Which Calendar is More Accurate: The Pope’s or Omar Khayyam’s?

Tropical year:                 365.242190 days
Jalil Calendar:               365.24219858156 days (Khayyam)
Gregorian Calendar:     365.2425 days
Justinian Calendar:       365.245 days


Austin's New Calendar



(The new last month of the year is ‘Remember’)

The last truly major revision to the calendar occurred over eight hundred years ago, when Omar Khayyàm realigned the Moslem calendar so that the seasons would arrive at the same time each year. Back then the year started in March, with the spring, the more logical time for a new year to start, I would say, since nature is new in the spring. It took Europe a long time to pick up on the changes. I suppose they got tired of celebrating Christmas in July-type weather or shoveling snow in the summertime.

Omar also revised his philosophic calendar to suit his mental outlook, by advocating that dead yesterday and unborn tomorrow be removed from the calendar; thus, he could truly live for Today. Later on, he refined this theory further by also removing dead and unborn minutes, so that he could live for the moment. My calendar revisions are more along those lines.

So, it’s high time for another major revision to the calendar, one that’s reflective of modern times, for the only improvements made during the last few hundred years have been to skip leap days in years that are evenly divisible by 400, and, more recently, to add a few insignificant leap-seconds every few year or so (”Wow, that seemed like a really long weekend!”).

First of all, I am eliminating the months of January (Bran-new-airy), February (Feb-buries), and March (March!) because, 1) They all contain cold and rotten weather, and 2) They totally lack holidays on which we could get time off with pay from work. It’s a heck of a long wait for a holiday between New Year’s Day and Memorial Day (we used to get Good Friday off, but now even that day has been eliminated, for it’s a religious-ethnic holiday and other religious-ethnic groups could then have proposed other such holidays, and so there’d be no time left for actual work days). Note: don’t worry, Valentine’s Day is being retained and moved elsewhere, as is New Year’s Day.

I am adding a whole new month, called Remember, which comes right after December. That way you will have some extra time to do all of the things that you meant or forgot to do during the year. Just think, there will be not as much need to say “Wait until next year!”.

My revised year starts in the spring, in April, which, as I’ve said, is much more appropriate, since it is a time for renewal and rebirth. By the way, it is easily proved that the year once started in spring by noting the Latin numbers from which the months got their modern names, i.e., 7-sept, 8-oct, 9-nov, 10-dec. We, of course, have now adopted these Latin numeric prefixes into general English, as well, for example, septuagenarian (age 70-80), octagon (8-sided), octave (8 musical degrees), novena (9 days of devotion), decimal (base 10), decimate (to kill one in ten), decathlon, decade, etc.

I also discovered that the old names of July and August were Quintus (Latin 5) and Sextus (Latin 6), but Julius and Augustus Caesar changed the names to suit their own. As for May, June, and April, those were the names of the Caesars’ girlfriends. So, anyway, what all this means is that since December used to be the tenth month (dec), the year obviously once started in March. I am generally readopting this policy, except that, since I’ve eliminated March, my revised year must now start in April, on April’s Fools Day, in fact, which will have to share the honor with New Year’s Day, an appropriate combination considering all of the foolish things that we do on New Year’s Eve.

So, since my year as so far constructed is only ten months long, I must now distribute the excess days that made up the two missing months. I would like to make all the months thirty days long, since people have problems with the current variations. So, I am introducing a new, unnumbered day into the week, called Funday, a day which does not have to be numbered or accounted for in any way whatsoever.

Funday occurs between Sunday and Monday. On Funday you can do as you please. Funday doesn’t even have a numerical date, and so it cannot possibly count against schedules, deadlines, or bills. Weekends, as we all know, have always been too short, but now, with the introduction of Funday, weekends become three days long.

I have, as have many others, already pioneered  the concept that led to Funday: I get up late on Saturday and Sunday to recover energy spent during the work week, and then, by Sunday night, being so well rested, I go to sleep quite late or sometimes not at all and stay up all night reading or doing you know what. Of course, I pay for all of this by being very tired on Monday, but naturally it’s much better to be tired on company time than on your own time, and who ever expects much of Monday anyway.

So, this is what led me to the idea of a Funday on which you could do whatever you want; you don’t even have to visit your relatives. Funday is totally dedicated to fun, and a new law will make it a crime for you to do anything else, although shopping and home chores are allowed if you whistle while you work or sing a happy song. Yes, people are so harried these days that we have to force them to enjoy life.

So, thanks to Funday there will be no more rush-rush or hectic feelings when the work week starts. People need no longer waste short weekends of great weather by doing silly and ridiculous things like going grocery shopping or doing the laundry.

Well, you might say, instead of lengthening the week why not just get people to do all their weekend chores during the week, but, of course, they can’t, since they’re so stressed out and exhausted when they get home from work that they just collapse and can’t even do the simplest thing.

Yes, yes, I know that this is simply a matter of attitude and style, but, believe me, personal changes, even such common sense changes, seem to take huge amounts of effort; whereas, I can simply solve the problem more easily with the introduction of Funday.

But, ten months of thirty numbered days plus five undated Fundays each month equals only 350 days, so there are still fifteen more days that must be dispersed into the new calendar. I am solving this by adding a special summer and winter festival period of seven days each, the winter festival being no more really than a re-establishment of the old Saturnalian pagan festival held in olden times, before the Christians put a damper on it. This winter festival is added between Christmas and New Year’s Day so that we can have a vacation from our vacation of visiting relatives and feasting and pigging out. The summer festival is inserted between July and August, and centers around the true midsummer’s day. Naturally these festivals do not count against anyone’s vacation time.

