Pilgrimage of Love

Beyond our doubts and dreams,

hidden far beyond

the thickets of the mind,

 beyond the blossoming reach

and sweetness of the senses

is a clearing

where the light is pure,

where love flows freely

as a life-giving source,

a spring of flowing energy,

 so vibrantly alive,

the universe

is given birth through

its radiant power.

It can only be glimpsed

as the heart opens,

through a flashing gaze,

 breaking open a moment,

 illuminating a vision

that launches perception

far beyond time and place and thought.

Infinity splinters every notion

into fragments

as countless worlds fuse

into Oneness

spinning us into the ecstasy

of Divine existence.

Naomi

Between Nothingness and Eternity

Some day soon I’m gonna try making myself a nice new blogroll page, because although when I find I’m on someone’s blogroll I’ll go and read their blog, and if I like it, I’ll link it – although this, sometimes I never check back on it. So I thought I’d better make a page for my real favourite blogs, the ones I read whenever there’s a post and the ones whose archives I have thoroughly studied and enjoyed.

Somewhere I can’t remember and sometime I don’t know, I was reading a comment discussion over what’s the first thing you look at on an unknown blog, to see if it’s your kind of haunt. They were largely saying the About Me page, which caused me to hastily rush and update mine. But for me, it’s the first post. I love first posts, although often they are hidden deep in the archives and I have to spend a while searching to unearth them. If it’s a well-known blog, all the better, because first posts are when the blogger was new and vulnerable, with no audience and no reason to say anything other than what they wanted to. They’re kind of pure, somehow. Kind of sweet. And if the fact I was about to add ‘kind of virginal’ to that list doesn’t clue you into my freaky-high mood at the moment, nothing else will.

I like building connections with other bloggers. Or trying to, at least. When I try and I’m ignored I get worried I’ve offended them and then I get angry they’ve ignored me, but when my efforts are returned, it’s great to have a connection. Like in my last post, where everyone was complaining about feeling down together. It’s a community – my DBAH community, and that makes me happy. If nothing else, I can bring people together, and a blogroll of blogs I feel close to is surely a way to achieve that. Right?

Now I have made this post I have no excuse not to make that page.

Oh, and I have to do Hannah’s meme: OK, well, here’s my six-word life:

SALE: line of reason, hardly trodden.

Because reasons have never really been something I’ve focused on too heavily. That’s probably why I don’t get on with Physics.

Everyone I would have tagged has already been tagged, so just steal it if you like it. And if you don't, don't! Life is simple when you live it like that...

Let's take it up a notch. Let your mind wonder down the trail of infinity. Let's think of a simple example from math. There are uncountably infinite numbers between 0 and 1 (0.1, 0.2 ... 0.9; 0.01, 0.02... 0.09; 0.001...). Now, consider the heavens. Let your mind go on a space journey across the universe. Pass by Jupiter, which has a radius 11 times that of the Earth's radius. Thus, in terms of volume, Jupiter is over 1300 times the volume of Earth. Or turn the other direction and look at the Sun. It's radius is approximately 110 times that of the Earth. Therefore, the Sun's volume is 1.3 million times the volume of the Earth.

To measure our Solar System, astronomers use a unit called astronomical unit (AU), which equals 93 million miles. While our Solar System is vastly unknown, Pluto sets at about 40 AU from the Sun. Beyond that, astronomers estimate that the Sun has the dominate gravitational force out to 125,000 AU (or 2 light-years). While the Oort cloud is estimated to range from 50 AU to 100,000 AU (now, that's a big cloud). All this is still within our Solar System, which is contained in the Milky Way.

Now, 1 light-year is a unit measurement that is equal to 63,241 AU. The Milky Way is approximately 100,000 light-years in diameter and contains some 200 billion stars, of which the Sun is one. Furthermore, the Universe is estimated at 93 billion light-years across. (numbers from Wikipedia).

Our minds quickly lose track and cannot adequately conceive dimensions of this order. By thinking on these things, I am not setting out to prove any scientific explanation. Rather, I want to warm up our minds.

Consider with me that God created the universe and all that is. He also holds it together. From the vastness of the universe to subatomic interactions, God is a magnificent designer. Furthermore, God is infinite in being and perfection. He is holy unlike anything we have ever seen or fully conceived in our mind.

