledge of transcendent Truth is possible in the oscillating response of the individual sphere of consciousness to the primordial impulses underlying the sound of Om; this is what allows for an increased degree of free choice as consciousness is expanded. Consciousness of infinite resonant frequency and infinite bandwidth (associated again with direct knowledge of "the white light of God already within you," or full realization of the power of the unfiltered impulses driving one's sphere of consciousness) forms a momentarily omnipresent sphere/circle of infinite radius--a circle centered in a given point, of circumference nowhere--such large bandwidth again being associated with body- identification, or the ability to receive and respond to "sensory" information transmitted across a wide range of frequencies; in this case identification with the (physical, astral, and causal) spherical body of the cosmos, transmitting information on frequencies from zero to infinity. Such consciousness--the Consciousness of Light--being omnipresent throughout space at only a single point in time (that is, at the time of application) of each Universal Breath, effectively takes only one consciously-penetrating subjective "snapshot" of all creation's activities in each Breath; where this penetration of one's consciousness through all objects within its sphere would be taken to grant direct conscious knowledge of these objects and their vibratory activities, that one might be (aware of) all of the activities occurring within one's expanded sphere of consciousness. There is a principal applicable to such "sampling"-- Nyquist's Theorem, which follows from simple mathematical laws of wave behavior--which states that if any signal is sampled at a given sampling frequency, the highest frequency that can be reproduced with fidelity is equal to one-half the sampling rate: any oscillations with frequencies above this critical frequency will be erroneously perceived as being between zero and one-half the sampling frequency. (Compact disc digital audio, for example, utilizes a sampling rate of about 44 kHz, so that its maximum resolvable frequency is 22 kHz, which is just above the normal human range of hearing.) Thus, the maximum resolvable frequency seen by such large bandwidth consciousness would be equal to one-half the frequency of the Universal Breathing, so that consciousness in this state, while being, on the one hand, of infinite bandwidth (in body-identification), would not have directly observed (i.e., intuitional) knowledge of the behavior of any island-particles, or their underlying waves of consciousness, oscillating at frequencies higher than one-half the rate of the Universal Breathing. (All large-bandwidth consciousness, expanding once in each Breath to a notable maximum radius, and then quickly contracting to "hover" around the point at its center--as in the higher states in Figure 4, page 23--and so sampling the activities within its expanded sphere only once per Universal Breath, will be affected by this same limitation, regardless of its resonant frequency.) That is, while such consciousness is perfectly motionless and quiescent, the true behavior of most of the wave-activities occurring within creation will be hidden from it, owing to the fact that it takes so few consciously penetrating pictures of these activities. (Although, as this state still involves complete union with transcendent God, and so absolute omniscience, this can hardly be seen as an insurmountable obstacle.) This state of infinite resonant frequency and infinite bandwidth thus cannot actually be the highest state of consciousness: Reality exists continuously, whereas this state only "samples" it at separated instants in time; this is not yet a full identification with God. The highest state, in order to be fully identified with Reality, must "sample" it continuously (i.e., with infinite frequency), or be continuously identified with its (infinite) nature. Finally, then, the state of infinite resonant frequency and zero bandwidth. Such consciousness, being of zero bandwidth, transcends "sensory" identification with the body/cosmos (just as, when mortals concentrate deeply on a given finite thought, they forget the body), and vibrates with INFINITE amplitude and infinite frequency. (Recall that when the bandwidth of a bandpass-filtering system is zero, any energy introduced into the system will oscillate but not decay or dissipate.) It is thus omnipresent not only at a single point in time, but continuously in the rest interval following a given Universal Breath. This state, as with the previous of infinite resonant frequency and infinite bandwidth, carries the resolution of the point/infinity, and expansion/ contraction and so good/evil dualities, but further resolves another aspect of the zero/infinity dichotomy: again, such consciousness, although of zero bandwidth, being continuously omnipresent (i.e., in vibrating with infinite amplitude and infinite frequency) "samples" creation continuously, or takes an infinitely rapid series of consciously penetrating snapshots of the activities occurring within its sphere, and so is directly aware of the activities of all frequencies of vibration in creation: it IS all these activities. Thus, although, as in the infinite bandwidth and resonant frequency state, such consciousness is itself perfectly motionless and quiescent, it is also fully aware, without distortion, of all creational activities occurring within itself, as itself. Further, this state of infinite resonant frequency and zero bandwidth effectively consists of a continuous series of impulses, and so may be said to contain the discrete series of rhythmic impulses within itself; i.e., the discrete series is a subset of the continuous series. Note this, then: that, unlike the previous state in which one's sphere of consciousness mirrors the input impulse--and so expands instantaneously to infinity, thereafter being continuously present in the point at its center--the currently considered state is continuously present at all points in space and time, and thus, though it is still an infinite sphere, HAS NO SPECIFIC CENTER (about which to oscillate after an initial expansion); or, we may say, has its center simultaneously at all points in space. This is St. Bonaventure's "sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere"--fully identified with ALL of the Ocean at all points in space and time, it IS the Infinite Ocean, in both its transcendent and immanent aspects; of infinite subjective time, so fully transcendent of time. It is the feeling of oneself as both the Ocean and as all its waves; union simultaneously