There are just a few minor alterations left. There is still one day left to be accounted for, and I am inserting it between May and June as Valentines Day. I am removing a day from June, so that the saying “Nothing is so rare as a day in June” will actually be true. In the old calendar, a day in February was 4.2% more rare than a day of June, but, of course, February is gone now. The day removed from June will be called World Day. On this day we should try to get all the world’s peoples to coexist in perfect harmony. This day occurs between June and July. I am moving the Fourth of July holiday to the first Monday in July so that we will have yet another extra long weekend.

Monday mornings and Friday afternoons are to be designated as home/work transition adjustment-recovery periods, during which one need not be present at work, thus reducing the work week to only four days!

Yes, the computer age has arrived and it’s time that we reaped its benefits and gained more leisure time, for this was the promise of the computer age: that computers would free us, so why do I feel like they have become our masters?

Furthermore, the nebulous day called Someday is being removed from the calendar and from everyday conversation, because what it really meant was “Noneday”, as in “Someday we’ll go out to lunch”.

Also, just as a matter of information, note that the days of the week were named after the sun, the moon, and all of the known planets of the time, although some of the days derive their names from French or Latin: Sunday (sun), Monday (moon), Tuesday (Mardi in French, or Mars), Wednesday (Mercredi, or Mercury in French), Thursday (Jeudi in French, or Jupiter), Friday (Vendredi in French for Venus), Saturday (Saturn). However, this still leaves Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune unrepresented, but I’ll probably leave those for my next revision.

My new names for the days of the week are: Onesday, Twosday, Wedsday, Thirstday, Fryday, Satday, Sundae, and Funday, and are for, respectively, self, relationships, marrieds, drinking, frying fish, sitting around, ice cream and fudge, and fun.

Or, we could just forget all of these revisions and go back to Omar’s great idea about having a calendar with only one day on it: Today.

The word "particle" is ambiguous. — TheMadFool

A particle, as a field quantum, is spread out, as kind of a lump.

Definitely causeless, but it may be that something that lacks a cause can, in some sense, also be said to be its own cause. — Bartricks

Either way, where/when does it get its information?

But we - the conscious things - are not physical things. — Bartricks

I, as the conscious thing, am my own cause, or causeless?

There's no delay to consciousness and I doubt you've read the Libet article. — Bartricks

So, the speed of light is infinite and any processing time is infinitely fast? OK. Time to go mental.

Address the argument. — Bartricks

Hello argument!

Less powerfully supported, by powerfully supported nevertheless, is this premise: — Bartricks

Now, really, who's going to notice a slight tape-like delay to consciousness?

But we can be informed by brain-consciousness correlation experiments and neurology…

Therefore we are not physical things. — Bartricks

Shush… they're listening. Too late; here come the white coats; we're all mental!

A change is always a song sung by the same, it's an event performed by something which is the same. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yes, it's like transmutation or topological formation; whatever transmutes can return to its previous form. The Eterne remains, always, conserved, as the only permanence, all else being so temporary that it never stays as anything particular even for an instant, for the Eterne transmutes continually.

Quantum mechanics is probabilistically deterministic. This means there is not one discrete possible outcome; rather, there is a well-defined probabilistic distribution of possible outcomes. — Relativist

That's a good way of putting it, for the probabilities add to 1, this being what is called 'unitary'.

it could be you know
something against the flow — TheMadFool

Good poem!

Who's the scribe of my slab written upon?
I ask myself whether I’m stylus or slate,
Or both the dancer and the danced upon?

Belief is necessarily not a virtue over consciously knowing what not to believe. and/or is this statement already obvious enough to grant as self-evident? — A Gnostic Agnostic

It's not good to have or state a belief when the object isn't known to be so, as it might ingrain itself, as well as that others might pick up on it as true, especially concerning invisible realms proposed.

Note also that in general what many believe can become their 'goods', in both of its meanings, prompting opposing beliefs to be labeled as 'bad' or 'evil'. That there even are opposing beliefs out there can seem to some to lessen the credibility of their own, and then might wish to wipe out the other believers, as nonsensical as that would be.

How long did it take to originate? — ZhouBoTong

It was fast, for there are sites on the internet for making anagrams.

something existent always existent, — elucid

The Block Universe?

Something existent is never the same as something non-existent. Therefore, something existent is something that is never non-existent. — elucid

Since non-existence can never be productive, much less be, Existence is eternal, as ever, and so it is not anything in particular, as random, given no possible inputs to it—that has no beginning, and so Existence is Everything, although about as unmeaningful as a Library of Babel of all possible books.

Sin is fun's evil twin.

If there is any logic that can be constructed — A Gnostic Agnostic

Never mind belief and the virtue of it or not, but rather let us get to a logic that undermines a belief in 'God'. Not a proof, mind you, but an undermining via probability, reason, and logic:

Probability for no ‘God’

0. Note: It is not a factor herein that the Biblical and thus necessarily fundamentalist ‘God’ has been demolished by evolutionary science and self-contradiction, for it still remains to size up what’s left.

1. All that we see goes from the simplest to the composite to the complex to the more complex, where we exist, which will continue into the future, where we can expect being higher than ourselves to become. The unlikely polar opposite of this is an ultra complex system of mind of a Designer 'God' being First as Fundamental, but systems have parts, this totally going against the fundamental arts.

2. (1) gets worse, given that there can be no input for any specific direction going into the Fundamental Eterne—the basis of all, this bedrock having to be causeless, having random effects, like those shown in quantum mechanics.

