The Planet Nine Hypothesis (Part 1)

 

July 29, 2021

Constantin Batygin,¹ Fred C. Adams,^2,3 Michael E. Brown,¹ and Juliette C. Becker³¹Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA

²Physics Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA

³Astronomy Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA

 Abstract

Over the course of the past two decades, observational surveys have unveiled the intri- cate orbital structure of the Kuiper Belt, a field of icy bodies orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune. In addition to a host of readily-predictable orbital behavior, the emerging census of trans-Neptunian objects displays dynamical phenomena that cannot be ac- counted for by interactions with the known eight-planet solar system alone. Specifi- cally, explanations for the observed physical clustering of orbits with semi-major axes in excess of 250 AU, the detachment of perihelia of select Kuiper belt objects from Neptune, as well as the dynamical origin of highly inclined/retrograde long-period or- bits remain elusive within the context of the classical view of the solar system. This

newly outlined dynamical architecture of the distant solar system points to the exis- tence of a new planet with mass of m₉ 5 10 M_⊕, residing on a moderately inclined orbit (i₉ 15 25 deg) with semi-major axis a₉ 400 800 AU and eccentricity between e₉ 0.2 0.5. This paper reviews the observational motivation, dynamical constraints, and prospects for detection of this proposed object known as Planet Nine.

Introduction

Understanding the solar system’s large-scale architecture embodies one of human- ity’s oldest pursuits and ranks among the grand challenges of natural science. Histor- ically, the first attempts to astronomically map the imperceptible structure of the solar system trace back to Galileo himself, and his adoption of the telescope as a scientific instrument some four centuries ago. In terms of sheer numbers, however, the quest to unveil new planets in the solar system has been strikingly inefficient: only two large objects that were not already known to ancient civilizations – Uranus and Neptune – have been discovered to date, with no significant updates to the solar system’s planetary catalogue since 1930.

While countless astronomical surveys aimed at discovering new solar system plan- ets have consistently resulted in non-detections, the solar system’s vast collection of minor bodies has slowly come into sharper focus. Particularly, the past quarter-century witnessed the discovery and characterization of a diverse collection of small icy objects residing in the outer reaches of our solar system, extending from the immediate vicinity

Preprint submitted to Physics Reports February 27, 2019

of Neptune’s orbit to far beyond the heliosphere¹ (Jewitt & Luu, 1993). Intriguingly, rather than the planets themselves, it is this population of scattered debris that holds the key to further illuminating the solar system’s intricate dynamical structure and to unraveling its dramatic evolutionary history.

The vast majority of trans-Neptunian small bodies, collectively known as the Kuiper belt, reside on orbits that are consistent with known dynamical properties of the so- lar system. The most extreme members of this population, however, trace out highly elongated orbits with periods measured in millennia, and display a number of curious orbital patterns. These anomalies include the striking alignment in the orientations of eccentric orbits in physical space, a common tilt of the orbital planes, perihelion dis- tances that stretch far beyond the gravitational reach of Neptune, as well as excursions of trans-Neptunian objects into highly inclined, and even retrograde orbits. All of these otherwise mysterious orbital features can be readily understood if the solar system con- tains an additional – as yet undetected – large planet, residing hundreds of astronomical units away from the sun.

The existence of this particular solar system object, colloquially known as Planet Nine, has only recently been proposed (Batygin and Brown, 2016a). Nonetheless, the discoveries in the outer solar system that ultimately led to the Planet Nine Hypothesis (Brown et al. 2004; Trujillo and Sheppard 2014 and the references therein) represent a veritable revolution in the scientific understanding of our home planetary system. This review will explore these developments, and will provide a status update on the Planet Nine hypothesis. Before delving into specifics, however, we note that despite being characterized by a unique combination of observational evidence and dynamical mechanisms, the Planet Nine hypothesis is by no means the first inference of a new solar system member that is based upon anomalous orbital behavior of known objects. Moreover, it is important to recognize that this general class of scientific proposals has a long and uneven history, with results varying from the stunning success of Neptune (Le Verrier, 1846a; Galle, 1846; Adams, 1846) to the regrettable failure of Nemesis (Davis et al., 1984). Accordingly, it is instructive to begin this manuscript with a brief historical review of past claims.

