Praise for Bottoming Out the Universe
“Good Lord! You’ve really done it this time! Richard Grossinger’s great gift is his ability to explicitly state what many of us merely feel. This is a magnificent talent, and also a rare blessing for humanity.. I stand in awe of Bottoming Out the Universe. it is a rare accomplishment, and never more needed than in our perilous times.”
~ Larry Dossey, MD, Author: One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matter
“In this profound but accessible book, Richard asks timeless questions like, ‘Who am I?’ ‘What is reality?’ and ‘What is consciousness?’ In an era of distraction and despair, he returns our attention to what deeply matters and explores, with clarity and nuance, the hidden meaning of life.” Connie Zweig, Ph.D., coeditor of Meeting the Shadow and coauthor of Romancing the Shadow
“Richard Grossinger is uniquely qualified to set our feet upon a righteous path, not around the problem as so many do but straight into its convoluted tangle. Is consciousness an illusion or a fundamental property of nature? Addressing this question has occupied many minds, and Richard’s foray here will engage yours to take you deeper into your own sense of being. If you are a scientist, here you must confront the limitations of science to explain your life. For the spiritualists, Richard’s erudition will rub your nose in the hard realities of the physical universe. Puzzle and wonder as you scratch beneath the surface with Richard as your able guide.” Thomas W. Myers, author of Anatomy Trains
“Richard Grossinger is one of the most articulate spokesmen of our time. He has the unique ability to move adeptly from one field to another, not superficially but deepening our understanding of how these fields interweave. I was especially drawn in by his thoughtful chapter on trauma . . . truly an engaging addition to the field. In his study of energy patterns, complexity, psychic phenomena, and consciousness, Grossinger takes us on an engaging journey. It may not be an easy read, but it is a rich one.” Peter A Levine, Ph.D., author of Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma, and In an Unspoken Voice
“Bottoming Out the Universe is an amazing literary task. And it will help people who are never going to quiet their minds and see the nature of things to understand it as best as possible conceptually. What Richard does is about as far as one can go with concept, in my opinion.” Paul Pitchford, dharma teacher and author of Healing with Whole Foods
“In Bottoming Out the Universe, Richard Grossinger puts the proverbial capstone on a life’s work of intense inquiry and naked observation. In the underbelly of creation, he’s like a Neolithic shaman reading the bloody and twisted entrails of this so-called reality. What emerge are numinous gifts cloaked in a magical language. Indeed, this magnum opus is like an epic incantation and not just a recital of data points, random ephemera, and formulaic synthesis. The universe bottoms out, and there is no point of return, only a chthonic journey through memory, fear, doubt, and a hard-earned hope that what awaits on the other side is not just an astral projection of this world without its governors and filters but something that’s far beyond even Grossinger’s considerable skills of syntactic mediumship to transmit it. Dig in, put your feet up, and enjoy the ride.” Robert Phoenix, curator of Astrology for the Now Age
“Bottoming Out the Universe encompasses so many aspects of what it means to make a work, a dance, to explore silence and movement, and how these frequencies vibrate and become a dance. When I enter a room to begin a new work, I enter with ALL the questions implied in this book—they hang in the air! And as I choreograph in collaboration, the ‘physical plane of ambient reality’ of which Richard speaks is always there. Reading this book is like making a work of art. You start one place and end up another.” Margaret Jenkins, founder and artistic director of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company
“Reading Grossinger turns cosmology and science into poetry. He provides the track lighting for a quirky map into the secret corridors of creation that we never bothered or dared to explore. The graffiti of the ages is scratched on its walls.” Paul Weiss, author of Moonlight Leaning Against an Old Rail Fence: Approaching the Dharma as Poetry
“We offer you greetings, Richard Grossinger. We are contacting you because we have observed your efforts over the decades in your capacity as explorer of the arcane. We note that you have spent decades attempting to understand the connection between the spiritual and the physical. Your encyclopedic efforts are exemplary in their thoroughness as well as their breadth and depth. We also note that often you have felt somewhat like a prophet crying in the wilderness; there has been so little demonstrative response to your writings. Be assured it is noticed. In future years, after your death, edited versions of your prolific work will find an eager and stimulated readership. None of these types of publications will ever be bestsellers. But they do have the potential to change lives. Your work will eventually rank among this category of literature. We wish you well as you complete the last period of your life, as you sum up what you have learned and seek to organize it into suitable situations for its ongoing availability. In saying this, please do not think we are suggesting your end is nigh. We are not implying that, and it is not the case.” Channeled by Keith Hill, author of Experimental Spirituality, in Auckland, New Zealand
Bottoming Out the Universe: Topics and Questions for Interviews and Discussion Groups
What’s the relationship between an objective physical universe and our subjective experience of it? That’s the big one: we and it, self and other, consciousness and matter.
