I got to thinking about the "Planes and Levels" thing and here seems to be a basic thread that we can follow which leads out of the cosmic causes through this life and back to a cosmic cause for a new life etc. Seems worth tossing out for consideration.

Let's start with the initial instant of our awareness of this universe, and call it the instant of Cause. Following Egyptian usage, I personally see the instant of cause to be the opposition of the locally defined and the globally defined natures of everything, which can be found in a dichotomous view of emptiness. One aspect is too small to define, just a vanishingly tiny state, while the other is too vast to fill, an all-engulfing state, yet both are one. By opposing these two aspects, we can build a lot of logical structures, and eventually we get to the level at which these states relate to one another just as reality relates to itself, and it looks like extended matter emerging. This is sufficient to give rise to the manifestation of "Creativity" in the sense of an "Uncaused Cause" that we call God.

The dynamic aspect of this emergence relates the static terms on various levels of abstraction, eventually giving rise to reflexive systems, and from them, potentially oscillatory systems of states which become autonomous. And this gives rise to sentient beings. At the same time, the organization of the universe also retains the collective aspects, giving rise to God-In-The-World, more commonly called "the Cosmic Consciousness".

The whole collection of possibilities filters itself by virtue of the most probable and stable states remaining and the rest fading away. There are many ways to view this stuff, so we have multiple viewpoints, yet all reflect the same core reality, as does the Cosmic Consciousness. This gives lots of individual sentiencies scattered here and there, plus one background global awareness.

The sentient actors live and develop values, and attitudes that carry those values into practice. The choices for life are defined by the ways in which the primal emptiness was manipulated to form an underlying potential world structure. We choose this or that opportunity by making an emotional identification with that state, an attachment. These are the ties that bind us to the material world. We could stop being here, but t do that would mean abandoning our attachments. (To test this, decide to go "elsewhere" and stop breathing. Notice that it is uncomfortable - that's the pressure of attachments urgng you to stay attached. - Now start again, please.)

At death we have a choice. When the individual actors die there are no material attachments, but the attitudes of the actors remain as a dynamic by which their future choices might be defined. For those who retain their attachments, they go back and get reborn and develop new attitudes. For those who no longer cling to their attachments, they leave the world of prior experience and enter a state inwhich they can view their options differently, whcih means that they discover nearly an infinity of potential alternative worlds in which to live. This places the actor's awareness at the point of oneness with God's awareness.

Those who no longer cling to the world of prior experience then abandon their attachments. This frees them to experience a vast number of alternative potentialities. When one of those potentialities seems to be interesting, then they form new attachments and cling to that set of initial definitions. This sends them to the point of creation of a new universe, a new instant of Cause. The Cosmic Consciousness is already embodied these options, so it is consistent theroughout, even though not manifesting.

While this is only a suggestion, I'd like to point out that this type of cycle explains an origination, evolution of awareness, and creation of the next universe down line. That gives endless creations, each of us acting, as Cayce put it, as Co-Creators with God. The role of attitude in choosing options for life is the essential determiner of experience. Cause and effect are sufficient to explain how it works. And all the other rich array of spiritual phenomena are added on by way of interactions which we elect while alive.

This kind of model, here presented as a skeleton only, should be more or less valid for everyone, although most people will see it slightly differently. What it implies is that we can build a universe tht operates quite well without the need for an eternal hell nor an eternal heaven. Both are unnecessary. Instead, we have an afterlife in which we remain in the abstract context of prior experiences. These may feel like heaven or hell, as all meditators can attest, but there is no need for a specific place for either extreme. Having neither heaven nor hell, we can get rid of the notion of Divine punishment or reward. All we have is a place to work out our differences, and to design a better way to live. And the responsibility is totally our own.

Hmmm - looks a lot like Buddhism.

dave

Actually, Alan, entropy is what I suggest as the driving motivation for this kind of sequence. - And I haven't filled in the blanks nor tucked in all the corners in my proposal. Consider, please-

For two ideas, A and B, in a non-additive space, the information at A has 50% chance of occurring in some random event. Because the space is non-additive, there is no increase of entropy because states do not change. But in an additive space, there is a chance that the two ideas will merge to form a third idea C, synergic to the two beginners. Then there is more than a 50% chance that any random interaction will encounter the information at A, because it now occurs in more than a single location. This alters the entropy. By making the information at A and at B more likely, the entropy of state for information A declines (the combined state is more probable, which is why it is stable) while the entropy of the entire system increases (the system increases in complexity).

