Does Your View Point Matter if it is Not Humourous

My blog earlier this week discussed the Wuh Lax discovery that the universe was an inside out universe and that light was not moving and there was something to the idea of a cosmic lantern. The main point behind the blog was to get the reader to think, but at the same time there is an element of humour involved. The notion that all the many millions of scientific hours spent researching the movement of light when it is in fact standing still has to be funny.

The question is what do you think I, the author, believe. If you think my view point is one of humour and I am sitting back think how clever or witty I am having cracked a joke, then that is one thing. But, if you think I am deadly serious when I say that science may have got things wrong. That is a very different thing. In any event, does it really matter what I think or what my real point of view is?

What is really paradoxical is that I don't believe I am right nor that I am wrong in saying that science has got its view point incorrect. I can hold both viewpoints simultaneously. That has to be strange. I can believe two things at once that are diametrically opposed. This suggests, does it that I am a bit unlike a computer. A computer generally requires one answer, either this or that. Unless we were trying to build a world of uncertainty, we would not want a computer to dither or hold two opposing views. So I am not a computer, and if Professor Penrose is right, I may be linked in a very exact way to the world of quantum matter. What does that really mean?

For one thing, it suggests that my behaviour or belief may not be programmed. Wow! I could tell you either this or that in complete honesty and be wrong in both cases. I could change my mind from moment to moment. There is no predicting what I really believed because there is no section of me that I can find, or any one else, that contains the things that I believe. Does that make me in any sense abnormal.

I suspect that sitting on the fence in ones beliefs is pretty normal. If I said to you that I have a coin in my hand and it is a pound coin, what would you believe. You would probably not believe anything. You would say to yourself that you would not have an opinion on the matter because you did not have enough information. The question, I would ask you is whether you would have enough information if two people said that I had a pound coin in my hand. How many people would you need to have faith that what I was saying was the 'truth.'

The fact is that you would probably not believe what I am saying if a thousand people were to tell you that light is standing still and you are exploding at the speed of light along with all the other things around you. You might be willing to take a bet on it, but that would depend on whether you thought that you would win the bet, but that would in turn depend on who was judging the bet and determining what was true or untrue. Who would be this marvelous judge?

If the judge were a member of the scientific community, you would probably make the bet that I was full of nonsense in thinking that we were exploding. We can see the universe is exploding, but we don't see ourselves as exploding. Strange that? So do you hold one belief or two? Do you think that the scientific method would be adequate to determine that light was moving or standing still? What would you accept as a method of testing the 'truth'?

Teaching People How to Think

The tragedy of many educational systems is that they don't teach children how to think for themselves.

The sign of a good teacher is that the students walk away with what education is all about. I would go even further to say that life is all about thinking for oneself. If you don't learn how to think and as a consequence don't understand why and who you are what you are, then you really miss the boat.

In my conversation with Dr. Dyson-Bruce yesterday, she said to me that as a student of art she would be a challenge to her teachers. The reason was because she raised the bar with respect to what she wanted to hear in the classroom. Her point was that she did not want the teacher to tell her what they mostly felt the responsibility to tell her, but to tell her more. "Teacher! I can get that from a book. What I want from you is something that I can't get from a book!"

The Wuh Lax Paradigm of Lost Light and Why it is Useful

In the world of Wuh Lax, or as I think of it, in the days of Wim and Wuh, some 50 years AD, the physics of the universal world was seen in a very different way. The paradigm of Wuh Lax's astra cosmic physics posits that the universe is to be interpreted differently.

In our modern age, based on knowledge that was recycled from Constantinople, and passed around North Africa over 600 years ago, we have been conditioned to see our space in a certain way.

To understand the world of Wuh Lax, one has to see the world very differently. This does not mean that you see the universe incorrectly. Far from it! It, instead, means that you may see the universe more clearly for the first time as a consquence of our expansion within the dimension of positive space. This does not tell you what exists in negative space, but we know negative space exists. What scientists are unclear about is how negative space impacts on positive space. Nor are they very forthcoming about light even though the best minds have been working to try to understand light for many years, highly intelligent thinking people such as the physicist Feynman.

You may even see the need to begin the task of building a new physics, or for rediscovering an older wiser physics that was lost when Roman linear thought replaced the understandings of the time of Wim and Wuh.

My analysis is that the physics of Wuh Lax did contain a somewhat better understanding of the properties of multi-dimensional space. The lost physics of lost light goes a long way towards providing a simple unified theory of the universe. This is not a new paradigm, but one we lost when the Romans overtook the lands of the Dumnonii in South West 'Briton'. In the Wuh Lax book, 'The Lost King', these things become obvious. My issue is that 'The Lost King' will not be released to the general public until they have read and understood, 'The Cosmic Lantern'.

Our Three Obvious Dimensions

What we experience is our three dimensions of space, up, across front/back, and across right/left, all suspended it seems at 90 degrees from each other. This is our everyday world in which we talk, move and think. Or, so we think it is! The reality is very different. We know that we are intricately bound up in an inescapable relationship with light and water, photons and H2O. We realize that all life and reason comes from our association. Indeed, we are mostly made up of light and H2O.

"What is light?" we often ask. The answer is that light comes from a cosmic lantern, hence the title of my book, "Wuh Lax and the Cosmic Lantern." That lantern is a dimension or universe within each of us. If we were placed on a funeral pyre that was set on fire, we would burn and we would give off light and water. The water would evaporate into the air for those people around us to use, but the light would be gone forever from the visibility of those around the funeral pyre.

The Worlds of Waves

In their art, the people of the time of Wim and Wuh of 50 AD, painted, carved, drew, etched, and spoke of waves. Waves appeared everywhere, within the sun, on water, in the flight of birds, in the patterns of leaves, in the cycles of the sun that determined the size of their harvests.

The people drew waves on their skin using blue dyes, creating magnificent tattoos on their flesh. These tattoos were the evidence that a young blood of the community had been travelling in the world of the unseen. These trips were carefully managed by the leaders of the community. The trips to see and experience waves were something the people did not want to forget.

Waves and Hallucinating

Waves emerging with the use of hallucinogenic yew were integral to life, living and understanding of the early community. The results of what they saw and experienced were carved into wood and they were etched into metal. The importance of waves to the people of this time is what attracted me to the possibility of researching the evidence that we now have of what these waves meant.

The results of my research are contained in my 'hystories' of Wuh Lax. This is not to mean that I used the poison of the yew tree. Far from it. Yew poison is very real poison, and that is why the secrets of using it are lost to the time of Wim and Wuh.

In my hystories, Wuh, himself, engages in the process of stopping the use of the poison from the Yew.

The people of the time of Wim and Wuh went to quiet sacred places and experienced things that brought them to certain understandings. The early Christian Church adopted these places as the congregations of the people of the time of Wim and Wuh adopted early Christianity. What was happening at these sacred places was the list of journeys by seers of the community into the worlds of the higher dimensions. This was done through the use of potent drugs from the yew tree that is so poisonous to cattle and people alike, but which remain within churchyards all across 'Briton.' And, with good reason!