Our inherent sinfulness cannot exist in true fellowship with God. Therefore, we deserve God's mighty wrath as our due punishment. Therefore, let me ask you again, what makes you shudder?

- “The human being is almost singularly pathetic. We lack claws, sport tiny little teeth, and are covered with thin, delicate skin. Most of us can’t even walk outside barefoot.” Roboticist Daniel Wilson is pointing to a singular riddle of humankind’s place on the planet. We are one of the weaker species physically and yet we sit at top of the food chain. The reason is our technology. A saber tooth tiger may be able to chew us to bits, but once that first cave man learned to shake a stick, its time was over. Today, we could literally bomb that tiger back into the Stone Age, that is, if it hadn’t already been made extinct by our stick-wielding ancestors.

I would like to simply clarify that humans are a singularity in creation--by design. As much as I am involved in and enjoy technology, it is not the reason that humans are so different from all other species. Technology is simply a mode in which we reflect creativity. The reason that we are a singularity in creation is because we were created in the image of God. We were created in the image of the infinite, all powerful, majestic God. He then gave us authority over all other created beings. I don't think our singularity has to do so much with us being relatively weak. Rather, our singularity has to do with being an image bearer. Out of this flows creativity, including technology. Consider the following:

Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."

God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

Then God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food"; and it was so.

God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Genesis 1:26-31

Vern S. Poythress, Science as Allegory (1983)

I see the waves, the sky, the sand, and I want to embrace it all. I want to take a deep breath of salt air and know it all, but I have to settle for the too-sharp glimpses I catch.

Droplets, caught by the wind, tear free of a crest to vanish into the air and I touch the endless.

Date Unknown

Zero Anon

This work by Zero Anon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

ps- the main reason I bothered was so that I could provide evidence that I independently deduced the same thing as Parmenides and Augustine (if you look closely, you'll see my deductions to be split between the prospects of "God exists outside time", and "time doesn't exist"). well, after all this time, here it is:

Solving the Paradox of infinity:
You might ask, what is the “paradox of infinity”, and since my efforts in solving this question (and the efforts have been great) would have no merit if you do not know the nature of the question, I will tell you. This is a question of of life, death, and the origin of the two. To put this into perspective, let's use “God” as an example. God, the creator of all things, the being that always was, and always will be. In other words, God infinite in all ways. But the greatest paradox of all time is infinity. Why?-
In order of God to be infinite, and to be the only entity that can have this quality, there had to have been a time when only he existed. Even if you believe there is more than one God, they had to be a point when nothing but those Gods existed. Now here lies the problem: Because God always existed, that would mean there is an infinite amount of time before he created us. Now the most obvious part of the problem is no matter when he started creating, he existed for an infinite amount of time before that, so “why didn't he create us sooner?” this an inevitable paradox, because the question in inescapable regardless of when we were created. But this concept would apply not just to God, but evolution, animism, or any of belief-systems regarding the origin of life, or matter for that matter.
(P.S., for all you Christians out there, instead of working hard to disprove evolution, you can bypass that argument entirely by insisting there has to be a God for matter to exist, since something can't come from nothing, and evolution is only regarding the origin of life. Ok maybe the big bang is related to evolution, but obviously the “Big Bang” didn't come from, nothing either, did it?)
Now, I hope you can be open-minded enough to see that this paradox completely invalidates any view of God that we possibly comprehend, since the concept of infinity does not correlate with any of the laws of physics due to its nature. In this lies the question- how can we solve a question to which there is no end? Although my answer to this question may seem “too easy” or something of the like, at least it is answer- and that is: infinity does not exist. Or more specifically, time does not exist. Now, you're probably what the hell am I talking about? To deny the existence of not only only infinity, but time itself seems implausible, doesn't it? Well maybe you'll understand if I tell you why- since our understanding of the universe hasn't even scratched the surface, anything is theoretically possible. So on that basis, it would be completely rational to go on with what I'm about to say. My theory is that our ideas about infinity, time, and everything else were integrated in us by one or more supreme entities, “God”(s) if you will. Thus, In reality time does not exist, and if it did exist, we would be “frozen in time” for lack of a better visual. This it the point at which I (understandably, but sadly so) have no further ideas, since I have already gone beyond theory and speculated on things beyond out comprehension. But, on the bright side, These theories effectively prove the existence of God better than any other belief system out there (notice I said “prove”, not “convince”. Obviously Christianity is the most convincing belief system, otherwise it wouldn't be the #1 religion.)

