From the Dalai Lama
Dear friends around the world:
The events of this day cause every thinking person to stop their daily lives, whatever is going on in them, and to ponder deeply the larger questions of life. We search again for not only the meaning of life, but the purpose of our individual and collective experience as we have created it--and we look earnestly for ways in which we might recreate ourselves as a human species, so that we will never treat each other this way again.
The hour has come for us to demonstrate at the highest level our most extraordinary thought about Who We Really Are. There are two possible responses to what has occurred today. The first comes from love, the second from fear.
If we come from fear we may panic and do things--as individuals and as nations--that could only cause further damage. If we come from love we will find refuge and strength, even as we provide it to others.
This is the moment of your ministry. This is the time of teaching. What you teach at this time, through your every word and action right now, will remain as indelible lessons in the hearts and minds of those whose lives you touch, both now, and for years to come.
We will set the course for tomorrow, today. At this hour. In this moment. Let us seek not to pinpoint blame, but to pinpoint cause. Unless we take this time to look at the cause of our experience, we will never remove ourselves from the experiences it creates. Instead, we will forever live in fear of retribution from those within the human family who feel aggrieved, and, likewise, seek retribution from them.
To us [Buddhist thinkers] the reasons are clear. We have not learned the most basic human lessons. We have not remembered the most basic human truths. We have not understood the most basic spiritual wisdom. In short, we have not been listening to God, and because we have not, we watch ourselves do ungodly things.
The message we hear from all sources of truth is clear: We are all one. That is a message the human race has largely ignored. Forgetting this truth is the only cause of hatred and war, and the way to remember is simple: Love, [in] this and every moment.
If we could love even those who have attacked us, and seek to understand why they have done so, what then would be our response? Yet if we meet negativity with negativity, rage with rage, attack with attack, what then will be the outcome?
These are the questions that are placed before the human race today. They are questions that we have failed to answer for thousands of years. Failure to answer them now could eliminate the need to answer them at all.
If we want the beauty of the world that we have co-created to be experienced by our children and our children's children, we will have to become spiritual activists right here, right now, and cause that to happen. We must choose to be a cause in the matter.
So, talk with God today. Ask God for help, for counsel and advice, for insight and for strength and for inner peace and for deep wisdom. Ask God on this day to show us how to show up in the world in a way that will cause the world itself to change. And join all those people around the world who are praying right now, adding your Light to the Light that dispels all fear.
That is the challenge that is placed before every thinking person today. Today the human soul asks the question: What can I do to preserve the beauty and the wonder of our world and to eliminate the anger and hatred--and the disparity that inevitably causes it--in that part of the world which I touch?
Please seek to answer that question today, with all the magnificence that is You. What can you do TODAY...[at] this very moment? A central teaching in most spiritual traditions is: What you wish to experience, provide for another.
Look to see, now, what it is you wish to experience--in your own life, and in the world. Then see if there is another for whom you may be the source of that. If you wish to experience peace, provide peace for another. If you wish to know that you are safe, cause [others] to know that they are safe. If you wish to better understand seemingly incomprehensible things, help another to better understand.
If you wish to heal your own sadness or anger, seek to heal the sadness or anger of another. Those others are waiting for you now. They are looking to you for guidance, for help, for courage, for strength, for understanding, and for assurance at this hour. Most of all, they are looking to you for love. My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.
Dalai Lama
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Charge Separation in the Mind
By Mel Acheson
"The operation of removing a problem from its traditional context and
placing it into a new one, looking at it through glasses of a different
color, as it were, has always seemed to me of the very essence of the
creative process. It leads not only to a revaluation of the problem itself,
but often to a synthesis of much wider consequences, brought about by a
fusion of two previously unrelated frames of reference."
-Arthur Koestler, The Watershed: A Biography of Johannes Kepler.