Our Three Less Obvious and Unseen Down/Inward Dimensions

What we immediately forget is the dimension down, up, across front/back, and across right/left. But, one has to ask where these dimensions or the corollary of down or inward actually are in relation to what we experience in consciousness. The down dimension is the inward dimension of everything in our cosmos.

Our present mythology is that of the big bang, but if you re-examine the theory of the big bang you will see that it begs the questions. The big bang never happened, and is just a mythology of the present science of cosmic physics. This is something the people of the time of Wim and Wuh understood because they were on a different path of understanding from the people of today.

The people of today and our Astra/cosmic physicists and well educated scientists follow a cosmic mythology that Wim and Wuh would not understand. But, it still is a mythology even though very modern, and our scientists receive great sums of money arising from their belief in their methods. But, what if they have the cosmos, ass backwards?

Scientists often make make discoveries not because they have any great or superceding understanding, but because there is more than one path to the truth. The thing is that they are on a path, but do not have the truth. It would not surprise me, that their path may be leading them away from it, useful as the path they are on is to the world of science.

The problem is also that the logic of the scientific method has broken down because what we see is not what is, but rather the illusion of what is.

This the people of the time of Wim and Wuh understood, but we don't.

To Wim, the cosmology was very simple. Light is a product of our three dimensions imploding. By imploding, they would understand that light comes from within the cosmos and that it is captured by our three dimensional world, which to them included a fourth inner dimension.

Think of it this way. If light is not moving and we are exploding, then light is travelling at the speed of light to us, but that speed is imaginary, since we are the ones travelling at the speed of light. That is how we get our gravity and our nuclear energy. It is also why cold fusion may seem to originate as a chemical rather than nuclear process. It also may help to begin to explain why the scientists at Harwell, CalTec and MIT cannot understand it.

We are all at ground zero as far as the cosmos is concerned. The issue is whether we can move below ground zero to the magnificent worlds that lie below.

The people of the time of Wim and Wuh understood another truth, which was that of the eternity of everything seen. It was not that the universe was being created but that is was an object like everything else that was repeated over and over again, just as nature displayed its repetitions over and over again within the objectss of its realms. Life seen in this way is already eternal, repetitious and clyclical. There are no straight lines in the universe beyond our illusions and our inability to see the curves.

Light and the Dimensions of Space

For want of a better analogy, at the present moment, we could say that light is trapped within our three obvious dimensions of space and that it is released at the boundaries of that space when matter, the fermionic world we live in, takes up its simplest forms. The can release tremendous amounts of light into our world by cracks in the three dimensional covering. We can peal away at the weakest parts of the fabric of our exploding world, but when we do we release massive amounts of energy associated with the slowing down our explosion outward. At the same time, we may have massive amounts of radiation as particles are fragmented into broken fragments and exist temporarily in unusual forms before they are reabsorbed into the shield that our cosmos can provide.

In a very real sense, our existence on this exploding planet is like being on a space ship. The earthly spaceship sustains us. What we have difficulty with is why the world is constructed as a body of enormous cycles of energy and matter that seem like tornadoes to be always twisting in a circular way or at the very least a curvilinear way.

This leads us to the understanding that there is a glue that binds the cosmos and allows the orderly release of light. That glue is the lepton and fermionic world that is created within the sun and stars and gas, the weakest part of our shield is unable to withstand the force of our exploding outwards and as a result releases immense amounts of light and energy.

What Wim and Wuh realized and what was lost to the civilization derivative of what the Romans left behind was that there are numerous patterns in the cosmos that reveal its secrets. One pattern is that everything is generally curvilinear. Wow, and we thought that straight lines were always best. Sure there is value to a straight line, but we need to understand what the limitations of straight lines are. An example would be our surveying of North America into rectangles. Whoa! Not too wise, eh!

Eternity and the Flight of Hares

To emphasize their point about the unseen world, the people of the time of Wim and Wuh, used the analogy of the flight of the hare. They had noticed that the hare in flight ran in a strange loop that to these people resembled the figure eight.

To the people of the time of Wim and Wuh, things in flight and capable of flight were to be revered and respected. Birds and hares were regarded with enormous respect almost amounting to taboo as regards killing them. One might say that such creatures were sacred. There is good reason because flight offers a means of escape. Most often when in flight, the people, were fleeing death, so it was not everything as usual.

The symbolism of the figure eight became associated with the notion of eternity associated with matters of life and death. In the inner world, was a universe of fire and light. What Wim and Wuh were seeing was the inner world from which light and energy came.

The people of Egypt were not very unlike the people of Briton in what they believed about the hare. To the Egyptian mind, the hare rising from water and light represented birth. Similarly, the Egyptians adopted curvilinear symbols to represent the source of life in the form of light which rose from the depths of the ocean, just as the sun rose each day.

An Inside Out Universe

It may seem a simple question, but it matters a great deal whether the world is inside out. "Oh Dear," you say! "You can't be serious?" "Well yes, or is it no! I am not not serious," I reply, but "The question is definitely worth asking."

My reasoning is that if the universe, which means everything that we can observe, reminded that we cannot observe things that go out beyond our best guess at the age of the universe of something up to 18 or so billions of years, is inside out, this means we are observing just a phase rather than the whole. Well, we probably don't see much of the universe really because we keep assuming that light is moving, the speed of light variable, and we are relatively constant, rather than the other way around and so we get our numbers skewiff! What we may have is the faster-than-lightspeed-propagation-of-gravity.

The Nature of Art and Light

The name of the artist Lucy Willis is associated with her books on how to capture the effects of light in one's water colour painting. She won the BP Portrait award in 1992 and her work has appeared on show in the National Portrait Gallery and on the web of the NPG. In her own right, Lucy is almost a famous artist. Her siblings, her father, mother, some of her grand parents are also well known artists deriving from a common Bateman ancestry. Bateman, himself, the grandfather of Lucy is a well known cartoonist in the UK, at least, for those of us who were around when he was active more than half a century ago.

I am reminded of another portrait artist Suzi Malin, who has a gift. These two artists are wonderful British portrait artists that are well worth viewing. Suzi wrote the book 'Love at First Sight', which explains why you are drawn towards your most loved ones because of subconscious preferences. The book by Suzi Malin is a must read as are the books by Lucy Willis on using light in your art work.

It is my pleasure to be presently associated with Lucy's father, 'Dick', or Richard Willis, possibly, the UK's greatest naval painter. Well, he is at least, in my opinion, the best of the current batch of artists who love to paint colours of the mighty seas, and there are a number of them. Dick's famous work is to be found at the Bridgman Gallery. But, my story today is not about the well-known art of Richard Willis, but his lessor known work, art work that is possibly of greater national interest than his paintings.