So we begin in voidness with total emptiness, which is also total potentiality, and we have a dichotomous presentation of the structure of space - vanishingly tiny or endlessly vast. There we have two abstract states, and since they are abstract, they add with replacement. Then, following the same tendency for additivity, this spews out an innate logical structure that extends from the initial twist of space to a potentially infinite number of relationships of twisted space. The logic of the elements of the structure is, at some points, the same as the logic of everyday interactions. Being isomorphic with reality, in various slightly different forms of isomorphism (think of the fibers of a pencil of states emergent as the product of an interated complexion - or iterated power set, if you like that term better),  this is sufficient to give the experiences we associate with reality. Reduction of physics to geometry has been quite successful, Einstein handling gravitation and major curvatures of space, and a couple months back, physicist A Garrett Lisi demonstrated that the sub-atomic zoo can be reduced to vector transitions within the exceptional and simply Lie group E8. He has the physics world alll a-twitter over his ideas, but they actually are a follow up to Kaluza and Klein's earlier work in the 1920s, and all without invoking strings or branes.

So That's the initial idea. The world must start itself and be as it is because no matter where or when, its nature is to occur by sheer probability. Thus, what St Thomas Aquinas called the "Uncaused Cause" can be equally well termed Thermodynamics.

What I'm suggesting is that this gives rise to two general systems, one being the core evolution of God-Mind-Manifest, embodied in the interaction stuff of the primordial instant, and potentially endless dynamics in potential state space. The other is that each fiber of the bundle of states surrounding the core state (the "progress vector" is the core state and most probable fiber, and is Lie congruent forward) is a personal viewpoint in information space, and thus is potentially an available state for a localized viewpoint, what we call an individual actor, to occur. So that gives individual people and a Cosmic Consciousness - verifiable through meditation at the level called sarvastarka samadhi.

On the dissolution of the aggregates by which the individual actors are supported, their dynamic returns to be part of the global dynamic, thus preserving the experience of life and transferring it to the collective, so the Cosmic Consciousness (I guess you could call it the Holy Spirit, although the term carries a lot of social frieght) essentially is using individual experiences for global awareness. That's you and me, the fingers and toes of God.

At death the material definitions recycle, and the dynamic of the actor has a choice - one way is to return to the world through attachments - like a craving for apple pie, or obedience to the Bodhisattvic Vow. The other is to reject this world and seek to transcend it, which means going into the point of creation, nirvastarka samadhi, from which a return to any potential state will be through selection of a new viewpoint which means that the individual now is at the point of bringing together the dichotomous aspects of void space by twisting them together anew, and thus creating an entirely new universe.

What I'm suggesting here is not that my logic is the ideal nor that this is correct in some absolute manner. What I'm suggesting is that by looking at ideas of this general sort, of which there are thousands of other ways to describe the same process, we get a look at the possibility of a universe that propagates itself through the agency of individual choice - emphasizing that the individual is ultimately God. 

If we consider that we have about 3.5 billions of people here, many of whom would like a nicer world, we have a good reason to expect that this world, a fraction of the universe of experience,  could give off 3.5 billion new universes. If the universe were a plant, that would be kind of like the dandelion in creating thousands of seeds and sending them off in all directions. Except here we have the potential for literally billions of seed universes.

As for heat death of any universe, the jury is still out on the nature of the cosmos - the Friedman-Lemaitre "Big Bang" model is only one theory. Personally, I'm not a Big Bang Ganger, but I obviously prefer a form of multiple creative instants. Because an iterated complexion on dyadic geometry is sufficient geometry to define far more than our own universe, there is at least one way to predict formation of cosmic structures such as galaxies, using that approach, so this is a testable theory, with good geometric foundation. 

Field testing of these ideas has been limited to demonstration that the iterated complexion model is a precise gauge model of creative thought. (Published 1987.)

Anyhow - I'm curious about how people see this approach. It might be worth development.

dave

Hi Dave. I'm as you know no scientist but it strikes me that Fancisco Varela and Hubert Maturana developed a theory of autopoiesis. Which if I have it right effectively posits a theory for the means by which nature and life is in effect wired to produce ever higher levels of organisation - in opposition to the tendency of things to proceed towards chaos.

Here's some stuff on it from Google: http://dialog.net:85/homepage/autopoiesis.html Stick in the guys names and lots comes up. You are probably familiar with them as Varela ended up collaborating with leading Buddhist thinkers of the 70s. Varela died of cancer.

It's an approach which if I remember correctly seems to fit pretty well with the thinking outlined in the 'What the Bleep' movie - about the overlap between spiritual thought and particle physics.  No idea if this all meshes with the Dave Theory of everything..

Dave You  posted

""That's total stability. This is entropy of state. It is a relative posture within the global system. The entire system has its own collective entropy based on the probability of is configuration, hence, as complexity increases, so does entropy, more or less, which is the way most of us learned it from Boltzman and Planck"". 

