God is not needed to explain why there is something rather than nothing — Shawn

This would be the beginning of the path to disprove God, that 'Nothing' cannot be, making the base something not to be an option but mandatory, it having no alternative or opposite; thus, no supernatural magic is required.

Pale rugged Winter bending o’er his tread,
His grizzled hair bedropt with icy dew;
His eyes, a dusky light congeal’d and dead,
His robe, a tinge of bright ethereal blue; — Michael Zwingli

I like autumn, too, and its portend of winter.

OLD AUTUMN

The glow-worms, fairy stars come down to ground,
Gleam the shadowy woods through summer’s round;
Then fall’s leaves flutter through the quiet air,
The autumn being the sunset of the year.

The rustling of the trees comes to my ear,
In this,the most mellow time of year.
The harvest brings fulfillment, yearning too,
For autumn is both a smile and a tear.

Each year in October Jack-in-the-Green
Has a chilled rendezvous with Old Autumn,
Who colors the leaves that Jack made verdant
A season ago. They meet out in the woods,
Although never in the same place, for seasons
Come and go and meet each other as they may.

We know that the will is usually free to operate, but that doesn't make one 'free' in any deep and non-trivial sense. The will is fixed to what one's brain repertoire has come to be up to that moment. The fixed will is the brain using its knowledge to provide future.

Though learning and experience we may enlarge the depth and range of our successive fixed wills through our ongoing choices if we are not truly too stuck to learn, but, again, the fixed will is ever consistent with who we've come to be. There is no being 'free' of the will; it does as it must.

The universe does us, not some other way around such as we somehow being mini first causes with no input. You will find that no one can ever really say what the 'free' in 'free will' is supposed to be free of, but for coercion, which, too, would have been determined.

While occasional 'random' or chemical brain mistakes would make events come out differently than they were meant to, this doesn't help the will but hurts it.

I have been describing a linear mode of time, but a block universe of Fate would do the same.

This is a reasonable request. I'll look at what the others have written and see if I have anything to add. — T Clark

Good news! Thanks.

On the lengthy and plenty point, that's fixed, plus I've found a way to reference longer poems by just pointing to a link that downloads a PDF hosted on one of my websites, such as the whole of the 'Flora Symbolica' poem about the lore and legends of the plants and flowers:

text: https://austintorn.files.wordpress.com/2021/07/flora-symbolica-text-8.5x11.pdf

illustrated (may take a minute to arrive):
https://austintorn.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/fsi-17x11-jpg-jpg-150-dpi.pdf

video (long): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOZknZJNA2U

We all have, upon occasion, intense inner experiences associated with places, events, or situations, which we cannot seem to describe adequately to make another person feel what we have felt, and understand what we have understood. A great poet is able to use language in a manner which recalls such experiences, and makes one think, "yes, I have experienced that, but could never describe it". It is the experience upon reading a poem of finding the expression for something profound that one has experienced but never been able to describe. This experience upon reading a poem tends to give someone the "fifty mile stare", and makes a person feel a need to say "...thank you so much..." to the poet. — Michael Zwingli

Yes, that's it, and you are a helpful discusser.

What you said about "something profound" as the basis for poetry can be described by poems about poetry:

A poem is a truth fleshed in living words,
Which by showing unapprehended proof
Lifts the veil to reveal hidden beauty—
It’s life’s image drawn in eternal truth.

Poetry dresses the phantasmic new
By enshrining the apparition’s brew,
Captured and bottled as aquavita,
Wisdom’s pearls, from the evanescent dew.

Poetry lives silently in an illustration;
A poem’s beauty is its painting with diction.
These, like music, are works of worldly art,
Just shadows of a deeper perfection!

Poetry makes clear what is barely heard,
For it translates soul-language into words,
Whereas, melody plays straight on the heart;
Merged, they create song; heart and soul converge.

Poetry makes immortal what is best
In life: it frees images of dreams impressed,
Apprehends the vanishing phantasms,
And sends them forth in fine words, fully dressed.
('fully dressed' phrase borrowed from someone)

The Rubaiyat Poetic Form

The verses beat the same, in measured chime.
Lines one-two set the stage, one-two-four rhyme.
Verse three’s the pivot around which thought turns;
Line four delivers the sting, just in time.

Now physics is nice. Your poems are a welcome addition to it! Are you a physicist yourself? Of course your poems lack humans, as it subject matter is the universe. The Poetic Universe. There is reference made to human affairs. — GraveItty

Thanks for discussing. Yes, many of my poems are meant to convey scientific and the philosophical themes in a non dry manner in digestible stanza chunks. I'm not a physicist but I understand it enough to interpret it for the lay reader. Your physics posts in other thread are as excellent as I've seen anywhere; you even understand the math, too, so your reviews will be helpful. I involve humans in other poems.

is best written with great deliberation and attention to meter and, if applicable, to rhyme. — Michael Zwingli

That is my main style, not a stream of consciousness, but in ten syllable quatrains that take quite a while to rhyme without the rhyme being an intrusion, plus to package a pearl in each stanza, making them easy digestible units of the whole poem, as in the one referenced, plus 'Flora Symbolica' intro, and more, near to those in this thread when Amnity was responding. "Intellect" often shows in very philosophical poems as much as it does in philosophy.

I don't use stream of consciousness; the poems don't come out that quickly. I don't aim for free verse either. Poetry requires more work than what can just go plop in just a live stream of thoughts arising.

Perhaps Mr. Clark might also add or rewrite a stanza in the referenced poem to show how it could become good poetry beyond its already lyrical, rhyming, metered form that you say he likes, but, first, let us see what he says this second time around of being asked to bolster his bare generalization about the 'Worldly Love' poem. How did you like it? Are you also still claiming '18'?

(Explaining the poetic style only):

A long time ago I read all of Shelley’s poems,
He being a scientific romanticist known,
Who plumbed the depths of mystery,
And too Keats and Byron, as eagerly,

They being the romantics of the Earthly realm,
Along with Omar Khayyam, at Sultan’s helm,
A romantic scientist who invented algebra,
As well as cherishing all of nature above Allah.

Omar was as Mr. Spock’s logic,
But with the glory of life added to it,
While Shelley was more of Dr. McCoy’s
Excessives of emotional, romantic ploys,

But Keats and Byron were more
Of a blend, like Captain Kirk’s sure
And dashing action tempered with reason—
A man for each and every season.

So, I ended up writing poems in the styles
Of Shelley’s and Old Khayyàm’s wiles,
The former being flowingly lyrical—
The latter twistingly epigrammatical,

Short ones at first, very precise,
But also using them as a concise
Way to whittle down entire books
To the few gems and pearls in their nooks.

So now after many educated years,
I still use them to boil down the idears.

(Anyway, no more epics, as being too long for the readers, plus they are not easy to do.)

I can see that your poetry is heart-felt and sincere. It's romantic, which is fine. It is also philosophical, as the OP specifies. But it is not good poetry. — T Clark

Amnity asks: What is wrong with it ? Constructive criticism, any ?

Any specifics concerning "But it is not good poetry?" to make your generalization helpful?

Here is the poem: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/599584

deal? — Michael Zwingli

I can agree to not posting any more lengthy poems.

The God of the Old Testament

Of all my rotten luck,
The God of the Old Testament
Appeared and proclaimed,
“I am Yahweh, never absent,
For those schooled from infancy
In My strange ways
Have become desensitized
To My horrific side,

“And so they continue to
Keep Me very much alive,
Through their thoughts;
So, fire away at Me;
I no longer bite that hard, you see.”

“You’re too easy of a target to attack for free—
So it would be rather unfair of me.”

“True, and I won’t deny it—
It’s all there in the Testament.
I was the most unpleasant character
That anyone ever made up in literary fiction.

“I was revealed to be jealous and proud of it,
Petty, unjust, controlling, vindictive,
An ethic cleanser, genocidal, infanticidal,

“Filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal,
Homophobic, misogynistic, sadomasochistic,
And much more, and a Bully—who gave it
Free will only if it matched My own Will.”

“Peace be with you.
How about the New Testament
To replace and hide Your scent,
As many religions have already
Done through Jesus sent?”

“Yes, that Testament is quite opposite in tone,
But I am still the Father of Jesus sown,
So the problem of Me can never really go away.
I am what I was, still here unto the present day.”

“Well, so long. You’re the worst role model yet
That human mammals have ever dreamed up.
Who would imitate, emulate,
Or follow You as a ‘leader’?”

“Well, My followers are those numerous slaves
Who excuse my mysterious [insane] ways,
Along with my exclusive desert tribe.”

“Well, You’re the Boss, and, anyway,
Who ever said that a God
Had to be perfect and good?”

“Everyone that I told—
And those who thought I should.”

“Oh well, never mind; whatever pleases.
So, um, Joseph was not
The biological father of Jesus?”

“No, I was.”

“So Jesus really did descend from David?”

“That was on his mother’s side.”

“Well, my ancestors descended from the trees.
Hey, why don’t Catholics get the 72 virgins
That Islam gives for martyrdom for their sins?”

“I told each religious faith a different story.”

“You also gave a bible half-different
To the Mormon founder,
Joseph Smith, finely engraved
On golden plates he discovered?”

“Sure. I thought at the time ‘why not’.”

“You had Islam add different things
To their Koran as well?”

“Yes of the many more ways to avoid Hell.”

“And You told only the Catholics
That there were umpteen levels of angels
And that bread was your body
And that wine was your blood?”

“Yep, I told just them and a few other selves,
But they made up the Saints themselves.”

“And You presented differing visions
To the Lutherans,
The Episcopals, and the Jewish,
And to many other also-rans?”

“Pretty much,
Except that a King of England
Founded the Episcopals—
The Anglicans, of course,
Since his own religion
Wouldn’t give him a divorce.”

“And you killed everyone but Noah
And his family in the Great Flood, wet,
Even young children and their pets?”

“Sure, again, why not? Life is cheap.
However, My creation of the rainbow
Says that I’ll never be so cruel again.
What can I say—I goofed. My sin.”

“But You are infallible, and even omniscient
And so You know all of the future meant.
You even broke your own commandments!”

“My omnipotence of changing my mind
Got in the way.”

“But your omniscience knew you would…
One day.”

“Yeah, I know—it’s a paradox; oh the strife.
And I can still technically end all life,
By means other than a flood.”

“You burned people in Hell, not saved,
When they didn’t follow
The unfree will that you gave?”

“Yes, because I was not a loving God.”

“Well, God, who made You?”

“No problem—either I was Eternal or I made Myself”

“This is remarkably the same, but for Thee,
As the Universal ingredients would be.”

“Then who would need me—wait,
I don’t want the answer told.”

“Is the Earth only about 4000 years old?”

“Of course not but I may have let that slip to some,
To tease their intelligence apart from being dumb.”

“Do you mind-read
The thoughts of every human,
Using all of your acumen,
And write the earthly script for each event,
Being so omnipresent?”

“I tried that at first, but it didn’t work for Me
To put my finger on every atom that be,
To micromanage its doings for all of thee.”

“That’s called ‘God’s Will’,
By some, even now.
What went wrong?
Was it the where and how?”

“It disrupted the atoms’ normal
And natural movements.”

“And that’s what caused the storms unfocused,
The lightning bolts and the plagues of locusts?”

“Yes, so I stopped making such a mess of things.”

