If you see where you are in the diagram to above, you will see why it is so hard to grasp what is going on.

The seeming intractability of such problems is caused by the fact that you can never discover the source of the percept in the percept, due to the way you are situated in relationship to it. Plato described this as a cave, and from this come numerous mystical philosophies such as Emanationism, Illuminationism, etc. In this chart we simply update the metaphor into a more modern form – taking into account clues we know now that we did not know then, such as quantifiable natural laws. The principles remain the same.

But there's no harm in addressing some of these concerns.

How do we know there are truly other minds? When you dream, no one ever tells you anything true you didn't already know. It is impossible because in a dream you are the only mind and contain all there is worth knowing, even the contents of the apparent other minds in the dream. Life is different. In life, people constantly tell you things you never guessed. You can go and confirm these things. You can prove to yourself that others have mental content that you don't have. So you can't be the only mind.

The idea that you might be a disembodied brain in a vat, fed electrons simulating sense data by a mad scientist, is interesting as a narrative, but not very interesting philosophically. The scenario assumes that much of the content of the brain’s experience is in fact correct – that there are other minds (the scientist), that there are computers, that brains are brains and the scientist has a body with a brain, that at least one other person has had similar ideas to the brain’s (the computer programmer). This whole idea presupposes that the world beyond the brain’s experience is much like that experience. But note carefully the absence of profundity in the scenario. Beyond being a somewhat novel paranoiac story about the kinds of tricks that might be played on us outside our range of view, the scenario is strangely incurious about the more interesting questions, such as how the scientist knows that there is a world outside his experience? And so forth. Regrettably, bad things do occasionally happen, and sometimes they happen in places we can’t see. But such imaginative scenarios are not rightly called philosophical. They are mere amusements by people who have not yet developed much intellectual discrimination.How do we know our logic about the primary and secondary qualities is right, when it is already established that intuitions used to form logic have no sure justification independent of experience of those intuitions? From a purely intellectual point of view we simply don’t. The way that contemplatives have traditionally dealt with their own limitations is to seek a teacher or examine the testimony of scriptures. Plato learned from Socrates, Aristotle from Plato. Socrates was a master. Spiritual inquiry divorced from respect of the perfect masters and the Avatar is barren and bound to be fruitless and frivolous. Shankara interpreted the Upanishads. Meher Baba learned from Upasni Maharaj, Maharaj from Sai Baba. There is no being a maverick on the path of gnosis.

Someone once wrote to Meher Baba about a scientist who was keeping a monkey brain alive by feeding it blood from a donor monkey in a grotesque and cruel manner. He claimed this proved the soul of the monkey was in the brain. This was in 1967. Baba asked that the scientist be sent a copy of God Speaks and that he write to him immediately. The correspondence has not survived. This is all I can think of to say. One can only read God Speaks, the Vedas, the scriptures of the great traditions, or seek a master directly. All this that I am writing, right or wrong, is in one way or another no more than an interpretation of God Speaks, with an eye to shedding light on certain scientific and metaphysical points, and integrating those points into a cohesive spiritual metaphysics that might be of use to others.

The aim of dnyana is different from what people ordinarily call intellectual inquiry. While logic seeks to distinguish truth from falsity, the path of gnosis seeks to distinguish the real from the illusory – knowledge from delusion. The first relies most heavily on inference from axioms, but in the path of gnosis inference is only one provisional tool in a lengthy process of excavating and eliminating self-deception. The path of gnosis also uses the heart in choosing what testimony (such as what master or religious scripture) to trust that goes beyond its axioms, and it discriminates in the kinds of observations and judgments it should rely on, and what it relies on them for. In its quest for the truth dnyana marga (the path of gnosis) remains suspicious of its own judgments – never ideological about its methods or axioms as in the case of logic divorced of the heart.

Summing up, the path of gnosis requires a kind of shedding, rather than acquiring, of imagination. It works by respect for the teacher, observation, self-examination, release of false thinking once recognized – rather than by empty proofs based on axioms. It is an unearthing of the essential through the gradual removal of the unessential, in stages. Truth, in its traditional worldly sense, is derived by unexamined intuitions. For this reason it has been called “uncritical.” But true knowledge, i.e. gnosis, is uncovered by the seeker like the pealing of an onion, which amounts to the gradual refinement of the intuitions by recognition and purgation of hallucinations. As the mind is purged the intuitions grow finer, analogies become subtler, and eventually it is hard for the logicians, working uncritically and like automatons, to keep up.

Very often this leaves the logicians no choice but to judge the mystic, who has finer thinking than himself, in a poor light, as the one who is superstitious, obtuse, mysterious, or less epistemologically rigorous. The opposite is true, but only by experience is this understood. The logician deals almost entirely with projections of his own ego – and is disingenuous with himself. The dnyan, on the other hand, honestly seeks to overcome his projections by gradually discerning and overcoming his own fabrications, and thus conquering ignorance.

Chapter Four: Is there a me?

Most famous western philosophers are really not very good. There was a very famous French philosopher named René Descartes. René Descartes had a lot of trouble distinguishing his assumptions from what he really knew. This is all the worse because it was his intention to do exactly that.

One night Descartes stayed up late and meditated on his thoughts. He then asked himself what he was really certain of. His intention was to slough off all his presuppositions and begin fresh upon solid ground.He noticed that he could see the room, and ruminated that this appearance might be a trick being played on him by an evil demon and he wouldn't be the wiser. So he determined that he could infer nothing from his experience with absolute certainty beyond that he had it – much as we have previously said. Then he turned his attention to his linguistic thoughts, trying to examine them with the same honesty that he had afforded the room. But when it came to his linguistic thoughts Descartes came to some very odd conclusions.When he examined his thoughts, Descartes decided that, at the very least, he knew that he was a mind having these thoughts. He had the thought that since he experienced thinking, there had to be a thinker (since thinking implies a thinker), and this thinker had to be him. Thus he wrote his famous cogito, "I think, therefore I am."

Actually, for all his good intentions, assumptions clung to Descartes' intellect like barnacles to a ship lost in the fog.

When contemplating thoughts, there is no reason in the world to suppose (beyond ideology) that you are causing them. That thinking implies a thinker is a mere convention of speech.

If Descartes had wanted to strip himself of his assumptions, he would have done better to become a painter than a philosopher. For philosophers are taken in by their beliefs, and cannot detach themselves from thoughts enough to simply observe them impassively.

What do I see when I look at my thoughts? I see much the same sort of phenomena as I do when I look at the room. With eyes open I see a kaleidoscope I call "color" and to certain forms of color I assign words like "chair" and "window." To such words I further assign uses such as "sitting" and "staring." So, really speaking, I see only thoughts – colors, words, and definitions – the content of my mind with eyes open. It is all a game of giving name to form.

Now when I close my eyes, I see diffuse pictures and hear a diffuse voice. Through the belief that there is a me who has a voice, I assign my name to this voice.

Now I call all this that I see, with eyes open or closed, my percept. It is a gestalt, which taken all together I call the world. It is just by virtue of naming that I see some of it as real things, some as dreamt things, some as ideas, some as sounds, and so forth. So, really speaking, and I mean really speaking, I see thoughts through the veil of thoughts through the veil of thoughts.

But I can find no thinker at all in any of it. I can find no source of either thoughts with eyes open or thoughts with eyes closed in their field.

Where is its origin? I have no way to determine it for certain. From where does it spring? Obviously the same question can be asked of its owner. Whose thoughts are these? So far they aren't telling me.

Unlike Descartes, I recognize my idea of myself (as something independent of the percept) for what it is – simply another thought found in the percept.

I most certainly cannot, in good conscience, claim all the various things that Descartes has claimed, e.g. that he is a mind having thoughts, that God is another greater mind, that God is good by definition, that being good God cannot deceive him, thus the world has to be real, etc. How does he make this stuff up?

The artist who did this painting was named Henri Rousseau. According to my father, Lyn Ott, Henri Rousseau was a primitive artist, which means he had no formal education in art and was self-taught. He was also a customs officer. One day Rousseau said of Picasso's paintings, which he could not understand, "Picasso and I are the two most important painters, me in the modern style – and him in the Egyptian style." My father used to laugh and laugh.Similarly there are two main explanations for human experience, the evolution of consciousness as explained by Meher Baba and all mystics before him, and the deus ex machina explanation. A deus ex machina (lit: god from the machine) was a method of solving story problems in ancient Greek theatre. When the writer couldn't think of a way to solve all the plot problems at the end of the story he would arrange to have a crane lower in a stone statue of a god. Then the god – someone hidden from the view of the audience speaking for the statue – would magically solve all the problems. To this day the term refers to an artificial or improbable device resolving the difficulties of a plot, a cheap seemingly magical solution to a problem, or an unexpected solution for someone in a hopeless situation.First understand the deus ex machina explanation of experience. Take an individual, a man or an elephant. How do we explain how its experience arises in it as it does, with primary and secondary qualities? Easy. We hypothesize an invisible, odorless, untestable, indescribable inert material. Now we define this inert invisible undetectable material as "the cause." By defining it this way, the inert something is by definition the cause of everything including experience. That's it. Problem solved. It’s impossible to refute.The only problem with this machina (in the modern case – matter) is that we are left still with the machina to explain, along with how it causes experience. Whereas we began with only our experience to explain, we wound up with our experience and its explanation, matter, to explain.The modern deus ex machina theory is of course materialism. It is impossible to mount a refutation of materialism because it has no arguments of its own to refute. It offers no account of itself. That is why I say it is a deus ex machina. It works by magic if anything at all and is entirely unsatisfying. It is a cheap solution that leaves one stupefied and thirsting for answers. Like Tinkerbelle it only lives if you clap your hands and believe.

Materialism is appealing to some who pose as contemplatives precisely because of its magical nonsensical quality. It works because you say so. It can't be argued about because it has no articulation. It causes no concerns because it can't be understood. Its existence can’t be disputed because there is no test for its existence. It's a deus ex machina.