Hay Dave my physics not as advanced as yours, however, “That’s Total Stability” Well that’s simply death of a system, it cannot move. when it reaches that state. I have never observed total stability, so as entropy increases complexity increases. We assume that’s complexity, but my view is complexity of a system or an individual are “intrinsic efforts to delay the inevitable chaos and death. Evolution says by some sort of natural mindless adaptation in as it organism becomes more complex to survive. Yes to avoid the ultimate fate that entropy poses to all material things. Thus the universe is finite and must eventually pass away as in Revelations

Reversal of Entropy, Entropy going down, well in infinite time anything that can happen will happen. The miracles of Jesus is a reversal of entropy chaos back to order. The original state of the universe as an infinite singularity is ultimate non (zero) entropy and from the moment God said let there be light it has being run down to a heat death with brief complexities arising and disappearing in the vast panorama of the totality of all existence. Thus we must shrug off the physical, cloth ourselves in the non-physical, spiritual with the infinite source. Of course, a universe without sentient beings to observe it is a failed. universe, is it not?

I have read very little of Edgar Caysey, as I was skeptical because he was so often found to be incorrect. For instant the Lindbergh baby< he said they would find the baby in a city somewhere when the baby was finally found right t by the Lindbergh home. Also California and Japan falling into the sea. I am not trying to get off the point but if we are to use his beliefs as truths, we must trust them as so.

Humanity with help of advanced medical science are all aims at keeping the status quo of our human body, keep the system as harmonious as possibly for as long as possible, but gloom! entropy always wins in the end , we die, the universe dies. In the book of Acts, somewhere, it says we seek him in which we live and move and have and sustain or being. To sustain our being forever like the Apostle Paul, one of the greatest minds in all history said, we must put off the mortal and cloth ourselvesin the immortal light of God.

WE ARE CO CREATORS WITH GOD AS HE GAVE US DOMANE OVER THE EARTH


Regards



Alan

"This old fart is 67 today 23Dec. so I am getting to the front of the que"

Dave,

I expressed myself incorrectly, when I said in reply to your thread "that this goes beyond correct physics"

I meant it goes against the postulating of the majority of physicists in that most now believe in the big bang , with a zero point entropy infinite singularity exploded bringing, time, matter, every space with.  there was no primordial void the void or space was created in the big bang. In addition, this was what I meant when I asked the forum to try to conceive of absolute nothingness, no void or space, no time, absolute non existence.

Dave I know it was not necessary for me the go into the theory of the big bang with you, I can read that you would be fully informed on  it, but I explained it here for those on the forum that might not know about.

Regards

Alan

Of course you're God. Works fine for me.

About entropy -
Entropy has been romanticized, which is the "Heat Death" image. That's why this looks so screwy.  In fact, entropy is just an expression for the odds against something. Formal definition for the entropy of a state X is:   H(X) = -log (prob X)  - that is, the negative of the logarithm of the probability of the state called X.

If the probability of X is 100%, then the probability is unity, and the log of one is zero, hence when a thing tends toward total probability, its entropy tends toward zero. This is called "entropy of state" and is a relative condition - like the entropy of a street light being turned on or off, when compared to another light down the street, a 50-50 proposition. If off, then its probability of being found on is zero and then its entropy is infinite, if on, its probability of being on is 100% and entropy is zero in that example. (This is a one-sample go-no-go statement, not a time-distribution of probability states, in which case the entropy would be 2 bits or .3010 hartleys.) This "entropy of state" concept is not the "decrease of system entropy" that the Heat Death people are talking about.

The "Heat Death" idea of entropy is that having been wound up, everything runs down. This is the measure called "system entropy" and is a direct expression of the entire internal structure of the system. Statistically, entropy changes according to the changes of structure, not temperature. Temperature reflects structure, since it involves the motions of the molecules etc of a system using Planck's Gibbsian distribution,  that relate average agitation level to a presumed zero state. We don't need that.

What I'm suggesting is that any syatem tends to become more complex because of structural factors, and that this is where we get the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (This has been commonly accepted since Boltzman.) Now, I work in the "why it happens" department, like "why does it become more complex" - and the "why" is because the attributions of the various gizmos that interact can generalize themselves. As they do, these attributes become more probable than they were before, because they now are being distributed more widely. A "thing" is merelty the sum of its attributes, hence "things" get more likely. This is the motor of the cosmos. It implies an indefinite and finite expansion. (Interestingly, this model provides for Cosmic Inflation as with the Friedman-Lemaitre BB Theory, and predicts formation of galaxies as well, more like Hoyle's continuous generation idea.) Even if the accretions of matter in the present collection of galaxies etc distribute themselves wide and thin, their attributes still combine to form new structures. More interestingly, since a statistical curve never really ends, the existence of any specific object is actually distributed across all time and space. Thus, the "Heat Death" idea is open to question as new physics arises.

