"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern." -- William Blake

Underneath all of the apparent complexity and diversity, the world is straightforward. Just as the numbers zero and infinity are the limits of existence, they are also the limits of human thinking. In fact, despite Blake's wonderful quotation, human minds  (but not the human senses) are geared towards zero and infinity. The reason is simple: any line of thinking will proceed in a certain direction until it reaches a limit, at which stage it can go no further; it has reached its natural end-point.

  

One of the best illustrations is religion. In the Abrahamic faiths, the distance between human beings and God is stretched to infinity. He is infinitely far above us in terms of everything: infinitely more powerful, infinitely more good, infinitely wiser, infinitely more knowing. He is infinite perfection. So, the contrast between God and us can be pushed no further. We, in comparison with this infinite God, are reduced to zero. There you have it: the eternal dualism of zero and infinity.

 

Imagine that a prophet claimed that God was 33% smarter and better than human beings. That would be absurd, wouldn’t it? The prophet would have no followers. What about 100% or 1000% or 1,000,000% or a trillion percent? Well, these are all utterly arbitrary, aren’t they? It would seem as though the prophet had simply plucked a number out of thin air. There is no sufficient reason to choose any such number. Only one number will suffice – infinity, the absolute limit. In other words, as soon as any prophet conceives of “God”, he is compelled to represent him in terms of the infinite, and by comparison humanity can’t help but be relegated to zero since all finite entities are zero in terms of infinity.


And that, quite simply, is the essence of the Abrahamic faiths. God = infinity; humans = zero. Every assertion made by any Abrahamic prophet is based is on this. The very moment the idea of monotheism was conceived, there was no question that the lone “Creator” would instantly sit on the throne of infinity.

 

The Greek gods of Mount Olympus were more like superbeings than deities. The very fact that there were many of them meant that they could not be defined in terms of infinity. Polytheism invariably dilutes the power of gods, but monotheism magnifies divine power until it reaches infinity and can go no further. So, automatically, Abrahamic monotheism resulted in a fanaticism completely absent in polytheistic religions. The Romans brutally slaughtered their enemies, but always in the name of Rome, not of God. They crucified Jesus Christ because he was a rebel, not because he claimed to be the Son of God. It was a political execution, not religious. (Although, of course, from the point of view of the Jewish hierarchy, it was absolutely a religious matter. They were the ones offended by the divine claims of Christ, not the Romans. After all, the Romans believed their emperor to be divine, so the idea of a man-god wasn't shocking to them.)

 

Neither the Romans nor the Greeks would ever have conceived of waging “holy war”. Only Abrahamic monotheism breeds that warped mentality.

 

Many Protestants subscribe to a theological doctrine called “Total Depravity”, which proclaims that all human beings are fallen, indelibly stained with original sin, and utterly depraved, with no hope of redemption through their own efforts. They are unable to follow God and to accept his gift of salvation without God’s direct intervention and his bestowal of grace upon those who are irredeemably corrupt and damned. Humans are literally incapable of being godly. Sin is intrinsic to humanity, so our “free will” cannot avoid it. Our choices invariably reflect our sinfulness. We cannot freely choose the path of God. We do not and cannot choose to be saved – we are far too wicked. We are entirely at God’s mercy.

 

Of course, the logical outcome of this position is that we have no free will to commit genuinely good acts; they are always beyond us. That’s no problem for Protestants. They believe in predestination, the horrific concept that our ultimate fate is determined by God when we are born and, through a random process, he makes a few of us the “elect” and the rest of us the damned who will certainly go to hell. (So much for a God of love, forgiveness and compassion.) And now you begin to see where the Old World Order get some of their ideas from: they are the chosen ones – the elect – and we are the damned who deserve to be treated with absolute contempt.

 

The Protestant religion is another example of a psychopathic set of beliefs. It takes the worst possible view of humanity. We are helpless playthings of the will of God and have absolutely no say in our lives. What’s the point of holding such insane beliefs that reduce us to puppets? Any act we perform, whether it be religious, charitable, altruistic, philanthropic, benevolent or compassionate is nevertheless wicked because the impulses for these actions arise within our totally corrupt human natures, and are not done to serve or glorify God, but ourselves. Only the granting of God’s grace, that none of us can ever deserve, can convert our actions into those compatible with true goodness and salvation.

 

It’s hard to comprehend how, in the 21st century, anyone could subscribe to this diabolical, sickening, perverted view of human nature, devoid of any hope or love. Protestantism is one of the most evil ideologies ever devised. It is the jewel in the crown of the Demiurge. It is the basis of the creed of the Old World Order. The vast majority of the members of the Tea Party are Protestants of this ilk. Their ancestors who got off the boats from England in the 1600s were mostly Puritan religious fanatics, and nothing much has changed. These same people became enthusiastic slave owners and ultra capitalists. Nothing could be more terrifying than the Tea Party assuming control of America.

 

Humanity, in this Protestant view, is nothing and God everything. Protestantism has simply pushed to their logical conclusion concepts already present in Catholicism but not emphasized. There was and is a tendency in Catholicism to promote the moral efficacy of “good works”. Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, adopted a position of “justification by faith”. Faith alone was all that mattered; good works counted for nothing. But the Catholic Saint Augustine had already gone far in this direction, and indeed Luther was initially an Augustinian monk, hence his familiarity with this train of thought.

 

Catholics, unlike Protestants, are much more supportive of community and are ambivalent about capitalism. Go to a southern European Catholic country such as Italy or Spain and you will discover a spectacularly different mentality from the one you encounter in Protestant Britain. The excesses of capitalism are much more likely to take place in Protestant nations than Catholic ones. So, to that extent at any rate, Catholicism has some virtue. It’s hard to see any virtue at all in Protestantism. Nearly all of the ills of the Western world can be traced unambiguously to beliefs of Protestants. The Tea Party exemplifies all of the horrific attitudes of Protestantism. The Republican Party is also fiercely Protestant. What more needs to be said? Who in their right mind would be a Protestant?

 

Muslims are every bit as locked into the humanity = zero, God = infinity model as the Christians. Muslims pray five times a day (including once in the middle of the night), facing East. They bow to the ground in their segregated mosques and murmur their prayers. Women have to pray out of sight of the men, and be dressed in hijabs, niqabs and burqas. Muslims “submit” to God (indeed Islam means “submission”.) They go on pilgrimages to Mecca and perform enormous synchronized grovelling to Allah. “We are not worthy!” To be a Muslim is to be a degraded self-hater. Human dignity and self-respect are reduced to zero.


