No matter at all

Preface

The following is a kind of first exploration of the field we are moving into now on this website, that of cosmology, which in this context means a refutation of the Big Bang theory and the development of an alternative.

Since the Big Bang theory is theoretically conform Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and that theory is based on Time as a fourth dimension (whereas on this website it is claimed Time does not exist in a physical sense and therefore cannot be a dimension either), I will try to delve deep into that extremely difficult subject of Time for several chapters, to show that the ‘relativity’ concept of space is inconsistent and that ‘inertial-time’ is a rate of transformation depending in nature on the acceleration of the inertial local field (also called ‘lee-field’ here).

But first, as I did with mathematics, also in philosophy I want to start from scratch and that means here: how we relate to reality, our world, our body, that we have to get used to the insight that all is mind and that there is ‘no matter at all’

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No matter at all

The philosopher Kant, widely seen as one of the greater philosophers of Europe after the Greeks, developed a notion which he called “ Ding-an-sich”, “the thing in itself”, something which would be un-knowable to the human mind, because we experience the world with a perception which absorbs sensations to the measure of its faculties.

We see a certain range of colours (frequencies), but there are more, which we don’t see, the same with sounds. So we definitely live in a world which in its appearance is closely related to our physical make-up, our body, as the measure to which we are capable of processing information.

Thus our human conditional limitations brought Kant to the conclusion that we could not know how things are ‘in themselves’. He called it the “noumenon” (but has been criticised for using this term that way because it has a different meaning in Greek philosophy).
However that maybe, it seems that the highly intellectual Kant in his analysis overlooked his own body.

The acute Schopenhauer realised this and made it the cornerstone of his philosophy, inspired by Kant. Schopenhauer argued that the materiality of the “ Ding-an-sich”, thing in itself, is in our body and relates through our body to the world. He said what we experience as our body is “will” and this will is an expression of the “Weltwille”, “World-will”, which is the will to live, will to exist.

Schopenhauer was, what is called, an “idealist” philosopher, which means that he understands the phenomenal world as in essence a manifestation of (the) mind. He is the first major Western philosopher who was inspired by Indian philosophy, especially Vedanta and Buddhism, where the predominance of mind is deeply ingrained from old.

Schopenhauer is an inspiring thinker and he deeply influenced Nietzsche who specified Schopenhauer’s Wille, going back to Kant’s noumenon, and declaring, notoriously, all existence a Will to Power (Wille zur Macht).

Also Wittgenstein, in his early philosophical development was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer’s ideas, even opened his most famous work with a phrase which is reminiscent of and contrasts with Schopenhauer’s opening sentence of his major work: “The world is my representation”.( “Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung”). Wittgenstein opened with: “The world is all that is the case”. (Die Welt ist alles was der Fall ist”). And for Wittgenstein the case was: facts (Tatsache), not things (Ding).

So Wittgenstein brings the concept of a “world” back to what we know about it (facts) and perceive of it (facts), without bothering what “matter” is, but the concept also contains the notion that it is all (Gesamtheit der Tatsachen) that exists (besteht), that is the case.

The concept ‘Tatsache’ (fact) was central to the Positivist philosophy of Mach who demanded scientific language use terms which are rooted in direct experience and who was influential in the Vienna of Wittgenstein’s youth, also Einstein was deeply influenced by Mach. Science should be brought back from the world of ‘Metaphysics’ (Aether?) to the world of direct experience and experiment, Mach declared. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus had a ‘logical-positivist’ aura which made that he was invited to join the ‘Vienna circle’ of Mach’s philosophical following, but he declined.

This philosophical concept of the “world” is thus the ‘world of experience’, our everyday reality, our experience of life. It is not the planet earth or the things in the world, it is the completest experience of our existence, it is human life. Wittgenstein says ‘I am my world’ (Ich bin meine Welt) ‘The world and life are one’. Not the ‘how’ of the world is mystical or mysterious, he says, but its existence ‘ueberhaupt’ (at all)

‘Our world’, in a sense, is what we know about life. Although the earth is the very basis on which we live, we take it for granted (a bit too much by now). ‘Our world’ is ‘our reality’ of which we are the physical centre, this centre is our body. Look around and see that you are in the middle of your world and then look at your body. Is it any different from the rest that you see or rather familiar? It is familiar, it belongs to the world, like other bodies.

