Genesis 1 My translation

Time began when Separating (see note) (God) separated (created) time (heaven) and space (earth).  Now, this was a space (earth)  with no objects or extension (without form and void) and a time (deep) with no past (in darkness). Separating produced a wave-like pattern (Spirit of God moving over the deep), the source of the first electromagnetic energy (light), which had an energy gradient symbolized by light and darkness. This energy gradient produced the first plasma (firmament), which in separating by electromagnetic charge (waters above from waters below), produced the first mass, which also existed in a gradient of captured separating energy: the elements. As time extended, a further level of separation (dry land from seas) along an energy gradient related to mass: gravity. Then all of these things began to exploit the energy gradients by forming self-replicating systems, including the potential for biological ones.  Then, stars, galaxies, the sun, the moon. Then higher biological systems separated by the ancients as sea-creatures, birds, animals useful to man, insects, and wild animals. To tend to the sea-creatures, the birds, the animals useful to man, and the insects, Separating separated men from women, who together have the purpose of tending the earth. And humans received the plants to eat and the essential human knowledge: that seeds replicate themselves, yielding fruit; this was the energy gradient for man's use. The earth's systems were well-provided for all creatures.

(Further reflection reveals that at this foundational level of ontology, subject and predicate merge. X could then be described as "Separating" as a gerund. This dual nature of the Logos, as this was later called in Hellenic and Christian theology, found rich resonance throughout human symbology even down to modern times with the wave/particle duality of quantum mechanics and the space/time duality of Eisteinian relativity. Separating is the suitable human term for this act, as separating lies at the basis of human culture, as logic.  Human knowledge rests on a basis of properly framing the environment into objects that can be manipulated by logic. Separating, in other words, is the hallmark of self-consciousness.  Genesis assumed a self-conscious God whose very act of self-consciousness sets the entire world going.)

Reflection on my name, which means twin

I've always been fascinated by what people mean by the word "God." One quality common to most people's idea of God is that God, like us, is self-conscious.  The same ability that gives us self-consciousness also gives us the ability to simulate the self-consciousness of others, an essential tool for human communication.  We easily ascribe consciousness and will to animals and natural phenomena.  Modern people, however, confine self-consciousness to humans only, leaving anthropomorphising to children and poets.  

What is self-consciousness? How can the self perceive itself?  When we become conscious of things other than the self it is because we create symbolic representations of these things in our minds. We do not directly perceive anything except our own 3-D simulation of reality and can only communicate what we perceive by further reducing that simulation to shared symbols.  Conscious states are symbolized in language, which requires a physical substrate, breath or writing to be communicated to others.

Self-consciousness then is a perception feedback loop, consisting of 1) perceiving self and 2) perceived self.  Human self-consciousness adds step 3) symbol of perception of self.  This symbol can be our name or our photograph or simply the word "I." Whereas self and perception of self are illusive, like a black hole that permits no light to escape, the symbol of perception of self exists in the real world, it is the "event horizon" of the black hole of self-consciousness.

Deep in human symbolism is an uneasiness about these symbols of self.  Narcissus was transfixed by his own image, but what if then he saw himself get out of the water and walk down the road?  Would he run after this other self, hopelessly in love, or would he kill the impostor?  Myths are rife with twins, doppelgangers, doubles, wax dummies, all identity stealers, all proof I am not unique. There is only one authentic me, consisting of my unique self-consciousness.  Twins often stay intertwined their whole lives, unable to separate from that vision of self. They seem to share a brain. Others begin pushing against each other, defining the self by its quality of being "not like the other." 

Twins, then, represent symbols of the self that are indistinguishable from the self. There can be only one such symbol, as there is only one self to perceive.    I can only be I.  Yet, the symbol of the perception of self is not the self.  In a sense, it too is a twin.  My name is not me, my photograph is not me, not even my corpse is me.  The more perfect the symbol the more it will be like the self until it is the self.  In the real world, nothing is perfect, so there can be no perfect symbol of the self.  Twins and doppelgangers abound.

