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Wolfgang Smith (1930-2024): The Afterlife, Quantum Physics, Sacred Geometry, and God
July 26, 2024
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What's next for you? What's next for me, my friend, is to prepare myself to enter into the life beyond this one, to enter into the next phase of life.
Today, we're honoring the legacy of Wolfgang Smith, who recently passed away at the age of 94. As you may know, I had the privilege of spending a few nights with Wolfgang approximately one year ago, during which we had several hours of conversation. Seven of those hours were recorded and put into podcast form, which you can find in the description. In this video, you'll see a compilation of some of my favorite moments with the scientist, mathematician, and physicist Wolfgang Smith. You will be missed.
The idea of the tripartite cosmos in which the highest level is beyond space and time, this is the crux of the matter. Well, this is a kind of eternity, but it needs to be distinguished from the eternity of religion, the eternity of
For example, the eternity which the Christian speaks of when he says that God is eternal and heaven is eternal. So eternity in that sense is more than the if eternity because actually one of the crucial
One of the ways in which Christianity differs from the Vedic teaching is that the Vedic teaching regards the cosmos as cyclic. It goes on and on like a sine curve that has no beginning and no end.
Cosmology is radically different because it is integral to the Christian tradition that at the second coming of Christ, which no man knows the day and the hour, the cosmos in its entirety will be destroyed.
So the difference between the Vedic outlook and the Christian is that in the Vedic outlook, the cosmos has no end in both senses, in the sense of a purpose and end in the sense of a termination. So in the Vedic way of looking at the cosmos, there is neither a purpose
because the only answer a Vedic guru could give to the question what is the purpose of the cosmos based on. The Vedic spiritual practice tries essentially to get out of this cosmos because
The Vedic wisdom says this is not God, this is not reality and the purpose of life is to gain union with God. So you see in this Vedic philosophy, the cosmos plays no role. The cosmos has no purpose.
And also ipsa facto, if you will, it has no ending either. In the Vedic tradition, the cosmos is without beginning and without end. And finally, the Vedic masters will tell you that in fact it's unreal. When you see a snake in the rope,
How can you, why should you ask, where does this snake come from? Why is it there? And so forth. Save yourself the trouble and realize that there is no snake. This is the Vedic approach. It's quite different from the Christian. The Christian says, yes, the cosmos has its reality.
It was put there by God and it was put there for a purpose. It's like a school. A school is there to teach the students and once that is done, the school has no more purpose. If there were only one student in the world and one school, as soon as this student graduates,
You don't need the school anymore. So therefore, in the Christian religion, the cosmos itself will come to an end. It'll end when it has fulfilled its purpose. As most people know, I'm sure the world, the physical universe as perceived in quantum mechanics is something utterly different
from the physical world as we normally know it and think of it. And so a physical system in the eyes of quantum mechanics is described by so-called wave function. So suppose you have the simplest system possible, a single particle. The wave function description of that particle
will give a certain probability that the particle is just about anywhere in the universe. It is not at any particular point. In fact, in reference to certain experiments, it can in fact multi-locate, it can pass through two slits at the same time. So in short, the world as seen in quantum mechanics is something utterly different
from the world that we perceive in ordinary life and the world as described also in classical physics. So the transition between quantum mechanics and classical physics takes place in the act of measurement.
And so you measure a quantum system and in a single instant the picture changes in place of a multi-locating particle described by wave function which is highly mathematical and only really the trained mathematician
can understand what this wave function actually has to say. So in an instant, the picture changes from the quantum mechanical to the classical, which means that after measurement, the particle has a definite position, a definite momentum and so on. After measurement, we find ourselves, so to speak, in the world that we normally know
as a physical universe. And so what then is the measurement problem? It is simply the question, how does this miracle take place? And leading physicists have been thinking about this problem ever since quantum mechanics really was discovered in 1926, to be exact. But when it comes right down to it,
No one has given us the answer. I mean, it remains an open question. And so, in 1995, I think it was, I became interested in that problem and I wanted to find a solution. And after considerable thinking and research and reading,
I put it all together and wrote a book called the quantum enigma and in this quantum enigma I do propose a solution and the key ideas, there are really two key ideas. The first key idea is that
We need to distinguish between the physical universe, which is the universe as conceived by the classical physicist and what I call the corporeal world, which is something much richer. The difference between
The physical universe and the corporeal world is basically that the corporeal world is perceivable, which means that in addition to quantities, it owns qualities, for example, color. So I postulated that color is not just the thing of the mind.
It is actually a quality pertaining to the corporeal world. So the physical universe then is a corporeal world as conceived by the physicist. So in passing from the corporeal world to the physical, something is lost. And I
With every corporeal object x, I associate a physical object, which I call Sx, and so there is actually a kind of function from x to Sx, because x determines Sx. So this was the first idea, the distinction between the corporeal world and the physical.
And having made this distinction, you still have a problem left. How namely does this transition take place? Because in the act of measurement, there is a passage from the physical to the corporeal.
The quantum system, the wave function describes the physical, pertains to the physical universe and after the measurement is made, you are actually in the corporeal world because you couldn't have a measurement
if the result of the measurement were not perceptible. So you end up with a pointer pointing to a certain location on a scale and you visibly read off the measurement. So measurement is a transition from the physical to the corporeal
and it is quite easy to understand rigorously that this transition cannot take place through the causation known to physics. So the causation known to physics is what I call horizontal causation and it is affected by a process taking place in time.
On the other hand, the transition from the physical to the corporeal plane, well, I just explained it cannot be understood on the basis of horizontal causation, so a different mode of causation is required, as this mode I call vertical causation.
It is easy to see on ontological grounds. I mean, we're outside the domain of physics. You can't write an equation for vertical causation. You can't even talk of it as a physicist without introducing some other notion.
So this is what I called vertical causation and the defining characteristic of vertical causation is the fact that it does not take place in time. In other words, it is instantaneous. I think it will be of interest to put in a little bit of a comment at this point.
Because many people know that the Nobel Prize in Physics issued in 2022 dealt with a certain question relating to quantum theory on one side and relativity on the other. And one has known for quite a while
that the two cannot both be true. Now, the Nobel Prize of 2022 was issued for, I think, three experiments, which actually were able to decide which of the two theories is true. And we know they can't both be true. There's something called the Bell Inequalities and
Quantum mechanics says the results will be on this side of an inequality. Einsteinian physics says the result will be on the other side of the inequality. So these experiments actually decided between the two issues and the winner was quantum theory. And now what does this have to do with vertical causation? The answer is everything, because
The point at issue in these experiments and therefore in the Nobel Prize was whether a physical effect can be transmitted instantaneously, in other words faster than the speed of light. Relativity theory says no.
Nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Quantum mechanics says yes, when you make a measurement on a particle which is entangled with this one will be instantly affected.
So there is a clear incompatibility here between classical physics and Einstein relativity on one side and quantum theory on the other. And so, as I said, quantum theory won. And the implication is that classical physics
in its Einsteinian mode is contradicted. Very interesting that I think this has to do with the fact that they waited such a very long time to issue that Nobel Prize. I think more than 30 years they waited. And I think the reason is that this is a very hot potato.
By saying that quantum theory won and relativity theory lost, you're stepping on a lot of tone. It's a very sensitive matter, but quantum theory did win and the Nobel Prize acknowledges that and incidentally
What does that have to do with vertical causation? The answer again is everything because it was really vertical causation that was at issue here. There is a causality that acts instantaneously as quantum mechanics demands or what Einstein was right that no causation
Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax.
As soon as I
gained what I consider clarity regarding the tripartite cosmos, so the existence of an intermediary level subject to time but not to space. I realized that this fact, which is nothing more than Platonist cosmology and also Vedic cosmology, they're one and the same. Platonist cosmology and the Vedic cosmology
One and the same. And integral to this cosmology is the existence of the intermediary realm, which is a realm of time alone. And the mere existence of such a time only
Stratum disproves all of Einsteinian physics at one stroke. It's gone. An integral part of Gnosticism is the idea of this journey into higher worlds. The problem that the Gnostics face with the dawn of the modern age is that we no longer accept any higher worlds.
So the problem was very, very drastic. How can you fly into higher worlds when there are no more higher worlds to fly into? This was the problem. And by golly, they solved it. And do you know how they solved it? It's really interesting and ingenious. This all comes from Satan and Satan is very ingenious.
No question about that. So the neo-Gnostic way of solving this problem that there are no more higher worlds to fly into is very simple. They said the higher world is futuristic. In other words,
This world itself is being turned into the higher world. So the higher world became futuristic. Like worshipping technology or thinking that... Yes, exactly. And as a matter of fact, who is the neo-Gnostic prophet of modern times? Theodosia. There's no question about it. Theodosia is, so to speak, the
The great Gnostic guru of the present age. This is also why he had tremendous power, because the devil has power. Let no one be in doubt about that. He has great power. In fact, the power of Satan is so great that unless we, we humans, avail ourselves of
The sacred means given to us by God, we have no chance of withstanding that power. How do we have free will when from another perspective all our choices have been made or all of it can be seen? Well, I think there's only one answer to that question, and that is that free will pertains to our present state, which is a state of half-knowing.
Once we attain enlightenment, there's no question of free will. Sorry, enlightenment is the same as salvation or is that different? Well, I think nothing short of salvation would put you into that state where there's no more free will. There's no more free will because there is no more will in our sense of the term.
The cosmos is there only for a certain stretch of time. It came into being and it will cease to exist when Christ will fully manifest himself at the second coming. And you know, it makes tremendous amount of sense. If you think about it long enough, you realize that from a Christian point of vantage, it cannot be otherwise.
Because when Christ manifests himself in the fullness of his divinity, it's like turning on an infinite light and the darkness will cease. The polarity of day and night and all these things will cease. When Christ manifests himself in his full divinity, it's like an atom bomb. All these little things that
We know now will disappear. The three levels of the cosmos constitute one irreducible wholeness in its threefold nature. And this is really easy to understand because man, you and I and every human being is also tripartite in exactly the same sense. We too
are made of three levels in the traditional terminologies this is corpus anima spiritus and clearly spiritus is the same as the if eternal realm spiritus is beyond time the psychic realm is subject to time but not to space
and our corporeal realm is obviously corporeal so it's subject clearly to time and space so we mustn't think and obviously we are one we're one thing we're one organism they're not three and i don't
Have three parts. You won't find an avid tunnel Wolfgang Smith and the corporeal Wolfgang Smith. Wolfgang Smith as a person is composed of these three levels, but these three levels are one organism. And incidentally, this is
the fundamental fact about the Platonist cosmology and this fundamental fact throws a new light on everything and it has tremendous scientific implications so much so that you cannot have any kind of deeper science that doesn't recognize this tripartite nature.
So obviously the physicist knows nothing about it, cannot know anything about it, because the very conceptions needed to define the tripartite cosmos or the tripartite anthropos entail ontological ideas, which are incomprehensible to the physicist, because the physicist deals only with
quantitative realities, something that can therefore be described in a differential equation. You can't write a differential equation for spiritus, you can't write a differential equation for
the psychic realm, and actually you can't write the differential equation for the corporeal world either, because strictly speaking the physicist knows nothing about the corporeal world, because you cannot have a corporeal world consisting only of quantity.
Doesn't matter how you want, what kind of quantity, whether you want to talk about a differentiable manifold or doesn't matter mathematics is one thing and the corporeal world is not a mathematical entity. So as soon as you have even a little glimmering of the Platonist cosmology, you see how utterly blind
our modern intellectuals are, whether they are actually scientists capable of working with differential equations is secondary. The point is that practically every intellectual in our day has been metaphysically formed on the basis of mathematical physics. And that means that he is incapable of understanding even the first thing about reality.
Once you see it, you see the tragedy of it. It's a terrible, terrible tragedy. We think that we know more than people ever knew, when in fact, strictly speaking, we know nothing. Do you fear death? As a natural man, certainly, yes, certainly. Absolutely, because
We have not yet reached the stage of sainthood. We've all read the lives of many, many saints. We have some idea of what they're like, and it is, in my belief, only in a high level of sainthood that the fear of death is transcended. It's not a simple thing.
Ordinary Christian faith is wonderful and it's a sine qua non. We need it otherwise we have nothing. But it doesn't instantly elevate us to great spiritual heights. It's something that you have to work on a lifetime. And there are millions and millions of Christians of all denominations and grades
But only a handful in every generation reaches the level of true sainthood. And this is something, it's not a matter of degree, it's a matter of kind. It isn't that we have a numerical scale and then we say above this number
No, because sainthood is something generically different from the ordinary condition of man. And incidentally sainthood is rare, and in my life I have met only one person who is bona fide a saint.
And he is as much different from any other person I've ever met in the world. It's almost as if he were a different species. So many Christians, I think, have somewhat inadequate ideas of what makes a saint. A saint isn't simply somebody who is very, very good and lives a very, very good life. He is that, but that's not what makes him a saint.
