Spiritually Unprepared

 

February 21, 2021

The night my mother suicided, the night I turned 17, my birthday, I believe my mother’s spirit came to me, and it was an unfortunate experience. Why? Whatever it truly was that descended upon me that night as I walked along Ellesmere Rd in Scarborough. It was black, Stygian black. There was no visible light or auric presence,

only a phenomenal sense of dead weight, which strove to be near me, which I totally rejected with every fibre of my being. Why? Because it felt evil, and at that particular time, I had suspended belief in all things, whether spiritual or corporeal. So whatever, or whoever this thing was, for me, it did not exist. There was no repeat performance 11 months later when Dad suicided, nor did I hope for or expect it.

The only thing that this experience did was open up the tiniest shred of almost impossible possibility that the church was wrong. But was it? I mean the thing had been black, which had to be evil, right? Maybe? I mean the church has always said that suicides went to hell, so had my parents gone to hell? Fucked if I could figure it out.

SU Black auric presence. I don't believe in ghosts, yet the easiest explanation for what took place is, my mother's ghost tried to physically assault me. At the time I had no idea of what a soul was made of, or what it would weigh, the only thing I knew for sure was, that year I had grown substantially bigger than her. Much later I was to learn that we're made of light, and our souls weigh about 21 grams. Doing the math, in that circumstance, I was this much bigger than her. The difference in weight between 180 pounds and 21 grams is overwhelmingly large — approximately 180 pounds or 81.6 kilograms.

Here’s the calculation breakdown:

• Conversion factor:
  1 pound = 453.592 grams

• Convert 180 pounds to grams:
  180 pounds × 453.592 grams/pound = 81,646.56 grams

• Subtract 21 grams:
  81,646.56 grams − 21 grams = 81,625.56 grams

• (Optional) Convert the difference back to pounds:
  81,625.56 grams ÷ 453.592 grams/pound = 180.0 pounds

Conclusion:
The weight difference between 180 pounds and 21 grams is effectively 180 pounds, making 21 grams negligible in comparison.

That seventeen-year-old boy was a wreck, he was all but dead inside. He knew no emotion, no joy, and saw no hope; I believed that we should never have climbed down from the trees. I was an empath but had no idea that such a thing was possible, all I knew was that in large groups of people I was overwhelmed by feelings that I could not begin to comprehend. I believed that being overwhelmed was a direct result of being a misfit; I had never had many friends so it only seemed to make sense that I was socially awkward in large groups. The thing of it though was this, I was not awkward in social situations, I was simply unable to determine where these emotions emanated from because I was dead, I did not feel them, my mother had made sure of that. As an empath, it is almost impossible to determine where I end and you begin.

Most Empaths report that they have suffered immense trauma, that being emotional, physical, sexual, etc. I have come to believe that this empathic gift acts as a type of early warning system, a type of emotional radar. By the time of my parents’ suicides, a favoured type of abuse used by them both was to ambush my brother or I, usually when we were most vulnerable to it. There are nine minutes every day when a child is most vulnerable, the first three minutes when it wakes up, three minutes during, before, or after the most common family meal, and the three minutes before bed. In my brother’s and mine cases, these were often the most violent and chaotic minutes in our entire day. An empath does not choose to be an empath; it is not a gift that can be cultivated. Though in my case there were a million times where I fervently wished that there were a way that I could somehow be warned ahead of time about these ambushes.

As a fifteen-year-old, I had a job at Ponderosa Steakhouse at Kennedy Rd and Ellesmere Ave; I was either busing tables or washing dishes.

SU Ponderossa Steakhouse. This was a popular family style, fast food type restaurant, where you could get reasonably priced steaks, fair service, cafeteria style. 

The company was soon to cease operations in Canada and the night manager was trying to keep it going, so one night he had us on the night crew give the place a very thorough cleaning. As a result, I called home and told Mom what was up and explained that I would likely be home very late. I got home at around three in the morning as it was about an hour’s walk from Kennedy to Bellamy, and the bus quit running around one. When I got home, I was surprised to see the house in darkness and everyone presumably asleep, so I went downstairs to crash so as not to risk waking anyone and start the fur flying in the middle of the night. I was exhausted from both a chronic lack of sleep and the nineteen-hour day I had just put in, so when my head hit the pillow I went out like a light. I do not know how long I was asleep, but I was deeply asleep when, without warning, I felt strong hands grab me violently, and quite literally pick me up, and throw me across six feet of space, and crash into the wood panelling of the opposite wall, leaving a Chris-sized dent in the wall a good five feet above the floor. My attacker was, of course, my father, who stood all of five foot nine but powerfully built and as strong as an ox.