About being God-
I'm intersted in where God comes from. If you are the I AM, then where was your original home? It's a legitimate question.

I propose two answers to that - one is that it is the nature of God to be self-created out of nothing. Thus, as we journey out to the Hubble limit at the ends of the universe, we discover the levels of formation of the universe, going back through them in reverse order, until we reach nothing at all. Nothing at all has no size, no shape, no color, no taste. It is pure vacuity, which is also pure potentiality to be filled with virtually everything. So as God, I'd say that your ultimate roots are in emptiness.

The second answer is that you are here and now as God because it is the nature of God to twist space (because that makes it more probable, since it forms a combination by which the attributes of the spatial dichotomy now propagate by being present in more places at once) and after doing that for a while we have a universe made out of emptiness twisted around itself in ways the ultimately reflect a dynamic (the twisting) and a relational metric (the stuff that was twisted). We experience all that as a probabilistic universe.   - This is a universe with no "matter" in the sense of an irreducible obdurate mass. Instead, what we actually have is probability waves. The late physicist Archibald Wheeler, near the end of his life, had become convinced that reality could be reduced easily to nothing but information, hence patterns of probability.  So the second answer is that you are God because that is the most probable state for you to acquire, since everything is God and a manifestation of God, you don't even have the option to be other than God.

And finally, autopoiesis -
So my suggestion is that we live in a world that has two definitions. One, it arises as the outcome of prior states, and second, it is locally self created. The notion of prior states implies an infinite sequence of self-creations. This is more easily thought of as a single instance self-creation spread over all space and time, a statistically valid way to view it. This instance is granular in nature, a sort of cosmic quantum state because we are discrete in nature, hence lumpy and granular - and our cosmos is one of the granules. It will lead to either form a path back into itself, or forward into a new universe. My suggestion is that this leads to a perpetual act of creation, so that universes beget universes ad infinitum.


I recall the tale of an old rishi who was wandering through the Himalyas. As he stopped by a stream he heard a great racket and fuss from nearby. A pilgrim was sitting by the water chanting, "Aham Siva. Sivo 'ham." meaning "I am Siva, Siva is me." *(Siva is the Hindu image of God as Creator-Destroyer, similar to Christian God-the-Father.) The rishi put up with it for a while and finally went down to the water and started to wash his bowl and things. As he did he screamed at the top of his lungs, "My pot. My bowl. My pot. My bowl. ... "  The pilgrim was abruptly shocked into silence at this annoyance. He called out to the rishi, "Hey! Cool it, Dude! Nobody denies that those are your pot and your bowl." The rishi smiled, "And nobody denies that you are Siva."

PUL
dave

Dave,

A profound and detailed answere, I just like to add that if we understand God as an eternal infinite being, ""there is one thing that it can never know, how it came to exist?"" You are one deep thinker Dave, I have more than met my equal in you and i like to learn.. However I am not a psysicist but an mechanical engineer with a life time of interest in cosmology, astromony and an insatiable thirst for knowlede of every kind.. I  have my own ten inch Newtonial telescope and studied variable stars when I was more active.

I admire Ricard Feynman and feel to much attention has been given to Stephen Harwing who is really a cosmologist.

I have read the works of most of the great psysicts and scientists over the years but make no claim to understand every angle of their though processes.


Your postulation as self creating cosmos still has the problem of infinite regression,

Your thread was deep and profound and I need more thought before giving some sort of an adequate reply. Enjoy  the holidays,

God bless all

Alan

Happy Belated Birthday, Alan !

It seems like our thoughts and wishes that are in harmony with universal forces keep us and our planet from entropy.  With enough of our thoughts in harmony with this AM energy, any material dross that we drop off can be recycled into another go-round in hopes of picking up on the universal force (PUL?--a vibrational range we call love?)
Voids would only exist where some forms could not sustain energies in harmony with universal force. Since  'nature' abhors emptiness' the voids would exist only until they could be refilled from still-active areas.

So thanks, you all, from keeping us from entropy!

Merry Christmas,
Bets

PS  What I'm trying to say is that I think I understand what you're saying, except I don't get why you deal with the void the way you have. The Void to me has no potentiality except to be filled. Blink, isn't the void's darkness the clue to its non-creative state of non-being?
Thought-filled/formed form carries the most potential energy/light, and our thinking and loving mind insures that our Earth is in this category, so I don't understand your poem, Alan.
On various scales the primordial soup, being the cast-off decay that is still viable, still contains light and potentiality. Dave says we reform new galaxies with it.
Bringing this dance down to human scale we call the energy PUL. We can wring PUL out of and into the most meager of circumstances before matters meet their point of no return and dissolve into the void.

I hope what I've suggested fits with what you're describing.