In fact, I would write a lengthy section about how materialism is supposed to work, so the reader could examine it, if there was something to write. I did my master’s thesis on materialism, and there just isn’t. All that can be said is that materialism is the view that there is an invisible substratum of matter that you can’t see and the primary qualities like number inhere in it. And this archaic enlightenment-era turn of phrase is believed to somehow (no explanation is yet forthcoming) explain your secondary experience called “sense data.” Materialism is actually defined as the belief that ‘some day everything will be explained in terms of matter.’

ma·te·ri·al·ism -noun

[muh-teer-ee-uh-liz-uhm]

the theory that physical matter is the only reality and that psychological states such as emotions, reason, thought, and desire will eventually be explained as physical functions

(Encarta World English Dictionary © 1999)

Now, besides materialism, there is a second explanation for experience, along with its dual quality nature. It is a process (or evolution) of conditions that are found every day operating in our experience and doesn’t require positing a mysterious invisible metaphysical entity. To see how process theories work, let's take a look at one in service today.

How did contemporary geologists go about guessing how the continents got into the positions they are now in? First they examined the processes that can be found still occurring on the Earth, such as volcanism, subduction, and erosion. Then they measured the rate of these ongoing processes. Based on this information they extrapolated how such processes, over a long period of time, might have caused the continents to take the shape they now have. This field is called "plate tectonics."Similarly, with a process of evolving consciousness, we search within our mind for ongoing processes, such as sight, memory, and apperception – and we extrapolate backward to a simpler state of these conditions.Just as in plate tectonics we discover that once the continents were unified as the continent geologists call Pangaea, we speculate that individual perception was once unified in a state that some mystics call the Universal Mind.Materialism is not a process theory like these. It is a steady state theory from an era when that was the only kind of theory that there was. It requires inventive imagination, a strong desire to believe that the conclusion is right regardless of absence of evidence, and is marked by a lack of genuine curiosity. It is faith-based – in the sense that it is grounded in belief without evidence. And it is superfluously metaphysical – in the sense that it is entirely immodest in its reliance on mysterious unobserved agencies and entities with no clear explanation of their nature or account of their declared causal power. And it is irrational in that it offers no justification whatsoever for its axiom that matter will one day explain experience (and everything else), beyond a kind of complacent timeworn familiarity that it incorrectly calls "intuition." The sensation that materialists ascribe to their intuition is actually the quality that mystics call gross or ordinary consciousness – the baseless sensation that sense objects (like cups and saucers) are the ultimate reality and that their cause must therefore be analogous to them.

Evolution of consciousness requires unflinching honesty, disgust for complacent acceptance of the baseless, willingness to reexamine assumptions shown to be groundless, deep observation and introspection, acceptance of facts as they present themselves, and reason.

Such a view as the evolution of consciousness can be intellectually calamitous to the individual for a period of time, because it demands that the contemplative give up age-old and deeply rooted beliefs. But the fact that it resolves riddles materialism cannot, addresses questions materialism fails even to pose to itself, and is intellectually and emotionally satisfying to the individual who contemplates it, offers a great deal of compensation.

There are at least ten questions materialists can't answer.

• 1. How does matter cause experience? Allusions to nervous systems are a red herring and avoid the question. Materialists know this.

  2. What does the theory of matter account for besides and beyond what supposedly really is real, i.e. matter? Doesn’t materialism only accomplish this feat by defining “matter” as the only reality? What if this definition is the result of a wrong belief by the definer? How would you know?

  3. How did or do the natural laws evolve? Are they material? If not, what is their ontological state? Explain better what you mean. How do you know? How is this answer consistant with materialism?

  4. What existed prior to the Big Bang? Was this a material state? Whether yes or no, by what method was this determined?

  5. What prompted the Big Bang to occur?

  6. Is a moment in time for the Big Bang a coherent concept?

  7. What is time? How did time emerge? Explain the mechanics by which time arose precisely, without inventing anything that cannot be observed within or around us.

  8. What is space besides “space?”

  9. What is the logical justification for modus ponens?

  10. What is the cause of healthy human intuitions, and by what faculty do you know this?

Decade after decade materialism has survived through evasion, obfuscation, red herrings, band wagon, appeal to authority, straw man arguments, ad hominem circumstantial (attacking the sanity or judgment of the arguer, rather than his argument), intimidation, and posturing. Such methods never satisfy the heart and mind of a true contemplative.

Chapter Six: "The Matrix" as a depiction of materialism

on objects it sees – like old comic strips of Superman’s heat vision. Such a person is making the mistake of imagining seeing like it's air or water. That's called an "analogue." He's thinking of something nonphysical – seeing – as if it's "analogous" to physical stuff. That's a problem. I can’t overemphasize how common such a problem in thinking is, or how much it impedes progress.Meher Baba was not only very smart and knew everything, but he was also very considerate of where people are and how they think. He knew their limitations but also wanted them to progress beyond these limits. He knew how people think, so he took the things he wanted to communicate and he explained them in a way that people could just barely get if they really tried, even with their very physical kind of thinking.So to make metaphysical things clear enough for people to focus on in order to progress, he used simple analogues that his devotees could picture, like drops and an Ocean, to explain issues of spirit and Existence.

But more privately, when Baba wanted to take certain people deeper into his gnosis, if they were duly prepared as his mandali were, he used finer, somewhat less physical, analogues – but still things from their experience they could relate to. So, for instance, in the Infinite Intelligence Notebooks taken from more private discourses given directly to his early disciples, Baba speaks about experience more like it is, using the word “oopabhog (meaning enjoyment or taking the experience of),” and sanskaras more as they are – analogous to glasses on the eye.

So the seeing of the shadow or the experiencing of the universe is done by his eye according to the glasses, i.e. subtle and gross forms, that his eye receives; and these glasses are produced opposite the eye according to the past impressions attached on the eye. (Infinite Intelligence)

Were Baba to use no analogies at all from our experience, we wouldn't have a clue what he meant.

Now, one of the reasons my own writing in the past was difficult to understand is that I often write in finer analogues or no analogues from the physical world at all. So, for instance, I will speak of perceptual schemata (ways of organizing experience) or of the process of psychological apperception, and I will give examples of sensory processes at work in experience that the reader can discover in his experience by examining its workings, but few or no analogies.

Nothing appears to be more difficult than when I talk about perception, for perception is something I don’t understand in a discursive linguistic way, but is rather intimately familiar to me in a way I can’t easily articulate. Sometimes I ask the reader to notice his seeing. But this is really confusing for some readers because people aren't sure if I mean the things they see like the things in the room they are in, or something else. So I explain I don't mean the impression they experience of things in the room. That, I explain, is the image or the percept. I mean the actual act of seeing like a verb. I have learned through trials that it is hard for many people, but not all, to hold their perception in their thoughts this way. As I have said, they are used to thinking of things like rocks and water and not at all designed by nature to think about the act of seeing the rocks, divorced from the rocks.

So that's what's so hard about much of my writing. It's the subject matter, not the language. Or this is what I now suspect.

So now that I've explained all this, the reader ought to be more than prepared for me to explain some of my most basic ideas – in very broad terms – in simple words.

There really is only perception.

There isn't even someone doing the perceiving.

If there is a seer, it is seeing itself.

If there is something seen it is the result of the act of seeing – and is nondifferent from the seeing itself.

Now if there is only perception, then it is no contradiction to assume that there are ways of perceiving. Just as, if there were only running, there would be no contradiction in saying there are ways of running.

I discern from reading Baba’s writing that these ways of perceiving (sanskaras) evolve and collect to produce an image.

This evolution of ways of perceiving (sanskaras) happens first in perception in its undifferentiated state of course. For by what manner of perception would it have to be divided?

Now, as this undifferentiated state of perception evolves, it gradually gives rise to individual states of perception called atmas, which are really only apparent states in the undifferentiated, caused by the accumulated ways of perceiving (sanskaras).

So, we take this always from the Beginning and move forward to see how this miracle of the self’s apparent emergence takes place.

First, time evolves in perception. Time is a way of perceiving. Seeing temporally causes things to be seen temporally.

Next is space. Space is a way of perceiving. Seeing spatially causes things to be seen spatially (with extension).

All natural laws are relations of space and time.

So now, relations of space and time evolve as new ways of seeing – and this is called the rise of natural laws.

Natural laws are ways of perceiving – laws of perception.

For example, seen through the law of gravity, things will be seen to fall.

These laws of seeing evolved even before there were any ‘things’ to be governed by them, e.g. gravity evolved as a way of seeing before there was anything to be seen falling.

So if the laws of nature are laws of perception, note the enormous implication:

Scientists can describe absolutely EVERYTHING about physical objects and their motions in terms of natural laws. This is not an exaggeration.

So when it is said that the natural laws are really laws of perceiving, nothing is left out of this account of physical things seen.

So speaking truly – all that is (physically) is seeing. And all that is ever happening (physically) is seeing and ways of seeing.

All living forms are reducible to natural laws, not simply governed by them. Thus arises in physical evolution the individual creatures.

The creature, i.e. the organism, is then the lens through which perception begins to perceive as an individual.

The brain and nerves of the organism evolve further. As it evolves more is seen, heard, smelt. Soon thinking evolves via ways of seeing. Seeing signs as symbols gives rise to words. Seeing objects through words gives rise to judgments, etc.

So the mental events also are caused by ways of perceiving.

For example, a man seeing a man through the schema of rich and poor, based on learned customs of dress and manner, he will see the man as rich or poor.

Now finally man finds himself in the world of his experience, when all the while his is nothing but Undifferentiated Perception that never went anywhere since it was never in space – but rather produced space in the act of seeing spatially. Perception never really moved forward in time, because it wasn’t in time – but produced time in the act of seeing temporally. Perception was never really conditioned by the laws of nature, because Perception produced the laws of nature by seeing in terms of them. Perception was never really a thought because Perception produced thought in the act of seeing things as signs symbolically. Perception was never a thing, because perception produced things in the act of seeing in terms of name and form.

This is consistent with Meher Baba’s principle book God Speaks. Creation is contained in the Universal Mind and is sustained by God seeing it. In jivatma (incarnate man) state, God sees the world as an individual, and this seeing sustains the world for him. In Paramatma (God) state, God, focused upon God, would see God, but being seeing itself there is nothing for God to perceive, but only Be. He knows everything for there is nothing but Himself to know, and he is formless and colorless. So what is there to know? What is there to see? He simply is. All that is apparently seen and known in illusion by man or the Universal Mind is the result of Maya (trickery of evolving imagination).

I'll repeat my main thought.

All that is is seeing and ways of seeing.

That’s it.

Remove the obstructions to seeing, the schemata of seeing, the sanskaras, and you see clear – you see your Real Self – by which you see nothing at all. You simply ARE.