with transcendent God beyond creation, God within creation, and the vibrations in the sound of Om themselves; being fully conscious of both transcendent God and of the immanent divine waves of God in/as creation. This highest state of God-consciousness is not a state among other states, but a state which includes all lower states--both in the sense that all states of consciousness derive from the white light of God (so that the white light includes all lower states within itself), and that the Ocean of Reality is present in every wave, and so is the source and suchness of all waves of consciousness; and in this highest state we have BECOME the Ocean. Consciousness in this state is both moving with infinite velocity, and present everywhere in a state of complete rest; it has become all vibrations, and IS all vibrations, and yet is vibrationless; it is present everywhere, so present in every point; and being fully present (in a state of complete rest) in every point, is transcendent of space and time. To clarify: we are not saying that God IS an infinite amplitude, infinite frequency vibration; rather, the meaning is that when one's consciousness--which is not something you possess, as for example your soul HAS a body but is not confined to the body, but is rather what you ARE; its existence is what gives rise to your intuitive feeling that "I exist": given Shankara's characterization of God- Reality as Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, any direct experience or illumination of reality must entail both consciousness and existence; that is, a CONSCIOUS awareness of one's own EXISTENCE, or intuitive knowledge that "I exist"; although, since we have earlier associated the Bliss-nature of this trio with transcendent God, it would probably be more correct to associate self-consciousness with the point- contractions of one's consciousness--has attained to cosmic consciousness or the "sphere of center everywhere, circumference nowhere," it realizes full omnipresent identity, at all points in time, with Reality in both its immanent and transcendent aspects. Conversely, if we are very careful to remember that mathematics cannot tell us what consciousness-reality IS but merely describe/map how it BEHAVES, we may say that the continuous existence of infinite Reality at every point in time ITSELF GENERATES a continuous series of impulses: an impulse is not merely infinite at a single point in time, but rather takes on every possible value from zero to infinity, at that one point in time: it is not present only at infinity, it is present everywhere; so that Reality-consciousness present everywhere at all points in time implicitly generates a continuous series of impulses, without special effort--this is, we may say, its natural state. The discrete series of rhythmic impulses-- implicitly containing all possible frequencies of vibration, all of equal amplitude--then arises when Reality focuses on certain distinct points of Itself, or individualizes Its consciousness (e.g., as "individualized points of joyous Spirit"), explicitly expressing Its immanence at only specific points in time, and then retiring to transcendence in the "special" point at the center of each such infinite sphere, in the interval between explicit expressions of immanence; and the rippling oceanic sound of Om comes into being when limitations are placed on this expression of immanence, circumscribing the hitherto infinite sphere--which itself creates no ripples on the surface of the Infinite Ocean--thus restricting both the immance and transcendence of that sphere of consciousness, whereby the produced wave "forgets" that it is part of the Ocean, one with the Ocean. We would thus regard the "little self" as being related in its essence to our finite sphere of consciousness, which again grants our intuitive knowledge that "I exist"; the Self to the Ocean of Reality, realized when one's self has dissolved or expanded to infinity; and the ego to the memory-map of reality, rooted in the subject/object dualism, by which we define what we are on the basis of what we have done in the past (although the ego also includes the analytical and discriminatory nature of the intellect). Thus, the three natural facets of Divine Consciousness--all derivable from a single common state--are: the projected pictures or sound of Om produced as waves on the surface of the Infinite Ocean by the filtered impulses of the Cosmic Projector; the impulses themselves; and the state of infinite resonant frequency and zero bandwidth--which is continuous full union with infinite Reality--which effectively consists of a continuous series of impulses, and so may be said to contain the discrete series of rhythmic impulses within itself. Alternatively, these three may be considered, in reverse order from that just given, as the state in which all possible rhythms are contained in potential, and in which one's union with the Divine Drummer is realized; the specific Rhythm beaten by the Divine Drummer against the ethereal membrane stretched across the Infinite Hemisphere; and the sound of Om produced as this Cosmic Drum vibrates after being struck. Consider now the yogic phrase "cloud-colored Christ"; or its Biblical counterpart in the association of Christ with the clouds, in that the second coming of Jesus is often misunderstood as involving Christ descending from heaven to earth on a physical cloud. ("Behold, he cometh with the clouds; and every eye shall see him"--Revelation 1:7.) Clouds are white areas (composed of microscopic spherical water droplets suspended in the air) within a sphere of blue--the sky. Further, white clouds descend to earth in the form of raindrops--spherical drops of water which, in masses (e.g., as any body of water, be it a pond, lake, etc.) appear blue; the sky being reflected in them. Thus, this association of Christ with the clouds may serve to shed some light on the metaphysical significance of rainbows: a rainbow in the sky may be taken as symbolic of the dispersion of the reflected dove-white light from the Sun-Father, into its component spectrum of colors or levels of reality within the blue sphere or sky of the cosmos, as the cloud-colored Christ consciousness descends from heaven--that is, from its parental home beyond duality--to earth in the form of spherical drops of water/Om. Similarly, but on a more cosmic scale, Christ consciousness descends from heaven ("above": higher in frequency, and viewed with upturned eyes through the spiritual eye) to earth in the form of a blue "drop" of water/Om: the cosmos, and its smaller sphere-within-sphere waterdrops or differentiations of the "noise of many waters"; so