The Discovery of Neptune

The mathematical determination of the existence of Neptune represents the only successful example of a new planetary discovery motivated by dynamical evidence within the solar system, and epitomizes one of the most sensational stories in the his- tory of astronomy (see Krajnovic´ 2016 for a recent review). The saga begins with the official discovery of the planet Uranus (then called Georgium Sidus) in 1781 by William Herschel. Although Herschel was the first to record the proper motion of the object and present his results to the Royal Astronomical Society (for further details, see the historical accounts of Alexander 1965; Miner 1998), numerous recorded obser- vations of Uranus already existed, which mistook the planet for a background star.

¹Data collected by the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft suggest that the heliosphere nominally extends to a heliocentric distance of approximately 120 AU.

Figure 1: Predicted orbit of Neptune. This diagram shows the outer solar system viewed from the north ecliptic pole, including the orbits of Uranus (gray) and Neptune (black), as well as the predicted Neptunian orbits (purple) from Le Verrier (1846a) and Adams (1846). Note that although the predicted physical location of Neptune was in close agreement with the actual location of Neptune in 1846, the derived orbits are considerably wider and more eccentric than Neptune’s true orbit.

Over the next six decades, astronomers continued to monitor the motion of Uranus along its 84 year orbit and computed ephemerides of its position over time based on the then-known properties of the giant planets (e.g., Bouvard 1824). The calculations and the observations were not in perfect agreement, with thedifferences between the theoretical longitudes and the observed longitudes of the orbit growing by approxi- mately 2^jj per year (see page 150 of Adams 1846). These data led Le Verrier (1846a,b)

and then Adams (1846)² to propose an additional planet to account for the differences.

It is worth noting that the inferred physical and orbital properties of Le Verrier’s and Adams’ putative planet differ considerably from those of the real Neptune (Figure 1). Specifically, instead of the modern value a₈ ≈ 30 AU, the orbit of the proposed planet

had a semi-major axis (reported as the ‘assumed mean distance’) of ~ 36 AU (Le

Verrier, 1846b) and ~ 37 AU (Adams, 1846). Meanwhile, the estimated orbital eccen- tricity was e₈ ~ 0.11 (Le Verrier, 1846b) and e₈ ~ 0.12 (Adams, 1846), significantly larger than the modern value of e₈ ≈ 0.008. Finally, the mass estimate for the new planet was reported as m₈ ~ 36 M_⊕ (Le Verrier, 1846b) and m₈ ~ 50 M_⊕ (Adams, 1846), two to three times larger than Neptune’s actual mass of m₈ 17 M_⊕. The pre- dicted properties of Neptune were thus somewhat larger in both mass and semi-major

²Although Le Verrier’s calculations famously predate Galle & d’Arrest’s astronomical detection of Nep- tune, Adams’s orbital predictions were only published after Neptune’s location was already known.axis than the observed body.

We note that resolution of the irregularities found in the orbit of Uranus required rather extensive calculations (Le Verrier, 1846a; Adams, 1846). The analysis had to include perturbations of all the previously known planets, the error budget for the es- timated orbital elements of Uranus, and the assumed orbital elements (and mass) of the proposed new planet (an overview of the difficulties is outlined in Lyttleton 1958). The discrepancies between Le Verrier’s and Adams’ theoretical expectations and the observed properties of Neptune therefore constitutes a gold standard for dynamically motivated planetary predictions. Moreover, it is worth pointing out that the most sig- nificant quantity in perturbing the orbit of Uranus was the anomalous acceleration in the radial direction produced by the new body, m₈/r² – a ratio that was predicted with much higher accuracy than the individual values of mass and semi-major axis. As we discuss below, comparable degeneracies between mass and orbital parameters exist within the framework of the Planet Nine hypothesis as well.