The Jews are no different. They have to obey hundreds of ludicrous rules to avoid offending God. Would God really care if you shaved off your beard, didn’t wear your hair in ringlets, didn’t wear tassels, didn’t wear a dark, sober suit? Does God spend his time checking whether a woman has her hair covered or not? Is that what God is all about – going round with a checklist to make sure everyone is following “the rules”? What a dismal view of both humanity and God. Imagine believing in a God who might send you to eternal hell-fire if your facial or head hair broke “the rules”. Are these people deranged? Their conception of God is disgraceful and embarrassing. They have turned him into some kind of petty prison guard with a Hitler moustache determined to punish any minor transgression. He is a God preoccupied with trivia and rulebooks, with keeping score. Is there actually any point in believing in the Jewish God?

 

The logic of the Abrahamic faiths is that we must perpetually beg God for mercy. We must glorify him at all times or fall into the dreadful sinfulness of our “human nature”. None of us deserves salvation, and there are no deeds we could ever perform to merit it because any finite act by a finite being will always be as nothing in comparison with the infinite, so we have to plead to be saved, and if we do not plead well enough then God will send us to the place of infinite and eternal punishment: hell.

 

As for Satan, he isn’t just evil, he is infinitely evil. No punishment he metes out is ever matched to any finite crime: it is always infinite in extent and duration. Again, we simply cannot go any further once we have reached infinity.


And once you have presented unintelligent people with the prospect of infinite reward for obeying the rules, and infinite punishment for breaking them, you have created the scope for brainwashed hordes and “martyrs”. People who are locked into this calculation of infinite pleasure/pain are capable of absolutely any crime in the name of their God. The 9/11 maniacs regarded all infidels as infinitely bad people, deserving of no mercy whatsoever. After all, it says in the Koran – the infallible, unquestionable word of Allah – that all infidels will suffer eternal hellfire. They were clearly carrying out his will by slaughtering the unbelievers.  


The Abrahamic faiths are all about zero and infinity. They are rooted in psychosis. They are exceptionally damaging to mental health. They create an extreme fantasy world based on infinite fear of hell, and infinite desire for paradise. They engender absolute hatred of unbelievers. They create infinite intolerance.   

 

But what about non-Abrahamic religions? Illumination proclaims that we can “become God”. In other words, instead of expanding the gap between God and us to infinity, Illumination does the opposite and reduces it to zero so that it is no longer possible to distinguish God from us. Hinduism and Buddhism follow this line of thought too. Moksha, Nirvana, Gnosis are all essentially the same concept: enlightenment leading to union with the Godhead or the Fount of Existence.

 

In the Abrahamic faiths, humanity is utterly alienated from God. In the non-Abrahamic religions there is, at the point of enlightenment, not only no alienation but actual identity with God.

 

Which type of religion do you think is psychologically healthier? Which promotes the more positive and optimistic view of the human race? Which promises the most glorious possibilities, indeed the most infinitely glorious outcome possible?

 

There is simply no comparison, The Abrahamic faiths are the products of warped, diseased, self-hating minds. They are an obscenity, an affront to the dignity of the human race.

 

Who is really on the side of the concept that we are created in God’s image? Certainly not the Abrahamists who place infinite distance between God and us i.e. we don’t look anything like God and share absolutely none of his attributes. But the religions of enlightenment all support the idea that we can become God literally. When we look in the mirror after we have achieved gnosis, it will be God’ reflection (image) that we see gazing back.

 

These are the five possible human attitudes to religion based on the zero/infinity analysis:

 

1) Abrahamism.
Gap between humans and God = infinity. Humans are zero in value.
2) Enlightenment.
Gap between humans and God = zero (ultimately). Humans are infinite in value (ultimately). (Pantheism - the idea that God is everywhere, that God is Nature, hence that we are all part of God, is a special case of enlightenment thinking.)
3) Polytheism.
 The gods are superbeings; powerful but not of infinite power. The gap between the gods and humanity is neither infinite nor zero. The gods are magnified humans, subject to the same passions and weaknesses (like the Greek gods of Olympus).
4) Atheism.
There are no gods. The gap between humans and gods is zero because gods don’t exist.
5) Agnosticism.
 Agnostics don’t know whether gods exist or not. Hence no gap between gods and humans can be defined. They do not subscribe to any extremist positions because they are not in a position to do so. 

So, you see how even in religion, zero and infinity control the entire discussion. And you see how easy it is to reduce all of the apparent complexity of the thousands of religions that exist in the world to just five basic positions.

 

*****

 

The Torah, the Koran and the Bible are regarded by Jews, Muslims and Fundamentalist Christians as the infallible Word of God that must never be questioned. These people regard these “holy” texts as infinitely true, hence anything that contradicts them must be infinitely false. Virtually 100% of religious fundamentalists believe that God literally made the world in six days and rested on the seventh, and that this took place within the last four thousand years or so. Almost all Muslims, Orthodox Jews and Christian Fundamentalist reject Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. So, there can be no question that believing in these books makes you infinitely stupid. Islam will get more and more backward as it clings to a text that stands in direct opposition to science and technology. Over a billion people, because of their inflexible, "infinite" belief, will fall further and further behind everyone else. In a million years from now, they will be infinitely far behind and they will be living in caves clutching tattered copies of the Koran and they will no longer be recognizable as members of the human race. That’s how dangerous it is to attach yourself to the wrong religion, a religion literally going backwards. With every passing year, the Abrahamic faiths fall further behind.

 

Catholicism differs from the rest of the Abrahamic faiths in a crucial regard. The Pope is regarded as Christ’s representative on earth – he is the “vicar” of Christ. According to the Catholic Church, he is capable of making infallible statements in specific situations about specific matters.

 

In Islam, Judaism and Protestantism, there is no equivalent of the Pope. The Pope has the authority to speak on behalf of the entire Catholic religion. What he says goes. But no Jew, Muslim or Protestant can do likewise for their faiths. Catholicism is hierarchical and meritocratic – the higher you climb, the more meritorious you must be. The Pope is someone of such merit that he is, from the Catholic standpoint, appointed by God himself via the vote of the College of Cardinals, the will of which is guided by God.

 

Catholicism departs from enslavement to holy texts by giving the Pope and the Church authority to set new rules and principles not set forth in the Bible. Theoretically, the Pope could radically alter the nature of Catholicism if he so-desired, even explicitly contradicting scripture. But he would thereby be admitting that Jesus was in error and that the eternal “truths” preached by the Church are not eternal, so his room for manoeuvre is strictly limited.

 

The Catholic Church is run by qualified experts in Catholicism. The Cardinals and the Pope are deeply learned people, of the calibre of academic professors. Protestantism is entirely different. Any charismatic individual can make himself a minister, set up a church and say whatever he likes i.e. Protestantism is all about giving a voice to the complete amateur who has no expertise and no qualifications. Anyone can claim they are infinitely accurate at interpreting scripture. This is one of the reasons why Protestantism is popular. It is the cult of the Amateur. A minister simply needs to say that he has read the Word of God, so he doesn’t need any formal, peer-reviewed qualifications. In Flannery O'Connor's book Wise Blood, the grandson of a preacher despises preachers yet nevertheless sets himself up as a preacher and establishes his own church called the Holy Church of Jesus Christ without Christ. Well, why not? It's as logical as any of the Protestant factions. One character says of the new church: "It's based on your own personal interpitation (sic) of the Bible, friends. You can sit at home and interpit your own Bible however you feel in your heart it ought to be interpited." And that pretty much sums up Protestantism.

