Recovered : The Unobstructed Universe

What is a human being? What is life? Can science give us reliable answers to such questions? The electricity of life. The meaning of human consciousness. Are we alone? Are the traditional contests between science and religion still relevant? Does the word "spirit" still hold meaning today?

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StefanR
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Recovered : The Unobstructed Universe

Unread post by StefanR » Fri Mar 21, 2008 8:04 am

Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 3:39 pm Post subject: The Unobstructed Universe Reply with quote
Here I wish to refer to a book, which for me was a good inspiration to get a grip on
notions as Time, Space and Motion. I place it here in the Human Question as this book
links those notions to the human condition and philosophy in general.
Now I know everybody has his own sources of inspiration and understanding concerning
these matters, it doesn't stop me from recommending the book (and maybe the preceding books of this writer pertaining to this book).
Under I present a few clippings from the book, and I must confess it doesn't do the understanding of the proposed
concepts not much good. But it is the only way I see as to bring it here.
How does it relate to the Electric Universe? I leave that to the ones who deside to read the book.
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301131.txt
Title: The Unobstructed Universe (1940)
Author: Stewart Edward White
Image


CONSCIOUSNESS: The one and all-inclusive reality, in evolution. Man's
self-awareness is the highest expression of this reality.

ORTHOS: (Greek, orthos: true.) The operation of consciousness, through
co-existent essences; in its unobstructed aspect.

ORTHIC: Adjective. Pertaining to orthos.

UNIVERSE: The total of all manifestations of consciousness.

OBSTRUCTED UNIVERSE: That aspect of the whole universe which man knows
through his senses, including their mechanical extensions.

UNOBSTRUCTED UNIVERSE: That aspect of the entire universe ordinarily
considered to be beyond the limitation of man's sense perceptions and
their extensions.

TRILOGIA: The threefold aspect of orthos, consisting of receptivity,
conductivity, and frequency.

ESSENCE: (Latin, ESSE: to be.) The co-existent and coefficient actuality
of orthos, manifesting itself in the obstructed universe as Time, Space
and Motion.

RECEPTIVITY: The Essence of Time.

CONDUCTIVITY: The Essence of Space.

FREQUENCY: The Essence of Motion.

TIME: The obstructed manifestation of the orthic essence, receptivity.

SPACE: The obstructed manifestation of the orthic essence, conductivity.

MOTION: The obstructed manifestation of the orthic essence, frequency.

MATTER: In the obstructed universe matter is that arrestment of frequency
which manifests itself in a three-dimensional extension; in the
unobstructed universe it is the form attribute of any aspect of the
trilogia.

MATERIAL FORCES: Those arrestments of frequency expressing themselves
through matter
ARRESTMENT: An incidence of frequency, conductivity and receptivity,
resulting in manifestation in the obstructed universe.

JUXTAPOSITION: The manner in which frequency (motion) variably collides
with receptivity (time) and conductivity (space) to result in an
arrestment, producing manifestation.

INTRAPOSITION: As juxtaposition is the manner of arrestment resulting in
manifestation, so intraposition is the status of relationship that
obtains as long as that arrestment holds.

CO-EXISTENT: That which is united in Being with something else for the
production of an effect.






"Let's sit down and write out, in our own words, what we each understand
to be Betty's basic concepts, or otherwise comment on them."

Darby nodded. "Good idea," he approved.

"That will sharpen our own mental picture, at least," I continued, "and I
have a hunch that something of our own obstructed viewpoint might help
all the subsidiary conceiving stations--may their tribe increase!"

"Huh?" grunted Darby.

"The readers of the book," I explained.

And then? characteristically, it turned out that Betty had intended this
all along. She had hinted at a Part IV, for which we could see no
material. We told her that henceforth we would utterly give over the hope
of having original ideas. She did not like that, even in fun; but we
reassured her by the promise of doing a bit of unimportant independent
thinking from time to time. After which, Darby settled down seriously to
compile his report.

2.

This is conceiving station D-A-R-B-Y speaking.


"TIME"


That there is psychological time as distinct from clock, or sidereal time
seems plain enough. No matter what the clock says, five minutes becomes
sixty when you're waiting for a pot to boil. But I don't think Betty
would have rung the changes on this obvious enough fact just for the sake
of its own exposition. What she really attempted was to entice S E W and
me--and you, too--out of our customarily static conception of time, out
of the acceptance of an hour as a fixed length, unvarying irrespective of
circumstances. That done, she sought to ease us into an appreciation of
time's malleable character right here in our ordinary experience.

Yes, psychologically a day may be short or long. We can fidget during the
fifteen minutes we wait for a train--bored, empty and bedeviled by
frustration--and thus stretch a quarter of an hour into three quarters.
Or we can be interested in our surroundings, speculate on where all the
people are so intent on going and why, and--presto!--the train arrives
before we know it; somehow fifteen minutes has been contracted to one.

So that is psychological time--not hard and fixed like sidereal time, but
stretchable, contractible, collapsible, elastic, malleable. And all of
this is in our daily experience.


I do not remember whether SEW has quoted the statement, and I shall not
stop to search through the record for it, but my recollection is that
Betty called time, psychological time, the road by which our
understanding might with the least sweat and strain penetrate into her
land of the unobstructed. For a certain distance it is a road we know.
But perhaps it has not occurred to many of us that, beyond the familiar
portion, this road continues as a trail.

Here is a little-trodden path leading beyond psychological time, quite as
psychological time carries on beyond sidereal time, to still another kind
of time--what Betty at first, for want of the word "orthic," could call
only third time.


Have we in our present obstructed state any perception, however elusive,
of this third time? The chances are we do have, if the wall between our
obstructed universe and Betty's unobstructed is as thin and fragile as
she asserts. This much we can now infer: That third time is malleable as
is psychological time--only more so; that like psychological time it
expands and contracts.

And this must mean that the tenses of sidereal time do not survive wholly
intact in the third time; surely they crumble in our daily experience of
psychological time. It would seem that, in third time, present, past and
future somehow coalesce.