Now this might frighten someone. But Baba tells us that this state is a state of Bliss and equipoise, and not annihilation of Consciousness. Thus Bliss experiences itself as Bliss. When delusion is removed, suffering is removed. When suffering is removed, the Bliss that was all along there, but not experienced for it was latent in Unconsciousness, is revealed and never lost.

This notion of the endgame of Creation being the event where God overcomes delusional separation from Himself is the ancient perennial knowledge you will find told in numerous ways in all mystical traditions. In the West it was expressed by the German philosopher Georg Hegel in the expression Spirit meets Spirit.

It is formulated in so many ways, and the many ways it is formulated can confuse people and make them think there are many stories. There is one story told in many ways, from many angles.

I like my formulation because I think it is accessible to our modern seeing-oriented screen-loving civilization. I even find meaning in the fact that so many of Meher Baba’s closest disciples were artists and screen artists. I also take heart that my book The Evolution of Perception & the Cosmology of Substance (2004) came out before I read the analogies in Infinite Intelligence (2005). This gives me hope I am doing some good for someone.

Just so I wouldn't die and leave my daughter not knowing what her Dad was doing – because it could be pretty hard to determine if you watched me – I asked her to memorize these words: "The laws of nature are laws of perception – seeing and ways of seeing." In a real sense, it’s really that simple. I hope I’m right. How can I know until I have the experience of Reality? But these thoughts encourage me to believe there is a Reality.

To make this idea that the laws of nature are laws of perception work brilliantly to explain experience accurately and completely as we receive it, it was important to propose an explanation for how there can be the objective world and at the same time our own individual experience of it, which is a little different for each person. It was very important to explain this. Even materialism cannot explain this. It just waits for an explanation.

To do this it was imperative to formulate the problem perfectly – explaining why there are two kinds of qualities we observe when we look at things. There are facts that are the same for everyone like relative measure, geometry, and natural laws, and things that are a little different for everyone such as how things feel, taste, and how we judge them. We had to explain how there were both "objective" facts and "subjective" facts.

This involved explaining how the two kinds of facts evolved, one from the other.

To explain this I posited a process that I now think is more easily understood from studying diagrams than words. I myself studied the central charts in God Speaks for years. I have the main chart framed in my living room and have literally studied it.

Explaining the chart above: The objective facts (same for everyone who measures them) are in the singular Universal Mind, while the subjective facts (more or less unique for each percipient who looks at them) are in the individual minds. The individual minds are contained in the Universal Mind, accounting for the fact that the objective and subjective experience are compossible and explaining why the individual has access to both – the subjective upon looking, the objective if he checks closer and thinks.

Another way to say this, and more accurate also, is that the individual minds are conditioned individually, and the Universal Mind is conditioned in a single stable way by the laws of nature. Since all individual minds are contained in the Universal Mind (or more accurately supervene upon the natural laws contained in the Universal Mind), they share the conditioning of the Universal Mind – thus each individual continues to see a persistent and stable objective world. But they do not share their individual conditioning (unless they do so by cultural accident). This then accounts for the apparent objective (stable) – subjective (relative) distinction found in ordinary human experience.

There are many fascinating implications to all of this. One of the most interesting is that it turns out to be an original idea. No one at Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, or Oxford has thought of this. The reason I know that is that three of my professors were from Harvard, one was from Stanford, one from Cambridge, and a friend studied philosophy at Oxford. Plus I studied philosophy books written at all these places. There's no such thing as Arkansas philosophy, so I didn't have much choice.

Now when I read Infinite Intelligence I was delighted, though not surprised, to learn that Baba had used some of the same analogies that I did – the movie projector, the projectionist, the lenses of glass signifying the sanskaras or conditioning on the mind. So now I am pretty confident that I am not far off the mark.

But, like I said, this is difficult. If people feel more comfortable with other analogies like the Ocean and drops then they should not worry. Baba gave them too. For all I know my ideas could do people damage by confusing them. So choose what’s right for you using your own discrimination. Baba is perfect. I’m absolutely positive I’m not.

I see twelve hopeful things about this model.

1. Understood properly and in its entirety this idea expressed in my charts and writing gives a lucid account for the evolution and apparent presence of time, space, and the fixed reliable natural laws. Prior to this there was no explanation at all. That's very exciting. When I was twelve years old I buried a time capsule on the Meher Spiritual Center that contained a letter titled “Note to future scientists.” Maybe now I have something to tell them. The time capsule is still there, by the way.

2. This idea explains gravity in a metaphysically simpler way than the General Theory of Relativity and certainly simpler than String Theory. It has ‘less moving parts’ as one kindly reviewer of my book once wrote on Amazon. And metaphysical simplicity, less moving parts, is the criterion science uses for choosing theories. It's called "Occam's Razor." That's exciting too.

3. This idea, when fleshed out as it is in my book, accounts for numerous things that no one could explain before, such as the ontology of mathematics, color perception, the rise of the human psyche etc.

4. As of this writing, the most progressive theory of language was developed by linguist and social philosopher Noam Chomsky. In my book I explain why my own theory of language, which falls naturally out of my idea, actually succeeds in accounting for the rise of language, while Chomsky’s fails to correctly isolate the central issue and thus necessarily fails as an account. That's extremely exciting for linguists.

5. This idea can account for what is called the primary-secondary quality distinction in philosophy without having to propose an unobservable substance like other philosophers have been forced to in the past. This means that the system I propose is (perhaps some would think ironically) less metaphysical than materialism.

6. This idea explains the speed of light without producing paradoxes. Einstein's paradoxes are the cause of scientism, which I argue is one of the six plagues on modern intellectual thought and development.

7. Most important to me, this idea is completely consistent with the teachings of Meher Baba, as well as Advaita Vedanta and Illuminationism.

8. This idea explains everything (both physical and mental objects) without postulating anything new to explain. Materialism, on the other hand, was totally incapable of explaining time, space, natural laws, or human consciousness. It couldn't even explain how matter arises or even what they meant by matter besides “that which is real.” Matter creates a useful model for physical chemistry, but little else. Similarly, Ptolemaic astronomy (the old Earth based solar model) is still useful for nautical navigation. Models ought not be confused with reality.

9. This idea produces a far more elegant and robust theory of money. I show this later on.

10. This theory obviates numerous diffuse other theories, supplanting them with a single unified theory.

11. This theory, as far as it goes, has no loose ends that anyone has been able to determine. It explains every quality of experience, both actual and potential, by explaining it away as a way of perceiving, or perceptual schema, even itself as a theory. The only thing it cannot explain away is the unified perceiver, i.e. God. Yet is does this without making a second zat (reality) outside of God, which would contradict God’s omnipresence. Thus it is completely consistent, if different, as far as I know, with the few mystical schools that Meher Baba upheld without qualification.

12. This idea explains everything while positing nothing. Thus, given Occam's Razor and extrapolating it to its ultimate conclusion, this idea is the ultimate idea. Thus to my mind it must be nearly true.

Now is God really just perception? I don't know. I don't think so. What I gather is that such a view would be closer to Buddhism than Advaita Vedanta.

But perception, something we take for granted everyday though we cannot see it, is the closest thing we can find in our own daily waking lives to what spirit is – if it is not spirit itself. I once wrote that perception is not consciousness but we enjoy our consciousness as perception.

If God is more than his creative and impulsive imagination I have no way to know, but I doubt that He exists apart from his nature. And creative and impulsive imagination, i.e. creating by seeing, is his nature. I think of this impulsive and creative imagination that we enjoy as God’s own. I guess that's like saying I think God is imagination and beyond imagination. He is the imaginer, the imagined, and beyond the distinction. He is incomprehensible, but not as incomprehensible as matter.

Seeing Through and Seeing As

Below is a visual metaphorical model of my idea of a process of perception as described in my book, The Evolution of Perception & the Cosmology of Substance. This model (and the theory in my book) explains what is known in philosophy as "the primary/secondary quality distinction." It also gives an account for experience that is missing from contemporary models of reality based on the corpuscular theory of reality that is fashionable in western philosophy at the moment. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it entails a view that we are all fundamentally of one cloth metaphysically, a view which, in my opinion, has powerful ethical implications.

It may help to understand that my background is in cinema and philosophy. I have been a projectionist, a camera assistant, have a degree from U.S.C. film school and a masters in philosophy. Thus it should be little surprise that I adopt a cinematic metaphor to explain a philosophical theory of perception.

Think of perception as light. Call it "the light of consciousness." This light is all that is.

If we want to speak of God we would say that God is this light – the light of consciousness. This light doesn't have consciousness. It is consciousness. It doesn't have imagination. It is imagination.

What but imagination can imagine? What but consciousness can be conscious? What but perception can perceive? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Now use this analogy. God imagines ways of seeing, states of consciousness. Liken these 'ways of seeing' to lenses. God imagines lenses, and through these imagined lenses sees. But what does he see? What is the object of his perception? Light – because there isn't anything else. Thus God is both projector and camera. He sees nothing but himself through his imagined lenses. He is both what he sees (world) and what he does not see (witness). He is both what he takes himself to be (body) and beyond what he takes himself to be. There is nothing that God (light of consciousness) is not.

When God looks through his lens he sees only the light that he projects. And even the lens through which the world is formed and through which God is informed are nothing but figments of his imagination, thus not divided from himself.

What really exists in the absolute and eternal sense is the light. The percept (forged in the light caste through the lenses) is illusion—an ephemeral figment of God's imagination. Yet this illusion is not separate from God, nor independent of him. Just as a dream is not really separate from the dreamer nor independent of the dreamer. There is nothing but the light. Thus, illusion and reality both are of God. God is too infinite to be displaced by that which he creates out of himself, whether real or imagined.

He who knows everything displaces nothing. (Meher Baba)

Now think of a projector. For we are going to discuss the formation of things perceived.

The projector has lenses. They are nothing but light (God's imagination) but through these lenses the world forms in the light as appearances. God sees the light he projects from himself, caste into forms through the lenses. Being the light, God is really seeing Himself as all these forms.

To understand this we must understand the lenses and what they form in the world of appearances.

The first lens that forms in God's imagination is time. And after it comes space. And through time and space we have the potential for the distinctions of before-and-after, backward-and-forward. But the source of the light (the spectator, God) is really located back with the projector where the light source is. The source or spectator is not really "in" time or space.

Time and space (lenses in the imagination of God) do not really ever materialize except in appearance. So the light (spectator, i.e. God) never really enters into the world of time and space, for time and space are merely imagined ways of seeing. Likewise the dreamer of a dream never really enters his dream. But from the point of view of the mind of God that is immersed in his illusion (in the form of man) he finds himself convincingly in the world of time and space.