SU The Fucker Did It

It was after this that my empathic abilities began to appear, not that they made any sense. If anything, this new thing just added to the utter chaos that was me. During the next year and a half, there were numerous occasions where the lack of emotional boundaries literally had me running almost panicked from different places, breathless and very scared for me. For a time I tried to numb it out with prodigious use of drugs, and alcohol, which had a limited effect and was mirroring my parents’ behaviour. Which made me sick because I had sworn to myself, that I would never, ever be anything like them. An empath cannot weaponize his/her gift, at least we should not because if we could/can, you lot of “normals” are in a shit load of trouble. The next major moment as an empath was the afternoon where mother dearest told me that my opinion did not, would not ever matter to anyone, anywhere, ever and that she had never wanted me. That is hard for any child, regardless of age, to hear. As an empath, I absorbed her cold hate, her contempt, her utter denial, her regret of not purposely miscarrying me. Moreover, it came through razor sharp with laser-focused clarity, with fire hose intensity. There was no regret; this was God’s truth if ever there was one. Three months later, my birthday, she suicides and her 21 grams come to me to what? I do not believe in ghosts and goblins, the supernatural is easily explained by string theory and its multiverse. A poltergeist encounter is only an intrusion into our realm in the same way that we intrude into theirs. For every action, there is an equal reaction, who are we to be so arrogant to think that ghosts and goblins are related to us? Being an empath, discovering this gift and finally understanding it, I had hoped that it would bring a type of clarity to the issue. It has not and I am no further ahead. The animosity that exists between my mother and I is perhaps best answered in the Akashic record, or perhaps something in another realm needed to happen.

SU Light being at war. I didn't know why she hated me, but her abuse had hospitalized me as a 4 year old child. Our relationship had changed when I was 11, my brother and I had disarmed her, and I had taken her weapon of choice, and had disposed of it. She had declared open war by rearming herself, and attempting to use it, after I had warned her of deadly serious consequences of doing that. From that point forward, her position only worsened, she was a Type 1 Diabetic. She was 85% blind, and had late stage Kidney Disease, with which she was in a lot of pain from. She had since being disarmed a second time, initiated terrible mental, emotional, and spiritual abuse. The crueller she became, I would with glee, inflame her injuries from her disease. She was prone to infection, as most diabetics are, and I'd piss on hand and face towels she used. Dad had warned her, and he was right, we were fighting back.

 

Mary the Wife

 

February 6, 2021

Nothing is secret that shall not be made manifest; neither anything hid that shall not be known and come abroad. (Luke 8:17)

MW Mary Magdalene. If ever in the world's history, there was a woman who deserved more to be a man hater, Mary here would be her. She went from being the wife of a dynastic king, to being a common prostitute.

 Funny that statement above, basically, it means that there are no secrets that shall not be made public. The problem with that is, too often people use shades of grey to describe whatever truth. As we delve into the mystery of who Mary really was, we will find not a shade of grey, but a huge deception. Mary, the wife of Christ, has proved to be a non-ending thorn in the side of the Catholic Church. Repeatedly, she sneaks out of obscurity and gets into the face of the church, most recently in Dan Brown’s novel/film, The Da Vinci Code.

Though Brown’s account is fictional, it is premised on fact; yes, the Magdalene was the wife of Christ and did indeed bear him children. The film was inaccurate in that the Grail does not reside in just one person, but rather resides in families, and throughout the generations since the time of Christ, it has disseminated throughout the populace. Brown would have been more correct to say that the strongest claim to the Grail resides with the family that can claim descent back to both Jesus’ and Mary’s lineage combined.

In the gospels, Jesus had various female companions, seven are cited; in all but one, the Magdalene is first named, in the other, it’s his mom Mary. We are introduced to Magdalene as a woman who “ministered unto him”;

MW Mary as his wife, has every right to be with him, and to see to his needs.

she makes her last appearance as the first person to speak with JC after his resurrection. In the first centuries of the first millennium A.D., the literature states clearly that Magdalene had a special place in the heart of JC and his followers. As time progressed, the church decided that Mary must have been a whore because a biblical reference classifies her as a “sinner”. To the bishops of that time, this meant that she was a woman of loose virtues. This, of course, being just one more instance of the church not knowing its own book, because in the next gospel verse, Mary is said to be a woman of substance and one of Jesus’s sponsors! In other gospel accounts, Magdalene is shown as a close friend and confidant of JC’s mother, who accompanies her to the crucifixion; as I’m sure that a grieving mother wants her son’s whoring prostitute at her side as her son is being tortuously murdered in front of her. So why did the church turn against this woman who Jesus loved more than all of his disciples? 

MW Jesus kissing his wife. You love your wife, and you kiss her. The misconception that Mary was a prostitute, was started by Pope Gregory I, in 591. So for an organization that had its story straight from its inception, why did it suddenly change after 271 years had passed?

What are they trying to conceal?

