Metaphoriuminomicon — revision 39280

==Introduction== A Book of Days is a book which lists a different version of the same activity for each day. This creates both variety and sameness of practice in your life which brings you a deeper connection and stronger practice to your religious experience. This Book of Days draws upon the SolSeed symbolic year and the SolSeed practice of daily meditation to give a practitioner a deeper understanding of the SolSeed religion. Feel free to use it book for whatever period you find useful, pick a day here and there to follow or follow it for multiple years. This is a wiki so feel free to add new options to existing days and to make additions to existing meditations. Each day will include a quote from a text that SolSeed members have found meaningful and then a discussion of that quote. Following this there will be a suggestion for a meditative practice. The calendar will start just after the Winter Solstice which is the beginning of the SolSeed symbolic year. == December 23rd == === Quote of the Day === --Nothing ... Nothing ... <gasp> ... Something -From the opening words of the SolSeed Service === Thoughts for the Day === Our symbolic year begins on the first day after the winter Solstice. This day symbolizes the beginning of time as do the first words of our service. So let us begin the year by considering one of the Big Questions of metaphysics. What came before the Big Bang? What caused the Big Bang? How did time start? The first words of our service are somewhat misleading. It is believed by some leading physicists that the Big Bang was the beginning of time. If this is true, then before that moment, there was no time. While there are other possible hypotheses, let us accept this one for a moment as a chance to expand our minds by meditating on a strange geometry. Just as the phrase, 1 Kelvin less than absolute zero, has no meaning because you cannot have less heat than no heat, and just as the phrase, one lumen less than absolute darkness, has no meaning because you cannot have less light than no light, the phrase, one second before the Big Bang, may have no meaning because you cannot have time before the beginning of time. A mathematically more accurate metaphor is that just as you cannot go one meter South of the South Pole because the direction South ends at the South Pole, it is meaningless to talk about the time one second into the past from the Big Bang because the 'direction' past ends at the Big Bang. So the big question of the temporal origin of the universe may be answered in the most unexpected way. What came before the Big Bang? The answer is that the question is meaningless. Our words seem to indicate that there was nothing before the Big Bang but in actual fact there was no 'before the Big Bang'. Time itself is part of the geometry of the universe. There was no moment of creation or coming into being of the universe. Time is a direction within the universe and the universe is finite in that direction. Nothing exists beyond the first moment of time. === Meditation for the Day === If you can, perform this meditation outdoors. Otherwise, choose a room where you can stand and walk a couple of paces in different directions. Every point on the surface of a sphere is the same and to the degree that the Earth is a sphere this is true for the Earth also. Only when you take the daily rotation of the Earth into account does the South Pole in any way become special. Unless you carefully watch the sky for several hours you won't notice the rotation of the Earth. If you want to do a very long version of this meditation by all means you may want to actually travel to the South Pole to do it. Otherwise simply pretend you are at the South Pole. Pick an exact spot on the ground which is to be the South Pole. Stand facing it about one pace away from it. Imagine the snow swirling about you. The southern Aurora is dancing in a dark sky filled with stars above your head. The South Pole is directly in front of you so obviously you are facing south. Now take a step forward and stand on the spot you chose to be the South Pole. Now you are standing on the South Pole. You are at the furthest point South on the whole Earth. You are facing north. Staying on the South Pole, spin slowly around. As you turn you continue to face north. Every direction is north from here. Is that true? Look down at your feet. That direction is still down. It is not south or north. Just as with any place on Earth, if you look down toward the centre of the Earth you are looking down not East or West or North or South. Look up. Imagine the bright stars and swirling aurora above you. That is still up. It is not South or North or East or West. Now imagine that this place is not the South Pole but instead the Big Bang and that the surface of the Earth is actually time. Instead of cold, snow, stars and aurora, you are surrounded by some kind of plasma which is almost infinitely dense and hot. This is the beginning of time. Slowly turn around keeping your eyes on the horizon. You are looking into the future no matter what direction you face. Take a step away from the Big Bang and then turn back to face it. Imagine that the step you took represented a thousand years. You are now standing in a very young universe, only one millennium old. Although it is much less dense and hot here