Suppose you enter that railway station again, this time rapt in thought.
It will be no unusual experience if you pace about oblivious of
everything, finally boarding your train you know not when. In some stray
corner of your mind you will have noted its arrival, of course, and you
do board it. Nonetheless you were unaware of the passage of the
fifteen-minute wait. Clock time ticked its way into a past that left no
impression on you. And more ticks were just around the corner of the
future, but they were unanticipated by you. Only the present registered.
You were in that present. Or should I say you WERE that present, that one
way or the other you and time, for the while, were one?

Betty's third time is like that. It stretches and it contracts; but
neither the stretching nor the contracting can be defined in terms of a
sidereal future or past. An odd kind of time, admittedly. But strange
also is the malleability of our own everyday sense of psychological time.
Look at it as we will, clocks are one thing; our internal timepiece is
something else again.


So far, so good.

But I think we can do even better than that. I think that we can dig down
into our consciousness, not mystically, but in a rather commonplace way,
and find there an all-including present--a matrix, as it were, that
receives and registers yet transcends events. Let's try.

There is in you, as I think there is in me, a final point below which
there is no need of underpinning. That point is our ultimate foundation,
supporting by its own sheer strength all the vast structure of our
senses, emotions and thoughts--the manifold of our perceptions,
instincts, tastes, our loves and hates, our very response, and even
obligation, to the world of things, forces and people about us. It was
called by the Jehovah of the ancient testament, "I Am." And after
thousands of years, language can find for it no better word. "I Am"--not
I was or will be, but just I am.

Now, in this deep-down, ultimate core of you do you find anything like
the past and future that clocks record? I think not. Do you find there
primarily just a BECOMING, such as might be measured by the standards of
ordinary time? Hardly. I think you will find there, as Betty encouraged S
E W and me to find in ourselves, something more fundamental than
becoming, basic as that may be, something that after a fashion escapes
the squirrel-cage of past and future: BEING--being that is rooted in one
tense only, the present.

You, the innermost you, ARE--co-existing with change and becoming, and so
still in time, still a matrix for reception, though looking neither
forward nor backward.

That kind of enduring yet malleable present you will find, I believe, in
your own feel of being. At least, it is foreshadowed psychologically. It
is the third time. It is the orthic time of Betty's unobstructed
universe.


3.

"SPACE"


If time has three aspects--sidereal, psychological and orthic--so too has
space--or so Betty said.

I shall always remember my first automobile. One-lungers had disappeared
some time before, but high-compression was still many years away. Tires
carried seventy pounds of air and were about as unyielding as the bumpy
unpaved roads, which, however undeniably they lured us, had to be
negotiated with a fine skill. Differentials had a way of responding
totally to every other thank-you-ma'am--they just up and fell out. Axles
were always breaking and springs forever going smash.

With the requisite urging this automobile of mine could do twenty miles
an hour. But, when on the open highway that speed was attained, farmers
working in their fields would turn to see what all the din and uproar was
about.
For at twenty miles Peggy (feminine for Pegasus) shook in all her parts,
shivered and snorted, rattled and clanked--from radiator to tail-light.
And I, with Joan holding her breath in the seat beside me, had a sense of
tremendous speed. The rougher the road, the wilder was Peggy's career;
and the more boisterous that career, the faster Joan and I seemed to be
propelled.

"She certainly eats space up," we used to say affectionately of Peggy, as
we bedded her down for the night after a fifty-mile run done in four
hours and thirteen minutes flat.

So, right in experience, you and I know that a mile is not simply a fixed
geometrical distance between two points. Sidereally it is all of that,
but psychologically it varies. Long if we walk it, footsore and weary;
short if we ride over a concrete road in a modern motor car geared to do
seventy, eighty, a hundred miles an hour.


A commonplace, of course--this mental appraisal of distance in terms of
experience rather than in geometrical feet and miles. Betty would not
have labored the point, as without ulterior purpose she would hardly have
hammered away at psychological time, had she not hoped that through
psychological space we could get some inkling of a third space--the
orthic space of her unobstructed universe.

As a rationalization, the proposition can now be stated. Betty's space,
like her time, is elastic, malleable--in the same way that we know our
psychological space to be elastic and malleable. And again it should be
added, "only more so."


But must we stop at a mere rationalization?

Unlike S E W, I have not taken to the air. A Pullman compartment, usually
entered at night to save a day, remains my fastest mode of travel.
Invariably, when I turn my back on the lights and sounds of a busy
railway station, board my train and close the compartment door, idling
away then the few minutes till the train pulls out, I have this
experience: It seems that space in its ordinary sense has vanished, that
suddenly all there is of space has been squeezed into the four
compartment walls. A feeling of intimacy with it comes over me; space and
I are alone at last, and the world with all its places and all that
intervenes is gone.

The train now moves, picks up speed; and still all space is compacted
within my four walls, but with a difference. Now this intimate all of
space has become fluid. Malleable? Of course. Has it not all been
squeezed into one small Pullman compartment! But it is flowing now, and I
with it. The two of us seem everywhere, yet nowhere. No longer for me
does space mean just the distance between two points. Rather, it's a
stream, without banks or landscape--a stream that flows in all directions
out from a center which is no dimensional center at all but only myself.

Perhaps the telling of this recurring experience tends to trip and fall
into the occult. Yet I have never felt any sense of mystery accompanying
it. At least, there's nothing even slightly mysterious about the further
fact that after a night's sleep I, who switched off the light just out of
Elizabeth, wake up in Chicago, with no feeling of geometrical space
traversed or of the places that dot that space. By availing myself of the
mechanical help of a railroad I have traveled five hundred miles in less
time than a good rider on a good horse could have run seventy, and with
infinitely less pains.

After all, then, it is not the number of geometrical miles that obstructs
us, but our inexpertness in telescoping them or, if you will, flowing
through them.

In the company of two friends I took an elevator the other day to the
sixty-fifth floor of a certain skyscraper. Numerous stops were made on
the way up, and finally we reached our floor, and that was that.

But, coming down, we made the descent without stop, clear from the
sixty-fifth to the ground floor. There was no sense of speed and little
of motion. Unprepared for the mental effect of the long drop, we stepped
from the elevator into the lobby.

And--bang!--it was like that explosive recovery from nitrous oxide with
which you crash back into everydayness after the dentist has extracted an
infected molar. "Where am I?" you demand, faced with just the plain,
familiar world, but now for a moment strange and curiously elfin. So my
two friends and I felt as we stared about in the lobby of the skyscraper.