3. So, (2) indicates that there is no ultimate meaning, not that a built-in meaning would be great, for it would be restrictive, but at least, as ‘liberating’, there’s anything and everything possible that could become from the basic eternal state of not anything in particular—our present Earthly life path being one that is being lived now after 13.57 billion years, much of which can be accounted for.

4. On top of the preceding unlikelihoods, and given that obviously that no Designer made everything instantly, it is unlikely that all eventualities could have been foreseen by a Deity in starting a universe suitable for life. It more seems like we were fine-tuned to the Earth.

5. It’s more OK if the ‘God’ Deity is like a scientist who throws a bunch of stuff together that is balanced and energetically reactive enough but not too much so that it races along too fast, etc., but, again, really, what is a fully formed person-like being doing sitting around beforehand, this also being all the more of a quandary that enlarges the question rather than answering it. If life has to come from a Larger Life, then a regress ensues, making this not to be a good template. As for a Deity trying to put workable stuff together, this is much like the idea of a multiverse.

6. Even worse, existence has no alternative, given that nonexistence has no being as a source and that there is indeed something, and so existence is mandatory, there not being any choice to it. It's a given.

7. We see that the One of Totality continually transitions/transmutes, never being able to remain as anything particular, which matches its nature supposed due to no information being able to come into the Eternal in the first place that never was, for the One Fundamental Eterne has to be ungenerated and deathless.

8. Aside from the trivial definition of free will being that without coercion, that the will is free to operate, and the useless definition of the harmful random will equaling ‘freedom’, the deeper notion of ‘free’ as being original and free of the brain will is of a currency never being able to be stated and cashed in on, leaving ‘determined’ to continue to be the opposite of ‘undetermined’.

While eternalism can’t yet be told apart from presentism, the message from both is of a transient ‘now’, whether pre-determined or determined as it goes along. All hope is crushed, both for us and the Great Wheel having any potency. This is the great humility; all hubris is gone.

It is enough, then, that we have the benefit of experiencing and living life well, sometimes, more so given this modern age, although still with sweat, tears, and aversive substrates of emotions that those of the future might consider to be barbaric.

It doesn’t seem like a smart God’s world, and so fundamentalist literalist Biblical ‘reasons’ cannot apply here, for those went away already. The pride of being special and deserving of reward and avoiding punishment is a nice wish, though, for us electro-chemical-bio organisms who appear be be as organic as anything else that grows in nature.

9. God’s operations, curiously restricted to be the same as nature’s has us not being able to tell them apart from nature's, but which is more likely, the natural or the supernatural? Earth is where it ought to be, in the Goldilocks zone, not impossibly out near Neptune. And why must there be a distinct transcendent, immaterial, intangible, super realm when it would still have to give and take energy in the physical material language, talking its talk and walking its walk?

10. So, sit on a fence and go to church half the time or estimate the probability either way; there can be no blame for not knowing what can’t be shown for sure.

Let us have wine, lovers, song, and laughter—
Water, chastity, prayer the day after.
Such we’ll alternate the rest of our days—
Thus, on the average, we’ll make Hereafter!

idol worshipers — A Gnostic Agnostic

The idol house is as the mosque, a shrine.
And chime of striking bells service divine;
Gueber’s belt, church and rosary and cross,
Each is in truth of worshiping a sign.

I don’t much mind what Idol they adore,
Nor what structures all the more they implore;
But, when they state it all as truth and fact,
This misleads, at best, and’s dishonest more!

The ancients found themselves here of nowhere,
Yet to fathom earth, fire, water, and air,
Asking why life was not square, as unfair,
So invented the Bad Role Model’s Care.

They looked unto their calamities,
Their powerful rulers and enemies,
Toward their olden family structure’s way,
Of strict father, and mother with no say.

The Christian concept of reward and punishment
Handed out by an omnipotent, omniscient God,
Is derivative of the family experience,
The child and parent, a conception of our world.

This Father Notion they based on themselves,
As the best answer that was ever delved:
The demanding Male Mind who was called ‘God’,
An idea for some to this day, well trod.

Answers were needed for them to persist:
They extended the Notion with more myths
And legends into lore layered upon,
Inventing all the scrolls of scripture on.

‘God’ brought both fear and comfort in those days,
Making people better through fearsome ways,
Although worse for some—the unchosen tribes,
Protecting their notions, as taught by scribes.

A wasteland of superstition plod,
Instantiates a meaning for ‘God’.
Emotion e’er sets up a firm blockade
When thoughts fired more build a stockade.

A hundred trillion stars and countless shores
Were built to light their universal nights explored;
Forty million other lower species too, the All-Might
Placed about our world, merely for their delight!

A trillion lights shine through, of depths of the deep,
Stars afire, with us the souls from their keep.
Man oft spouts the ‘truth’ of a Creator,
As did proto-men, near the equator.

Scrolled into scripture, ‘God’ brought rapture,
Enough for sad hearts to wholly capture;
Yet, there can’t be First Complexity’s shove,
As there wasn’t such to make the Thing of.

There were various modifications,
Yet the Creator concept remained one;
But natural understandings progressed,
Leaping ahead of the dogmatical rest.

Thousands of years came to pass, in stories,
But then we solved much of the mystery,
Irrefutable now, as gone beyond—
Utterly not of God’s magical wand.

The basis is forever, no creation—
Energy being the primest potion,
And Entirety is seen that it can be
No way but than it is, eternally.

Claims of Revelation in Genesis
Of all of Nature’s species made, as is,
Have been demolished, obliterated,
By evolution and data liberated.

Nature finds no requirement for a ‘God’,
Growth naturally forming in the sod.
The organic ‘comes of the mud and slime,
Formed within billions of years of sweet time.