My sane friends (yes, I do have a few) point out that an electrified
universe is impossible because of the astronomical amount of energy it
would take to create any significant amount of charge separation in
space. Various calculations, usually on the backs of envelopes, show that
to produce the effects conventionally attributed to gravity would
necessitate, electrically, a separation of charges requiring many times
the energy available. To turn a nuclear star into an electric star, for
example, would require many times the energy output of the star just to
separate enough electrons from their hydrogen protons to generate
sufficient current. With galaxies, the problem is billions of times worse.
It's much easier--the difference, they say, between possible and
impossible--to squeeze a stellar mass of hydrogen with its own gravity
until it gets hot enough to ignite its nuclear furnace.
Of course, they're right. They're the experts, and they're sane besides.
It's almost with embarrassment that I bring up a matter of insight that
reveals their oversight. Everyone knows those hot nuclear stars began as
cold clouds of hydrogen. We detect those clouds throughout the universe.
And they must be collapsing because the law of gravity requires it. As
they collapse, they heat up, until the heat triggers nuclear reactions.
Then the radiation pressure outward balances the gravitation pressure
inward and a star is formed. This is a chain of logic that's linked
together with mathematical certainty.
But where did that ontological cloud of hydrogen come from? I don't mean
its physical origin. As I mentioned, we detect clouds of hydrogen
throughout the universe. I mean where was it assumed a cloud of
hydrogen was the progenitor of a star? That origin is in the third
sentence of the previous paragraph, indicated by the word "must". That
origin is in the mind, in imagination. The cloud of hydrogen is needed only
if you assume gravity is the sole force operating. If you assume gravity,
you require the cloud, with which you can prove the necessity of gravity.
And inside this circular cage of logic the gerbil of astrophysics begins to
run.
An electric star wouldn't begin with the cloud. It would begin with charge
separation. Everything we see in the universe, with the possible exception
of a few specks of planets and reflection nebulas, is ionized to some
degree. It's a PLASMA, the fourth and dominant state of matter in the
universe. The positive ions and negative electrons move, and because
protons are a couple of thousand times more massive than electrons, any
force--electrical, magnetic, gravitational, even mechanical--can cause
some separation of charges. An immeasurably small surplus of one electron
or proton in a volume measured in cubic meters is all that's necessary for
a weak electric field to exist in deep space. That electric field will drive
an electric current, which will generate a magnetic field that interacts
with the fields of other currents.
An elementary observation of matter in deep space is that the currents
tend to form twisted pairs of filaments, called Birkeland currents, that
snake along the magnetic field lines. These filaments suck in surrounding
ions and gas and dust as if they were cosmic vacuum cleaners,
overwhelming gravitational forces. Their magnetic fields pinch the
mixture, called a dusty plasma, into higher density blobs and columns.
As the magnetic pinching increases, the electric field intensifies, which
further increases the pinching. The compressing blobs form spinning
focuses of electrical discharges, first a red glow, then brilliant arcs,
driven by the current in the filament that generated them until the
energy is dissipated. We see these filaments and blobs in high-energy
plasma labs.
We see them in lightning. We see them as the balls of arc discharges we
call stars. We see them as the filigreed bubbles and cones of neon-tube
-like glow discharges we call planetary nebulas. We see them in the forms
of spiraling galactic arms and of pencil-thin beams of galactic jets. We
see them at the largest scale we can observe, that of superclusters of
galaxies. The initial condition of the observed universe is that of charges
already separated.
Now the original question comes full circle. The problem is not that of
supplying the energy to ionize neutral matter. The problem is that of
dissipating the energy of already ionized matter. It's the act of
neutralizing existing separations of charges that provides the prodigious
energy driving and shaping the universe. After seeing that the universe is
already electrified, a calculation on the back of another envelope shows
that gravity is too weak--by about 40 orders of magnitude!-- to account
for the observed structure, movement, and dissipation of energy. It's the
gravity universe that's impossible.
Link To Original Article
"The operation of removing a problem from its traditional context and
placing it into a new one, looking at it through glasses of a different
color, as it were, has always seemed to me of the very essence of the
creative process. It leads not only to a revaluation of the problem itself,
but often to a synthesis of much wider consequences, brought about by a
fusion of two previously unrelated frames of reference."