Through some trick of the small, moving enclosure called an elevator we
had been loosened, maybe, from the space of good old Euclid and then, on
reaching the ground floor, unceremoniously dumped back into it.

"Where am I?" I almost asked the starter in the lobby. More sensible
perhaps would it have been to ask, "Where was I?"

All in all, third space was hard for me to get the hang of. For third
time I seemed to have an intuitive feeling. But I could uncover in myself
no similar spatial instinct. And Betty's introduction of the time-space
concept as an aid to understanding did not help much, though in
retrospect it becomes clear that all our modern control of space analyzes
down to control of the time required to travel space. With me the
time-space idea began really to click only after motion came under
discussion.

But, whatever my difficulties, they need not be yours. For some ordinary
experience of your own may so illustrate the malleability of
psychological space that it will be easy for you to add Betty's new
ingredient, the flow. Do so, and I think you will have glimpsed orthic
space.

And now let's go back for a moment to consideration of unadorned sidereal
space. Is there warrant in it, wholly aside from psychological reactions,
for Betty's conductivity concept?

Look at the matter in this wise:

Your physical body is itself an obstruction, and as such it is in
constant conflict with environing obstructions, the most deterring of
them being solids. It is from these solids--the doors of our houses,
their walls and floors and furniture; the materials of our handicraft and
its tools, from lathes and drills to pencils and paper and even
books--that we gather our more obvious spatial impressions. Everything is
so long and so wide and so high; and that, we judge hastily, is all there
is to space. But even sidereally this is only one aspect, and perhaps not
the more fundamental. The other aspect tells us that space is that in
which we move.

Space itself is not a solid. On the contrary, except as we meet
obstructions, we pass right through it. Indeed, it is only because our
bodies are material and must be moved about in such a way as to avoid, or
utilize, other material obstructions that we are particularly aware of
space at all. To the degree that our bodies are not hindered by other
material objects, we pay but small attention to the length, breadth and
height of things. But always we are aware that we move--through space.
Surely we do recognize the conductivity of space, even in this sidereal
world.

So, to use Betty's phrase, strip space down. Strip off its three
dimensions, and there is still left conductivity. Orthic space is
conductivity--a fluidity of conduction, neither up nor down nor across,
yet, because of its very fluidity, still definitely space.


4.

"MOTION"


In presenting orthic motion Betty did not follow the pattern she had
established for explanation of third time and third space. Starting with
the motion of our obstructed universe, whether astronomical or just
pedestrian, she could have passed glibly to psychological viewpoints. For
motion--the uniform sway of a clock pendulum, for instance--does seem to
speed or slacken according to the observer's interest; at a scene of
disaster relief arrives with cruel slowness, be it rushed by horse or
truck or plane.


And it was thus that I supposed Betty would postulate orthic motion:
malleable, just as a given rate of ordinary motion appears to vary with
the conditions under which it is experienced.

My questions led in that direction. Betty would have none of them. Once,
if my memory serves me, she came close to denying existence of any such
thing as psychological motion. Later she took that half back, with a
ho-hum and a yes-no. And in the end she took it back with a vengeance.
Thought itself, she announced, is psychological motion! Had this been an
early statement, S E W and I might well be floundering still.

In any case, abandoned the established pattern was, even at the risk of
motion appearing for a while to be the ugly duckling of Betty's grand
trilogy. Instead, we found ourselves plunged deeper and deeper into that
hyphenate of the modern physicist--time-space.

First, let me say that Betty used this concept only as an aid to
instruction. When it had done its work, she proceeded promptly to knock
the hyphen out, ever so solicitously putting time and space back on their
sundry and individual legs.

Several decades ago a search developed among mathematically inclined
physicists for a fourth dimension. The length, breadth and height of
objects in space, satisfactory enough in everyday thinking, had become
inadequate. For it was being experimentally demonstrated that the
innerness of all physical things was in flux--even inert matter. And how
in the world could one go on charting a no longer static physics in terms
of three-dimensional substance?


A number of dizzy books were written. But few, if any, of them tried to
name or describe the needed new dimension. That is not to say it didn't
exist. As a mathematical X, it opened fields of equations far beyond the
ambition of a Leibnitz and his calculus. And as a convenience in
accounting for the disappearance of lost articles it was par excellence.
After a man had searched ten minutes under bed and bureau for his dropped
collar button, he could dismiss the wretched thing with good
conscience--somehow it had just rolled into the fourth dimension.

Finally something akin to common sense prevailed. By common sense is
meant, I take it, the art of reasoning toward what one doesn't know from
what one does know. If we can't find a clew to the unknown in empirical
knowledge, we had best wait. Otherwise, we are liable to become spinners
of remote and inapplicable theories, or, worse, mystics, or, more horrid
still, cultists. Anyway, common sense found a fourth dimension, truly
essential to the new physics of radiation and electrons and wave-lengths
and what-not, in simple, ordinary experience--in time itself.

Let's explore the idea. There in the station waits our railway train. It
possesses the traditional three dimensions; it is so long, so wide and so
high. But now it moves, quitting the station; and, as it moves in the
three dimensions of space, uphill and downhill and straight away on the
level, it moves as well in a fourth dimension. It swings along in
time--in time as in space.

And men say, as they have always said of such matters, that the train
moves so many miles an hour, which is to assert that its rate of motion
in space can be stated only in terms of time.

But suppose the train does not get under way. Suppose it continues to
stand still. Nonetheless it moves, because it is part and parcel of an
earth that itself is in motion.

So pertinent to any analysis of motion is this concept that one may well
ask whether time-space is not just another name for motion. Maybe so, and
maybe not so. This much, at least, the concept makes clear:

Without the time dimension there can be no sidereal motion, and, equally,
there can be none without the dimensions of space. In other words, there
can be sidereal motion only in time plus space.

But where does this get us in understanding orthic motion?

Betty says that her unobstructed universe is but an extension of our
obstructed. To use Stephen's language of some twenty-five years ago, the
two worlds function under parallels of one and the same law. This being
so, it follows that motion in the unobstructed universe is as
inextricably tied into an orthic time-space as motion here is tied into
sidereal time-space. If, then, we have learned anything of orthic time
and orthic space, no matter how little, we probably have learned a like
something about orthic motion. Let's see.