it is still much hotter and denser than you could survive if this were real rather than meditation. You are facing the past. You can time travel. Take a step back in time to return to the moment of the Big Bang. You have just travelled back in time to the beginning of time. Take another step. You have gone past the beginning of time and are travelling forward into the future again. Turn and walk right through the Big Bang. You began by travelling back in time but as you crossed the Big Bang, without turning you changed direction and began going forward in time again. No matter how many 'times' you walk back and forth through the Big Bang you always end up in its future. The direction past ends at the Big Bang. Quietly meditate on this idea for a while. Open your mind to unintuitive geometries. == December 24th == === Quote of the Day === "... one second per second is one second divided by one second, and one second divided by one second is the number one. But the number one is not a rate, so it is certainly not the rate at which anything (the flow of time included) happens." -Bradford Skow, “One Second Per Second,” ''Philosophy and Phenomenological Research'' (2012). " ... Space-Time ... " -Opening Words of the SolSeed Service === Thoughts for the Day === Yesterday, we meditated on the unintuitive geometry of direction on a sphere and how this might apply to the 'beginning' of our universe. We pretended to move back and forth around the place where the direction, past, ends. We used this thought-experiment to think about how time started, one of the Big Questions of metaphysics. Today we will consider another such Big Question. 'What is time and what makes it flow?' Let us begin by thinking about how we could actually achieve the movements, in reality, that we pretended yesterday. If we could move in such a fashion, back and forth through time, how would we measure the rate of our movement? As Bradford Skow points out in the quote of the day, one second per second is not a rate. Of course, relativity talks a great deal about time dilation. In relativity an event is 'place' in space-time so you might say that "yesterday noon local time at Cape Canaveral" was Event A or "tomorrow 9AM local time in Death Valley California" is event B. A path through space-time is defined both by the places it visits along the way and the times it gets to each place. In time dilation, two alternate paths can lead from event A to event B and yet take different amounts of time to get there. We would say that the time between events A and B is 48 hours but that is only because we spend a great deal of time traveling through very flat space-time. If we went by more adventurous paths the time between those two events might be 4 hours or 800 hours or any other amount of time. This means that, in relativity, one might say that along one path time passes at 2 seconds per second of time that passes on another path. In order for us to actually travel back and forth around the beginning of the universe, we would need to use some very adventurous paths indeed, something akin to worm holes in space-time or warp drives would be needed. But what about the normal 'traveling' through time that we do every day. We start our day in the morning and by evening its ... well its evening. We seem to flow through time from morning to evening every day and then from evening to morning every night. What is powering this flow? Does everything in the universe have some kind of temporal inertia that keeps it gliding evenly forward through time at one second per second? Bradford Skow's answer is that the flow of time is an illusion. In fact, many physicists believe that objects do not flow through time but are present at all times between their creation and their destruction and that they form a kind of 4 dimensional worm that stretches from their creation event to their destruction event. This agrees with all our imaginings of time travel. If all objects were gliding forward through time at a constant rate, and if you managed to send a DeLorean back in time from 1985 to 1955 then you would find an empty universe. Everything would have already moved through 1955 and on past 1985. You would find an inky black cold universe. If it is possible to go back in time and find Doc Brown recovering from a fall in his bathroom, then Doc Brown, his bathroom and the Earth all must still be in that event in space-time 'when' another 'temporal part' of Doc Brown is oiling his new DeLorean at an event in space-time we would call 30 years later. Relativity does predict that time-travel is theoretically possible. All you have to do is warp space-time is some very exotic ways in order to form a worm hole through to another part of space-time that is in your past. Warping space-time is easy enough; every mass warps space-time; you warp space-time every time you walk over to the fridge to get a glass of milk. But warping it in the exotic ways necessary to create a worm hole is beyond us. It's not just that we don't have powerful enough machines to do it; we don't even know what a machine capable of doing it would look like. Still every prediction that relativity has made that we have been able to test has been right to many decimal places, so we might assume that it's predictions about time travel are also correct. Relativity also predicts that the objects