In other non-canonical gospels, her life was recorded, her clerical and academic status, she was known to have been endowed with knowledge, vision, and insight that not even Peter had. As we carry on, we will discover what she has come to mean in the world of fine art, how she is still relative to today. Magdalene has been painted, sculpted, been seen in stained glass, she is in fact one of the most depicted individuals. There have been portrayals of her at the cross, the tomb, and the “Do not cling to me” drama from John 20:17. Most of her depictions have nothing whatsoever to do with the Bible; most scenes have her alone, either at a table or in a glen or grotto, most feature a mirror, candle, skull, jewellery, and a book. Sometimes when she is depicted with other women, there is an ointment jar. The mirror and jewellery are symbolic of her rejection of the vanities of life (ego).

MW Mary being beautiful. If you ever need to be certain a representation is the Magdalene, she's usually portrayed with red hair, this representing fertility. She may too have a book, indicating her depth of knowledge. Sometimes she has a jar, or jug, this indicating her place as a king's wife, and her right to anoint a king. 

The candle and book, of course, represent the movement from ignorance to enlightenment, the skull, only the inevitability of death, and she, of course, represents the cup of life — her womb. Mark 16:1 says that when she and the others arrived at JC’s tomb, they brought sweet spices in an ointment jar so that they might come and anoint him. The real importance of the ointment is this though, when Mary anointed the head and feet of JC at the house of Simon in Bethany before the crucifixion.

The church has always said with some vehemence that Mary the whore was not the person who performed the anointing, they insist that JC would not be anointed by a sinner. (Funny that, considering he died for us sinners.) Luke 7:37-38 states clearly that Mary performed the anointing at the house of Simon the Pharisee. The gospels tell us that two anointings took place, John 11:2 assures us that they were both done by Magdalene. Pope Gregory I (590-604 A.D.) argued this, and finally, 1,306 years later, in 1910, the Catholic Encyclopedia acknowledged this fact.

MW The Anointer & Anointed

Magdalene was finally made a saint in 1969, which is a church feast day on July 22. In the West, this pagan feast day has been the same since the 8th century; here we have another instance of the Catholic Church appropriating Grail-related rituals. Unsurprisingly, the Roman Missal, which determines Latin Rite liturgy, still rejects the fact that the whore and Mary of Bethany are the same person. The change in 1969 to Mary’s canonical status is based on the presumption that she had repented, although nowhere in the scriptures does it say that she had repented from having been a prostitute!

So again, why did the church go to such lengths to vilify her? Obviously, there was something about her being such an important part of JC’s life that really irritated those early bishops. From day one, the church had been designed as a celibacy-based male prerogative institution, because somehow Mary’s influence undermined this new hybrid Pauline church. 

MW Mary Nude. To simplify this, the Magdalene was a beautiful young woman of who Christ loved and respected. The Essene society allowed for the full integration of women in all roles, because they are essentiakl for balancing the sacred masculine/feminine. She bore Christ's children and is generally portrayed as a red head, to represent fertility. Here we've stepped that up a notch, beautiful, voluptuous, and a flirt.

 

A Man Who Underappreciated the Holy Grail Despite His Family's Connection to It

 

January 31, 2021

AHG Led Zeppelin IV. The album that started it all for me.

We left our last article with some thoughts about digital recording and how the sound quality is poor. In spite of this, I have a Spotify account where I have quite a playlist consisting of just under 4,000 songs. When I was a kid, in order to obtain that same amount of music, I had an enormous collection of LP (Long Play) vinyl albums numbering in the thousands. Yes, storage was a bit of an issue, and it had the benefit of allowing me to find absolute gems on the album’s “B” side, instead of just the “Top 10 hits” on side “A.”

Everyone enjoys music to whatever degree; my father was a bit odd in that way. His music tastes were very narrow — Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, Sinatra, the folk rock sound of America, and their song “The Horse with No Name.” He dabbled with the hard rock sound of The James Gang, but beyond that, there was only the sound of silence around him. My mother’s tastes were a little broader, consisting of Tom Jones, Charlie Pride, Freddie Fender, Meatloaf, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac.

You may be wondering what, if anything, all this has to do with the Grail. Be patient — you will understand soon. When I was nine, I was beginning to search for my own musical tastes. I had found that I just did not like what my parents listened to. It was then, on an early Saturday morning, that I had got up early and was poking through my brother’s album collection, where I discovered Led Zeppelin’s unnamed Zeppelin IV.

It was quite literally music to my ears and paved the way for the next 44 years of needing hard classic rock in my life.

In previous articles, I have talked about the violence that was all too common in my parents’ home. I will not reiterate that now, but music provided an escape for me — a coping mechanism. After school or work, I would clamp the headphones over my ears and lose myself in the sound, searching endlessly for meaning in the lyrics of the songs. Indeed, sometimes the song’s lyrics were perfect for whatever the circumstance, or the meaning of the song needed just a little tweaking.

Then there is the experience of actually seeing the band live and feeling thousands of people around you, all sharing their energy in the same place. Every now and again, an artist will comment on that — the energy. Sadly, too often, it feeds nothing but their egos. Here, we are talking about something very different.