Sidereally, any really instantaneous transit is impossible. The train can
move faster and faster as the engineer desires, but only up to a certain
limit. There is a final maximum rate of speed beyond which it can not go.
Light moves fastest of all, so fast that astronomers set down its speed
in terms of years; but even in the instance of light there is always just
so much movement in any given interval of time. Never in the obstructed
universe is motion transmitted instantaneously.

In the same way, sidereal motion cannot escape the fixed distances of
space. However fast the train, it must run the exact length of each
individual mile traveled.

But orthic time, we have learned, is malleable, collapsible; and orthic
space is a flow, a completely rarified conductor if you please. In such a
time and such a space, the instancy of motion becomes conceivable or, if
not quite conceivable, imaginable.

And that--instantaneous transit, with all the brakes of sidereal
time-space released--is half, more or less, of Betty's story of orthic
motion, as told through Joan.

You will understand now, I think, why Betty did not rely on psychological
considerations to demonstrate the motion of her unobstructed universe.
Sidereal motion, unlike sidereal time and space, is patently malleable
here in the obstructed universe. It not only SEEMS that way to us; it IS
that way. We can walk or we can run. By interest and anticipation we can
speed the frequency of our very heartbeat. S E W and I knew that all
along, and Betty knew that we knew it. But what about it? It helped us
not at all to apprehend instancy, that is, motion unlimited by a maximum
rate.


Our effort to visualize an infinitely accelerated flywheel did
help--some--at the time. But this was largely an intellectual exercise.
For myself I had no FEEL for that sort of flywheel, though at the point
of infinity its motion would plainly imply instancy.

No, some other device was called for--and provided. The time-space
concept, offering an everyday frame for sidereal motion and then argued
from the obstructed to the orthic, turned the trick--for me. At least, I
can state the proposition:

Motion in the obstructed universe is gripped in the vice of sidereal
time-space. That time-space is fixed, and any motion through it is
potentially limited. The parallel motion of the unobstructed universe is
as unrestricted as the orthic time-space in which it functions. And
orthic time-space is limited neither by tense, direction nor extraneous
resistance. In orthos, motion is instant.


You may say, as I was tempted to say, that this annihilates time, that a
truly instantaneous motion would have no need of time. But that is to
think in terms of sidereal time, with its three tenses. Furthermore,
Betty cautioned us again and again not to confuse the rate of motion with
motion itself. Perhaps all this can be made clearer if we pause to answer
the question asked a page or two back: Is time-space just another word
for motion? The answer is, no.
I walk into a room, stumble and in recovering my balance knock a chair
over. As it topples to the floor it is in motion; it moves through
time-space. But time-space was there before my awkwardness upset the
chair, as it will be after I put the chair to rights. Given time-space
and it only, the world would lie as unruffled as the night before
Christmas, when, as everybody knows, not a creature was stirring. A stir,
an activating something must exist as a condition precedent to any
motion.

It is that stir, orthic in the final analysis, which, colliding with
sidereal time and space in the obstructed universe, sets up the
phenomenon we know here as the time-rate of motion. The stir itself
requires no rate.


And now to get back to earth, if only briefly. Let's reason out the
second half of Betty's story of motion unobstructed. This exploration
need not press beyond mundane frontiers.

In everyday motion we deal first with our bodily impacts. We hit things
and they move. And so we are inclined to assess all motion in terms, say,
of a billiard table. The cue strikes a ball. Immediately that ball leaps
into motion and hits another, which in turn rushes off to hit a third.
Finally all the balls are at rest again, and we say that the motion set
up by the impact of the cue has spent itself. The fact, of course, is
that that motion did not SPEND itself, did not cease, but was merely
DISTRIBUTED, its big stream breaking up into innumerable small streams no
longer apparent to us.

It is only on reflection that we note that motion never comes to rest. It
may be transferred or transformed until it eludes our senses; but, on
second thought, we are not deceived. It still oscillates, actually or
potentially, in one wave-band, so to speak, or another.
Of course, then, orthic motion is perpetual, just as perpetual as is
sidereal motion. And again it is well to add, " Only more so." This is
why Betty spoke tolerantly of the "mad inventors" who, glimpsing a truth,
have labored honestly, if fatuously, to apply it. Their perpetual motion
machines have not come off for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless motion
itself is perpetual.


Perpetualness, demonstrated in the obstructed universe, is the other half
of Betty's story of orthic motion.

We know now two characteristics of the orthic stir, the activating
impulse without which time and space would be as dead as a
herring--instancy and the state of being perpetual. And we know one thing
that this stir is not--thought. For thought, says Betty, is psychological
motion; and I suppose that psychological motion is as remote from orthic
motion as sidereal is short of psychological. Yet, to use the word of
children playing hide-and-seek, thought is " warm"--warmer than the sway
of a pendulum or even the course of the planets around the sun.

From the very beginning of Betty's divulgence, it was a sidereal word
that she used to express the essence of orthic motion--"frequency." This,
I think, was because modern physics has gained wide acceptance for the
word and given it new and flexible meanings. Also Betty may have been
influenced by the fact that men know much about the deep inwardness of
themselves and can tell little, while of the world outside themselves
they know little, yet feel qualified to tell much. Pardonable, since
language depicts the outer world more adequately than it does the inner.

5.


There remains a clump or two of underbrush to clear away, and then, I
rather think, we shall be ready to make trial of what Betty, borrowing
again from the Greek, called "trilogia"--her threefold frame of
consciousness.


First, we must not be tempted to regard time, space and motion as mere
attributes of consciousness, as one might say blueness is an attribute of
the sea. Under shifting light conditions, the sea may be blue or it may
be green or just gray; it is still the sea, whatever its color. Time,
space and motion, however, are of the very fabric of consciousness.
If it
is correct to say that they exist no otherwhere than in consciousness, it
is hardly less correct to say that consciousness exists no otherwhere
than in them.

The second misconception we shall want to guard against is illustrated by
the very emphasis of what I have just written. I seem to suggest that the
sum of time, space and motion equals consciousness. Not so. Always
consciousness works through time, space and motion, but their total is
not consciousness, any more than leaves, branches and roots add up to
make a living tree.