I recently shared a glass of wine with Dick puzzling over what we should do with his other artwork. We have decided to share it with a well known archaeologist skilled in mapping in order to get her views and possibly her blessing before we publish this other artwork. What I am saying is that Dick may be on to something about the nature of the landscape of the British Isles, and it may be of greater significance to the world of archaeology than he can ever imagine. The problem is that Dick does not want to be ridiculed for putting across some startling and revolutionary ideas, and I think he is right. It is important as a social value that when one makes a suggestion, as part of free speech, and proposal in all sincerity, that we have the patience to listen and review carefully.

I am not going to say what Dick has discovered, but will keep you posted on the progress of his efforts through this blog. You will be blown away if half of what he is saying is correct. No! You will be astonished at what he has discovered, in any event. He has spent lots of time researching his second field of art and science, and it is absolutely amazing! Before he publishes, however, there is the process of verification and review by people who have the PhD's in this world of science that he has touched upon.

What Really is the Speed of Light?

When we think about the speed of light, we make some very serious assumptions. What if some of these assumptions have to be revised? At one time, people thought that the earth was the center of the universe and the planets and sun revolved around the earth. We have since found that this paradigm of the earth being at the center of the universe was quite wrong.

We now know that earth revolves around the sun and the sun is part of the much larger Milky Way Galaxy, a huge collection of stars, and our Milky Way Galaxy is part of a much larger collection of galaxies. Arthur Koestler's book 'The Sleepwalkers' catalogs this epic journey.

What is remarkable is that the revolution in thought about the earth and planets ever took place at all. Copernicus's book of 1543 'De Revolutionibus' that was closer to an understanding earth's relationship to the stars and the planets was possibly not widely distributed nor read. In modern physics we are on a threshold of another revolution and perhaps don't even know it. This revolution has to do with the nature of light.

The question I raise is whether scientists are still sleepwalking. After you read my blog fully, and assuming that you understand much of what I am saying whether it is right or wrong, I would be interested in your view.

My Idea that The Speed of Light is Zero

At the very least, light is a puzzle.

Light seems to move extraordinarily fast, but why? What is causing light to move? Light movement seems to me to be a strange anomaly. Light is classified by scientists to belong within a group of particles referred to as force carrying particles. But, where is this force actually coming from?

In fact, Einstein's equation for energy e=mc squared seems to make the fact very obvious that light is possibly the fastest stuff around. But, having considered it for some time I have to ask the question, "Is it?" My point is that, it could be very difficult to distinguish empirically whether light is moving or everything else is moving.

My ideas concerning the nature of light arise because of my artistical 'interest' in light. As an artist, I am not confined to the results of scientific method and when I see the results of such method produce non-sensical conclusions, I have to ask whether they are an illusion. The real question, I ask is whether our advance in the physical sciences is based on a grand illusion and whether by removing that illusion some answers to physical anomalies might be unvieled. I begin with the concept of a three dimensional space. This we can see, feel, touch and use. We find that within the three dimensions are entities that scientists call fermions. The fermions are grouped into two groups called leptons and quarks. Outside the world of fermions, which are entities that repel each other, and do not bunch, but there is another world that of the bunching bosons. The thing to remember is that bosons do not obey the Pauli exclusion principle. Light is made up of photons and photons are a kind of boson an entity that tends to bunch.

Now if you, made up of fermions consider that you are still, then light is moving. However, if you consider that you are expanding at the rate of 186,000 miles per second, then it could be that light is standing still. My question is how do you tell for sure. Also how do you explain the other properties of light, and gravity, which are the force carrying entities.

If light is standing still, surrounds, and is interlaced with everything else, then when we observe light we will get a difference between light in point A and point B suggesting that light has moved from point A to point B.

The problem with this is that there are some anomalies about the movement of light particles or photons, which are part of a class of particles referred to as bozons or force carrying particles. We also see light as waves. But, why?

We have been told by scientists that the speed of light as 186,000 miles per second. Wow! That is very fast.

In my humble view donning my artist hat temporarily and without a great deal of knowledge about physics I feel I need to beg to differ that light is that fast at all! No! Light is not moving.

In my view, the speed of light may be conceptually, zero, or 186,000 miles per second slower than our own movement, which is what we may be measuring. Ever wonder why there is so much energy in the particles that make us up. What if that energy is kinetic? If we were to slow an exploding particle down, would we not release energy because of differences in relative speeds? What would happen?

Instead of light, it may be fermions, or we, who are moving at the speed of 186,000 miles per second. Or should I say, we are exploding at that speed. In addition, it would seem that the rate at which we are exploding is not fixed, but indeed may be accelerating.

"Absurd" you exclaim! "How can it be! You are an idiot! Quit making these outlandish comments that are clearly a load of non-sense! Who do you think you are that you can get away with such obvious fantasy?"

How do I arrive at my conclusion that light has no speed, but we do?

I am not saying that the idea of light being stationary has sex appeal. I am not even saying it to be controversial, which is, of course, what it is. I am making the statement because it is what I presently believe. Now, if you can give me another thing to believe about the speed of light, I will not ignore what you say, unless there are too many of you, in which case I will pay attention to some of you.

No! Please hear me out on this one!

My view of light as being static emerges for a search for the artist to draw the fourth dimension along the lines of Hinton's original ideas. Basically, it is easy to draw a point, line, rectangle and cube, which are representative of our fermionic world. For the fourth dimension the normal method is to continue using the fermionic tools and assumptions.

Where I depart from this is to take the next step and assume that the fourth dimension is not fermionic, but bosonic in nature. This means that the cube is populated inwards rather than outwards to creat the visual image of the fourth dimension. In other words, the cube is bunchy or groupy rather than exclusionary and independent. It means that the fourth dimension and additional dimensions that we will want to represent occur within rather than outside the cube.

This leads to another concept of what we as humans actually see as a reflection or evidence of the fourth dimension. What we see is light? The second aspect of this visual imagery or imagination is that that the light does not move, but is everywhere purvasive within the fermionic dimensions. The third aspect of the imagery is that because the cube is turned inward in terms of the three fermionic dimensions there is an enormous repelling force created by the non-bunching fermions as they scramble to avoid bunching together.

This enormous repellant force pushes the three fermionic dimensions outward in at an amazing and excellerating velocity. One has to ask why the fermionic dimensions are pushed inwards rather than outwards. They are in effect held by another dimension that acts to hold them together. This other dimension has enormous force. Where then is this other dimension. Obviously, it surrounds all of the fermionic entities like a balloon. The only thing is that we don't see them because they is very very small in relative terms, as small as the particles making up the fermionic dimensions.

What Are My Twelve Artistic Dimensions?

The big all may have at least 12 artistic dimensions, and came to me when I was playing around with higher geometries. It works somewhat as follows:

Dimensions 1-3:

There are the three regular dimensions, but remember that time does not exist, but only spacetime and that your brain is not a memory device that works at the molecular level, but a device that works at a much lower level.Its like realizing that the atom has tremendous amounts of energy that cannot be explained by the 'non-nuclear' physics. The atom is made up of three kinds of particles; electrons, and protons made that comprise up quarks and down quarks. Other kinds of particles can be made, such as composite fermions etc, but while electrons and quarks may have long lives, most other fermions are temporary entities. The proton itself is made up of up quarks and down quarks.