 

Protestantism exists in endless different versions precisely because anyone can claim to be the correct interpreter of God’s Word. Islam is very similar. Anyone who has read the Koran is an “expert” on Islam. It’s staggeringly easy to find passages in the Koran advocating violence against infidels, hence the rise of violent Islamic Fundamentalism. Catholicism adopted the view that Christianity was so complex that only experts could hope to understand it, hence the ordinary people shouldn’t even try and ought to be creatures of simple faith and nothing more.  

 

When an incident happens impacting on Catholicism, it is the job of the Pope and his Cardinals to respond. Ordinary Catholics don’t have to do anything. When an incident impacts on Islam, there is no official voice of Islam to respond, so every Muslim feels they must react individually, hence the vast, baying crowds that burn the American flag and chant, “Death to America!” (Of course, according to the 9/11 conspiracy theorists these protesters are actually CIA or Mossad agents since no Muslim in world history has ever been motivated to raise a hand against America!)

 

In the Cold War, a hot line existed between the American and Russian presidents. In the Vatican, the Pope has the Catholic hot line to God. Only he is allowed to use it. For Muslims and Protestants, every one of them has their own personal hotline. Hence Islam and Protestantism are “mob” religions because all the believers react at the same time, unlike Catholicism which waits on the Pope. They are “rent-a-crowd” ideologies. Everyone feels much closer to God because of their personal hotline, so they are much more fanatical, much more sensitive to perceived slights, and much more dangerous than modern Catholics.

 

A strange dichotomy exists in the head of Muslims and Protestants. On the one hand, they preach infinite distance between God and themselves, and on the other hand they think they are just one call away from God. This unbridgeable contradiction leads to mental illness. Similarly with Jews. They are worthless compared with God, so they believe, but they are also his Chosen People, hence infinitely valuable.

 

Any ideology that simultaneously defines you as worthless and infinitely valuable can have only one psychological outcome – psychosis. And that characterizes the history of the Abrahamic faiths. They have been the bane of the human race, done untold damage, and held us back for millennia.


The Perfect Storm - Pho' ft. Xception [S.O.U.L. Vol. I]

 

 

As Above, So Below

"I'm not trying to copy Nature, I'm trying to find the principles she's using."

R. Buckminster Fuller

All human ideas invariably get pushed to the zero or infinite limit. Here are a few more examples.

Economics:

1) Capitalism assigns infinite value to the top capitalists. There is nothing in principle to prevent one man owning the world - an idea that features prominently in The Last Bling King. If one person (or a few) are of infinite value then everyone else is of zero value in comparison. This is the world we live in.

2) In Communism, everyone is assigned (theoretically) equal value i.e. there is zero difference between people. There is no possibility of anyone being assigned a value different from everyone else, and the notion of any person having infinite value in relation to others is unthinkable. Hence Communism is the absolute opposite of Capitalism. Communism, until the fall of the Berlin Wall, was the only serious challenger to Capitalism.

3) Meritocracy does not reduce everyone to artificial total equality (in contrast to Communism). Nor does it permit anyone unlimited (to infinity) opportunities to increase their financial value over others (in contrast to Capitalism). Instead, Meritocracy says that everyone is potentially of infinite value because they can all become as good as they can be. It aspires towards infinite equality of opportunity (i.e. to reduce the influence of privilege to zero), but it does not endorse equality of outcome. The more meritorious will be rewarded more than the less meritorious, but not to an extent where the resultant economic imbalance can ever be used as weapon (as in Capitalism). Meritocracy is the Middle Way between Capitalism and Communism, and vastly superior to both. It takes what is best of each and discards what is worst. Meritocracy is dialectically guaranteed to replace Capitalism since it is a higher synthesis.

The Tea Party seek to reduce government and the state to zero. No one, they believe, should be allowed to interfere with their lives in any way. A senior member of the Tea Party openly advocated that a white businessman should not have to serve a black customer if he did not want to i.e. this places infinite value on the businessman and reduces the black customer to zero. This is an absolutely horrific and obscene concept that has no place in any civilised nation, and is exactly why there is a need for strong government and a powerful state. If the Tea Party ever came to power, a second Civil War would follow within days. The Tea Party are just the Confederates in a new guise. The Confederates - White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) - actually went to war to uphold slavery. Has any army in history ever fought for such an ignoble, disgusting cause? Yet Confederate flags are still regularly flown all over America!

The Old World Order assign infinite value to themselves and zero to everyone else. Bankers, hedge fund managers, top CEOs, top sportspeople, top celebrities, top actors…they all partake of the ideology that they are of infinite value and everyone else is worthless. If they didn't then they would never ask for so much more money than the average person receives. They would never pay themselves ludicrously high bonuses.

Slavery reduces the slave to zero and raises the master to infinite value. Airbrushed supermodels and Hollywood actresses are regarded as infinitely beautiful; everyone else has zero attractiveness in comparison.

The fast food industry seeks to be the infinitely fast food industry. Any delay at all is too much.

The advertising industry seeks to use infinitely seductive images to manipulate the zeroes - the masses - to buy their products. This industry seeks to promote the message that the consumer is nothing without their product, and becomes infinitely valuable if they buy it. People are terrified of not having the latest gadgets because their peers might mock them (i.e. treat them as if they have zero value). 

In the Hindu caste system, the Untouchables are given a value of zero. Humanity has a horrific predisposition towards the assigning of infinite value to the few and a zero value to the many. The few are elevated to god-like status, and the rest to their slaves.

We live in a society of those with names (the famous) upon whom infinite value is conferred, while the rest of us - the foot soldiers, the cannon fodder, worker drones, the masses, the common herd - are faceless and nameless, easy to replace and assigned zero value. In The Last Bling King, the group agitating for freedom was specifically called The League for the Liberation of Nobodies.

When you analyze any situation, just look for the "zero" angle and the "infinite" angle and pray you are not on the zero side (you almost certainly will be in this world of the damned that we inhabit). In the workplace, your boss is on the side of the infinite while you are zero. If a policeman stops you, he is on the side of the infinite while you are zero. If a serial killer abducts you, he is on the side of the infinite while you are zero. If you fall in unrequited love, the object of your desire is on the side of the infinite while you are zero.

True love may be the greatest feeling of all because you assign your lover infinite value and they do the same back. You both feel like gods.