1. Planet X and the Discovery of Pluto

Following Le Verrier’s triumphant mathematical discovery of Neptune, unexplained behavior in the motions of objects in the solar system continued to inspire predictions of the existence, and sometimes locations of new planets beyond the boundaries of the known solar system. Some of the early trans-Neptunian planetary proposals include Jacques Babinet’s 1848 claim of a 12 M_⊕ planet beyond Neptune (Grosser, 1964),

David P. Todd’s 1877 speculation about a planet at 52 AU (Hoyt, 1976), Camille Flam-

marion’s inference of a planet at 48 AU (Flammarion, 1884), as well as the prediction of two planets at 100 and 300 AU by George Forbes, whose calculations were mo- tivated by an apparent grouping of orbital elements of long-period comets (Forbes, 1880). An expansive set of planetary hypotheses was later put forth by W. H. Picker- ing, who predicted seven different planets between 1909 and 1932, with masses rang-

ing from 0.045 M_⊕ to 20, 000 M_⊕ (see Hoyt 1976 for an excellent historical overview). Arguably, the most emblematic planetary prediction, however, can be attributed to Per-

cival Lowell, who championed the search for what he called “Planet X” and founded Lowell Observatory in Arizona in hopes of finding it.

The story of the search for Planet X is well documented in the literature (e.g., Levy 1991). Briefly: despite the addition of Neptune to the solar system’s ledger of planets, small apparent discrepancies in the orbits of the giant planets remained. With the ob- servations and analysis available at the time, the inferred orbital anomalies in the orbit of Uranus implied a planetary object with a mass of m_X 7 M_⊕, about half the mass

of Neptune. Lowell died suddenly in 1916, without having found the elusive planet.

Nevertheless, the search continued. The new director, Vesto Slipher (who used the ob- servatory to measure the recession velocities of galaxies; see Appendix A), handed off the search for Planet X to Clyde Tombaugh. By 1930, Tombaugh had examined countless photographic plates containing millions of point sources for possible plane- tary motion and finally discovered a moving object (Tombaugh,1946, 1996). Because it was found in the approximate location on the sky where Planet X was envisioned to be, and because Planet X was the object of the original search, the newly found body was initially considered to be the long-sought-after Planet X (Slipher, 1930).

1

₁₀-1

₁₀-2

₁₀-3

1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Year

Figure 2: Estimated mass of Pluto as a function of time. The first (and largest) estimate is from the dynamical calculations that inpired the initial search. The subsequent estimates are based on observations (as labeled) and show a steady downward trend until relatively recently. The particularly steep decline of Pluto’s mass in 1978 is marked by the discovery of its largest moon, Charon.

Immediately there was a problem. An object with physical size comparable to Nep- tune should have been resolved with the observational facilities of the era, but the new planet appeared point-like. It was also dim, coming in about six times fainter than the estimates. It soon became clear that the newly found member of the solar system was not the Planet X, as it was not massive enough to account for the perceived perturba- tions in the orbit of Uranus. The new body was subsequently named Pluto, after the Greek god of the underworld³. In the end, the observed irregularities in Uranus’ and Neptune’s motion turned out to be spurious, and were fully resolved by a 0.5% revision of Neptune’s mass, following the Voyager 2 flyby (Standish, 1993).

Figure 2 shows the estimated mass of Pluto as a function of time. The initial es- timate (m_X 7 M_⊕) is the mass required to account for the perceived perturbations of the giant planet orbits (Tombaugh, 1946). The first observational estimate for the mass of Pluto (Nicholson and Mayall, 1931) was already down toM_LP 1 M_⊕, and subsequent observations led to steadily lower values as shown in the Figure. Note that

a precipitous drop in the mass estimate that came in 1978, with the discovery of the moon Charon and the first clean measurement of Pluto’s mass (Christy and Harring- ton, 1978). The current mass estimate is only M_LP 0.00218 M_⊕ (Buie et al., 2006), roughly 3200 times smaller than the original mass estimate that inspired the search. In spite of its diminutive size, Pluto was considered as the ninth planet of the solar system

until 2006, when it was demoted to the status of a dwarf planet (IAU Resolution B5, 2006).