“So the prayers of six million Jews pleaded
In the holocaust went all unheeded?”

“Yes, plus I have better things to do, in time,
My sooth,
Than look after some old experiment of Mine
From my misspent youth.”

“Did you really make Adam and Eve
And all of Earth and Nature, as we believe?”

“Yes, I made Nature,
Including the humans, in My image.”

“It shows in their rage.”

“Thank you.”

“God, it’s ID deja-vu all over again—
I really have to move on.”

“No, wait. I like your questions.
I’m mellower now, this being My new direction.
Not as many strictly admit to Me anymore.”

“How come so many of the gospels were omitted
From the New Catholic Testament,
Like those of Thomas, Peter, Nicodemus,
Philip, Bartholomew, and more,

“As well as whole books kept from us,
Although You told some other religions to keep them,
Such as the Book of Revelations?”

“Those gospels were embarrassing and wild;
They told about My Son doing magic tricks
And practical jokes on people when He was a child.”

“Oh, we never heard much about his youth.
And didn’t You send the Mormons proof
That Jesus spent an early era
In what was to become America?”

“Probably.”

“What about the trillions of galaxies in the sky?”

“They’re just for show and scenery on high.”
“Where’s all your rantings and ravings
That I’ve heard about?”

“I now take Prozac for
My mood swings and bouts.”

“You don’t really exist, do You, as mental,
For how could You have an emotional system—
As composite—and still be absolute and fundamental?”

“No, I don’t exist,
For how could I since I am so horrible?
Human mammals made all of Me up
As a very bad example,

“As it turned out, from their many fears
In the childhood of their species’ years.
Unfortunately, it caught on to their children’s ears.”

“So, yet You still subsist
In this indefinite locus of wishes?”

“Yes, sort of.
I am sustained here since many children
Have learned to obey and listen
To what is-was told to them,

“For this obeying was an
Evolutionarily useful thing,
As many of their obediences
Resulted from warnings of things

“That were truly dangerous,
And so the children grew up
To indoctrinate their own children
In all the ‘knowledge’.”

“We’ll have to offer more reason
To those so indoctrinated.
Now farewell to You, the impersonated.”

“See you. Pay no attention to Me as certain,
But to all those blinded by the curtain.”

He soon dozed off into never land.

The God of the Agnostics

I came next upon a God sitting on a high fence,
And waved to Him, saying
“Come down and talk the whence.”

“I can’t; I am stuck here, but Salutations to you.
I am the God of Agnosticism, one neither false nor true.
None of the agnostics know if I exist or not,
So here I must stay put a lot,

“Along with the Tooth Fairy,
Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny,
Just in case we all might exist or not,
As a quadzillion-to-one shot.”

“Why can’t agnostics make up their minds?”

“My followers cannot even make or see
Probability judgments about the question of Me.
This is the limitation of agnosticism,

“Perhaps the error of no consideration
Of the likelihood of that for which evidence seeable
Is not even the least bit conceivable.”

“It is a fallacy; what I call the poverty of agnosticism,
Because though being agnostic is reasonable criticism
For some things, such as whether life exists elsewhere,
It is not appropriate for those things undoable,

“For which the idea of evidence is not even applicable;
However, actually, we can actually still talk
About the probability of the event,
While even going for a walk.

“The true fallacy, however, is that the existence ever,
And the nonexistence of You never,
Are not even on an even footing to begin with.
The two are not at all equiprobable cases.

“The burden of proof lies with the believers,
For anything that we can conceive of
Can be claimed to exist, as that we love,
Such as ghosts, spirits, and such forth.

“Are we then to straddle a fence that has no worth?
And, never seen. So, then, at the end of the day,

“Probability creeps into the beliefs of the agnostic way,
For in practice they end up in the lurch,
Not going ‘half the time’ to Church,
But mostly deciding not to go at all.”

“Yes, they still decide that which is ‘undecidable’,
For the fence is very uncomfortable
And so then the superposition

“Decoheres into the inclination
Of non belief—until, right here,
The Extraordinary’s evidence appears.”
He came down off the fence,
For he couldn’t exist and not exist at the same time.
I continued on through the undulating hills.

(We can refer to the fence sitters as non theists
In order to get away from labels like ‘agnostic’
Which might imply that the probability of thinking
God or not is on some kind of equal footing;

Plus that the fence sitters don’t really stay
On the uncomfortable fence but usually…

Go one way or the other way
In life’s practice of the everyday,
Although some might go to church
On alternating Sundays.

In between, perhaps they go
On wild picnics with their sweetie
And drink wine and do all that ‘bad’ stuff,
That we can’t say here, while waiting for some
Extraordinary evidence to appear.

I will soon have a talk with
Old Jehovah Yahweh’s Thee.
He’s not so terrible as many
Have made Him up to be,
But then again He’s not
So great either—He’s quite off,
Just another poor middle manager
Caught up in the layoffs.

I already spoke to the Deity
The God who doesn’t ever interfere
In the running of the universe.

The Pope doesn’t know it here,
But a Deity is what he’s
Leaning toward when he says then
That evolution is acceptable now
For Catholics to believe in (no mind).

The Deity Guy was
Actually kind of a great scientist.
And I already met with
The Creationist’s ID God,
Who while still a Designer
Is, well, not so cool at all, either,

For He gets back to what
The Fundamentalists believe,
And neither, they would say,
Did evolution happen,
Or if it did ever function,
God constantly stepped in
To rectify its direction.

I haven’t really begun
To scratch the surface of all the Gods,
Though, for so many lie now beneath the sod.

I’m only interested in
The person-type Gods of monotheism,
And I’m hardly even getting
Through those variant theisms
That fight amongst themselves
Over Jesus’ divinity, or if there is a Hell,

Or a Devil and some Angels about thee,
And over so many more
And other major differences, totally.

Then there are the multiple Gods,
Now up in the millions,
And the many Gods-who-are-not-persons,
Plus the TAO, the Consciousness,
And some way-out Ones.

There are also hundreds
Of long gone, ‘sure thing’ Gods,
Which I needn’t get into,
Except to wonder, and say:
Is that how the future will
Look at our Gods of today?

I can also skip the many
Weird offshoots that persist,
Like those saying that
The self is not allowed to exist,
Even calling it ‘ego’ to make
It seem so much worse;
I don’t have time for these
And other cult-level verse.)

The Deity

Another God appeared, a mere Deity,
Meaning no intervention, so He’s not a Theity,
And thusly said, “Forget the Theity solution.
I am the Smart God who seeded Evolution.

“It was I that set the whole universal notion
And all of life’s evolution into motion;
That was My elegant and foreseeing way
Of creating the kind of life that would stay.”

“I thought You were all powerful;
Why not just make 20-40 million species,
All fully formed, as immutable as Thee,
Along with their usable natural habitats,

“For this is how most Gods would do it.
What energy loss could that be to You?
Your infinity could all this in an instant do.”

“I’m not so Great, plus, since Evolution is too stable
For some creationists to scoff at, as a fable,
They have assigned the job to Me, the Creator,
As all of Nature’s natural Instigator,

“Because they must take retreat from the first ID God
Who zooms souls into humans at birth—it’s so odd.
So, now I am not a Theity any more of proof,
And thus I must ever remain aloof.

“Of course, now I have very little to do,
And so I am not much needed, true,
For I can’t even muddle with their lives;
They are all stuck now with their wives.

“I might really just as well retire,
For I am superfluous and tired.”

“Well, You’re still kind of close to our Universe,
Not completely outside it, the place the worst,
As I suppose your successor will have to be placed,
Absolutely, totally invisible to the human race.

“At least You made some
Basic primordial substance,
And foresaw the billion years
Of combinatorial chance,

“Predicting every turn,
Or at least knowing that something neat
Might probably come out of it,
Which was still quite a feat.”

“Thank you, but it was nothing.”

“On the contrary—I say verily—
You’re the Super Scientist,
An Engineer Par Excellence—
The Ultimate Inventor of All Time—
Much better than than the old God of ID.”

“Yes, I am a Scientist, making all that’s real—
I Had to be, but it was really no big deal.”

“You’re too modest.”

“It was just some little quarks,
And some electrons that I sparked,
And some forces that arose,
As reality was composed.”

“But look what became of its simplicity—
Through its stages, to astounding complexity,
Over billions of years of circumstances;
We’ve traced the composites to simple substances.”

“Well, um, it did really take that long for My intention,
By some coincidence, the same as that for evolution;

“However, I guess I’m just as surprised as you, frown,
That when some examine substance and get down
To these simple subatomic levels of unadorned things,

“That they then take a giant leap back, of all things,
To the composite complexity of Me, the Ultimate.”

“Isn’t complexity a much higher product
Of combination upon combination,
And thus not lower than simplicity itself?”

“Yes, it would seem so; that’s a near empty shelf.”

“Then I suppose You’re some Great Alien Scientist, odd,
Highly evolved from somewhere, but not really God.”

“True, and you, Austin, as a scientist,
Should seek what underlies the all,
Not some Great Complexity who oversees it,
For that’s for what the theory calls.”

“Wise thoughts.”

“The best that can’t be bought.”

“Well, whatever on the alien thing of it,
But the creationists are not keen on scientists,
For scientists regard the honest seeking after truth
As a supreme virtue beyond all reproof.

“If they ever found out…”

“Yikes, they know not what they have made Me.
As a Scientist Myself, I truly value honesty
And skepticism over the dishonestly faked beliefs,
Those that only seem to bring Rolaid’s relief.”

“The Founding Fathers of America liked You,
Although some of them, as Thomas Jefferson too
Were outright non theists, many seeing You as a Deity
Who just started things up,
never interfering with reality.”

“Funny how President Bush’s and Trump's America sings,
Straying so oppositely from its humble beginnings.”

“Not to mention that some the world’s peoples, really,
Are squandering their precious time
Worshiping a Theity, and sacrificing to Him,
Begging, fighting, and dying for Him,

“Even threatening the world with its destruction.”

“What a waste.”

“Are you real?”

“No, I am but a figment of imagination, see,
But some really do like harmless old Me.”

“So what’s really fundamental?”

“The real fundamentals, just below
What you now call ‘fundamentality’,
Have always existed—the quantum reality.”

“There’s perhaps no time of ‘forever’
At that level for Your ‘always’ ever.”

“True, they just are, and had to be—the possible,
For a state of absolute nothing is indeed impossible.”

The God of the Gaps

Yet another Theity appeared, out of the mist.

“I am the God of the Gaps, of all those missed.
I Myself personally fill in all the gaps withstanding,
In the present-day knowledge of non understanding,

“Albeit a very large and unwarranted assumption,
But I surely do fill them all in—via the fiat lent
To Me by the creationist’s fine endorsement.”

“These gaps shrink as science advances anew.”

“And so there is less and less for Me to do.”

“What worries me is not so much that You
May be eventually laid off, having nothing to do,
But that those of Religion think it is a virtue
To be satisfied with not understanding a quandary;
Enigmas drive scientists on—they exult in mystery.”

“True, My believers exult in mystery
Remaining as mystery and so they go no further,
But it keeps Me from being history!
They worship all these evolutionary gaps as being Me.”

“With no justification?”

“We have a ‘get out of jail free’ card—a vocation;
It’s an immunity to
The rigorous proofs of science;
We just claim by the ‘say so’.
All must respect that stance.”