that were there at any time in the past (even 1955) would still be there if you travelled through a worm hole to the past so the objects must actually be present at all times between their creation and their destruction just like the 4 dimensional worm image we discussed in the previous paragraph. === Meditation for the Day === If you can, perform this meditation in a corridor where you can stand and walk several paces in a straight line. You can also do this outdoors, if you have no place indoors that you can do it. Our minds are poor when it comes to imagining four-dimensional objects. The best we can usually do is to ignore one dimension and picture the 'extra' dimension in the place of the one we are ignoring, a sort of mental dimensional swap. So you might imagine a two-dimensional slice of an object moving through time, replacing the third dimension with time. Alternatively you can superimpose a new dimension onto an existing one. So you might imagine that up is also the future and down is also the past and picture yourself as a ghostly blur where the future of your foot is blurred over the present of your head and the past of your head is blurred over the present of your foot. Start at one end of your corridor facing the other and take a single slow smooth step forward. Now look behind you. You don't see yourself! But if the four-dimensional worm theory of objects in time is true then another temporal part of yourself is still there but a second or so in the past. If we are performing our mental dimensional superposition such that down is also the past then that other temporal part of yourself is under the floor somewhere. But your step forward was not a matter of you disappearing from one place and appearing at another place a second or so later. You moved forward smoothly occupying all the places between your starting point and where you are standing now as the second passed. So all the 'places' in space-time between the temporal part of you now who is looking back and the temporal part of you who began to step forward would also be occupied by temporal parts of yourself. It was a smooth movement so, at least at the macroscopic scale, all these parts would be connected together in a diagonal that emerges from the 'floor' and smoothly rises up to connect to the temporal part of you who is looking backward. Of course all the spatial parts of the floor would also have temporal parts sloping downward behind you but, in the hope of being gentle on our minds, which have enough trouble with 3 dimensions, let's not try to imagine that. All these temporal parts of yourself each have all of your physical parts; your arms and legs, brain and heart, eyes and ears. Each physical part flows smoothly through all of your temporal parts. Your right eye in one temporal part is always connected to your right eye in the next temporal part. Your right eye never suddenly becomes your left kidney. Your heart in one temporal part of you connects directly to your heart in the next temporal part of you despite the fact that both temporal parts of your heart are completely surrounded by different temporal parts of your torso. These two hearts are connected without having to exit your chest at any 'time in-between'. This is hard to picture because it happens in four dimensions and we are only good at picturing 3 dimensions. The best you can do is to kind of blur your image of yourself so that you become a kind of ghostly cloud of a person stretched forward and diagonally upward. By transposing the two dimensions so that we can see both your head and your feet and your future and your past, we also create the ghostly blurring of yourself. The alternative would be to picture a thin slice of yourself, perhaps a thin horizontal slice of your belly moving through time but that wouldn't be very pleasant. Now look forward again. Imagine that in the near future you will be continuing your journey along the corridor. The temporal parts of yourself who will be making that journey will be 'already' there but climbing into the ceiling of the future forming a diagonal that stretches perhaps several stories upward into the future before you reach the far end of the corridor. All these temporal parts of you are connected together into a single stretched out segment of four-dimensional human-worm. It isn't too taxing to imagine this short section of your life as a sloping stretched out human being. But how can you imagine your whole life, as you wander around the world back and forth to work and on trips to visit your relatives, as you eat food and breath out carbon dioxide and as atoms join your body and leave it, as you have children and their bodies leave yours and start their own journeys and as you emerge from your parents and they from your grandparents. It all gets messy and complicated. Simplify the picture so that your mind can hold it. Focus on your own body shrinking as you mentally 'follow' it back through time into your childhood. Picture your body as the blurred together chain of temporal parts tapering as you go back through your childhood to your infancy. Forget about the crazy twists and turns that your body makes as each day you go back and forth to school or daycare. Simplify and focus on the change in your body's size, tapering down from many feet tall to perhaps just a single foot, still human