We are ensconced in the dimensions that arise in the percept as a result of these lenses. Thus they condition our minds and experiences. So if we ask, "Is God here or there; is he now or then?" the real answer is that he precedes as imaginer all such imagined distinctions.

Now we can use this analogy of the projector to see how the world forms, and especially to explain what is called

in philosophy the distinction between the objective world (same for everyone, such as the fixed formula of gravity F=Gm1m2/r2) and the subjective world (a little different for each observer).We account for this difference with the order of the lenses. When we understand the sequence of the lenses, we see why we find this objective/subjective quality distinction. The answer lies in the order of the lenses.Each lens forms the raw material for the next distinction. For example natural laws are merely variations on pure relations of time and space, and the body of a man (or animal) is merely variations of pure relations of natural laws.Study the picture above. In it lies the key to why the facts of reality were so hard to discover. Seeing the world through the distinction of time we say that there is time. And we cannot conceive of a world without it. This is because time is part of the fabric of our conception. Thus we cannot possibly discover the cause of our percept by simply examining our percept. It must be revealed by a master or through inspiration. This explains why western philosophy has moved in endless circles, chasing its own tail as it were. Time, space, and natural laws, we thought, must be independent of perception since they are the same for every observer. In fact they are independent of the individual's perception, but not independent of perception itself – for they precede in the perceptual process the rise of the sense of individuality. We have been mistakenly reading the effect (laws of nature) into the cause. This error in thinking is called the historical fallacy as described by philosopher John Dewey.

A set of considerations which hold good only because a completed process is read into the content of the process which conditions this completed result. (The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology, 1896)

Now look at the picture below. It shows where in the sequence of the process of perception the primary and secondary qualities (and the worlds that supervene upon them) emerge in the image.

The above illustration is meant to show that each person sees the same world conditioned by the primary lenses such as time, space, and natural law, but sees that world slightly different according to their own individual psychology and biology. Realize too that the psychology and biology they are using as a medium for interpreting their perception of the world of laws, is itself an outcome of those primary lenses that precede them in the process that is forming the image world. Thus, a way to think of this is that the world is partially formed behind them, and partially in front of them – behind them by God's lenses, in front of them by their own. The person arises in the middle out of the laws. Thus, like God, man is really looking at the light of God through his lenses.

Thus each person sees a slightly different variation of the same world. The world is filtered to the individual through the eyes and brain. But the one receiving the impressions is God himself actually. The one who searches is God himself. The one who becomes confused is God himself. The one who realizes his true original nature is God himself. This non-difference between the individual and the whole is called nondualism, the view that there is no true separation in time or space because time and space never really existed at all. Thus division (world) is illusion and unity (light) is reality. But both are Divine because both originate in God and remain in God for there is nowhere to go but God.

From the point of view of one who has not gone beyond Maya, it seems that there are as many individuals as there are minds and bodies. In Truth there is one Universal Being behind the minds of seemingly different individuals, who through them has the experiences of duality. (Meher Baba)

It is truer to say that the world is in you than that you are in the world. (Meher Baba)

Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:21)

What is unique about this view is that it does not fall into the spiritually paralyzing trap of "mind idealism" where human intellect is the ultimate reality. Rather it is both perceptual idealism and perceptual realism and obliterates the distinction, for the world that people and living creatures experience is the actual world. In this view Plato's forms become ways of seeing and lose their ontological existence – ceasing to be mysterious metaphysical things. The image world is the only world to see, not a faint copy of an ideal primary one. Thus it is the first system to escape what is called representationalism, the idea of perception as a faint copying of something unseen. Even materialism has never successfully escaped this intractable noose, where the so-called qualia of experience are believed to represent an unseen unheard mysterious substratum. The system also is compatible with both biological evolution and an all-creating, all-knowing, all-seeing God, yet does not collapse into anthropomorphism or atheism. It is even compatible with existentialism and one could do away with the idea of God if they had too many bad emotions tied to the word "God". So it is a very elastic and adaptive basic concept. It represents a generalized shift in paradigm, a turning inside out of our old conceptions, but not a new dogma.

Another note of interest is that this model obliterates the need for a model of an atom – if one wanted to take it to an extreme. The natural laws (including quantum ones) are reassigned as perceptual schemata, or regular ways of organizing experience, rather than properties of tiny entities, a manner of thinking that seems to have no conclusion as we subdivide and subdivide and never seem to find the working core of reality.

If we were to sum this view up we would say that consciousness, which is real, creates matter, which is appearance. This isn't very original. What is original is the order of lenses and the notion of replacing metaphysical entities with a single repeating process.

In the evolution of perception, represented as progressing from left to right in the above chart, each perceptual schema (represented as pink ovals or lenses) gives rise to the raw material for the next perceptual schema. As they emerge in God's imagination, the impression they produce supervenes with the previous impression to form the world of appearances. The world of appearance is what we refer to as the phenomenal world. The world is illusion in every sense of the word, a complete chimera, a delusion. Yet what arises out of this process is God's own awareness of his existence. God himself is cause and world (appearance) is effect. Only the cause (God) ever truly exists. God (who is invisible) exists. The world (that appears) is illusion.

Post-modernism

One of the problems that faces our time is the view of relativism. For instance, people seem to have misinterpreted the implications of quantum mechanics to be that the percept is entirely in the individual's mind. This misunderstanding is expressed in new age literature such as Seth Speaks and Jitterbug Perfume, and popular movies like What the #$*! Do We Know? The newly popular but confused view is that everyone has their own reality (ENTIRELY!). This has led to the false idea that the whole world is an expression of your own ego or thoughts. An individual's thoughts, it is falsely assumed, is causing the image world. How absurd!

What needs to be understood is that some of the world that you perceive is the same for everyone and some is an outcome of your personal biology and beliefs, i.e. an interpretation of that objective reality.

Currently the world is divided into two false views. One is that the world is independent of all perception – objectivism. The other is that it is dependent on an individual's beliefs – subjectivism. Both are wrong in that they are incomplete. The whole world is perception, but not the perception of the individual.

The above model accounts for both the objective and the subjective. It does away with the old false dichotomy that it is one or the other.

Another outcome of this confusion is the sense that there is no truth and that all beliefs are mere opinion – or worse – mere "language games" (Wittgenstein). This frightening view has led to two equally frightening responses. On the one hand you have a loss of respect for truth and a view that everyone has their own truth... and of course a totally self-absorbed way of living. The other is in reaction to this nightmare – fundamentalism. Fundamentalism (the reaction to relativism) is now leading us backward to a time of dogmatism and superstition.

In the new view it is possible to have a clear sense of reality, without succumbing to dogmatism. For one has a sense of what is true for all and what is not. And one need not choose between "all is individual" or "nothing is individual." So I think this view heals a terrible divide between relativism and fundamentalism.

Quantum Mechanics

Quantum mechanics has come to be associated with a lot of hocus pocus. People use the apparently amazing nature of quantum events to justify almost anything. This is a terrible state of affairs, as it leads to the argument from ignorance that can be abused to justify almost any claim. In the new view, quantum events are rather boring and trivial. In The Evolution of Perception & the Cosmology of Substance I explain what quantum events are and why they seem so bizarre. They only seem bizarre through the lens of the old way of looking at reality. In the new way they have no magic and they have no important implications. Quantum events, in recent times, have also been used to further justify that everything is in your head. This is a socially and scientifically dangerous misunderstanding. Quantum laws arise prior to the rise of individual mind. Thus individual observers are not creating quantum events as certain philosophers have thought. Nor are they very mysterious when understood in the context of an ordered process that gives rise first to individuality and then to the image world.

"Long ago a man picked up a stick and dug up some soft metal near the surface of the soil. From this soft metal he made a little trowel. With his little trowel he could dig much deeper and dug up heavier metal. With this heavier metal he fashioned a strong hand shovel. With this strong hand shovel he dug up even more metals, mixed them to make even stronger alloys, and from these new alloys he fashioned a steam shovel and many other machines like cranes. And with these cranes he built this city."As you see, the only way out of circularity is to postulate a process. Otherwise we fall into an infinite regress. The same story can be told about the image-world and how it was formed. "Long ago there was perception, but it had a whim to know itself and so it went seeking. Since there was only perception, perception had to invent a first way of perceiving so it could build something out of itself. This first way of perceiving was distinction or duality, i.e. splitting in two. But this wasn't enough for perception could not pull its distinctions apart from one another so it used distinction to make a particular kind of distinction which served as a medium in which to manifest its idea of distinction. And this way of perceiving was time. Time made it possible to perceive relations. Out of relations perception created natural laws. And out of these natural laws perception formed a body. And now looking through this body perception saw other bodies. And now using its old idea of distinctions perception divided the bodies it saw into up and down, good and bad, rich and poor. Then perception (seeing and moving about through the vehicle of its invented bodies) built buildings out of decomposed bodies (trees and stones) and shaped houses and roads and labeled some good and some bad, some sacred and some profane, etc. And then perception had created a world out of distinctions in a world that we call the world of duality, which is really only in the imagination of the one and only reality which itself never went anywhere since there was nowhere in reality to go. But by this time perception was quite caught up in this fantastic illusion it had formed and took itself to be this one and that one. Slowly perception (in the form of a man or a woman) began to question the distinctions it saw all around itself and wonder about its true identity. And one day it dawned on perception that perception had always been, always was, and always would remain the one indivisible source of all that it had come to perceive. Then perception no longer took itself to be the things it saw, but rather their source. And it saw that that impression was simply its own indivisible reflection in the world of forms. The world was of him, yet he was not of the world. In that moment perception realized that the world of duality was really nothing and that perception, its source, was really the everything.

In short, out of perception is formed the schemata of time and space. Out of the schemata of time and space are formed the laws of nature. Out of the laws of nature are formed individual bodies. Through bodies color, sound etc. are perceived. Through the schema of reference objects are seen as signs. Through signs language is formed. Through language intellect is born. Through intellect cultural schemata are perceived, creating the cultural world around us.