The force that gets these particles active is the froce that ensures the light dimension and that light remains still. Fermions move and it seems like a stream that they are bathed in light and that it is the light that is moving when in my view as an artist it is physical matter that is moving and for very good reasons.

Anyways, I have concocted a world in which there are 12 dimensions of artistic space that physicists may not recognize in the way that I do, possibly and no one else but me can see as mental images. I don't think I am being absurd. Do you?

Dimension 4:

In the very beginning our three dimensional space spawned a force called light or photons, which is my fourth dimension. The geometry of this is fascinating because one needs to have light permeate the universe in its very peculiar way and my theory of still light explains this.

Dimension 5:

The photons combine because of properties of higher dimensionality/geometry to create energy through their mass and motion, called e=mc power 2 (from Einstein's theory of relativity) energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, and energy is the fifth dimension. It results from fermionic entities pushing away from each other.

Dimension 6:

The energy accelerates and creates gravity and weight, as we experience it, and warps spacetime, which is our sixth dimension, gravity is directly proportional to mass. The world is inside out. Very interest this!

Dimension 7:

As energy accelerates and spacetime warps, it causes all the particles to spin and to assume a particular direction (left handed or right handed), which creates our 7th dimension of spin.

Dimension 8:

The spin in turn produces a vortex that is the basis of the patterns all natural or material objects, our eighth dimension, the mathematical theory of chaos applies, i.e. the butterfly effects. Nothing exists, but chaos, so there are no linearities of existence. All is curves, just as my Ing people thought. That is why the leaves have the shape they have and stones are just stones.

Dimension 9:

The patterns of matter in turn form networks that are made from a spinning lower dimension, which creates our nineth dimension of patterns, which can explain the clustering of galaxies and their distribution within spacetime, as well as why we are part of spacetime in the region we are.

Dimension 10:

The networks are translated into forms (matter and crystals), and life forms (animal, vegetable, etc), which creates our tenth dimension, which is where we appear as humans, as a life form created not from clay, but from light, and why our brains are light forms not clay forms, and explains why when we die, we go into the light, and why ghosts always come to us as forms of light.

Dimension 11:

The material forms of all sizes and life forms develop into evolutions which create our eleventh dimension, we have evolved from earlier light forms, and all living things depend on or result from light.

Dimension 12:

There is next with the evolution of all things material from light and force or power, the source of everything, the production of meaning, which is the 12th dimension of my framework.

The Void, Spacetime, and the Curvilinear Cross

I often think that one needs a really healthy dose of imagination or image realizing abilities to understand complex relationships. Perhaps, this is only in the case of those with eyesight that is colonically rich!?

My main point to make this morning is that 'modern man' is not modern at all. Ancient man had a non-linear cross that our linear cross derives from. We today have mostly branched off into what falls into my small bucket of 'linear musings'. It's a curious oddity that we have so much progressed in understanding romantic or Romanized linear relationships with so little understanding of non-linear relationships. We use symbolism as contained in our letters and words, which make up sounds and sentences, which then get added together to form paragraphs and paragraphs of hopefully reasonably well-expressed logic.

This is all very fine and good, but is it really modern. In doing all this, what we may miss is that very cute baby in the bath water, which we throw away. That is because modern is our way of expressing progress along a path that we mentally conjure up to express our satisfaction that we have a form of positive evolution going on. But are we really modern?

Guys, it is just possible that the boat has already been here, or been built, and has gone. We may be the left behinds. I just say this to get one's brain cells activated. It is a reasonably pleasant day outside, but still too cold to enjoy a walk in a meandering sort of way. That I like to do here,and now, in my world of blog.

Meanderings on Leaves

We have very little to go on by way of words coming from the ancient people who used to live where I am sitting right now. Yes! There were people here on this cosy hill overlooking a beautiful valley populated with wandering sheep and many other creatures it would be pointless to list. In case you were wondering what part of the world I am in, may I say that I am abiding in Somerset, England.

The early people that lived here knew plants much better than I. In particular, they understood much more about trees. By looking at trees and the relationships of trees to the world around them they understood much more than 'modern man'. I say this because, they used the leaves of trees as a way to convey complex ideas. They would save a variety of leaves in a basket and when they wanted to tell someone something important, they would select those leaves that conveyed the idea. They would amass a small handful of leaves and organize them in sequence and putting them between fore finger and thumb hand them over to the person with whom they wished to communicate.

The reaction would be as great as the written word. On occasion love making would ensue or a fight would break out with jaws damaged and feelings hurt. But, it remains that by using ordinary leaves that they could find locally in the woods they were able to record considerable 'paragraphs' of emotion and expression. We have some idea of what the leaves spoke, but much of what we have are guesses. Nevertheless, the people hereabouts used leaves to record and communicate, and they would have done so very easily and effectively.

That is not to say that they did not have spoken words. Yes! They probably, almost certainly, spoke English! "Rubbish," you say! "I don't believe you," you add, shaking your head. I smile and think to myself, "There goes another linear modern man, thinking without thinking."

The Forest that the Leaves Symbolized

Often its difficult to see the forest from the trees. If my memory serves me correctly, Arthur Koestler wrote that the image of a tree with its roots represented the fourth dimension. He coined the term 'holon' and a term for a configuration of 'holon' he referred to as a 'holonarchy'. What you see when you look at a tree is what life is all about. Life and society is organized, or organizes itself, as a holonarchy. This is true of all forms of structures including those we often do not think of as living, such as particle structures.

The economists Kenneth Boulding and Jeffery Stamps saw the economy and other social structures in this way and gave a name to their concept, calling it a 'holonomy'. They were thinking of a social structure, but the ancients when they thought of a holonomy were thinking of a mathematical structure, much like what is found in advanced differential mathematics. From the idea of the holonomy of structures comes the idea of the non-linear cross.

The Holonic Cross and the Non-linearity of Ancient People Who Lived Here

If you think that the people of ancient times were not modern, forget this notion very quickly. We are the ones that are not clued in. We are so not modern that we are backward in comparison to my ancient people, the one's that lived right where I am sitting right now. And, they were here almost 2,000 years ago. I write about their lives in my adventure and mystery story Wuh Lax and the Cosmic Lantern.

The holonic cross was very familiar to many of the people who lived in England at the time of the Roman invasion in 43 AD. The problems of gathering information about the thought processes of people of this period are well known. These people have no voice and are the forgotten tragedy of ancient time. It is almost as if they did not exist. Their influence on the Roman and subsequent world is not understood nor estimated. One might say that they were marginalized which is precisely what the Romans wished to do with them. Understanding, expressing, and feeling for such margins and marginalized people, however, is the work of the artist, and what I see as my present enjoyment. Bringing them into our fold of comprehension makes them more real and gives us a way to empathize as to their plight. What we do for the least of them is what we can do for others.