“You lead a charmed life then,
One with no faults,
But You seek ignorance
In order to claim victory by default,
As a weed thriving in the gaps
Of science’s fertile fields.

“Scientists rejoice in (temporary)
Uncertain yields,
Whereas You halt all inquiry.”

“I remain as a mystery.”

“You’re the same God
Of Intelligent Design assumed—
Now known by a much more
Desperate nom de plume.”

“I repeat that I intervene
To fill the evolutionary gap.
I even alter DNA.”

“We could check the evidence for that.
We researchers fill the gaps in the fossil record.”

“Then there are twice as many gaps. Absurd.”

“I’d laugh, but I know You’re not joking.”

“No joke. Try what we’ve been smoking.
Lack of 100% complete documentation
Of Evolution means that I aid its motion.”

“‘God’, that is not a good default stance.”

“It’s an unknown happenstance.”

“So do we let criminals go
Because we don’t have a video
Of their every intermediate foot step
To and from the lawless event?”

“No, of course not, but we now have great worry
About our precariously perched gappy theory.

“Also, you made a typo—it’s a God default stance,
Certified by nothing more than proclamation
Of Our Bull of Decree covering all instantiation.”

“An edict, huh.”

“Why not, duh.”

“It was also once avowed that an Evil Spirit,
One that You Yourself allowed to exist,
Produced physical illnesses, on us weighing,
But, thank God—just an old saying—
That scientists persevered, and still do,

“Such as finding out the immune system’s zoo—
Our defense against the non evil spirits
Of germs, viruses, and bacterial fits.”

“Yes, agreed; that claim was dead wrong; take pills,
But evil spirits still cause the nonphysical mental ills
That are called sins and bad thoughts,
Even crimes of wills.”

“Still trying to halt scientific inquiry,
I see, for the burning.
Mental lapsing ‘sins’
Stem from upbringing, wrong learning,

“And/or low serotonin and
Such imbalances, needing cures,
Not to mention the differences in cultures,

“Such as other religions
Causing a problem of stability,
For people think this undermines
Their own belief’s credibility.”

“Okay, I give up for now, AustinTorn. Be.
Go on with your work, with My blessing,
To discover important truths about reality,
But some fossils are evidently missing!”

“Only a tiny fraction of corpses fossilize;
However, not even a single fossil guy
Has shown up in the wrong geological stratum;
How’s that for absolutely no erratum?”

“Well… it’s sad for Me, but true.
I’d still love to find wrong a few,
Like a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian.
I’d have planted one there if I existed then.”

“Dream on. Lazy reasoning is all that’s behind
These declarations of the irreducible complexity kind.”

“Yes, but all this ignorance, for sure,
Of the possible steps of Nature
Has kept Me forever alive,
Allowing Me to ever thrive.”

“And has just as soon forgotten You, in truth,
But for those sustaining your being without proof.”

“Wait, what about an arch of bricks?
I’ll try to use this one as a trick.

“Pull one away and the arch falls apart;
It cannot survive the subtraction of a part,
So how then was it built in the first place?
With this insight, I can win the human race.”

“By scaffolding, the same as seen in Evolution.”

“I was afraid that would be the solution.”

With that, the holely God of the Gaps separated
And nearly evaporated
To become a discontinuity Himself,
But the creationists gave Him help
By trying to hold Him together
With their ditch efforts.

(Yes, ‘gapping’ still goes on, it seems.
When the argument first gathered steam,
There were but a few transitional forms known,
Although good ones, enough for the idea to own,

One being the bridge to vertebrates
And another the bridge to flying creatures.
But there are many more now, a wide range,
So then it is the data that has changed.

These ‘gap’ arguments were already down
To the faint hope that scientists, as clowns,
Wouldn’t find any more natural explanations;
But the finds were the most inevitable situations.

Creationists yet remain at the pointward
Of not being able to ‘push forward’,
So all that’s left to is push backward,

Albeit at the firmly established fact words
Of evolution. Even the Pope concedes this
But tries to salvage the faith and solve,
By saying that the mind was not at all involved.)

“In the darkness I alit from the Wiz,
And tried to make sense of this world of His.
Now I’ve found the answer to life’s dark quiz:
One must live this life by what light there is.”

The God of Irreducible Complexity

“Hello, Austino; it’s time for more perplexity,
For I am now the God of Irreducible Complexity.”

“That you are, being the unmade All,
And so it shall become your downfall.”

“Eh? I’m never to be at all?”

“Your believers have given You some fine new clothes:
But Intelligent Design is falsely based, God knows,
On Irreducible Complexity—
So I still recognize You as the God of ID.”

“That I am is what I really am now.”

“Well, Darwin said long ago that his theory
Would break down if Irreducible Complexity
Were shown to be true, and yet
No proposal has ever stood up to the analysis.”

“Still, here I am, Mr. A, alive merely by possibility,
Myself indeed quite complex, even irreducibly,

“For “I am the be all and end all—the Prime Maker,
And so I keep tabs on every form and splinter
Of the Universe, planning its every constituent
That I designed. So then, simple I am NOT.

“Yes, man, I am an extremely complicated System,
Yet I have no parts, for then My parts that stemmed
Would be even more fundamental than Me!”

“Yes, ‘God’, if You existed you would surely be
Very very very complex, irreducibly so…”

“…So…”

“…So, by the Creationist Theory, such as it must be,
You cannot be explained except by a larger ID.”

“I’m falling…”

“…Into the hole that they dug for you.”

The Intelligent Designer

I approached a semitransparent,
Theistic Embellishment, quite well lit,
Who was holding out an eyeball—a shove
Of His hand for me to take note of.

“Who might you be?” He mimed,
“For I am the God of Intelligent Design,
The One who was made by the signs discerned,
When the creationists noted them all, unlearned.”

I answered, “I am Austin, Earth’s flower,
Although not ‘Powers’, but ‘Higher Powers’.”

“Ha. Lo, they saw inexplicable complexity in Nature,
And thus they leapt and promulgated that Nature
Must have a Grand Designer of its mechanical dance,
For how could life have come about by ‘chance’?”

I replied, “You’re right about ‘chance’s’ stance,
But wrong about ‘chance’ too, for little greatness,
If any at all, comes about by mere ‘chance’,

“Especially as some giant leap in one bound,
Up the sheer cliff-side of Mt. Improbable—
To find on its top a great complexity
Of something like the eye that You show me;

“However, it is actually an error to suppose
That ‘Chance’ is the scientific alternative
To Intelligent Design, for that’s quite negative.

“Natural Selection is the means of the design,
For it, unlike a one-shot ‘chance’, being not in kind,
Is a cumulative effect that ever winds,
And slowly and so gently climbs

Around the mountain’s other side, behind the sight,
To eventually arrive at the great height
Of complexity—from which we can then view
The beautiful sights through our eye anew.”

“But the widespread Watchtower Zines
Always pronounce that the biological Designs
Were created by Me instead of by ‘chance’!

“Just look at these eyeballs—take a glance—
And the optic system hanging behind them!
How could that come about by ‘chance’, these gems?”

“You, like your followers, may listen,
But You do not hear, writing with untruth’s pen.
IDers deceive by this wrong approach,
Whether they mean to or not; I give reproach.

“‘Chance’ is not the opposite of Nature’s design;
Evolution of the Species through the graduality
Of Natural Selection is the path to complexity;
Your ploy falls as flat as an imaginary line.

“A flatworm has but an optical system’s spark
That can only sense but light and dark;
Thus it sees no image, not even a part;

“Whereas Nautilus has a ‘pinhole camera’ eye
About as good as half a human eye
That sees but very blurry shapes;
Thus these are examples of intermediate stages.

“‘Rome’ can not be built in a day by ‘chance’;
‘Chance’ is not a likely designer at all!

“Really now, could a 747 ever be
Assembled by a hurricane blowing free
Through Boeing’s warehouse of all the parts?
Now is this the sum of Your conversational art?”

“No, Austin—it’s quite unlikely—’tis just to confuse,
And that’s why we always so misleadingly use
The 747 argument as the contrast to ID…

“So then, Austie, ‘chance’ and Intelligent Design
Are not the two candidate solutions we’ll find
To the riddle posed by the improbable?
It’s not like a jackpot or nothing at all?”

“‘God’, Your ID ideas persist, as repetition,
But again, ‘chance’, for one, is not a solution
To the highly improbable situated Nature,
And no sane anti-creationist, for sure,
Ever said that it was; your tale is impure.

“Intelligent Design, is neither a solution—
Because it raises a much bigger question
Than it solves, as You will soon see, in a lesson.”

“Well, I’ll be darned,” replied the Designer.
“Natural selection is a good answer;

“It is a very long and summative process,
One which breaks up the problem’s mess
Of improbability into smaller pieces, less,
Each of which is only slightly improbable,

“But not prohibitively so, thus it’s reasonable,
As the product of all the little steps of which
Would be far beyond the reach of chance—it’s rich!

“The creationists have been looking askance,
Seeing only the end product, perchance,
Thinking of it as a single event of chance,
Never even understanding
The great power of accumulation.

“Such they didn’t know much else—their fall,
Not having any other natural ideas at all,
So they outright claimed that ID did it, as the Tree
That can magically grow the All, namely Me.”

“So ‘God’ You have now seen the light
Of the accumulative power’s might;
This is the elegance of Evolution’s ‘sight’.”

“Yes but what is to become of Me, the Person,
For I only ‘exist’ through their speculation.

“In fact, the improbability of Me is so High,
And so much more so from where I lie so ‘sure’,
Compared to that of ‘simple’ Nature,
That My own origin…”

“…Is a near-infinitely Larger dilemma, Mate,
For the creationists—the problem they love to hate;
That being that You, therefore, can only be explained
By another, Higher Intelligent Designer claimed!

“Far from terminating the endless regress,
They’ve aggravated it with a vengeance
That is way beyond repair or redress—
As beyond could ever be yonder of! Out west!”

With that, the poor Guy faded toward oblivion,
Which remarkably was the very location
I was visiting, but hence he soon reappeared,
Although in another guise, but quite well attired.

[God created Adam, then Eve, of Adam’s rib,
Both fully formed, imbued with God’s knowledge
And memories of times that never were,
Such as childhood.]

[They believed a shifty talking snake,
Ate the verboten fruit,
And were cast out, to fend for themselves,
God being quite surprised at their sin…]

(Poem inspired by Dawkins)

The Graveyard of the Gods

Without so much much as a word to say,
I passed those to whom most no longer pray,
Nor believe in, but once did, namely,
Those of the tombstones now deemed unholy:
Astrology—the God of the stars that plod,
Eternally blazed and marbled in the sod,

Monuments of Diana the Moon God,
Druid Gods, Apollo, Baal, Zeus, Wotan,
Aphrodite, Mithras, Isis, Amon,
Poseidon, Thor, and on and on, anon—
Posed in the burial ground of the Gods.

I ever hurried past the ledgering
Of those older Mythologies preceding
The formation of the Old Testament story—
Those ancient superstitions whose very
And various olden amalgamations
Brought forth to form it whole for our salvation.