that each of our spheres of consciousness may be viewed as a drop of the "vast blue Ocean of sky." (If the ocean were to rise and cover all land on earth, it too would again form a blue sphere.) To summarize the cycle: Water falls from the clouds down to earth, participates as waves on the ocean in various oscillating spheres of consciousness (and as rivers of life energy, returning in their right direction of flow to the Ocean) then evaporates or returns to the clouds: Christ consciousness descends and ascends on a cloud; rain falls, and evaporates in the light of the sun (the transfer of energy from sunlight and atmosphere to the water raises the energy and RATE OF VIBRATION of the water molecules, changing them from liquid to vapor.) Accordingly, the relationship of Christ to the clouds would seem to indicate that we should associate Christ consciousness with something white--that is, a white consciousness--existing within the blue sphere of the cosmos. Allied to this association: the idea of the Son of God being born within a virgin (i.e., white; pure or unspoiled; not having experienced the pleasures and pains of duality; the state of purity from which egoic pleasure is absent) womb. Also, some scholars have proposed that Jesus Christ and John the Baptist never existed, but are merely mythological representations that have evolved from earlier sun- and water-gods, respectively. While this obviously misses the mark--to put it mildly--it does at least again bring out the association between the Son, and the white light of the sun. Anything visibly white (e.g., a cloud) is so because it reflects all colors, or visible rates of vibration, equally; so that the extended structural implication again seems to be that Christ consciousness should be in some way associated with a true whiteness, or the presence of all possible rates of vibration, from zero to infinity, all of equal amplitude (although both the Drummer--the "continuous series of impulses" which is full identity with the omnipresent Ocean of immanent and transcendent God at each point in time, containing all possible rhythms or movements of Itself in potential, and BEING all such actual movements--and the Cosmic Drumming can be considered to embody this "whiteness"; the former is simply a state of continuous, "undecaying" whiteness). Certainly the previously- described infinite resonant frequency, zero bandwidth state, of "center everywhere and circumference nowhere," being both omnipresent and transcendent, fits the description of cosmic consciousness; and Christ consciousness is described as the sole reflection of the intelligence of God the Father within creation, so that it should be possible to describe it as some subset or derivation of this symbolic description of the characteristics of cosmic consciousness, or continuous true cloud-whiteness both within and beyond the blue sphere of creation. Since the Christ Intelligence is present continuously within creation (i.e., not merely at specific points in time), we would expect that we could only realize conscious union with it though our individualized consciousness being likewise present continuously--that is, through our "sampling" creation at all points in time, and so evidently vibrating with infinite frequency (so that it would be incorrect to associate Christ consciousness with the discrete rhythmic impulsive beating of the Cosmic Drum). That is, we may say that so long as one's consciousness vibrates with merely finite frequency, it is only aware of the likewise-finitely-vibrating waves on the Ocean; whereas when it vibrates with infinite frequency, it is one with both the waves and the Ocean. However, this presents a bit of a problem when we attempt to account for the mystic's drawing of a distinction between the SUCCESSIVE realizations of Christ consciousness and cosmic consciousness: in the view of the characteristics of the impulse response, these two divine states would be realized simultaneously (in that an infinite frequency of vibration implies an infinite maximum frequency, and so an infinite amplitude of expansion of one's consciousness: in the bandpass-filtered impulse response, there is no such thing as an infinite frequency, finite amplitude vibration). On the other hand, if we do not distinguish between conscious union with Om and with the Reality-Intelligence or Ocean underlying/becoming all the waves of Om, we lose the distinction between the Holy Ghost and the Christ consciousness. Clearly, there are many things in heaven and earth yet to be understood here. Consequently, none of the ideas presented herein are meant to be taken as statements of final truth as such (although they do accord remarkably well with the common ground of all great religions in their descriptions of the characteristics of consciousness entailed in the direct intuitive experience of reality). Even aside from the fact that truth can only be stated unequivocally by one in cosmic consciousness, and so united with God, any attempt to convey such direct knowledge of Truth through the medium of words and symbols becomes subject to all the limits and potential for misunderstanding inherent in such communication. The ideas presented here are thus given simply with the proposal "Doesn't this seem to make sense?" And, if you can rightly answer this question in the affirmative, is there then any logical reason not to give extended effort in meditation toward one's own intuitive illumination of Truth? to the direct experience of Reality, unmediated by the veil-symbols covering the face of the Divine Beloved? The only proper purpose of any book on mysticism--or on the underlying unity of science and religion: of the reflection of the characteristics of consciousness in physical behavior, of the reproduceable and so "experimental" nature of meditative experience, and of the ability of consciousness to influence its condensation in matter through free will--is to encourage others toward actual meditative practice. The mere satisfaction of curiosities through the intellectual understanding of "new paradigms" cannot be allowed to substitute for this spiritual discipline; if it does, it is a bane rather than a boon. SUMMARY The phrase "the Consciousness of Light" encapsulates the truism that velocities approaching the velocity of light reflect the behavior of levels of consciousness advancing toward the highest state of God-Light, of infinite subjective time and mass, and so omnipresent. Just as God-Truth descends to become absolutely distinguishable good and evil, light can differentiate into matter and anti-matter; conversely, the resolution of all possible dualities (e.g., the