Mysticism

What does this model allow us to see that is of spiritual value? It helps us understand what is and is not real?What is important to see through this model is that that which is truly real (on the left of the above diagram), precedes or transcends the percept, i.e. does not fall into the scope of its imagined schemata (seen in the gray region of the diagram). In other words, God (or Self) cannot be understood in terms of the dimensions that we think in. Even to say "God is One" is merely a concept understood in contrast to duality. And no such contrast can apply. Thus the mystics say of the transcendental, "not one, not two." What they mean to communicate is that about the "I am" we can only speak in negative terms, for we have no schemata to understand it with.

To understand what we 'cannot' know and why is the end of philosophy (and the final frontier of human intellect) and the beginning of mysticism. If this model allows one to see this single idea then it is of value. Of course the 'eye picture' on the left is simply a symbol that maps to nothing that we can conceive. It is more a 'place-marker' for what we cannot know with the mind.

Comparing the Old Model and the New

The old model was called 'representationalism.' That idea is that you are looking at something primary (noumenal or mathematical) and interpreting it with your brain. The new model is different. It is a seeing through invented evolved schemata (ways of organizing experience) and the result is seeing as. Each perceptual schema brings complexity to the percept, which itself is nothing but a seeing as. In this sense there is no subject or object, but rather an evolved process of simply seeing. What I see is a result entirely of how seeing is occurring. The sensation of subject and object materialize out of this process. In a sense there is no seer or seen, but rather simply seeing. But this is nothing new to the mystics. In reality this is the truly old model.

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series, The Over-Soul)

The Holy Book of Science

Science is reasoned-based analysis of sensation upon our awareness. As such, the scientific method cannot deduce anything about the realm of reality that is beyond what is observable by existing means. — Lawrence Kuznar, Reclaiming a Scientific Anthropology

Picture a fictional planet that explains its corner of the Universe by imaginatively inventing magic invisible objects, forces, and substances. How easy it would be for the priests of this planet to explain whatever they wanted when their invented invisible objects could do it by a simple decree. Where is the scientific genius in that?

Now further picture this planet. If someone asks the priests for an explanation of these invented invisible magical entities, forces, and substances he is looked upon as a maverick. If he demands to see them he is told they are known only by their effects. If he asks for proof of this magical realm he is told that its existence is so self-evident that it requires no proof. If he asks the priests to articulate a way to comprehend these objects he is told they are beyond the mortal mind – asked for their cause the priests are silent. If this someone goes further and asks the priests how the invisible objects they speak of create the visible world, they are told that the priests don’t know, but that it is so obvious that they do that the question is silly.

That planet is Earth. And those priests are the magicians and sophists that have usurped the title of ‘scientist’ to perfume the expressions of their quasi-religion. The invisible objects are the forces and metaphysical substances that they insist are there that no one can see. This is not science at all. This is pseudo-science, and we have been living in a dark age of it for a very long time.

Science must find itself again, upon a renewed empirical footing.

Chapter One: Observation

What kinds of things can be observed?

• 1. Pictures.

  2. Sounds.

  3. Taste.

  4. Fragrance.

  5. Pressure upon the skin, pain, heat, cold, itch…

We’ll use the first as an example to make a point. We observe pictures. Where are these pictures that we observe?

Can we honestly say that these pictures, that appear to be in front of us, are actually in front of us? Isn’t this notion of a head on our shoulders with things in front and behind it derived from the picture itself? It makes no sense, then, to say that the picture, from which we are attempting to derive information about the location of the picture, is where it appears to be in the picture. Remember, it is the picture we are asking about, not the relative location of objects in the picture. How then can the picture tell us where the picture is? We only have the picture, and not a diagram of where the picture is. Now if we were to ask how the picture originated, from whence it arose and by what process, we would encounter once again the same problem.

Now observe still deeper. Do not give up observing what exactly you observe. Think back in memory on what varieties of experience you have had.

• 1. Emotion – such as light or heavy heart, butterflies in the stomach or a sense of strength and can-do energy, alert anticipation of the mind or boredom and disappointment, anxiety in the form of tension and fear.

  2. Strength and weakness in the body.

  3. Night dreams.

  4. Thoughts such as internal talk.

  5. Pictures in the head when we imagine or fantasize.

  6. Memories. Right now you are observing your memories to see if these things are present there.

Where are all these subtle experiences we observe located – such as our dreams and thoughts?

If we think they are in something called a mind, didn’t we get such a notion from our thoughts and thus from our mind?

Remember – our visual picture of physical objects can tell us where those objects are located relative to one another within that picture, but that visual picture cannot tell us where the picture is. This is because we cannot get a vantage point from outside our picturing to see where the picturing is occurring. Nor see what is causing it.

Similarly, the mind can show us a thought about thoughts, such as a theory, but the mind cannot observe the mind or how it comes into being. This is because, while the mind contains many marvelous and interesting thoughts, it cannot possibly tell us anything definitive about itself as a whole – but only its parts. It can merely guess and express its guesses using analogues borrowed from experience. This creation of analogues from experience to explain the mechanics of experience is pleasurable but not rationally justifiable. It is not really science.

At this point the mind rightfully gives up. For if we cannot get far enough outside of our experience to say anything definitive about experience itself, what is the point in talking about the subject? If the mind is smart it finds a guru at this point and surrenders itself to him. The guru is the one who has gone beyond the mind itself and thus knows the nature of the mind. Meher Baba is such a guru.

Chapter Two: Reason

Notice what is meant by intellect and notice what is meant by reason. By intellect we mean all the operations of the speaking mind, both smart and stupid, both good and bad, both mundane and profound, both passé and novel.

But by reason we are more specific. We mean only those thoughts that have a reason to be had, i.e. a justification or rationale. Furthermore, we do not mean some absurd rationale that could as easily lead us to falsity as truth, but only those rationales that could never lead us to a falsity but only lead us to truth.

How do we demarcate a just rationale from an unjust one, i.e. a good reason for holding a belief from a poor reason. The principle method is to test the justification by means of a counter-example. If someone offers a justification for a belief and you can show an instance where that exact same justification can lead to a false belief, then you have shown that it is an inadequate justification. In fact the initial laws of logic are derived in just this way – as simple and crude as it may appear.

But there is a second part of reason that arises only when we measure the veracity of a belief within the larger context of a full set of beliefs. This second part of reason is consistency.

If a system of beliefs can be derived by arguments that cannot be shown to lead to false beliefs, and secondly that system of beliefs does not contain an irresolvable self-contradiction, then that system is said to be a rational (internally consistent) system.

Now, the question will arise: can we have two systems that are both logically sound and internally consistent and entirely complete in their explanation of a particular phenomenon? The answer is yes. Thus it is possible to be rational and also wrong. The common example that is given is Aristotle who was entirely rational in his belief that the Sun revolved around the Earth (given the facts he had), but he was wrong.

Now this apparent inability of reason to determine truth with any degree of certainty would be enough to lead one to be a relativist or even a nihilist. It could make a person despair. But this pitfall is a chimera and can easily be transcended.

For, while a particular phenomenon, such as the relative orbit of two heavenly bodies, can be explained by two opposing systems, the Universe in its entirety cannot. There is only one rational system that can do that.

To understand the relationship between the global and the particular in explanations, consider this. The principal reason that Aristotle could not guess that the Earth orbited the sun was that he did not have a global enough picture of the movement of other bodies and the evolution of the Cosmos. Had he had a more complete body of information he likely would have. Having an incomplete picture of what it is you are trying to describe and explain can have a detrimental effect on the soundness of the system you form to explain it.

So in explaining the Universe in its entirety it needs to be understood what it is we are explaining – and with a completeness of observation that has not been previously practiced.

I do not mean we need to know all the facts about the Universe. There are too many. But we need to know all the facts about the nature of our experience of it. Once we fully grasp our experience of the Universe we can explain the Universe, where it is, and how it originated. But only a true guru (sat guru) can divulge its theme and purpose.

Chapter Three: Science as an examination of experience

It seems strange to say that science is a discussion of experience. But if it is not, then what is it a discussion of?

Science interests itself exclusively in experience because there is nothing else that it can, by its methods of observation, concede exists. For, if it creates a conjecture of some metaphysical separation between experience and the physical world, it can offer no justification. If it creates a conjecture of a metaphysical substratum that is not observed or observable then it has abandoned its tenets and embraced those of pseudo-science where anything is believed on a whim.

Now it is not controversial that a person only has immediate access to his own experience.

A professor tells you something to be true. The sound of his voice was found in your experience even if it did not originate there.

You think about what the professor has told you and come to your own conclusions. This thinking you have found in your experience. Regardless of how or where you might theorize that that experience originated, you find it in your experience. You can trace it no further except in your fantasies (theories) and even those you find in your experience only.

There is nothing you can talk about that you did not discover in your own experience. As you muse on your memory to see if it is true, you are musing on your experience. As you read this page, you are reading your experience of a page. You pick up the page and feel its temperature and texture and you are feeling your experience. Smell it and you are smelling your experience.

Even by the theories of science, disregarding for a second whether those ideas are true or not, you only have access to your own experience. Let me explain this, for it is helpful.

First the inorganic world (as public qualities) evolves in the Universal mind. Then the individual mind evolves in the Universal mind.

Thus you are seeing the public qualities (such as natural laws) from the vantage point of the Universal mind, and the private qualities (such as color and apparent shape) from the vantage point of the individual mind.

First the laws evolve as laws conceptually in the Universal mind. They are mathematical, geometric, i.e. purely conceptual. Out of the laws supervenes the body and organic world (not originally seen as such) and the body evolves by Darwin's laws. Once the body evolves enough to have brain and sense organs the public qualities (such as math) are seen as private qualities (such as color, sound, etc.). The body and brain are thus a medium or lens for converting primary qualities into secondary qualities. The relative location and condition of the body naturally shifts the image slightly and gives it an individual cast.

This so easily explains and accounts for the private and public qualities that it is hard to know what else to say.

Chapter Eight: The cosmology of substance

Note: The word "schema" means a way of organizing something. "Schemata" is simply the plural form of "schema."

Here I'll explain how the historical fallacy can be avoided.

Remember that the historical fallacy is when something found in an effect, brought about as the result of a completed process, is read into the process.

Going over it again – an example of this fallacy being committed would be imagining that the cause of our phenomenal world is much like our phenomenal world. When we fall victim to this fallacy while trying to explain the process that gives rise to our experience, we postulate metaphysical substances analogous to ones found in that very experience we're trying to explain, metaphysical moving objects analogous to ones we see, factors such as time and space analogous to those that condition our experience, etc. This is the primitive thinking that has caused an impasse for science. Once this primitive thinking is transcended, smoke clears and a full understanding of the mechanics of the Universe becomes attainable.