I paused at that Old Testament maligned,
To mark the old but lingering lines
Of the ‘knowing’ of more invisibles—
The beliefs in imagined Angelics:

There were angels standing, frozen in stone,
Over the timeworn memorials’ poems,
As well as atop the crumbling gateposts,
Cast as undying and near-living ghosts

Of the representations of the three spheres
Of the Heavenly host: the demigod-near
Seraphim, Cherubim, Ophanim,
Thrones, Principalities, Dominions,

Powers, Archangels, Angels, and, those final,
And the most useful—the Guardian Angels,
Who are said to protect children from harm.

There, Amaranth, its dead red leaves never
Fading on this Earth, unto forever,
Gave some color ‘round the graveyard pallor
And to the dateless headstones’ gray squalor.

There was a garish maroon view, on high,
Of streaking lights of an electromagnetic sky,
Heretofore never imagined by my self.
I strolled on, and into the vale itself.

To The Eternally Dead

Here lie the Gods, once so high,
Beneath an electromagnetic sky.

Lo!—the eternally marbled monuments
Of the Moon God, the Sun God (Apollo),
Baal, Zeus, Wotan, Aphrodite, Thor,
Mithras, Isis, Amon, Poseidon, Krishna,
The Druid Gods, and so many more.

Behold!—the ledger of those many Mythologies
That preceded, paraded, and then passed on.

Here they rest, the dead and long gone rhyme,
Adorned with the splendor of mouldering time.

Figmentations

Into supernatural figmentations,
I strode, through brilliant imagination,
To interview all the supposed Gods there—
Some no more and some ruling everywhere.

Notions of ‘God’ are of the wide purview
Of the inquiring mind confined—its ‘why’,
That wide expanse of fables, faith, hoaxes,
Lies, imaginations, fictions, guesses,

Foggy notions, concoctions, phantasms,
Fantasies, falsehoods, conceptions,
Decrees, fiats, misrepresentations,
Dead ideas, magic, proclamations,

Wild tales, anecdotes, revelations,
Untruths, revelations, hearsay, scrap heaps,
Yarns, and fish stories, stated as beliefs
In that unseeable supernatural station,
Through faith’s without knowledge ration;
These are all figmentations of the imagination.

Strewn about this great panoramic realm
Of the One possibly conceivable at the helm
Were all of the unknowable fabrications
Often dreamt up, via exaggerations,
By the human race of mammal sapiens.

The realm of such pronouncements has come to be
Superposed at the furthest edge of Reality,
Poised by the scope of some wishful thinking,
By all those dreaming and wild supposing,

Who wish for such legends to be ever
Actualized and realized; however,
These unknowns have never ever made it
Into our observable realistic habitat in any way,

They but remaining in the minds, joint,
Of the God-beholders—
Even as wildly varying viewpoints.

Deriving the Narrative Uni-Versed Poem
Of the Cosmos’ Poetic Universe

All the temporary complexities
From the Eterne must someday fade away,
Namely, our universe with its grandness
Dispersing its greatness into blandness.

In between, the Basis writes a story
That gets lived by the transients within,
As us and all the stars, moons, and planets—
In one book from the Babel Library.

What’s Fundamental has to be partless,
Permanent and e’er remain as itself;
Thus, it can only form temporaries
Upward as rearrangements of itself.

The ‘vacuum’ has to e’er jitter and sing,
This base existent forced as something,
Given the nonexistence of a ‘Nothing’;
If it tries to be zero, it cannot.

At the indefinite quantum level,
Zero must be fuzzy, not definite;
So it can’t be zero, but has to be
As that which is ever up to something.

What’s continuous means a field, naught else,
That waves; ‘Stillness’ is impossible.
A field has a changing value everywhere,
For the ‘vacuum’ e’er has to fluctuate.

The fields overlap and can interact;
So, there is one overall field as All.
It’s the basis of all that is possible—
With another forced default of motion.

From field points moving in their one degree
Quantum field waverings have to result
From their dragging e’er on one another.

As sums of harmonic oscillators,
Fields can only form their elementaries
At stable quanta energy levels;
Other excitation levels don’t persist.

Since the quantum fields are everywhere,
The elementaries as kinks can move
To anyplace in the realms of the fields;
As in a rope, only the quanta move.

At each level of organization
Of temporaries in the universe
New capabilities become available,
And so they take on a life of their own
In addition to what gives rise to them.

The great needle plays, stitches, winds, and paves
As the strands of quantum fields’ webs of waves
That weave the warp, weft, and woof, uni-versed,
Into being’s fabric of Earth’s living braids.

Quantum fields are the fundamental stroke
Whose excitations at harmonics cloak
The field quanta with stability
To persist and obtain mobility.

As letters of the Cosmic alphabet,
The elementary particles beget,
Combining to words to write the story
Of the stars, atoms, cells, and life’s glory.

This is the Poetic Universe.

The weave of the quantum fields as strokes writes
The letters of the elemental bytes—
The alphabet of the standard model,
Atoms then forming the stars’ words whose mights

Merge to form molecules, as the phrases,
On to proteins/cells, as verse sentences,
In to organisms ‘stanza paragraphs,
And to the poem stories of the species.

Of this concordance of literature,
We’re the Cosmos’ poetic adventure,
Sentient poems being unified-verses,
As both the contained and the container.

We are both essence and form, as poems versed,
Ever unveiling this life’s deeper thirsts,
As new riches, through strokes, letters, phonemes,
Words, phrases, and sentences—uni versed.

We have rhythm, reason, rhyme, meter, sense,
Metric, melody, and beauty’s true pense,
Revealed through life’s participation,
From the latent whence into us hence.

From quantum non-locality entanglement,
We know that information’s primary
Over distance, that objects don’t have to
Be near each other to have relation.

Everything connected to everything
Would seem to be a ‘perception’ as an
All-at-onceness, so a particle
Might ‘know’ something about what to do.

Informationally derived meanings
Unify in non-reductive gleanings,
In a relational reality,
Through the semantical life happenings.

This is a realm of happenings, not things,
For ‘things’ don’t remain the same on time’s wings.
What remains through time are processes—
Relations between different systems.

Syntactical information exchange,
Without breaking of the holistic range,
Reveals the epic whole of nature’s poetics,
Within her requisite of ongoing change.

So there’s form before gloried substance,
Relationality before the chance
Of material impressions rising,
Traced in our world from the gestalt’s dance.

All lives in the multi–dimensional spaces
Of basic superpositional traces
Of Possibility, as like the whirl’s
Probable clouds of distributed paces.

What remains unchanged over time are All’s
Properties that find expression, as laws,
Of the conservation of energy,
Momentum, and electric charge—unpaused.

A poem is a truth fleshed in living words,
Which by showing unapprehended proof
Lifts the veil to reveal hidden beauty:
It’s life’s image drawn in eternal truth.

A poem is both the thought and the presence,
An object born from one’s profoundest sense,
An image of diction, feeling, and rhythm;
It’s both the existence and the essence.

Poetry makes clear what’s just barely heard,
For it translates soul-language into words,
Whereas, music plays right on the heartstrings;
Merged, they create song; heart and soul converge.

Poems are renderings of the soul’s spirit,
The highest power of language and wit.
The reader then translates back to spirit;
If the soul responds, then a poem you’ve writ!

…

Oh, those imaginings of what can’t be!
Such as Nought, Stillness, and Permanence,
As well as Apart, Beginning, and End,
The Unfixed Will, Blame, Fame, and Theity.

…

When the universe ends, sparse photons left,
All splendor, life, and objects will have gone
The way that all temporaries must go,
To oblivion—oh, grand complexities!

Only the Eternal Basis remains
As potential for all possible books
In Everything’s Great Repository
To author another universe’s story.

Tombstone Remembrances

The cemetery was where the ducks were fed,
Where two friends feasted on wine, verse, and bread,
Amidst the flowered trees and quiet streams—
The home for both the living and the dead.

We lived at once, aware that life was dear,
Oft smiling at Heaven and Hell without fear;
Yes, we had some laughs, gave true love, and made
Life better—for it was now and we were here.

Here the grave-sign of The Four Elements:
From the fires of stars to those of the cremation,
He has breathed, flourished, and dissolved:
Life is ashes to ashes, stardust to stardust.

Of airy winds, vapors, and a soft earth,
He rests, at last, under the spinning skies,
Those of Earth’s sunny days and starry nights.

The Symphony of Life plays for the dead:
All that we know, even the loveliest of the best,
Decomposes into the dust of earth compressed.
The songs once composed now lie in repose;
Of this dust the future rearranges to recompose.

En-graved is ‘THE END’ of your Earthly sigh:
Six sides ‘round you: five are dirt, one is sky.
Shov’ling, Death talks to you at last, and says:
“What were you doing during all of nigh?”

From Heaven’s stars came our dust eterne;
Time’s seas nurtured thee and thine in turn.
From time, death, and dust we thus became,
And by this, thus, and that we must return.

What would be the price of a moment’s breath
Purchased from Death’s hand at the final hour?
All the world’s wealth can’t extend the power
That drains the cup and withers the flower.

The light of Heav’n did the Earth illumine,
When He shaped human nature’s acumen.
Temptations He then placed everywhere,
But He’ll punish us for being human!

The wings of time are checkered black and white,
As fluttering ‘round the day flies the night.
Like chess pieces, we gamely play for life,
Until into the box we return, quite!

Now my cup was nearly empty and done;
There was left but one last drop for the sun
To drink, or with which to make rivers run:
Its flavor burst in joy—my life was won!

Not all poems are pleasant—some speak of death,
Of life’s end, separate by just a breath.
I saw tombstones overgrown, under swept,
Names unknown—and to all the message saith:

Read Me, it said, engraved beyond the brink,
You, who live, up above: of life go drink;
And you, underneath, now lying so dead:
Rest in peace, RELAX—it’s later than you think!

Refreshed, I wandered among the tombstones,
Under which rested little more than bones,
Where from the life had fled when dreams were dead,
Which under me became life’s stepping stones.

I’ll play the game and roll the earthly dies,
And through this worldly life enjoy the prize;
If Earth is Hell for love’s adventurers,
Then I wish no more for God’s Paradise.

Good and evil were wrought from wrong and right,
When, of nought, twin genii split day and night.
Some may think that black’s might can vanquish white,
But night can’t even quench the smallest light!

Every-thing, every order happens for a reason.
Yes, for the most part, for most seasons,
But not for the bottommost cause the first,
For there was nothing before it to direct it forth.

Youth and Beauty made agèd Winter mourn,
For Summer’s grain—the waving wheat and corn;
For Old Autumn, withered, wan, had passed on,
Leaving the Earth a widow, weather worn.

At first, you sleep in your dear mother’s womb;
At last, you sleep in Earth’s cold silent tomb.
In between, Life whispers a dream that says
Wake, live, for the rose withers all too soon!

Waste not the time of your life in gloom’s doom!
By these verses, your lamp of life relume:
Your live body, full of warmth and bloom,
Is worth ten thousand lying in the tomb.

Art and poetry enrich human experience,
But they’re no substitutes for the living of it.
Like Keats’ figures on the urn, should we live life less?
No, because what is deathless is also lifeless!

…

INTO THE LANDS OF THE GODS

Towards the Gods Far and Unknown

My reverie took flight, with autumn’s sight,
For I was abstracted, entranced, and light.

I beamed to the site suffused with insight—
The solutions are deep within the mind,
Reachable by dreams of the lucid kind.

I flew south from my home, in New Hamburg,
Over the Hudson river, toward Newburgh,
Past Chelsea, and the great Storm King Mountain—
On philosophical aspiration.