meeting of matter/anti-matter pairs of all possible energies) produces an expanding sphere of white light. The simplest truly white signal is the impulse, which, in conjunction with the idea that creation consists of ripples on the surface of the Infinite Ocean (this posing the question as to how these ripples are introduced) discloses that omnipresence and omniscience, in the sphere of truly white Light, come hand in hand. Further, in this Ocean we have free choice and free will in proportion to the degree to which we unfold/raise/attune our consciousness to the Divine to manifest the infinite perfection of God already within us: Yoga, or union (with God), is the neutralization of the alternating states in consciousness: we become what we concentrate on. The involved rhythmic impulsive nature of the universe follows from (i) Om as the basis of all vibrations, implying that the root of such a soundless roar will contain all possible frequencies; (ii) Om as the "Word [or Name] of God," through which all things are made, again implying that the basis of such a Word must contain all possible frequencies from zero to infinity; (iii) Om as arising from the "beating of a Cosmic Drum"; (iv) Om as the sound produced by the "knocking" at the door between God and creation; (v) Om as the "whirr of the Vibratory Motor"; (vi) Om as the outward expression of the clockworklike "ticking of a Cosmic Watch" or Metronome: the cosmos runs like clockwork; (vii) Om as arising from the "swinging of a Cosmic Pendulum." In the words of Kabir: "Held by the cords of love, the swing of the Ocean of Joy sways to and fro; and a mighty sound breaks forth in song"; (viii) Om as the sound of One Hand clapping; (ix) Om as "that Lady I saw you with last night"; (x) but seriously; (xi) the vocal vowel incantation of "o" and subsequent "mmm" closing of this aperture in chanting "Om," implying a rhythmic expansion and contraction, or opening and closing, of a circle or sphere: whenever an aperture rhythmically expands and contracts, it mimics the sound of Om; i.e., all speech is derivative of the power of Om; (xii) the "electrical spike" character of the nervous system (and the relation of the subtle or astral nervous system and its chakras to spiritual evolution or the expansion of consciousness, plus "As above, so below"); (xiii) the averred motion picture basis of creation: a white light signal applied at uniformly separated instants in time to a filtering system/film; (xiv) the cosmos being a living, breathing-as-an- act-of-mind-(or energy distribution) entity: all matter is consciousness in varying degrees of spiritual evolution (so that light, too, is consciousness); and (xv) this entity having a heartbeat. This bandpass filtered rhythmic impulsive basis also accounts for the intuitive knowledge that "I exist." And again, Om as the "noise of many waters," as with (i) and (ii) above, implies that the white light of the Cosmic Projector not only drives the expansion of all individual spheres of consciousness, but is also responsible for the birth, maintenance, and death of all the transitory oceanic wave-forms of creation. Finally, the interdependence of individual and universal good implies that by the very act of improving yourself, you raise others' consciousness, or contribute to their true and lasting happiness or Bliss, so that the highest duty of each one of us is to seek God through meditation and selfless service-- improving ourselves without limit: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God." CONCLUSIONS The consonance of universal behavior with the inner perceptions of the mystics is not merely coincidental; this has been adequately demonstrated. The inescapable conclusion of their harmony is this: deep meditation opens the door to a level of consciousness inclusive of but transcending all finite states; to the infinite Bliss and Wisdom of God. Act on this right conclusion! Begin meditating, with the goal of one day knowing with absolute certainty all that your heart and mind have ever longed to know. Unlike the often purely speculative philosophies of the West, yoga and its related Eastern systems of thought are not only amenable to proof but further DEMAND the personal meditative experience of Truth as the inner, undeniable demonstration of their eternal validity. Theories regarding the nature and behavior of the physical world are testable through physical experiments; the "theories" of consciousness expounded by the mystics of all ages are also verifiable, but not through external experiments. Rather, the nature and behavior of consciousness can be known only through the performance of the appropriate experiments in the expansion of consciousness; through concentration used to know God, which is meditation. Meditation has sometimes been reasonably spoken of as "scientific." This, however, is not meant to imply that a knowledge of higher mathematics is required in its practice! Rather, what is meant is that, just as physical experiments performed with careful attention to the requisite techniques of experimentation will always produce the same results, independent of the preconceived beliefs of the experimenter, so also the meditative experiments in the expansion of consciousness, when performed with due attention and devotion, will produce the same results regardless of one's system of beliefs. The methods of meditation are thus universal and useable by everyone toward the realization of Reality. To suggest that they are specifically adapted to the East, and that we in the West must evolve our own methods of systematic spiritual unfoldment based more on the principles of physical science than on Eastern mysticism, shows a grave misunderstanding of the principles upon which such techniques are based. Duality can only be transcended through the raising to infinity of one's level of consciousness; through one- pointed, singular concentration on God, and the concomitant expansion of one's sphere of conscious sympathies and awareness to include and so transcend all space. Other than demonstrating the physical manifestation of subtler mystic-expounded verities, and thus providing a very strong hint that the Masters have indeed spoken truth, physical science of itself is useless as a means of spiritual unfoldment. Further, mysticism and physical science are not mutually exclusive of one another: the mystic can directly experience, from "inside" in conscious oneness, any level of reality, including the level probed by the physicist, but the physicist can at best observe, from "outside," the lower reflections of consciousness in the behavior of matter. An individual could very well be both