Infinity Ward y Activision acaban de lanzar un nuevo parche para su excelente Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, el cual lleva a este trepidante juego de acción bélica a la versión 1.7. Con un peso de 37MB, este nuevo parche viene a solucionar algunos pequeños bugs y añade diversas mejoras.

Gravity- Barophobia

Infinity- Ipeiropobia

Money- Chrometophobia (who could be scared of money)

Opinions- Allodoxaphobia

Peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth- Arachibutyrophobia

and my favorite---

The fear of phobias- phobophobia

In modern usage it can be used to describe a person who leads a lawful existence, particularly in regard to employment.

Scan from an old Fujichrome 64 Slide Film.

Digital image.

Digital image.

OK, I took this picture on Celebrity Cruises INFINITY when we were actually in Miraflores Locks!  And these folks paid good money to take a Panama Canal cruise!  Go figure!  It's the same on every ship: when you first enter the Canal the deck is crowded with folks trying to get the best view.  By the end of the day . . . well, not everyone is asleep . . .

The secret on a Canal cruise is to move about the ship.  The view from the bow is different than the view from the stern.  To get the full impact of the Canal you need to see the operation from all parts of the ship.

Please visit my other photoblog at www.beautifulpanama.wordpress.com for photos of life in Panama and my primary blog about life in Panama at www.RichardDetrich.wordpress.com.

Copyright 2008 RD. May not be used without permission.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

Enlightenment Now
Continuous Learning
Once Begun
An Everlasting Journey

What Lies Within?
Clarifying Uncertainties
Thru the Doors of Light
Finding Other Withins

Calmness and Calm
In Self we find Peace
Forgiving and Giving
Sharing Insights and Smiles

Infinite Realms
In Every Walk of Life

Arts, Sports, Culture
Science, Music, Healing

Universe, Deities, Source
Reality, Ancestors, Tao

Diffferences - Commonalities
Higher Power - Divine Self

Balance, God, Atman, Entities
Buddha, Energy, Void, Family

Yes we all have our Heavens
Love Connects Them all

Rique’

Scan from an old Fujichrome 64 Slide Film.

Built To Spill’s 1997 opus Perfect From Now On opens with the song “Randy Described Eternity” which attempts to put the concept of eternity into human terms:

Every thousand years
this metal sphere
ten times the size of Jupiter
floats just a few yards past the Earth.
You climb on your roof
and take a swipe at it
with a single feather;
hit it once every thousand years
’til you’ve worn it down
to the size of a pea.
Yeah, I’d say that’s a loooong time,
but it’s only half a blink
in the place you’re gonna be.

In a Rolling Stone interview BTS’s leader, Doug Martsch, explains that the analogy that formed the basis for this verse was conveyed to him when he was in junior high by a Christian Youth group leader named Randy.

I was recently listening to this song, and I decided it would be an interesting exercise to attempt to quantify this length of time.  [This probably says quite a bit about me.]

Let’s start with the “metal sphere”.  The volume of Jupiter is roughly 1.43128 times 10 to the 15th km³ (or 1,431,280,000,000,000 cubic kilometers).  This can more succinctly be expressed as 1.43128e+15 km³.  The first question is what is meant by “ten times the size” — does that mean ten times larger by volume or ten times larger in diameter.  The difference is a factor of 100, but it turns out that these numbers are so large that it doesn’t really matter.  We’ll err on the side of the conservative and say that our sphere is ten times larger than Jupiter by volume, or 1.43128e+16 km³.

My next question is of what type of metal is this sphere comprised.  I’ll assume that it’s made of iron, since that is the most plentiful metal in the universe.  The density of iron is 7.86e+15 g/km³, so our sphere will weigh roughly 1.125e+32 grams.

Let’s now (very charitably) assume that each swipe with the feather removes 1/10 of a gram of material.  By this assumption along with the fact that you hit the sphere only once per millenium, the sphere will be reduced by a gram every 10,000 years.

If we ignore the pea-sized remainder, it will take 1.125e+37 years (11,250,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years) to whittle this sphere down.