-Arthur Koestler, The Watershed: A Biography of Johannes Kepler.
My sane friends (yes, I do have a few) point out that an electrified
universe is impossible because of the astronomical amount of energy it
would take to create any significant amount of charge separation in
space. Various calculations, usually on the backs of envelopes, show that
to produce the effects conventionally attributed to gravity would
necessitate, electrically, a separation of charges requiring many times
the energy available. To turn a nuclear star into an electric star, for
example, would require many times the energy output of the star just to
separate enough electrons from their hydrogen protons to generate
sufficient current. With galaxies, the problem is billions of times worse.
It's much easier--the difference, they say, between possible and
impossible--to squeeze a stellar mass of hydrogen with its own gravity
until it gets hot enough to ignite its nuclear furnace.
Of course, they're right. They're the experts, and they're sane besides.
It's almost with embarrassment that I bring up a matter of insight that
reveals their oversight. Everyone knows those hot nuclear stars began as
cold clouds of hydrogen. We detect those clouds throughout the universe.
And they must be collapsing because the law of gravity requires it. As
they collapse, they heat up, until the heat triggers nuclear reactions.
Then the radiation pressure outward balances the gravitation pressure
inward and a star is formed. This is a chain of logic that's linked
together with mathematical certainty.
But where did that ontological cloud of hydrogen come from? I don't mean
its physical origin. As I mentioned, we detect clouds of hydrogen
throughout the universe. I mean where was it assumed a cloud of
hydrogen was the progenitor of a star? That origin is in the third
sentence of the previous paragraph, indicated by the word "must". That
origin is in the mind, in imagination. The cloud of hydrogen is needed only
if you assume gravity is the sole force operating. If you assume gravity,
you require the cloud, with which you can prove the necessity of gravity.
And inside this circular cage of logic the gerbil of astrophysics begins to
run.
An electric star wouldn't begin with the cloud. It would begin with charge
separation. Everything we see in the universe, with the possible exception
of a few specks of planets and reflection nebulas, is ionized to some
degree. It's a PLASMA, the fourth and dominant state of matter in the
universe. The positive ions and negative electrons move, and because
protons are a couple of thousand times more massive than electrons, any
force--electrical, magnetic, gravitational, even mechanical--can cause
some separation of charges. An immeasurably small surplus of one electron
or proton in a volume measured in cubic meters is all that's necessary for
a weak electric field to exist in deep space. That electric field will drive
an electric current, which will generate a magnetic field that interacts
with the fields of other currents.
An elementary observation of matter in deep space is that the currents
tend to form twisted pairs of filaments, called Birkeland currents, that
snake along the magnetic field lines. These filaments suck in surrounding
ions and gas and dust as if they were cosmic vacuum cleaners,
overwhelming gravitational forces. Their magnetic fields pinch the
mixture, called a dusty plasma, into higher density blobs and columns.
As the magnetic pinching increases, the electric field intensifies, which
further increases the pinching. The compressing blobs form spinning
focuses of electrical discharges, first a red glow, then brilliant arcs,
driven by the current in the filament that generated them until the
energy is dissipated. We see these filaments and blobs in high-energy
plasma labs.
We see them in lightning. We see them as the balls of arc discharges we
call stars. We see them as the filigreed bubbles and cones of neon-tube
-like glow discharges we call planetary nebulas. We see them in the forms
of spiraling galactic arms and of pencil-thin beams of galactic jets. We
see them at the largest scale we can observe, that of superclusters of
galaxies. The initial condition of the observed universe is that of charges
already separated.
Now the original question comes full circle. The problem is not that of
supplying the energy to ionize neutral matter. The problem is that of
dissipating the energy of already ionized matter. It's the act of
neutralizing existing separations of charges that provides the prodigious
energy driving and shaping the universe. After seeing that the universe is
already electrified, a calculation on the back of another envelope shows
that gravity is too weak--by about 40 orders of magnitude!-- to account
for the observed structure, movement, and dissipation of energy. It's the
gravity universe that's impossible.
Link To Original Article
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)