³As a bonus, the first two letters of the planet’s name were coincident with the initials of Percival Lowell, although W. H. Pickering was evidently under the impression that it stood for Pickering-Lowell (Hoyt, 1976).

1. The False Alarm of Vulcan

By the mid 19th century, observations of the planet Mercury became precise enough to detect variations in its orbital parameters, lending a handle on the gravitational per- turbations exerted by the terrestrial planets upon one-another. By making precise mea- surements of transits of Mercury across the Sun, 19th century astronomers thus realized that the orbit of Mercury was precessing forward at a rate that could not be fully ac- counted for by known bodies. This determination inspired Le Verrier (1843, 1859) to propose that an additional planet interior to Mercury is responsible for the extra perihe- lion precession necessary to fit the observations. This hypothetical new planet become known as Vulcan, the god of fire, volcanoes, and metal working in Roman mythology. In order to generate the anomalous (da/dt) = 43”/century perihelion advance of Mercury, the parameters of the unseen planet (m_v, a_v) would have been constrained by

(see section 3.1)_da

3 ^, G M_s 1

m_v a²

_da

^, G M_s G M_s 3

 where G is the gravitational constant and c is the speed of light. Coincidentally, the above expression is satisfied by a m_v 3 M_⊕ Super-Earth type planet with an orbital period of approximately 3 days, analogues of which are now known to be very com-

mon around sun-like stars (Borucki et al., 2010; Batalha et al., 2013). In the early 20th century, however, Einstein developed his theory of General Relativity, which self- consistently resolved the ancillary precession problem (yielding a rate of apsidal ad- vance given by the RHS of the above equation; Einstein 1916). This alleviated the need for intra-Mercurian planets within the solar system. Accordingly, unlike the case of Uranus (discussed in section 1.1), dynamical anomalies in the inner solar system paved the way to the discovery of fundamentally new physics rather than a planet.

1. The Nemesis Affair

The 1980s witnessed the proposal that the Sun was actually part of a binary star system. This time, the motivation for the proposed stellar companion stemmed from paleontology: approximately 65 Myr ago, a mass extinction event wiped out three quar- ters of the species then living on Earth. This cataclysm, which famously included the removal of (non-avian) dinosaurs from the biosphere, occurred at what is known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary. At the layer of rock corresponding to this geological age, sediments are observed to contain high levels of iridium, an element that is relatively rare in crustal rocks on Earth, but is much more plentiful in asteroids. The association of the iridium layer with the extinction boundary led to the hypothesis that the event was caused by a collision of a large ( 10 15 km) asteroid with Earth (Alvarez et al., 1980). The resulting impact would have catastrophic consequences on the climate, and would, in turn, explain the mass extinction event.

Although the K-T extinction event is often seen as being the most dramatic, it is far from unique: the geologic record unequivocally shows that the biosphere of Earth has experienced a series of mass extinction events. Moreover, although the data are sparse, with 12 events distributed over a time span of ~ 250 Myr, some analyses have

Figure 1: Predicted orbit of Neptune. This diagram shows the outer solar system viewed from the north ecliptic pole, including the orbits of Uranus (gray) and Neptune (black), as well as the predicted Neptunian orbits (purple) from Le Verrier (1846a) and Adams (1846). Note that although the predicted physical location of Neptune was in close agreement with the actual location of Neptune in 1846, the derived orbits are considerably wider and more eccentric than Neptune’s true orbit.