A wake of leaves trailed behind, like a stream,
While I gathered clues, through my musing means.
My design, in this vaporous pipe dream,
Was to converse with all the Gods who seemed.

If Fishkill’s and Peekskill’s murderous names
Had not been token enough, there soon came
A sequence of locales that seemed to be
Ominous in their triple proximity.

First was Sleepy Hollow, the haunted land
Of the gambols of the headless horseman,
Then the Gate of Heaven Cemetery,

And the surprising Town of Valhalla—
A bright afterlife of an old-time place,
Of shops built right up against the road race.

I stopped to rest, well away from the maze,
Dazzled by the lustrous autumnal haze,
In a warm day’s musk, before twilight dusk,
Near shining gates, toward the unearthly sod
Of the refulgent Graveyard of the Gods.

Over the stream, there was an arched bridge thrown.
Then I knew I’d gone beyond the known:
For in that span, each piece was a keystone.

I questioned two luminous angel goths,
“Where be the mythic Graveyard of the Gods?”

They looked askance, then smiled and pointed past,
“It’s just beyond the Land of Epitaphs.”

…

I have extended the ‘Rubaiyat’ by adding more of Omar’s quatrains and some of my own at the appropriate places, illustrating it with my digital art compositions. But first… some background:

FitzOmar’s Rubaiyat and Its Interpretations

Edward FitzGerald’s ‘Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’ poem stunned Victorian England soon after Darwin’s ‘Origin of the Species’ had shocked their sensibilities, but soon they and the world came to embrace what came to be known as the greatest poem in history, and also the one most often illustrated.

Omar had the deep and grand ideas, but it was FitzGerald, as a kindred soul and poet, who dressed them in such fine clothes, attracting the world to them forever.

The synergy of FitzOmar takes us far and away from the mundane, everyday, low-life, blah-blah, sit-com type situations, into the glorious reaches of deeper thinking about the Big Questions, as well as to the great philosophical tenet of enjoying life to the fullest.

FitzGerald’s transmogrification of Omar is near unbelievable in its excellence, one of those rare poetic products that could go on for hundreds of years without equal. Shelley was close, in his poem, ‘Adonais’, as well as was Thomas Gray, in ‘An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’.

See the ‘Concordance of the Rubáiyát’ online to see from what very plain original language FitzGerald developed his stupendous quatrain gems time and time again. FitzGerald even discarded some quatrains because they were merely quite masterful instead of meeting the perfectly superb standard he had set for himself. I have restored them.

All things, roll on “impotently”, by Omar. We are, as Shakespeare noted, but actors in a play, strutting and posturing. When were we ever responsible for how we were or are at any given moment?

What benefit to life then? I suggest it is Experience, which can be mostly a joy—with Omar’s love, drink, food, friends, adventure, romance, and deep feeling, although transient, but ever of the glorious Now, and generally free of shame and blame, being in the Paradise of right here, plus we being just as organic as anything else in nature, and thus no more important, “willy-nilly blowing”.

“Round which we Phantom Figures come and go” is about the noumena from which our phenomena arise from, as a kind of holo-graphic phantasmagorial realm of the “Magic Shadow-Show”. What lies behind is difficult to get at, but there has been some progress, such as insights into our brain networks.

“The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has pour’d/Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour” because, well, in short, it has to, all things happening over and over again for all time. It’s Deja vu all over again.

“Which, for the Pastime of Eternity, He doth Himself contrive, enact, behold” and the like is that, if one plays along with the myth, it is like that He thought of, planned, designed, and implemented humans and their nature, with an inherent wide-ranging spectrum of capacity for and from Good to Bad; however, in this myth-take ‘God’ bears no responsibility for His recipe expressing itself in just the way He all-knowingly intended it to. Why His surprise and disappointment?

Often, big paradoxes mightily arrive when a proposed realm is declared  ‘invisible’, and Omar is ever up to the task. Brave Omar knocks ‘god’ without fear.

When “You shall be You no more” and “And naked on the Air of Heaven ride”, and the like, it is perhaps that there not really a redundant soul ever living on, made of some invisible angelic vapour that duplicates and preserves our brain neuron network, which readily maintains what is already you just fine, in some essence of an already evolutionarily expensively formed brain. FitzGerald’s ‘quicksilver’ is either as the above soul or as wine coursing through us.

Omar cites the limits to Knowing Everything as us moving toward a carpe diem centering in the now. He writes “…evermore Came out by the same Door as in I went”, “…But not the Master knot of Human Fate”, and so forth. Not being able to know is the same dilemma facing his Impotent Great Wheel itself.

And so Omar unveils his basic human philosophy for the human condition, the central tenet being the primacy of the ‘Now’— over “Unborn To-morrow and dead Yesterday”.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

While the above probably refers to predestination by Allah, as made more explicit in other quatrains, it can also relate now-a-days to more scientifically modern views as to how each moment arises in Time, in the Now, and then completely passes away, wholly replaced right then and there by the next Now, which process, or even ‘processing’, can’t be stopped, much like the deterministic chain “That none can slip, nor break, nor over-reach”.

Whether there is being or becoming, as eternalism or presentism, is still an open question. We don’t know the mode of time, for either mode would have the same appearance to us.

What one did long ago is done, dead, and gone, obviating any real shame and blame, but one must as well give up any fame, as well, crediting all to Fate. Plus, indeed, can anyone really be held responsible for who/what they’ve come to be from nature and nurture?

While Omar rails against a predestination by ‘God’, it is for other, godless, reasons that determinism might still be much the way events have to be, but for some possible quantum level randomness, if any, which damages the will, anyway, harming it, not helping it at all, as much as we somehow wish to think that our will can be free of itself or that we or any part of physical Nature can do the same to somehow be self-made entities as mini first causes. It seems that for one to have ‘God’, whatever Nature does is what ‘God’ does, and so thus ‘god’ is not required.

Omar reveals that an ultimate basis without Origin, such as his causeless Great Wheel. standing in for the Eternal Basis, cannot even know its own reason for existence, and is powerless over this and its state, with no choice given to it for its being, it having to do just what it does and naught else, much as we may also have to admit to at our level.

“It rolls impotently on as Thou or I”, or it just ‘IS’, ever and eternal, without a beginning or end, and what never begins cannot have a certain direction, design, meaning, or purpose put to it in the first place that never was.

Whose secret Presence through Creation’s veins
Running Quicksilver-like eludes your pains;
Taking all shapes from Máh to Máhi and
They change and perish all—but He remains;

Thanks to you both, Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyam, for the insights, as well as for attending to the serious task of pointing out the dubious and the deep.

Part 1:

(Just the Intro for now)

FLORA SYMBOLICA
Lore and Legends of the Flowers

A tale I’ve written, invented, yes, hence
An attempt to unite the Christian pense
With the non-belief, in a middle ground,
Somewhere between mystery and good sense:

With flora mystical and magical,
Eden’s botanical garden was blest,
So Eve, taking more than just the Apple,
Plucked off the loveliest of the best.

Thus it’s to Eve that we must give our thanks,
For Earth’s variety of fruits and plants,
For when she was out of Paradise thrown,
She stole all the flowers we’ve ever known.

Therewith, through sensuous beauty and grace,
Eve with Adam brought forth the human race,
But our world would never have come to be,
Had not God allowed them His mystery.

When they were banished from His bosom,
Eve saw more than just the Apple Blossom,
And took, on her way through Eden’s bowers,
Many wondrous plants and fruitful flowers.

Mighty God, upon seeing this great theft,
At first was angered, but soon smiled and wept,
For human nature was made in His name—
So He had no one but Himself to blame!

Yet still He made ready His thunderbolt,
As His Old Testament wrath cast its vote
To end this experiment gone so wrong—
But then He felt the joy of life’s new song.

Eve had all the plants that she could carry;
God in His wisdom grew uncontrary.
Out of Eden she waved the flowered wands,
The seeds spilling upon the barren lands.

God held the lightning bolt already lit,
No longer knowing what to do with it,
So He threw it into the heart of Hell,
Forming of it a place where all was well.

Thus the world from molten fire had birth,
As Hell faded and was turned into Earth.
This He gave to Adam and Eve, with love,
For them and theirs to make a Heaven of.

From His bolt grew the Hawthorn and Bluebell,
And He be damned, for Eve stole these as well!
So He laughed and pretended not to see,
Retreating into eternity.

“So be it,” He said, when time was young,
“That such is the life My design has wrung,
For in their souls some part of Me has sprung—
So let them enjoy all the songs I’ve sung.

“Life was much too easy in Paradise,
And lacked therefore of any real meaning,
For without the lows there can be no highs—
All that remains is a dull flat feeling!

“There’s no Devil to blame for their great zest—
This mix of good and bad makes them best!
The human nature that makes them survive,
Also lets them feel very much alive.

“That same beastful soul that makes them glad
Does also make them seem a little bad.
If only I could strip the wrong from right,
But I cannot have the day without the night!”

So it was that with fertile delight Eve
Seeded the lifeless Earth for us to receive.
Though many flowers she had to leave behind,
These we have from the Mother of Mankind:

…

I don't think love belongs to humans, but is something humans partake of, even if imperfectly. — Derrick Huestis

This is a sad story, yet, we wouldn't even be around were it not for evolution doing as it had to do, granting a barbaric life for millions of years to all the hominids who came before, and to the whole tree of life beneath that. Even now, from evolution's 'design' of human nature without a designer (who would have done it much better out of Love) the times are still tough in many places, and will be getting worse from global warming and viruses, which is a large opening for evolution to weed the silly from the wise, to sift the best from the rest in terms of survival (the unvaccinated will die).

From tsihcrana:

The [computer] program would, by pure doggedness 'and accident', eventually simulate the universe* (and probably create several AIs on the way). In that simulation would be 'beings' who think they are real, alive, and conscious, but who are ultimately just code adhering to the rules of the program. They're not special or unique or serve any purpose to the computer running the simulation. The simulation doesn't care about their plight or take anything from their existence. It just runs the code.

We're just the same: created by eons of chance/change and ruled by the genetic 'code' that haphazardly arose from those changes, unaware of our mechanical nature and liable to ascribe meaning to things because that's what our 'code' has us do. When genetics arose that said "oh, what's the point of existence?" and killed itself those genes obviously didn't endure. We are the descendants of genetics that thought life was meaningful only because the alternative (thinking life is meaningless) isn't long-term viable. Mutations that led to life that didn't want to live led also to early demise for those organisms, so a 'desire to live' set of genes will always populate the gene-pool. Life is no more meaningful than that. All that we care about we care about because it aides survival, and all that we fear we fear only because it threatens survival.

The universe is populated with these immortal particles that obey laws. Those laws lead to change, and by accretion those changes lead to complexity. The universe says "change everything" and let what what is stable, or what is complex (in the right way), endure. We are what endures, and nothing more.

Only Alice did the homework:

A Brief History of All History

Alice looked to the stars and remarked, “I’ve come such a long way to be here, with you both, but my possibility was there in the beginning, with me spread all over the place. Now with you two in Honolulu.

“I’m taking a cosmology course from Professor Victor Stenger, the guy you play tennis with, Patrick, and the final exam is coming, so I’m going to practice for it now, adding in some reflections of my own.”