When you support a sports team, you assign your team infinite value. If you are a true "fan" (fanatic), you will enjoy infinite pleasure when they win, and infinite despair when they lose (in particular to their main rival). 

Racism is about placing infinite value on one race and zero on others.

Nationalism/Patriotism is about placing infinite value on one nation and zero on others.

Xenophobia is all about placing zero value on the "stranger", the "outsider", the "alien". The Chosen People - of infinite value. The Non-chosen people - zero value.

The Master Race - of infinite value. The non-master race (subhuman) - zero value.

Them and Us. Them - zero value. Us - infinite value. 

"We" - infinite value. The "Other" - zero value.

The Family - infinite value. Everyone else - zero value.

The Community - everyone has equality before the law, equality of opportunity and is given equal consideration. No nepotism, cronyism and privilege.

Nepotism, cronyism and privilege - the "insiders" have infinite value; the "outsiders" have zero value.

Why is the dialectic the supreme philosophical principle? Because it is all about systematically moving any process to its omega point of perfection where it can be refined no more. It combines two things: infinity and excellence. It doesn't move towards any old infinity, but the best possible infinity, the infinity associated with God. It is a law of human thinking that any argument will eventually arrive at a position that can be described in terms of zero and infinity. In philosophy, idealism reduces materialism to zero, and materialism reduces idealism to zero. In philosophy, it is extraordinary the number of times that one person asserts one position and then another argues the precise opposite. The Middle Way is rarely pursued. Arguments are always pushed to the limit. When Nietzsche says things such as: "There are no facts, only interpretations", and "What, ultimately, are man's truths, merely his irrefutable errors" he has arrived at a position beyond which it is impossible to go.

The Death of Art, the End of History, the Death of the Author, The Death of Reality, the Death of the Grand Narrative, the Death of the Subject…ideas are always taken to the extremest extent. In fact, this is frequently highly useful because it provides total clarity and it reveals a thought in its purest form.

Capitalism never says that it places infinite value on some and zero value on everyone else (because it knows that this would provoke a revolution), but the conduct of capitalists makes that conclusion inescapable. It would help to clarify the issue for people if the infinite and zero aspects of Capitalism were presented. Instead, the masses are in denial, desperate not to confront the fact that they are regarded as utterly dispensable. When you get laid off, your boss is telling you that you have zero value. But even before you get laid off, you are still of zero value. Unless you are one of the bosses (those of infinite value) then you have no value. You are just one of "them".    

*****

The ancient wisdom of Hermeticism As above, so below says that we, humanity, are a microcosm of the macrocosm, and exactly the same rules apply to us as apply everywhere else. God does not use a special "divine" logic, but exactly the same logic that we do. The only difference is that he's much better at it. Aliens would use the same logic too. 

When Abrahamists say things such as "God works in mysterious ways" and "How can our finite minds understand the infinite mind of God?", they are establishing a false dichotomy. They are suggesting that different rules apply in different parts of the universe; that gods and aliens have access to things that we can never know. They are saying that we can never understand God's plan, hence must resort to nothing but faith. Knowledge is always futile in such a system because it can never shed any light on what is really going on (which only God knows). Reason, as Luther put it, is indeed the "Devil's whore" since it can never reveal God's mind, hence can only be about deception, delusion and the Devil's lies. To subscribe to As above, so below is to say that our knowledge, if we are skilful and wise enough, is the same as God's. He does not work in mysterious ways. Although his mind is infinite, it nevertheless works in a way that finite minds can comprehend.

So, which view is healthier and more optimistic? As usual, the Abrahamists are on the crazy side of the fence. The Hermetic wisdom is so much more glorious and enlightened. In every single way, Abrahamism fails. It is astounding how this grim, stupid system of faith has conquered half the world, a sure testimony to how idiotic most people are.

The reality is this. We can work out everything about the macrocosm by studying our own world (the microcosm) and ourselves. We need no extra information. We can literally work out the thoughts of God because he thinks in the same way that we do, just at a much higher, better informed and more accurate level. But it's simply a difference of degree, not of kind. All of the secrets of existence are all around us in our own world. A scientific Grand Unified Theory of Everything would apply to the whole universe, not just to our local galaxy. Logic is universal, not restricted to our planet. Mathematics is universal: it is the same everywhere. Evolution operates in the same way everywhere. The dialectic is a universal principle. There is nothing that is beyond our knowledge. There is never any need for faith. Everything is a matter of knowledge. Every problem will yield to humanity. Look how far we have come in the last five thousand years. Look at the astounding amount of knowledge we have accumulated. Think of the knowledge we will have acquired in five million rather than five thousand years. Will we not be gods?

Closely related to As above, so below is As inside, so outside. This asserts that the outer world is a reflection of what is inside our minds. If the world is evil it is because evil predominates in the minds of humanity. If the world is trivial and childish, it is because most of us are trivial and childish. If the world is seen to be spoiled, self-indulgent and always seeking instant gratification, it's because we are all of those things. The world merely externalises the inner traits of humanity. The institutions we create that shape our world are in turn shaped by the contents of our minds. If we were godlike, the world would be perfect, and our institutions flawless. The only way to make the world better is to improve the quality of the human race. And that means everyone on the planet. That means a New World Order.

We, the human race, naturally create external things that reflect our inner workings, albeit often subconsciously. In the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the protagonist (played by Richard Dreyfuss) obsessively creates the shape of a particular mountain: he has made the content of his mind into a real object, and that real object reflects a real mountain (to which the protagonist will finally go to encounter aliens). 

Now consider the biggest revolution in human history. We are experiencing it right now. It's the internet.

The internet is the ultimate "meme" machine. An unimaginably large number of websites compete for attention. Virtually all the knowledge of the human race is available on the internet. It can be accessed instantly from anywhere in the world. New ideas can be spread around the globe just as quickly, but most wither and die. There is a savage competition between ideas, and those that succeed tend to be of certain types, reflecting the human mentality.

The changes the internet will bring about in the human condition can either accelerate us towards divinity by bringing to the fore everything that's best in us and sharing it worldwide instantly, or they can massively magnify our flaws and instantly contaminate the whole world with all of our worst aspects. The internet exhibits both the best and worst of humanity, and the worst seems to be winning.

There is a film called Idiocracy where the IQ of the human race has suffered a catastrophic decline and complete idiots are running the planet. Let's face it, the world is already run by idiots, but things could get even worse. The internet is certainly capable of giving birth to a real Idiocracy. If you ever glance at internet lists of "what's trending?" you will never see anything remotely inspirational, philosophical, scientific, intellectual, spiritual, creative or artistic. Invariably, top ten lists reflect celebrity culture. We are obsessed with the latest snippets regarding top pop stars, actors and sports stars.