I was initially drawn to the holonic version of the cross appearing on ancient objects because it is an interesting non-linear art form. More recently, I have tried to understand what it meant. The process of interpretation has led me to what I consider modest speculations with relatively high probability. These are not certainties, but probabilities given the physical evidence before me. When I donn my artist hat, I depart from the world of certainties and enter the world of modest speculation. This does not mean that what I am saying is fiction though I will call it fiction, because I am aware of the need for verification, fact is pretty close to fiction until it is verified. One accepts and enjoys such fiction because one lives in a world of uncertainties. If one needs certainties then go far away. There are none!

The Void

How did the ancients understand the void and the non-linearity of existence?

Cosmic scientists speculate that the universe that earth belongs to is expanding into the void of nothingness and nothing to resist pressure 'our world' coming at it at an accelerating rate. What is not so clear is how fast we are ourselves expanding. My speculation is that we are also expanding at an unbelievably fast rate. My idea is that our expansion enables us to experience motion, or ease of movement. This we relate to and about in a relative way and call time, or we may even call it spacetime when we realize that time is an abstraction of our imagination. There is something else, many things, but in my view it / they is / are not time.

The idea of time belongs to the physical world and cannot be truly measured depending as it does on relative speeds. Our reality is a mixture of physical and non-physical worlds interacting in a meaningful way. If you did not understand what I just wrote, do not worry, you don't really need to, unless you are exploring possibilities.

The notion that a God used time in creating the world that we inhabit is non sense. It is a conceptual abstraction used by teachers to convey an idea since teaching about a non-time world is so difficult. Would you not agree!?

What created our world did it in such a way that all the pasts, presents, and futures were created all at once. Can you imagine yourself as travelling within this world. You think that you are an effective part, but you do not really control anything. What will be will be! Ouch! Stop surrounding me with those awful thoughts. Give me a chance, I can explain!

First understand that non-linear thinking is probably very different from the thought processes that you are familiar with.

Purpose in the Void

All the purposes of a universe are the end result of a universe. What the universe ends up as is its end result. Your purpose in the universe is part of what the universe becomes, but you are only a little branch and circle in a very large tree. For the most part, the universe is so large that you feel that can have little impact on it. That is despite your ambitions, you feel that you are effectively ineffective as far as the purpose of the universe. You feel that you contribute nothing of substance to its purpose, but you may understand that you contribute purpose to its purpose. What does this mean?

It means that your impact on the universe is enormously disproportionate to your scale of effort, or so you think. In non-linear mathematics, this is referred to as the butterfly effect. You wag your tongue and the result is an end result very much greater than you can ever imagine in terms of scale. So it is with your existence within the universe. You are of much grander proportions than you can ever imagine. Even breathing for less than a full second has a major impact on the direction of matter within the universe.

The problem we have, however, is that impact on a physical level may be much less than the impact on other levels. This is because we belong to powerful worlds, 'universes', that are interlaced and interact with one another.

To extend the purpose of the world in a meaningful way, you need to develop in an abstract or non-linear way. This is a difficult concept to grasp since we are so used to thinking our effectiveness and purpose arises from what we actually do as compared to what we actually think. The reality is, however, that we have much greater impact by what we think than by what we do. The reason is the butterfly effect of thought within ourselves. We think that we can extend our influence by taking action, but we frequently forget that we need to harmonize our thought with our action if our action is to be effective.

In other words, it is not our actions that cause purpose, but the direction of our actions. For example, in history, had the Roman soldier not destroyed the culture that he did not understand because he thought better of doing so, the outcome would have had greater purpose than mere destruction. Think in the abstract before you act. See the purpose of action before you do something. If you do this, your actions will have greater purpose than destruction. The reason is that purpose in the grand scheme of the universe derives from extension rather than exclusion or destruction of things that embody a higher or more constructive 'non-linear' purpose.

The Circle or Curve Produced by Streams of Consciousness

Analogous to the water flowing in the streams of the beautiful local landscape, are the thoughts flowing in our minds. Like water flowing from springs downstream and collecting in pools and lakes, our thought processes are connected like strings and crosses. The ancient mind understood that the relationship between the brain and its workings were very much like the landscape and the flow of rivers through the landscape. This appears in their art.

Revision is the Nature of Life

The Immediate Problem

Yesterday's blog was very long. Parts of the writing were more exploratory than I expected when starting different trains of thought. It was obvious when I looked at the blog later that I should do some revision and editing. Revision of one's writing is normal. Some writers will revise and revise until they have almost nothing of value. The problem is continually that when you are getting your thoughts out, you tend to have a window of opportunity in which you can follow a train of thought. If you lose the train of thought, which is a stream of ideas that translate themselves into words, you don't accomplish the goal of expressing that inner impulse.

Revising may or may not put you back into the original stream of thought. More often than not, revisions lead to confabulation. Artists know of this problem when painting. Some writers are not even aware of it. The criminal law courts are increasingly aware of it.

Our inner impulses are produced by molecules making up our bodies. Thus, our thoughts are affected by what we feed ourselves by way of food, water, and other intake. It is too simplistic to think that we are a machine or a comprehensible input-output system. Some of our behaviour may be very machine-like, but we, as humans, are very very far away from being simplistic machines. A displacement in time of a thought, means an entirely new thought because what is stimulating the original thought disappears after a short period. Thus it is that interruptions, no matter how warranted, will change one's life and thinking.

A characteristic of our humanity is the fact that we sleep and that we need considerable amounts of sleep in order to retain our sanity. Deprived of sleep, a human being quickly goes insane. Humans are made from genetic material, which means that we have exceeding complex structures that have very early origins in the coming into being of the earth. We are only now discovering how complex genetic material actually is and how important sleep is to making sure that body revises and updates the protein and genetic code it has already written.

In other words, the body is correcting for the mistakes it has made and that is what sleep is all about, correction and reviewing, smoothing out and simplifying. We may in fact be so good at repairing and revising our experiences that we don't really remember what we experienced. This is called confabulation and it means that our minds revise so well that we forget. This is a protective process going on in the body to help us heal from trauma as well as to help keep us sane and clear thinking. For example, try to draw something on paper using your memory. You will find how well your mind is actually able to remember detail. Not all of us have such ability, and what we have needs to be continually exercised to work effectively. In some ways, our bodies work against us remembering a lot of details. To have clear thinking, you need to train your mind to revise and still retain the memory that you wish to retain. Read, review/re-step, and recall, are stages to remembering more accurately and we need to repeat the process many times to be sure of accuracy.

The Bigger Picture

A book by Steven Oppenheimer arrived on my desk this morning. It is entitled 'The Origins of the British - A New Prehistory of Britain and Ireland from Ice-Age Hunter Gatherers to the Vikings as revealed by DNA Analysis. The book is enormous and has over 600 pages of written material to support its thesis. This is a lot of material to get through.

When you have a book of this size written in English, one trick is to use the English method of reading to your advantage. Culturally, or for whatever reason, the English tend to organized paragraphs by putting the main idea in the first sentences. The paragraph is used to support the main idea. By reading the first sentence of each paragraph one can get through a book much faster than reading every word. At least, such reading tends to prepare one for a more detailed and exhausting reading later on. It also helps one to determine whether the work being examined is something one wants to spend a lot of time on, or can it be put aside temporarily or indefinitely.