What makes him a sainthood is categorically different from our ordinary state. Saints come in all shapes and guises and many different kinds of life they've lived. The saint that I had the privilege to see, I visited him, he has since been canonized
His name is St. Padre Pio of Piacerciano. He was a Capuchin monk. He spent his life in a monastery in San Giovanni Rotondo in southern Italy. The most remarkable thing about him was that when he was a young priest,
On a certain Friday he said Mass and while he was saying Mass he experienced great pain and at the end of Mass he noticed that he had the so-called stigmata, that is the wounds of Christ, five wounds, two in the hands, two in the feet and one. So these five wounds of Christ
were manifest in his body. This is called a stigmata. So he was the first priest in history who received a stigmata. And he received it at an early age, I think he was in his 20s. And this stigmata remained on him for 50 years. It came on a Friday and they left on a Friday.
And two days after the stigmata disappeared from his body, he died. So it was evidently his mission, so to speak, to suffer. And he suffered terribly. That was his mission.
It is so difficult for a non-Christian to understand all this because it is so contrary to a normal human way of looking at things and what we desire and what we shun. So I'm saying all these things just to make the point that sainthood is a very real thing. It's a very
Wonderful thing, it is almost always associated with great pain and suffering preceding the miracle of sainthood and oftentimes also after that miracle has occurred. So a saint is someone who as it were in some miniscule way repeats the life of Christ in his own body.
The example of Padre Pio, which I mentioned, is a very extreme example, but that's why it is helpful in our attempt to understand what sanctity is. It's a very real thing and it's a discontinuity. In other words, in our ordinary state, we're far, far from sanctity.
We can't even imagine it, much less live as saints live. But we can understand, we can appreciate what sanctity is. It is becoming somewhat in some miniscule way like Christ. It is always associated with suffering. You do not
attain any higher spiritual grade just in fun. No, it's very serious business and pain and suffering, as I say, is somehow a sine qua non in this man's journey to God. Many people, and I think there are also many people who
A Christian who do not really accept this fact because it goes so much against our human desire. We don't want to suffer. For example, if you practice certain abstinence during Lent or so, we as human beings
We do it sort of reluctantly, it goes against our brain, and that is exactly why it is spiritually efficacious, because religion is to go against that natural brain.
What's next for you?
What's next for me, my friend, is to prepare myself to enter into the life beyond this one, to enter into the next phase of life. Christianity and every true religion has always taught that one should prepare oneself for the end.
One of the great insights from the Vedic tradition is the Vedic tradition declares that the natural life of man divides into four stages. Brahmacharya, this is where a young man prepares himself to enter life
through study. He's expected to live a celibate life. It's a sort of an ascetic life. And next comes grihastia, the life of married life. So the man marries, he founds a family and he has an employment and he supports his family. This is the second stage of life according to the Vedic tradition.
The third stage is, I think they call it Vana Prastha. I think it means a forest life. The idea is that the children are grown up and they've married themselves. So the man and his wife enter a new stage of life, which is a life of, they call it forest life because it's a very simple life.
It involves little outward activity. It's a matter of preparing for the life to come. And then the fourth stage of life is called Sannyas. And this is something very Vedic, foreign to our Western way of thinking. But according to the Vedic tradition, this is when both the man and the woman
Leave all attachments to the world and totally fix their spirit upon God. So the extreme way of living that life of sannyas, and this is actually, I saw people living like that, it was still going on. You retire completely from the world.
And you give you a whole day to prayer and contemplation. Very few people in the Western world can even conceive of such a thing. When I was traveling in India half a century ago, it was still visible. It was rare, yes. And you had to go far away from New Delhi and Calcutta.
So this is the ancient Vedic culture. We can't duplicate it here, but I'm just mentioning that the principle applies to us, too. The principle is that at the end of our life, there should be a transitional phase,
where we turn our attention away from the world and the cares of the world and we live a life as much as possible in prayer, solitude, contemplation. I think the principle is therefore everyone will do so to the extent that he or she can.
And actually, from a higher point of view, all the earlier phases of our life should really, in truth, be a preparation for that fourth stage, which is itself a preparation for the true life, which is life eternal. But I think only someone who can really be called a saint is able to
Bernardo Kastrup interprets the fall in the Garden of Eden as a fall into meta-consciousness, i.e.
I must tell you in all frankness that I have very little interest in this kind of speculation.
I feel that if you want to approach these great truths, the truth of Christianity and the Judeo-Christian tradition, you cannot do it by starting from the contemporary Weltanschauung. You cannot do it, strictly speaking, as a man of the 21st century.
You have to do it. You have to go back to the basic, the basis, our scriptures and our early Christian commentaries and so on, and feel your way into this world to try to understand it basically. And I think this applies not only to Kastrup. It's sort of a typical thing.
We have a lot of intellectuals today who are basically respectful of the great traditions, which is in itself wonderful because the typical thing is just the opposite. The typical thing in our, if you go to our universities and you get out of them still believing in God, you are one of the chosen few because the thrust of it all is
I call it satanic because I think it basically it is. They are on the opposite side. But the people that you are referring to now, there's a whole group of them. It is very much to their credit that they are respectful of the Christianity and the other great traditions and they want to understand. They think that there's truth there and they want to understand it.
But they want to understand it, so to speak, starting out more or less from the contemporary well-done shang. And I think this is absolutely the wrong place to start.
Because if we were in any way schooled or versed in the true metaphysics and the true Christianity, let us say, we would realize that the contemporary Weltanschauung is nonsense. It's a disease. And it's a little bit like poison. I mean, it poisons you.
And so the idea of interpreting Christianity in terms that connect with our contemporary physicists or contemporary psychologists or whatever you find in the contemporary culture is in a sense to lose before you even started. You cannot understand Christianity.
from the direction of physics or any other contemporary strand of thought, whether it's psychology or what have you, we are in a completely different culture and the only way to gain access to Christianity is to start from the beginning, that means on a scriptural basis.
There's the Old and the New Testament and there are the commentaries of the great Christian teachers, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. That's how you can learn. And once you have a certain insight into Christianity, you can of course engage in a
A dialogue, if you will, with contemporary thinkers. You can listen to what they have to say and explain what is right and what is not right and help your fellow man find their way into the traditional teaching. But you can't get into the traditional teaching
from the direction of contemporary thought, there's no way. Is it more accurate to say that the corporeal realm is a reduction of the avaturnal or an expression of the avaturnal? Well, the actually correct answer I think to this question is that
Whatever has any kind of being in the corporeal world, for example, this table originates in the avid tunnel. So if you ask, what is this table? What is it? The contemporary person will start talking about atoms and this and that, which has nothing to do with metaphysics. This is something else entirely.
Metaphysically, if you want to understand what this table actually is, what the being is that manifests as this table, you are led unquestionably back to the Ave eternal realm, because
What is not illusory, what is not perishable, what is actually real in this table, and there must be something like that, otherwise even the illusion of the table couldn't arise. So what is real, what this actual being is located or originates in the avid tunnel plane.
In the same way that we say a baby originates from a mother, we don't say a baby is a reduction of the mother or a baby is an expression of the mother. Is it similar like that or different? I would say it's a little different because the connection that I was trying to verbalize or somehow express is purely vertical. It's ontological.
And, of course, the only way we can understand it in a human way is to add the fiction to spatialize. You say, all right, let this plane be corporeal. And up here you have another plane is avid tunnel. So we sort of make a mental picture of it, which is not really
What do you think of the patristic formulation that love is the coexistence of unity and multiplicity?
Well, I would have to really think about this a little bit. On the whole, I shy away from trying to intellectually understand the deep metaphysical theological truths.
For example, the teachings of Christ as you read them in the Gospels, I don't really try to understand this, this type of statement, the way one might want to understand the differential equation or mathematical theorem by analyzing it and so on. I think that
It is preferable to approach these things figuratively speaking from the heart rather than the intellect because you're trying to understand the greater in terms of the lesser. It doesn't really make that much sense.
So I think there is a great deal of this kind of thinking going on. It is somehow an attempt to reach the higher planes without leaving the lower. I tend to be skeptical
To many of the so-called commentaries about deep metaphysical or Christian ideas given by learned men of our day, because these metaphysical truths have been known and communicated for thousands of years.
I like to approach them using the language, if you will, of the great sages of prior times. In the case of Christianity, we have this arena of brilliant and at the same time holy and sagacious men and women.
And I am perfectly happy to approach these mysteries in the very terms given to us in the traditional form. The idea of say suppose somebody writes an essay about some Christian topic with its love or
life eternal or whatever it be using analogies from modern science something about quantum particles or god knows what i don't feel drawn to that because these ideas have been transmitted from master to disciple
for more than 2000 years now and so we have a wonderful language that we can use by way of approaching or entering into these highest spheres of thought. To be honest with you, that language that I was now referring to was given to us
by the great saints and mystics of the church, a Thomas Aquinas, a Meister Eckhart, a Saint Augustine. And we have that available, then why should I listen to Professor So-and-so, who somehow approaches Christian themes, Christian mysteries, one can say,
Using ideas or terminology from quantum theory or cognitive psychology and so forth, I feel no need for that. And I am skeptical about it too. In other words, not only are the truths of Christianity sacred, but in a sense, the words, the language and the conceptions
which go back to the the patristic era have a sacredness of their own and so I tend to be skeptical about modern-day gurus who will use a completely different language. I feel no need for that and as I say I'm
I tend to be skeptical that it's really going to work, because not only is the sacred truth sacred, the means of expression are also sacred. The very words that have formed from the lips, say, of the apostle are sacred.
Why should I listen to Professor so-and-so? I'd much rather listen to St. Paul or St. Augustine, St. Maximus. I mean, they are the people who understood these things. They are the people who attained them also in varying degrees in their own life.
My own approach to philosophy has always been instinctively Platonist. I became interested in Platonism at a very early age.
And I never really wavered in this regard. Something in me recognizes this as the true ontology. Now, when you study Platonism very, very carefully, you discover that the Platonist, Weltanschau, conceives of the cosmos as inherently tripartite.
The three planes, if you want to put it that way, are firstly what I call the avid tunnel plane, which is a domain which is subject neither to space nor to time. And this is really where reality comes from. Reality emanates from that domain.
And the second domain, which I call the, the Platonists call it the psychic domain. I call it the intermediary. So the psychic domain is subject to time, but not to space. And incidentally,
I'm convinced that this is integral Platonism, but I've never in any Platonist or Neoplatonist document read this interpretation. I doubt not that all the real Platonists understood this very well, but it is of interest that for whatever reason, I don't think it has been explicitly stated.
And then the third domain I call the corporeal, this is the world in which we normally find ourselves. That domain is obviously subject to time, but not to space. Excuse me, both time and space. So this is the basic tripartite ontology associated with Platonism. Now let me just mention
For the record that I think many people will be interested to know that this tripartite ontology is also found in the Vedic tradition, which is by far the oldest tradition in the world. It antecedes all others, including the Judeo-Christian which came much later.
This tripartite ontology underlies both the Vedic and the Platonist traditions. Let me say first of all, I find it very fascinating that the mere existence of this intermediary level implies
the falsity of relativistic physics. It is absolutely clear and beyond dispute because according to relativistic physics, there is no time and there is no space. There is only a space-time and the fact that there is a time-only realm obviously contradicts that assumption.
I was very fascinated to discover that both the Vedic and the Platonist ontology disproves all of relativistic physics at one stroke. Incidentally, regarding the intermediary or psychic realm, let me point out
Even though nobody in the western world knows these things now, because we are all into the scientific, quote unquote, scientific way of looking at things. So even though we don't know about it, we spend a part of our life, our conscious life in that domain. Namely, we enter that, we are in that domain whenever we dream.
The dream state is we enter the dream state when we dream. The dream state is which one? The intermediary. In the dreams there is no space? The space in the dream state is not real. It's a kind of a hallucination and you can easily prove that because
Whereas the time that we experience in the dream state coincides with our temporal time. For example, I think everyone has experienced being awakened in the middle of a dream and the point is the moment of awakening you can identify in the dream.
The time in the dream state is none other than the time of the waking state, but the space that you experience in the dream state proves to be unreal. In the dream, you may see a castle on three-dimensional thing, and the instant you wake up, you realize that there never was such a thing, meaning this belonged to the dream state, but not to the corporeal.
So there is a rigorous, precise ontological distinction between the three states. You may say, well, what about the eternal state? It is true that we normally do not experience that. We do not experience it in the waking state. We do not experience it in the dream state.
And this is exactly where these yogic traditions enter the picture. In other words, to enter the eternal state is not given to the ordinary human being. It is something that can be acquired, but at a great cost.
