Metamaterials are materials unavailable in nature, in which the microstructure is changed to create unusual properties such as bending of electromagnetic waves.
…Professor Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St Andrews, one of the project leaders, told BBC News that in future, this technology could be applied in the areas of communications, wireless energy transfer, sensors and security.
He said that the ‘magic’ illusion of disappearance stems from bending light in an unnatural way.
“In the ‘cloaking’ device, you bend light around something so that you don’t see the object, but you also don’t see that the light has been bent—it enters the device in a straight lines and it also leaves the device in the same direction it came from, as if nothing had happened to it,” he said.
The non-scientists can read more of the story at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology 14084051 - story_continues_2
[Note: For human eyes, visible light falls between 380 to 750 nanometers. Most people are around this range; some may be able to see colours slightly above or below this range. The color of visible light waves depends on their wavelengths.]
And now, back to the FUTURE.
The concept that that which may have advanced beyond what had once been considered natural had to go through the process referred to as evolution will be long gone. Knowledge will be accepted to be omnipresent, rather like light in its infinite diversity of wavelengths. All we shall need to do to obtain it will be to enter our unconscious for the new, or subconscious for the past, and extract new wisdom or knowledge from within our psyche. And psyche, let us not forget, has long been recognized as the goddess of soul, as well to being synonymous with soul or spirit. It is not to be confused with the subconscious (nephesh), which in the Bible is often, erroneously, translated as soul.
Please note that I am describing ideas that will be explored by the few; not by the masses, which within a few decades will have regressed to quite primitive mental level.
After various religions will have shrunk to tiny conclaves holding on to past superstitions, some people, though childlike, will be learning, again, to stand on their own feet. They might takes as long as a few centuries for them to gain psychic freedom, which can be regarded as a period of apostasies.
“You cannot pour new wine into old skins…” people will remember, vaguely, as though through a fog of yesteryear. Yet the real teachings of the past will remain imbedded deeply in their psyche. Real teaching—time discarded as false by the misinterpretation of natural selection. Perhaps Darwin was right, after all, only his followers didn’t understand him. Perhaps natural selection was intended to refer to human mind, not his or her body. Actually, Darwin didn’t make it clear enough.
I wish I could believe it…
But Darwin’s theory of natural selection may not be the only theory that may have been misinterpreted.
While, as I have already pointed out, the Bible has been written in a highly symbolic idiom, making it virtually incomprehensible to fundamentalists—scientific and religious alike. Even when deciphered, though it then reads like guidelines for the living, the reader was not intended to regard himself as a product of biological evolution but as a spiritual being using the biological construct as a means to experience the process of becoming.
The biologists and their scientifically minded confreres who did not study symbolism, nor did they venture into the mystical nature of man, will, as far as the Bible is concerned, remain in the dark.
To cheer up the late developers who say that since the vast majority of people take the Bible literally, they cannot all be wrong, let me suggest an equal number does not understand quantum mechanics, yet not one of the stubborn scientific fundamentalists claims that therefore the quantum theory must be wrong. Furthermore, a number of biblical stories have been known long before biblical times, yet, in spite of the extended Kindergarten, they continue to be taken literally. It seems that indeed, many are called but few are chosen. The vast majority of people chose the easy way out, a way not requiring any effort or study, or hours of contemplation; they choose to remain ignorant.
Such people should not be that surprised when we consider that among the countless millions, now billions, of people, there are indeed very few to match Mozart, or Beethoven, or Verdi, or Shakespeare, or Yeshûa, or Buddha, or any of the giants of human species, exceptional or chosen people, who left those millions and billions behind. The ultimate consolation is that our true self is immortal, time a figment of our imagination, and ultimately we are all latent, dormant, if slightly retarded Buddhas.
Our time will come.
It seems that truth lies within us.
This inherent ability of the human species to access virtually infinite knowledge that remains dormant in each one of us comes as a surprise to all, particularly to the scientists. They could never accept anything they couldn’t measure. In most cases this ability still enjoys deep slumber—mostly in the minds of the recalcitrant fundamentalists.
I suspect that by the middle of the 3rd or 4th decade of the present century, most priests will be out of a job. With the incredible rise in the powers of computers, so will be most scientists. The tiny minority that will have resisted devolution will continue to recognize the infinite potential that lies within them. Those few will adopt ‘stopping’ as a daily mode of behaviour. This will become a catchphrase for meditation, contemplation, relaxation, but most of all for recharging one’s inner batteries to increase the functionality of their brains. The select few will do so without the need of noisy loudspeakers, which in the past disturbed the peace from the tops of minarets, or church towers with their resonant bells, competing for the attention of the faithful. In the future, the reverse will be true. People will seek fulfillment within. Mostly, self-imposed silence.
For all who will practice moments of ‘stopping’, such moments will bring fruit beyond their wildest expectations.