To avoid this error we must take special care not to postulate any metaphysical entities. Rather we must supplant the notion of inventing entities with consideration of an earlier evolutionary process of events and happenings that we already find all around us. By extrapolating a process of what is occurring, from simple to complex, rather than postulating original theoretical entities, we can avoid the errors of the past.

In addition we must not make the prior mistake of making an unfounded metaphysical claim that perception and the thing perceived are separate. By doing this we are inadvertently inventing a parallel world, and this is far too Platonic to work within the rules of science, which only accept what is confirmed by observation.

This does not mean that we assume that objects are in the individual mind – as in solipsism. This is a useless absurdity. Rather we must account both for the objective (public) and subjective (private) aspects of experience. Thus we speak of perception not solely as an individual possession, but as a global indivisible and self-evident occurrence. For no one would deny that perception is occurring. We thus postulate an evolution of this occurrence from simple to complex – and disregard the two-world metaphysics that has been our undoing.

We find that it is possible that the private experience is an outcome of an evolution of the public experience. For this to make sense, the public experience must evolve first.

Starting then at the beginning of this evolution:

Now if there is originally only a single indivisible eternal occurring of perception that sees nothing since there is nothing for it to see but itself, what could change this indivisible eternal occurring of perception in such a way that it would begin to see objects?

It is essential not to add anything to perception. That would just give us something else to explain. Thus we merely postulate 'ways of perceiving.' In the East these ways of seeing are called "sanskaras" and in my book I call them "perceptual schemata," by which I simply mean ways that experience might be organized.

The following is roughly how I explain it in my book:

The first perceptual schema was time. Seeing through and thus in terms of the schema of time (a way of organizing experience temporally) perception occurs temporally. The same is repeated with space. Seeing through and in terms of the schema of space, perception occurs spatially.

Through the schemata of space and time, pure relations (or ratios if it is more helpful) become conceivable to the Universal Mind that is beginning to emerge.

Now notice something: Space can only be understood in terms of time (i.e. through the schema of time) – for you must have here and then here. [In case this isn't understood, you can't conceive of a spatial separation between two objects when those two objects are conceived at the same time. A temporal sequence is necessary to apprehend a physical distance. Try it.] And motion is released as a potential as soon as you have both time and space. And natural laws (ratios of time and space) are conceivable as soon as there is time space and motion. Out of natural laws supervenes (through evolution) the inorganic world, and out of the inorganic world supervenes (through further evolution) the organic world. And in the organic world are forms with sense organs that allow perception to experience the organic world in terms of color, sound, and various other types of sense data. Thus the conceptual becomes tactile.

Notice that the phenomenal world (the complex world of experience) is accounted for without postulating any new metaphysical force or objects. All that is found in this 'story' is found all around us – such as time and natural laws and the self-evident occurrence of perception acting upon our awareness.

The first is the notion of curved space. This notion is an outcome of the same kind of primitive thinking that produced the material substratum. The idea of "bending something" is a geometric concept. Geometry is a spatial concept. Thus space, which conditions geometry, cannot be bent. Nor can time be traveled or be made to move backward. These are all errors born of imagining space and time as substances analogous to substances found in space and time like water or plastic.There is no "space time fabric of the Universe." That is a childish notion. Laws such as the speed of light are ratios of time and space, and as such cannot be understood in terms of just one or the other. This fact led to a new metaphysical "stuff." Einstein was a genius, but his metaphysics was unsophisticated. Had he understood Kant he might have seen his error. Einstein used his excellent ability for visual fantasy to create a metaphorical model of space and time that wound up working and predicting events in space/time. But he went further and thought this meant that his model was a real metaphysical reality. This led to the false notion that space or "spacetime" can be bent. It is a misunderstanding. Space and time are merely ways of seeing things, not things. When you see through and in terms of the schema of time you see temporally. When you see through and in terms of the schema of space you see spatially.Additionally, things that have wowed and perplexed people for a hundred years are almost banal through this new way of understanding. If you read my book you will see how badly special relativity has been understood.

I'll briefly go over it here.

The speed of sound is 768 miles per hour. But if you are in a jet and a sound wave is chasing you, the wave will "appear" to you to be going slower – and thus the crests of the wave farther apart. Therefore, if you heard the sound from the jet you are in, it would be lower than it would be if you were standing still.

But light is different. Its speed (186,000 miles per second) is the same whether or not you are standing still or moving. To understand how weird this is, I give this little illustration:

From Superman's point of view (he is traveling the speed of light) he experiences himself as not being able to keep up with the light beam. The front of the light beam appears to him to be 186,000 miles ahead of him – almost like he isn't moving at all. But if he looked back at the Earth he would see it is 186,000 miles behind him. What's going on? Remember, one second has gone by and he is traveling 186,000 miles per second, the speed of light. He should be keeping up with the light beam.From Lois' point of view it's an altogether different story. She sees Superman keeping up with the beam of light – flying right beside the front of the beam. What's happening?Had Albert Einstein, the first to guess that the speed of light was a constant, understood what time is he would not have been very disturbed. But Einstein thought time was something like the lines in his High School geometry book that he treasured all his life. So he fabricated an algorithm for a bendable space – one that bends differently according to the point of view of moving objects. This is where you get the notion of bending spacetime. It is just a misunderstanding of what time and space actually are. The speed of light is a natural law, a ratio of time and space. And both Superman and Lois Lane, along with all other sentient beings, experience the motion of light through the schema of this regular equation. The reason that Lois and Superman both see the light move at the same speed and why the speed of light trumps events in the macro world is that the speed of light is a lens in the Universal mind that precedes Lois and Superman's individual minds and even the world they live in. The laws condition the world of appearances. Appearances do not condition the laws. The paradoxes that this fact about the speed of light creates are only confounding to those who misunderstand the event. So the whole revolution of Einstein that has dominated science fiction and scientism for all these years is based on a gross misunderstanding of the nature of things. Note that the scenario described of Lois and Superman could never actually be experienced in the macro world due to the absurd speeds and distances. In other words, the experiential world is held together by 'good-enough' micromechanics.

Understood through the lens of perceptual evolution, the apparent contortions of special relativity are not particularly paradoxical. They are what one would expect. The system of evolved perceptual schemata actually predicts what Albert Einstein guessed – that the speed of light is the same for all observers. For if the law is in the Universal mind, and precedes the individual, the speed would trump considerations of so-called common sense that evolved to deal more with the surface of daily experience, and not its Universal Divine causes.

The same principle, of considering the place in the process of perception where a law arises, also fully explains away the esoteric scientism of quantum mechanics.

Plagues and Misconceptions

Chapter One: Explaining pure relations

In my book The Evolution of Perception & the Cosmology of Substance I use the term "pure relations" more than once.

I have never explained what I meant.

I write that God (though I deliberately don't use the word God in that book) first conceived the Universe in conceptual mathematical and geometric terms.

This is half right. If we think that God saw these concepts the way we do, we would be committing the historical fallacy, i.e. reading into the cause something that only comes about later.

So when we talk about a ratio of time and space as we find in gravity, we ought not be so silly as to imagine an anthropomorphic God literally thinking about such concepts as time, space and number as we conceive of them.

Rather we must accept that however God conceived of these first relations, that way is now beyond our overly burdened faculties and intuitions. Our faculties and intuitions are burdened by all this sophistication of language. God was not encumbered by that.

So I coined the term "pure relations" to communicate that such relations as God first conceived them were not so conceptually laden as we now experience them. Remember that God conceived such relations before name and form, for name and form arise out of those relations and not the other way around. In a sense the term "pure relation" is a placeholder for what I can't conceive – God's primordial imagination.

But I am never one to avoid explaining the unexplainable.

Once when I was trying to explain pure relations to a philosopher friend, I began to point to things. I said, "Forget the number and that concept, and just look with your eyes."

So here is an example of doing that. Let's say I take a piece of paper and I fold it in half. Now I fold that in thirds. Now I cut that up and overlay it in such and such a way. This creates a geometry after a while, but no numbers or words are used. You just watch me do it, playing around.

Now if you can hold in your head those relations, those ratios and divisions and additions and multiplications that you watched me perform wordlessly – and at the same time remove from your mind the pictures – what you are left with are the pure relations. That of course is impossible.

It is impossible not because it is impossible by some a priori principle, but because your mind is too burdened with assumptions, conditioning, etc. But you must imagine God as unconditioned. His mind is fully free in the beginning of time. So there is nothing to prevent him from doing this.

I point out in my book also that reason will show that it is necessary fact that the laws of nature precede in evolution the things that they condition. So this is not only a theory, it is a necessary fact.

Now of course what arises out of all this is the obvious possibility for sacred geometry. I am not a disciple of this path of interest, but I see what the geometers are getting at. Throughout nature, forms can be reduced to regular shapes and solids. Even sound and light.

I find this story about Meher Baba as a boy interesting in relation to all this about mathematics and geometry in the beginning of time and sacred geometry underlying all things.

Merwan did not like arithmetic and would complain to his father, Sheriar, about his school problem. Although he was intelligent, studying mathematics became a great headache to him and became his first source of unhappiness in life.

One day at the Padamji School during an arithmetic lesson Merwan had an overwhelming experience which he later described: "I saw a great glitter of circles with tiny points in them as if suns, moons and stars were being projected from those points." His teacher noticed that Merwan suddenly looked dazed or dizzy, and as he lost consciousness he fell out of his chair. She rushed to him and laid him on a bench, sprinkling water to revive him. After a while the boy regained consciousness and his teacher asked, "Merwan, are you all right? What happened?"

The boy muttered, "A halo ... I saw a divine halo!"

The teacher could not understand what the child meant and inquired, "Merwan, how do you feel? Would you like to go home?"

"I am all right," the boy replied, "I don't need to go home." But when the teacher resumed her lesson, Merwan sighed with regret, for after enjoying the noor state or the light of God – an experience of divine effulgence – here was this awful arithmetic again. He thought: "It would have been much better if I had gone home."

(Lord Meher, online version, p148)

I have wondered if the arithmetic reminded Merwan of its primordial condition.

In God Speaks Baba speaks of the "form." This is a metaphysical term that first appears as far as I know in translations of Plato.

I suspect that Baba is referring to the geometry and pure relations of the various forms. The reason you taste and smell as you do is said to be conditioned by the shape (geometry) of the atoms. Atoms, unperceived, are geometries in motion.