As everyone that has any acquaintance with these domains knows very well, it is after a lifetime of endeavor under the guidance of someone who has himself received that from a master. If you're lucky, you can do that. It's a great achievement. And it turns out
that this has not only been always the chief gore, as it were, in the Vedic tradition, but the same is true in the Platonist. And let me mention that this is something I did not know until very, very recently when I came across some writings by
18th century British Platonist known as Thomas Taylor, who for some unknowable reason strikes me as a perfect insider of the Platonist tradition. How that is to be explained is totally beyond my comprehension, but I have no doubt that Thomas Taylor knows very well
What he is talking about when he gives us, so to speak, an inside view of the Platonist tradition. And it turns out that the Platonist tradition is identical to the Pythagorean. In fact, it comes from the Pythagorean. If you will, Plato was a distant disciple of Pythagoras.
And now what we learn from Thomas Taylor is that Pythagoras as a young man traveled to Egypt and actually became a disciple of an Egyptian master. And Thomas Taylor, where he gets this information from, I don't know. Undoubtedly, there are sources.
But what I recognize immediately is that from the description that Thomas Taylor gives us of the life of these disciples, when I read this, I said to myself, my God, this is what I witnessed when 50 years ago I traveled in India and lived amongst real sadhus. That's how they live.
This explains the correspondence between the Pythagorean Platonist tradition on the one side and the Vedic on the other. In a sense, they are the same tradition. However, there is a very decisive feature of the Pythagorean Platonist tradition, which
So far as I know simply does not exist in the Vedic. What is that? It is the rule of geometry. Geometry in the hands of the Pythagoreans and Platonists was an instrument which enabled the practicing yogi to ascend from the psychic to the eternal plane.
And conceptually we can see how this is possible because geometry as a subject studied in our schools, for example, pertains to the psychic realm. It's the realm of thought, of consciousness. But the truth of geometry, what
What it really deals with pertains to the Ave Eternal Plan. After all, when you prove a theorem, you prove a theorem and the theorem is something that is eternal. And in fact, geometry derives from the Ave Eternal Plan because what we experience, if you will, on the psychic realm comes from
the avid tunnel. If there were not an avid tunnel geometry, there could be no geometry as we understand it. So the Greeks, the Pythagoreans first of all, understood this very well and realized that because geometry does come from the avid tunnel and what it essentially asserts pertains to the avid tunnel,
It can be used as an instrument to actually ascend from the psychic level, where this kind of discussion right now, even though it involves the corporeal, actually takes place on the psychic. There is no geometry running around here on the corporeal plane. We're talking about something on the psychic level and
The crucial point is, and this is what the Pythagoreans and the Platonists understood so well, the point is that because geometry derives from the eternal realm, it is in principle possible to use geometry to ascend from the psychic to the
So this is very easy to say, but as I indicated a moment ago, the actual accomplishment of this is a lifetime's task. And incidentally, we're talking here. An authentic spiritual tradition is nothing that you can access on your own. It entails discipleship, as this is vital.
I found in India when I was traveling there half a century ago, every 14-year-old Brahmin boy would understand this very well, simply known. Here in the West, it is almost totally unknown. But the fact is, if you want to ascend to the eternal plane, you have to become a disciple of someone who was himself a disciple.
And incidentally, both in the Vedic tradition and in the Pythagorean Platonist, it is well understood that this path calls for lifelong celibacy. So in India, I noticed this every, as I say, every 14 year old Brahmin boy understands if you want to ascend this path,
It will cost you lifelong celibacy and the writings of Thomas Taylor confirm that such was the case in the Pythagorean tradition and undoubtedly also in the Platonists. Incidentally, what I have said so far gives you the key to understanding
A very mysterious inscription which reputedly was inscribed over the portal of the Plato Platonic Academy. In English it says, let no one ignorant of geometry enter here. So we understand this now in a different way.
because actually no one ignorant of geometry can enter here if entering means to access the avid eternal plane. So the modus operandi used in the Pythagorean Platonist tradition, which comes from the Egyptian, differs from the Vedic
In the sense that the means of access were different. Of course, they had the common elements of celibacy and this incredible practice. You know, when I lived among sadhus in India about 50 years ago, I was amazed that
These men spend a good 20 hours a day in other states, in higher states. If you were to put a knife in their flesh while they are in these states, there would be no reaction because they're no longer in this body. And so I also realized then when they did
come to know consciousness. I could talk with them and it was, as you can imagine, absolutely fascinating to me to talk to someone who has just been somewhere that our wildest men in the contemporary West know nothing about. I mean, we know nothing even about the intermediaries place.
Go to Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies. I guarantee that there is not a single person there, unless he happens to have read the books that I have read, knows about that. And incidentally, in India, just about everyone knows about these things, in fact.
These three states, when you talk to an educated Hindu in my day, you could converse with him about the so-called Tribhuvana. I talked to people who were businessmen and we could talk about the Tribhuvana. It was in their tradition. Tribhuvana is just a Sanskrit word meaning three worlds.
After this trip to India, the first trip, I realized how ignorant we are in the West. I mean, we know a little piece of the world. We don't even know about the existence of the intermediary world, which we actually enter just about every day in the dream state. And let me in this connection tell you something which illustrates what I'm talking about here, namely the fact
that fifty years ago and probably doesn't exist anymore. But at that time, there was this remarkable knowledge among even ordinary people in India. So. When I on my first trip to India. I think I landed in New Delhi and
I took a room in a hotel and that first evening I had some telephone conversations and I was very very happy to learn that someone whom I had great admiration for was going to arrive in New Delhi the next day by train at 11 o'clock. So I was very very happy about that
and just took a stroll in the city and went to Ordele and on my return to the hotel I was accosted by I guess you could call him a fakir. That means a person who has a little bit of knowledge of yoga but not all that much. And this fakir accosted me out of the blue
I said, very lucky man. So, he says, oh yeah, he said very lucky man, tomorrow at 11 o'clock something good will happen. Well, no one in New Delhi, besides myself, knew about this tomorrow 11 o'clock, which is really something that elated me.
And so I must have been thinking about it deeply. So this fakir somehow picked that up out of thin air. Well, this fact, of course, interested me. So I went to a nearby garden with him to see what he can have to say. And so he gave me a piece of paper and he said, look at it. So I saw it was blank.
Then he says, please fold it and hold it in your hand. So I did, I held this paper. And then he said, all right, now think of a number between 1 and 100. So I thought of a number, I think it was 36. And then he says, all right, now open your hand and look at the paper. And on this paper was written 36.
So I gave him something, but on my way home to the hotel, I brooded on this. What's going on? And I think I figured it out. The fact that he talked to me, accosted me,
in reference to something good that would happen tomorrow at 11 o'clock. This was clearly a case of telepathy. I mean, he was able to read my mind. So then what about the 36, that number? Well, I eventually did figure that out too. There is something called invisible ink.
And so that number must have been written in invisible ink and it became visible when I held this in my hands. Meanwhile, he puts that number into my mind. So there were two for us supernatural powers that he had. A to read someone else's mind and B to put something into someone else's mind.
So here, the first day in India, I by chance encountered a fakir who had these two powers and he could demonstrate that to me. Now why do I speak of fakir? Well, clearly these are yogic powers and you cannot acquire them just out of books.
Absolutely not. So this man had a guru. He was a disciple of someone who was enough for a yogi to possess these two powers and therefore he could transmit it to his disciple. All this doesn't come on the cheap. This fakir must have spent
Maybe two, three years, I don't know, a certain period of time as a disciple, subject to a very disciplined kind of life, to acquire these powers. So why do we call him a Fakir, which is a somewhat derogatory term? How do you spell that, by the way? F-A-T-I-R. And as I understand it,
A fakir is someone who has a certain knowledge of yoga, not a very high knowledge, but a certain knowledge just the same, and who instead of going on, I mean, ideally yoga is given to us in order to go all the way. But there is a possibility that at various stages you stop.
and utilize this knowledge and it can be utilized in many ways. You can become a millionaire if you play your cards right. I mean this knowledge is knowledge of a very unusual kind. So the word Fakir as I understand it refers to these yogis who instead of going on
In a certain at a certain level use this half knowledge that they have for pecuniary purposes. That's all right. But it was so interesting. My first day in India, I learned things.
which here in the West hardly anyone knows. As I said, if we were to go to the Institute for Advanced Studies, I don't think you would find anyone there who has a ghost of an idea about these things. And yet it's real and it's in a way science. It's a higher science than what we possess. Because our science is actually, our physical science doesn't even reach up to the corporeal level.
This is why I had to introduce it. I had to distinguish between X and Sx and that was one of the two keys to the resolution of the measurement problem. The reason that top physicists have not been able to solve the problem to this day is that the ontology of physics doesn't suffice. If there were only
A physical domain and no corporeal domain which is higher than that, there could be no measurement. I think I have made the point in light of my contact with India that there are things between heaven and earth that our sciences here in the West, our contemporary sciences, don't know anything about.
But would you agree, Brian, with my point that these things are there in the quantum world? But in potency, you need to understand quantum mechanics. You do need the Aristotelian distinction between potency and act. And in fact, Heisenberg understood this almost immediately.
when he said that so-called quantum particles are not real particles, they are potentiae. They become real particles precisely when they interact with a corporeal instrument and as I show in my latest book on physics, the point of it is that
The reality comes from the corporeal level. In other words, the reason quantum physics deals with entities that in a sense do not exist is because classical physics is sub-corporeal.
I mean, this little entity is corporeal, but when the physicist looks at it, it becomes physical. In other words, he sees it as a physical entity, and as a physical entity, it still has being because the physical coaster receives its being from the corporeal.
Is the Sx a subset of X or is it a different domain? It's a different domain. It's not a subset. It is something you might say it's a physicist's way of comprehending X. But the point that I'm making is that the reality comes from the corporeal. It's a complete opposite of what contemporary scientists tend to believe.
Contemporary scientists tend to believe that the reality that we encounter here on the corporeal level derives ultimately from the particulate domain, the domain of quantum theory, but the actual fact of the matter is just the opposite. There's no intermediary. I have come to look upon physics from a rigorous
Platonist ontological standpoint. And there it is very, very simple. All reality, all being comes from the avitonal plane. So, iconically, you have a circle with a center. The center represents the avitonal plane. The intermediary is the interior.
And then the corporeal is the actual circumference of that circle. I sort of taught myself to think in terms of this icon, because if you do everything becomes very simple. So all the reality, whether in the corporeal world or the physical, derives from that center. And now,
And how does it derive it through vertical causation? So how then is the reality of corporeal objects transmitted to the physical realm? Well, the physical realm breaks into two parts and this is absolutely essential. You can't understand physics without that.
You have to make the distinction between subcorporeal physics, which is the physics of entities which derive from the corporeal level. So subcorporeal physics deals with objects Sx derived from a corporeal X. And the crucial point here is that because
sub corporeal physics derives from the corporeal level it receives being which is the same as irreducible wholeness through vertical causation there's vertical causation from the corporeal level to the physical level and that is why the physical level has a reality
Technically speaking it has being because that being is transmitted from the corporeal to the physical level through vertical causation. So this is the story about classical physics. Now what about quantum mechanics? Well, quantum mechanics is the physics of the trans-corporeal. Trans-corporeal means
not subcorporeal. Do you describe that as Tx? So Sx is classical physics? Yes, classical physics is a physics of physical systems Sx derived from X. But in quantum theory, strange as it obviously must be, you are dealing with
entities that are physical but not derived from a corporeal entity. Now if you think about this and it's not quite that easy, I mean these are subtle points, because the quantum world is not sub-corporeal, it does not
have its own intrinsic reality. So this is why quantum theory is so weird. This is why particles can multilocate, for example. The answer is in plain terms that in itself quantum entities have no reality, have no being.
So how then can there be a classical physics, a quantum physics? Well, the point is that the quantum realm does not exist all by itself. It interacts with corporeal instruments in two ways. First, in its definition.
A quantum theory is not just a mental thing, it has a certain reality because by virtue of the instruments, the corporeal instruments which define the physical system. So this already is one source which transmits reality to the non-physical
Non-reality of the quantum world conceived in isolation from the corporeal. Some of the most beautifully esoteric teachings that I have ever heard you find in the Confessions of St. Augustine. I'll give you one example, it's an example I love so much I've cited it often in my writings.
Saint Augustine begins a chapter speaking as it were to God, and he says, let me see if I can, I want to remember it precisely, he says, I see these others beneath thee, in existence they have
Because they are from thee, yet no existence, because they are not what thou art. Now, I won't go into this now, that would not be the time, but let me say that this is one of the most esoteric statements I have ever read. And you could give lectures about it, you could
For example, explain how all of Vedanta is really contained in these words. They go as deep and as high as the human mind can go. And yet, it is something that is said casually in St. Augustine's autobiography. I mean, the Confessions is his autobiography.
which weaves into one the story of his intellectual and spiritual life and also the teachings of Christ on both the exoteric and the esoteric plane. So everything is in there. Now, during the patristic age, both levels of understanding, the exoteric and the esoteric,
went hand in hand. It was part and parcel of the Christian heritage. And then, during the Middle Ages, in the West mainly, in the West more than in the East, this equilibrium was disturbed and esotericism tended to disappear.