Here now, in the Kali Yuga, we have drifted a long way from the spiritual purity of Satya Yuga — or even the more moderate Treta Yuga. During these previous time periods, our focus was on our higher light beings — our sacred selves. Then, as now, we are warned to avoid distractions in our corporeal lives. We are warned in particular about sex, although it is hard to find anything wrong with sex between consenting adults. The problems arise when individuals become addicted to it, and the welfare of anyone involved becomes meaningless.

AHG Music from Adrian Wagner, one of several pieces put together for his work on the Holy Grail.

It is with sadness that we note the passing of British electronic composer, entrepreneur, and inventor Adrian Wagner, who co-created the Wasp synthesizer. The great-great-grandson of German composer Richard Wagner, Adrian wrote and released many musical works of his own, collaborated with the Radiophonic Workshop, and even penned the theme tune to the Trans World Sport television show. However, it was the low-cost yellow and black synthesizer, developed with synth designer Chris Huggett (of Oscar and Novation fame), that really cements his name in the music production hall of fame.

In an age of VCOs, the Wasp’s inventive DCOs kept their tuning remarkably well, and its use of capacitive keyboard strips rather than a regular keyboard was quite unusual. Its key selling point was the price, though. At only £200 upon its release in 1977, it was substantially less than anything from Moog, Oberheim, or Roland. Wagner went on to produce entomologically themed devices such as the Gnat single-voice synth, Spider sequencer, the Caterpillar keyboard, the Wasp Deluxe, and more.

AHG Wasp Synthesizer

 After leaving the world of synth making, Wagner moved to Wales and continued to release music on his Mediaquest label and pursued his other passions of photography and painting.

His contribution to the world of electronic music cannot be underestimated — conceiving of and bringing to market a synthesizer that was truly affordable was no mean feat. Also, the gritty, dirty sounds of which it was capable made it a go-to for those eschewing the prog-rock aesthetic of the late ’70s, gaining notable users over the years such as Vince Clarke, Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle, 808 State, Will Gregory, and more.

Adrian passed away on June 22, 2018. His wife, Helen, and stepchildren, Stephen and Emma, survive him.

Blocked

 

January 24, 2021

In our article “East Meets West,” we leave the article with mention of the Toltec, and then talk about time immemorial, where we explore the Hindu Yugas. From there, we go on to explore celestial time, then even extinctions. Why? As I have stated throughout these articles, it is vital that we bring understanding to seemingly disparate subjects. The first law of quantum physics states that the universe equals zero, a zero is of course a circular motion that protects you and keeps you from harm. When a special operations operator does a CTR (close target recognizance), one of the purposes of it is to determine patterns of behavior of the targets guarding force. Here of course, our target is not physical, but is just as daunting because it is ethereal.

In our quest for the Holy Grail, we are continuously blocked by lack of written records, the farther back in time we go, the harder it is. We know that the Catholic Church’s zeal to become the dominate religious force has done tremendous damage to historic fact, instances like in the 15th century with Diego de Landa's burning of the Mayan codices, and again the destruction of the library of Alexandria in the 3rd century A.D. The Great Library of Alexandria in Alexandria Egypt was one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world.

BD Library of Alexandria Egypt

The Library was part of a larger research institution called the Mouseion, which was dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts. The idea of a universal library in Alexandria may have been proposed by Demetrius of Phalerum, an exiled Athenian statesman living in Alexandria, to Ptolemy I Soter, who may have established plans for the Library, but the Library itself was probably not built until the reign of his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus. The Library quickly acquired many papyrus scrolls, due largely to the Ptolemaic kings' aggressive and well-funded policies for procuring texts. It is unknown precisely how many such scrolls were housed at any given time, but estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 at its height.

Alexandria came to be regarded as the capital of knowledge and learning, in part because of the Great Library. Many important and influential scholars worked at the Library during the third and second centuries BC, including, among many others: Zenodotus of Ephesus , who worked towards standardizing the texts of the Homeric poems ; Callimachus , who wrote the Pinakes, sometimes considered to be the world's first library catalogue; Apollonius of Rhodes, who composed the epic poem the Argonautica Eratosthenes of Cyrene; , who calculated the circumference of the earth  within a few hundred kilometers of accuracy; Aristophanes of Byzantium , who invented the system of Greek diacritics  and was the first to divide poetic texts into lines; and Aristarchus of Samothrace , who produced the definitive texts of the Homeric poems as well as extensive commentaries on them. During the reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes, a daughter library was established in the Serapeum, a temple to the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis.

BD Serapis. An unfortunate God, he was made up to bridge certain Greek and Egyptian Gods. This an example of how the Christian Church stole much of its ceremonies, and symbolism from the Holy Grail. Most notably in the creation of the God Jesus Christ.

Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library of Alexandria was burned once and cataclysmically destroyed, the Library actually declined gradually over the course of several centuries. This decline began with the purging of intellectuals from Alexandria in 145 BC during the reign of Ptolemy VIII Physcon, which resulted in Aristarchus of Samothrace, the head librarian, resigning from his position and exiling himself to Cyprus. Many other scholars, including Dionysius Thrax and Apollodorus of Athens, fled to other cities, where they continued teaching and conducting scholarship. The Library, or part of its collection, was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how much was actually destroyed and it seems to have either survived or been rebuilt shortly thereafter; the geographer Stabo mentions having visited the Mouseion in around 20 BC and the prodigious scholarly output of Didymus Chalcenterus in Alexandria from this period indicates that he had access to at least some of the Library's resources.

BD 8 Track Tape Cassette and Player. The richest sound quality found outside of the studio.

The Library dwindled during the Roman Period, due to lack of funding and support. Its membership appears to have ceased by the 260s AD. Between 270 and 275 AD, the city of Alexandria saw a rebellion and an imperial counterattack that probably destroyed whatever remained of the Library, if it still existed at that time. The daughter library of the Serapeum may have survived after the main Library's destruction. The Serapeum was vandalized and demolished in 391 AD under a decree issued by Coptic Christian Pope Theophilus of Alexandria, but it does not seem to have housed books at the time and was mainly used as a gathering place for Neoplatonist philosophers following the teachings of Iamblichus.

Even in the 20th century, with the advent of laser technology and compact disks, we were fooled into the idea that foolproof data storage was here. Demonstrably that was not the case, because once one of those disks was damaged in any way, too often that data was irretrievably lost. Call me a dinosaur but when I was a very young boy, my dad had 8 track cassettes and the sound was phenomenal, then there was vinyl albums, then god awful cassettes, then cds, then Mp3 players, and now, digital music on your smart phones, and the sound sucks big donkey dicks. I am all for going back to 8 tracks, where the sound is so full that you are in the studio with the musician.

PSR 1257 + 12

 

December 31, 2020

Now twenty years in to a new millennium, we wonder if things will be better or worse. We have shifted from one zodiacal house to another, from Pisces to Aquarius. As in all things we need to understand that which has taken place before to properly understand the now or tomorrow. We have some understanding of time through our experience of celestial time, but that is limited. Augustine of Hippo

the bishop of Roman Carthage, (354 – 430 A.D.), who was perhaps the greatest thinker of that nascent early almost unformed Christian church who fused the New Testament with Platonistic Greek philosophy was asked, “What is time?” He replied, “If no one asks me, I know what it is; but if I wish to explain what it is to him who asks, I do not know”. Time seems crucial to us on earth; it separates the span between our birth and death.

We measure that span of time in years; the year being determined by the amount of time, it takes Gaia to orbit our sun. Though we cannot define time, we have found ways to measure it. Being able to measure time enables us to ask questions about it, one such question is if we lived on another planet, would we be measuring time in a wholly different way? What if this planet had a vast elliptical orbit that took thousands of years to complete? Would we live longer? Would our life cycles be inextricably linked to that planet’s orbital period? To another planet’s life form, would we be considered immortal?

PSR Time is What to Who?

The Egyptian Pharaohs believed that they would be immortal once they joined the “gods” on that planet that gave its inhabitants life spans of millions of years because of its enormous orbital period. In Genesis, 15:5 Yahweh told Abraham as he formed the convenient with him, “to look skyward and count the stars”. Since then man has gazed upon the stars and wondered if somewhere among them, if there were others like us out there. In 1992 pulsar PSR 1257 + 12 was discovered, this collapsed star is about 1,300 light years away and had exploded about one billion years ago. It was found to have three planets orbiting it, two were orbiting at about the same distance as Mercury does our sun, the third was found to orbit in the goldilocks zone. John Noble Wilford wrote in the New York times January 9, 1992, “scientists said it was most unlikely that planets orbiting pulsars could be hospitable to life; but the findings encouraged astronomers, who this fall will begin a systematic survey of the heavens for signs of extraterrestrial life”.

Six thousand years ago, in the Sumerian epic called the Enuma Elish; (interestingly the word Enuma means when) they already knew what astronomers discovered in the 1990s. Those other solar systems had planets orbiting other stars, and that those stars could and did explode and the associated planets could be thrown from their orbits and that any life that existed on those planets, could be transferred to other planetary bodies by a process called panspermia.

Egypt, the successive major culture, of the ancient near east after Shinar; left us a text called the Pyramid Text. In paragraph 1466, it gives a description of the beginning of time, “When heaven had not come in to existence, when men had not come in to existence, when gods had not yet been born, when death had not yet come in to existence. This of course echoes the first few verses of the bible’s book of Genesis. Scholars, excepting those from the Catholic Church, accept that the Enuma Elish is the

document that Genesis was written from. The bible however, only picks the story up from the separation from the waters, for us earthlings, time begins with the formation of our solar system. The creation epic, the Enuma Elish gives us a detailed history as to how Nibiru enters our solar system, how it crashes in to Tiamat, turns Neptune on its side, rearranges Pluto’s orbit, crashes in to the very wounded Tiamat a second time, then nudges her to our present orbit, the third rock from the sun. Then Nibiru finds itself bound to our sun’s gravity, and is locked in to an enormous elliptical orbit that encompasses our entire solar system , then finds itself at perihelion (the closest point to the sun), at the same place where it hit Tiamat, between Mars and Jupiter. In addition, it then becomes the twelfth member of our little solar system.