Could the universe be a computer simulation? (A lively online debate topic these days.)
Let’s contrast the physical and biological evolution of consciousness with consciousness as a self-authenticating energy with a distinct and different essence—the fundamental ground of everything that exists.
Why is there something rather than nothing? Is the surprise that there is something rather than nothing or that there is nothing rather than something?
Can we frame the universe as fundamentally conscious without getting stuck in panpsychism?
Is the Big Bang an implosion, explosion, or both? This is a kōan for which each answer yields its opposite.
How might we construct a pre-Big Bang cosmology, ] psychospiritually and/orphysically?
What is the difference between consciousness (network symbolings) and personal identity (“self” as known to self)?
Is artificial consciousness actually conscious and will someday be developed to think and act like humans or is it merely an algorithm dependent for its intelligence on the consciousness that constructs and programs it?
Are the brain and a computer comparable or different mechanisms? To what degree are computers modeled on brains? What aspects of brains, if any, can’t be designed into computers?
Could the vegetal structure of the brain have evolved to tune into a numinous frequency of consciousness instead of as the structure and process manufacturing mind from the ground up?
To what degree have neuroscientists credibly explained consciousness?
Is Penrose-Hameroff quantum superposition—mindedness from quantum effects and microtubules—a satisfactory material derivation of consciousness?
We could consider the various realities of paranormal phenomena like poltergeists, telekinesis, remote viewing—even synchronicity—against skeptics’ dismissal from the same “evidence.”
What are conscious and unconscious motives of debunkers?
Past-life memories can be considered [options]: (1) proof of linear rebirth, (2) aspects of transpersonal consciousness fields, (3) indications of multicentric identity, and either (4) fraud or (5) delusions.
Eight-year-old Muskogee boy Ryan Hammons asks: “Why would
God let you get to be sixty-one and then make you come back as a baby?”
Good question, Ryan. If you can remember big chunks of another dude’s life, if you are born with these inside you, what’s happening and what kind of a deal is life?
Why, if these memories purport to be records of actual lived lives, are they so fragmentary and incomplete?
Is reincarnation the only logical explanation for wounds in past persons recurring as birthmarks and scars in present individuals who have some memories from the people who lived those lives and suffered those wounds? The evidence for the reality of this phenomenon is striking, so how might it function both psychically and genetically?
Can planes of consciousness like the Etheric, Astral, and Causal be synthesized with scientific and indigenous models of reality to make a greater model of reality?
Let’s discuss Terrence Deacon’s theory of constraints (absences) that organize matter and contrast his model of a teleodynamic universe to standard Darwinian memes and/or Rupert Sheldrake’s model of morphic (morphodynamic) resonance.
Compare Buddhist theories of consciousness, dependent origination, and karma to scientific and Western theosophical views and to Sethian multipersonhood.
Most scientists view the universe as real but meaningless whereas many spiritual systems consider it, to some degree, unreal but meaningful. How might meaningfulness or soul expression be generated by ego existence?
How to explain evil and cruelty without dualism? What is their relation to the universe’s profundity, and to its mechanisms of transformation and redemption?
Are walk-ins a possible description of a psychic phenomenon and, if so, what do they say about the singular or composite nature of souls or how they fuse with ego states?
How do thoughtforms and matter interact? Is reality a collective thoughtform. How can individuals change a thoughtform that is generated collectively?
Could the universe be viewed as a vast family constellation or evolving shared reality.
The algorithm has become a cult, the God of No God, and its theft by capitalism has led to a corporate takeover of reality.
I pose scientific materialism as a prime inadvertent source of Trumpian ideology. This flips conventional left- and right-wing positions and opens a different debate about our current polarized ideologies.
Death as a beginning or an end.
Is cybernetic Life Extension a delusion of a technologically inflated culture?
How might we understand superconscious entities like Seth and Michael in terms of parallel universes and probabilities..
If there are E.T.’s, how do they travel between solar systems, since no present or imaginable propulsion could accomplish interstellar travel in anything close to a human lifetime?
The astrophysical universe, however vast, is spiritually claustrophobic. Does the true vastness of the universe lie “in” rather than “out”? Where is “in”?