Anything Lady Gaga does soars immediately to number one in the list. Her words and deeds have, seemingly, infinite importance to her legions of fans. Have they really got nothing better to do with their time than read a pop star's tweets on Twitter? What is Twitter other than "literature" for retards - for people with zero attention span, and zero intelligence? How many of the myriad of tweets have real content? If Twitter were turning people into experts in aphorisms - into reflecting the world in a few perfectly chosen words like the best of poetry or philosophy - it would be fantastic. Instead, it is nothing but bland, banal, dumb observations reflecting the first thought that comes into someone's head. There's no quality control. The instant nature of the medium, its immediacy, its unmediated rawness - these are all applauded by its fans. But these are not unambiguous "good" things. Where is the pause for self-reflection, for perfecting the message, for working out something profound that you want to say? What's the point of splurging out random thoughts? What's that going to achieve? For sad, lonely people (extraverts in particular who hate their own company), it gives them the illusion that they are in contact with others, that they are part of something exciting, something that never sleeps. Yet 99.9% of it is worthless. A Latin epigram of one of the sayings of Pythagoras is: "Aut tace aut loquere meliora silentio", meaning "Either be silent or say something better than silence." What would happen if they put that on the front page of Twitter? Would the cyber world fall silent? If only…

Facebook too is almost entirely devoid of worth. Hundreds of millions of people stare at pictures and exchange bad jokes and gossip. Is that the best humanity can do? Where is the Facebook for philosophical exchange, for sharing the latest scientific breakthroughs, for political activism, for changing the government, for analysing the economy, for discussing techniques for the psychological transformation of society? Where is the religious Facebook, the spiritual Facebook, the intellectual and cultural Facebook? Sure, someone starts a campaign about something serious every now and again but the essence of Facebook is shallow narcissism, mindless chatter, inane preening and posturing. The culture of Facebook is "too cool for school". Too dumb, more like.

There's a phenomenon on the internet whereby the more popular something is the more popular it becomes in a kind of snowball effect. Items in a trending list get looked at more precisely because they are on the list, so it gets harder and harder for anything not on the list to get any hits. The internet is a winner-takes-all medium. Some memes are infinitely more successful than others. If you make it onto a trending list, you're going viral. If you're not on the trending list you're going nowhere. Advertisers love celebrities because they instantly get onto the trending lists and get enormous numbers of hits. It's guaranteed. 100% reliable. If Lady Gaga said she'd come across a really cool website called the Armageddon Conspiracy, we'd get on the trending list instantly and within hours we'd have a million hits. That's the way the system works. It has nothing to do with quality or importance. It could be the greatest and most profound idea in human history but so what? If it doesn't have the endorsement of a celebrity then it is zero, nothing, zilch. Lady Gaga featuring in a video with a dog walking on its hind legs could easily get a billion times more hits than the million words of the Armageddon site about the secret workings of the world. That's the human race for you. If Abraxas himself created a webpage specifying the answer to "life, the universe and everything," it would be completely ignored while the human race went about its usual routine of inane Twittering, watching the latest Katy Perry video, dreaming of Megan Fox and George Clooney, posting pictures of the latest drunken parties on Facebook, checking out porn videos, finding out more about the X-Factor contestants…and all the other nonsense that occupies most people. There is no mechanism for finding gold on the internet but there are plenty of mechanisms pushing you towards garbage. The internet is, paradoxically, a great place for maintaining secrets. There are webpages that have barely ever been looked at. The number of "hidden" pages will keep growing.

Someone like Noam Chomsky would say that the point of most internet activity is to keep the masses distracted while the movers and shakers get on with the real action.

The internet is a winner-takes-all platform, and celebrities are the winners. The effect is more magnified on the internet than anywhere else, hence is much more dangerous. Celebrity culture is actually capable of lowering humanity's collective IQ. Infinite attention is paid to celebrities, and zero to everything else. It takes a miracle to divert attention away from celebrity tittle-tattle. The merest update in the life of a celebrity is the cause of an immediate feeding frenzy. The sharks are always circling, and they're always looking for that single drop of blood that lights up the ocean to every predator.

Celebrity culture is a common reference point for everyone. It allows everyone to take part in a Lowest Common Denominator (LCD) exchange of opinions. You don't need to know anything to take part in celebrity culture; you just need opinions. All the issues of the day can be discussed via one celebrity or another. Gays in the army? - let's discuss Lady Gaga. Drug abuse - let' discuss Lindsay Lohan. Lesbianism - Lohan again. Gay mid-life crisis - George Michael. Suicidal depression - Curt Cobain. Scientology - John Travolta and Tom Cruise. Aliens - Robbie Williams. Female attitudes towards sex - the Sex and the City girls. Friendship - the cast of Friends. And so on. Celebrity is the way in to any LCD discussion. Advanced philosophy, science or theology are incapable of being LCD. With anything complex you actually have to be well informed. Not all people are equally well informed. It's impossible for the well informed to have an "equal" discussion with the ill informed. There's a fundamental asymmetry that creates tension. But when it comes to celebrity culture, everyone is equal. It is the great leveller. It's also the great enemy of any high-level thought.

It could be persuasively argued that celebrity culture has taken over from religion as the defining battleground of human existence. Humanity, in the West, managed to escape from enslavement to the Abrahamic religions through science and technology. Enormous numbers of Westerners now openly scorn the Abrahamic faiths. Unfortunately a new type of religion has arisen in place of the old - the worship of celebrities instead of gods, or, rather, celebrities ARE gods.

The next great dialectical antithesis standing in the way of progress is celebrity culture. There's only one way to beat it - to raise the minds of the people to higher levels, to give them more psychological understanding, to give them better opportunities in life, to give them enormously more satisfying, fulfilling and full lives so that they are much more concerned about what they are doing in life rather than what celebrities are doing. Celebrities, like the gods of Olympus, vanish when they are ignored. 

Why is any new idea on the internet instantly dumbed down to the lowest common denominator - celebrity culture, narcissism, trying to be "cool and popular", pictures of parties (because if you ain't partying then there's something wrong with you), pictures of pets, pictures of the weird and wonderful? As inside, so outside. Humanity is literally spewing forth into cyberspace all of the garbage that lurks in human minds. It is vomiting out endless trivial nonsense. It is infantile and infinitely egotistical. Is that the best we have to offer?

Yet the internet itself is something truly remarkable because its infrastructure may reflect the way in which the human race will evolve.

The evolution of computer technology should, if we accept the principles of As above, so below and As inside, so outside in some way tell us about ourselves and the way we work. So, modern computing began with enormous mainframe computers used by enormous corporations. This might be called the "Vatican" model of computing. Ordinary people had no access to computers, just as ordinary Catholics in the Middle Ages had no access to the Bible. The Bible was in Latin, which ordinary people didn't speak or understand - indeed most people hadn't learned to read - and prior to the invention of the printing press there were few books in any case. Only experts - monks, priests and the Catholic hierarchy - had the opportunity to read and study the Bible. Similarly, only an elite group of software engineers understood mainframe computers, and only big corporations (the equivalent of the Church) could afford them. They were a complete mystery to ordinary people.