Not sure what you mean there — enqramot

It's 'merely' a summary of the derivation of the ultimate Theory of Everything, which would conclude with Totality/Existence being causeless. Yes, it's simple and almost boring, as not what was expected, but still the answer to the most often asked question.

Really? Wikipedia says they have a statue of him in Iran — TheMadFool

Yes, and a kind of a shrine/memorial, too. It's paradoxical or perhaps it's more for his other work.

What do you think the Rubaiyat, the only work of Khayyam I'm familiar with in a very superficial way, is about? — TheMadFool

It's about the human condition, pleasure, anti-Allah, and the suppression of reason and philosophy by the Islamics near and in 11th century Persia. It's the greatest poem in history in the exquisite form of it as transmogrified by Edward Fitzgerald in 115 quatrains, as the story of a day/life. See the first three videos for the quatrains.

Mid Afternoon at the OK Club—Part 2—On the ‘Now’



Ruby Yacht comes over to my table and introduces herself, “Ruby I am, as the color of wine, and I just sailed through the front door.”

“Happy to meet you; have a seat. Is it still snowing?”

“Yes, and it’s sticking, and it’s windy, and getting darker earlier now; but, at least we gained an hour by setting our clocks back.”

The weed flowers came, marking autumn’s track,
The blossoms that almost brought the spring back,
But winter’s white death wrap was drawn over,
Smothering the earth’s last warm sweet odour. 

Such then comes the end of summer’s dreams,
The blanching of the grassy banks of streams,
But all fragrances the elves remember
Through their sleep during the winter embers. 

“Oh, I’ll set mine back now; that will give us an hour!”

“It’s about time, and speaking of time, what makes for time’s rate of change, anyway?”

“It likely has to with how quickly the smallest monads at the Planck level can change, this rippling upward, which makes for information arriving at the finite speed of light, or less, depending on what else goes through changes higher and higher up, which then informs us, after going through our senses and brains.”

“So, we live behind the times?”

“Yes, slightly behind, from light's finite speed, but more so because the subconscious brain takes from 300-500 milliseconds to to do its neuronal analysis that culminates in conscious qualia as a unified result, along with continuity.”

“So, wow, that's a lot more behind; we live in the past.”

“Yes, it’s like a tape-delayed broadcast of the game of life, but our brains are fairly quick, due to parallel processing by different modules, such as example for vision for color, texture, intensity, direction, edges, semblances to memory objects, cross-associations, and much more.”

“But we still call our present as the ‘now’, as close enough?”

“Sure, as a psychological version of ‘now’, or whatever, it seeming to us what it always did, regardless of our scientific insight.”

“If in traffic we change lanes and pull in just behind a car, it’s lucky that the car is really slightly ahead of where we think it is.”

“Yes, true, but our own car is also slightly ahead of where we think it is. It evens out.”

“And if we switch lanes and pull in just ahead of a car?”

“That’s a bit more dangerous, maybe, but at least our car is really still a bit ahead of where we think it is.”

“I’m a would-be philosopher, Austin.”

“Good, and Omar’s ‘now’ can best be taken as enjoying and savoring the moment, never ignoring it or ruining it by too many mostly needless worries about the future fogging and clouding the present, even the virtual present past that we talked about not withstanding.”

“The other implication is that the universe does us!”

“Yes, you’ve hit on one of the more seemingly unpleasant truths at first, until we realize and accept that things could be no other way. Some people hate that one, regardless.”

“If I look at my watch at any given second, it stands to reason that the longest we’ll have to wait for the seconds digit to change with be one second, but, …”

“Sometimes 1.5 seconds will pass before the digit changes.”

“Aha, you’re up on this!”

“I’ve explored the ‘now’.”

“Wonderful.”

“In our ‘Hall of Now’, only the present tense can be spoken. I’ve been practicing this in all of these Club posts.”

“You did? I mean, you do?”

“Yes, I do."

"That's the longest sentence in the English language!"

"Ha, yes, marriage is not a word; it's a sentence."

"Twenty years to life!"

"A movie about time’s two possible modes is playing in the Hall now, with some Omar quotes at the end; it's called ‘Now Here — No Where’.”

“Ah, both of the same letters in a row. Or could be ‘Every Now — All Where’.”

“Yes, either. For all our science, we still don’t know time’s mode, whether there’s only now, with the past gone and the future not yet, per our intuition, called Presentism, or whether the past, now, and the future all exist right now and always, eternally, per Einstein and Parmenides and their Block Universe, called Eternalism. For all purposes, we're stuck in the present, either way, not being able to jump into the future or the past even if there is a long world-line along which we're traveling through the Block.”

?
There’s naught else but lone, resultant Nows.
No matter how one tries to shake from boughs
The fruits of time’s truth from the Tree of Knows,
Computation has not yet made the morrows.

Radical Islam isn't getting as far as it used to; drones take out the suspected night and day.

I always imagined a newspaper headline of 'Obama takes out Osama!'.

Abbottabad
(About a Bad)

The specter fled to Abottabad,
Having done a whole lotta bad,
His courier’s bin laden with what OBL had,
It being their way or no way—how sad.

No phone, internet, or even any trash
Was the giveaway to what the mansion hath,
And even in the nearby counter-terrorism’s path,
The Jihad of Evil courting the goodly wrath.

SEALs swept into the heart of the storm
Coptering into the hilltop’s guarding swarm,
In a foreign land, the tempest ID’d by the CIA,
And so the leader and his men live no more today.

A shot to the head and he was dead,
And to evil the end, as to all in his stead,
Whether clerics or just plain terror led.