There are some provisos. The quick reading trick does not always work for every paragraph. It is intended to work on the average. Works in English, but written by someone of another culture may not be written with the normal logic of the English paragraph. That depends on culture and education. You will have to find out for yourself whether the writer is using standard English methods of presenting paragraphs and sentences. Some scientists and engineers do a lot of writing but the structure of their writing may follow different rules from those of the normal English.

What does this mean or imply when research a work, a place, a name or something like labels and identification. It probably means that an English person tends to organize materials in a predictable way. If initially, the product of an English person is fairly complete, it may be that the organization comes as a secondary activity. Sentences may be organized into tighter mire structured paragraphs etc as a secondary stage.

Know Your Cultural Biases

I personally have at least three cultures affecting my writing. My main is English, my second main is Canadian, and my third is French / Quebecois. I am also heavily influenced by having lived in America for an extended period. What does this mean for my own logic and preferred style of thinking, writing and organizing words, sentences and paragraphs?

To be honest, I am not sure. I tend to be more English than French. What this means is that I tend to prefer objects over people, and to organize and to label accordingly. Now that sounds very cultural. I am not sure, but suspect that it is.

Maybe, I think the way I do because of my genes. I know that I eat the food that I eat because of my genes. My body tolerates oats better than wheat. In fact, now I find that I am becoming less wheat tolerant as time goes on. Is this due to my DNA being associated with the majority of ancestors living in the woods or in northerly climes.

Putting Together a Mental Image of What Seems to Fit Best

What I am finding is that given druthers, those subconscious preferences one does not have much control over, one is drawn towards locations because of reactions to the environment. If one rarely moves around then one is not giving oneself the opportunity to be drawn. What makes me think that this is genetic is the fact that I have an Australian friend, whose ancestral origins are from the northern Scottish islands, red hair, fair skin, not used to too much sun light, always wanting to be in doors and huddled away in some cosy dark room away from people and the elements of climate. One example, may cloud my thinking, but when I see a tomb of a book, such as that by Oppenheimer, I can't stop thinking that it says something about where one might be happiest without knowing why. Another issue is whether one would gravitate to such places, given druthers. The answer, for me at least, seems to be yes.

I notice that Scots, and Russians, Yorkshire, and Brittany people mostly tend to like Canada and its climate. This is a very small sample of different cultures, but it may be that there is an adaptive process that has gone on over many many generations. When I was young, I may have been more sensitive than now to these inner factors shaping my preferences, what economists call preference functions, but they seem real enough even now.

It is the advantage of having time that one does revisions. One corrects mistakes and one moves closer to situations and places one is more suited to or prefers. Essentially then, revision is a way of life. We may not understand it or see why we do it. By having genetic preferences locked into us we may even be destroying ourselves, as say falling prey to our latent addictive tendencies that are prescribed genetically. Do you think that you are really in control? Well consider the amazing studies done on identical twins.

A Guide to Thinking - Consciousness, Omega 3 and Multiple Dimensional Exploration

Our Waking Thoughts

When one has the quiet of the morning, it is a time when thoughts can appear within the mind unstimulated by the stimuli of action and reaction associated with the many aspects of daily life. One of the possibilities of the early morning mind is an exercise to awaken one's spirit. Exercise of the spirit is only part of the process of travelling across universes. One needs to feed the brain the best food and stay well away from chemicals or drugs that the brain does not consider as normal brain food.

The Nature of Consciousness

When I think of spirit, I am thinking of worlds that do not have a strong resemblance to our normal material life in what one may think of as universe 'main'. We all know what the main universe is, after all we live and die within it. What we need to do is visit other universes, many of which we are unfamiliar. How we can do this is not obvious. The Penrose - Hameroff research team has food for thought when they say we are probably totally immersed quantum phenomena. Its obvious that such worlds as the quantum world which make many of present technologies work come from outside our 'main' universe and are interlaced with it.

Our Being Within Uncertain Mysterious Worlds

This is why such mysteries as cold fusion dog the scientific world. Religious communities have long delt with mysteries! All of us, we need to have a greater understanding of what the universe is that human beings are actually now seeing and learning about. We actually know very little about what may have been the forces who created the 'main' universe, but we now need to see more of it because our curiosity is tickled pink. People of all pursuasions need to have open minds. We have the itch to learn and we are not in for easy answers. We are the multidimensional generation, but still a very young generation.

Keeping One's Brain Clear for Logical and Exporatory Thought

The joy of searching for and exploring the multiverse is not age dependent. It matters little how old you are. I am addressing parents when I write that for children there are many things you should remember. Be aware of what stimuli you expose them to at a very young age. This is a generation of parental laziness, neglect and experimentation. If you avoid all three of the former, you can have a head start for guiding your children on the path to understanding the multiverse.

Avoid One Dimensional Thinking

Herbert Marcuse once wrote about the dangers of one dimensional man. The fact that Marcuse was a highly respected author and philosopher that one would put on what was once the new left of politics made him aware that the values of a totally material world were not what working people really sought. Marcuse foresaw the enormous dangers of a new industrial technological age in which spiritual values were lost to consumerism. These are insights that young challenged people need to have to cope with an exceedingly complex post industrial revolution society. Our future is that enormous change will be the norm. Not only that! Change is coming about faster and faster. Change will happen at an unprecedented scale and speed. It will happen regardless of most efforts to slow it down.

Be Aware of How Fast The World is Evolving

Think that inflation is dangerous for social values and cohesion! We are entering a dangerous period of hyperchange. Change may already now be too fast for many societies to cope. Look at what change is doing to once peaceful communities that have had long periods without it. Violent reactions, flighting in the streets, mobs, secret armies, totalitarian groups, police control.

The obverse problem of trying to control changes is fraught with problems. The answers to negative change are elusive. As governments and groups try to control others from changing or to prevent others from introducing approaches and technologies that will bring about change. We all need a very healthy dose of patience and clarity of thought that being sober and spiritually alert brings.

Placing Youself in the Spacetime Dimension

We need all to think very hard each morning about just how lucky we are to be able to read and exchange information freely over the internet. This is a blessing that we can all use to extend freedom, social awareness, and philosophical maturity. That is why the Wuh Lax books are healthy. They show you how easy it is to get lost in a world of straight lines and be guided by the pressures of the day rather than human psychological needs.

Leaving Personal Addictions Behind

Food for the spiritual side of the brain is extremely valuable and is obtained with visual and perceptive clarity and concentration. Likewise to be a multiverse traveller you need a clear unaddicted mind.

The inner city writer, Anne Wilson Shaef has written many books about the many forms of mental and social addiction. Often we are addictive without realizing it. For example, for the very young television has become addictive and may contribute to the two fast growing problems of concentration loss and obesity. It may be that parents need to be much more vigilent than ever in the past in keeping the very young, say those not yet five years old, away from TV viewing. The results of studies of how TV viewing may alter concentration levels long term are food for serious thought.