a great physicist AND a God- realized mystic; there is no need or benefit to minimize the latter in order to excel in the former. The inquiry as to whether free choice exists is the most fundamental question of existence: If we have no choice in the actions we perform--that is, if our "choices" are either random or completely predetermined--we cannot be held ultimately responsible for our actions; so that it is only if we have some freedom of choice that it really "matters" whether good and evil are distinguishable or not, whether God, heaven, or hell exists, etc. This being the case, before we need feel bound to accept the "revealed authority" of any religion, we may reasonably ask of it an explanation as to how free choice, and its outward expression in free will, can exist. We know and feel intuitively, and find recorded in the teachings of the Yogis, that rocks have no free will, humans can exercise partial free will, and perfected consciousness is possessed of complete freedom of will. And again, it is only beyond time that we can make choices unconditioned by past causes, and so have free choice and free will. Further, only the perfectly integrated state of the Absolute is beyond time. Thus, in order to have free will in proportion to the height of our individual states of consciousness, we must go beyond time, and so into the integrated state of God, to a greater degree in higher (or expanded) states of consciousness than in lower levels of awareness. And it is self-evident that we require at least omnipresence throughout creation in order to have complete free will; else the universe could conceivably end up with two localized beings or spheres of consciousness, each having complete free will and so being all-powerful. (Complete free will implies omnipotence: full free will is, by any reasonable definition, the ability to reshape creation immediately and through all future time in whatever way one chooses--and this is indistinguishable from the characteristics carried by omnipotence. Thus, no one can reasonably claim that all mortal humans have complete free will.) And this is as absurd as there being two Gods, each of Whom is omnipotent: there can be only one Infinite, invisibly embracing all. Thus, we cannot have complete free will--which is the full passage of consciousness through the door between creation and transcendent Spirit--without being also omnipresent (and vibrationless) through all relative space. We know also that the mystical experience of higher states of consciousness involves the experience of a greater degree of Bliss; a dilation and "flying" of subjective time; an increasing refinement of thought and clarity of intuition; and an awareness of and ability to function in higher or more subtle realities, having "finer" particles than does physical reality. The impulse response model of the universe-- which, being comprehensible to the present-day human intellect, must necessarily give only a vague glimpse of the complete creational mechanism--provides a very compact and efficient means of accounting for this wide range of expectations, and does so on the basis of a minimum number of postulates: it need assume only the validity of the motion picture basis of creation, the fact that higher states of consciousness are higher rates of intelligent vibration, and combine these with a literal interpretation of the expressions "sphere of consciousness" and "expansion of consciousness." And, as an added bonus, and metaphysical necessity, the involved ability to distinguish between the expansion and contraction of consciousness implies that good is absolutely distinguishable from evil. Further, given the fact that free choice can only be made beyond time, it is only in a view of the universe closely allied to the motion picture model that we can account for the fact that mortal consciousness has only partial free choice and free will: how else but in a finite frequency of point-contractions can consciousness be only partly beyond time? And as soon as one has accepted the intuitively audible and averred nature of Om as the omnipresent basis of all vibrations, implying that this basis contains all possible frequencies from zero to infinity, and so leading naturally to the impulsive structure of creation (as with the application of "As above, so below" to the spikes of the human nervous system), and the filtering of this Word implied by the motion picture nature of the universe (or by the fact that the infinite perfection of God is already within us; that it is only ego that limits the manifestation/ expression of this Light), it can hardly be disputed that it follows logically and mathematically from this that the realization of God-consciousness consists, as noted by Patanjali, in the neutralization of the oppositional states in dualistic consciousness. Lacking the precise language of mathematics, it would be very difficult to objectively and forcefully demonstrate that creation can be both a "cosmic motion picture," and arise from the "beating of a Cosmic Drum"--to the casual eye, what similarities exist between motion pictures and drumming?--and, further, that this structure or body of God could have anything to do with the lower reflected human nervous and circulatory systems; as well as with knocking, with breath, with mouths and words, with true cloud- whiteness, clockworklike pendulums, and thunderous hands clapping. However, given a simple application of the quantitative language of mathematics, the equivalence of these various structural descriptions becomes obvious. Conversely, were any meditator, being formally unfamiliar with the mathematical equivalence of these diverse structures, to characterize creation, on the basis of his-her meditative perceptions, as both a cosmic motion picture and as arising from the beating of a Cosmic Drum, this characterization could not but be based in valid direct conscious perception of the basic creational structure. The mathematical self-consistency of such meditative perceptions must further dismiss as utterly untenable any suggestion that meditation is merely a form of self-hypnosis; that its revelations are merely "what you want them to be." Good and evil are again absolutely distinguishable, and are contained in integrated potential in the Divine Drumming underlying Om. That is, the universe exhibits both "dualism"--good and evil being distinct and opposite principles--and "monism," in that these principles are derived from a unified whole: both good and evil (indeed, all dualities or polarities) have descended from neutral God immanent in creation, transcendent beyond creation. And we transcend good and evil