I mean, there always were and there always will be individuals who have been given from God this higher vision. But when I say it disappeared, I mean, for instance, that it was no longer recognized officially. And I'm sorry to say that undoubtedly many esoteric Christians
were actually burnt at the stake in the European Middle Ages. This is a sad fact which however is true and you can't deny it. Do you have any issues with evolution versus intelligent design? Do you have any thoughts there? Oh, absolutely. Evolution is a heresy. It's a fundamentally false doctrine. There's no actual scientific evidence whatsoever
about evolution and as I keep writing in my various articles since 1998 evolution has been mathematically disproved it is impossible and that can be proved rigorously and it has been proved but even so I think it's ultimately due to satanic forces
Evolution is, so to speak, the pseudo-religious cradle of our civilization. So this may be one of those coans that can be misinterpreted. So what specifically about evolution do you not agree with? Is it that we share a common ancestor with a different species or that we all came from a single-celled organism? Well, fundamentally, what I object to in
evolution and why i think that it is basically satanic teaching satanic is always inverting putting god down and satan up it's a complete inversion and evolution is a complete inversion inversion because instead of recognizing that all being comes from above from what i call the eternal plane and thus from god because
Who puts that eternal plane in there? That is the creative act. Platonism is very clear about this. And of course, Vedic teaching is also very clear about this. But in reality,
The entire universe, I'm just gesturing, the entire universe is descending from that avid tunnel, from that center point of the cosmic icon and the doctrine of evolution puts it completely, it puts the world upside down. Particles, quantum particles, as we talked about that earlier this afternoon and I pointed out to you that quantum particles
As quantum particles don't exist, whatever existence, whatever reality they have, they obtain in one of two ways. It's always through contact with the corporeal entity, and there are two ways in which this actually happens.
in the corporeal entity that defines the quantum system. Quantum systems don't just grow on trees. I mean, every physicist, if he wants to study quantum system, he has to set up equipment which in effect produces that quantum system. So the quantum systems don't grow on trees. They are in a certain sense man-made.
which means that the impetus comes from the opposite direction that our physicists think it comes from. It comes from the center of the cosmic icon. It comes from the eternal realm because it was known since the days of Plato and Pythagoras that that's where all being comes from.
These are absolute statements. I've just finished an article on consciousness, and in fact I added a very essential section this morning, so this is all very recent, but the central point about consciousness is that it
definitely derives not just from the eternal realm, but from God himself. And this is where I quote a Vedic statement, namely that the fundamental principle is what is called in an Upanishad Satchidananda. So satch is being.
Chit is consciousness and Ananda is bliss. So these are three nomen Dei, names of God, which are Vedic in origin. And it is from this divine trinity, Sat Chit Ananda, that the creation comes. And this is why the creation
is tripartite because these three parts, the aviturnal, the psychic and the corporeal, are manifestations respectively of sot, chit, ananda. And in my paper I have to explain that because at first hearing you don't grasp how ananda
which means bliss, is in any way associated with the corporeal world. In fact, you might very well conceive the opposite, that this is a veil of tears and it's a place where there is least an underworld. Well, I go into all these issues very carefully and I hope I'm making a very plausible argument. So the point is,
That consciousness, we have it all wrong. And not just the gross materialists, but also the people who think they are spiritualists or what have you. The point is, one way or another, we all try to explain or understand consciousness from below.
The outright materialist says, aha, it all comes from quantum particles. If you have enough of them aggregating in suitable ways, voila, there's consciousness. Well, pardon me for saying so. This is nonsense. This is utter sheer nonsense. There's not a speck of truth in that. And in fact, it's a complete inversion.
Because there's only one place where consciousness can actually originate, and that's in God himself. And we have a Vedic source which tells us so. One of the most profound nomen Dei in the Vedic tradition is Satchitananda. Satchitananda is a name of God, and it's a name which tells us something about
the nature of God, and interestingly enough, it's triadic. God is in a sense one and three at the same time. You find the same thing in Christianity, but in a very, very different way. Christianity speaks of the Trinity, yes. So it also sees God as a triad, a triplicity, but let's leave that out of the picture because it's completely different from the Vedic.
Not at all. On the contrary, in a sense, there are, as I've already said, in a way polar opposites. So in order to understand cosmology, in a Platonist cosmology, you have to start with the Vedic nomen Dei. The key is unquestionably the revealed name Satchidananda.
This is not a human invention that comes from God, and it is the oldest in the name of God because the Vedic tradition is the oldest tradition in the world, by a long shot, even as Christianity is, so to speak, the last. I think there are in essence only these two traditions and then there are many in-betweens, but I think so far as bona fide
and the
There's a little technical difference, as I said, the platonic involves the idea of geometry in a way which you nowhere find in the Vedas. But apart from this, the Vedic and the Platonist are interchangeable. And so if you want to understand cosmology,
ontologically there is no other way you can get it from the Vedas you can get it from Plato in either case you get the tripartite cosmos and this is the way you are going to understand cosmology and once you have seen that you recognize at the glance that
the modern scientific way. I say scientific because it's not really scientific at all, but all of our scientists think that way, so it's scientific. The scientific way is the polar opposite of the Vedic or Platonist, where the Vedic and Platonist sees being
or irreducible wholeness, which is the same thing as originating on the eternal plane and actually beyond that it originates in the tripartite divinity. The scientistic thinks it comes from quantum particles. If you have enough of these non-existent things, you will have consciousness. This is nonsense, complete nonsense.
And I want to use what little energy I have left to get this message across. This is nonsense. There's no evidence for it and theoretically it doesn't make sense.
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"text": " What's next for you? What's next for me, my friend, is to prepare myself to enter into the life beyond this one, to enter into the next phase of life."
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"text": " Today, we're honoring the legacy of Wolfgang Smith, who recently passed away at the age of 94. As you may know, I had the privilege of spending a few nights with Wolfgang approximately one year ago, during which we had several hours of conversation. Seven of those hours were recorded and put into podcast form, which you can find in the description. In this video, you'll see a compilation of some of my favorite moments with the scientist, mathematician, and physicist Wolfgang Smith. You will be missed."
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"text": " The idea of the tripartite cosmos in which the highest level is beyond space and time, this is the crux of the matter. Well, this is a kind of eternity, but it needs to be distinguished from the eternity of religion, the eternity of"
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"text": " For example, the eternity which the Christian speaks of when he says that God is eternal and heaven is eternal. So eternity in that sense is more than the if eternity because actually one of the crucial"
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"text": " One of the ways in which Christianity differs from the Vedic teaching is that the Vedic teaching regards the cosmos as cyclic. It goes on and on like a sine curve that has no beginning and no end."
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"text": " Cosmology is radically different because it is integral to the Christian tradition that at the second coming of Christ, which no man knows the day and the hour, the cosmos in its entirety will be destroyed."
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"text": " So the difference between the Vedic outlook and the Christian is that in the Vedic outlook, the cosmos has no end in both senses, in the sense of a purpose and end in the sense of a termination. So in the Vedic way of looking at the cosmos, there is neither a purpose"
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"text": " because the only answer a Vedic guru could give to the question what is the purpose of the cosmos based on. The Vedic spiritual practice tries essentially to get out of this cosmos because"
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"text": " The Vedic wisdom says this is not God, this is not reality and the purpose of life is to gain union with God. So you see in this Vedic philosophy, the cosmos plays no role. The cosmos has no purpose."
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"text": " And also ipsa facto, if you will, it has no ending either. In the Vedic tradition, the cosmos is without beginning and without end. And finally, the Vedic masters will tell you that in fact it's unreal. When you see a snake in the rope,"
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"text": " How can you, why should you ask, where does this snake come from? Why is it there? And so forth. Save yourself the trouble and realize that there is no snake. This is the Vedic approach. It's quite different from the Christian. The Christian says, yes, the cosmos has its reality."
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"text": " It was put there by God and it was put there for a purpose. It's like a school. A school is there to teach the students and once that is done, the school has no more purpose. If there were only one student in the world and one school, as soon as this student graduates,"
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"text": " You don't need the school anymore. So therefore, in the Christian religion, the cosmos itself will come to an end. It'll end when it has fulfilled its purpose. As most people know, I'm sure the world, the physical universe as perceived in quantum mechanics is something utterly different"
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"text": " from the physical world as we normally know it and think of it. And so a physical system in the eyes of quantum mechanics is described by so-called wave function. So suppose you have the simplest system possible, a single particle. The wave function description of that particle"
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"text": " will give a certain probability that the particle is just about anywhere in the universe. It is not at any particular point. In fact, in reference to certain experiments, it can in fact multi-locate, it can pass through two slits at the same time. So in short, the world as seen in quantum mechanics is something utterly different"
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"text": " from the world that we perceive in ordinary life and the world as described also in classical physics. So the transition between quantum mechanics and classical physics takes place in the act of measurement."
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"text": " And so you measure a quantum system and in a single instant the picture changes in place of a multi-locating particle described by wave function which is highly mathematical and only really the trained mathematician"
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"text": " can understand what this wave function actually has to say. So in an instant, the picture changes from the quantum mechanical to the classical, which means that after measurement, the particle has a definite position, a definite momentum and so on. After measurement, we find ourselves, so to speak, in the world that we normally know"
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"text": " as a physical universe. And so what then is the measurement problem? It is simply the question, how does this miracle take place? And leading physicists have been thinking about this problem ever since quantum mechanics really was discovered in 1926, to be exact. But when it comes right down to it,"
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"text": " I put it all together and wrote a book called the quantum enigma and in this quantum enigma I do propose a solution and the key ideas, there are really two key ideas. The first key idea is that"
},
{
"end_time": 700.367,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 671.766,
"text": " We need to distinguish between the physical universe, which is the universe as conceived by the classical physicist and what I call the corporeal world, which is something much richer. The difference between"
},
{
"end_time": 730.282,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 700.759,
"text": " The physical universe and the corporeal world is basically that the corporeal world is perceivable, which means that in addition to quantities, it owns qualities, for example, color. So I postulated that color is not just the thing of the mind."
},
{
"end_time": 758.558,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 730.964,
"text": " It is actually a quality pertaining to the corporeal world. So the physical universe then is a corporeal world as conceived by the physicist. So in passing from the corporeal world to the physical, something is lost. And I"
},
{
"end_time": 787.654,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 759.002,
"text": " With every corporeal object x, I associate a physical object, which I call Sx, and so there is actually a kind of function from x to Sx, because x determines Sx. So this was the first idea, the distinction between the corporeal world and the physical."
},
{
"end_time": 810.418,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 788.951,
"text": " And having made this distinction, you still have a problem left. How namely does this transition take place? Because in the act of measurement, there is a passage from the physical to the corporeal."
},
{
"end_time": 838.131,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 811.049,
"text": " The quantum system, the wave function describes the physical, pertains to the physical universe and after the measurement is made, you are actually in the corporeal world because you couldn't have a measurement"
},
{
"end_time": 862.09,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 838.575,
"text": " if the result of the measurement were not perceptible. So you end up with a pointer pointing to a certain location on a scale and you visibly read off the measurement. So measurement is a transition from the physical to the corporeal"
},
{
"end_time": 885.128,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 862.517,
"text": " and it is quite easy to understand rigorously that this transition cannot take place through the causation known to physics. So the causation known to physics is what I call horizontal causation and it is affected by a process taking place in time."
},
{
"end_time": 915.06,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 888.012,
"text": " On the other hand, the transition from the physical to the corporeal plane, well, I just explained it cannot be understood on the basis of horizontal causation, so a different mode of causation is required, as this mode I call vertical causation."
},
{
"end_time": 938.131,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 916.937,
"text": " It is easy to see on ontological grounds. I mean, we're outside the domain of physics. You can't write an equation for vertical causation. You can't even talk of it as a physicist without introducing some other notion."
},
{
"end_time": 966.766,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 938.763,
"text": " So this is what I called vertical causation and the defining characteristic of vertical causation is the fact that it does not take place in time. In other words, it is instantaneous. I think it will be of interest to put in a little bit of a comment at this point."
},
{
"end_time": 997.329,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 968.268,
"text": " Because many people know that the Nobel Prize in Physics issued in 2022 dealt with a certain question relating to quantum theory on one side and relativity on the other. And one has known for quite a while"
},
{
"end_time": 1027.278,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 997.739,
"text": " that the two cannot both be true. Now, the Nobel Prize of 2022 was issued for, I think, three experiments, which actually were able to decide which of the two theories is true. And we know they can't both be true. There's something called the Bell Inequalities and"
},
{
"end_time": 1057.329,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 1027.722,
"text": " Quantum mechanics says the results will be on this side of an inequality. Einsteinian physics says the result will be on the other side of the inequality. So these experiments actually decided between the two issues and the winner was quantum theory. And now what does this have to do with vertical causation? The answer is everything, because"
},
{
"end_time": 1085.213,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 1058.183,
"text": " The point at issue in these experiments and therefore in the Nobel Prize was whether a physical effect can be transmitted instantaneously, in other words faster than the speed of light. Relativity theory says no."