One thing more, in passing: The word trilogia could be applied, of
course, to the time-space-motion complex in which we function here in the
obstructed universe, as well as to orthos. Do not the obstructed and
unobstructed parallel each other in all respects, existing under one law?

But it was not the obstructed universe that Betty sought primarily to
clarify. She was trying to rationalize the unobstructed. For the ends of
language she reserved the term trilogia for the orthic complex, and it
has seemed best to S E W and me to preserve that usage.

And now let's get on.

Consciousness has three co-existences.
From the obstructed point of view
this is not a difficult statement. You are constantly in time; you are
constantly in space; and I suspect you are constantly in motion, or at
least you are always in the midst of motion. It is not otherwise in the
unobstructed universe, granted that time there is not measurable by
clocks, space by footrules or motion by speedometers.

Betty's trilogia, co-existent with the consciousness that is she,
consists of ORTHIC time, the essence of which is RECEPTIVITY; ORTHIC
space, the essence of which is CONDUCTIVITY; and ORTHIC motion, the
essence of which is FREQUENCY.


A day or two after the essences were sprung on us, without which I am
afraid trilogia might indeed have proved just a verbal curiosity, Joan, S
E W and I had occasion to drive sixty miles across country. As we climbed
into the car, I had a big idea. For the purpose of this one ride, why not
forget all our ordinary notions of time, space and motion and instead
think only in terms of receptivity, conductivity and frequency? "A good
idea if it works," agreed S E W.

Well, it worked and it didn't. Certainly the well-tuned motor fired with
an unmistakable rhythm, and regularly this frequency was transmitted to
the wheels of the car. There was conductivity too, such as modern
road-builders know how to make; for we were being propelled THROUGH
rather than AGAINST. And there was receptivity, maybe. S E W said the
receptivity was good, meaning, I inferred, that, as the countryside was
new to him, his mind was registering many fresh and interesting
impressions. To Joan and me the receptivity was only fair; we had taken
that ride too many times before.

"How shall we define the rate of this frequency?" I asked S E W.

"So much conductivity per so much receptivity," he replied with a
twinkle.

"Hooey!" volunteered Joan. "Why not say a mile a minute and be done with
it?"

Why not, indeed? For were we not right where we began--in sidereal time,
space and motion? The plain fact was that we had never got out of them.
And that, of course, was why the experiment had failed to work.

"But," I said, "it does help. Imagine a road of perfect smoothness,
running through an atmosphere of no resistance. That road, that space
would suggest just conductivity."

"A super speedway for a motor of unlimited frequency!" S E W contributed.

"Provided," said Joan, "one hasn't brought the wrong kind of receptivity
along. I insist on the orthic brand."

I think Joan's insistence went pretty straight to the heart of things.
The effort of our technical age has been to control motion, to speed it
and so to collapse time. Thus stated, time shortens as an effect of
speeded motion. But actually it is the other way around. You must tinker
with time first, seeking to step up its ratio to space. Accelerated
motion is the external evidence of how well you have done that tinkering.

Betty says she controls her orthic time, the essence of which is
receptivity. How? By manipulating receptivity? How? I was in deep water.

To say that space, orthically viewed, is essentially a matter of
conductivity was becoming acceptable enough, because in ordinary
experience space is a conductor; we do go through it. To say that the
essence of orthic motion is frequency may require a deal of explanation,
but it rings a bell, because even in the obstructed universe we are so
accustomed to analyzing motion into vibrations, cycles, rhythms--in fact,
frequencies. But to me time seemed possessed of other characteristics
quite as essential as receptivity.


There was duration, for example. Had I been asked before Betty came what
was the essence of time, I am confident I would have replied, "Duration."
Surely so subjective a characteristic as receptivity would not have
occurred to me; such is one's inveterate devotion to the working
materialism of the obstructed universe.

And I was not content even after Betty explained at, length how all
things are received in time, and in time only, and how an event remains
influential after its occurrence--as the influence of a man may continue
after his death--precisely because of the receptivity which is time's
essence. I was impressed, but not satisfied.

So I had to back-track. I had to remind myself again of what Betty was
really trying to do. It was this: She was seeking to explain to us why
her world is unobstructed and the how of it; she was trying to make her
unobstructed state reasonable in terms of our obstruction.

All right, then, how do we HERE overcome obstruction?

The sixty-mile cross-country automobile ride is a good enough answer. We
MASTERED space, because a mechanical gadget, our gas engine and its
appurtenances, had put us in a position to take more than usual advantage
of conductivity. But we did not really SHORTEN space. As to time, that we
DID shorten, relatively. We traveled sixty miles in the interval it would
have taken us to walk five. And how did we do that? By manipulating
duration? Scarcely. For duration, I was learning, really was the thing
shortened. We shortened time, because we had increased its
receptivity--crammed more into it, as it were--thanks to our humming
motor.

Orthic space is no obstruction at all to Betty, if she is in full control
of its essence, conductivity. I had ceased to argue about that. And it
now seems that there can be as little argument over the essence of orthic
time, receptivity. For it is only in this characteristic of time, as we
know it here in the obstructed universe, that control is to be
predicated.

To the extent that Betty can increase receptivity, that is, fill time to
its utmost, to the extent that she can increase conductivity, telescoping
mere distance, to that extent she can step up, as she will, the essence
of motion, frequency--all this simply on the basis of an altered
time-space ratio. It is in this orthic ratio that motion becomes
instantaneous; time becomes an all-inclusive now; and space becomes only
a stream of non-resistance.


To assert these wonders of the trilogia would seem fantastic were it not
that we find them grounded right here in the commonplace experience of
our obstructed universe. After all, these are the very wonders that Joan,
S E W and I worked in that sixty-mile auto ride--imperfectly. We
shortened time by crowding its essence, receptivity. We overcame space by
utilizing to unusual degree its essence, conductivity. And motion beyond
the dreams of shanks' mare resulted. As Mr. Wordsworth might have
said--Trilogia lay all about us.

6.

Speaking of wonderland, you'll recall that when Alice arrived on the
other side of the looking-glass she was horrified by the persistence with
which the people she found there attached strange and outlandish meanings
to comfortable words that Alice had always supposed she understood quite
well. So it had to be explained, and this is what they told her
concerning one of their puzzlers:

"You see it's like a portmanteau--there are two meanings packed up in one
word."