“The Planck era at 1E-43 seconds was the first hint of me, as a cyclical compactfication or a vacuum fluctuation eruption in an indefinite realm that’s as close to Nothing as can be, but it can’t be a Nothing as such, since that would be a definite, whereas the vacuum as the basic something must be fuzzy, uncaused, and so zero is out. Motion can’t cease or all would come to a standstill. ‘Stillness’, like ‘Nothing’, is impossible.

“To learn the Secrets of what IS and ever WAS, we must brave the crypt and ghost of cause. The quantum foam as quantum fields is ever and always, and has pairs of virtual particles quick appearing and then annihilating and disappearing, as noise, in a kind of sub-existence when not anything forms to persist. They are somethings, as one might even call possibility or potential, but are not yet as true, meaningful existence until they become part of an information process and thus endure. This state has always been, and must be, so jot: that this All is ever here to be, since ‘Nothing’ cannot.

“Here we fathom the cryptic, where the shade of substance slept with arithmetic. There is a basic lightness of being because anything more would then be of parts, and thus lie beyond the fundamental arts. The impossible ‘Full’ joins the impossible ‘Null’ in oblivion.

“So, where the causeless reigns supreme, the spark nursed by embers is the first that the universe remembers when it fires toward the other members in a processing way. The opposite twins as virtual pairs rule the causing call, these positives and negatives constituting the All.

“It proceeds very quickly. At 1E-36 seconds, in a GUT (Grand Unified Theory) transition, the strong force separates from the electro–weak force, the strong force providing for stability and the weak force for changeability.

“Inflation begins, as a slow rolling scalar field generates negative pressure, causing an exponential expansion of spacetime. The doubling is of a vacuum energy density of 1E73 tons/cm^3. Quantum fluctuations lock in nearly scale invariant 1E-5 variation in energy density. Inflation was so fast that some virtual particles couldn’t recombine, thus becoming real. Here the enigma of the ever immortal is undone and unloosed through its portal.

“At 1E-34 seconds, inflation quickly ends, the decay of the scalar inflaton field causing reheating. Is this the ‘let there be light moment’? No, photons don’t exist yet, but other massless vector quanta like left and right weak and B-L particles may exist. Things are not well known about this era. I am still a twinkling in the cosmic eye.

“At1E-34 to 1E-8 seconds, in the quark era, there is the quark gluon plasma, and then quarks and perhaps proposed super partner particles dominate matter content.

“At 1E-17 to 1E-15 seconds, SUSY (supersymmetry) breaking occurs when proposed super partners acquire mass with the LSP (lightest supersymmetric particle) expected to have a mass of about 10 Tev. In induced gravity models, this is where mass energy first generates the induced gravity field; gravity is born. I am grounded.

“At 1E-10 seconds, there comes the electroweak transition, when the electroweak force, under the action of the Higgs mechanism breaks symmetry. The photon is born. The Standard Model particles acquire mass.

“Lo! The quantum fields guide me, as illumination beside me, having produced the elementary particles, while the mind whirls round and round, as the ear draws forth the sound, as the eye sees the light, and of the dark the fright. Fear not the proof—it’s the beauty of the truth.

“At 1E-5 seconds, quark confinement comes about when the QCD (Quantum chromodynamics) vacuum becomes superconducting to color magnetic current. Quarks and gluons become confined.

“At 1E-5 to 1 E-4 seconds, in the hadron era, protons, neutrons, and pions, etc., form. Now my future atoms are on the horizon.

“At 1E-4 seconds, hadron annihilation occurs during a brief period of proton/anti proton and neutron/anti neutron annihilation. A slight favoring of matter over anti matter, possibly locked in by CP violation by the neutrinos being only left-handed (CP is the combination of charge symmetry and parity symmetry) at reheating allows some excess protons and neutrons to survive, with ten billion photons for every matter particle, which tells us how many annihilations there were.

“At 1E-4 to 10 seconds, in the next era, leptons are the dominant energy density, such as electrons.

“We are up to about one second after the Big Bang now, at neutrino decoupling, when mass energy falls low enough to free neutrinos, creating the neutrino cosmic background.

“At 10 seconds, electrons and positrons annihilate, leaving a tiny fraction of electrons remaining. At this point the total number of electrons equals the total number of protons. This is a beautiful symmetry.

“From 10 seconds to 57 thousand years is the radiation era, in which photons created from the annihilation of matter and anti-matter dominate the energy density of universe. Light has been let; I will shine.

“At 1-5 minutes, nucleosynthesis begins, as fusion of protons creates helium, deuterium and trace amounts of lithium. A few of my basics are there.

“At 57,000 years, there is matter/radiation equality.

The radiation density (photon and neutrino) and matter density (dark and atomic) are equal. This is because radiation density falls more quickly due to the stretching of the relativistic particles’ wavelengths. Dark matter clumps into structures. Atomic matter begins oscillation due to the battle between gravity and photon pressure generating acoustic oscillations. The first sounds of the new universe come forth as the ‘word’.

“At 380,000 years, there is recombination, when the temperature falls low enough to allow atoms to form; photons decouple. The CMBR (Cosmic Microwave Radiation Background) is born, locking in its structure for us to look back at later—the record of the earliest visible time in the universe.

“For 5 to 200 million years, there is a dark age, as the photons fall into the infra red energy range. The universe goes dark. The atomic gas continues to fall toward the dark matter clumps, which grow more pronounced.

“Near to 100 Million years, the densest clumps halt their expansion and begin collapsing.

“By 200 Million years, the first mini halos form and within these the atomic cloud cools and collapses to make the very first stars whose light brings to an end the dark era. We are totally of stars to be, as stardust.

“At 200 million years, there are the first stars, which are very massive and short lived, but emit some lower atomic elements since this doesn’t require extra energy. They die in violent neuron star collisions or in supernova explosions, filling the cosmos with the higher atomic elements that needed energy to be added, building dust for new stars and the planets of solar systems, and the elements for life.

“At 200 to 800 million years, there is the epoch of ionization, in which the radiation from the stars and possibly the first quasars, ionizes much of the remaining neutral hydrogen and helium. A thin mist returns and partly obscures the CMBR, but future Low Frequency Radio Telescopes may be able to see the epoch of ionization.

“At 1 to 2 billion years, there become infant galaxies, as star groups merge. There are frequent collisions of galaxies, high star birth rates, and high supernova rates. Heavy element production changes the pattern of star formation, making them lower mass, less luminous and longer lived, like second and third generation metallic stars of today that life had to wait for. The stage is set for the emergence of life, although it is still 6 billions years away; the cosmos will then have eyes to see and minds to think, like ours.

“At 2 to 3 billion years, there is a star birth and quasar peak. In the dense environment of frequent galaxy collisions, the star birth rate reaches it maximum, as does the forming and feeding of supermassive black holes, as darkling beasts. Abandon hope all ye who enter there.

“At 6 billion years, there are the first very rich galaxy clusters, since enough time has elapsed for the densest regions to stop expanding and form these clusters.

“At 7 billion years, there is decelerated acceleration.

The effects of dark energy kick in. The universe once again begins to accelerate its expansion rate, but gentler.

“At 8 billion years, the first modern spiral galaxies form, although some elliptical galaxies form in the first billion years, but classic spiral galaxies aren’t seen until at about 5 billion years.

“At 9 billion years, there is matter and dark energy equality, since the falling density of matter, both dark and atomic, become equal to that of dark energy.

“At 9.1 billion years, our sun and Earth form. We are inherent, as ever. Our solar system forms in the outer disk of the Milky Way, a relatively safe place. The stage is set for the emergence of humankind in the Cosmos—for us to meet and love. All this from stabilizations forming, onward and upward, in emergences, taking on a life of their own, and so on.

“At 13.7 billion years, there is the present time. Human civilization perhaps reaches its peak and perhaps begins heading into decline and eventual extinction due to over population, resource depletion, and environmental destruction, which generates conflict as human nation states fight for ever dwindling resources, aggravated by global warming. Hopefully, humankind is not typical and intelligent life solves the problem of balancing intelligent life needs with available resources by developing communitarian economic social structures.

“By the way, all of this is dynamic in time. There cannot be a block universe because it’s infinite into the future, it’s a complexity as First, it can’t have a definite blueprint, and we would not need brains to redundantly figure things out if they were already set, as in a movie, as conglomerations are.

“At 16 to 17 billion years in the future, the Milky Way collides with the Andromeda galaxy. Somewhere within this time our sun enters into its red giant phase, vaporizing the Earth. Humankind, perhaps already extinct for over 4 billion years, is not around here to witness this event, though possibly a new intelligent species who emerged after the extinction of human–kind might be. It will be a very sad time for them unless their technology includes very advanced space flight. We are just a tiny and insignificant spark of all time considered at large, as less than 5% of all matter types.

“At 20 billion years, the growth of structures ceases, for expansion due to dark energy empties each casual patch of the Cosmos. The great story of our universe draws to a close. It was a ride to the middle of nowhere that takes away the meaning of what out baggings meant.

“At 100 billion years, what remains of the Milky Way is alone in its causal patch of the Universe. We are alone.

“At 1000 billion years, which is a trillion, the last stars die, giving rise to the final, silent dark; however, stirring in the vacuum of spacetime itself are the ever present vacuum fluctuations. One small patch quite by some indefinite chance fluctuates sufficiently to create a volume of false vacuum which cuts off from its mother universe by negative pressure, and explodes into a new universe, creating new spacetime and future hope for the emergence of intelligent life in the cosmos. I’m done.”

“Cripes!” I exclaimed, “and that’s only a part of the exam, as the overall scheme, with more details to it.”

Cho added, “Very good, and Patrick and I came up with something like your idea, as Fundamental Possibility, since there’s no point at which to impart any definite plan to Totality, given that is has no ‘outside’ and no ‘before’.”

“Yeah,” answered Alice. “Cosmetics is much easier than cosmology, by far; however, I’m so glad to be as me, relating to both of you. We, although distinctive outcroppings of the ‘IS’, as the Cosmos ongoing, aren’t really independent, self goings-on, but are all of the play’s expression continuing and happening from the one big effect of the Big Bang—and that’s what does us all.”

Worldly Love:
A Love Story of the Earth and the Moon

As the moon, challenge night and gain the light;
As the rose, suffer the thorn—gain the fragrance;
Of life, surrender to live forever—
Enlightened more than a thousand suns.

I am thy moon, thy constant satellite,
Thy crystal paramour of day and night.
Above and below, and within thy sight,
I whirl around you in loving delight.

In a magnetic dance, I whirl and twirl,
Attracted to you, oh liveliest world.
Around you as a necklace I’m aswirl—
Wear me as thy crystalline gem impearled.

Wherever thou orbits ‘round Apollo,
I must twirl and whirl, hurry and follow;
Dust I gather, meteors I swallow,
Ranging far and wide through space not hollow.

Thy romantic beam, as Cupid’s arrow,
Pierces my heart and kills my sorrow,
Injecting life and love for tomorrow;
Henceforth, I’ll shine with this life I borrow.

Around you I whirl, a necklace of pearl,
Trailing afterimages of my world,
Adorning you, thy bosom bountiful,
With crystalline gems of another world.

Oh moon, thy Earth would wobble like a top
With your steadying influence not,
In turns quick of searing and freezing ruins,
Unto dying soon, without you, oh moon!

As twin planets, our orbits must convolve;
Into each our tidal motions dissolve.
Around a common center we revolve—
The focus from which our passions evolve.