The number 12 has been instrumental to us since then; it divides our 24-hour clock, year in to months, the houses of the zodiac. Earth sort of owns the number 12, whereas the Sumerians had a mathematical system call sexgesimal, based on the number 60, instead of our metric system based on 100. An advantage of the sexgesimal system is its divisibility in to 12, the system progresses by alternately multiplying 6 x 10 = 60 x 6 = 360, the degrees in a circle, used in geometry and astronomy. Then when we take 360 x 10 = 3,600, the great sar (year), the length of time it takes Nibiru to complete one orbit. Texts known as the Sumerian King Lists describe the first ten Annunaki kings before the great flood as having ruled 120 Sars or 3,600 years per Sar, meaning Nibiru orbited the sun 120 times, meaning that 432,000 years had passed. This number 432,000 had significance beyond Sumer, in Hamlet’s Mill, by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend they search for a point where science and myth come together. They cite the example of the Teutonic/Norse tale of Valhalla; they continue that it is also the number of syllables in the Rigveda. There are 10,800 stanzas in the Rigveda with 40 syllables to a stanza 10,800 x 40 = 432,000Hindu tradition envisions ten eons paralleling the ten Sumerian rulers of the pre-flood era, however, they do expand the overall time span to 4,320,000 years. 432,000 applied to Hindu tradition is the kalpa, the day of Lord Brahma, it comprises twelve million devas, (divine Years). A divine year is 360 earth years, so a day of the Lord Brahma is 4,320,000,000 earth years. This number of course is very close to our estimated age of the solar system, 4.7 billion years.

Gaia Overwhelmed and on Her Knees

 

January 16, 2021

Some mass extinctions unfold like a sloppy murder, leaving clear fingerprints for the keen investigator to uncover. (Asteroids are no masters of subtlety.) The Late Ordovician mass extinction, the oldest of all and the second most lethal, is not one of them. Though there is a standard explanation for this granddaddy of death involving an ancient ice age the evidence is cryptic enough that experts are still submitting new theories for how 85 percent of all marine species suddenly sank into oblivion.

The planet’s first death knell sounded 444 million years ago, near the end of the Ordovician period Simple forms of life — mainly bacteria and archaea — had already flourished for 3 billion years. Complex life, on the other hand, had only just hit its stride. 

In the sequence of geologic time, the Ordovician follows the Cambrian period, well-known for the evolutionary "explosion" of the same name that populated the world with nearly all the modern animal phyla — the major branches we now see in the tree of life. The ranks of vertebrates, mollusks, arthropods and other broad taxonomic groups still familiar to us today were growing and diversifying at an extraordinary rate — until their abrupt downfall, that is.

“The Ordovician is a very interesting time period,” says Seth Finnegan, a paleo biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, “because you have one of the largest and most rapid bio diversification events … and also one of the largest mass extinction events. Both of them are clearly tied up in physical changes to the environment.”

Ice, Fire and Deformities

At the time, most of Earth’s dry land was merged together in the supercontinent of Gondwana, which had drifted so far south that it hovered over the pole like present-day Antarctica. To the north, there were a few minor continents — notably Laurentia, which includes most of North America, and Baltica, which includes the Baltic region and part of Russia — that dotted the tropical and temperate regions around the equator. 

Plants and animals were perhaps beginning to venture above water, though nothing near the extent that they would in the coming eras. Largely, most of the action was still happening under the sea, where trilobites, corals and other primordial ocean-dwellers prospered like never before.

Orthoconic (straight-shelled) cephalopod

Cameroceras (name meaning "chambered horn") is an extinct orthoconic (straight-shelled) cephalopod that lived during the Ordovician period. They were likely a top predator of their time. (Credit: Esteban De Armas/Shutterstock)

Then came their demise. In conventional wisdom, it consisted of two distinct pulses separated by roughly a million years. First, glaciers engulfed Gondwana and the planet cooled dramatically, chilling the tropics and mid-latitudes. Sea levels plummeted hundreds of feet. This destroyed vast stretches of the warm, shallow-water habitat that sustained marine life. Then, in the second pulse, the glaciers melted, the planet warmed, and the ocean rose. The species that had just adapted to the cold struggled once again to evolve fast enough.

It is unclear what triggered that icy advance. Some studies suggest weathering of silicate rocks — especially in the rising Appalachian Mountains — could have drawn down atmospheric carbon dioxide, lowering global temperatures. Others implicate the expansion of plants, which could have absorbed greenhouse gases while also speeding up silicate weathering. One theory posits that a gamma-ray burst, by converting nitrogen and oxygen into sun-blocking smog, may have brought on the glaciers.