That’s obviously a big number with a lot of zeros, but I’m still finding it difficult to put it into terms that I can understand.  To provide a bit more perspective to the length of time that’s being described, let’s consider that the Big Bang occurred less than 14 billion years ago.  That is, all the time that has ever been since our universe began is nothing more than a rounding error in the length of time described in the song.

If one were to construct a timeline which stretched the entire diameter of the Milky Way galaxy (100,000 light years or 9.461e+17 km) which corresponds to the length of time described in this song, the distance on this timeline representing the time between the Big Bang and today would be on the order of 1 micrometer (or micron), which is one thousandth of a millimeter.  This distance is roughly one eightieth (1/80) the diameter of a human hair.

And this nearly unimaginable length of time is still “only half a blink” in the "eternity" described.  All in all this is one of the best descriptions of something almost indescribable that I have encountered…and certainly the best in a pop song.

Scan from an old Fujichrome 64 Slide Film.

Stunning, fresh, and quite genius.

May just drive you mad.

In mathematics, "infinity" is often used in contexts where it is treated as if it were a number (i.e., it counts or measures things: "an infinite number of terms") but it is a different type of "number" from the real numbers. Infinity is related to limits, aleph numbers, classes in set theory, Dedekind-infinite sets, large cardinals,[1] Russell's paradox, non-standard arithmetic, hyperreal numbers, projective geometry, extended real numbers and the absolute Infinite.

Scan from an old Fujichrome 64 Slide Film.

The number "8," placed upon its side, is the symbol for infinity (as perhaps many of us remember from the Schoolhouse Rock song). And if we think of the Schoolhouse Rock video that accompanies the song, in which a young girl, as day rolls calmly into night, quietly ice skates in quiet "figure eights," perhaps we associate infinity with a stilling of time into divine wholeness.

But what happens when MC Escher turns the symbol for infinity into a gridded mobius strip, and runs ants over it? What is it now?

For me, it feels not so much like the blissful ice skater of Schoolhouse Rock, or William Blake's "moving image of eternity," and more like a symbol of eternal entrapment, as Joseph K. might feel while under arrest in Franz Kafka's novel, The Trial, or as Dosoevsky imagined, in The Brothers Karamazov, of the terror of finding, not God, but a spider at the beginning of creation.

Escher's image is visually suggestive of why most people, against compelling reason, and the consensus of scientists, instinctively resist belief in evolution. Evolution seems to turn the symbol of infinity away from an anthropomorphic god who sees all things at once, and is in control, and makes existence into a blind mechanism upon which inhuman forces move. Like entering a roach motel, once you crawl into the evolutionary universe, many fear that you can't crawl out again. Escher's mobius strip is the mechanism of infinity stripped of its gleam and mystery. It is the Wizard of Oz's curtain tugged back by Toto. It exposes the realm of the rationalized and the Kafkaesque, where nonhuman-sized bureaucracies, Dostoevskian spiders, and Escher ants make the world go.

If God does not exist, Escher's mobius strip threatens to become the rack on which the body of humankind is crucified, or to which Prometheus is chained and abandoned.  

Beginning with the story to come, the Beijing 2008 Olympics is scheduled to begin at 8:08 at on August 8 (yep, that's 8/08/08). They say it's their lucky number.

Well, wasn't so lucky when the 8.0 earthquake struck. The most recent headline regarding this highly suspicious event say that new estimates place the death toll at near 80,000

Moving across the Pacific, we find that the tropical storm that slammed the Phillipines with 120 mph surface winds overturned a ferry boat, estimated casualties being 800.

And in California, a freak thunderstorm ignited up to 800 fires in the northern part of the state, the same counties, I noticed, that had successfully passed the GMO ban. Interesting, no?

Another interesting tidbit surfaced only on spaceweather.com, strangely enough. It was about the 80000 fires lit on the Solstice in the Australian Alps. Upon investigation, turns out most of the symbols so carefully constructed of fire related directly to Venus issues (dove, 8 pointed star, hexagram, ect.) but you'll have to take my word for it, all references I had marked have vanished.

So, I'm keeping alert for the 8 energy, I think it is definitely one of those things that can go either way, depending on how you look at it, the 8 is infinity or confinement, which do we chose?