Over the next six decades, astronomers continued to monitor the motion of Uranus along its 84 year orbit and computed ephemerides of its position over time based on the then-known properties of the giant planets (e.g., Bouvard 1824). The calculations and the observations were not in perfect agreement, with the

The Empath

 

September 5, 2021

The last 3 ½ years have been fascinating. There have been a handful of revelations that I had never really thought I would understand. One was coming to understand the number 26; it was a number that kept popping up in high school. And yes, you would be right in assuming that it was wrapped firmly around the Nanny. As a 16 year old kid there was absolutely no way of knowing why or how the number would affect us, but still it was there on the wall clock, 2:26, the date in her note book 2/26/84. Then there was a long period of separation that never should have been, but was 26 years in length until we were reunited. (There was an intermediate period where the universe asked us a question of which we both got very wrong). The universe was telling us that yes you are destined to be together but first, there are lessons to be learned; awful tough lessons. Prior to our reunification in 2018, beginning in 2015, again the number 26 would pop up in unexpected places, I would find an old receipt for $26.26, and increasingly often I would look at a clock and it would read whatever hour and twenty-six minutes.

In truth, the number scared me; I could not envision the obvious idea that the number indicated how much time that I would continue to spend with the narcissistic leprechaun of who was killing me with her energy vampire alcoholic ways. I could not envision that it had anything to do with the Nanny, 20 years previous, she had married this other jackass and the way we had parted had been less than ideal. Sure, we were “friends” on Facebook, but there was zero inter-action between us; so it had seemed pointless to even consider her. The universe was working to wake me up and give me hope when I was in a situation where I had very little. Understanding the number 26 is vital for my future; the Nanny is and always has been my soul mate extending back billions of years.

   An Empath is born from trauma; it does not matter from what type, physical, emotional, sexual, and even spiritual. My gift was given me from emotional and physical abuse. As I have out lined in other articles, I was the victim of incredibly severe bullying outside the home and at home, the abuse was severe. As both my brother and I approached the 180 cm 6 ‘mark in height and 85+ kgs 185 lbs. in weight, both mom and dad’s ability to throw us around at will was limited, as an alternative tactic they would ambush us, always when we were most vulnerable to it. As a defense mechanism, I chose to take my chances on the streets of Toronto finding a measure of safety there, because there was none to be had at home.

The problem with violence is that it learns, the four of us in that “family” learned new and better ways to hurt and severely wound each other. As in any conflict, the most desired weapon is one that will preemptively stop/end the conflict. Many times while being ambushed, I had wished that there had been a way of being warned ahead of time as to how bad it was going to be. Given that knowledge perhaps there might be a way of disarming or limiting the damage done.

The manifestation of this defense mechanism was unexpected and essentially useless to me. It did not begin to show itself to me until after a particularly violent episode between my father and myself, which involved being thrown against a wall while I was sound asleep and leaving a Chris sized dent in the wall. The problem was of course that I had no idea that such a thing was possible so there had been no way to prepare or train for such an eventuality as becoming an empath. My only exposure to the word Empath during the next 30 years was the television series, “Star Trek The Next Generation” and the character, Deanna Troi, who was an “empath”. Hers was a character that I thought hokey, and yet, I easily appreciated how and why she was beneficial to the captain of the Enterprise.

Her character had been trained since birth to focus on and interpret emotions that people broadcast unconsciously. She made it look easy and natural, and was mis-leading in that people broadcast singular emotions; whereas truthfully, you all do not. You are all a messy hodge- podge of everything all at once all the time; it has been chaotic and overwhelming absorbing all your stuff. But the worst part of all of it was having no understanding of why I did.  

The 7 Common Types of Empaths 

Empath Type	Core Sensitivity	Strengths	Common Challenges
Emotional Empath	Feels others’ emotions as if they were their own	Deep compassion, emotional intelligence, strong relational bonds	Emotional overwhelm, mood absorption, burnout
Physical Empath	Feels physical sensations or symptoms in others	Healing intuition, body awareness, caregiving abilities	Somatic overload, misidentifying others’ pain as their own
Intuitive Empath	Picks up subtle information, motives, or outcomes	Strong intuition, pattern recognition, foresight	Anxiety, second-guessing, information overload
Environmental Empath	Sensitive to places, crowds, and atmospheres	Awareness of energy shifts, design and spatial intuition	Sensory overload, exhaustion in busy or chaotic spaces
Animal Empath	Deeply attuned to animals’ emotions and needs	Strong human-animal bonds, animal care and advocacy	Emotional distress from animal suffering
Plant / Earth Empath	Connected to plants, nature, and ecosystems	Grounding presence, environmental awareness, nurturing energy	Feeling ecological grief, discomfort in artificial environments
Spiritual Empath	Sensitive to collective emotions or spiritual states	Sense of meaning, connection to humanity as a whole	Existential overwhelm, boundary confusion