That will be their secret. Silence. Total silence.
Not talking but listening. Stopping will mean more than just keeping quiet. One will have to still one’s mind, one’s thoughts, not just one’s body. Silence will become a euphemism for worship, which word, for those people, will carry unpleasant connotation. Man will no longer bend his knee to anyone, to any image, any icon or idol. The chosen few will discover the power within. The rejuvenating and restoring as well as inspiring value of alpha waves, even for a short while, has been known for years.
On emerging from ‘stopping’, a new participator in the daily ritual will stand silent, surreptitious smile playing about his or her lips; they will seem surprised, unbelieving, yet accepting the evidence of their own inner senses. They will stand transfixed, open mouthed, galactic splendor still whirling in their eyes.
“Just then,” they will say, “the universe and I became one. Can you believe it?”
They will.
Chapter 19
The Beginning of the End ?
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
Aldous Leonard Huxley, British author (1894—1963)
Many, many years into the future, after the best computers will prove unable to define infinity, some people will decide that while past and future are amusing subjects or hypotheses for entertainment, they will, henceforth, conduct their becoming in the Now. While they’ll still use the concept of time in order not to allow all things happening at once, they’ll also find that only now is what matters, and a succession of nows is as good a definition for infinity as anything they, or their computers, could think of. The succession of nows also took care of their need for becoming.
This, of course, will also take care of the Beginning and the End.
Not all agreed. The scientists (yes, they still fulfilled a function of c
ategorizing discoveries made by people at large), and some (very few) priests, who will still desperately try to place the infinite outside the psyche of man, will remain on guard on the ramparts of fundamentalism. They will be treated with compassion, as one would children who, although showing promise, have not yet reached their maturity.
Yet, as always, the discovery of the ‘now’ will pertain only to individuals. To those few, who will consider themselves to be indivisible part of the Whole; of the omnipresent consciousness. The masses will continue to search for infinity outside their own being. On the fringes of the universe? Perhaps. I suspect they’d still call it god.
Just one problem will remain. If we were immortal, than how could we assure our means of fairly continuous becoming? Of the continuum of now?
In a purely physical sense, we hover on the thin line between living and dying all the time. Our bodies are continuously reconstructed, continuously rebuilt from elements that somehow become available for that purpose. We have biological evolution to thank for that. It seems that our physical renewal takes place partially from old cells breaking down, partly, possibly, from the food we eat. In the biological sense, this ongoing process we refer to as ‘life’. What remains in question is our individuality. As we withdraw our consciousness from our physical bodies our consciousness appears to retain its characteristics, which define its uniqueness. Of one thing we can be sure. At any particular moment in our becoming, in any instant of now, we are the sum-total of everything we ever were; everything we had ever been. Physically, mentally and emotionally we carry our whole baggage in our genes. At mental level, it is all stored in our subconscious.
This may or may not be good news—depending on the baggage we carry. This concept, however, leads us to the unavoidable conclusion of recurrent reincarnation. Otherwise Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart couldn’t possibly compose anything at the age of five. There are ample other examples which defy genetic explanation.
Paul Charles Morphy (1837—1884) who at just twelve years of age, defeated visiting Hungarian chess master Johann Löwenthal in a match of three games.
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss, was the son of poor working-class parents. Indeed, his mother was illiterate and never recorded the date of his birth. Nevertheless, Gauss was a child prodigy. There are many anecdotes pertaining to his precocity while a toddler, and he made his first ground-breaking mathematical discoveries while still a teenager.
Srīnivāsa Aiyangār Rāmānujan, (better known as Srinivasa Iyengar Ramanujan), was an autodidact (self-taught) Indian mathematician who, with almost no formal training in pure mathematics, made extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series and continued fractions. During his short life, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3900 results. The natural selection managed to kill him by the time he reached 32.
John von Neumann (1903—1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath, who made major contribution in many fields. Hans Bethe, the Nobel laureate in physics once said, “I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man”. By the age of six, young John could exchange jokes in Classical Greek, memorize telephone directories on sight, and display prodigious abilities in mental calculations. As a 6-year-old, he astonished onlookers by dividing two 8-digit numbers in his head, and producing answers to a decimal point. By the time he was 8, he had attained mastery in calculus. The list goes on. Can natural selection explain that?
Baptized Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, became known to us as Pablo Picasso. We also know him as Spanish expatriate, painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramicist and stage designer. Born in 25 October 1881, by 1893 the juvenile quality of his earliest work falls away, and at the age of 14, he painted Portrait of Aunt Pepa, a vigorous and dramatic portrait that Juan-Eduardo Cirlot has called “without a doubt one of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting.” In spite of his dismally poor beginnings, neither environment nor natural selection had managed to kill him for 91 years. At the time of his death he owned some 50,000 works.