Then came personal computers. At first only a few had them but now, in the West, most people have one. This is the equivalent of the Protestant Reformation where the Bible was translated from Latin into the national languages of the ordinary people, and where printing presses churned out enormous numbers of Bibles so that at last ordinary people could have one. The power of the Church suffered accordingly as it could no longer control the flow of information.

Personal computers were initially "standalone" (in religious terms this was the equivalent of a believer studying the Bible on their own). Then along came the internet and it became possible to link all of the PCs in the world (in religious terms, believers could link up with all the other believers and exchange their thoughts, and clarify things they hadn't understood). In other words, the internet allowed individual minds to become nodes of some kind of Mass Mind. Religion is also a kind of Mass Mind, with all the followers of a particular religion subscribing to a collective rather than individual worldview. 

Our religions, our technology, everything we do, are external reflections of our inner selves. They are mirrors in which we see our inner natures. A book is simply an externalised mind: an organized store of knowledge. Books are the precursors of the internet: knowledge stores, externalised minds, passed around from one person to another and shared globally.

So, is it possible that with the internet we get a more accurate reflection in the mirror than we have ever had before? The mind has both structure (form) and content. So, obviously, does the internet: it has a physical infrastructure (the equivalent of the physical brain), a set of communication protocols without which it would be impossible to exchange any information (the protocols correspond to the form of the mind; the mind's protocols for shaping everything it experiences into a comprehensible, standardized, consistent whole), and it has content such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc (reflecting the content of our minds).

We can learn about our minds from rationally reflecting on our minds and also from studying the output of our minds - the things we create in the external world: the objects, institutions, technologies, the art, science, philosophies and religions. Some people might say that the internet represents our best clue yet to the true way in which our minds operate.

 The Mind Mystery

The key to God, religion, souls, the afterlife, mind is contained in the cosmic equation r >= 0. What this equation says is that although there is a single continuum of existence, it can be regarded as the interaction of two separate domains: one in space and time (r > 0) and one outside space and time (r = 0). We previously showed how light in its own frame of reference is outside space and time, yet is perceived by us as being in space and time. This dichotomy and supreme paradox is the essence of existence.

Any mind perceiving the cosmos from the perspective of space and time can't help but impose space and time on everything, including those things such as light that are not actually in space and time. Things that exist in space and time have a beginning and an end. They are mortal. They die. Humans die. The part of the human mind shaped by space and time dies. These are the facts of space and time. These are the facts of a life lived within space and time.

Yet part of the cosmos is not in space and time. It is immortal. It cannot die. It is not subject to the laws of space and time. It does not partake of those laws. Instead, it partakes of the radically different laws of an existence outside space and time. It has an entirely different perspective of the cosmos. 

What does the universe look like from outside space and time? If everything is interconnected because there is no physical distance between any two things, how does that work? If no time ever passes, how can anything ever change? Isn't everything just eternally frozen? Isn't the universe outside space and time incomprehensible?

Certainly, we cannot hope to describe it in the familiar terms of space and time since these do not apply. Still, it is useful to have some kind of image in our minds.

The r = 0 cosmos is hard-wired to the r > 0 cosmos. The r = 0 domain is not in space and time, but is indissolubly linked to something that is (the r > 0 domain). So, the r = 0 DOES experience space and time, albeit at second hand. In particular, it experiences it informationally, mentally. Consider a time-lapse film. You film traffic going over a bridge for a 24-hr period. You then speed up the film and compress the 24 hours into, say, 24 minutes. The speeded up film looks both familiar and very different. The compressed film is operating according to different rules of space and time compared with the original film. Now speed up the film to infinity. What happens? If something is travelling infinitely fast, it does not experience the passage of time. It gets anywhere in no time. Everything is instantaneous. The time-lapse film ends as soon as it begins. All of the information it contained is processed instantly.

And now we get to the heart of it. An observer in the r = 0 domain perceives the r > 0 domain as running at infinite speed. Everything that happens is instantly reflected in r = 0. No time passes and yet information accumulates infinitely rapidly, in complete contradiction of the notion that nothing can change in a timeless environment. This is the ultimate time-lapse film. If you could view the r > 0 domain from the r = 0 domain you would experience all the events of the universe flashing past you at infinite speed, and yet not a single moment would ever elapse.

You wouldn't experience "physical" time - the time of the r > 0 domain that can be measured with a clock, but you WOULD experience another type of time - psychological/mental. 

In times of extreme danger, people report that time seems to almost stop. Each second passes much more slowly. This is not physically true of course, but it is mentally, and, in the pure mental realm of r = 0, this would be the only type of time that would be experienced: mental time. By the same token, the mind would be able to cope with distance. It would have a mental ability to differentiate all of the spatial events taking place in r > 0 even though it did not itself experience physical space.

So, in the r = 0 domain, physical space and time, measured by physical rulers and clocks, are replaced by a mental experience of space and time, measured by mental rulers and clocks. The statement that something is outside space and time is something of a misnomer. The precise meaning is that it is not subject to physical space and time.

The r >= 0 universe is a cosmic two-way feedback process. The informational content of the r > 0 domain (all the events happening everywhere) are fed into the r = 0 domain, which mentally processes the information and responds to it, which is then instantly reflected in the r > 0 domain, as scientifically demonstrated by the famous EPR paradox where quantum particles that are "entangled" are able to coordinate their behaviour instantaneously.

Some people claim that a domain outside space and time must already have experienced all future events. Such things have been said about God: he knows the future because he is outside time. This is utterly absurd. The future hasn't happened yet. No one can know that which has not yet happened. They might be able to predict it, but they certainly can't "know" it. We have now presented the proper philosophical, scientific and religious framework in which this matter should be contemplated: the union of two domains, one outside space and time, and one inside. The domain that is outside space and time is continually and instantaneously updated by what's going on in the r > 0 domain, but it never has access to any events that have not yet happened in the r > 0 domain. This is a simple impossibility. No one can ever know the future and all talk of precognition, seeing the future, travelling into the future and back again etc is pure fantasy. It can never happen. We can certainly influence the future and make certain events more likely to happen, but we cannot "know" the future. God cannot know it. No one can. People can have strong intuitions about the future, but that's as far as it goes.     