---

A couple of grounding notes (important)

• Most people aren’t just one type—they’re usually a blend.

• These categories describe how sensitivity shows up, not how “psychic” someone is.

• From a scientific lens, many of these traits overlap with high empathy, sensory processing sensitivity (HSP), and emotional attunement.

It is thanks to the Nanny and her incredible insights in to my character that I learned that I was an empath. She found groups on Facebook for empaths and, there I was able to learn that most of us share the same experience in that we did not know that we were empaths. The pandemic has actually been something of a boon to me, the first few months of it were incredibly tough, people’s fear and anxiety were through the roof, and I would literally come home a quivering mess having had to deal with it all week as an essential worker. However as time passed, it became easier to focus on who was feeling what, where the strongest signal was coming from, and very importantly; how to at least for a time, block the signal, after deciding what I think of the broadcaster; to in a way, weaponize my gift using both my abilities as an empath, and my ability to see auras.

There are different types of empaths, and their differing types of strengths are impressive. To be completely honest and non-insulting, I honestly feel sorry for those who are not an empath.

Pitfalls

August 16, 2021

With 80 articles written, most of them dealing with information about The Holy Grail, and a few about the conditions that led to my grail quest, the one subject that I have not touched on is, the pitfalls of a spiritual awakening.

When I began this quest back in the late 1990s, I was a wreck of epic proportions. I knew that I had to find a way to change, what that entailed, or how to go about it, I could not have known. Part of the recovery process involved finding A.A. (Alcoholic Anonymous), though I was not an addict, I had been trained since birth to think and act like an addict. While in those rooms, I learned exactly how and why my thinking differed from a "normal person's." What occurred too, was that I was able to better understand what I needed in terms of my spiritual life.

• We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.

• Came to believe and to accept that we needed strengths beyond our awareness and resources to restore us to sanity.

• Made a decision to entrust our will and our lives to the care of the collective wisdom and resources of those who have searched before us.

• Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

• Admitted to ourselves without reservation, and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs.

• Were ready to accept help in letting go of all our defects of character.

• With humility and openness sought to eliminate our shortcomings.

• Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

• Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

• Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

• Sought through meditation to improve our spiritual awareness and our understanding of the AA way of life and to discover the power to carry out that way of life.

• Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

  If you are an alcoholic, these 12 steps may seem daunting, they're really not, and when taken one at a time, can change your life.

As I examined my spirituality, I discovered that I was indeed an empty space. The belief system that I had tried so desperately to attach myself to in my mid-teens, was entirely incapable of filling the void that existed in my soul. In too many ways, the damage done to me by my mother completely incapacitated me.

My mother was absolutely ruthless in how she had taught me to suppress any and all of my emotions. This was so she did not have to acknowledge me as a person.

What my soul needed, was to find a place where there was infinite love, beauty, and, purpose. Unfortunately, that sounds a bit like the biblical heaven, a concept that I rejected entirely. So where did this leave me? For quite some time, I thought that I was completely fucked. I could not and did not believe in god, and because I did not, that meant that I was going to hell and I would spend eternity splashing around in a lake of fire or some such.

The problem with that was, the concept of hell to me was overblown. I mean the fire, demons, betrayal, mean evil things that fly, and then there is the guy in charge who has a tail and horns. Really? Think about it though, if god was all that powerful, why had he not put this evil ass down? And, why does he need all the geo-political crap to happen to have the final round at Mt Megiddo in Israel?