Betty's term "frequency," I take it, is a portmanteau word. And therein
it differs from her other terms, receptivity and conductivity.

As a word, "receptivity " functions well enough whether applied to
material or psychological processes. For instance, paper is receptive to
ink, and likewise your mind is receptive to sensory impressions. In the
same way, the word "conductivity" blankets both the objective and
subjective ranges. A length of pipe is conductive of water; from the
verbal standpoint, one can say just as reasonably that your mind is now
serving as a conductor of the thought expressed in this sentence.


But with the word "frequency" it is different. There may be a word so
descriptive of the essence of motion as to work both materially and
psychologically. But I don't know it. Neither apparently did Betty.
Anyway, it was a portmanteau word that she left with S E W and me--a word
of two meanings. Rather, I fear of three and maybe more.

Frequency--what is it sidereally? On first consideration, only the number
of vibrations in a unit of time. That's our take-off; and in these latter
days we get off the ground quickly enough, leaving such old-time
familiars as the oscillating clock pendulum and the vibrating piano
string far below. For now the primary meaning of the word is no longer so
simple. With the discovery and utilization of electricity, including in
recent years what we have come to know as radiant energies, the
connotations of the term have been vastly broadened. Now we talk
confidently of radio frequencies. We never saw or felt one. But because
of mechanical registration we know they are.


It is this territory of new energies--and of older but equally baffling
ones such as light--which Betty (or was it Anne?) called "no-man's land."
Scarcely nonmaterial are they, nor yet material in the old acceptance of
the word.

A few pages back we tried to isolate two characteristics of orthic
motion--perpetualness and instancy. As motion is perpetual even in the
sidereal universe, further comment is unnecessary. But sidereal motion is
not instant. Orthic motion is, says Betty. If so, perhaps the frequencies
of no-man's land foreshadow orthic instancy. Certainly they should do a
better job of showing the way than do the grosser vibrations of tuning
forks and such.

The radio announcer, broadcasting miles off, says:, "Eight o'clock by
Fugit, the world's most estimable watch." And we, sitting at our
firesides, haul out our own watches to see if they need resetting. So
close to instantaneous is the transmission of the radio frequency that we
ignore the lag between the announcer's spoken words and our reception of
the impulse that reproduces those words in our own living rooms. This
discrepancy never occurs to us.

Or we push a button in the wall and expect instantaneous response in the
chandelier, and for all practical purposes we get it.

So our present-day experience does encompass frequencies approximately
instantaneous. Suspect, therefore, the existence of really instant
frequencies, as far beyond radio, for example, as radio is beyond a clock
pendulum. Thus S E W and I were charged by Betty, through Joan.

In fact, one of these ultra frequencies men have known since men were,
more intimately than they know land and sea and all that in them is. But,
because they have found no way of measuring this particular frequency,
they still swear by the gods of earth, air and water. Good, reliable old
gods, to be sure! But their robust objectivity became measurable only
when yardsticks were devised and applied by thought.


True, the energies of no man's land lift our understanding of frequency,
the essence of motion, beyond the simpler mechanisms. But with the
frequency we so intimately know as thought we climb high above no-man's
land, high above wave-lengths, and quanta and what have you.


Betty did not ask us to conceive thought as orthic motion. For us in the
obstructed universe it remains only a psychological frequency, still
short of orthos, but powerful, real and pointing straight up the skyway
in the direction of orthic frequency itself.

Let's test the proposition out. Assume that thought is a frequency, an
ultra frequency, foreshadowing the orthic essence of motion. In that case
you would not expect to find it in sidereal space. Do you? Obviously not.
Nor would you expect it to be confined in sidereal time. Is it? The ACT
of thinking may be in sidereal time, but thought itself jumps all
sidereal barriers. The truth is, neither space nor time obstructs it. You
can think of China, not as accurately, but as easily as you can think of
the street you live on. You can think of 10 B.C. as easily as you can of
1940 A.D.

There was once a very great philosopher who, wishing to prove all things,
began by trying to prove his own existence. And he proved it, in his own
estimation, by saying, "I think. Therefore, I am." Critics ever since
have been clamoring that Descartes could have said with equal sense, "I
walk, or I talk, or I weep. Therefore, I am." But the critics, I submit,
have been only half right. For, while it may be futile for any man, no
matter how great a philosopher, to attempt to prove the only thing that
he really KNOWS, his own consciousness through which he infers all else,
nonetheless long before consciousness walked or talked or wept or even
rejoiced, it THOUGHT, if only amoeba-wise.

Another thing: Betty says that we here always confuse the obstructed
manifestations of the simple mechanical world, and those of the more
complex no man's land, with motion per se. We are made that way, it
seems--with an exception, however, in the case of thought. Thought is a
thing that we never confuse with objective manifestation. We may think to
walk, but we do not call walking thinking. And there, too, thought is on
the side of the angels.

Again, if thought previews the essence of orthic motion, we would expect
it to be close to instantaneous. Is it not so? And we would expect it to
be close to perpetual. Surely it is ceaseless in our waking moments; and
we are told by psychologists that subconsciously it continues even in our
deepest sleep. Betty is living proof--to me--that its activity survives
bodily death.

In the same vein, thought does not vanish with the act of thinking; the
thoughts of a thousand years of yesterdays color today, for better or
worse, and will color tomorrows unnumbered.

Yes, I think thought offers specifications on which to build whatever
lame conceptions of orthic frequency we denizens of the obstructed
universe are capable of. It is the freest, the least obstructed fact in
our experience. And, more, is it not the great creator? Is it not our
world's biggest stir, its mightiest activity, its most potent impulse?

I make these observations on thought not to glorify it. There are
negative as well as positive thoughts. My purpose is only to suggest some
experiential basis for your and my understanding that the essence Betty
calls frequency is the ACTIVATING impulse, without husk, shell or
wrapping--obstructed in this world, but with thought offering a glimpse
of its unobstruction in orthos. There is nothing I can add to the phrase
"activating impulse."
We shall just have to let it go at that, with,
however, a caution or two.