Computers can more interactive and don't lead to zombiism of movie viewing. Books with pictures are far better for children. In short, computer games and books, if they are slow paced, yet interesting, are better for children than the flashy fast-paced hypnotic movies produced in the age of movie culture gone wild.

What causes attention deficit disorder? Do the research? Drugs may calm children temporarily, but is that all what you want, a short term solution with a series of calamities later on. We are now finding that many drugs that fool the brain can do long term damage to your fragile psyche. Omega 3 is a brain food, so follow your mother's advice and stay away from the TV. Omega 3 may be good for children! Don't let your parent use the TV as a child minder, get your parents to read you a book with lots of pictures. What 3 year old can? But still, it is very advisable for you 3 year old children reading this blog (huh!) to tell your parents that you do not want to have attention deficit disorder. In the end, it is probably better that children have the traditional cod liver oil instead of Ritalin. Do your own research and make up your mind for the health of your kids and grandchildren.

Equip Yourself by Reading Widely

Instead of giving them drugs, read books to your children, or help them leaf through books such as the one's described below following the multi-verse adventures of Wuh Lax. It is far better to equip yourself for visiting the multi-verse by developing your ability to concentrate through healthy and regular omega 3 consumption as found in oily fish.

In my writing of the Wuh Lax series, I try to guide sentient beings through the mysteries of the multi-verse of all ages, from as young as 4 to well over 100. Much of the battle for understanding is the health of those faced with life's challenges. For example, it is not easy being rational if you are an oppressed Palestinian or targeted Jew. We need our brains as healthy as possible and far away from stress, violence and negative thought in order to see clearly.

Without the clarity thinking granted by good mental health we are doomed to a single-verse world in which we fail to see the rainbow of the many other worlds and communities around us. As children, we can be injured by violence and poor drug or therapeutic technology that doom us to a life of seeing things very narrowly, to say the least.

Begin the Exploration Porcess

As far as I know, there aren't many tool kits, guidebooks, instruction leaflets, as yet about how to enter another universe. So here goes!

Have a Look at Internet Links about the Multiverse

This is your first guide to exploring the multiple universes. You will need a big mug of coffee and a chunk of very dark 'chocolat.' These you will slowly consume as you read my guide. You might first do a Google on the name Everett, the scientist who embarked some considerable time ago with explanations of the nature of multiple universes. Things have moved on since his ideas became known. Now scientists have much more to say about the nature of the multiverse. When you have googled Everett, you need to return to this blog for guidance as to how you may begin your own personal exploration.

My review of the nature of other universes suggests that there are basically two main types, at least for the exploring beginner. You can think of these as the two groups of universes. The first group is made up of universes of fermions and the second group is made up of universes of leptons. These two universes interact and are interlaced, so movement between them is relatively easy. You could move between them, but in this day and age, you would not survive to remember that you came from one and arrived in the other. No, the fact is that our present technology for moving between universes is pretty awful. No worse, it does not exist! So what does one do?

Consider Acquiring the Wuh Lax Books

One to prepare your mind to visit multiple universes is to begin by reading the extremely interesting books about Wuh Lax and the extraordinary life of a child of destiny of the mid Roman period from Wookey Marsh in South West (I)England. It matters little when you live, but it makes a great difference whether you have adequate use of the written word and know how to record your adventures as Wuh has done. Search out the books. The books recommended here are intended to be a source of information on how to deal with the multiverse. They have been and are being written to follow the life experiences of a very early member of a very human family, the Lax family of early Roman Briton.

Lax is the early word for salmon, which is what you need to eat to travel the multiverse. Salmon helps your brain develop and helps you remain sane. In ancient times, it was regarded as the source of knowledge. Wuh's life adventures through space, the multiverse and earthly time form an exciting series of books that explore the vast world of relationships between all things, not just between people, but between different places, different spacetimes, different civilizations and cultures, different economic structures, different political formations, different meanings to the idea of giving life and limb, different ways to save oneself, different philosophies, different life experiences, different life challenges, different universes, and the many different forms of existence of sentient entities. There are many sentient entities and you need to understand why and how they relate to you.

My recommended way to begin is to read the series of books beginning with the Cosmic Lantern . These books are for any age of reader or viewer.

Understanding the Nature of Spacetime

Strictly speaking, time is just a concept we humans use to give us a sense of place, but we will soon have devices that make the concept of time a very mute point. More important is that we retain a concept of bifurcation. Notice how the number of Google results dropped dramatically. That is because most people forget about bifurcation in their thinking of time and space and time travel, space visitation. Bifurcation ensures that you can't kill yourself when travelling through space and time by doing something that ensures that you don't exist.

The only problem is that travel through spacetime is unfortunately not without limits. One has to deal with bifurcation. In their very nature, our universes have this big flaw. The original calibration set the stage for a very strange orchestration of creation in which we are dominated by bifurcation. The original architect of our 'known' world realizes this is frustrating for us, but as a consequence, there is no way that we will ever know or experience everything even when we develop the art of spacetime travel.

But, assuming that you can't spare the change for a book, or a series of books, there is another possibility. Just keep reading this and Wuh Lax's own blog.

Getting Serious About Finding Lost Balls

The very first principle about finding lost golf balls is that they are almost always in the rough. It is my contention that those most likely to be able to find golf balls are painters. It don't mean industrial painters, but those who can paint images in a painterly fashion. Such people are more likely to be able to distinguish small out of place blobs or pin pricks in an otherwise neat and tidy landscape. They will be able to find balls in fog, in the wet, in muck, in ponds and in tall grass along streams.

This is because the eye composition of painterly people has more rods than cones. Having more cones enables one to see colours better and to find extremely tiny discrepancies in a landscape or a painting. Having more rods helps one to see things more quickly and possibly crisper or less blurred, since rods hit on the location of things more quickly. You now see why painterly is better. This is because the artist or painterly person is also looking for a way to make the image something that hangs together in a meaningful way, an expression of originality. Such a person will see the ball as an anomaly, and be able to pin point its location as being in the place where something looks like a ball or looks a little anomalous. The downside of being painterly may be that one needs more rods than cones to be a good golfer, since golfing may require seeing something very small and not blurred out of the corner of one's eye when one is in full swing.

You will have guessed that a good eye doctor will be able to tell you whether or not you will be good at finding golf balls, were eyesight the only thing that you needed. In my view, the most valuable asset to finding golf balls is being a novice at golf or being really unskilled. Such people will find golf balls where they hit them. They need only to remember that after one hits a ball, one must never take one's eye off the last place that one expects to find the ball. Last being the operative word here!