Baba spoke a lot about the numbers and geometries of the human form. By "perfect form" I think he is speaking of a perfect ratio – not perfect skin texture. Beauty that we see, in music or shape, I think is the outcome of "beautiful" geometries from the point of view of God in a particular state. There have been many signs of this given in nature recently, but they are ignored and misunderstood.

Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.

Words inscribed above the entrance to Plato's Academy, 387 B.C.

Chapter Two: The Historical Fallacy

The historical fallacy (a fallacy in logical reasoning) is the most significant obstacle to a deep understanding of Meher Baba that I know about. The importance of understanding this fallacy in order to overcome it fully cannot be overemphasized.

Now understand that this historical fallacy is not some esoteric point philosophers know about that has only a fleeting application to the study of the works of Meher Baba. First of all, philosophers don't know about it. Not at Harvard. Not at Cambridge. If you add it to the list of fallacies on Wikipedia, editors will remove it because they've never heard of it and can't understand it. However, once you understand it, you will notice that Baba not only never commits it, but goes out of his way to help his readers not to.

The historical fallacy is when you think that some property that comes about only as the result of a process, can happen earlier than that process.

So let's say there is a process that makes time possible. But you keep talking about the process as if it is something that happens over the course of a year – in time. You're putting the cart before the horse. Or it's more like you're putting the cart before the wheel. That's impossible. You first need the wheel to have a cart.

Now carefully read this quote from Baba.

A whim is not a whim if it can be explained or rationalized. And just as no one may usefully ask why it arises, so no one may ask when it arises. "When" implies a time series with past, present and future. All these are absent in the eternal Beyond. So let us call this initial urge to know a "whim". You may call this an explanation if you like or you may call it an affirmation of its inherent inexplicability. The initial whim is completely independent of reason, intellect, or imagination, all of which are by-products of this whim. (Beams of the Spiritual Panorama p8)

Baba says that the Original Whim made reason and imagination. So how could it be understood or imagined? It can't exist in such terms as time and reason because it preceded them in the process of producing them. It is therefore necessarily independent of these qualities it produces.

First causes are so hard to understand because we are constantly picturing them in the terms of qualities and conditions that they produce. Those qualities don't apply to those first causes because the causes precede those qualities.

One example is the post-modern picture of the Big Bang, which is conceived as an event that produced, time and space, but is simultaneously imagined as having a place in time and space.

The failure or refusal of science to see this point is the cause of all their errors.

Sanskaras are also hard to understand until you overcome the limitation of this fallacy in thinking. Many of the qualities you experience in objects are really only produced in the act of seeing them that way, and don't apply to the perceiver. That is why the world we see can be full of diversity, yet we and God be one. It only sounds like a paradox until you understand the historical fallacy.

The most important implication of this fallacy is in understanding what Baba says about God. God creates the conditions of illusion such as time, space, number, law, reason, and duality. Thus God necessarily does not fall under the influence of these factors. Baba repeats this numerous times. But I have heard Baba lovers really confused by Baba because they haven't gotten this one idea. So they think Baba is being poetic when he says, "You and I are not we, but one." Or they ask questions like "Where is Baba now?" The question of "where" assumes some aspect besides his body was ever "in" space. Baba did and always will precede space. And you create space in the act of seeing it.

Philosophers have so consistently fallen into the trap of this fallacy that I have wondered if it has some special place in Maya. I have even wondered if it is the gatekeeper of gross consciousness.

All schools of philosophical thought fall into it, even Immanuel Kant, who assumed that many aspects of his "intuitions" had to apply to their cause.

• 1. Ancients explained the presence of humans of the temporal world by postulating magic other ones called gods in another. They read the effect into the cause.

  2. Atomists explained particles of stuff by postulating smaller particles of stuff called atoms, reading the effect into the cause.

  3. Plato explained things in terms of magic other things just like them called forms, reading the effect into the cause.

  4. Materialism explains stuff we see by postulating a stuff we don't see called matter, reading the effect into the cause.

  5. Scientists explains time and space by postulating a moment in time and space called the Big Bang, reading the effect into the cause.

  6. Scientism explains life on this planet by postulating life on another migrating here, reading the effect into the cause.

The person who originally pointed out the fallacy was John Dewey in 1896, but it has gone ignored. Dewey was an American pragmatist philosopher and educator. I had already guessed the historical fallacy and was having a hard time explaining it to my professors. One day I picked up a book by Dewey, opened it, and there it was. You know how those angels are."a set of considerations which hold good only because a completed process is read into the content of the process which conditions this completed result." (John Dewey, The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology, 1896)Giving an exampleHere's an example of how to apply this principle to critical thinking. For sake of illustration we'll attempt to come up with a theory of money without committing the historical fallacy. We must do this without using terms and concepts only understood from our experience of using money.

Let us suppose we want to know what money is fundamentally. We want a theory of money. It's not enough to hold up paper that's green. That's not money. Money has value. We have to account for that. The first thing I do is rephrase the question. If I want to know what money is, I have to know how it came into existence. How did it evolve? I'm asking for the process that created money. If I know this process I will know what money is fundamentally, and I'll have my theory of money. So I want to postulate a process by which money could have come about in a culture.

Obviously money has no value if it isn't seen to have value. For instance if I wound up back in the Stone Age, among cavemen, and I offered the cave men some money, they would scratch their heads and walk away.

There is a really good chance those cavemen wouldn't see the green paper in my hands as anything but paper in my hands. To have value, which is the essence of being money, the paper needs to be seen as having value. And it needs to have a special kind of value we could call 'trade-value.'

So the first part of my theory is that money is a symbol or sign (a representation) that people agree to see as standing for something else called "trade-value."

But this theory is incomplete, because monetary trade-value is an assignment we understand from our experience of using money. How, then, could I explain this concept of monetary trade-value to cavemen who have never traded with money before. After all they only value familiar objects they use, not symbolic value. Thinking the concept of trade-value was present in the process of inventing money would commit the historical fallacy. It would be reading something that comes about as the result of the evolution of money into the evolution of money. It would be reading the effect into the cause.

The trick will be to explain the epiphany of money as a way of organizing experience of symbols without telling a story that includes this way of organizing. We must see how the schema came about, not assume the schema was there to form the schema out of. That makes no sense. But that's what philosophers do. We have to not do that.

Caveman Brown is sitting with his family, playing with his painted stone that his wife gave him long ago. They are very happy. Suddenly he puts two ideas together in his mind. Looking at the stone and thinking of "trade" he suddenly reorganizes his sense data of the stone. He has had an epiphany. "Trade-stone," he says to his wife holding up the stone. "Trade-stone!" Lisa looks curiously at him. He is so delighted he dances a jig. It will be some time before anyone else gets it, but that was the day money was born.Now we are ready to formalize our theory of money.Money manifests out of psychological apperception. Apperception is the process by which new experience is assimilated to and transformed by the residuum of past experience of an individual to form a new whole. Money is a way of looking at a sign or symbol. It occurs when a sign or symbol is looked upon as a representation of trade. This is then codified in a culture through cultural agreement. Money is a way of seeing. Money has no existence outside its being apprehended as such and this apprehension being agreed upon.

Chapter Three: Notes on the Original Whim

There are three ideas I want to get across on this page:

• 1. The Original Whim caused time and space.

  2. The Original Whim is not the Big Bang.

  3. God was formless at the moment of the Whim so could not see, but by the urge created the first form through which to see.

Before there can be a meaningful discussion of the Original Whim there needs to be a pretty good understanding of the ordinary human sanskara.

Some people mistakenly think of sanskaras as tiny little things that float around like light orbs and are transferred from person to person like germs.

Sanskaras are really impressions left on the psyche by past experiences and they aren’t things at all. They are psychogenic.

Psy.cho.gen.ic

–adjective Psychology

having origin in the mind or in a mental condition or process

It is always best to use a simple example from everyday life to convey what sanskaras are and what they do.

Every time you do something or every time something happens to you, if you are happy or sad about it, that experience leaves a slight impression on you. That impression then affects how you look upon that kind of experience when it comes up in the future.

For instance, if you eat something and like it – next time you see it you want it. Conversely, if you eat something and it makes you throw up – next time you see it you don’t want it.

Every time you eat in a way that satisfies your hunger, you relieve your hunger but you reinforce your habit of eating. What is happening each time you eat is that you are erasing a sanskara left over by past eating, but replacing it with a new impression of pleasure from eating that will cause you to desire food again in the future when your stomach hurts.

So each experience of pleasure satisfies a latent craving, but establishes another craving in the future.

Each experience of suffering establishes a desire to avoid that experience in the future. Fear attracts the thing feared so that the fear can be overcome. But no sooner do we re-experience the feared thing then a new fear of it is created.

This is how sanskaras work.

It matters not if you do the thing or if you have it done to you or you just watch it happen. What is important is that you experience something happening and it causes you either happiness or sadness. That is what leaves the sanskara (impression) of it on your mind.

Note here a very important point. If you could somehow re-experience the thing desired or feared without feeling happy or sad about it (without having an internal reaction), it would exhaust the past impression and not create a new one. Baba explains this in Infinite Intelligence. Perfect masters have no internal response (because they have no sanskaras) and thus create no new sanskaras in themselves.

It should be obvious now that sanskaras beget sanskaras.

It goes like this and in this order:

• • Action – could be by you or to you, important thing is that it is an event you experience.

  • Impression – pleasure or pain from the action leaves either a positive or negative impression on you about that kind of event you experienced.

  • Desire or Fear – in the future you will either desire or fear that experience depending on your pleasure or pain.

  • Action – sooner or later the desire or fear to repeat or not repeat that experience will prompt you to re-experience it to satisfy that craving for repetition, or to satisfy a desire to overcome the fear.

  • Impression – no sooner is the past impression worked off in the new action, a new impression is left on the mind again of pleasure or pain and the cycle starts over again...

This is what causes evolution and the seemingly endless cycle of births and death called samsara.

Now we are ready to talk about the Original Whim of God.

Maya is the mechanics by which illusion is produced. Sanskaras are really the smallest building block of Maya. Besides reality, there is Maya (the mechanics of illusion) and nothing else. The world doesn’t really exist. It is just a mirage caused by Maya. God’s urge is to find himself. Maya is the method God uses to do that – first by seeing illusions, then by discovering his own reality against the backdrop of illusion. Then illusion vanishes and God experiences only Himself.