Don't think that by frequency is meant consciousness itself. Frequency,
the essence of orthic motion, activates consciousness, and is co-existent
with it, but not more so than is receptivity, the essence of time, or
conductivity, the essence of space. All three together constitute the
trilogia of consciousness. They are interfused and interdependent.


Nor should we vainly imagine that all orthic frequency is of the same
degree. As there are many sidereal frequencies, each differing from the
other, so there are many orthic frequencies. Betty's world is as
pluralistic in its monism as is our own.

For instance, there is in our world this thing we call electricity. We
know that we do not know its essence; all that we know about it is the
manner in which it behaves in obstruction. In the unobstructed universe
the essence is known and dealt with. And that illustrates why, when we
asked Betty if there were electricity and oxygen and bricks and sticks
and stones in her world, she answered, yes--even at the risk of being Sir
Oliverish. But always she added that she knew and dealt with these
things, not in their obstructed aspect as we do, but in their essence.


Never fear but that Betty's unobstructed universe has all the infinite
variety of our obstructed universe--"only more so," what with frequencies
we here have not been able to reach up to, and she there, reaching down
to us, is unable to bestow.

So the portmanteau character of the term "frequency" need no longer
concern us, because it is clear that frequencies must be in degrees, as
is consciousness itself. There is no difference in kind between the
essential frequency of ordinary visible motion and a radio wavelength;
there is only a difference of degree. In essence, a radio wave-length and
thought are alike in kind; they, too, differ only in degree. It is the
same way with thought and the frequencies of orthos.


But Betty did not mean that all orthic frequencies are of a potential
equal to that of thought. On the contrary, thought, even as it operates
in the obstructed universe, has a potential far beyond that of many a
frequency of the unobstructed universe. She meant only that in the
unobstructed universe all motion is apprehended in its essence and that
our feel of the freest obstructed motion, thought, gives us a clue to
motion's orthic essence, called by her for the purpose of her divulgence,
FREQUENCY.


7.

Still another of Betty's terms seems to warrant Special
attention--"arrestment." She had her bit of fun with me there, as I
maneuvered this way and that to get at her meaning. But I forgive her.
Certainly I had earned no "ticket" for speeding. I was guilty only of the
common and relatively trivial offense of blocking the traffic. In the
name of the unobstructed universe, aren't we all!

You and I--every mother's child of us--are arrested, joking aside. And so
are all other frequencies manifesting in obstruction. Thus spoke Betty.
Perhaps a moment's introspection will help us to understand.

We have all had the experience of being lifted out of ourselves by great
music or perhaps just a good movie. Under the spell of art, we escape our
encirclement. That is, we imagine we are escaping it. And then when the
play is over, what do we do? Do we go out and crystallize the vague
aspirations of make-believe into fact? Sometimes--if we have aspired
quantitatively, as Stephen would say. But if we have aspired
qualitatively, and often we do, it is otherwise. Here we are left to
settle back as comfortably as may be into what we really are.

The point is that but slight self-analysis is required for each of us to
recognize arrestment in himself. We know our arrestment unmistakably
enough whenever we try to escape it.

But in the field of self-awareness, as elsewhere, arrestment of frequency
does not imply obdurate limitation. That can hardly be, urged as we are
by our deepest nature to break through whatever it is that confines us.
And surely arrestment implies no dead stop. It means only a SUSPENSION of
potentiality. Nonetheless, frequency as it manifests in the obstructed
universe is arrested; it does have its point of suspense.


Take the electric fan that Joan was repairing one morning in the early
days of Betty's divulgence. Let's say it was a fan of two speeds. The low
speed we'll label 50 and the high speed 100. We set the fan revolving at
50. It will go right on revolving at 50 indefinitely, though its over-all
frequency is 100. In other words, without disturbing the potential of
100, we have arrested the fan's motion at 50.

Now, forgetting about 100 being a potential, well push the control lever
directly into high. With the fan going twice as fast as before, we note a
curious effect--just as did Joan. Whereas at 50 we could see the blades
clearly, now we don't see them at all. We look right through them at the
wall behind.

It is easy for us to say that the fan is revolving too rapidly for our
eyes to follow its motion, and that's true. But something else is also
true, something that is independent of our eyes. It can be stated this
way: At 100 the blades of the fan are traveling twice as far as they did
at 50--in the same unit of time. Into the same time interval we have
packed double the space.

And this brings us to Betty's statement that matter as we know it in the
obstructed universe is an arrestment of frequency resulting from a
certain incidence of motion in time and space
. This is not altogether a
hard saying, if, for the purpose of illustration, you will assume 100 to
be the essence of motion, frequency itself in its orthic meaning. To our
obstructed eyesight the blades of the fan are invisible at 100 (essence);
there is just the wall behind the place where the fan was. But now we
pull the control back to the 50 mark of arrestment Behold the fan again,
safely back in the obstructed universe! All done by a simple shift of the
time-space ratio.

Physicists have been telling us for some years now that there is no
material substance as we have understood the term in the past; that
instead there are only aggregates of energy. Matter, it seems, is the
name that we popularly apply to those particular stress-knots that are
three-dimensionally measurable. Well, it is the arrestment of frequency,
if I understand Betty correctly, that makes that measurement possible. It
is the arrestment, in fact, that we measure.


8.

The universe, Betty told S E W and me, is one and entire, despite its two
aspects. Therefore this one and entire universe is HERE now, despite our
obstruction.


Go into a dark room. You blunder around and see nothing. That's one
aspect. Now find the electric Switch and flood the room with light. You
no longer blunder about; now you see furnishings and decorations, colors
and shapes. That's another aspect. Yet both aspects are of the same room.
And this is the room you were in all the time. You are still in it and
will be in it You perceive the room in obstruction. Betty perceives it in
essence.

Did you ever see two sides of a coin at one time? You could do that only
with mirrors. Yet, seeing one side of a coin, you do not deny the
existence of its other side, or that both sides belong to the same coin.

It has not been my purpose, in this contribution to S E W's more detailed
report, to tie Betty's divulgence down to hard and fast formulas. That I
could not do, and would not if I could. For she intended her divulgence
only as an aid to thinking, as suggestion rather than statement.