We could discuss ostensible channelings from the Challenger crew.
What are possibilities for the ontological status of crop circles?
Why do major cosmological questions have multiple contradicting answers? Are we searching for the right question to ask of the universe rather than the right answer?
How big is the real “big picture”?
Author Selected Quotes from Bottoming Out the Universe
Two things stand against reductionist materialism: First, the universe—even according to physics—doesn’t bottom out as matter but turns into something else. Electron microscopes and cyclotrons discover no statutory source.
Instead of bottoming, quarks and preons dissipate into energy, curvature, strings, quantum fields, whatever scientists choose to call it. Where physicists once thought to find bottom, there is none. Neither is there bottomlessness, just dissolution of form or transition to another mode of form.
Post-Newtonian physics with its shape-shifting quarks is the physics of a mirage. Materialists know this, but they don’t believe it.
Second, consciousness that witnesses itself as consciousness does not fit any unified field theory of physics. I’m not saying that physicists don’t get out the shoehorn and make it fit. I am saying they do.
Hard to believe that Homo sapiens crossed ice and seas and battled firestorms and saber-toothed predators for hundreds of thousands of years to arrive at this sorry conclusion.
The barrage of sound and fury, once signifying divine theater, signifies zilch. Shakespeare saw a tale told by an idiot. Now the idiot is gone too. Information is erasure, absence of other information. And meaning is dragged along like bubblegum on an unfortunate sneaker.
Awareness is the least significant phase of mentation, for philosophers as well as raccoons. Blind transfers of information supersede sentience on Earth and, presumably, beneath the Europan ice if zooids dwell there. Non-conscious systemic sets run any hawk or shark—network symbolings, optics, neural lattices, syntactic strings, parse trees: all autopilot functions.
Throw in everything else incipiently pre- and post-synaptic and semantic or that has been elided from consciousness, plus the metaconscious, quasi-linguistic structure of DNA and you have an entire underground bestiary with internal alphabets and alphabetic structures. Its hubs discharge a hummingbird’s flapping wings and a rat’s sniff of carrion. The “mind” that keeps them alive is not even subconscious in a Freudian sense; it is immune to representation. Yet its messaging generates beehives, birdsongs, and octopus mood coloring.
The effects of consciousness are not consciousness itself any more than the effects of the sun or moon are the sun or moon. The sun and moon have contiguous causes and accounted for identities. Consciousness has no identity beyond its effects. What materialist pundits can’t explain is how common electrical and chemical properties resulted in “inside-outness” and luminous apprehension of the universe.
Science hasn’t the slightest idea what consciousness is. What it does, yes. What it is, not even “close but no cigar.” It can’t locate “thought” in the organic rummage of a brain—electrical and chemical activity but not thought. There is no imaginable experiment—cellular, molecular, atomic, or even subatomic—for pulling the rag out of the machine. If a biochemist did ignite an autonomous zooid, he would be like Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, unaware of how he set the brooms marching.
Imagine yourself a biotechnician stirring a chemical solution into a primitive life form. How does “is” get centrifuged out of “non-is”? What foments an interior glow? What spawns epistemology?
Though neuron-deprived by comparison with us, dogs and mice—as well as jellyfish, barnacles, worms, and the like—are no less evolved or clever. Even oaks and foxgloves have a phenomenology. What they don’t know—propositions and schemes precious to us—is irrelevant to them.
Every plant and animal not only knows what it is but also what the universe is—not as descriptor but essence. A bacterial formation on Callisto is as reality-astute as a biologist on a temperate world of the same system. Each reads Creation through its operating node. An earthworm “is”— as “is” as it gets, squiggling through nutrient-rich mud. It is doing philosophy of the most fundamental sort, for it is funneling information and identity into the universe. It may not be aware that it has a body and that its body is what is aware, but that is between us and the worm, not between the worm and its gods.
‘I want you to keep going back and back and back in your mind. And, surprising as it may seem, strange as it may seem, you will find that there are other scenes in your memory. There are other scenes from faraway lands and distant places in your memory.”*
He sounded like Rod Serling opening an episode of the Twilight Zone
except this time was for real. Bernstein held his breath, waited. He was by no means a confirmed believer in past lifetimes, more like a combination prankster and rabble-rouser. He wanted to see what would happen if he led a subject past the last known citadel to where nothing should exist. Part of him was curious; another part enjoyed the audacity of his stunt. Plus, he kidded himself that he was operating by the same logic as the car mechanic down the street.