},
{
"end_time": 1111.749,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1085.981,
"text": " Nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Quantum mechanics says yes, when you make a measurement on a particle which is entangled with this one will be instantly affected."
},
{
"end_time": 1141.067,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1112.381,
"text": " So there is a clear incompatibility here between classical physics and Einstein relativity on one side and quantum theory on the other. And so, as I said, quantum theory won. And the implication is that classical physics"
},
{
"end_time": 1172.022,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1142.142,
"text": " in its Einsteinian mode is contradicted. Very interesting that I think this has to do with the fact that they waited such a very long time to issue that Nobel Prize. I think more than 30 years they waited. And I think the reason is that this is a very hot potato."
},
{
"end_time": 1196.834,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1173.08,
"text": " By saying that quantum theory won and relativity theory lost, you're stepping on a lot of tone. It's a very sensitive matter, but quantum theory did win and the Nobel Prize acknowledges that and incidentally"
},
{
"end_time": 1224.77,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1197.244,
"text": " What does that have to do with vertical causation? The answer again is everything because it was really vertical causation that was at issue here. There is a causality that acts instantaneously as quantum mechanics demands or what Einstein was right that no causation"
},
{
"end_time": 1238.012,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1225.572,
"text": " Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax."
},
{
"end_time": 1267.176,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1238.404,
"text": " As soon as I"
},
{
"end_time": 1296.937,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1267.824,
"text": " gained what I consider clarity regarding the tripartite cosmos, so the existence of an intermediary level subject to time but not to space. I realized that this fact, which is nothing more than Platonist cosmology and also Vedic cosmology, they're one and the same. Platonist cosmology and the Vedic cosmology"
},
{
"end_time": 1316.63,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1297.466,
"text": " One and the same. And integral to this cosmology is the existence of the intermediary realm, which is a realm of time alone. And the mere existence of such a time only"
},
{
"end_time": 1346.647,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1317.278,
"text": " Stratum disproves all of Einsteinian physics at one stroke. It's gone. An integral part of Gnosticism is the idea of this journey into higher worlds. The problem that the Gnostics face with the dawn of the modern age is that we no longer accept any higher worlds."
},
{
"end_time": 1375.179,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1346.92,
"text": " So the problem was very, very drastic. How can you fly into higher worlds when there are no more higher worlds to fly into? This was the problem. And by golly, they solved it. And do you know how they solved it? It's really interesting and ingenious. This all comes from Satan and Satan is very ingenious."
},
{
"end_time": 1400.196,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1377.09,
"text": " No question about that. So the neo-Gnostic way of solving this problem that there are no more higher worlds to fly into is very simple. They said the higher world is futuristic. In other words,"
},
{
"end_time": 1430.452,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1400.828,
"text": " This world itself is being turned into the higher world. So the higher world became futuristic. Like worshipping technology or thinking that... Yes, exactly. And as a matter of fact, who is the neo-Gnostic prophet of modern times? Theodosia. There's no question about it. Theodosia is, so to speak, the"
},
{
"end_time": 1457.517,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1431.51,
"text": " The great Gnostic guru of the present age. This is also why he had tremendous power, because the devil has power. Let no one be in doubt about that. He has great power. In fact, the power of Satan is so great that unless we, we humans, avail ourselves of"
},
{
"end_time": 1486.254,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1458.114,
"text": " The sacred means given to us by God, we have no chance of withstanding that power. How do we have free will when from another perspective all our choices have been made or all of it can be seen? Well, I think there's only one answer to that question, and that is that free will pertains to our present state, which is a state of half-knowing."
},
{
"end_time": 1513.677,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1488.251,
"text": " Once we attain enlightenment, there's no question of free will. Sorry, enlightenment is the same as salvation or is that different? Well, I think nothing short of salvation would put you into that state where there's no more free will. There's no more free will because there is no more will in our sense of the term."
},
{
"end_time": 1543.302,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1514.411,
"text": " The cosmos is there only for a certain stretch of time. It came into being and it will cease to exist when Christ will fully manifest himself at the second coming. And you know, it makes tremendous amount of sense. If you think about it long enough, you realize that from a Christian point of vantage, it cannot be otherwise."
},
{
"end_time": 1572.244,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1543.695,
"text": " Because when Christ manifests himself in the fullness of his divinity, it's like turning on an infinite light and the darkness will cease. The polarity of day and night and all these things will cease. When Christ manifests himself in his full divinity, it's like an atom bomb. All these little things that"
},
{
"end_time": 1602.056,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1572.619,
"text": " We know now will disappear. The three levels of the cosmos constitute one irreducible wholeness in its threefold nature. And this is really easy to understand because man, you and I and every human being is also tripartite in exactly the same sense. We too"
},
{
"end_time": 1628.968,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1603.439,
"text": " are made of three levels in the traditional terminologies this is corpus anima spiritus and clearly spiritus is the same as the if eternal realm spiritus is beyond time the psychic realm is subject to time but not to space"
},
{
"end_time": 1654.104,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1629.65,
"text": " and our corporeal realm is obviously corporeal so it's subject clearly to time and space so we mustn't think and obviously we are one we're one thing we're one organism they're not three and i don't"
},
{
"end_time": 1678.08,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1654.343,
"text": " Have three parts. You won't find an avid tunnel Wolfgang Smith and the corporeal Wolfgang Smith. Wolfgang Smith as a person is composed of these three levels, but these three levels are one organism. And incidentally, this is"
},
{
"end_time": 1707.637,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1678.797,
"text": " the fundamental fact about the Platonist cosmology and this fundamental fact throws a new light on everything and it has tremendous scientific implications so much so that you cannot have any kind of deeper science that doesn't recognize this tripartite nature."
},
{
"end_time": 1736.937,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1708.2,
"text": " So obviously the physicist knows nothing about it, cannot know anything about it, because the very conceptions needed to define the tripartite cosmos or the tripartite anthropos entail ontological ideas, which are incomprehensible to the physicist, because the physicist deals only with"
},
{
"end_time": 1754.343,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1737.944,
"text": " quantitative realities, something that can therefore be described in a differential equation. You can't write a differential equation for spiritus, you can't write a differential equation for"
},
{
"end_time": 1779.121,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1754.821,
"text": " the psychic realm, and actually you can't write the differential equation for the corporeal world either, because strictly speaking the physicist knows nothing about the corporeal world, because you cannot have a corporeal world consisting only of quantity."
},
{
"end_time": 1806.664,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1781.698,
"text": " Doesn't matter how you want, what kind of quantity, whether you want to talk about a differentiable manifold or doesn't matter mathematics is one thing and the corporeal world is not a mathematical entity. So as soon as you have even a little glimmering of the Platonist cosmology, you see how utterly blind"
},
{
"end_time": 1836.186,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1807.073,
"text": " our modern intellectuals are, whether they are actually scientists capable of working with differential equations is secondary. The point is that practically every intellectual in our day has been metaphysically formed on the basis of mathematical physics. And that means that he is incapable of understanding even the first thing about reality."
},
{
"end_time": 1861.578,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1837.005,
"text": " Once you see it, you see the tragedy of it. It's a terrible, terrible tragedy. We think that we know more than people ever knew, when in fact, strictly speaking, we know nothing. Do you fear death? As a natural man, certainly, yes, certainly. Absolutely, because"
},
{
"end_time": 1891.186,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1861.988,
"text": " We have not yet reached the stage of sainthood. We've all read the lives of many, many saints. We have some idea of what they're like, and it is, in my belief, only in a high level of sainthood that the fear of death is transcended. It's not a simple thing."
},
{
"end_time": 1916.527,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1891.613,
"text": " Ordinary Christian faith is wonderful and it's a sine qua non. We need it otherwise we have nothing. But it doesn't instantly elevate us to great spiritual heights. It's something that you have to work on a lifetime. And there are millions and millions of Christians of all denominations and grades"
},
{
"end_time": 1940.265,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1916.988,
"text": " But only a handful in every generation reaches the level of true sainthood. And this is something, it's not a matter of degree, it's a matter of kind. It isn't that we have a numerical scale and then we say above this number"
},
{
"end_time": 1967.415,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1940.811,
"text": " No, because sainthood is something generically different from the ordinary condition of man. And incidentally sainthood is rare, and in my life I have met only one person who is bona fide a saint."
},
{
"end_time": 1997.108,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1968.507,
"text": " And he is as much different from any other person I've ever met in the world. It's almost as if he were a different species. So many Christians, I think, have somewhat inadequate ideas of what makes a saint. A saint isn't simply somebody who is very, very good and lives a very, very good life. He is that, but that's not what makes him a saint."
},
{
"end_time": 2026.783,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1997.807,
"text": " What makes him a sainthood is categorically different from our ordinary state. Saints come in all shapes and guises and many different kinds of life they've lived. The saint that I had the privilege to see, I visited him, he has since been canonized"
},
{
"end_time": 2057.176,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 2027.466,
"text": " His name is St. Padre Pio of Piacerciano. He was a Capuchin monk. He spent his life in a monastery in San Giovanni Rotondo in southern Italy. The most remarkable thing about him was that when he was a young priest,"
},
{
"end_time": 2085.265,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 2058.131,
"text": " On a certain Friday he said Mass and while he was saying Mass he experienced great pain and at the end of Mass he noticed that he had the so-called stigmata, that is the wounds of Christ, five wounds, two in the hands, two in the feet and one. So these five wounds of Christ"
},
{
"end_time": 2115.657,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 2086.118,
"text": " were manifest in his body. This is called a stigmata. So he was the first priest in history who received a stigmata. And he received it at an early age, I think he was in his 20s. And this stigmata remained on him for 50 years. It came on a Friday and they left on a Friday."
},
{
"end_time": 2134.923,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2116.817,
"text": " And two days after the stigmata disappeared from his body, he died. So it was evidently his mission, so to speak, to suffer. And he suffered terribly. That was his mission."
},
{
"end_time": 2160.657,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2135.35,
"text": " It is so difficult for a non-Christian to understand all this because it is so contrary to a normal human way of looking at things and what we desire and what we shun. So I'm saying all these things just to make the point that sainthood is a very real thing. It's a very"
},
{
"end_time": 2190.998,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2161.203,
"text": " Wonderful thing, it is almost always associated with great pain and suffering preceding the miracle of sainthood and oftentimes also after that miracle has occurred. So a saint is someone who as it were in some miniscule way repeats the life of Christ in his own body."
},
{
"end_time": 2219.087,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2191.988,
"text": " The example of Padre Pio, which I mentioned, is a very extreme example, but that's why it is helpful in our attempt to understand what sanctity is. It's a very real thing and it's a discontinuity. In other words, in our ordinary state, we're far, far from sanctity."
},
{
"end_time": 2249.548,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2219.991,
"text": " We can't even imagine it, much less live as saints live. But we can understand, we can appreciate what sanctity is. It is becoming somewhat in some miniscule way like Christ. It is always associated with suffering. You do not"
},
{
"end_time": 2279.087,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2250.043,
"text": " attain any higher spiritual grade just in fun. No, it's very serious business and pain and suffering, as I say, is somehow a sine qua non in this man's journey to God. Many people, and I think there are also many people who"
},
{
"end_time": 2311.067,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2282.295,
"text": " A Christian who do not really accept this fact because it goes so much against our human desire. We don't want to suffer. For example, if you practice certain abstinence during Lent or so, we as human beings"
},
{
"end_time": 2326.903,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2311.391,
"text": " We do it sort of reluctantly, it goes against our brain, and that is exactly why it is spiritually efficacious, because religion is to go against that natural brain."
},
{
"end_time": 2356.63,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2327.824,
"text": " What's next for you?"
},
{
"end_time": 2387.722,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2359.07,
"text": " What's next for me, my friend, is to prepare myself to enter into the life beyond this one, to enter into the next phase of life. Christianity and every true religion has always taught that one should prepare oneself for the end."
},
{
"end_time": 2416.51,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2388.387,
"text": " One of the great insights from the Vedic tradition is the Vedic tradition declares that the natural life of man divides into four stages. Brahmacharya, this is where a young man prepares himself to enter life"
},
{
"end_time": 2444.343,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2417.227,
"text": " through study. He's expected to live a celibate life. It's a sort of an ascetic life. And next comes grihastia, the life of married life. So the man marries, he founds a family and he has an employment and he supports his family. This is the second stage of life according to the Vedic tradition."