We often completely forget about our body when we are concentrated , then we are ‘only mind’, absorbed in the object of our attention. Those are our best moments when we become one with what we are doing and “forget about the world”. That is our creativity, our forgetting about ourselves, so we become ‘one with the world’ and lose all materiality. It is the emptiness of matter.

There is of course something strange about the way we relate to our body. Are we and our body one or two? Is our body the body we see with our eyes placed in its environment, or is our body the body we feel? When we close our eyes and feel our body, can we say where our body ends and the spacious darkness begins? Is there a clear difference there?

We can feel the body as an energy in space, with our eyes closed, in dark space. We cannot really discern between the space of our body and the space outside. The space outside is indistinguishable from the space inside our body, like the brain, so it is all the same space, which shows that matter, since we are matter, does not have substance, it is ‘will’, ‘desire’.

It is maybe a good idea to see everything around you as the expression of the “will to exist” and in that sense it is all very precious, because what is there is the manifestation of the “cosmic or divine will to exist”.

If we look at it that way we can easier appreciate that people substantiate this “diverse will” into spirits which have an influence on our world.

The good thing about this concept of ‘will’ is that on the one hand it is not something of ourselves which we have under control, but then on the other it is shown by many sages that it is possible to get this body, this “world will”, under control. This dichotomy in us is not so much two entities as well that one of them, the body, is a non-essential aspect of the other.
Interesting is the comparison of the ‘will’ with the Hindu concept of ‘desire’ (kama), which is also basic and will have sustained Schopenhauer in his thinking.

It is the enlightened-ones who by conquering the “world will” in their body, become will-less and, in that process, the individuality of the person, characterised by this will, eventually evaporates in will-less-ness and blends with the world, the Tao, the Miracle. This is where the enlightened-one becomes ego-less, desire-less and the world becomes timeless.

Important in our appreciation of the concept of the world as (produced by the) mind, is that we first see that the world in essence is our experience and experience is not solid, is not material, experience is ‘us’, we experience and we talk about this experience with each other as ‘the world’ and our scientists tell us we live on a globe circling the sun and even that we rotate on our own axis. And we are absolutely certain that this is the right picture, because that is what everybody thinks.

It is a miracle we haven’t got the slightest awareness of these movements of us, with cosy armchair speeds, far beyond the sound barrier (Mach -1, same Mach), but it is a comfortable ride in the space ship we have inherited, well designed and self-sufficient (up to a point maybe).
When we sit down we are at rest, even on a train or in a car. Language cannot grasp being at rest and moving at the same time. We will see that this confusing relativity of rest and motion is at the heart of theoretical physics for one and a half century now, but in this context it is because our body is at rest, that we are at rest.

Sitting in a car I am at rest, or shall we say my body is at rest within the frame of the car, but I am moving from A to B, or is it the frame, anyway, sitting on a bicycle I am not at rest. Rest is a very physical sensation of a state of no-motion of the body itself.
In the rest we become one with our inertia and blend with the inertia of the earth.

Emphasizing ‘the world’ in essence as ‘experience’ immediately points at the one-ness of the situation because the dichotomy between I and the world is gone, the whole thing is experience. The problem is, we do as if we know what the world is and that in many ways it is something outside of us. We view matter as solid and granular, we crave for particles, however clever we are, matter must be something, it must have existence, endurance, substance, and with that we put it in opposition with what we see as our mind, as us.

We know, and all scientists know, that even atoms, the smallest ‘qualities’ are 99 % empty space and still the house we live in looks solid. So here again we see Kant’s insight that the world we experience is very much “coloured” by our senses.

When we now realise that also the elementary particles do not physically exist but are mathematical patterns and configurations of waves in space, the aether, and nothing else, then things change.

Because when matter becomes something like music, only of a more enduring type, then the whole mind-thing about matter starts to make sense. Enduring matter does no longer exist, particles have no ‘Eigen-substance’ (self-substance), one could say, there is no Ding-an-sich, no thing-in-itself, because there is no-thing.

There is no thing-in-itself because no-thing at that level of analysis can be isolated from its environment. The boundary of things is completely fluid because of the reflection fields, the lee-fields and the virtual fields that surround all objects, but the object itself is, technically speaking, just an excitement of local space, like we ourselves. We are the energy of space.

We have seen that we are space inside and that we cannot put a boundary on the feeling of our body, that its space seems pervaded by all space. We are space and that is why we have a mind and are the mind. The mind is everywhere and we know that the mind is eternal, because nothing in the mind points to an end. That is why we must learn to trust ever to find our refuge in the One (Mind) that always was and will be.

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