But he had a light, even sacred touch. Dismissed in hypnosis circles as a lowbrow dabbler and showman—his method for putting subjects into a trance was a kitsch watch on a chain—Bernstein hit the sweet spot with Ms. Tighe. Part chaperone, part psychopomp, he coaxed her past her taboos and resistance and enticed an unknown entity from her psyche. Listen to his cadence and chant, a crafty hacker charming his way through an ancient firewall, trying to lure a nonexistent dragon out of its nonexistent lair. You could object that he was leading his subject, because he was. But he was speaking to her subconscious mind, and that’s why it worked.
“I will talk to you again. I will talk to you again in a little while. I will talk to you again in a little while. Meanwhile your mind will be going back, back, and back until it picks up a scene, until, oddly enough, you find yourself in some other scene, in some other place, in some other time, and when I talk to you again you will tell me about it. You will be able to talk to me about it and answer my questions. And now just rest and relax while these scenes come into your mind.”
Ms. Tighe did go, past the last protected outpost, into the void before her own existence. Morey Bernstein guided her to where nothing should be, to see if she still had an existence, an identity before she experienced herself as Virginia Tighe.
*My copy of this book was a gift from Henry Hough, my father-in-law, to my daughter upon her birth. Hank was a Denver journalist and a friend of Morey Bernstein, who inscribed it, “To Miranda Grossinger, from Morey, Many Happy Lifetimes.”
Look at it a different way: if James Leininger isn’t the proximal legatee of James Huston’s soul, what is the relationship between the two? And where is James Huston Jr. now if he is not James Leininger? Does he continue to exist independently? Does the fact that young Leininger possesses strands of Huston’s death picture and other memories preclude Huston’s existence elsewhere (because he has been transformed)? Or can aspects of spirit be separated as they are transferred between auras? Can memories and identities exist in multiple hosts simultaneously?
Children are similarly attached to their PP’s cultures and lifestyle. In some instances, a child may be upset by the diminishment of his or her social status. Jasbir Singh, a boy “reborn” into a lower caste in India, insisted on having his food prepared for him by a Brahmin neighbor for a year and a half before reluctantly submitting to his family’s cuisine. Suzanne complained that her “real” house was larger and more beautiful.
Ryan Hammons “sometimes seemed confused about what was then and what was now, and what were reasonable expectations now as opposed to then. He thought he should pay his mom for cleaning his room because before he had a maid who came in every day to clean his house. He expected to see his buddies when he went to Hollywood, and said he might stay with them for a while and come home after his parents.”
His mother noted, “There were nights when he was very funny and I enjoyed hearing his stories. Then on other nights he just seemed to be mad at the world. Why couldn’t I just fly him to Hollywood and let him eat at his favorite place? Sometimes our house would be too small in his opinion and he would rant about how he couldn’t believe he was being expected to live in these conditions. His old room had been large and grand and he had his own swimming pool. Why couldn’t we have servants? Do you know how much easier life is with hired help?”
If the Seven Planes (and the Ray of Creation and its octaves) are renditions of something genuine in the universe, they have to mesh with other natural phenomena, joining mass, gravity, electromagnetism, dark energy, dark matter, and so on somewhere in a unified field. Dimensional “rabbit holes” would bring each plane, subplane, or octave into relationship with not only the others but also known energies of physics.
Yet I suspect that even if science significantly broadened its parameters, it would never come upon these sorts of vibrational tiers. Because they are generated outside our operating range, they only enter it as other things. Insofar as those “other things” are even recognized, they are assigned material causes, forfeiting any transdimensional provenance. Bertrand Russell may have intuited such when he said, “Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.”
Demonstrating how a system works on our own Physical plane—for
example, how the sun is lit by the nuclear transmutation of hydrogen and helium—doesn’t say what it is. Though electron microscopes and hadron colliders were conceived by sophisticated tactioceptors, we still perceive a star the way a flatworm does: as a “thing.” We inherit the primal orientation of its statocysts.
The dynamics of the Seven Planes are finally as inaccessible to us as the Milky Way is to a flatworm. Even were such a creature to develop a telescope—and it could do so only in a thought experiment—it wouldn’t “see.” Likewise, we can’t see behind the curtain, whether you call the hidden universe Seven Planes, octaves, superstrings, or something else.