shaped but narrower than the temporal section of you that we call your adulthood. As we move back through the moment of your birth, you reach the narrow section of you where you were called a fetus. Now akin to how we described your heart, each temporal part of you is directly connected to the next while at the same time entirely surrounded by separate temporal parts of your mother's womb. There is no separation between you the infant and you the fetus. You are a single connected four-dimensional worm. Follow the four-dimensional blur of the temporal part of yourself that is you as a fetus backward in time as it tapers down to a single cell and merges with your mother's ovary. You are still there, a single cell line within your mother's four-dimensional space-time body. Again there is no separation between you the zygote and you the cell in your mother's ovary. From your adult self all the way back to that cell is a single four-dimensional object. You are literally a branch of your mother; the same object as your mother in four dimensions. You seem like two objects now because you only see the temporal parts of your mother and you that intersect with the time we call now. But if you both stretch back through time as four-dimensional worms to the point where you were part of her body then you are just connected parts of the same object in space-time. Follow your mother back as she shrinks down into infancy and becomes a single cell line in your grandmother. That cell line isn't just your mother. It is also you. If you have siblings it is also them. That cell doesn't somehow become all these separate people. It is them. They are all a single connected four-dimensional object that stretches through space-time. Each child emerges from its parent like a branch emerging from a trunk. Somewhere back in each child's past, it is still connected to the four-dimensional blur that is its parent. Now imagine this line stretching back through dozens of ancestors and several millenia. Hundreds of branches come off this temporal worm and most of those branches themselves becoming more and more worms until they account at the present day 'end' for our whole human population. This isn't a family tree. It is a single four-dimensional object. Humanity is not just a group of related people. It is a single four-dimensional object. We are not just all brothers and sisters and cousins as we are taught by geneticists. We are all one object when viewed through the eyes of a temporal physicist. Now imagine the stretching of this branching line further into the past to the common ancestor with all the other mammals. We are not just related to the other mammals. Mammalia is a single four-dimensional object. And on further into the past to the common ancestor with all other animals. We are not just related to all other animals. Animalia is a single four-dimensional object. And on further into the past to the common ancestor with bacteria. All life is not just related. All life on Earth is a single four-dimensional object of which we are each but a segment or branch. Quietly meditate on this idea for a while. Open your mind to being one object with the body of all life. == December 25th == === Quotes of the Day === "... About 98% of the atoms in the human body are renewed each year ..." -''Time'' Magazine, "Science: The Fleeting Flesh," 1954-10-11. "... Continents flow back into the sea, gases flow through the atomosphere, and molecules flow through my body. Balanced, invisible flows might underlie anything I take for granted. The 'balance of nature' is profoundly more true than I once realised." -Paul Krafel, ''Seeing Nature: Deliberate encounters with the visible world,'' Chelsea Green Publishing Company, White River Junction, Vermont, 1999 "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." -Heraclitus "The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together." -Carl Sagan, in the television series ''Cosmos'' " ... Matter-Energy ... " -Opening Words of the SolSeed Service === Thoughts for the Day === Yesterday, we meditated on the idea that in space-time we are four-dimensional objects that not only stretch from our birth to our death but are connected together as branchs of a single massive four-dimensional tree with all other living things existing now, in the past and in the future. This came from an attempt to understand how time flows but ended up answering 'What do we look like in four-dimensions?" But how does that jive with the scientific fact that most of our atoms are replaced every year. Lets think about this in order to seek an answer to the fundamental Metaphysical Question, "What are we; are we just lumps of flesh, lumps of matter, are we our bodies?" Firstly, it is important to understand that while 98% of our atoms are replaced each year, some of the other 2% remain with us for our entire existences. Consider that we are about 70% water; water flows in and out of your cells easily. The water in your body is replaced every few days. But the shape of your body remains the same. If you lose more water than you gain, you become thirsty and that drives you to replace the loss. On the other hand, drink to much water to suddenly and you will be visiting the washroom. Yet the water you urinate out isn't the same water you just drank. If you pour water into a full bathtub at the end far