The backup Chinook replaced the fallen stealth,
Perhaps too new of a aircraft to sustain its health.

Osama rules nothing now, as he’s not to be,
Rotting at the bottom of the Arabian sea.

It's when I contemplate evil, which I consider entirely human-made, that I'm left asking more and more questions. I never consider this issue from the standpoint of original sin or any other kind of origin of evil; I'm personally not concerned with origin in this case. — uncanni

Original Sin doesn't work out so well, anyway, as a blame, for 'God' would be fully responsible for creating a human nature that has His intended capabilities in it, for evil, good, and whatnot.

So, evil would have to be some necessity for us from 'God'/All. The 'freedom' given to humans would then have to be totally free of consequences from Him.

To sum it up: we just invented God that is like us: emotional, vengeful etc. , just because our limited imagination couldn't do better than that. Frankly, I think it's pitiful. — enqramot

We suspect as much, but this thread's OP ignores that kind of literal, Biblical 'God', since it is disproved by contradictions and science.

I think we should focus on practical matters and things that we are able to grasp. And accept, that some things remain unexplicable. At least for now. — enqramot

Still, it gets one to thinking about alternatives and what can and cannot coincide, philosophically, beyond the Person-Hood Mind aspect that gets abandoned, such as deriving Existence to be here all at once, as ever/eternal, and what that would further imply, as I've hinted earlier, such as it having to be an everything of no information content, as not anything in particular, for it seems to have no inputs of cause that can go into it, due to its no beginning, and so the effects would be as random.

Whence evil? — uncanni

Evil and all the kinds of ugliness of humans needs to be of the All/'God', for how could there be something independent and separate? Dismay follows. There are no longer many gods; so, we can't stick the evil onto just a few of them, as was done in the poly past.

Elohim — A Gnostic Agnostic

And also the children of God (El).

and this is how knowledge of good and evil is attained. — A Gnostic Agnostic

That seems like a jump, but I'll be darned, for all along I thought "good and evil" became of "God and Devil", or vice versa, rather than of reproductive organs.

Anagramming is the REAL Key to All

Hidden in the word ‘Evolution’ which as an anagram…
is the meaning
Outlive On
which means literally metaphorically to outlive the others,
in order to survive and live on, and
Vile No Out
Vile On Out
which symbolically means that we can go either way, vile or not, and
Live On Out
which the wise old ancients took to mean to live well and look alive, and
Evil No Out
Evil On Out
which the symbolic Bible reveals to have a mixture of good and ‘bad’ is best, and
Novel I Out
which is the story of evolution read to us by the fossils, and
Ovule In To
Love In Out
which means for man and woman to know each other
in the Biblical way to procreate and recreate, and, finally
Love I Unto
which proves beyond all doubt that
evolution = love.

In total, then, all the above really proves the great insight that…
letters can be rearranged.

It's in the vertebral column. No, wait, that's a design flaw. — S

Nor in the eye, for which design we'd flunk our engineering course.

There's a book I haven't had the time to read: Just six numbers by astronomer Martin Rees. — TheMadFool

THE MEADOWS OF HEAVEN

We as the highest consciousness ever known
And of the most versatile form that’s been shown
Reside as consequent beings in this Earthly realm,
Possibly the most fortuitous creatures
That the universe has ever wrought.

In fact,
We are this universe come to life—
Necessarily from a long line
Of ‘fortunate accidents’.

It had to be this way, for any universe
In which we could emerge
Would have to be appropriate for us
Or we wouldn’t be here to discuss it.

Looking back
We already know ahead of time
That we will discover
The many ‘happenings’
That made us possible.

All this we know and expect
Because we are here.

Perhaps in some other ‘wheres’,
Junkyard universes litter the omniscape,
For they flunked, failed, and miscarried—
A quadrillion trillion universes broken down
For every one that worked to any extent at all.

In some of these forlorn universes
Perhaps the material was inert
And so it just sat there, doing nothing, forever.

In others, maybe gravity was insufficient
Or had no natural place to collect particles
And so it thinned out endlessly,
Spreading coldly toward infinity.

In yet others again,
Even those in the same ballpark as ours,
Perhaps the portions weren’t quite right.
Although they may have formed a few elements,
They went no further than that for a zillion years.

It would also be that all the possibilities-probabilities
That are of so many imbalances must ever trace back
To the near balance of matter and antimatter,
This start no longer seen as improbable.

In our universe the dark chest of wonders
Of Possibility and Probability opened up
In just the just right way:

Naked quarks spewed forth,
Among other things,
And boiled and brewed
In one of the steamiest broths
Ever cooked up.

They somehow simmered and combined
Into the ordinary matter
Of protons and neutrons.

Then quite independently,
By some unknown means,
Dark matter-energy arose as well,
In just the right mix, and, luckily too
Some very long filaments,
Called cosmic strings,
Formed and survived long enough
To be useful as collection agents,
Which were merely imperfections,
As in an unevenly freezing pond—
A kind of a cooling flaw.

None of these happenings were connected,
Except by Potential’s destiny,
So, ‘fortunately’,
The cosmic strings attracted,
By their gravity,
Both dark and ordinary matter,
Which in turn
Attracted even more of the same.

These pearls of embryonic galaxies arose
And were strung along these cosmic necklaces,
As can still be noted today.

So it was
That some almost incidental irregularities,
Frozen out as cosmic anchors,
Were latched onto by matter, both light and dark,
The proportionate portions of which were favorable,
The dark matter dwarfing our ordinary matter
For some reason of a happy ‘circumstance’.