Aristotle provided four discrete modes of causation—material, efficient, formal, and final, each at the scale of the universe itself. That was the provenance of Western thought until the earnest watchmakers—the lineage of physicists—arrived. The Greeks couldn’t take apart the watch— the atom or molecule—because they didn’t have a lens sufficient to the pry; instead, they intuited how its parts worked collectively.
Yet even Stephen Hawking, with all his can openers, couldn’t account for the full range of Aristotelian causation. Unable to assign an initial state to the universe, he proposed that its present configuration selects its past from a superposition of possible histories. His trademark black holes, bosons, and time travel, though mathematically impeccable, turn into paradoxes against a greater night. That his tropes seem hip-hop or sci-fi compared with Aristotle’s more cardinal notes doesn’t mean that Hawking transcended Greek philosophy or beat the master at the West’s oldest game; he merely switched the home court because modernity gave him three hundred years of equations and topological displays. He kicked the can—the real one—down the road.
The accessible DNA grid is like a thin layer of taffeta atop a dense glob of information spun by billions of years of evolution wherein each line of primal organisms got wrapped intermittently (and unevenly) in branching sequences of successors many times over, a fractal ball of yarn with helical threads. The pearls (information) on those threads were expeditiously abbreviated, synopsized, and recoded. Pathways of storage, interaction, and expression retangled at such deep levels that they developed their own attractors, dynamic phase states, and recursive motifs during later embryogenic playback, and some of these got locked in by organismic successes. This is where mutations under incremental feedback encounter constraints imposed by prior systems. Effects may get organized randomly, but that organization becomes an anchor and compass for the next generation. The developing embryo doesn’t have to know where its ballast comes from; it was already there, so it points the way.
A constraint functions teleodynamically as its own outgrowth. Like transit in a Klein bottle—a one-sided surface across which a traveler is flipped upside-down in returning to her point of origin—inside and outside fuse as a continuous interdependent flow. A form never has to disclose itself or its etiology, for its identity emerges from within without a without. An entity persists by continually undermining its own integrity, which allows it to maintain far-from-equilibrium states. It does not just insist, “neg-entropically,” on its own existence; its potential nonexistence becomes existence by maintaining disequilibrium, advancing by fluctuations of constraints, delaying its own obliteration. All the action is inside the shell—the cell membrane—because there is no “shell,” only a temporal matrix. Recursion becomes excursion.
Ultimately, you can squeeze an organism through the eye of a needle, teleodynamically.
The autogene—the hypothetical first cell—encompassed a shift of positive and negative feedback loops. As active values of efficient cause brought about random changes, passive ones integrated them, leading to membrane-enclosed organelles. That’s how Deacon’s version of nature managed to go from inanimate chemistry to unicellular membranes to a broad multicellular taxonomy.
Teleodynamics organizes (disorganizes) an informational helix and then a speaking hominid. Yes, morphic resonance is an elegant application of congruence (or sacred geometry) as a depth effect, but all those genetic molecules, organelles, and cells are simultaneously interacting, coordinating, and layering in membranes and designs inside their own three-billion-year dense ball of chaos and information. Selfhood is both potential and innate. Constraints drive information outward from micro and macro-molecular levels into novel forms, even as archetypes impose signatures. The paradigms clash and combine as the universe proceeds, paying no more than lip service to either.
To be teleodynamic is to be teleological without teleology.
The distinction between existence as a mirage and existence as a self-arising radiance marks the divide between Eastern and Western ontologies.
For creatures in the game, meaning all creatures, “being”—temporal
selfhood—is indispensable because they have nothing to put in its place, no way to exchange where or what they are. Since the choice to be wasn’t a choice, it cannot be repealed. If you try to annul it by suicide, you alter its frequency but not its basis. Karma assures continuity. We go only (and inextricably) from reality to reality. Consider then how marooned we are. This may not be real, but reality is real.
Even narco lords trying to spread fear by the most horrific tortures they can imagine can’t go deeper than the universe itself goes and can’t cast a darker shadow. Their very consciousness turns back on them as they try to drive it into their victims, for they are as vulnerable to their own existence. They are answering “what if?”
What is profoundly terrifying is also terrifyingly profound.
“Duality is not a problem,” John explained. “In fact, it’s more than not a problem. It’s the whole point. It’s who we are. The soul survives, and the personality survives. You are your soul, not added on to you but as a center of awareness. We don’t own our soul, nor does our soul own us. The broader your perspective, the more you see that this is how the universe operates and why we’re presently in this dual phase and also why we don’t see it.”