},
{
"end_time": 2474.087,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2444.923,
"text": " The third stage is, I think they call it Vana Prastha. I think it means a forest life. The idea is that the children are grown up and they've married themselves. So the man and his wife enter a new stage of life, which is a life of, they call it forest life because it's a very simple life."
},
{
"end_time": 2501.357,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2474.735,
"text": " It involves little outward activity. It's a matter of preparing for the life to come. And then the fourth stage of life is called Sannyas. And this is something very Vedic, foreign to our Western way of thinking. But according to the Vedic tradition, this is when both the man and the woman"
},
{
"end_time": 2529.565,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2502.381,
"text": " Leave all attachments to the world and totally fix their spirit upon God. So the extreme way of living that life of sannyas, and this is actually, I saw people living like that, it was still going on. You retire completely from the world."
},
{
"end_time": 2558.643,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2530.299,
"text": " And you give you a whole day to prayer and contemplation. Very few people in the Western world can even conceive of such a thing. When I was traveling in India half a century ago, it was still visible. It was rare, yes. And you had to go far away from New Delhi and Calcutta."
},
{
"end_time": 2587.824,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2558.763,
"text": " So this is the ancient Vedic culture. We can't duplicate it here, but I'm just mentioning that the principle applies to us, too. The principle is that at the end of our life, there should be a transitional phase,"
},
{
"end_time": 2615.401,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2588.473,
"text": " where we turn our attention away from the world and the cares of the world and we live a life as much as possible in prayer, solitude, contemplation. I think the principle is therefore everyone will do so to the extent that he or she can."
},
{
"end_time": 2646.34,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2617.415,
"text": " And actually, from a higher point of view, all the earlier phases of our life should really, in truth, be a preparation for that fourth stage, which is itself a preparation for the true life, which is life eternal. But I think only someone who can really be called a saint is able to"
},
{
"end_time": 2677.978,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2648.609,
"text": " Bernardo Kastrup interprets the fall in the Garden of Eden as a fall into meta-consciousness, i.e."
},
{
"end_time": 2699.07,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2678.302,
"text": " I must tell you in all frankness that I have very little interest in this kind of speculation."
},
{
"end_time": 2728.456,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2699.65,
"text": " I feel that if you want to approach these great truths, the truth of Christianity and the Judeo-Christian tradition, you cannot do it by starting from the contemporary Weltanschauung. You cannot do it, strictly speaking, as a man of the 21st century."
},
{
"end_time": 2755.708,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2729.019,
"text": " You have to do it. You have to go back to the basic, the basis, our scriptures and our early Christian commentaries and so on, and feel your way into this world to try to understand it basically. And I think this applies not only to Kastrup. It's sort of a typical thing."
},
{
"end_time": 2785.589,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2756.152,
"text": " We have a lot of intellectuals today who are basically respectful of the great traditions, which is in itself wonderful because the typical thing is just the opposite. The typical thing in our, if you go to our universities and you get out of them still believing in God, you are one of the chosen few because the thrust of it all is"
},
{
"end_time": 2815.828,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2785.913,
"text": " I call it satanic because I think it basically it is. They are on the opposite side. But the people that you are referring to now, there's a whole group of them. It is very much to their credit that they are respectful of the Christianity and the other great traditions and they want to understand. They think that there's truth there and they want to understand it."
},
{
"end_time": 2831.698,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2816.408,
"text": " But they want to understand it, so to speak, starting out more or less from the contemporary well-done shang. And I think this is absolutely the wrong place to start."
},
{
"end_time": 2861.732,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2832.346,
"text": " Because if we were in any way schooled or versed in the true metaphysics and the true Christianity, let us say, we would realize that the contemporary Weltanschauung is nonsense. It's a disease. And it's a little bit like poison. I mean, it poisons you."
},
{
"end_time": 2891.186,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2862.039,
"text": " And so the idea of interpreting Christianity in terms that connect with our contemporary physicists or contemporary psychologists or whatever you find in the contemporary culture is in a sense to lose before you even started. You cannot understand Christianity."
},
{
"end_time": 2920.572,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2892.142,
"text": " from the direction of physics or any other contemporary strand of thought, whether it's psychology or what have you, we are in a completely different culture and the only way to gain access to Christianity is to start from the beginning, that means on a scriptural basis."
},
{
"end_time": 2946.8,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2921.613,
"text": " There's the Old and the New Testament and there are the commentaries of the great Christian teachers, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. That's how you can learn. And once you have a certain insight into Christianity, you can of course engage in a"
},
{
"end_time": 2978.08,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2948.2,
"text": " A dialogue, if you will, with contemporary thinkers. You can listen to what they have to say and explain what is right and what is not right and help your fellow man find their way into the traditional teaching. But you can't get into the traditional teaching"
},
{
"end_time": 3005.589,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2980.179,
"text": " from the direction of contemporary thought, there's no way. Is it more accurate to say that the corporeal realm is a reduction of the avaturnal or an expression of the avaturnal? Well, the actually correct answer I think to this question is that"
},
{
"end_time": 3035.998,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 3006.34,
"text": " Whatever has any kind of being in the corporeal world, for example, this table originates in the avid tunnel. So if you ask, what is this table? What is it? The contemporary person will start talking about atoms and this and that, which has nothing to do with metaphysics. This is something else entirely."
},
{
"end_time": 3061.408,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 3036.596,
"text": " Metaphysically, if you want to understand what this table actually is, what the being is that manifests as this table, you are led unquestionably back to the Ave eternal realm, because"
},
{
"end_time": 3089.155,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 3062.824,
"text": " What is not illusory, what is not perishable, what is actually real in this table, and there must be something like that, otherwise even the illusion of the table couldn't arise. So what is real, what this actual being is located or originates in the avid tunnel plane."
},
{
"end_time": 3115.094,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 3089.838,
"text": " In the same way that we say a baby originates from a mother, we don't say a baby is a reduction of the mother or a baby is an expression of the mother. Is it similar like that or different? I would say it's a little different because the connection that I was trying to verbalize or somehow express is purely vertical. It's ontological."
},
{
"end_time": 3141.766,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 3115.452,
"text": " And, of course, the only way we can understand it in a human way is to add the fiction to spatialize. You say, all right, let this plane be corporeal. And up here you have another plane is avid tunnel. So we sort of make a mental picture of it, which is not really"
},
{
"end_time": 3168.285,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3142.125,
"text": " What do you think of the patristic formulation that love is the coexistence of unity and multiplicity?"
},
{
"end_time": 3200.128,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 3172.415,
"text": " Well, I would have to really think about this a little bit. On the whole, I shy away from trying to intellectually understand the deep metaphysical theological truths."
},
{
"end_time": 3230.026,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3200.708,
"text": " For example, the teachings of Christ as you read them in the Gospels, I don't really try to understand this, this type of statement, the way one might want to understand the differential equation or mathematical theorem by analyzing it and so on. I think that"
},
{
"end_time": 3259.121,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3230.964,
"text": " It is preferable to approach these things figuratively speaking from the heart rather than the intellect because you're trying to understand the greater in terms of the lesser. It doesn't really make that much sense."
},
{
"end_time": 3289.326,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3261.476,
"text": " So I think there is a great deal of this kind of thinking going on. It is somehow an attempt to reach the higher planes without leaving the lower. I tend to be skeptical"
},
{
"end_time": 3319.838,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3290.026,
"text": " To many of the so-called commentaries about deep metaphysical or Christian ideas given by learned men of our day, because these metaphysical truths have been known and communicated for thousands of years."
},
{
"end_time": 3349.241,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3320.094,
"text": " I like to approach them using the language, if you will, of the great sages of prior times. In the case of Christianity, we have this arena of brilliant and at the same time holy and sagacious men and women."
},
{
"end_time": 3378.08,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3350.435,
"text": " And I am perfectly happy to approach these mysteries in the very terms given to us in the traditional form. The idea of say suppose somebody writes an essay about some Christian topic with its love or"
},
{
"end_time": 3405.879,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3378.763,
"text": " life eternal or whatever it be using analogies from modern science something about quantum particles or god knows what i don't feel drawn to that because these ideas have been transmitted from master to disciple"
},
{
"end_time": 3433.746,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3406.305,
"text": " for more than 2000 years now and so we have a wonderful language that we can use by way of approaching or entering into these highest spheres of thought. To be honest with you, that language that I was now referring to was given to us"
},
{
"end_time": 3460.128,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3434.189,
"text": " by the great saints and mystics of the church, a Thomas Aquinas, a Meister Eckhart, a Saint Augustine. And we have that available, then why should I listen to Professor So-and-so, who somehow approaches Christian themes, Christian mysteries, one can say,"
},
{
"end_time": 3485.384,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3460.538,
"text": " Using ideas or terminology from quantum theory or cognitive psychology and so forth, I feel no need for that. And I am skeptical about it too. In other words, not only are the truths of Christianity sacred, but in a sense, the words, the language and the conceptions"
},
{
"end_time": 3513.968,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3485.998,
"text": " which go back to the the patristic era have a sacredness of their own and so I tend to be skeptical about modern-day gurus who will use a completely different language. I feel no need for that and as I say I'm"
},
{
"end_time": 3540.572,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3514.48,
"text": " I tend to be skeptical that it's really going to work, because not only is the sacred truth sacred, the means of expression are also sacred. The very words that have formed from the lips, say, of the apostle are sacred."
},
{
"end_time": 3561.544,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3542.176,
"text": " Why should I listen to Professor so-and-so? I'd much rather listen to St. Paul or St. Augustine, St. Maximus. I mean, they are the people who understood these things. They are the people who attained them also in varying degrees in their own life."
},
{
"end_time": 3590.742,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3562.056,
"text": " My own approach to philosophy has always been instinctively Platonist. I became interested in Platonism at a very early age."
},
{
"end_time": 3620.572,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3591.152,
"text": " And I never really wavered in this regard. Something in me recognizes this as the true ontology. Now, when you study Platonism very, very carefully, you discover that the Platonist, Weltanschau, conceives of the cosmos as inherently tripartite."
},
{
"end_time": 3649.804,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3622.688,
"text": " The three planes, if you want to put it that way, are firstly what I call the avid tunnel plane, which is a domain which is subject neither to space nor to time. And this is really where reality comes from. Reality emanates from that domain."
},
{
"end_time": 3674.428,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3651.63,
"text": " And the second domain, which I call the, the Platonists call it the psychic domain. I call it the intermediary. So the psychic domain is subject to time, but not to space. And incidentally,"
},
{
"end_time": 3703.985,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3674.804,
"text": " I'm convinced that this is integral Platonism, but I've never in any Platonist or Neoplatonist document read this interpretation. I doubt not that all the real Platonists understood this very well, but it is of interest that for whatever reason, I don't think it has been explicitly stated."
},
{
"end_time": 3735.469,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3706.766,
"text": " And then the third domain I call the corporeal, this is the world in which we normally find ourselves. That domain is obviously subject to time, but not to space. Excuse me, both time and space. So this is the basic tripartite ontology associated with Platonism. Now let me just mention"
},
{
"end_time": 3765.657,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3736.152,
"text": " For the record that I think many people will be interested to know that this tripartite ontology is also found in the Vedic tradition, which is by far the oldest tradition in the world. It antecedes all others, including the Judeo-Christian which came much later."
},
{
"end_time": 3794.957,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3767.927,
"text": " This tripartite ontology underlies both the Vedic and the Platonist traditions. Let me say first of all, I find it very fascinating that the mere existence of this intermediary level implies"
},
{
"end_time": 3825.401,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3795.503,
"text": " the falsity of relativistic physics. It is absolutely clear and beyond dispute because according to relativistic physics, there is no time and there is no space. There is only a space-time and the fact that there is a time-only realm obviously contradicts that assumption."
},
{
"end_time": 3853.473,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3825.794,
"text": " I was very fascinated to discover that both the Vedic and the Platonist ontology disproves all of relativistic physics at one stroke. Incidentally, regarding the intermediary or psychic realm, let me point out"
},
{
"end_time": 3882.005,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3854.497,
"text": " Even though nobody in the western world knows these things now, because we are all into the scientific, quote unquote, scientific way of looking at things. So even though we don't know about it, we spend a part of our life, our conscious life in that domain. Namely, we enter that, we are in that domain whenever we dream."
},
{
"end_time": 3908.558,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3882.756,
"text": " The dream state is we enter the dream state when we dream. The dream state is which one? The intermediary. In the dreams there is no space? The space in the dream state is not real. It's a kind of a hallucination and you can easily prove that because"
},
{
"end_time": 3934.138,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3910.811,
"text": " Whereas the time that we experience in the dream state coincides with our temporal time. For example, I think everyone has experienced being awakened in the middle of a dream and the point is the moment of awakening you can identify in the dream."