Many researchers are beginning to think that “cooling itself may not be solely responsible for these extinctions,” as Thijs Vandenbroucke and colleagues wrote in a 2015 paper that links some deaths to changing ocean chemistry. They found fossilized plankton with fatal deformities dating to the event, suggesting the release of toxic metals like iron and lead from the ocean depths may have been an important kill mechanism.

Some evidence in recent years even points the finger at glaciation’s elemental opposite: volcanism. The Ordovician extinction, if caused by the cooling climate, would be an outlier. Extreme volcanic activity is widely accepted as a main catalyst in most other mass die-offs, since it leads to inhospitable global warming. Now, with the discovery of mercury deposits from the era, the telltale signature of eruptions has surfaced in this extinction too. Rewriting the story with a fiery culprit would “make the late Ordovician stand out less,” Finnegan says, though he is not convinced yet.

The Equitable Extinction

While scientists are unsure why the majority of species died at this moment, they do understand how those deaths influenced the progression of life. Many extinctions jolt evolution off its course, allowing a host of new organisms to rise from the ashes and fill new niches in a new environment. But not so with the Ordovician extinction.

“The resulting fauna had ecologic patterns similar to the fauna that had become extinct,” writes Peter Sheehan, a paleontologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Other extinction events that eliminated similar or even smaller percentages of species had greater long-term ecologic effects.” That is because those long-term effects depend on which level of the taxonomic ladder an extinction acts upon. 

The Ordovician, for example, eliminated 85 percent of all species, but only 60 percent of genera and 25 percent of families, the next two levels of classification. Since somemembers survived in most families, life went on more or less, as it would have anyway. The Cretaetious Paleocene, in contrast, dethroned both orders (an even higher tier of taxonomy) of the dominant dinosaurs. The natural hierarchy inverted, and mammals rose to power.

So, even though it was deadlier than all mass extinctions but the Permian (also known, grimly, as the “Great Dying”), the Ordovician didn’t leave much of an impression. It killed many individual organisms, but decimated no so-called mascot groups — nothing of dinosaur, or even ammonite, stature. 

There were casualties, of course. The asaphida family of trilobites — which, with their snail-like eyestalks, are “about as charismatic as late Ordovician fossils get,” says Finnegan — disappeared almost completely. Graptolites, tiny colonial animals that lived together in a single skeleton, also flirted with annihilation. Corals, bryozoans  (another colonial creature), clam-like brachiopods, and eel-esque conodonts  suffered too.

Fossilized asaphida at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo. (Credit: Sarunyu

 Overall, this extinction just was not as selective as most — it did not target specific groups over others. In some extinctions, “it matters who you are and how you make your living,” as Finnegan puts it. For example, in the Permian extinction, acidic oceans eroded the calcified shells of many animals, while sparing the uncalcified. “In the late Ordovician event,” he went on, “my sense is that it matters more where you are.”

Most high-level taxonomic groups, happily for them, were widely dispersed. So even as ecological catastrophe struck certain regions, the cousins of the less fortunate persisted elsewhere and upheld the evolutionary status quo. In fact, the fossil record is so similar before and after the event that a rookie paleontologist staring right at the layers might miss the cutoff. “You need to be a specialist,” Finnegan says, “to tell what side of the Ordovician-Silurian boundary you’re on.” 

*Author note: It is likely that the Ordovician event was not actually the first mass extinction ever to sweep Earth, at least in terms of the proportion of organisms killed. In the billions of years before complex life emerged, the planet’s single-celled denizens endured harsh ecological change many times, including so-called snowball Earth episodes that likely locked every living thing beneath a sheet of ice. These and other events surely led to widespread extinction for microbial life.

Time

 

December 29, 2020

What is time? Does it have a beginning? Does it have meaning or context considering our immortality? When we look at the Universe today, we know with an extraordinary amount of scientific certainty that it was not simply created as-is, but evolved to its present configuration over billions of years of cosmic history. We can use what we see today, both nearby and at great distances, to extrapolate what the Universe was like a long time ago, and to understand how it came to be the way it is now.

When we think about our cosmic origins, then, it is only human to ask the most fundamental of all possible questions: where did this all come from? It has been more than half a century since the first robust and unique predictions of the Big Bang was confirmed, leading to our modern picture of a Universe that began from a hot, dense state some 13.8 billion years ago. However, in our quest for the beginning, we know already that time could not have started with the Big Bang. In fact, it might not have had a beginning at all.

For a time, there were multiple competing ideas, which were all consistent with the observations we had.

1. An expanding Universe could have originated from a singular point — an event in space-time — where all of space and time emerged from a singularity.

2. The Universe could be expanding today because it was contracting in the past, and will contract again in the future, presenting an oscillating solution.

3. Finally, the expanding Universe could have been an eternal state, where space is expanding now and always had been and always would be where new matter is continuously created to keep the density constant.