The fact that we can’t presently see beyond a dualistic mode is the
way in which we are seeing it as well as the reason we exist in it. It’s how we go on the roller coaster while forgetting that it was just a ride. John also likened the experience to a “mud run”:
There are people who will actually pay money to get up very early in the morning, like five a.m., in forty degrees, and run through an obstacle course filled with wet mud and slush. And they enjoy it, or most of them do. In some of the mud runs, wires will shock you if you don’t get low enough. So you really have to get down in the mud. And people do this on purpose.
But you don’t have to slosh through mud. You can go to a thing called a motel room and take a hot shower and watch television on which you might even see other suckers running through mud and going under wires and ropes and stuff like that. Or you can sit in an RV and listen to Bach. But then you wouldn’t have the experience of a mud run. You’d be missing something. You’d have a different experience. . . .
In a sense, this life is a mud run, a mud run for the soul that it chose willingly. Your multidimensional self says, “I think I’m going to explore time and space. And I’m going to set these rules for myself. I can’t fly and things have to happen, one after another. Won’t that be interesting?”
Nonduality is sort of like doing everything in the mud run except running through the mud. In other words, you’re missing something quite profound. When you’re done with the mud run, it becomes part of the richness of your life. The mud run may be over, but it’s part of a story you tell twenty years from now.
What I’m saying is, “Welcome to Planet Earth. It is a mud run. You signed up for it. You may not have understood that you were signing up for it, but that’s part of what makes it real.”
Here’s a slightly different perspective. When I was in the eighth grade, we had our first summer football practice. It was 102 degrees.
Now if that were my entire life—I was born at 2 o’clock that afternoon and I died at 5 o’clock that afternoon—then football practice would make no sense at all.
Yet football is no more arbitrary than wind or igneous rocks. It arises as “real” within conditional reality. None of these are arbitrary rides, and the amusement park is not merely virtual or for diversion and entertainment alone. While being amused (or terrified), we are exploring the inside of creation and our own beingness simultaneously. Where they come together is an imprimatur that drives everything. The reason we feel texture, cadence, and profundity is that there are depth, elation, joy, and sorrow at the heart of Creation. But if we were to go at their gravitas by the lucid singularity of unity consciousness, it would fragment into lesser states and lose its sumptuousness.
John put this succinctly in an email to me:
“The innumerable constituent parts that we ordinary human beings lump together, such as bodies and auric energies, themselves continue, within and outside time, to grow, to expand subjectively, in all directions together and separately, ‘forever’ (language fails, as time itself is only a form of consciousness). In a universe where no single consciousness arises by its self, it is nevertheless true that every subjectivity, from subatomic particles to universes and thus to the human personality, expands in all directions and thus retains an eternal, though ever changing and interdependent subjectivity that is divinely meaningful. (Again, language fails, because our concepts of eternality rely on time, which is itself, an energy construct, a particular form of consciousness that is just one of many others which are incomprehensible to embodied humans.) In this multidimensional world that ecstatically breaks outside human experience, our human experience of duality is something to be treasured, even though it involves suffering that can be avoided. It is humans’ gift to other dimensions of ourselves, a gift that they and we human personalities can luxuriate in and continue transforming forever.”
Described by Cannon as short, blonde, buxom, blue-eyed, and charismatic, Katie expressed curiosity about past lives at a 1983 party without tipping her hand. Like James Leininger (and Ryan), she grew up in an orthodox Christian family Pentecostal in her case—and reincarnation was a taboo topic. Cannon took steps to disguise her subject’s identity: her name is not Kathryn (or Katie) Harris.
In Cannon’s initial regressions, she noticed her subject’s receptivity to past lives. The young woman slipped into trance with all five senses, as she adopted the “I” of former beings and crossed gender lines effortlessly. When experiencing her first “other lifetime,” she described a white house “sitting up there all lonesome” in a landscape of hills and valleys, a place she later identified as Colorado Territory before statehood. The girl (named Sharon) could smell her mother’s bread baking in the oven.
Only after trust was established did Katie confide her Hiroshima flashback. Using Sharon’s dating of her death as sometime in the late 1870s, Cannon subtracted the Colorado timeline from her subject’s birthdate of 1960, clearing a gap of about eighty years. The women agreed: let’s go for it!
Not wanting to plunge Katie into the traumatic events of World War II, let alone Hiroshima on the day of the attack, Cannon picked 1935 as a safe starting point, instructing her subject to go back to then.