by rising into this unified higher state, in which both good and evil--both hero and villain--are seen to be born from the formless white light (in which neither good nor evil are present in actuality, but both are present in potential) of the primordial manifestation of God; a state which can be reached only through unconditional goodness, or the expanding of one's consciousness to infinity, and so the feeling of oneself as all things equally and the working for the greatest bliss and service of all. This state transcends the good/evil duality, or the raising and lowering of the resonant frequency of consciousness, not because the instantaneously omnipresent sphere is both expanding and contracting simultaneously, but because in order for a sphere of consciousness to expand or contract, it must be finite in the first place; and all possible finite spheres are contained in potential--but none are bounded in actuality--in the omnipresent state. In this God-conscious state, we rightly realize all creational activity to be nothing more than plays of light and shadow of the Creator: neither villain nor hero are real; it is only shadows and light producing the pictures of the cosmic movie; this projected play yet a "seamless" coat of God, in that all objective manifestations--classed as chairs, human bodies, trees--arise as localized waves of disturbance in the Cosmic Sea, and so are all made of the same stuff: there are no separate and distinct objects, divorced from one another; everything is interpenetrating waves of the same Sea, or light from the same Projector. The continuous white Light of God- consciousness is not only the infinite limit of the spectrum of consciousness, it is the nature and source of each level of the spectrum: God is in all things-- all the world in truth is God--but all things together do not pantheistically constitute God. Further, if God were not omnipresent, He would not be God, but if He were only omnipresent, you would be enlightened right now; thus, God is both omnipresent and not omnipresent. What every person and thing is, whether enlightened or not, is still only God, and is pervaded by the undivided omnipresence of God--so that, when God is seen to be in the world, as the world, the world is radically divine--but expresses that infinite omnipresence through itself only in a limited or finite way: We may say that all of the Absolute is equally at every point (so that, for example, every point of the Infinite Ocean is a "point without extension, moment without duration," or state of transcendence of time and space) but some points are closer to Absolute than others (since, as soon as consciousness begins rippling in a sphere, the point at its center becomes its unique gateway--restricted to a finite frequency of passage--to transcendent God; whereas, for cosmic consciousness, AT REST simultaneously in ALL points, every point of the Infinite Ocean is realized as both immanent and equally transcendent as all other points). The Absolute is both the highest level of reality AND the condition or real nature of EVERY level of reality. It is not that the Absolute only comes into existence at that highest state--it existed all along, but could only be REALIZED when consciousness itself evolved to its highest estate. Buddha-nature is both your real and present condition and your future potential or realization. (A number of the phrases in the latter half of this paragraph have been borrowed from Wilber's "Eye to Eye", and thence from the perennial philosophy.) "Since, upon a careful/logical/scientific/unbiased examination of the universe, it becomes self-evident that God exists, even before one has ascended to direct knowledge of Perfection, where does this leave faith, given that faith may be colloquially defined as 'belief even in the presence of doubt'? How can one have faith when there is no rational reason to doubt?" The idea of faith as belief in the presence of doubt, although widespread and encouraged by mainstream religion, is not valid: mere belief, with or without questioning, cannot move mountains; only intuitive REALIZATION of the Infinite Power of Truth, and the associated indomitable freedom of will, can do this. If you have attained to realized true belief, or direct intuitive knowledge of the true structure of the cosmos, your consciousness having taken on the characteristic qualities of form echoed in the tiny, spherical (pointlike) yellow-white (i.e., sunlike; infinite sphere-of-light) mustard seed--a sunlike sphere of light-consciousness, such consciousness being infinitely large, infinitely small or pointillistic, and everything in between, simultaneously; the sunlike seed-potential from which all manifest Nature unfurls--creation will dance in effortless accord with the power of your God-united will; ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you. The sunlike spherical mustard seed, when initially planted in the earthy soil of material nature, is indeed the smallest, most insignificant seed (of zero amplitude and zero frequency); but when it grows, its bowers (i.e., the developed tree of the subtle nervous system) provide a home for the bird of omnipresence. "Faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen....Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God" (Hebrews 11:1-3. Indeed, the word of God frames the innermost structure of all creation's worlds; but the faith through which this is fully understood is identical with Self-realization or direct conscious knowledge of God through intuition, and has nothing to do with believing without the possibility of proof). Faith cannot be separated from free choice/will--both have their source in conscious intuitional contact with God. That is, the existence of free will, based in the freely chosen transfer of energy between individual and environment--the means through which mountains may be moved into the sea, rooted in the outward projection of one's "hopes" or concentrated positive thoughts--is "evidence of things not seen"; is evidence of the existence of God: if free will and so free choice exist, formless transcendent God, not "seeable" even in principle, exists. The respective views of India in yoga, and of the Far East in Taoism, concerning liberation or moksha may be summarized as: "All is illusion: let it go"; and "All is in order: let it come." These are not contradictory viewpoints; they cannot be, if both are based in Ultimate Enlightenment: there are many paths, but can be only One Goal. The cosmic motion picture is simply that--a movie. Even the highest pleasure, worst suffering and grossest imbalances are only plays of shadow and light: the eternal