Two philosophical traditions have dominated Western intellectual thought: materialism and idealism. Materialism is the position championed by modern science. In this view, mind emerges from matter, and can have no existence independently of matter. This is the exclusive r > 0 universe. According to science and materialism, two numbers are excluded from physical reality: zero and infinity. Science says that a strictly dimensionless (zero-dimension) entity is impossible since in the material universe all things are dimensional by definition. Science also says that if the equations of physics produce infinite results at certain points then physics has "broken down" at these points and something must be wrong with the underlying theory. One divided by zero equals infinity. One divided by infinity equals zero. Infinity is the "flip side" of zero. Zero and infinity are inextricably linked. If you exclude one, you exclude both. In short, the assertion of science is that the r = 0 universe does not and cannot exist. Yet no scientist queries the properties of light which, according to Einstein's sacrosanct special theory of relativity, is massless, travels in "null" space and does not experience space and time i.e. is dimensionless. No scientist has ever realized that science has already proved materialism to be untenable. Dimensionless existence is the essence of light, which is the beating heart of relativity theory.

Idealism is the view that only mind exists. What we perceive as the external world is actually a mental construct. "Material" objects are mental rather than physical. This is the r = 0 universe. In this view, zero and infinity define reality. There are no solid, dimensional objects i.e. there is no matter. The assertion of idealism is that the r > 0 universe does not exist i.e. reality consists of an infinite number of dimensionless (zero-dimensional) entities; all other numbers are mental rather than physical - the term "four dogs" would refer to four mental dogs rather than four physical, dimensional, material dogs. Many of the greatest philosophers have supported this position.

Illumination is the synthesis of materialism and idealism: r >= 0. Mind and matter co-exist. All numbers from zero to infinity are part of reality. No numbers are excluded mentally or physically. Nature has no preference for some numbers over others. It doesn't discriminate.

Materialism and idealism are both subsets of reality, based on a fallacious view that Nature, for some unexplained reason, gives some numbers a greater "reality" than others. (In materialism, zero and infinity have no "reality"; in idealism only zero and infinity have "reality".) Illumination is based on mathematical completeness. In the language of Gnosticism, this concept is known as the "pleroma": the universe of "fullness".

Both materialism and idealism are examples of what Gnosticism calls "hysterema": the universe of "deficiency".

Illumination, by incorporating all possible numbers, cannot be made any bigger. It lacks nothing. Materialism and idealism are both in the position of having to explain why they are deficient; why materialism excludes the dimensionless and why idealism excludes the dimensional. Neither ideology has ever successfully accomplished this.

Science has done an excellent job of explaining the r > 0 cosmos, but now it cannot go any further to produce a Grand Unified Theory of Everything until it confronts the two critical remaining pieces of the jigsaw: zero and infinity. While science blindly asserts that these numbers are impossible in Nature, it is doomed to failure. Nature accounts for all possibilities. It does not exclude anything. This MUST be the basis of any theory of everything. Clearly, if science has ruled out zero and infinity, it is a limited theory, hence not a theory of everything. Bizarrely, not a single scientist has ever comprehended that any theory of everything must specifically address everything. The r >= 0 paradigm does address everything; r > 0 and r = 0 do not. R >= 0 is the only paradigm devised by the human mind that imposes no limits. It is the only viable, the only possible, Grand Unified Theory. It is the summit of human thought, the limit. Nothing can exist beyond it, not even in principle. Once zero and infinity have been accommodated, the story is over. Finis. R >= 0 is the answer to "life, the universe and everything."

Imagine that you are the owner of a radio-controlled helicopter. There's a little silver pilot sitting in the cockpit. You start remotely flying the helicopter and you've never had so much fun. But then you think - this COULD be better. Specifically, it could be better if your consciousness was somehow transferred into the little pilot guy. For you, if the helicopter crashes, it's too bad. You'll need to get a new one. If your little pilot crashes, he's dead. The stakes are so much higher for him, hence the excitement is so much greater. Your hobby is transformed into a life and death struggle if you can switch your consciousness into the pilot.

So, imagine that your "soul" in the r = 0 domain is controlling a physical body, a human being, in the r > 0 domain. Well, it's quite a lot of fun having this remote-controlled "android" doing things at your behest. But the creature is disposable. You're not feeling what it's going through. Everything is taking place at a distance. You are experiencing second-level, second-hand emotions. Your mind needs to be inside that human being if your life is to become meaningful. What is a human brain? What's the point of it? If minds exist independently of matter, who needs a physical brain? The answer could not be simpler. The brain, with its countless brain cells and connections, is the means by which consciousness in the r = 0 domain gets transferred into the r > 0 domain. That's the amount of processing power a mind needs if it's to change its perceptions from that of something outside space and time to something inside space and time. It needs to be able to process, via the physical senses, all of the signals coming from its environment. It needs to understand spatial and temporal pleasure and pain. It needs to feel emotion.

The mind is never anywhere other than in the r = 0 domain, but a physical brain allows a mind to have the experience of being in space and time. Consciousness is transferred from one place to another, like the helicopter owner transferring his consciousness to the toy pilot. Our space-time consciousness is, strictly speaking, an illusion since our mind is never actually in space and time. Yet it's a very convincing one!

But the situation is rather more complicated than we are suggesting, and the architecture of the internet helps us to get the full picture. Human beings actually have "multi-minds" that work seamlessly together to give the illusion of a single consciousness.

Experiments conducted on "split brain" patients, where the corpus callosum joining the two hemisphere of the brain is severed, have demonstrated unequivocally that the left and right brains are different in capabilities, intelligence, creativity, and emotions i.e. they are "different people", different minds. Many of the peculiarities of human behaviour stem from the fact that more than one mind is involved in our decisions. Right-handed people, the vast majority of the human race, are dominated by the mind associated with their left brain. This is what they regard as their consciousness, their ego, their sense of self. The dominant left hemisphere is where our language abilities reside. Therefore if consciousness and language go together, it is inevitable that the left brain will seem to be the seat of consciousness. The constant monologue that goes through our heads all the time is the product of our language skills, hence is a left brain phenomenon. The mind in the right hemisphere is effectively silent and some researchers have called it "the unconscious". The language skills of the right brain are not non-existent, but they are distinctly primitive. They are like caveman grunts and basic commands.   So, of our two minds, one constantly speaks to us while the other grunts. Naturally, we identify with the language-based mind, so that becomes our consciousness, but it's not the "whole" of us. Again, we see that we are the victims of a kind of delusion. Is it possible that the delusion has even more layers? Do we have a ladder of minds, for example, that we might use to climb up to the level of none other than God himself?

Let's return to the computer analogy. A standalone personal computer is like our brain-based mind(s). Our left-brain consciousness is like the active application on the computer, while our right brain consciousness is like all the background tasks being performed by the computer and all of the various rules, protocols and code for running the computer. Sometimes there's a conflict and our computer suffers a blue-screen crash (like a human nervous breakdown). The computer needs to be rebooted (we might have to be helped by a psychotherapist to get our life back on track; to be "rebooted").

The computer's RAM memory is like our short-term memory. The hard drive is where our long-term memories are stored. Over time, some sectors can become corrupted and we can't access them any more (equivalent to losing some of our memories).