Now originally, before there was any of this illusion, there was God. But God was in deep sleep and did not know he existed. He was unconscious.

Baba says that somehow this vacuum state of God was stirred. This complete unconsciousness was interrupted, Baba says, by a desire by God to know himself. Baba says that no cause will ever be found for this first urge or desire. He says it was a whim, which by definition has no cause other than itself.

This Whim had no cause, but it happened. So Baba explains that the Original Whim of God to want to know himself was the “first cause.” This is significant to philosophers for they have never known what the first cause was.

When this Whim happened, there were some unique characteristics that never were to be true again. One is that there was no time. For this reason Baba always refers to this moment as “the beginningless beginning.” If it was just the “beginning” then that would imply a beginning in time, a moment along a time line. But the Whim happened prior to time and caused time to happen. (by "prior" in this instance I mean causally, not temporally)

Now remember that the original Whim was a desire. And remember the order of causation of illusion:

action – sanskara – desire – action, etc.

Note now that this first desire came before any sanskara or action. So there was no sanskara to cause this desire. So there was no reason to have had this desire. Now you see why Baba says it was a whim.

But, as explained, a desire leads to an action.

God was really next to infinitely fine at this point – there wasn’t much to Him in the sense of thought or consciousness. All there was in that instantless instant was this desire. So what ACTION could God in this almost infinitely fine state take?There are two I want to discuss. The first created distinction and time. The second created space.By the very desire to know himself, God formed the first way of seeing. He formed in himself almost unconsciously the notion of otherness, separation, a second. For in the sense of the question “Who?” is latent something outside oneself to be. This sense of distinction is the first schema of experience that we continue to see the world through today. We call it duality. When we perceive, we perceive things as distinct from one another and we look for something other than what we are – distinctly.Now the moment this desire existed and created this notion of otherness, of duality, this way of seeing in divisions, there was implicit in this a second notion of time. For there was instantly in the moment of the Whim a before the Whim and an after the Whim latent in its very happening. This first happening of the Whim thusly divided the past from the future in appearance. "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years" (Genesis). The Whim did not happen in time. How could it for it gave rise to time. Rather the Whim caused implicitly the impression of time in God. And instantly time became explicit as a way of seeing henceforth from that first momentless moment in the beginningless beginning.

Well, now having plenty of time, God looked around to see what he might be. And of course this act of looking around gave to God the distinct notion that there was somewhere to look – outerness – the notion of there being a there out there. Where was God to look to find this there out there that he felt existed, but in the far off reaches of his dreamt imagination? So, simply the temporal act of looking implicitly gave rise in God's imagination to a sense of space. So it was that this act of seeking had the unintended but fortuitous effect of making space first implicit and then explicit as a way of seeing. And we call this sense of seeing space.

So in the Whim itself there was the emergence of time and space.

This is in the Bible.

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. (Genesis 1:7)

And the next step is in the Bible too. This pleased God.

...God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. (Genesis 1:31)

God took pleasure in what he saw. Now remember once again the order of the process of creation: desire – action – sanskara, etc.

God’s desire to know who he was – the Whim or first desire or first cause – caused in God the impulse to act upon his desire, i.e. to look about. This act effectively caused God to experience pleasure, and this formed in God the first sanskara (impression).

And of course from this first sanskara came the second act of imagination and so forth.

So what we see initially forming in God’s imagination are the schemata for all that He would later come to see, and then take himself to be.

Chapter Four: The Big Bang Misunderstanding

The Original Whim is not the Big Bang. In many ways there was a Big Bang after the Original Whim, but in as many ways this is misunderstood.

Scientists are confused about the Ground Zero event of the Big Bang. They are confused by a fallacy in thinking known as the historical fallacy. This is the error in thinking you make when you imagine the cause of a thing having the characteristics of that thing. It is easiest to understand this fallacy through examples.Example 1: Some tribesmen are sitting around a fire trying to explain where people came from. So they smoke their peace pipes and come up with the idea that magical people (gods) created them. The problem with this explanation is that while the tribesmen only had people to explain before, now they have people and magic people to explain – and they still haven’t explained how the magic people created the regular people except by their magic. Plato called this kind of infinite regress “the third man argument.” It’s a sign of a flaw in thinking.Example 2: Some Greeks are sitting around trying to guess what things are fundamentally composed of. So they come up with the notion of atoms (tinier things). The problem with this is that the Greeks now have their atoms to explain. Are they closer to understanding the first cause?

Example 3: An Enlightenment philosopher hunches over his desk in his attic. A candle flickers beside his inkwell. He is wondering what stuff is made of? So he invents an invisible stuff (matter). Now he has two kinds of stuff to explain.

Each one of these is imagining the cause of a thing to be analogous to (just like) the thing.

Now here is more tricky sense of the historical fallacy.

The Om Point is not a point in space.Even if you knew all the trajectories of all the stars and planets in the expanding Universe and you were to trace those trajectories in reverse to a point in space and a moment in time from which things appear to have Banged out, that would not be the Om Point.The Om Point is a subjective point. Out of this point the Universe oozes from the mind of God.To understand what a subjective point is, look around you at your environment. Then look within you at your thoughts and memories. What is in common between them? That which sees them. And where is this? If you contemplate you can trace it to a spot which feels as if it is between the eyes in the center of the forehead. But what is there at this point if you look in the mirror or take an X-ray? Nothing. Time, space, and your head come out of the point; the point isn't on your head or in time and space. This point is infinitely vast and the world of objects and thoughts is really infinitely finite. But seen through the schemata of time and space the opposite is experienced.

There is a sense in which each person is a Big Bang, a point out of which the Universe that is continuously emerging from God's imagination explodes into appearances. The sense in which this is true is called homeomerity, where parts contain the whole and the whole contains the parts. The example usually given is a tree, whose seeds contain the tree itself. Each soul is in the Over-soul and the Infinite Over-soul is in each soul. In this sense each one is a Big Bang out of which the Original Whim is expressed. Each day, from your point of view, the Universe expands out of you when you wake and contracts back into you when you go to sleep. In the course of lives experienced by a single atma Creation first evolves outward and then involves inward. Like this, from the point of view of the Over-soul (Paramatma) the Universe is projected in Creation and collapses in Mahapralaya. The point from which all three are experienced is the Om Point and is One.

Chapter Seven: The missing argument for materialism

Beware of people who say they hold a position but avoid discussing it with words like "It would take me hours to explain." Tell them you have the time.

To some it may come as a shock, but there is no argument for materialism. There is no defense for it. There isn't even an explanation of what materialism exactly is.

I should know. I did my thesis on materialist arguments against idealism. I had wanted to do my thesis on idealism – namely George Berkeley's idea that there is no such thing as matter but only perception – so I could understand it better. In my first discussion with my thesis adviser I asked, "Everyone seems to know that idealism is wrong, but I seem to have missed what the argument against it is. What is the argument against idealism."

His answer was flat and surprising. "There isn't one really," he began without entirely looking up at me. "Idealism was in favor in the nineteenth century and now materialism is. It's just fashion." I had to think about that and I have to say it still amazes me, even though it turns out to be true.

But he suggested I explore the question, and we decided to call my thesis "Refutations of Idealism."

This required that I study the history of modern materialism beginning with John Locke. For materialist arguments to examine we chose one of materialism's most luminous post-modern proponents, G.E. Moore. We chose Moore because he offered just the kind of argument I was looking for, sharp logic-oriented refutations of idealism. Moore wrote three major essays on the subject.

Then, to assess the success of these refutations, I wrote what one idealist would have said to his charges, George Berkeley. This might at first seem a bit unfair, since it could be argued that Moore was thinking mainly of his contemporaries and not the famous 17th century idealist. But Moore himself said that his arguments refuted "all forms of idealism." So my professor and I were both curious to see what I would discover.

It turned out that Berkeley had anticipated all of Moore's charges and had already written defenses against each of them two hundred years earlier. So this made quite an interesting thesis. I wound up having to say the obvious, that in the end Moore had failed to refute at least one idealist, George Berkeley, who from a western point of view is really the quintessential idealist.

So my thesis passed.

But that was not the end of the story. I later learned much much more on my own.

This whole time I was writing Berkeley's defenses of idealism from attacks by materialists, it had never occurred to me to ask what the defense of materialism was. Berkeley had. He had said there was none, not even an articulation of what it was. But it didn't fully dawn on me at the time quite how significant this is.

It took some time for me to digest just how damaging it really is for materialism that there is not a single logic-bound argument for it. Its only argument is that it is the intuitive view and common sense, which Berkeley correctly shows is nonsense when you see what materialism says. I will get into that further on. Philosophy is not the art of holding beliefs. Both idiots and ideologues can hold beliefs. Philosophy is the art of argument for beliefs. What did Shankara do his whole adult life? He argued against the Buddhists and dvaitas (dualists). He went from debate to debate. He defended his beliefs and refuted those of his opponents. Had he simply written refutations, he would not have been remembered. Any academic can write a refutation.

But let's go back to Moore. Even in Moore's own day he began to realize that his refutations were going nowhere. He kept wanting to think of a defense for materialism – against the idealist notion he found so repugnant – that everything is perception.

Now I'm always talking about my duck-rabbit demonstration of ways of seeing conditioning what we see.If you examine the picture to the right you can see a duck facing left or a rabbit facing right. Those long horizontal things can be the bill of a duck or the ears of a rabbit. But you can't see both animals at the same time. Your perception can shift from one to the other, back and forth. What is changing? Certainly not the picture. Your eyes aren't moving. What is changing is the construct (schema) through which you are organizing the lines in your mind.Now, had you never seen a duck, you could not see the picture as one. So your past conditioning (sanskaras) are required to condition what you see.

Now, what you are seeing happening – this change in what you see just demonstrated – is not some idle conjecture. It is an observable fact. All I am doing is reassigning what this event you observe taking place actually is. I am saying "that" is your sanskaras operating on your perceptions. Do you see?

Now, finally I want to address the title of this section – 'what things are made of.' In science it is said that things are made of atoms and atoms are made of quarks, etc. And this is an infinite regress – meaning it cannot arrive at a conclusion even in principle. It is a lost cause. What things are made of will continually demand another question "and what is that made of?" This will happen so long as we continue to explain a thing in terms of yet another thing. That kind of thinking can't satisfy the mind because it is fraudulent thinking that commits the historical fallacy. It is gross most-dense thinking.