timeless Self which peeks through the pores of space as both uninvolved witness and actor in the drama of creation is forever blissful, forever untarnished by duality's boundaries. Therefore, do not be deceived into thinking that the transitory God's-will-sustained and ultimately decaying/dissolving light-forms of the motion picture are capable of producing eternal happiness in you: it is illusion; a dance of shadow and light; let it go. But in this movie, the Director's plot is being constantly modified to make the most of the present circumstances, or aspire toward the greatest good (flowing like a river to the place it wants to be); and when one's thoughts and actions are in perfect accord with this natural flow--when, having expanded your consciousness into Infinity, you realize fully that the Director has become you, and so participate in this plotting as one with Him--they result not only in the greatest realization of one's own Bliss, but in the greatest Bliss possible for all without infringing on free will, or the choice to reject God-Bliss in favor of egoic pleasure and pain: all things work together for the good of each and all. And in everything there is an element of perfection, for Om- God has become and is present in all things: All is in order; let it come. It's an illusion, but it's an ordered illusion: God's in His heaven, and all's well in light on earth. Further, while creation is rooted in the balanced reciprocity of polarities, the right or natural way of progress toward Perfection does not consist in maintaining a dynamic balance between good and evil--between the expansion and contraction, or raising and lowering of the resonant frequency, of consciousness. The innate course of creation is the evolution of consciousness toward the infinite resonant frequency that is attunement to the Absolute; it is only ego, or the concern for self rather than for All, that interferes with this natural course. The magnetic ardor of Love of the Searcher of Hearts is constantly encouraging consciousness to enter the spiritual eye; it is only unwillingness and restlessness on the part of the individual that interferes with this natural course of action. It is only by acting unconditionally in accord with the will of God, thus ridding oneself of personal desires, and so of the ego, that the disturbances that are the individualized wave of consciousness subside, and the eternal union of the tranquilled wave with the Infinite Ocean is realized. Action sometimes in good, sometimes in selfishness or evil, can never lead one to the transcendence of duality, because consciousness can never melt completely in God so long as there is any vestige of finite self remaining. This is so by definition, both spiritual and mathematical. Nor is it impossible for us to act in unconditional goodness--to act always in accord with the will of God (and so always toward the greatest good), as expressed through the guru, who is one with God. Unconditional goodness comes part and parcel with the death of the ego and the expansion of the finite self to infinity: when self is gone, there can be nothing left to interfere with the right course of events. The white Light of Truth is already within all of us; it is only ego (that is, the primary individual application of the ego-principle) that limits the manifestation of this Light. And the full expression of the Light of God through each one of us is not only possible, but is necessary and inevitable, through the course of this and, if need be, future incarnations. In attempting to demonstrate, among other things, the underlying common ground of all true religions, the author has made quiet reference herein to scientific-religious principles expounded in a number of different sources. However, whenever an approach such as this is taken, great care must be exercised that it does not degenerate, or be perceived as degenerating, into the borrowing of what one sees as the best characteristics of each path to form a "new" approach to God--the creation of one's own hybrid spiritual path. While all true masters offer valid means to the attainment of God-realization, the ego- induced admixture of these approaches cannot but dilute their effect; at the very least it demonstrates an acute lack of loyalty and faith in one's master. The guru knows best; only a very foolish disciple would presume to "improve" upon the instructions and techniques of one who knows God. Thus, although the author recognizes the validity of all true paths to God, his heart's allegiance and loyalty rest solely with the path of Paramahansa Yogananda, as expressed through Self-Realization Fellowship: none but Yogananda and the SRF line of gurus have permission to shape this life and consciousness. And there is virtue in loyalty also. The close disciples of the Galilean master would have found no benefit in the consultation or discussion of the principles of metaphysics with the intellectuals of their time. Pilate was, after all, one of the intellectuals living at the time of Christ; but even notwithstanding this association, the fact remains: When you have found one in whom the Light of Truth shines fully, what point is there in continuing to be influenced by the conjectures of the millions still wandering blindly in darkness? Those who are striving to regain their lost immortality should be influenced only by ideas corroborated by the Great Ones, and not by the mere opinions of other mortals, however great they may be in the eyes of science or the eyes of the world: "If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch." It is only through the guidance of a true master that the labyrinthine maze of duality can be escaped. A true guru is not merely a teacher or spiritual guide: he-she is the disciple's direct link with God; not a rabbi or a minister, but a saviour, empowered to grant the everlasting blessing of full God-realization, not on the basis of intellectual study of the scriptures, nor merely through the "privileged status" of minister or rabbi, but rather because he-she lives in that highest state of consciousness. The acceptance of the guru- disciple relationship is of additional importance toward the realization that YOU are not the direct maker of your spiritual progress: that all you have comes to you from the hands of God--your Higher Self-- through attunement to the guru. Neither intellectual cleverness and erudition nor the awareness of hitherto unnoticed correspondences between science and mysticism nor the intellectual derivation of physical laws and universal models from metaphysical principles are any indication of the transcendence of duality on the part of