Saul Aaron Kripke, born on November 13, 1940, is an American philosopher and logician. He taught himself Ancient Hebrew by the age of six, read the complete works of Shakespeare by nine, and mastered the works of Descartes and complex mathematical problems before graduating elementary school. He wrote his first completeness theorem in modal logic at the age of 17, and had it published a year later.
The Internet adds to this list Ludwig van Beethoven, and a roster of more than 120 names of people who all reached maturity in their chosen fields before the age of 15, most a lot earlier. I am sure there are many more. It is amazing how many of them natural selection has mistaken for duds, and managed to kill off at a surprising early age.
Reincarnation, which would allow for knowledge to be passed on through other than just genetic means, seems like a very pragmatic explanation. By any scholastic standards known to man (or at least to me), none of the child prodigies listed above had sufficient time to acquire knowledge or expertise in their fields by the time they did. And this is not only a question of mental capacity; there is also the dexterity of Yehudi Menuhin’s fingers who, at the age of 11, used them to perform the Beethoven’s violin concerto. He previously played with the San Francisco Symphony orchestra at the age of 7. By the way, when Albert Einstein heard him a few years later, he is reported to have said, “Now I know there is a God!”
The reverse may be true, however. It may be that even the most talented child prodigies lose their uniqueness in later years. The natural selector or equalizer wins after all. Whatever the natural selection is capable of conveying, by whatever proxies or “phenotypic traits” they employ to “flesh out the anatomy, physiology, biochemistry or behaviour” (Dawkins’s phrase), they obviously cannot pass on talent. Talent, let alone genius, seems in direct opposition to the natural selection powered by Darwinian replicators. Unless it happens by unwanted mutation, and if so, then it is quickly judged to be detrimental to the human species, and is quickly eradicated.
Surely, with such an abundance of inordinate talent, there would be at least some convincing evidence of genetic predisposition to quality on the side of parents or children of the wunderkind. Alas, there is none. Neither is there evidence that either the parents of the children exceeded the prodigy. It is becoming evident that natural selection concerns itself with physical survival only, even if it means reversal of progress (‘devolution’) to more primitive forms. Not a pleasant prospect, yet one that is becoming more and more visible in the behaviour pattern of the Homo sapiens.
There is an alternative.
The interesting aspect of the theory of reincarnation is that when we leave our physical bodies (people call this dying), our individualized consciousness retains all the characteristics it developed in its sojourn on earth (perhaps longer). A fringe benefit, and this is the nice part, that, providing our loved-ones, the so called dearly-departed, have not as yet constructed and entered another physical sheath (have not yet reincarnated), we have a good chance of not only meeting them, but actually recognizing them on the “other side” (in their disembodied condition). The wives can meet their husbands, the children their parents, and, of course, vice versa.
This could, on occasion, prove a very embarrassing situation. But… Karma, it seems, does not stop here.
Of course, we need our physical bodies to be able to experience becoming. They provide us with the ability to experience contrasting emotions, consequences of positive and/or errant imagination, intellectual appreciation, as well as equip us with the five senses that we all take for granted. We tend to forget that it took us millions of years to evolve these attributes. Until we learn the architecture of our nature, we shall remain in the reactive stage of evolution, as are all animals, plants and even lower forms of ‘life’.
What we do in the fragment of eternity
between our reincarnations I leave to the mystics. The Buddhists seem to retire to Bardo. Perhaps they allow others there, too.
Unfortunately, once we return for another stint on earth, (or, perhaps, in anaerobic forms on other planets), the problem of recognition becomes very acute. To stop ourselves from going mad, we temporarily erase from memory our previous embodiments.
If any atheist can find a more pragmatic reality than that proposed above, then please, keep it to yourself. You probably deserve it. Anyone interested in pursuing this subject further can find my essay entitled Immortality in my Beyond Religion collections. I hope they’ll enjoy it.
Galaxies apart, drifting, ever moving, billions, trillions of stars, clouds of stars still hesitant—in the process of formation, light, light pervading all, caressing, commanding, prodding, arranging, consciousness searching…
A universe of atoms, countless zillions of atoms, each atom a star, electrons whirling around them, ever new ones in a state of formation, constant formation, spinning, finding new relationships, new ways to serve, each on its prescribed journey, in its position in the universal order…
Clouds, countless clouds as yet invisible, but felt, timorous fragments of primeval energy, drifting, ever ready to take up their function, to take their righteous place in the universe, constantly in the state of formation, growing, expanding, renewing, ever alive…
Yes, the universes in a state of flux, drifting towards each other, then setting themselves apart, in constant communion, in a dance of joy, ever changing…
I am the consciousness of the universe.
World without beginning, without end…
I am a living god.
I AM THAT I AM.
Neither beginning nor end. Being and Becoming are one. Eternal.
DELUSIONS — Pragmatic Realism Page 15