The truth never varies. Men's understanding of it does, and will for
long, long ages to come. New knowledge brings new understanding. Hence it
is that dogma dies. To me it seems that the fruits of Betty's divulgence
are for those of us who are still willing to ask: "Where shall wisdom be
found, I and where is the place of understanding?"



GLOSSARY

CONSCIOUSNESS: The one and all-inclusive reality, in evolution. Man's
self-awareness is the highest expression of this reality.

ORTHOS: (Greek, orthos: true.) The operation of consciousness, through
co-existent essences; in its unobstucted aspect.

ORTHIC: Adjective. Pertaining to orthos.

UNIVERSE: The total of all manifestations of consciousness.

OBSTRUCTED UNIVERSE: That aspect of the whole universe which man knows
through his senses, including their mechanical extensions.

UNOBSTRUCTED UNIVERSE: That aspect of the entire universe ordinarily
considered to be beyond the limitation of man's sense perceptions and
their extensions.

TRILOGIA: The threefold aspect of orthos, consisting of receptivity,
conductivity, and frequency.

ESSENCE: (Latin, ESSE: to be.) The co-existent and coefficient actuality
of orthos, manifesting itself in the obstructed universe as Time, Space
and Motion.

RECEPTIVITY: The Essence of Time.

CONDUCTIVITY: The Essence of Space.

FREQUENCY: The Essence of Motion.

TIME: The obstructed manifestation of the orthic essence, receptivity.

SPACE: The obstructed manifestation of the orthic essence, conductivity.

MOTION: The obstructed manifestation of the orthic essence, frequency.

ARRESTMENT: An incidence of frequency, conductivity and receptivity,
resulting in manifestation in the obstructed universe.

DEGREE: Consciousness, being in evolution, is in degrees. Each degree
represents a specific manifestation.

QUALITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: That aspect of consciousness resulting in
species manifestation, as electricity, gold, tree, antelope, man, etc. In
the unobstructed universe Quality is in evolution, and therefore in
degrees. In the obstructed universe it is of fixed potentiality in its
given degree.

QUANTITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: That aspect of consciousness, in the
obstructed universe, capable of, and subject to development by the
individual, in evolution and therefore in degrees.

MATTER: In the obstructed universe matter is that arrestment of frequency
which manifests itself in a three-dimensional extension; in the
unobstructed universe it is the form attribute of any aspect of the
trilogia.

MATERIAL FORCES: Those arrestments of frequency expressing themselves
through matter.

AWARENESS-MECHANISM: That equipment of self-aware consciousness whereby
the individual perceives that which is objective to him.

PARALLEL LAW: The term connotes the interextension of principles
operating in both the obstructed and unobstructed universes.

BETA BODY: The form attribute of that frequency which is an individual
consciousness, an I-Am. It is integral, atomic and noncellular.

ALPHA BODY: The form attribute of a combination of frequencies,
constituting the physical housing in the obstructed universe of an
individual consciousness. Such as the human body.

PLURALISTIC MONISM: Connotes one reality expressing itself in
individualization, alike in kind but different in manifestation.

JUXTAPOSITION: The manner in which frequency (motion) variably collides
with receptivity (time) and conductivity (space) to result in an
arrestment, producing manifestation.

INTRAPOSITION: As juxtaposition is the manner of arrestment resulting in
manifestation, so intraposition is the status of relationship that
obtains as long as that arrestment holds.

CO-EXISTENT: That which is united in Being with something else for the
production of an effect.
The illusion from which we are seeking to extricate ourselves is not that constituted by the realm of space and time, but that which comes from failing to know that realm from the standpoint of a higher vision. -L.H.

lizzie
Guest

Re: Recovered : The Unobstructed Universe

Unread post by lizzie » Sat Apr 12, 2008 11:58 am

About Quest in Search of Ultimate Theory of Everything
http://www.supraconsciousnessnetwork.org/AboutUTE.htm

Even though the Integrated Theory of Intelligence could act as a foundation for a Theory of Everything, it ultimately will require a completed mathematical formulation developed by physicists and cosmologists liberally borrowing from all other physical and biological sciences. All fields must ultimately fit under the umbrella of the completed theory.

In Chapter Four I differentiate between the terms “Information” and “Intelligence”, and state that:

Intelligence = (Information + Consciousness)
Or
Information = (Intelligence – Consciousness)

User avatar
junglelord
Posts: 3693
Joined: Mon Mar 17, 2008 5:39 am
Location: Canada

Re: Recovered : The Unobstructed Universe

Unread post by junglelord » Sat Apr 12, 2008 12:38 pm

I came to the conclusion that Energy = Information awhile ago. I get slammed for that sometimes, but its what I believe.
If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have a key to the universe.
— Nikola Tesla
Casting Out the Nines from PHI into Indigs reveals the Cosmic Harmonic Code.
— Junglelord.
Knowledge is Structured in Consciouness. Structure and Function Cannot Be Seperated.
— Junglelord

lizzie
Guest

Re: Recovered : The Unobstructed Universe

Unread post by lizzie » Wed Apr 23, 2008 8:17 am

"Energy = information"?

Knowledge: particular standing waveform patterns extracted from the Implicate Order by a sentient being through the energetic process called “thinking”?

Please make sure that you employ only non-energetic (non-electrical) methods to present your arguments either for or against the idea that "energy is information."

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webolife
Posts: 2539
Joined: Mon Mar 17, 2008 2:01 pm
Location: Seattle

Re: Recovered : The Unobstructed Universe

Unread post by webolife » Wed Apr 23, 2008 11:55 am

Dean, I hope you weren't thinking I was "slamming" you! I simply thought that E = I was a weak view of "information".
In that former thread, the topic seemed to me to go in a direction that "consciousness" (as Lizzie supplied) or "intelligence" (as I had also brought up) were merely matters of energy flow... to me the"mind" is so much more than that. Or perhaps you are thinking that "= I" means the same as "resonates"... if so, then it's just a matter of words, and we differ little in our view. Molecules resonating with the interspacial field dynamics is not the same thing to me as information, which to me requires a decoder/sorter, ie. an intelligent agent.
Truth extends beyond the border of self-limiting science. Free discourse among opposing viewpoints draws the open-minded away from the darkness of inevitable bias and nearer to the light of universal reality.

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