Michael Sternbach

I am wondering, too! I was following it with interest. Hopefully it will be back soon.

Yes, I am sure. I would recommend letting the elderly man (o-sensei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido) give directions rather than making him look like the owner of a closed shop who doesn't care about letting you wait endlessly.

LaoZiDao, Although some traditionalists wouldn't like to hear this, what you are saying here is in full agreement with the teachings of Seth, an entity channelled by the famous psychic Jane Roberts. Seth emphasized, over and over again, that we ourselves create the reality of our life, based on our beliefs. But I have never before heard this stated so clearly by a Daoist. Do you know any Daoist texts which elaborate on this, either by Master Dongyang or somebody else?

Since they are associated with the kidneys, I consider the adrenal hormones their biochemical equivalent. The adrenal hormones are crucial to our strength and vitality.

It is an interesting thought that one could continuously replenish one's qi from the universal qi, thus becoming relatively immortal. There are stories about some Alchemists having achieved this also in Western countries. Surely, there is little evidence. But being immortal, it would be preferable not to let too many people know about it, right? I could also imagine that at a certain stage of spiritual evolution, one might be able to transform one's physical body and "ascend" to other planes without dying in the usual sense. Perhaps, one could then even return to Earth in the same body as one wishes. It's fun to imagine these things...

Water molecules naturally form some kind of crystalline structures via hydrogen bonds. These structures are vital in order for water to perform its functions in the body properly. Not least, they carry the imprints of all kinds of different substances. Water can seem to be okay according to a chemical analysis but in fact be quite unhealthy if it either doesn't contain these structures, or if they carry detrimental "information". There are many methods to "reactivate" drinking water, and not all of them are equally useful. The one that your friend demonstrated sounds really interesting, however.

What can you do without a teacher? Whatever you like!

Nice meeting you, Sean. I was stuck with O-sensei for a day, and my hands started shivering from withdrawal symptoms, but luckily at least my cellphone got things right which helped me figure out what had happened. I have a TTB (um, TDB) friend who is still waiting for Ueshiba to "be back", though. Sorta like Neo stuck at the subway station. I will release him now. That said, the change might help the aforesaid friend to finally get the pronunciation right. Personally, I prefer "Dao", it is indeed more accurate. The Yin Wood Goat is nice, too. Daoistic cheers, Michael

That doesn't surprise me because this identification is based on my own synthesis of Spiritual Alchemy, Anthroposophy, and Projective Geometry. You could just as well call them Hadit and Nuit. I like that description. Yes, worlds from the very smallest to the very largest scales, inside one another like Russian dolls. The Multiverse is the largest conceivable level, containing many Universes. There is nothing wrong with this assumption in my view, but if you don't like it, you don't need to follow me there.

Of course, 3bob's living room only existed potentially at the time. But if you ask where in relation to our current Universe the Big Bang happened, 3bob's living room is as good a choice as any other location

That's an interesting definition! I also believe that Source is still, has always been and will always be there. According to the common Big Bang theories, it is not supposed to be, that is the main problem I have with them. But I think there are ways to reconcile the differing views. For example, our Universe might exist in an infinite 4d space. Moreover, outside our Universe, "before" and "after" might actually be quite meaningless. An analogy to the infinitely small and the infinitely big that I talked about earlier, perhaps. Virtual particles popping in and out of the manifested Universe come to mind... But your explanation is more poetic. Beautiful.

I am not sure what implosion you are talking about. Are you referring to the Big Crunch theory?

And you would find that the Big Bang happened right inside your smoking brain. No, I'm not kidding... The thing is that the Big Bang didn't happen in a space in which you could locate it. It created space in the first place (pun totally unintended). Please imagine that you are an ant sitting on a balloon. Unless you were a really smart ant, you would think that you are on a flat plane. Notwithstanding that the plane has a curvature in the third dimension (we smart humans understand that the balloon is a 3d object, of course). Let's upgrade all this by one dimension: The whole balloon is now four-dimensional, its surface a three-dimensional space. However, it's infinitely small in the beginning. As it expands, you (no matter where you are positioned on its surface) will find the 3d space around you expanding in all directions. You can think of the "beginning position" either as everywhere on the surface of the balloon (which was infinitely compact initially), or not in 3d space at all but in the center of our four-dimensional balloon. Now, not all cosmologists think of the Universe as curved in a 4d space, but the particular model I presented has the advantage that a smart ant can draw nearer to an understanding. Yes! You're on the right track! It may seem to be a nuance, but I would say that the Big Bang occurred as a singularity in an infinite 4d space rather than in absolute nothingness.

No, we are both right at the same time. Every being is the center of its world. Where would you locate that beginning position?

So, while the Universe as we know seems to be finite, it may in fact exist in a larger, even infinite space, along with many other Universes. We can call this the Multiverse. The circumference of an infinite sphere is not tangible, so it is nowhere. Therefore its centers are everywhere. Rigorously, any such center is dimensionless, a mere point without the slightest extension, infinitely small as opposed to the infinite extension of the periphery. Both the infinitely small and the infinitely big are intangible; they are transcendent or metaphysical. They are called Sulphur and Mercury in the symbolical language of Alchemy.