},
{
"end_time": 3964.684,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3935.265,
"text": " The time in the dream state is none other than the time of the waking state, but the space that you experience in the dream state proves to be unreal. In the dream, you may see a castle on three-dimensional thing, and the instant you wake up, you realize that there never was such a thing, meaning this belonged to the dream state, but not to the corporeal."
},
{
"end_time": 3995.128,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3965.52,
"text": " So there is a rigorous, precise ontological distinction between the three states. You may say, well, what about the eternal state? It is true that we normally do not experience that. We do not experience it in the waking state. We do not experience it in the dream state."
},
{
"end_time": 4018.524,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3995.384,
"text": " And this is exactly where these yogic traditions enter the picture. In other words, to enter the eternal state is not given to the ordinary human being. It is something that can be acquired, but at a great cost."
},
{
"end_time": 4048.234,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 4019.309,
"text": " As everyone that has any acquaintance with these domains knows very well, it is after a lifetime of endeavor under the guidance of someone who has himself received that from a master. If you're lucky, you can do that. It's a great achievement. And it turns out"
},
{
"end_time": 4078.456,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 4049.394,
"text": " that this has not only been always the chief gore, as it were, in the Vedic tradition, but the same is true in the Platonist. And let me mention that this is something I did not know until very, very recently when I came across some writings by"
},
{
"end_time": 4108.592,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 4079.07,
"text": " 18th century British Platonist known as Thomas Taylor, who for some unknowable reason strikes me as a perfect insider of the Platonist tradition. How that is to be explained is totally beyond my comprehension, but I have no doubt that Thomas Taylor knows very well"
},
{
"end_time": 4136.903,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 4109.241,
"text": " What he is talking about when he gives us, so to speak, an inside view of the Platonist tradition. And it turns out that the Platonist tradition is identical to the Pythagorean. In fact, it comes from the Pythagorean. If you will, Plato was a distant disciple of Pythagoras."
},
{
"end_time": 4164.206,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 4137.312,
"text": " And now what we learn from Thomas Taylor is that Pythagoras as a young man traveled to Egypt and actually became a disciple of an Egyptian master. And Thomas Taylor, where he gets this information from, I don't know. Undoubtedly, there are sources."
},
{
"end_time": 4195.657,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 4165.862,
"text": " But what I recognize immediately is that from the description that Thomas Taylor gives us of the life of these disciples, when I read this, I said to myself, my God, this is what I witnessed when 50 years ago I traveled in India and lived amongst real sadhus. That's how they live."
},
{
"end_time": 4222.654,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 4196.084,
"text": " This explains the correspondence between the Pythagorean Platonist tradition on the one side and the Vedic on the other. In a sense, they are the same tradition. However, there is a very decisive feature of the Pythagorean Platonist tradition, which"
},
{
"end_time": 4253.08,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 4223.319,
"text": " So far as I know simply does not exist in the Vedic. What is that? It is the rule of geometry. Geometry in the hands of the Pythagoreans and Platonists was an instrument which enabled the practicing yogi to ascend from the psychic to the eternal plane."
},
{
"end_time": 4281.647,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4254.906,
"text": " And conceptually we can see how this is possible because geometry as a subject studied in our schools, for example, pertains to the psychic realm. It's the realm of thought, of consciousness. But the truth of geometry, what"
},
{
"end_time": 4312.449,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4283.951,
"text": " What it really deals with pertains to the Ave Eternal Plan. After all, when you prove a theorem, you prove a theorem and the theorem is something that is eternal. And in fact, geometry derives from the Ave Eternal Plan because what we experience, if you will, on the psychic realm comes from"
},
{
"end_time": 4340.623,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4313.148,
"text": " the avid tunnel. If there were not an avid tunnel geometry, there could be no geometry as we understand it. So the Greeks, the Pythagoreans first of all, understood this very well and realized that because geometry does come from the avid tunnel and what it essentially asserts pertains to the avid tunnel,"
},
{
"end_time": 4366.852,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4341.152,
"text": " It can be used as an instrument to actually ascend from the psychic level, where this kind of discussion right now, even though it involves the corporeal, actually takes place on the psychic. There is no geometry running around here on the corporeal plane. We're talking about something on the psychic level and"
},
{
"end_time": 4394.923,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4367.278,
"text": " The crucial point is, and this is what the Pythagoreans and the Platonists understood so well, the point is that because geometry derives from the eternal realm, it is in principle possible to use geometry to ascend from the psychic to the"
},
{
"end_time": 4423.387,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4395.572,
"text": " So this is very easy to say, but as I indicated a moment ago, the actual accomplishment of this is a lifetime's task. And incidentally, we're talking here. An authentic spiritual tradition is nothing that you can access on your own. It entails discipleship, as this is vital."
},
{
"end_time": 4453.985,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4424.172,
"text": " I found in India when I was traveling there half a century ago, every 14-year-old Brahmin boy would understand this very well, simply known. Here in the West, it is almost totally unknown. But the fact is, if you want to ascend to the eternal plane, you have to become a disciple of someone who was himself a disciple."
},
{
"end_time": 4483.183,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4454.735,
"text": " And incidentally, both in the Vedic tradition and in the Pythagorean Platonist, it is well understood that this path calls for lifelong celibacy. So in India, I noticed this every, as I say, every 14 year old Brahmin boy understands if you want to ascend this path,"
},
{
"end_time": 4512.278,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4483.848,
"text": " It will cost you lifelong celibacy and the writings of Thomas Taylor confirm that such was the case in the Pythagorean tradition and undoubtedly also in the Platonists. Incidentally, what I have said so far gives you the key to understanding"
},
{
"end_time": 4542.261,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4512.602,
"text": " A very mysterious inscription which reputedly was inscribed over the portal of the Plato Platonic Academy. In English it says, let no one ignorant of geometry enter here. So we understand this now in a different way."
},
{
"end_time": 4571.015,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4543.37,
"text": " because actually no one ignorant of geometry can enter here if entering means to access the avid eternal plane. So the modus operandi used in the Pythagorean Platonist tradition, which comes from the Egyptian, differs from the Vedic"
},
{
"end_time": 4600.913,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4571.664,
"text": " In the sense that the means of access were different. Of course, they had the common elements of celibacy and this incredible practice. You know, when I lived among sadhus in India about 50 years ago, I was amazed that"
},
{
"end_time": 4630.708,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4601.544,
"text": " These men spend a good 20 hours a day in other states, in higher states. If you were to put a knife in their flesh while they are in these states, there would be no reaction because they're no longer in this body. And so I also realized then when they did"
},
{
"end_time": 4657.193,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4631.118,
"text": " come to know consciousness. I could talk with them and it was, as you can imagine, absolutely fascinating to me to talk to someone who has just been somewhere that our wildest men in the contemporary West know nothing about. I mean, we know nothing even about the intermediaries place."
},
{
"end_time": 4680.043,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4657.705,
"text": " Go to Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies. I guarantee that there is not a single person there, unless he happens to have read the books that I have read, knows about that. And incidentally, in India, just about everyone knows about these things, in fact."
},
{
"end_time": 4709.633,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4680.657,
"text": " These three states, when you talk to an educated Hindu in my day, you could converse with him about the so-called Tribhuvana. I talked to people who were businessmen and we could talk about the Tribhuvana. It was in their tradition. Tribhuvana is just a Sanskrit word meaning three worlds."
},
{
"end_time": 4742.108,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4712.346,
"text": " After this trip to India, the first trip, I realized how ignorant we are in the West. I mean, we know a little piece of the world. We don't even know about the existence of the intermediary world, which we actually enter just about every day in the dream state. And let me in this connection tell you something which illustrates what I'm talking about here, namely the fact"
},
{
"end_time": 4769.241,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4742.534,
"text": " that fifty years ago and probably doesn't exist anymore. But at that time, there was this remarkable knowledge among even ordinary people in India. So. When I on my first trip to India. I think I landed in New Delhi and"
},
{
"end_time": 4798.217,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4770.52,
"text": " I took a room in a hotel and that first evening I had some telephone conversations and I was very very happy to learn that someone whom I had great admiration for was going to arrive in New Delhi the next day by train at 11 o'clock. So I was very very happy about that"
},
{
"end_time": 4825.776,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4798.729,
"text": " and just took a stroll in the city and went to Ordele and on my return to the hotel I was accosted by I guess you could call him a fakir. That means a person who has a little bit of knowledge of yoga but not all that much. And this fakir accosted me out of the blue"
},
{
"end_time": 4855.247,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4826.596,
"text": " I said, very lucky man. So, he says, oh yeah, he said very lucky man, tomorrow at 11 o'clock something good will happen. Well, no one in New Delhi, besides myself, knew about this tomorrow 11 o'clock, which is really something that elated me."
},
{
"end_time": 4883.507,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4855.862,
"text": " And so I must have been thinking about it deeply. So this fakir somehow picked that up out of thin air. Well, this fact, of course, interested me. So I went to a nearby garden with him to see what he can have to say. And so he gave me a piece of paper and he said, look at it. So I saw it was blank."
},
{
"end_time": 4912.227,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4884.104,
"text": " Then he says, please fold it and hold it in your hand. So I did, I held this paper. And then he said, all right, now think of a number between 1 and 100. So I thought of a number, I think it was 36. And then he says, all right, now open your hand and look at the paper. And on this paper was written 36."
},
{
"end_time": 4938.575,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4913.285,
"text": " So I gave him something, but on my way home to the hotel, I brooded on this. What's going on? And I think I figured it out. The fact that he talked to me, accosted me,"
},
{
"end_time": 4965.265,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4939.053,
"text": " in reference to something good that would happen tomorrow at 11 o'clock. This was clearly a case of telepathy. I mean, he was able to read my mind. So then what about the 36, that number? Well, I eventually did figure that out too. There is something called invisible ink."
},
{
"end_time": 4996.032,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4966.084,
"text": " And so that number must have been written in invisible ink and it became visible when I held this in my hands. Meanwhile, he puts that number into my mind. So there were two for us supernatural powers that he had. A to read someone else's mind and B to put something into someone else's mind."
},
{
"end_time": 5025.93,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4997.073,
"text": " So here, the first day in India, I by chance encountered a fakir who had these two powers and he could demonstrate that to me. Now why do I speak of fakir? Well, clearly these are yogic powers and you cannot acquire them just out of books."
},
{
"end_time": 5055.725,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 5026.988,
"text": " Absolutely not. So this man had a guru. He was a disciple of someone who was enough for a yogi to possess these two powers and therefore he could transmit it to his disciple. All this doesn't come on the cheap. This fakir must have spent"
},
{
"end_time": 5082.432,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 5055.998,
"text": " Maybe two, three years, I don't know, a certain period of time as a disciple, subject to a very disciplined kind of life, to acquire these powers. So why do we call him a Fakir, which is a somewhat derogatory term? How do you spell that, by the way? F-A-T-I-R. And as I understand it,"
},
{
"end_time": 5110.247,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 5083.183,
"text": " A fakir is someone who has a certain knowledge of yoga, not a very high knowledge, but a certain knowledge just the same, and who instead of going on, I mean, ideally yoga is given to us in order to go all the way. But there is a possibility that at various stages you stop."
},
{
"end_time": 5135.503,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 5110.93,
"text": " and utilize this knowledge and it can be utilized in many ways. You can become a millionaire if you play your cards right. I mean this knowledge is knowledge of a very unusual kind. So the word Fakir as I understand it refers to these yogis who instead of going on"
},
{
"end_time": 5153.387,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 5135.981,
"text": " In a certain at a certain level use this half knowledge that they have for pecuniary purposes. That's all right. But it was so interesting. My first day in India, I learned things."
},
{
"end_time": 5182.21,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 5153.592,
"text": " which here in the West hardly anyone knows. As I said, if we were to go to the Institute for Advanced Studies, I don't think you would find anyone there who has a ghost of an idea about these things. And yet it's real and it's in a way science. It's a higher science than what we possess. Because our science is actually, our physical science doesn't even reach up to the corporeal level."
},
{
"end_time": 5211.664,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 5184.445,
"text": " This is why I had to introduce it. I had to distinguish between X and Sx and that was one of the two keys to the resolution of the measurement problem. The reason that top physicists have not been able to solve the problem to this day is that the ontology of physics doesn't suffice. If there were only"
},
{
"end_time": 5242.449,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 5212.739,
"text": " A physical domain and no corporeal domain which is higher than that, there could be no measurement. I think I have made the point in light of my contact with India that there are things between heaven and earth that our sciences here in the West, our contemporary sciences, don't know anything about."
},
{
"end_time": 5270.111,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 5243.302,
"text": " But would you agree, Brian, with my point that these things are there in the quantum world? But in potency, you need to understand quantum mechanics. You do need the Aristotelian distinction between potency and act. And in fact, Heisenberg understood this almost immediately."