Even without a twin I have always had an inchoate anxiety about the self. I was who I was because of my parents. What if I had different parents? Or we lived in a different country? I didn't invent English or Mormonism or the Great Books or color television, all things that influenced me greatly.  I had no say. It was already there, waiting for defenseless baby me.  My brain was shaped by the language and ideas and values that were being coded into me, all in the form of symbols. My brain grew around the symbols that were already there.  Who was I really other than naked self-awareness?

God, it is agreed, possesses this naked self-awareness otherwise He is no God.  Anyone who proposed a god who lacked self-consciousness would be accused of substituting something that is, by definition, not God into the concept of "God."  Not only that, by analogy with human self-consciousness, God must communicate his self-consciousness in a way that other self-conscious entities will understand.

Man lives in a world of imagination and symbols, things that partake of little reality. God's imagination and symbols are reality itself.  Reality is God's symbol of of the perception of his self.  But what of the perception of self, the second element in self-consciousness, itself? Is what is beheld in perception of self the self itself, indistinguishable from the self in all respects except that it is the pereceived self rather than the perceiving self?  These two states, perceiving and perceived, must exist simultaneously for there to be self-consciousness. A distinction is brought into the nature of God.

Within the single self of God, then there is 1) perceiving self, and 2) perceived self, the self being identical in both cases.  One sees from the inside, one from the outside. One is transcendent, one is imminent.  Each is twin of the other.  From God's self-consciousness, from His twinning, comes God's message, "I am that I am," and God's symbol, the physical world.  Reality should then, to communicate God's self-perception, consist of self-recursive processes, such as self-replication and self-consciousness.  Our own self-consciousness is a result of the self-recursive nature of reality, the symbol of God's simultaneous perception and perceiving of God.  Each of us, in that act of naked self-awareness, participates in the primal and timeless act of God's self-awareness.  We ourselves are the symbols of God's twinning, and through His twinning, His creating.

We're River Apes

Hominids developed as a marsh-living variation of the genus Pan in the inland deltas of the Great Rift Valley. Hominid diet consisted largely of fish proteins, fueling the physical development of the brain. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/38009.php At some point early on, hominids adapted to increasing wetland conditions. It was as a wetland predator that hominids began to walk upright, lost their hair, and developed floating breasts. http://www.riverapes.com/AHAH/ComparativeBiology/Bipedalism/Bipedalism.htm Birth took place in the water http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071029113809AAFrtYa; babies can be taught to swim at a similar rate to learning to walk. http://www.babyswimming.com/whatlearn.htm 

Those big brains switched the evolutionary process to the fast track. Instincts were suppressed to make room for a growing common mental space, which soon overtook the natural environment as the prime motivator of hominid behavior. Brains grew so big they began to finish development outside the womb. It was this interface between biology and early childhood experiences that created the opportunity for the explosive growth and increasing complexity of human culture.  http://books.google.com/books?id=9CM5L4WPXp8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Lifespand+development+and+the+brain&ei=_q0QSN-aKpyStwOq9cyYBg&client=firefox-a&sig=Ped5lshb0Mo9d-_kq984JjgiMlc#PRA1-PA15,M1

Mystery solved: The Star of Bethlehem

Ahem,
I would like to make the insane claim that I've figured out exactly what the Star of Bethlehem was. To completely justify my claim will require solving many other mysteries in future posts, so if you have questions about my explanation, write me or wait for future posts.

By Way of Introduction

Academic scholarship is blind to one important fact: the original gods of neolithic man were the stars themselves. They operated as their only clock, timing, by the rising and setting of stars, various tasks important to their survival in the local environment. Neolithic man lived very close to the land and was acutely tuned to the rhythms of nature as they pertained to the survival of the clan. Stars, when viewed by someone who has closely studied their relationship to other natural phenomena in a culture that has developed a body of lore based on previous observations, in other words, a modern human with the college degree equivalent of starwatching, when that person looks at the stars, he will immediately be oriented as to the compass points, he will know the season and month of the year, and will associate those stars with that season and its associated activities. As humans underwent the development of civilization following the domestication of grains and livestock and the development of irrigation and metallurgy, this old lore became ossified into mythology. These frozen neolithic artifacts are the symbolic substrate of the modern world religions. Since serious archaeology has been underway, the star symbolism of the ancients has been largely ignored by academics because of its unsavory associations with modern astrology and the lunatic fringe. Recently, however, archaeoastronomy has entered the academic scene, so such discussions are no longer off the table.