Katie landed, as hoped, in Japan, becoming Suragami Nogorigatu, “a man
in his late fifties making pottery at a kiln in back of his house. He was at a small farm located about 20 miles south of Hiroshima in Nippon (the Japanese word for Japan).”
Magic and prayers may be slow going and subliminal, but they are ultimately cosmos changing. Minerals and life forms coalesced on Earth from the same geochemical deposits at different epochs. A seemingly random distribution of molecules and their compounds, many of them located underground, became modifiable into everything Homo sapiens needed, from weapons and clothing to huts, vehicles, and eventually microscopes and computer networks. That speaks to either an uncanny ability to turn lemons into lemonade or an intrinsic relationship between mind and matter.
Just about anything can be made if it is imagined long enough. Some things take hundreds of thousands of years, and in the case of hominids, the physics and chemistry to support the creation of an object have to be developed first. What is being made magically is unknown until it manifests, which may be epochs later. Cars zooming through modernity were once shamanic sigils. They are also the outcome of empirical thought applied to stone. Over long periods of time these converge.
Unless given an opportunity for absolution, the energy field of the abuser murderer, enforcer, rapist, or sadist—proceeds in a septic cloud until it bursts or forms a meteor (metaphorical or metallic) in some cosmos, to pick up its pieces and kindle again with galactic dust. Universes come into being for such reasons, though they are imperceptible to the worlds they generate.
“You do not understand the dimensions into which your own thoughts drop,” Seth tells his assembled listeners, “for they continue their own existences, and others look up to them and view them like stars. I am telling you that your own dreams and thoughts and mental actions appear to the inhabitants of other systems like the stars and planets within your own; and those inhabitants do not perceive what lies within and behind the stars in their own heavens.”
Physics and neuroscience are the wrong tools for locating the source of either consciousness or matter. An externalized universe is a hollow chassis, an accelerating carousel of objects and effects, toys and gimmicks that turn heavens and seas into elective scenery: it is a simulation that comes to its own cul-de-sac, leaving “nothing” to preside over a charade of infinite distraction. Liberal scientists may deplore a Trumpian idiocracy that has run roughshod over their rationalism and dreams of progress, but they unwittingly helped create it by casting the shadow from which it sprang. Having eaten the forbidden apple and opened Pandora’s jar, they have released a meaning they are incapable of comprehending and left us in the middle of nowhere with no rationale beyond hedonistic consumption, technocratic fascination, and material titillation.
What scientistic liberals miss is the subtext with which they have saddled themselves. Rationalism and empiricism mask a marriage of science and capitalism for the crony takeover of reality. The algorithm has been blackmailed into converting everything into commodities and cash flow, hiding the theft in its own quantitative depth. I say “everything” because even parsecs of space and zettagrams of meteor dust are used to inflate the algorithm and make its hegemony inviolable. When twenty-six individuals hold more wealth than the poorer half of humanity—almost four billion people—and displaced carbon imposes an accelerating greenhouse, the algorithm is no longer a neutral bystander. Its ledgers are protected by mercenary armies and bought politicians using industrial ordnance, programmed assassinations, redaction of whistleblowers and reporters, and incitement of populist envy and rage.
Yes, artificial intelligence will replace us if we cede it our lien. Twentieth-century occultist P. D. Ouspensky foresaw as much when he warned that for every new power a machine grants us, a human power is taken away. The rise of artificial intelligence has made human intelligence more and more artificial and human reality less and less real.
We are giving up the freedom and capacity to create our own thoughtforms, transferring it to robots, which are of course created by thoughtforms too, but strictured ones that take no prisoners and give no exemptions nor know the meaning of grace, nor could.
Worshipping the algorithm in lieu of God or Spirit has diminished mystery, texture, honor, and creativity and introduced a synthetic era, the Anthropocene, with Homo sapiens its defining geological and meteorological force.
It isn’t that far from “a light goes on, a light goes off, but it wasn’t
even a light” to “they’re not real people, so who gives a shit!” Lanza didn’t think that, but it was in the air he breathed, the electrons he sucked off the internet. Regarding his self as a toss of cosmic dice, he had no basis for personal morality. He assumed that the oil slick known to him as “Adam Lanza”—its misery as well as responsibility for his crime—would be eradicated for good. What would happen to him was what he told himself would happen: Nothing happens. Nothing happens forever.
But the notion that personhood can be discontinued is little more than a throw of dice when neither physicists nor priests know what consciousness is—what turns on its light, what happens after its synapses are disconnected.