‘Fortuitously’, as well,
Anti-matter, if there ever was any,
Did not fully cancel out the uncle-matter.

The universe could not foresee any of this
In and of itself’s fundamental substance(s),
For if it could have
Then we’d only have the larger problem
Of how the foreseer could have been foreseen,
Ad infinitum…

So it could have been like the ‘trying out’
Of all possibilities in superposition…
A brute force happening
Of every path gone down.

We know much of the rest of the story
Of how the stars and their supernovae
Created the light and heavy elements
Which combined into molecules,
Which ‘auspiciously’
Became able to replicate themselves, as DNA,
And progress to make cells, tissues, and life.

And then there was the luck of oxygen,
A mere waste product of photosynthesis
By bacteria, and later, plants,
That could fill the lungs
As well as build an ozone layer of protection
From the harmful rays of outer space.

Luck on top of luck, good fortune,
And then prosperity…
‘Stumbled along’ the right path.

Of course all this took many billions of years—
And it is of course this long ‘yardstick’
That baffles the mind and sticks in the throat,
But demonstrates the long time lag needed
To produce even the tiniest of advances.

It bears all the hallmarks
Of ‘randomness’ at work,
Although probable
If Potential had it all ‘worked out’.

Dinosaurs roamed the Earth
For over two hundred million years—
Imagine the length of that time.

They were supreme and invincible—
The kings of all the Earth ‘forever’,
On land, sea, and even in the air—
Heading towards forevermore and beyond,
But…

Dame Fortune once again intervened
When the asteroids or some such catastrophe
Finished off the dinosaurs,
As well as 90% of the existing species.

This ‘random’ event left a vacuum
In which newer species could thrive.

Proto-man gave way to near-man
And thence to us, eventually,
When two ‘monkey’ chromosomes fused together,
Making ‘us’ incompatible with the chimps,
And so our ancestors then
Truly descended from the trees!

‘You’ were once a lucky shrew, darting all about,
But then attached to a favorable evolutionary line…
Every single one of your forbears on both sides
Being attractive enough to locate a loving mate,
And they fortunately had the good health to celebrate!

We came to need no specialized niches,
Since we could adapt to any terrain,
Having brains that could learn much more
After birth than instinct could bestow before.

Our higher consciousness
Was the crowning glory—
We had won the human race—
The be all and end all; the grand prize
Of the universal lottery.

So there is nothing more,
Aside from our own progress
To be and learn.
This is it!
That’s all there is.

DNA remembers every step of our evolution—
And you can see this in ‘fast’ motion
When embryos form simply in the liquid womb,
Replicate, and then grow cells
That diversify into a human being
After going through some nonhuman stages.

Thus four billion years compresses into
The nine months of pregnancy.

So then hail and good fortune,
Fine fellows and ladies,
And welcome all of you
To the Meadows of Heaven—
The highest point of all being,
Although we are surely
Still in our infancy.

The path “chosen” by Potential ends here,
With our consciousness.

There were many pockets of universes,
And it is was this very one
That could sing our verses.

The further design
And the role of mankind
Is now in our hands.

We were borne here upon the shoulders
Of so many who have long since come and gone,
All of them advancing the cause,
Over eons of wiles—so here we are.

Hail and good fortune, fine fellows and ladies;
Welcome, all of you, to the Meadows of Heaven;
We are the luckiest sons and daughters of being—
Mediums in a rare universe well done.

Celebrate; live; be,
For everyone dies,
But not everyone lives.



Now thou art in Heaven…

I assumed that Everything was God; I thought we came to that conclusion--at least, I had. — uncanni

Yes, since what 'is', as ever, is all there is, and so, as @rlcauler says better, it has to transmute into forms of itself, heresy or not, and so this is what logically has to be, as the new common ground of 'God' or 'IS'.

A nun wonders, about a philosopher of old,

“I have read in your flowing ancient tome
That a man’s mind is God in human form
Though it does admit this idea is rough
And might not with normal logic conform.
 
“So, like you and me, mind and God unite
Just as the sun is connected to light.

“What’s here now has to be as that long before,
Not new out of the blue, for there is no more;
So we and all are akin to what is,
Ne’er less—we're united beyond the door.”

"Oh, thou, that olden wise man, come here fast,
For you're alive in that keep of the past."

The Ancient soon arrives, full of energy.
‘Hail to the All, philosophical clergy.
I’ve read your poems’ presents to the forum.
I a-rose from death, from fumes down the stems.’

The young nun now caught in the light that shined,
Stilled her racing heart and then searched her mind
For questions fit for resurrected Guides
To ask the Apparition by her side.
 
She hoped that in some miraculous ways
Her monk was included in the man's gaze
But fearing that she might be all alone
She would address the man in trembling tone.

“I’m seeing,” said her monk, “his spectral form.
He’s moving, by Something, out of his norm.
We’ve stirred him from the underground city—
Of unity in multiplicity.”
 
"Great spirit, I have lately read your words
And have some questions you might find absurd
My abiding wish is to understand
And beg your patience with my learning bland."

The spirit then turned as the world stood hushed,
Regarded the nun with her young face flushed,
‘Your quest and your love are both holy pure
And deserve answers you are seeking for.
 
‘All must at last to itself return One,
When each age of long existence is done.
Matter exists by reconstitution
And existence works by revolution.
 
‘The One splits and breaks to diversity,
So becoming the All that you can see.
Humanity, twixt their birth and their death,
Is the turning point of His Holy Breath.
 
‘All matter is chains of numbers composed,
Built into each entity’s science code.
That’s how Life keeps order within the change,
As One to All simply builds and erodes.
 