As twin planets, each other’s way we pave,
With the push-pulse of the graviton wave.
We’re captured, but not as each other’s slave,
For to the sun our orbits are concave.

To your lines of flux my path I align—
I’m your constant paramour, crystalline.
Your world pours life on mine, on mine!
Dearest Earth, I must be thine, must be thine!

A magnetic beam emanates from thee,
Attracting me, holding me, kissing me.
Tidal love washes freely over me,
Linking you and me for eternity.

Basking warmly in your reflected light,
I’m bright, oh so radiant in your sight!
In the love and light of your spirit bright,
I need not ever face the endless night.

Your vibrations travel without a sound,
Circling from all directions to surround.
This affection touches me ‘round and ‘round,
And closely binds me to you—I’m love-bound!

We’re as different as midnight and noon,
Yet drawn close by the force of Earth and moon;
As lovers we merge, in a sweet eclipse,
When world meets world, as a kiss on our lips.

Oh, as your shadow of love covers me,
I am full, so full in the shade of thee;
When we overlap, that union is us;
The you is in me, the me is in thee!

As moon and Earth we bathe in radiance,
Cleansing our hearts in love’s grand alliance;
Around and around each other we dance,
Entranced by the whirl of our dalliance.

My blood runs warm with the sun’s heat at noon.
My spirit is swept by thee, swelling moon.
Space surrounds us. The tides flow through us.
Global rhythms are always playing our tune.

This dominion of man over Nature shall gradually be extended, until, at length, no farther expenditure of mechanical labour shall be necessary than what the human body requires for its development, cultivation, and health; and this labour shall cease to be a burden;—for a reasonable being is not destined to be a bearer of burdens. — Pantagruel

We will all be born into retirement with no sweat.

The Last Gasp for a Grasp

The Reality of Light

The Oddness of Light Photons

Light is ‘null’ to time—not a part of it,
Nor is light of space—it makes space-time ‘lit’.
On a light beam there’s no extent or time!
Light seems to have neither reason nor rhyme.

Lighting the Way

To ‘ride a light beam’ makes time instant,
With the all of space shrinking to a point.


Extending Penrose:

To find out what there was before the Big Bang, we should look to what remains at the end of our universe.

There are only photons; they cannot decay on their own. All that ever was is embodied in them. There is no mass any more.

Photons don’t ‘experience’ time or distance. It doesn’t matter that we would see them as far apart an in time. They have no clocks and no rulers. They are together all at once.

…

The next big Bang occurs from their singular point and they deliver the next universe that is inherent in them by emitting electrons and positrons which go on to form atoms.


Alternately:

Since light photons are timeless and spaceless, Everything happens in an instant at infinite speed at a point before the Big Bang, this containing the universe from beginning to end; however, it takes time to play out, given that there is a lot of mass in between the start and the end, making the speed of light to be finite. It’s like a time-dilated broadcast.

The universe must ever steer toward the blended symmetry order at the end, from its grouping order of matter and antimatter at the start, plus steering a path in between lumpiness and smoothness, this then bringing out all that has to occur in between for those two boundaries.

Already There

Light’s full speed in a true vacuum
Of no time and no space is as ‘infinite’,
For it is already everywhere;
In other words: everywhere in no time.

The Zero-Point Extended

This point of creation-annihilation
Is extended into a faux reality,
Both by finite consciousness and by
Light slowed by virtual particle pairs.

Light/Matter

Light photons colliding make for
Electrons and positrons, and vice-versa,
With the forward-time of photons being
Canceled by the backward-time gravitons.

Phantasmal Being

Each ‘now’ that’s created and recreated
Over the various relative quanta
Has really already happened, coming, going,
And never ever returning, gone in a flash.

Once Upon a ‘Time’

Of course, it did all really happen ‘once’,
As in all-at-once, in the timeless realm
That must be the state of the ‘eternal’ IS,
With IS being close to what’s called the ‘Wiz’.

The Play

Our ‘reality’ is as a flip-book’s pages turning,
The still pictures changing a bit, granting
An apparent motion, such as in a movie;
However, we do get to experience it!

Come and Gone

Like the light from a star already spent,
Our ‘get up and go’ has long gone and went.
We all birthed, lived, and died right away;
There’s nothing left but the slo-mo replay.

Being Nothingness

Our parentheses in eternity
Flashes as a twinkling, but’s extended
By ‘time’ into a phantasmic life dream
That’s existent the same as if it were.

The Mechanics of Reality

The result, being the message, is undeniable,
But herein we speak of the messenger,
Which is the implementation,
As that of a recording, over a live band.

What Makes No Difference is No Difference

There is no difference in what makes none;
‘Eternalism’ is now playing, the living film—
A reality show in the inner theater
Of the mind’s eye, with the ‘I’ observing.

Uncaused

For what is causeless there is no point
At which any specific direction
Can be imparted to it; thus, there is none:
Everything that is possible can happen.

The Shimmering Gleam

We butterflies, on the edge of forever’s flight,
Spread fast our wings on the ocean of light
That is of the ageless photonic opposing waves
In no time, mass, or space that is thereby made.

Here and Now Seeming

We are as beings of the everlasting light dream,
As products time and time again by its means,
Of the eternal return, as baubles blown and burst,
Though frames of time that quench life’s thirst.

Nowhere Man/Woman

Time future, time present, and time past
Are all at once, with not a bit of it to last.
The glorious light flashes us into being shone,
As the light eternal of all time to be known.

Homework: Detail the beginning of the Universe, from the Planck time unto the end.

The Impossible Recipe Accomplished

Explaining the Cosmos is as easy as pie:
It’s an endless extravagance beyond the sky,
Which shows that matter’s very readily made—
Underlying energy raising the shades.

This All sounds rather like an ultimate free lunch,
For the basis is already made, with no punch,
It ever being around, as is, never a ‘was’—
Everywhere, in great abundance quite unheard of.

There’s even more of it than can be imagined—
Of lavish big spenders, there in amounts unbounded:
Bubbles of universes within pockets more,
Across all the times and spaces beyond our shore!

What is the birthing source of this tremendous weight?
There is nothing from which to make the causeless cake!
Its nature is undirected, uncooked, unbaked?
There can’t be a choice to that ne’er born and awaked!

There can’t be turtles on turtles all the way down;
The buck has to stop somewhere in this town.
‘Nothing’ is unproductive—can’t even be meant;
All ever needed is, with nothing on it spent!

Yes, none from nothing, yet something is here, true;
But, really, you can’t have your cake and Edith, too!
And yet I’ve still all of my wedding cake, I do—
It’s just changed form; what ever IS can never go.

Since there’s no point at which to impart direction
The essence would have no limited, specific,
Certain, designed, created, crafted, thought out meaning!
Thus the Great IS is anything and everything!

This All is as useless as Babel’s Library
Of all possible books in all variety!
Yes, and even in our own small aisle we see
Any and every manner of diversity.

The information content of Everything
Would be the same as that of Nothing!
Zero. The bake’s ingredients vary widely,
And so express themselves accordingly.

What’s Everything, detailed? Length, width, depth, 4D—
Your world-line; 5th, all your probable futures;
6th, jump to any; 7th, all Big Bang starts to ends;
8th, all universes’ lines; 9th, jump to any;
10th, the IS of all possible realities.

Your elucidation is quite a piece of cake!
Yo, it exceeds, as well, and so it takes the cake.
Everything ever must be, because ‘nothing’ can’t?
Yes, it’s that existence has no opposite, Kant!

So, we’re here at the mouth of the horn of plenty,
For a free breakfast, lunch, and a dinner party;
Yet many starving are fed up with being unfed.
Alas, for now I have to say, Let Them Eat Cake!

Conclusions:

A ‘Mind’ as the The Existence is dubious since:

— Systems can’t be Fundamental. We look back and see the simple being first.

— We’d have to explain this greater level as just being so all the more than the lesser level that we won’t accept as just being so, and so forth.

— Life continuing on Earth seems precarious, given many near extinctions.

— Achieving life took a very long time.

— Throwing a large asteroid at Earth to provide an opening for us to evolve after the Permian Extinction doesn’t seem intelligent.

— the Big Bang was messy.

Yet, The Existence must be everything possible and mind has happened, although it didn’t come first. Our minds becoming actualized this universe’s reality out of everything in a superposition?


Deliberate:

Our universe seems to be a rarity, and thus unnatural, since it works and some of the parameters had to be exact. So, something is behind that, yet life was and can still be barbaric, although that may be of 'best can do' due to what is good in general.


My vote:

I’m voting for a multiverse since because there is a universe implies that there can be others, many of which don’t work. Our universe doesn’t seem to be optimal, but perhaps some other one is, yet we get by, for now, but our continuation is not for sure.

The Eternal has to be everything,
All paths contained within, or the default;
It can’t have inputs, with no beginning;
Still, what chose the song our universe sings?

All universes might spring forth, in turn,
Most inert or not going far enough,
With some reaching life after a long time,
Such as ours, precarious as its life is.

The Eternal is as a multiverse,
As all paths, which thus lacks information,
As in Babel’s Library of all books,
Being as Nothing’s zero’s non ‘info’.


2nd vote:

The quantum fields could not have been otherwise, forced as the only default.

…
I had discovered The Poetic Universe.

I headed back home, this taking a few months, never stepping into the same universe twice, or even once.

Funny thing, I thought, they didn’t use poems in what they told me, but, then again, they are as living poetic forms themselves.

My Report

We are both essence and form, as poems versed,
Ever unveiling our live’s deeper thirsts,
As new riches, from strokes, letters, phonemes,
Words, phrases, and sentences—uni versed.

We have rhythm, reason, rhyme, meter, sense,
Metric, melody, and beauty’s true pense,
Revealed through life’s participation,
From the latent whence into us hence.

The weave of the quantum fields as strokes writes
The letters of the elemental bytes—
The alphabet of the standard model,
Forming the words as the atoms whose mights

Merge to form molecules, as phrases,
Onto proteins and cells, as sentences,
Up to paragraphs of organisms,
And unto the stories of the species.

In this concordance of literature,
We are the Cosmos’ book of adventure,
As a uni-verse of sentient poems,
Being both the contained and the container.

Our poem is both the thought and the presence,
An object born from the profoundest sense,
An image of diction, feeling, and rhythm;
We’re both the existence and the essence.

Informationally derived meanings
Unify in non-reductive gleanings,
In a relational reality,
Through the semantical life happenings.

Syntactical information exchange,
Without breaking of the holistic range,
Reveals the epic whole of nature’s poetics,
Within her requisite of ongoing change.

So there’s form before gloried substance,
Relationality before the chance
Of material impressions rising,
Traced in our world from the gestalt’s dance.

All lives in the multi–dimensional spaces
Of basic superpositional traces
Of Possibility, as like the whirl’s
Probable clouds of distributed paces.

What remains unchanged over time are All’s
Properties that find expression, as laws,
Of the conservation of energy,
Momentum, and electric charge—unpaused.

I've actually tried to sing your poetic words. Withou actually assigning meaning to them they sound great words! — Rstotalloss

Ah, good! Are you a good singer? We could make a musical.

How can an eternally infinite wonder exist on its own? It can't. — Rstotalloss

We have the same template for 'God', as an even larger Wonder.