},
{
"end_time": 5297.739,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 5270.435,
"text": " when he said that so-called quantum particles are not real particles, they are potentiae. They become real particles precisely when they interact with a corporeal instrument and as I show in my latest book on physics, the point of it is that"
},
{
"end_time": 5327.858,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 5298.251,
"text": " The reality comes from the corporeal level. In other words, the reason quantum physics deals with entities that in a sense do not exist is because classical physics is sub-corporeal."
},
{
"end_time": 5355.179,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 5328.558,
"text": " I mean, this little entity is corporeal, but when the physicist looks at it, it becomes physical. In other words, he sees it as a physical entity, and as a physical entity, it still has being because the physical coaster receives its being from the corporeal."
},
{
"end_time": 5385.196,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 5355.845,
"text": " Is the Sx a subset of X or is it a different domain? It's a different domain. It's not a subset. It is something you might say it's a physicist's way of comprehending X. But the point that I'm making is that the reality comes from the corporeal. It's a complete opposite of what contemporary scientists tend to believe."
},
{
"end_time": 5414.172,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5385.52,
"text": " Contemporary scientists tend to believe that the reality that we encounter here on the corporeal level derives ultimately from the particulate domain, the domain of quantum theory, but the actual fact of the matter is just the opposite. There's no intermediary. I have come to look upon physics from a rigorous"
},
{
"end_time": 5443.012,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5414.753,
"text": " Platonist ontological standpoint. And there it is very, very simple. All reality, all being comes from the avitonal plane. So, iconically, you have a circle with a center. The center represents the avitonal plane. The intermediary is the interior."
},
{
"end_time": 5471.135,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5443.626,
"text": " And then the corporeal is the actual circumference of that circle. I sort of taught myself to think in terms of this icon, because if you do everything becomes very simple. So all the reality, whether in the corporeal world or the physical, derives from that center. And now,"
},
{
"end_time": 5499.189,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5472.705,
"text": " And how does it derive it through vertical causation? So how then is the reality of corporeal objects transmitted to the physical realm? Well, the physical realm breaks into two parts and this is absolutely essential. You can't understand physics without that."
},
{
"end_time": 5527.602,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5499.77,
"text": " You have to make the distinction between subcorporeal physics, which is the physics of entities which derive from the corporeal level. So subcorporeal physics deals with objects Sx derived from a corporeal X. And the crucial point here is that because"
},
{
"end_time": 5556.613,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5528.131,
"text": " sub corporeal physics derives from the corporeal level it receives being which is the same as irreducible wholeness through vertical causation there's vertical causation from the corporeal level to the physical level and that is why the physical level has a reality"
},
{
"end_time": 5586.817,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5557.21,
"text": " Technically speaking it has being because that being is transmitted from the corporeal to the physical level through vertical causation. So this is the story about classical physics. Now what about quantum mechanics? Well, quantum mechanics is the physics of the trans-corporeal. Trans-corporeal means"
},
{
"end_time": 5614.002,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5588.08,
"text": " not subcorporeal. Do you describe that as Tx? So Sx is classical physics? Yes, classical physics is a physics of physical systems Sx derived from X. But in quantum theory, strange as it obviously must be, you are dealing with"
},
{
"end_time": 5641.51,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5614.497,
"text": " entities that are physical but not derived from a corporeal entity. Now if you think about this and it's not quite that easy, I mean these are subtle points, because the quantum world is not sub-corporeal, it does not"
},
{
"end_time": 5667.415,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5642.039,
"text": " have its own intrinsic reality. So this is why quantum theory is so weird. This is why particles can multilocate, for example. The answer is in plain terms that in itself quantum entities have no reality, have no being."
},
{
"end_time": 5698.507,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5668.848,
"text": " So how then can there be a classical physics, a quantum physics? Well, the point is that the quantum realm does not exist all by itself. It interacts with corporeal instruments in two ways. First, in its definition."
},
{
"end_time": 5728.951,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5699.275,
"text": " A quantum theory is not just a mental thing, it has a certain reality because by virtue of the instruments, the corporeal instruments which define the physical system. So this already is one source which transmits reality to the non-physical"
},
{
"end_time": 5758.012,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5730.247,
"text": " Non-reality of the quantum world conceived in isolation from the corporeal. Some of the most beautifully esoteric teachings that I have ever heard you find in the Confessions of St. Augustine. I'll give you one example, it's an example I love so much I've cited it often in my writings."
},
{
"end_time": 5786.51,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5758.609,
"text": " Saint Augustine begins a chapter speaking as it were to God, and he says, let me see if I can, I want to remember it precisely, he says, I see these others beneath thee, in existence they have"
},
{
"end_time": 5816.425,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5787.432,
"text": " Because they are from thee, yet no existence, because they are not what thou art. Now, I won't go into this now, that would not be the time, but let me say that this is one of the most esoteric statements I have ever read. And you could give lectures about it, you could"
},
{
"end_time": 5843.183,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5817.261,
"text": " For example, explain how all of Vedanta is really contained in these words. They go as deep and as high as the human mind can go. And yet, it is something that is said casually in St. Augustine's autobiography. I mean, the Confessions is his autobiography."
},
{
"end_time": 5872.739,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5843.558,
"text": " which weaves into one the story of his intellectual and spiritual life and also the teachings of Christ on both the exoteric and the esoteric plane. So everything is in there. Now, during the patristic age, both levels of understanding, the exoteric and the esoteric,"
},
{
"end_time": 5903.541,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5873.541,
"text": " went hand in hand. It was part and parcel of the Christian heritage. And then, during the Middle Ages, in the West mainly, in the West more than in the East, this equilibrium was disturbed and esotericism tended to disappear."
},
{
"end_time": 5933.49,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5904.343,
"text": " I mean, there always were and there always will be individuals who have been given from God this higher vision. But when I say it disappeared, I mean, for instance, that it was no longer recognized officially. And I'm sorry to say that undoubtedly many esoteric Christians"
},
{
"end_time": 5963.626,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5933.916,
"text": " were actually burnt at the stake in the European Middle Ages. This is a sad fact which however is true and you can't deny it. Do you have any issues with evolution versus intelligent design? Do you have any thoughts there? Oh, absolutely. Evolution is a heresy. It's a fundamentally false doctrine. There's no actual scientific evidence whatsoever"
},
{
"end_time": 5994.189,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5964.309,
"text": " about evolution and as I keep writing in my various articles since 1998 evolution has been mathematically disproved it is impossible and that can be proved rigorously and it has been proved but even so I think it's ultimately due to satanic forces"
},
{
"end_time": 6020.52,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5994.923,
"text": " Evolution is, so to speak, the pseudo-religious cradle of our civilization. So this may be one of those coans that can be misinterpreted. So what specifically about evolution do you not agree with? Is it that we share a common ancestor with a different species or that we all came from a single-celled organism? Well, fundamentally, what I object to in"
},
{
"end_time": 6050.64,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 6020.879,
"text": " evolution and why i think that it is basically satanic teaching satanic is always inverting putting god down and satan up it's a complete inversion and evolution is a complete inversion inversion because instead of recognizing that all being comes from above from what i call the eternal plane and thus from god because"
},
{
"end_time": 6067.432,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 6051.032,
"text": " Who puts that eternal plane in there? That is the creative act. Platonism is very clear about this. And of course, Vedic teaching is also very clear about this. But in reality,"
},
{
"end_time": 6098.37,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 6069.104,
"text": " The entire universe, I'm just gesturing, the entire universe is descending from that avid tunnel, from that center point of the cosmic icon and the doctrine of evolution puts it completely, it puts the world upside down. Particles, quantum particles, as we talked about that earlier this afternoon and I pointed out to you that quantum particles"
},
{
"end_time": 6119.019,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 6099.07,
"text": " As quantum particles don't exist, whatever existence, whatever reality they have, they obtain in one of two ways. It's always through contact with the corporeal entity, and there are two ways in which this actually happens."
},
{
"end_time": 6146.544,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 6120.401,
"text": " in the corporeal entity that defines the quantum system. Quantum systems don't just grow on trees. I mean, every physicist, if he wants to study quantum system, he has to set up equipment which in effect produces that quantum system. So the quantum systems don't grow on trees. They are in a certain sense man-made."
},
{
"end_time": 6173.285,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 6146.954,
"text": " which means that the impetus comes from the opposite direction that our physicists think it comes from. It comes from the center of the cosmic icon. It comes from the eternal realm because it was known since the days of Plato and Pythagoras that that's where all being comes from."
},
{
"end_time": 6203.387,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 6173.985,
"text": " These are absolute statements. I've just finished an article on consciousness, and in fact I added a very essential section this morning, so this is all very recent, but the central point about consciousness is that it"
},
{
"end_time": 6232.415,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 6204.155,
"text": " definitely derives not just from the eternal realm, but from God himself. And this is where I quote a Vedic statement, namely that the fundamental principle is what is called in an Upanishad Satchidananda. So satch is being."
},
{
"end_time": 6261.647,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 6232.79,
"text": " Chit is consciousness and Ananda is bliss. So these are three nomen Dei, names of God, which are Vedic in origin. And it is from this divine trinity, Sat Chit Ananda, that the creation comes. And this is why the creation"
},
{
"end_time": 6292.056,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 6262.415,
"text": " is tripartite because these three parts, the aviturnal, the psychic and the corporeal, are manifestations respectively of sot, chit, ananda. And in my paper I have to explain that because at first hearing you don't grasp how ananda"
},
{
"end_time": 6320.879,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 6292.585,
"text": " which means bliss, is in any way associated with the corporeal world. In fact, you might very well conceive the opposite, that this is a veil of tears and it's a place where there is least an underworld. Well, I go into all these issues very carefully and I hope I'm making a very plausible argument. So the point is,"
},
{
"end_time": 6345.179,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 6320.998,
"text": " That consciousness, we have it all wrong. And not just the gross materialists, but also the people who think they are spiritualists or what have you. The point is, one way or another, we all try to explain or understand consciousness from below."
},
{
"end_time": 6369.974,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 6345.725,
"text": " The outright materialist says, aha, it all comes from quantum particles. If you have enough of them aggregating in suitable ways, voila, there's consciousness. Well, pardon me for saying so. This is nonsense. This is utter sheer nonsense. There's not a speck of truth in that. And in fact, it's a complete inversion."
},
{
"end_time": 6398.063,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 6370.896,
"text": " Because there's only one place where consciousness can actually originate, and that's in God himself. And we have a Vedic source which tells us so. One of the most profound nomen Dei in the Vedic tradition is Satchitananda. Satchitananda is a name of God, and it's a name which tells us something about"
},
{
"end_time": 6428.131,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 6398.541,
"text": " the nature of God, and interestingly enough, it's triadic. God is in a sense one and three at the same time. You find the same thing in Christianity, but in a very, very different way. Christianity speaks of the Trinity, yes. So it also sees God as a triad, a triplicity, but let's leave that out of the picture because it's completely different from the Vedic."
},
{
"end_time": 6458.677,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 6429.411,
"text": " Not at all. On the contrary, in a sense, there are, as I've already said, in a way polar opposites. So in order to understand cosmology, in a Platonist cosmology, you have to start with the Vedic nomen Dei. The key is unquestionably the revealed name Satchidananda."
},
{
"end_time": 6489.019,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 6459.65,
"text": " This is not a human invention that comes from God, and it is the oldest in the name of God because the Vedic tradition is the oldest tradition in the world, by a long shot, even as Christianity is, so to speak, the last. I think there are in essence only these two traditions and then there are many in-betweens, but I think so far as bona fide"
},
{
"end_time": 6519.65,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 6490.162,
"text": " and the"
},
{
"end_time": 6549.394,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6520.179,
"text": " There's a little technical difference, as I said, the platonic involves the idea of geometry in a way which you nowhere find in the Vedas. But apart from this, the Vedic and the Platonist are interchangeable. And so if you want to understand cosmology,"
},
{
"end_time": 6579.411,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6549.991,
"text": " ontologically there is no other way you can get it from the Vedas you can get it from Plato in either case you get the tripartite cosmos and this is the way you are going to understand cosmology and once you have seen that you recognize at the glance that"
},
{
"end_time": 6605.026,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6579.633,
"text": " the modern scientific way. I say scientific because it's not really scientific at all, but all of our scientists think that way, so it's scientific. The scientific way is the polar opposite of the Vedic or Platonist, where the Vedic and Platonist sees being"
},
{
"end_time": 6634.428,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6605.64,
"text": " or irreducible wholeness, which is the same thing as originating on the eternal plane and actually beyond that it originates in the tripartite divinity. The scientistic thinks it comes from quantum particles. If you have enough of these non-existent things, you will have consciousness. This is nonsense, complete nonsense."
},
{
"end_time": 6649.906,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6635.026,
"text": " And I want to use what little energy I have left to get this message across. This is nonsense. There's no evidence for it and theoretically it doesn't make sense."
}
]
}No transcript available.