If a ball flies into a place that is very uncomfortable, such as a brier patch, or a place of poison ivy or stinging nettles, or a place that is wet, or on the side of a steep cliff, it will more difficult to find. Such places can be expected to hide more golf balls. It is advisable to carry a very fast high definition digital camera with one and as soon as the ball is about to disappear from sight, one takes a picture. Lining up with the point of disappearance and walking in a dead straight line, one can simulate the direction of an errant golf ball. One should always have a long pole scooper with one when playing golf. This allows one to scoop a ball from one side of a stream to the other, from within a thick gorse bush, from a pond or stream, or from a sand pit that is full of water.

My advice to one that wishes to find gold balls as well as I do, is to eat lots of cooked carrots on a regular basis. Cooked carrots are best because the cooking releases the good stuff for your eyesight in the carrots. Eating raw carrots gives you enzymes which may or may not help you, but it certainly means that you won't eat as many carrots. Another thing that you can do is to drink a glass of carrot juice every morning. This not only helps your eyesight, but may also help you to live longer.

If a ball flies into an area of long grass, such as a rough, or a place with snakes, or things that bite, it will be more difficult to find. In England and Scotland there is a bush called a gorse. These are prickly bushes that will almost always contain a few lost balls. Many of the balls will not be visible even if one makes one's way into the center of the gorse.

The Art of Finding Golf Balls

Some things are more like a skill and some things are more like a science or art. The activity of finding golf balls is arguably more like a science or art. My reasoning is that many people lose golf balls, and many of these are highly skilled individuals. Their main interest is in hitting a ball towards a very specific target. The more skilled the golfer is the less likely he will lose a golf ball. When a skilled player lose a golf ball this is due to really difficult conditions. The ball is very well hidden in the more obvious places and closer to the shorter grass, and yet it cannot be found. This takes a lot of skill.

On the other hand, a novice and unskilled player loses many more balls and many of these are in well off the preferred places. I should know because I am a very unskilled player and I lose lots of golf balls. But, here's the rub. I find many more golf balls than I lose. In an average game, I will often find more than a golf ball per hole, which sometimes means that I end up with more than another nine or eighteen balls to play on the next round. You might say that I am developing, perhaps unconsciously, the art or science of finding golf balls. I am definitely not developing much in the way of playing golf. Thus, there seems to me to be more in the way of an art and science going on with my game than the development of a golfing skill. That does not mean that I enjoy the game any less, but that I get more pleasure than the average person who only plays to hit a ball in a hole. I play golf to be artistic, to develop the science of finding golf balls inobtrusively, to demonstrate skill in playing the game of golf by getting the ball in the hole with less shots over time.

If we look up the definition of art in the online dictionary, we find that it means "the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance." Another definition is "skill in conducting any human activity." If we look up the definition of skill in the online dictionary, we find that it means "the ability, coming from one's knowledge, practice, aptitude, etc., to do something well." What you immediately notice is that a skill is not necessarily an art. It would seem that an art is a little more than a skill. It would seem that if one is artistic in something, one is skilled in that something. So being an artful golf player would seem to be of a higher order than being a skilled golf player.

Now what would give the game of golf the element of beauty beyond the mere description of skill. In my opinion, one could say that an artful golfer is a golfer that knows not only how to play golf but also how to hit golf balls so that they can can be easily found. It follows that the less artful golfer may hit a ball into the cup, but that only makes him skilled at golf. To be artful at golf in the way I am describing one must not only hit the ball into the cup, one must also know how to lose the ball in a beautiful or appealing way. Its best, of course, if one doesn't lose a golf ball at all, but if one is destined to lose the ball, one should have a bit of taste in the way one goes about it.

Because I have mastered the art of finding a golf ball, I believe that I am a more artful golfer, not by definition but as a consequence of having developing a finding skill, which I would think is very much more like an art and science than a skill. When I lose my golf ball in an artful way it is so well hidden that I can never find it, but in the process find many other golf balls that were hit in much less artful ways.

The beauty in losing a ball comes from the impact that it makes when others observe you losing the ball. One of the most dramatic ways to lose a ball, is to hit it into a lake or pond. It makes much more of an impression on the observer if one does this within a few feet of the pond. That would seem illogical, but remember that art and skill don't really have that much in common.

Now what am I really driving at when talking about losing one's balls, is the problem that many reviewers of art have with images they are viewing on a canvas. To realize that to be artistic does not necessarily mean that you need to be skilled is to realize that a really good painting does not really have to demonstrate very much in the way of skill. It is enough that it create a slash much like a golf ball plunking in a lake for it to be good art.

Interest in the Mysterious Can be Lost

One of the attirbutes of a truly well educated person, is that such a person does not lose interest in the mysterious. Life in a world environment such as ours has to be full of surprises. Thus, it is that there is no valid theory of everything. There may be a theory of something, but not everything. There will always be a mystery to solve. That is what continuing education is all about.

When we open ourselves to learning on a continuing basis we open ourselves also to the mysterious. Those that think everything has been discovered cannot be right, they may think that for them, it is time to put up the feet and rest away from a world that is continually evolving. They have only defined what for them seems a best policy. Such people choose to ignore the change going on about them. They also perhaps do not realize that nothing is permanent.

One surity that we all experience is that everything has a life and death process attached to any state that it may have. All frozen ice eventually melts. All solid rock eventually loses its solidity. Changes in everything mean that nothing material is what it seems to be. It takes on the nature of an object when in reality its most defining characteristic is that it is not an object over the longer term.

Our ancestors were possibly closer than we ourselves to an understanding of the changing nature of things. The closer they were to continuous change, the more difficult they found it to create something that lasted. It is our modern faith in the semi-permanence of things that gives us meaning. We see ourselves less a part of a changing environment and more a part of a world in which we can create a niche that is sustainable.

The big question is whether we have the ability to create something that is sustainable and permanent out of all the science and religious effort we spend in thinking we do things that are meaningful. A test of whether we create something lasting is whether or not it remains with us while we are living. We have less control over things when we are dead, but if we have not control over them while we are living, it defies reason that we can find meaning in our efforts.

What gums up the works of one trying to achieve a sort of niche or permanence is the realization at some point that we are all subject to the mysterious world that we know nothing about. Our interest in the mysterious world needs to be sustained if we are to find meaning, for the one thing that will reduce our efforts to change is the participation of the mysterious in the period after we give up our efforts to create something that has lasting value. This is the ironical aspect to our existence is that we have around all the time a world of mysteries, a world that is infinitely greater than we can ever imagine, that will ultimately reduce all our efforts to something we would never recognize.

If we were to live long into the future, our biggest problem would be that we could not keep up with the rate of change around us. The mystery that surrounds us all the time is the very vastness of the world we inhabit. It is so vast that it is almost incomprehensible that we could ever exist at all, and when we do realise that we do exist, we may or may not also realize just how small a part we play in the vastness of the world we were born to. It's almost as if we were never born.

But that is the whole point isn't it. If we assume that we are what we see that we are, we make a huge mistake. We are nothing like what we see that we are. We are and must be much greater and significant. It's as if the whole world was made for us. During our stay in the world it is up to us to take note of who and what we are in what we think of as the present, to remember ourselves and to realize that we are not what we think we are. No way are we ever even close to what we think we are!