Divisions of the Sky
Putting on our neolithic mask, what do we see when we observe the stars over time?

Milky Way
Anyone who has gone into the desert and looked at the night sky when the brightest part of the Milky Way is visible will understand the power this display must have had for the ancients. Our night skies in the United States have been obscured significantly, even in remote places, so the ancients were able to see the Milky Way even more clearly, mapping its course through the star field. One of the most enduring neolithic images of the Milky Way is the worm Ouroboros that its own tail. The widest part of the Milky Way, in the constellation Saggitarius is the worm's head. This is the location of the center of the galaxy (a word derived from the Greek word for milk).

Never setting stars
First we may note that there are some stars to the north that never set. How large an area of the sky this is depends on the observer's latitude. Knowing these stars can immediately orient an observer to the north. Today this task is so easy we've forgotten that Polaris hasn't always been the pole star. It has slowly moved into that position and only got close enough to be effective for navigation around the time of European exploration of the globe. It will reach its closest proximity to the pole in the year 2100.

As with Polaris, the stars in the never-setting zone change over time: some move into the zone and some move out. Knowing the stars in the never-setting zone is vital to orientation and over the ~700 year period that a given set of rules is useful, there will be many stories told about those stars. One day, though, one of the never-setting stars dips below the horizon. New stories are told to account for this event. Gods are born and gods die.

Planets and ecliptic
Among the stars are five that move around along the same track the sun and moon take across the sky. This track (called the ecliptic) changes its course across the sky during the year. In the spring and winter the planets rise directly east, but the exact place they rise changes slightly every day moving north for summer and south for winter. Our word "orientation" means to locate the eastern point, and as the never-setting stars showed where north was, the planets and the sun showed where east was.

The meridian
We have identified two imaginary lines that go across the sky: the centerline of the milky way and the track of the planets. There is a third important line imagined by the ancients that is the key to solving the Bethlehem Star mystery: the line linking the stars that rise exactly in the east. Astronomers call this the meridian and it corresponds to the earth's equator.

Precession
As the never-setting stars move in and out of position, the stars that rise exactly in the east also change. Some stars move to the south and some to the north. The closer a star is to the north the longer it is in the sky, so stars that move across the meridian (when they take on special importance) toward the north are gaining life and those moving toward the south are losing life. The meridian marks the boundary between the land of the living (the northern side of the sky) and the land of the dead (the southern part of the sky). Some stars can move so far south that they are never seen again. The time a star spends in the northern or southern part of the sky is half a precession cycle (~12 000 y).

The Star of Bethlehem Mystery Solved
In the year 1BC, the star Spica crossed the meridian from the north to the south. This marked the end of Spica's 12 000 years in the northern hempisphere (The Land of the Living). The importance of Spica can be understood by considering the autumn sky in 12000 BC. As Spica moved into the northern hemisphere, Vega, another very bright star, was moving into the pole position. Vega made a much more dazzling display as pole star than Polaris does. On the autumnal equinox, one of two days a year when the sun rises exactly in the east, Spica would rise just at sunset. It was from this time that Spica became associated with a sprig of wheat (hence its name). Before cultivated grains, neolithic man learned to harvest the wild grasses of the area. When Spica rose in the east at sunset, it was time for the harvest. Over time, the star became associated with the other stars around it as the constellation Virgo: a virgin presenting a sprig of wheat. Virgo is the sign opposite Pisces (which was rising into the north as Virgo was setting) and one not need be a theologian to understand the importance of the Virgin and of fish to Christian symbology.