Sorry, but a lot of people, including my father, have spent too much time on trying to make current events match up with an almost imaginary time line found in the Book of Revelation. The time line exists, but the only people that it mattered to was, Jesus and his rebellious Essenes. The battle at Mt Megiddo was supposed to have been between a united Israel and the Roman Empire. This final great battle is not the Russians against Americans or Israel vs the world nor even god against the purple polka dot monster.

As I wandered somewhat aimlessly through the following months with my head full of the above, it seemed that there was no other option except to try to realign my belief system with the accepted Christian tradition. Not out of fear of going to hell, I figured that I would take my chances with that; I mean with all of Jesus's parables, their meanings could be twisted just enough to let me squeak through the pearly gates. The problem here was that I was neither an atheist, or an agnostic, nor a Christian believer.

While in those A.A. rooms, I had learned the importance of having a higher power. Not because they proscribe to one, (they do not) but because it became obvious to me that, without some kind of spiritual connection, my soul would continue to feel glacially cold and empty. But still the questions remained, where and what was the connection?

The connection of course was The Holy Grail. When I first discovered that Jesus Christ was a mortal man, who had children, and had been married, this was mind blowing. And it stopped me in my tracks for months. Nowhere in the New Testament is there even a hint of this. This then for me, was the hardest hurdle for me to get over, could I accept that Jesus was an average mortal man, and not a deity? This went against everything that I had been taught or tried to believe.

 That said, accepting the above led to finding answers that were real. Much of it at first seemed intellectual, and I was not sure how it affected me spiritually. It was not easy to discuss with others, they were too afraid of "evil influences" leading them astray. This is funny because, there is nothing about the Holy Grail that is evil. The only thing that could be considered "evil", is that we learn about the occult and the true meanings behind the symbolism, which has been twisted by the church to look evil as they worked incredibly hard to suppress Jesus's Grail bloodline heritage and, supplement it with the lie of the Pauline church.

So again,  how does this intellectual information better me spiritually? The answer was something that my former, now late,  life partner could not understand.  It was something that we would argue about nastily, and she would say that it was impossible for it to help my growth.  What she failed to realize was that it takes time for anyone to heal.  I was in exceptionally poor shape, and it took a long time for the serenity of the Grail to raise my inner vibrational frequencies.  After 20 years of study,  I do not claim to be a master of anything, there is still a lifetime of study in front of me, but the thing that I know for sure is,  she needed to work far harder on her inner self than she ever did; as opposed to trying to criticize and control my spiritual journey. 

This article is about the pitfalls of a spiritual awakening,  and some of the things that could/can and will be part of it. There is no "right" path,  the information that I present here is meant to open doors,  answer questions that may lead to revelations about things that you need to know about for your own journey.  No one's journey is the same,  and we have the multiverse to thank for that. 

When I first began this journey,  and was introduced to the idea of the silver cord,  and how it descended from what I termed "heaven", I could not begin to comprehend how it was that the things did not get impossibly tangled up in a gargantuan knot. The answer was a long time coming and was,  insanely complicated and yet,  oh so simple.  We are beings of light and energy,  and each of us vibrates on our own frequencies, and it is the differing frequencies that allow these cords of energy that are connected to the kundalini, to pass harmlessly through those who are around us.

String Theory and the multiverse that is hard science.  You may not think that science and spirituality would have a whole lot to do with each other,  but believe it or not,  these three things may be the answer to each other.  To over simplify,  string theory posits that, anything, anytime, anywhere can, does, and will happen.  The multiverse suggests that there is more than one universe.  Spirituality says that we are beings of light and energy and that we are immortal and we will live in limitless dimensions and planes of existence.  (I hate the word AND). What if these differing planes of existence are other universes where physics and evolution work just a little differently? What if the multiverse where science believes that each dimension gets exponentially smaller, is where we live now? Not one life here on earth is the same as another,  which essentially allows string theory to be fact. Science and spirituality are two peas in the same pod,  we just have to learn how they communicate.