Now we add in the internet. How does this change the picture? The internet protocols and a modem allow us to link to an enormous number of other computers. We can download material onto our hard drive from internet servers, and we can do the opposite and upload material onto internet servers. Let's say that the internet is like the interconnected r = 0 domain.

Let's say that our right brain is the "modem" for connecting us to the r = 0 domain, and knows all of the relevant protocols. The r = 0 domain can pass messages to us via the right brain, and we can upload material to the r = 0 domain via the right brain.

Let's say that there is a specific "soul" in the r = 0 domain that is like an internet server dedicated exclusively to us. Let's say that this exclusive server/soul is tightly linked to certain others servers/souls - those of the members of our family. And let's say that it can make strong new connections with other servers/souls - our friends and lovers.  

So, our left brain consciousness is equated with our standalone computer. Our right brain is too (it works in tandem with the left brain), but it can also be equated with a link to the internet i.e. with a direct link to other computers (the equivalent of other consciousnesses). If we say that the internet, based on linked computers, is like a Mass Mind based on linked minds then we can create a new model of mind and its connections.   

Our right brain is linked to the Mass Mind via a node in the r = 0 domain: our "soul". The soul can download messages to the right-brain mind, and the right brain can upload messages to the soul, but this all happens unconsciously because our consciousness resides in the left brain which does not explicitly participate in this link.

Our soul is closely linked to the souls of the other people in our lives, particularly in the case of identical twins where their souls might be so closely linked that they practically overlap, hence the ability of identical twins to virtually read each other's mind. We can use soul "hyperlinks" to hook up with any other soul in the Mass Mind. This is the basis of "remote" psychic connections with those with whom we are not related.  

If we associate the whole of the Mass Mind with none other than God's Mind then all of us are linked to the Mind of God, meaning that part of our soul is in direct contact with the Godhead, albeit at an unconscious level.

Consider God as the original node of the Mass Mind (the first computer on the internet), that defines all the communications protocols. God is the Controller of The Matrix, in a manner of speaking, the Supreme Architect.  

 If we can climb the ladder of mind and raise our soul to this highest possible level - our Highest Self - then we have achieved our divine mission - to become God. We have entered into mental union with God. We are experiencing his thoughts and he ours. We have attained our personal Omega Point. And when all of us have attained this same level then we have become a community of Gods and the cosmos has reached its Omega Point of maximum actualization of cosmic potential.

Is it not a wondrous prospect? Is it not glorious? Is it not divine?

Yet, in truth, although we have talked about multi-minds (about a left-brain mind, a right-brain mind, about a linked r = 0 domain soul and an r = 0 Highest Self), they are all really the same mind, located in r = 0, but compartmentalized to allow us to function in two domains, r = 0 and r > 0, and to ultimately raise ourselves to our highest possible level.

When we die, our left-brain consciousness perishes - there's no avoiding that - but at the moment of death it is in a sense uploaded via the right-brain link to our soul in the r = 0 domain. And if we have not achieved gnosis/enlightenment/the achievement of our Highest Self then the process will begin again (reincarnation) and our soul (or rather one aspect of it) will be downloaded into a new brain and will assume a new consciousness in the r > 0 domain.

The characteristic descriptions of near-death experiences: entering a long tunnel and seeing a bright light at the end, and feeling the presence of the dear departed who went before you to the Great Beyond - these would be entirely compatible with the type of set-up we have outlined.

Borrowing and modifying Hindu terminology we can construct the following scheme:

Jiva: left-brain consciousness; the ego that perceives itself as existing in r > 0. The "active" consciousness of our everyday experience.

Jiva-atman: right brain consciousness. It is connected to both the r > 0 left brain consciousness and also to the r = 0 domain.

Atman: the r = 0 Soul/Higher Self/Divine Spark that can communicate with us via the jiva-atman connection. This might be referred to as our "real", immortal Self.

Param-atman: the r = 0 perfected Soul/Highest Self. This is what we aspire to. This is when we have literally "become God".

Brahman: the union of all Param-atmans - the transcendent Godhead, the union of all the Gods in a single entity that is yet greater than the collection. Nirvana for Buddhists. The Gestalt. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The cosmic Omega Point.     

But all of this is just an analogy, a pictorial framework in which to consider the issues. There is no actual "uploading" and "downloading" since the mind never leaves the r = 0 domain. It's AS IF this type of process takes places, but in fact what's really taking place is a sequence of coordinated alterations and shifts in the consciousness of an immortal mind in the r = 0 domain as it proceeds on its dialectical journey to the ultimate destination.

Try to think of your own model of what takes place. Look around the world for possible analogies. Maybe you will look to Nature and consider ant colonies, beehives and flocks of birds - "swarm" intelligences. Maybe you will look at a human political movement such as Communism, or the "market" of capitalism, or a metaphysical concept such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's General Will, or a psychological concept such as Freud's Id/Ego/Superego model of the psyche, or a religious organisation such as the Catholic Church or one of the Protestant sects. Do such things reveal truths about our minds and souls, about how they relate to and interact with each other?  

And never forget…

As above so below.

As inside, so outside.

 *****

We previously asked how many dimensions the universe has. We received several answers, including zero, one, five and infinity. All ingenious, but wrong.

Here's one highly imaginative comment we received from Finland:

Here are my calculations:

I was thinking that the universe should have a center somewhere. The zero and the infinite are not proper centres, they are just points through which the circle of existence (negative and/or positive) goes. We need to find the center between these two.

The center point between zero and infinity cannot be given any precise location using normal methods to calculate distances. The calculation would be impossible since in mathematics you cannot add or subtract anything from infinite (or the result would always be infinite).

Therefore we need one more imaginary number. Lets call it "G". G marks the imaginary center point between zero and infinity. The G-point is also an imaginary dimension, or a portal leading into one, in a same fashion as the zero is the portal between the negative and the positive universes.

The G dimension combines the qualities of the zero and the infinite. It cannot be given an exact location, so it's actually nowhere like the zero. But at the same time its location is infinite, since infinity divided by 2 is still infinity. It is also the communication link between the two, in the same fashion as the zero is the communication link between the negative and positive universes.

Also the G-point is outside of the positive and negative universes,since if you try to give the "middle number" between zero and infinity, you couldn't define it as either + or -, because zero and infinity are both without polarity.

The G-point is also outside of zero and infinity, yet also included in them, since it is the centre point, the "average" between them.

This "G" would then be the fifth dimension of the universe, uniting the four others. The four elements, earth, water, air and fire united by the fifth element, the spirit.

 Logical.

Maybe the molecules in the G dimension should be called "spirit molecules"(and light would be the communication method between them)?  

An ingenious proposal that fits in well with the ancient idea of the Quintessence., but it introduces an utterly speculative mathematical entity. In our next article, we will provide the answer, based on rigorous, existing mathematical knowledge.