In my previous post we saw that the center of the surface of the Earth is to be set at the location of the observer. As the observer moves on the surface, so will the center. We also saw that there is a center of a higher order which we located in the center of our planet. Every observer on the surface gravitates toward that center. But if we expand our perspective, we realize that the center of the Earth again has no fixed location, as the Earth is constantly moving around the Sun. The Sun is the gravitational center of the Solar System: The center of the super-system that the Earth system is a part of. But this is not the end of the story. The Sun orbits around a yet higher center which is Sagittarius A* or the Black Hole in the middle of our galaxy... We could extend this scheme to the totality of the Universe as we know it, if not beyond. Starting from the observer, we could also go in the other direction and consider that they consist of organs, cells, molecules, atoms, and so on. In summary, there is a (perhaps infinite) order of systems, one contained in the other, from the smallest to the biggest, and each with their individual centers.

Every location is the center. Let's consider this statement. Every location on the surface of the Earth can be looked at as its center because our planet is a sphere whose surface is unlimited, yet finite. (I.e. in Japan, I saw a world map on which Japan was the center.) If we go from 2d to 3d and look at the Earth as a whole, the center of the Earth is defined as being in the middle of her core. Likewise, the Theory of Relativity says that every location in the Universe is central as viewed from there. That's why most galaxies are moving away from us as space is expanding. The Big Bang happened everywhere - including I your living room! So the center of the Universe is everywhere. But again, 3d space can be thought of as the surface of a four-dimensional hypersphere that is unlimited, yet finite (we are talking about four spatial dimensions here and ignore time for the time being - pun intended). In this expanded sense, the center of the Universe is outside of it, in four-dimensional space.

This idea was originally conceived within a Geocentric model of the world. But I think it can still serve as an (at least partial) explanation for Astrology, with some modifications. The ancient assumption was that an individual's soul core descends from the realm of the fixed stars through the planetary spheres from Saturn to the Moon, thereby acquiring an astroeides ochema or astral vehicle. In each sphere, the soul assimilates a specific kind of ether, thereby dressing itself in layer upon layer of astral matter. (It's easy to see the connection with the concept of the astral body and subtle bodies in general, respectively.) At the same time, the soul is imbued with corresponding "virtues" and "vices", in the terminology of the ancients. It eventually reaches Earth and incarnates in a physical body. After an incarnation has ended, the soul returns to the stellar realm, shedding the layers of subtle matter one by one while it again passes through the planetary spheres. This idea was first described by Macrobius in his Commentary on the Dream of Scipio. I am enjoying yours, too!

Agreed. I like your use of "potential" in this context. Of course, next we could talk about where that potential came from. But maybe what is limiting our comprehension is our idea of cause and effect. It presupposes a before and an after. Without a time flow, it is not applicable. And that potential exists outside time and space.

Google works miracles sometimes. They are jets of matter escaping along magnetic field lines. The matter comes from the accretion disk around the black hole, where it got accelerated to a mind-boggling speed. It takes off at right angles before it actually reaches the black hole. At least that's the official explanation. The cosmologists quickly tweaked their model of the accretion disk to arrive at an explanation. That doesn't mean that it's the only one or the right one. That one also came as a big surprise to the researchers. However, bear in mind that the iron and nickel atoms are in an ionized state, meaning that they are naked nuclei deprived of their electrons due to high temperature. So you are suggesting that the matter/energy that exists in the Universe today was never created in the first place - it has simply always been there. Yes, there are a couple of theories to this effect. But overall, I find the concept hardly less challenging than the creation of matter and energy ex nihilo.

True! The thing is that those natural therapies get the dirt out.

"Dark matter" is just a term scientists are employing for covering up that they don't have a clue what most of the Universe consists of. What's in the dark is the grey matter between their ears.

I can't help commenting on this... You mean, not only your head? That's truly a koan. The idea that black holes are meditation (centers) of the universe somehow resonates with me. They are storing (processing?) huge amounts of information, anyway. And surely there was a hellova lot of violence in my mind when I started meditating.

I considered the view that black holes don't really exist after I had read some unconventional thinkers. However, now I am of the opinion that they do exist but are far from being understood in modern cosmology.

Maybe black holes are doing more than gathering material. There is a Theosophical idea older than the discovery of black holes that our galaxy was created by a Central Sun. It's well known that there are light-years long jets of matter getting ejected from black holes. The official explanation being that lots of highly accelerated matter approaching the black hole actually never reaches the Event Horizon but takes off before at enormous speed at right angles to the accretion disk. However, two very recent observations make me think that there may be more involved: The jets are leaving the black hole with about three times the amount of energy that was contained in the accumulated matter to begin with. According to the 2nd law of thermodynamics no energy (or matter) can be created out of nowhere. So where does all the extra energy come from? Moreover, some black holes have been observed to occasionally spit out not only electrons (as was hitherto believed) but also ionized atomic nuclei of iron and nickel. In other words, building blocks for planets! Of course, following these discoveries, the scientists quickly changed their models to somehow account for them without questioning principles of physics as established. But if those principles would hold true in every case, how did the Big Bang happen? Nobody has been able to convincingly explain this yet.