I dive into her eyes, her soulful gate,
And worship before her heart’s flaming grate,
Midst flowers in the gardens of her dreams,
Then whirl back up through her eyes as her mate.

“There are no point masses then, but only smudged particles, such as we know of in the space-filling representations of the distribution of electrons in the shells of atoms—called the ‘cloud’.

“What remains unchanged over time are certain properties that find expression in the laws of conservation of energy, momentum, electrical charge, etc., these necessarily being closer to the basis of all.”

At last, I met the ultimate Poet, the Elfin Queen, who told, “There is a relationship structure that arises not only from the manifold and the complicated interactions of the imagined building blocks of matter, but also one that is substantially more inherent and holistic.”

She continued, “So, then, the weaves, warps, and woofs of the quantum bits as strokes makes for the letters of the elementals, as in the alphabet of the standard model, forming the words as the atoms that go on to form the molecules as the phrases, on into cells as sentences, up to the paragraphs of the organisms, and unto the stories of the species, via the unity of life’s conscious literature as the unified verse in which we live out our poems.”

I’m left with a feeling that’s no mere spell,
But a fact in Heaven that’s fancy in Hell,
Of elemental affinity’s flame,
Deeper than thought, much older than speech can tell.

the particle is a pop-view. — Rstotalloss

She continued, “The actual reality is quantum fields.”

After two weeks with her, I had to survive the passage through the land of skulls and roses.

Finally, I emerged, unscathed, into the Land of Spring, and found out about more about growth.

“There are no objects that are identical with themselves over time, and so the temporal sequence remains open. Nature is a ‘possibility gestalt’, with the world forming anew each moment, from the deeper, enfolded realm, which is a unity in the sense of an indivisible ‘potentiality’ which can realize itself in many possible ways, it not being a strict sum of the partial states.”

‘Twas that time of morn when the exiled rise,
Thrown to time’s Earthly bondage through the skies,
Being for an hour their own Heavenly selves,
Their full glory unhidden by disguise.

“It still appears to us, though, that the world consists of parts that have continued from ‘a moment ago’, and thus retain their identity in time; yet, matter really only appears secondarily, as a congealed potentiality.”

These forest fairies, dryads, nymphs, and fauns,
Ever flash their nude blossoms on the lawns.
They beckon me along, for though the air
I pass thoughts of love, verses, and songs.

“In a stable configuration of matter, such as in the inanimate, all the quantum uncertainties are effectively statistically averaged out, this thus ever being deterministic; but in the case of the statically unstable but dynamically stable configurations the ‘lively’ features of the underlying quantum structure have a chance to surface to the macroscopic level.”

And so they tell more, “Physical phenomena are made of information processors that generate overlappings of correlated multi–dimensional wave fields which are propagating through time, as fields of possibility, whose intensity is a measure of the probability of an object-like realization.”

The life of her face is in her deep blue eyes,
Soft-lipped mouth, and the ears that pointed rise,
As the moon and stars reflect in a pool,
Which look as for a lifetime pours surprise.

“So, there is form before substance, relationality before a materiality that is of a secondary arising and importance, its information being primary. Impressions of realizations are left in our world by the gestalt that ‘lives’ in the multidimensional spaces of quantum superpositional possibility.”

Being out of ideas, those residing in ElfLande were my last hope…

I had finished with the yogis and the gurus, and the seers and the oracles only know of the future; so, I surmised, to uncover the deepness of the present, for nature and the conscious animates, I must seek out Nature’s Great Poet in her Uni-verse, in order to fully apprehend the ethereal phantasms of the entangled and enchanted branches in the forest of nature, bringing them into the light.

Fortunately, I was a poet myself, and so I could gain entrance to the elfin dell, as a human, having to first pass through the neophytes, resisting their temptations and spells; however, the sensual can often take a back seat to the intellectual, although the ecstasy can be similar.

I had been there once before, bringing my epic poem, ‘Flora Symbolica’, unto them, and writing up the results in ‘Elfin Legends’, and so they had bid me to return one day on a quest. Theirs was more of an ethereal world, whereas mine was often clunky, except when I dreamt at night, and it was time for me to wander again, to ask about and better understand the quantum guidance principle, especially learning from those closer to nature and the heavens, they being the elven mixture of spirit–angel beings and humans, and thus aware of the causal nexus.

I flew to England, to the special forest Fairy Kingdom, near Gallienne’s old haunts, and waited for the funnel to open up into the tunnel, and then I came out into their realm and walked on for a full day, seeing no one straight out yet, just sideward waverings, but noting many new colors hereto–fore unknown, as there were more waves and frequencies here.

Here the blesséd and haunted old forest,
Whereat the base of an oak I rest,
While all about lay wondrous deep coverts,
And a green-turfed path that leads o’er a crest.

They all knew what I was after, as evidenced in the first encounter.

“To pass and learn of the connectedness of all things, you must kiss me, after which I’ll give you your first clue.”

The kiss vibrated deep within my being, and I felt it to my core, and then she related, “All of life’s entities embrace one another, including cells, organisms, species, and biotope”.

I was on my way again the next morning, the hours having flown by, as when Einstein had sat next to a pretty girl and had noted the much quicker passage of time, over the slower passage of his instant of touching a hot stove.

I learned more as I meandered through the labyrinth of the forest.

She said, “Hold me tight and love me, and I will unveil some of the poetic structure afterward.”

Well, two days went by, and she revealed more of my quest, “Living conscious creatures are as a poem, they ever revealing further dimensions and expressing new properties at every level of organization, via strokes, letters, phonemes, words, phrases, and sentences, in and of a [uni]verse of rhythm, reason, rhyme, meter, metric, and melody. This relates to the quantum All.”

I was hungry for the continuation of life’s quantum poem, and hoped I’d be able to move on more quickly, but her allure was testing my resolve; however, she told me something very soon after we’d rubbed our cheeks together, “Meanings in life are not just discovered or gleaned by mere observation but by understanding through participation, these informationally derived meanings combined to make sense in a non-reductive process, as in the relational reality of life happening at our semantical level of syntactical information exchange, with no breaking of any of the holistic connections, all this as the epic whole of the book of nature.”

It was so still you could hear a nut fall,
And the musical strain of mystic call,
In soft tones flowered upon the silence,
As floating on the surface of the All.

“There is the particle and there is the wave—either one forced on us by our observations, being jointly known as the ‘wavicle’, all three states of which are truly not the actual reality.”

Part 3

Is there more, then, to the beginning?

“Yes.”

Thus, we ask from the powers of the night,
Not immortality, nor youth, nor birth,
But only that we glimpse the enigmatic—
That riddle solved of the conundrum.

“Then we must go downward and pastward
Into the Depths of the Deep.”

Here we stand, each holding fast,
Onto our other half.

“Follow.”

The door resists at first.
Then creaks into the crypt,
Powdered rust streaming from the hinges.

Here the answer to All is kept;
But not all was pleasant—it speaks of death,
Of life’s end, separate by just a breath.

“To learn the Secrets—what IS and e’er WAS,
One must brave the crypt and ghost of cause.

“So into the deep we go, without pause,
To look down, ever down, no self to keep—
Through birth, death, and the shade of sleep,
Through paths unkempt, under swept—

“To the deep,

“Through the cloudy strife of this hazy life,
Through the equations of eternity—
Their non-paternity nor maternity,
Past the realm of the things which seem or are,
Even o’er the steps of the remotest bar.

Down, down,

“Where the mind whirls round and round,
As the ear draws forth the sound,
As the eye sees the light,
And of the dark the fright.

“Down, down,

“Beyond all death, despair, love, and sorrow,
Past yesterday, today, and tomorrow—
The body’s guide but the logic of the ‘know’.

“Down through the fog, the not, and the void,
Where ‘God’ and everything fail; Oh, zoids!

“Down,

“Where reigns the night, where the air is thin,
Where the sky and stars are not, but within,
Where the glorious have not their throne,
Where there is one presiding, all alone.

“Down, down,

“To the fathoms of the cryptic;
Where substance slept with arithmetic,

“Toward the spark yet nursed by embers,
To the first and last the universe remembers,
To seek the gem that shines—the wealth of mines,
The jewels so treasured by thee and thine.”

What truth accelerates life’s momentous gem,
Letting the motto become ‘Carpe diem?
Who seized the moment or lost its momentum,
Wearing not the time as its royal diadem?

“Down, down!

“We guide thee, we must carry thee;
We’re illumination beside thee…

“Down!

“Fear not the proof—
It’s the beauty of the truth:

“Above the ground you were ever born again,
When the roseate hearts were cleansed by dew,
And lucky were you if spring found you new,
As every blossom on the bush blew full.

“When these wonders the new morning bestrew,
The beauty of truth was all that you “knew”.

“Life’s hardships there were softened by beauty,
All its weaknesses strengthened by the truth—
As when roses blossomed, like realizations,
Beauty itself bloomed from the well of truth.

“For now, rarely enough, existence is left aside,
And yet the essence ever has its other side.”

When sadness brooded over the morrow,
I once visited the deep well of sorrow.
There enshrined, inseparate, Beauty said,
‘Twas from me that sadness you borrowed.’

“Down, down,

“The essence beckons you back home,
As the contained-container is the poem.”

So do we live the life of art,
Each playing our part?

“Nay, that is not life, nor a part, bit,
For there’s another dimension to it.
Art and poetry enrich human experience
But they’re not substitutes for the living of it.”

Like Keats’ figures on the urn, blest,
Should we live life any less?

“No—because what is deathless is also lifeless!”

“Down, down!”

Truth and beauty must be inseparable,
Although this is seemingly imponderable.

On that sphere above,
Soft breezes ever blew, caressing me and you
As we kissed the roses new and drank their dew.

Reason and passion then merged into one,
As truth and beauty made their rendezvous.

“Down, down, ever down—

“Through the antiquity, past all of the known—
Arriving at the lowest, remotest throne,
One of the highest perfection,
For it is of the two contrasting directions.

“Plus and minus from little came to be,
But while most charges rejoined, some went free,
The pluses forming matter, energy,
And the minuses forming gravity.

“Opposite twins rule the causing call,
The positives and negatives constituting All.”

Here the enigma of the ever immortal
Is undone and unloosed through its portal:
The Theory of Everything mortal—
The Idea for which we’ve opened the door to.

“Down, down,

“To the end at last!”

Here be the lawless and the formless
Of the unordered, uncreated scene.

Here the causeless reigns supreme.

…

(The timeless-formless contains ev’ry path,
Useless as the Library of All Books—
Its sum of information is zero,
Yet, one of the avenues became ours.)

We may be stymied since we can't tell presentism apart from eternalism.

nutshell — ArisTootelEs

Acts 29 “Therefore since we are the field's box spring's offspring, we should not think that the field's being is like gold or silver or stone—but like a mattress."

It's also that the plans for our universe are already in The Existence, among everything possible, and they get to life and consciousness, which is pretty far, and so perhaps that wins out, somehow. — PoeticUniverse

Better yet; since The Existence is completely self contained, with no beginning and no end, as not affected by anything outside itself, it would just BE, and so it IS, not just having the plans for the universe, but already having the universe. The darn Block Universe keeps trying to reinstate itself.

"For in the quantum field we live, and move, and have our being" — bert1

"The Quantum Field that made the Universe is the Ground of Determination and does not live in Colliders built by human hands. It made everything from the field excitations that are the stable elementaries."