SFF Cosmic Eternity 

These three examples represent the three major options: the Universe had a singular beginning, the Universe is cyclical in nature, or the Universe has always existed. In the 1960s, however, a low-level of microwave radiation was found everywhere across the sky, changing the story forever.

This radiation was not just the same magnitude everywhere, but also the same in all directions. At just a few degrees above absolute zero, it was consistent with the Universe emerging from an earlier, hot dense state, and cooling as it expanded. As improved technology and novel techniques led to better data, we learned that the spectrum of this radiation had a particular shape: that of a near-perfect blackbody. A blackbody is what you get if you have a perfect absorber of radiation heated up to a certain specific temperature. If the Universe expands and cools without changing its entropy (i.e., adiabatically), something that starts with a blackbody spectrum will remain a blackbody, even as it cools. This radiation was not only consistent with being the leftover glow from the Big Bang, but was inconsistent with alternatives like tired light or reflected starlight. According to the Big Bang, the Universe was hotter, denser, uniform and smaller in the past. It only has the properties we see today because it has been expanding, cooling, and experiencing the influence of gravitation for so long. Because the wavelength of radiation stretches as the Universe expands, a smaller Universe should have had radiation with shorter wavelengths, meaning it had higher energies and greater temperatures.

Billions of years ago, it was once so hot that even neutral atoms could not form without being blasted apart. Even earlier than that, today's microwave radiations were so energetic that they dominated over matter as far as the Universe's energy content was concerned. At even earlier times, atomic nuclei were instantly blasted apart, and at still earlier ones, we could not even create stable protons and neutrons.

If we extrapolate all the way back, to arbitrarily hot temperatures, small distances, and high densities, you would intuit that this would truly equate to the beginning. If you were willing to run the clock backwards as far as you could, all of the space that makes up our visible Universe today would be compressed down to a single point.

Now, it is true that if you went to these extreme conditions, compressing all the matter and energy present in today's Universe into a tiny enough volume of space, the laws of physics would break down. You could try to calculate various properties, but you would only get nonsense for answers. This is what we describe as a singularity: a set of conditions where time and space have no meaning. At first glance, if you do the math, it appears that a singularity is inevitable, regardless of what dominates the Universe's energy content.

Singularities are where the law of gravitation governing the Universe — Einstein’s General Relativity — yields nonsense for predictions. Relativity, remember, is the theory that describes space and time. But at singularities, both spatial and temporal dimensions cease to exist. Asking questions like “what came before this event where time began” is as nonsensical as asking “where am I” if space no longer exists.

Indeed, this is the argument that many make, including Paul Davies, when they claim that there can be no discussion of what occurred before the Big Bang. This is a tautology, of course, if you assert that the Big Bang is where time began. But as interesting as this argument is, we know that the Big Bang is not where time began anymore. Ever since we have made modern, detailed measurements of the cosmos, we have learned that this extrapolation to a singularity must be wrong.

In particular, the patterns and magnitudes of the fluctuations that we have discovered in the modern radiation left over from that early, hot, dense state teach us a number of important properties about our Universe. They teach us how much matter was present in dark matter as well as normal matter: protons, neutrons and electrons. They give us a measurement of the

Universe's spatial curvature, as well as the presence of dark energy and the effects of neutrinos.

But they also tell us something vitally important that is often overlooked: they tell us whether there was a maximum temperature for the Universe back in its earliest stages. According to the data from WMAP and Planck, the Universe never achieved a temperature greater than about 10²⁹ K. This number is enormous, but it is over 1,000 times smaller than the temperatures we would need to equate to a singularity.

The particular properties of the Universe that are imprinted upon it from the earliest stages provide a window into the physical processes that took place at those times. Not only do they tell us that we cannot extrapolate the Big Bang all the way back to a singularity, but they tell us about the state that existed prior to (and set up) the hot Big Bang: a period of cosmic inflation.

During inflation, there was a tremendous amount of energy inherent to space itself, causing the Universe to expand both rapidly and relentlessly: at an exponential rate. This period of inflation occurred prior to the hot Big Bang, set up the initial conditions that our Universe began with, and left a series of unique imprints that we searched for and discovered after the theory had already predicted them. By any metric, inflation is a tremendous success.

Even though we can trace our cosmic history all the way back to the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang, that isn't enough to answer the question of how (or if) time began. Going even earlier, to the end-stages of cosmic inflation, we can learn how the Big Bang was set up and began, but we have no observable information about what occurred prior to that. The final fraction-of-a-second of inflation is where our knowledge ends.

Thousands of years after we laid out the three major possibilities for how time began — as having always existed, as having begun a finite duration ago in the past, or as being a cyclical entity — we are no closer to a definitive answer. Whether time is finite, infinite, or cyclical is not a question that we have enough information within our observable Universe to answer. Unless we figure out a new way to gain information about this deep, existential question, the answer may forever be beyond the limits of what is knowable.

That is what science says, but does it really help with our day-to-day reality? The Hindu yugas tell us that time is cyclical.