an individual. The proof that one is a master and has therefore transcended duality is evidenced only by the ability to enter at will the breathless God-conscious state, and by the higher experience of continuous God- ecstasy, whether or not the body is motionless and breathless. Self-realization is the direct experience, in body, mind, and soul, of one's eternal conscious union with the omnipresence of God both within and beyond creation. This union is the state of consciousness known by all the Great Ones, and WITHOUT EXCEPTION the message they have brought to unenlightened humanity is that, through intelligent self-effort and guru-guided meditation, this Goal of Goals can and must be realized by each one of us. But we must meditate! What is needed, then, are the guru and the efficient techniques of meditation. Toward this, the sincere seeker is offered heartfelt encouragement to read Paramahansa Yogananda's "Autobiography of a Yogi". This beloved masterpiece of metaphysical literature--the greatest and most wisdom-perfumed book I have ever been privileged to read; no one who reads it, with an open heart, will fail to be changed by it --is available from Self-Realization Fellowship (3880 San Rafael Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90065-3299), the organization founded by Sri Yogananda in 1920 to act as the means of dissemination of the ancient scientific meditative technique of Kriya Yoga. ("Sri" is an East Indian title of respect.) Kriya Yoga is an advanced technique of life-force (prana) control by which, through the guru's inner guidance, the rate of conscious evolution of the individual may be greatly increased. Yogananda's testimony regarding the efficacy of the science of Kriya Yoga is recorded in Chapter 26 of the Autobiography. The technique itself may be received after the devotee has completed approximately the first year of the Self-Realization Fellowship Lessons. (Several preliminary techniques of meditation are taught within this period.) A free booklet, "Undreamed-of Possibilities," describing the general philosophy of Sri Yogananda and SRF, and including an application form for the SRF Lessons, is available from the above address. All Kriya Yogis, of which I am one, pledge their spiritual loyalty to Sri Yogananda: No Kriya Yoga disciple of his can ever assume the status of "guru," regardless of his-her degree of spiritual advancement. It is a vital point of metaphysics that the eternal guru-disciple bond is established, and the guru's inner guidance thus secured, only when the disciple receives spiritual initiation either from the guru himself or through the guru's chosen agency. Sri Yogananda specifically founded and designated SRF for this purpose. Any other individual or organization claiming to represent Yogananda's teachings or purporting to offer Kriya initiation should therefore be avoided. (Self-Realization Fellowship annually publishes a list of persons authorized by the President of SRF to give Kriya Yoga initiation for the coming year, in the summer issue of "Self-Realization Magazine". Anyone whose name does not appear on this list is not authorized or qualified to give Kriya initiation: mere "attunement to the guru" on the part of the initiator--or having once been authorized in past years, but having had this privilege withdrawn by SRF owing to lack of loyalty, etc., on the part of the initiator--does not establish the guru-disciple bond; this bond is established only when Kriya is given by someone annually re-authorized by the President of SRF to do so.) Likewise, while the models presented herein are, to the best of my present understanding, in large accord with the valid direct perceptions of all true masters --including Sri Yogananda: Yogananda often characterized creation as a "cosmic motion picture," and as arising from the "beating of a Cosmic Drum"; recall how these characterizations are mathematically equivalent--the ideas given voice in this manuscript have not in any way been explicitly endorsed or approved by Self-Realization Fellowship; i.e., the author is not to be taken as an authorized representative of Yogananda's work--only SRF merits this revered privilege. I am well aware of the damage that can be done when still-too-ignorant disciples attempt to spread, conditioned by their own imperfect understanding, the "Good Word" they have recently discovered; and, conversely, of the importance of maintaining the purity of any master's original teachings. But still, I could not write this book without mentioning Yogananda's name at least a few times; for if his name were to have been entirely omitted, where then could you turn for the wanted techniques of meditation? The pilgrimage of Spirit is an ever-new journey into Perfect Love, Wisdom and Truth. It accepts no excuses born of imagined mortality; it demands a continuously reaffirmed dedication of heart, mind and soul, not just in meditation but in one's every thought and activity. But for those who would labor unceasingly only to please Our Love, the harvest truly is plentiful; even the first fragrant wisps of peace born in meditation will convince of this. In Her Perfection and nowhere else is found the sole nectar to quench the every noble desire of the heart. "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." ABOUT THE AUTHOR ~author~═══════╕ │ │ Geoffrey Falk was born in southern Manitoba in │ │ 1966, and has studied Electrical Engineering │ │ and Physics at the University of Manitoba, with │ │ varying degrees of interest. He is presently │ │ employed as a waiter, is proud of it, and is │ │ working on an album of keyboard- and voice- │ │ based music, "Beside Blissful Waters". │ │ ╘══════════════╛ FOOTNOTE FOR PAGE 12 Gregory Bateson observed that "metaphor is the language of Nature." This is true, but is simply another way of saying "As above, so below": all above/below correspondences are metaphorical (e.g, "creation is waves on the surface of the Infinite Ocean"); and Nature is built on "As above, so below." (The implication of "As above, so below" is that the microcosm reflects the macrocosm: atoms [in the view of classical physics, at least] are miniature solar systems; the human body mirrors the structure of the cosmos [the "body" of God]--so that humankind is created "in the image of God"--etc.) Puns involve plays on words, or the "working" of an idea on more than one level. This is a very metaphorical ("above/below" or "self-similar") characteristic, so that puns are--potentially, at least--the highest, not the lowest, form of humour: they have the greatest capacity to express the intelligence of God enfolded in the self-similar universal structure.