‘This is the message so plain and so clear
That you two this day are given to hear.'

…

…

Relations among basic events, or ‘ontological atoms’, can be the basis from which substantival spacetime emerges, in a similar way to how things emerge from spacetime events.

Change of space-time would require an extra dimension not included in space-time. This, in turn, would imply that space-time is a thing with an emergent relational property that should be measured by the extra dimension or ‘meta-time’. There is no physical reason to introduce such an ontology. And if someone is willing to pay the price to do it, an infinite regress follows immediately, since the 5D ‘super space-time’ might change requiring more extra dimensions ontological inflation would turn the price unaffordable.

The representation of spacetime appears, therefore, as the large number limit of an ontology of basic timeless and spaceless events that can be identified only at a more basic ontological level.

Composition leads to a hierarchy of events, with basic events on the lower level and increasing complexity towards higher levels. Reality seems to be organized into levels, each one differentiated by qualitative, emerging properties. Higher levels have processes and things with some properties belonging to lower levels in addition to specific ones.

At some point of this hierarchy of events, things can be introduced as classes abstracted from large number of events (see Romero 2013a for formal definitions). A thing-based ontology allows a simplification in the description of the higher levels of organisation of what is, essentially, an event ontology. Spacetime is then an emerging thing from the collection of all events.

Event substantialism regarding spacetime does not preclude relationism at a more basic level. Relations among basic events, or ‘ontological atoms’, can be the basis from which substantival spacetime emerges, in a similar way to how things emerge from spacetime events.

If we want to represent events at very small scale, the assumption of compactness must be abandoned. The reason is that any accumulation point implies an infinite energy density, since events have finite (but not arbitrarily small) energy, and energy is an additive property. In other words, spacetime must be discrete at the smallest scale.

Since the quantum of action is given by the Planck constant, it is a reasonable hypothesis to assume that the atomic events occur at the Planck scale. If there are atomic events, their association would give rise to composed events (i.e. processes), and then to the continuum spacetime, which would be a large-scale emergent entity, absent at the more basic ontological level. This is similar to, for instance, considering the mind as a collection of complex processes of the brain, emerging from arrays of ‘mindless’ neurons.

If we were meant to be naked, 'God' would have made us that way, um, which supposedly He did, but now, with our fig clothes, we don't get used to nakedness, and then come to see it as bland, but can ever wonder what's underneath, getting attracted by the jiggles and shape.

I seems that Mother Nature went way overboard to insure offspring, but I'll take it. And to think that even in the early 1900s swimsuits had to cover everything. Men also went nutty over petticoats then and earlier.

We can't know ecstasy and joy and love without knowing depression, fear and frustration. Amen. — uncanni

And:

If we were angels, life would be so just;
Instead, we try, we push, we climb, we lust,
We dance, we dream, we feel, and love with zest;
Yes, all this, thanks to the beast within us!

They're both good, for Heraclitus promotes presentism and Parmenides promotes eternalism.

Heraclitus' fire as the basis of all is akin to energy. His balance of opposites could be seen today as analogous to virtual particle pairs and the other balances in nature.

Do you know about kanneh bosm in the Old Testament? Cannabis!! Humans' very best friend in the flora kingdom. — uncanni

No, I didn't know. No wonder Sodom and Gomorrah turned to stone!

Oh, Olongapo, fleshpot of fertile flora,
Pinatubo reseals your box pandora.
Fiery ash freezes your beauty in time,
A poem in stone, like Sodom and Gomorrah.

We can't know ecstasy and joy and love without knowing depression, fear and frustration. Amen. — uncanni

Similar, and like Keats' notion:

Truth & Beauty

Life’s hardships can be softened by beauty;
Its weaknesses can be strengthened by truth.
As roses blossom like realizations,
Beauty itself blooms from the well of truth.

When a deep truth is known so intensely
That all of its clothing falls away,
Then one has learned the beauty of truth, for
The reality of meaning is beauty.

Life, although anguishing, must be lived fully;
But if we’re alive enough to feel beauty,
Then we’re exposed to its opposite twin
Yes, Beauty’s other side is Melancholy.

When sadness brooded over the morrow,
I visited the deep well of sorrow.
There enshrined, inseparate, Beauty said,
It’s from me that sadness you borrow.

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

Soft breezes blow, caressing me and you
As we kiss the roses and drink their dew.
Reason and passion soon merge into one,
As truth and beauty make their rendezvous.

A 2 dimensional person can be trapped inside a closed square but, according to how I understand it, a 3 dimensional being can just jump over the sides of the square. In other words impossibility is relative. — TheMadFool

This is good, as a circle perpendicular to the 2D square, like a rainbow.

Here is my 4-sided circle: O.

Sides one and two are the inside and the outside; sides three and four are the perpendicular top side and bottom side.

I also made an infinitely sided polygon circle: O.

What an amazing poem; who wrote it? — uncanni

I wrote it. It's the intro portion of a much longer poem, 'Flora Symbolica', about the lore and legends of the flowers and plants. I'll have to figure where to put the rest of it out—perhaps I'll put it in my 'Omar Khayyam' thread. It's one of my favorite long poems that sustains one subject.

Back to the outputs we go. — schopenhauer1

All that we have left of note is experience, if that's a benefit.

A current book by Rovelli (the Order of Time) underscores Bohr's view with the phrase 'things are just repetitive events.
This proposed 'relativity of existence' seems to me to render most philosophical discussion of 'ontology' to be what Wittgenstein called Geschwätz (idle chatter).
Any thoughts ? — fresco

Long thread, but a clear OP to be directly spoken to.