away from the overflow drain, water will pour down the overflow drain but the water coming in won't be the water going out. You will know this if you pour cold water into a hot bath for long enough; soon it will become cold. The same is true for most of the atoms that your body replaces. Everyday you eat food that contains fuel molecules like sugar and fat and everyday you burn fuel molecules like sugar and fat in order to power your body. The molecules you take in arn't always the same as the ones you burn; your supplies of these molecules turn over. The cells in your liver and fatty tissues that store these molecules are continuously pulling out molecules for use and storing new molecules received. Eat as many calories as you burn and the stores stay the same size but the molecules flow through. Your fuel stores are replaces less quickly than your water, perhaps every few weeks. Your body is continuously fighting the decay of its structure. The calcium structures in your bones, your muscle fibers, the membranes around your cells and around the parts of your cells (your organelles), the complex organic molecules that make your ligements and tendons and cartilage pads strong and supple. All of these molecules and structures are continously breaking down and being rebuilt. The gospel (good news) here is that when you are injured your body can usually repair itself because it has lots of capacity to repair and regrow anyway. These structures are replaced less often than your fuel stores, perhaps every few months. But other structures are conserved for very long periods. The DNA in your cells is not replaced. Your cells often make copies of themselves because cells must often must be replaced in their entirety. If you shave, you will remove large numbers of skin cells along with the hair you are trying to remove. These cells must be replaced and your body is ready to do so. In fact, it is continuously replacing skin cells that get rubbed of by chaffing clothing or rough surfaces. When those cells are lost the DNA inside them is also lost. When your cells make copies of themselves they also copy their DNA from new molecular building blocks (nucleic acids) built from the food you eat. But the old DNA is still there (half in each of the daughter cells after each cell division). Some of your cell types (for instance neurons in your brain) are replaced so slowly that the majority of cells of those types stay with you your entire life. The DNA at their centres stays with you too. The rest of the molecular building blocks (the water, the sugars, the fats, the phospholipids, the proteins) that make up each of those cells is replaced over and over again but the core DNA and a few other molecular structures stay with you. So if the rest is replaced, are we just the DNA at the centres of our lasting cells? If all of this is true, then was yesterday's meditation false. We are not enduring objects connected as one through space-time but ephemeral things washed away everytime we drink a glass of water? === Meditation for the Day === If you can, perform this meditation sitting by a stream or river. Heraclitus was right; the water in a stream is never the same water. But the water in a stream has a shape to it. Watch how it flows over or around a particular stone or against a particular bank. The shape remains the same long after all the water has been replaced many times. And the shape of a fast flowing river is not the just the shape of the rocks around which it passes. Standing waves form which echo the form of the underlying rocks but exagerate some of their shapes and smooth out others. In this Heraclitus was wrong, the river is the same river even though the water is replaced continously. Even rivers that nearly dry up seasonally remain the same rivers as they ebb and flood. Their ebbing and flooding is part of the pattern that is the river's existence separate from the water and rocks that make it up. We too are like this. Water flows through us. But we actively maintain our forms while a river is more passive in its pattern-maintenance. A river shapes its chanel and its channel shapes it. We are the shapers, when it comes to our bodies. Our bodies are continously rebuilding themselves in order to return to the same shape. We change over time, we grow and age but these changes are part of our bodies' plans. The reason that others can recognise you in your high-school yearbook photos is that you have retained most of your shape even as you have replace most of your matter. You are not your atoms or molecules or cells or chunks of tissue. Neither do you need a magical or metaphysical explanation for your continuity in the face of your material replacement. You are the shape or pattern formed from the atoms, molecules and cells that make up your body. You are the pattern of synapses between the neurons in your brain. The complexity of your pattern is what makes it special. It is a pattern that is capable at so many levels of maintaining itself and even replicating itself. We change over time and when we replicate ourselves we create variations on our theme (our children). Over longer periods we evolve into new species. All of this change leads to ever greater complexity and diversity. Our bodies are made up of four major consituent elements, Carbon (C), Hydrongen (H), Oxygen (O) and Nitrogen (N). Organic chemists sometimes refer to this mixture as CHON. In itself, it isn't very complex or divers; it is just four elements. It is not the atoms that make us up that are important. Three tanks of gas (HON) and a lump of coal (C) are not very impressive and yet that is almost all there is to our bodies at the atomic level. It isn't the impurities of calcium, sodium and other elements, that makes us special. It is the pattern into which our bodies are formed that is important. We are not lumps of matter or supernatural souls; we are patterns imprinted on matter. We are special complex patterns that strive to maintain themselves and to create new diversity. We, the body of all life, are a single four-dimensional branching worm, but we are not made out of atoms, we are a pattern imprinted in atoms that gets ever more complicated and diverse at its future end. Quietly meditate on this idea for a while. Open your mind to being a segment of the pattern of the body of all life. == December 26th == === Quote of the Day === "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct." -Niels Bohr === Thoughts for the Day === Yesterday we meditated on the idea that we are not made of atoms but instead that we are patterns imprinted on atoms. Today, let us consider the Big metaphysical question, "What is matter?" We need not start with debates between Democritus and Aristotle as to the existence of atoms. We now know that almost all matter is made of atoms and that all atoms are made of sub-atomic particles such as electrons, protons and neutrons and that all sub-atomic particles are made of quarks. Perhaps it is possible to break quarks down into yet more basic particles. But string theory models the most basic particles as just folded space-time. This is why string theory requires eleven dimensions; that makes space-time complicated enough for folds in it to account for matter. String theory isn't necessarily the best model for explaining matter. The jury will always be out on that question. But with more work, someone might prove that it is an exceptionally good model, like relativity, quantum mechanics or evolution by natural selection. If that happens then we will be able to say that space-time and matter-energy have been unified into a single concept. Unification is important in science. Relativity unified space and time into one concept and that is why we talk about space-time. Einstein's equation, E = mc^2 unified matter and energy into a single concept that we now call matter-energy. A basic understanding that sound and light travel at very different speeds allowed us to unify the once separate concepts of thunder and lightning, although, it never became fashionable to talk about thunder-lightening. The unification of space-time and matter-energy would result in a single concept we might call space-time-matter-energy but that is an awful mouthful. Instead we could call it spimanergy. But if all matter and energy is actually just complex folds in space-time then as it moves around it must fold and unfold space-time the way a single ripple bends and straightens the surface of a still pond. Just as water doesn't cross the pond with the ripple, no spimanergy is actually traveling when an electron crosses the vacuum tube in an oscilloscope. The pattern of folding that the electron represents moves but the spimanergy just wobbles a bit. The electron is like a magic bit of origami where all the folds are concentrated in one part of the paper but the folds themselves perform expert origami and create a copy of themselves in the next segment of paper and smooth themselves out as they do so and so the origami moves about the paper while the paper remains pretty much still. === Meditation for the Day === If you can, perform this meditation sitting near a stone or rock. So if matter-energy is really just a pattern of folds in space-time, does anything really exist? The answer is yes. If you yell, "I refute it thus!" and kick a stone, the folded spimanergy that makes up your toe will not just pass through the folded spimanergy that makes up the stone. Don't actually do this, because, your foot will come to a painful stop. This is rather unlike ripples on a still pond which can pass right through each other. But it is a bit more like large waves which as they pass through each other create superimposed crests which then break losing much of the waves' energy. Eleven-dimensional spimanergy can be folded in complicated enough ways to represent a toe breaking when its owner kicks a stone. So, even though they are just folded space-time, matter and energy still exist. Just as life is a pattern imprinted on atoms, those atoms are a pattern imprinted on space-time. The universe is like a gigantic eleven-dimensional sheet of origami paper and we are all complex patterns of folds in that same sheet of paper. The entire universe is a single object and the Body of All Life on Earth is a pattern of complex folds in that object. All the other bodies of all life on other worlds out there in the gigantic origami universe are folds in the same space-time sheet of paper. Quietly meditate on this idea for a while. Open your mind to being a part of one eleven-dimensional biosphere-pattern folded into the same sheet of space-time origami-paper as the patterns of every other object alive or inanimate in the universe.