What if, with the light off, each person sinks to the propensity of what he or she is? Perhaps death snaps the narrative but not the vortex from which it is arising. What if willful interference with a karmic pattern breaks critical links, leaving one in some sort of purgatory?
In choosing suicide, mass murderers Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Adam Lanza, Seung-Hui Cho, Stephen Paddock, and others of their ilk meant to raze their social identities and everything that could be identified as them or traced to them, but not themselves. My guess is, they did not believe in their own nonexistence, and they could not “conceive of not being”; they could “conceive of the absence of experience but not of absence itself.”
To talk about moving folks among worlds far apart, much more needs to be understood about the nature of the touring entities, the worlds themselves, and the universe’s modes of transport and transfer. Going to an Earth-like planet in the Crab Nebula 6,500 light years away, or even Kepler-452b in Cygnus, 1,400 light years from here, confronts not only the topology of space-time and range of quantum fields but the stability of selfhood, the nature of mortality, and the distinction between inner and outer space. We may have to meld advanced propulsion with our psychic and moral development. To solve the physics may be inseparable from where we want to go and what we want to do when we arrive there.
To advance from quantum fields to intergalactic space flight requires an ontological transformation at the level of basic identity. Perhaps one reaches the Pleiadian system most cost-effectively by being reborn there. The whispers of the dead may be what get us from the Hardy Boys’ crooked arrow to the clue in the hydrogen atom to the inverted complexity of the Big Bang.
“No matter what decision you make and no matter how horrible a decision you make, at that moment the universe immediately reconstructs itself to optimize your chance of developing spiritual freedom or spiritual meaningfulness. The ground of manifestation is biased in your favor. I’m not saying it makes it easier because you may have made enough bad decisions that it’s really pretty hard, but given the context you have created, the universe always changes every aspect of itself to optimize your ability to make meaning in that moment.” John Friedlander
The reason the universe doesn’t read like a thoughtform is that so many entities, living and dead, are projecting it through the physics of its own manifestation. It’s impossible to see behind such a screen or ruffle its mirage. The conundrum is how consciousness in the form of individual personal identities, each known subjectively only to itself, gets inserted into a collective thoughtform such that the awareness of reality becomes identical to the physics of that reality.
That doesn’t mean that the entire Creation is a mirage or chimera—though of course it is—it means that there are only chimeras, and they are all real. They are individuations and give rise to subjective experience, which is what reality is—and nothing is more real.
The way to understand how Seth and a few others created the earth is to presume that they generated the thoughtform behind its planetary manifestation. They didn’t raise a clay firmament in the middle of waters or divide the waters or gather an atmosphere. They set a frequency and dimensionality; the rest followed by natural and karmic law. If you read Genesis 1–31 closely, that is what God did too, not clay and nuclear fusion (light) but mudcakes and Atmic fields.
This is serious business for the lion as well as the goat because everything has to pass through its gate. In one universe, you’re a “dead man walking” (or dead woman or being or beast). In the other, you were there at the beginning and you exist in some form forever.
Look again at “origin by Big Bang.” Did a wee pinball pop out of a breach in nowhere and start ricocheting and agglomerating in gravity, as it fissioned into a measureless cosmos? Was the pinball packed with blueprints for alphabets, oceans, clouds, hogs, and evening gowns, or are they reverberations of a lucky bounce?
If intelligence was antecedent to the Big Bang—the only competing option in a space-time continuum—then the implosion was a shift of reflection in something already present, a fata morgana of dimensional tilt. There was no sequence of universes or multiverses nor quietudes between them—no intermission for cosmogenesis. Sacred sigils flowed through timeless catacombs as dark energy, dark matter—dark knowledge.
What is happening is what it looks like is happening. Starry night is not only a mirage but also a perfect mirage: a phantasmagoria by its ephemeral nature, a spell because of its prolongation, an altar because of its capacity for transference, and an inertial field so powerful that it drives more proximal fields and galaxies by its zodiac.
The universe knows that. Of course, it doesn’t; it simply is, which is a more profoundly bottoming-out state.
The thoughtform visible through the Hubble telescope as myriad galaxies is being generated and transmuted this very moment by sentient beings, ourselves included; it is a residue of the creation and destruction of trillions of tulpas emanating from All That Is at the frequency and collective intelligence of spirits everywhere.
If the universe were real, it would be exactly the same as it is, so it is real and looks exactly like this, but in a totally other way.