So the Bible tells us that at the birth of Jesus, Magi (that is, astrologers) saw Jesus' star (why they made this identification is a further mystery to be explained later) "rising in the east". If we take these words literally (a method that works surprisingly well sometimes) they saw a star rising EXACTLY in the east. And exactly at that time, Spica was crossing the meridian, an event that marked the age transition from Aries to Pisces (from the Lamb to the Fish) and from Libra to Virgo (from the Scales of Justice to the Virgin).

Mystery solved.

Bee Colony Collapse Threatens Civilization

From the first exhausted field caused by not rotating crops to the current bee crisis, the human experiment with agriculture has been a continuing ecological disaster. Rich biodiversity has been replaced by monoculture, but not only with plants, but with bees. This renders the species liable to collapse from a single agent, it's happening again to bananas and most frightening, to bees. Without bees, the whole agricultural system collapses. Thanks Green Revolution!

You've been warned!

This Alex Jones program with Naomi Wolf, a prominent progressive feminist, would be funny if the subject of her interview, her book The End of America, wasn't so scary. This book now makes it ok for progressives to become alarmed over the accelerating pace our liberty is being withdrawn. She lays out 10 steps that governments take to destroy a democracy. She claims these steps were developed by Mussolini, usually cited as the origin of fascism.

Mussolini, though, may have been following a blueprint laid out by Louis Napoleon who was elected president of France in the turbulent 1840s. On 11 December 1851, he staged a coup d'etat, rewriting the constitution to make the presidency the only real power (a show parliament was retained). This book, by Maurice Joly, a satirical dialog between Montesquieu and Machiavelli, where Machiavelli explains how Louis Napoleon followed Machiavelli's advice in his method of taking over control of France. The conceit is that Machiavelli knows what has happened in France and Montesquieu does not. One can discern Wolf's ten points in Joly's description of how Louis Napoleon took down the Republic, creating the second French Empire.

Wolf's ten steps:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.
2. Create secret prisons where torture takes place.
3. Develop a thug caste or paramilitary force not answerable to citizens.
4. Set up an internal surveillance system.
5. Harass citizen groups.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release.
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press.
9. Treat all political dissidents as traitors.
10. Suspend the rule of law.

I recommend reading The End of America.

The end of memory

Once at BYU in an Old Testament class, in 1974, the professor wrote "4004 BC -- The Garden of Eden" and not a single student, certainly not I, a well known skeptic, snickered, let alone challenged this. I understand how clipped thinking works. There is this thing out there, it can't be named or even described really, we feel it groping with our hands, and when we feel it's near, we become very careful what we think. Our thoughts could betray us. With most students it probably never rose to that level of consciousness. They followed the brethren and that was that. I was struck at that moment of how insidious lies can be--even the brightest light of day will not dim a certain kind of lie--in fact, it steals that light, wraps itself up in it, and delivers a stirring impression of your idea of a saint. We were children sitting in a university level Sunday School class.

And they lied to us.

When you look into it, the amount of lying or framing it another way (that is, lying about it), mythmaking that has gone on in history is mindboggling. We don't realize that we are polliwogs swimming in a sea of narratives. Inception, Contraction, Release, Relaxation--we are soothed by this rhythm, this is how things make sense, and we will find a narrative, build one up from nothing, from the barest of shadows of facts, to slake our thirst, we do this reflexively, as a community, with common consent. We must have answers and garbage in, garbage out.

They couldn't help that they lied to us. They lied to them.

How far back does this lie go? When did self-deception and groupthink become the common lot of humans? When did mankind "fall" from his primoridal behavior patterns so far, that lying became the only way to cope? Tracing this story, the story not of the origin of consciousness (I hypthesize that consciousness is innate in self-repicating negative entropic systems), but of the disease of consciousness, the disease we inherit in early childhood when we start to understand the contours of the thing that cannot be named, the thing we must skirt around. An analysis of the thing would reveal that it is extremely complex, but we have no idea about that, we do not think about it, we do not even acknowledge the thing's existence. It's there but we don't talk about it. How long has it been there?