Strictly speaking, no objects are identical with themselves over time. 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.

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

What if the Mind isn't a part, but the totality of the First and Fundamental Being? — uncanni

Then we are all made of God-stuff, as the atman in the Brahman.

Or, without God's Mind, we are all made of the base existence.

All that 'is' already is, complete.

Mid Afternoon at the OK Club—Part 1—Old Autumn



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.


Ice winds stalk the weed flowers,
The ghosts frosting the dead stalks,
Snow crystals barring all that grows.

Winter is life cooled over;
Melting snows feed spring waters.

Scheherazade appears a bit early for our rendezvous, saying, “It’s snowing on the dome over Paradise; come, let’s go in now and see.”

When we return, floating on clouds, we create a film in honor of Old Autumn and the two Jacks, in which also one's older self encounters one’s younger self, and vice-versa:


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.

This year Old Autumn was a little late,
So Jack-in-the-Green sat down on a stump.

Jack pondered his disappearing green youth,
For someday he would have to take Autumn’s place
And perform all of his withering tasks.

A few days later Old Autumn came by;
He gave unto Jack a cheery greeting
And a warm embrace that marked summer’s end.

He gazed fondly at Jack, his younger self,
And saw the vitality that was once his,
And said, “Once I was young; once I was you!”

“I know,” said Jack, “Do you remember how
I refused to believe you, saying ‘no’?”

“Yes,” remembered Old Autumn, “very well,
Like the time I met the Old Man, Winter
On a snowy December day long ago.
He told me that he was my older self—
But I didn’t believe him! Told him off!

“True, I was already feeling my age
But after seeing the old white-haired geezer
I felt young again! Yes, he knew me well.”

“Right,” said Jack, “so I made a little poem:

“When younger, I knew not my elder same,
But when older I told my younger same
That youth must be young; he knew not my name!
It was my younger self who was to blame!”

Swallows twittered in the skies as sprightly
Jack-in-the-Green picked a ripening gourd
And gave it to Old Autumn, who encouraged,
“You won’t have to meet the Old Man until
You take my place, for only I can see him,
After I take down the last of the oak leaves.

“For now, the Old Man sends but his errand boy,
Jack Frost, your twin brother. Hi ho, here he comes!
Aye, young Jack, this is the rarest of days,
For the three of us can be together
But once a year on this bright day / cool night.”

“The Old Man is so lonely, is he not?”
Asked Jack-in-the-Green, “for he sees only you.”

“Yes. Old Man Winter lives cold and alone;
He never sees the fair maidens of spring
Who reinvent the natural world each year.”

There is a chill in the air as Jack Frost arrives
And sings out a greeting: “Hello my brother!
Hello Old Autumn! It’s going to be cold—
Our first frost, but don’t worry too much—
It won’t harm the pumpkins any at all.”

Old Autumn sighed and quick replied: “Good.
Now the rest of the leaves will crack and fall
All the more due to the ice in their veins;

“Yes, they’ll fall like the illusions of youth,
‘Lying carelessly on the granary floor’ and
‘On a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies’, as Keats wrote.”

Composing himself, Old Autumn continued:
“And for those of you who think that ‘warm days
Will never cease’, let us ever remember
Dear Johnny Keats, who died so young, at 25;
However, he lived and saw more than some
Of us might hope to do in a lifetime.”

A shiver ran through Jack-in-the-Green,
Hence he said: “It’s cold; I must go now, for
Summer passed away in his sleep last night;

“Autumn, sweet and plump, carries his offspring.
The year dies in the night; ghostly winter looms;
Lo; the flower is already in the seed.”

“Well done, young Jack-in-the-Green; quick, go,
For soon enough comes your autumn of care
Sobering into age, thence into
The pale white winter of death,

“Though not yet your warm indolent summer
Of contentment lazing into middle-age,
But surely past is our crisp,
Flowering youth-spring of joy!

“Such then, comes the end of summer’s dreams,
The blanching of the grassy banks of streams,
But all fragrances my elves remember
Through their long sleep in the winter embers.

“The blossoms fall, showers of fragrant beauty,
As leaves fade, while the bulbs store up energy.
Nature’s floral dreams grant this destiny,
For these leavings enrich earth’s potpourri.

“Flowers lay their heads to sleep in soft beds,
Blanketed by webs of gossamer threads;
My elfin creatures cast their spectral glow,
As winter stars—floral twins—start to grow.

“Later, when surely all the world is dead,
An elf will stand atop Old Winter’s grave
And say, ‘tis not dead’, and by magic bred
Make Snowdrops flower in the tomb’s heat wave.”

Once I, the author, ventured outside at
Four on a dark frosty October morning.
It was so quiet that I could sense the
Cosmos as it played rhythm to my beating heart.

I saw a preview of the winter stars:
Orion, you are so high in the sky—
There for only the astronomer’s eye,
As all those meteors go flying by.

Then I heard a rustling sound in the leaves
Around me—a skunk perhaps—but no,
It was the sound of many falling leaves.
I knew that it must be him, Old Autumn.

He was out there somewhere. Then I sensed him
Going by, for some of the leaves on the
Tree right in front of me broke loose and
Floated away, hitting some other leaves
On the way down, making that rustling sound.


Soon it started up on the next tree, and
Then the next—and so I could very well
Follow the path of Old Autumn making
His rounds in the misty October morn.

Chrysanthemums drank the mellow day,
Falling petals carried the light away.

The weed-flowers grew, marking autumn’s track,
The blossoms that almost brought the spring back,
But winter’s white death wrap was drawn over,
Smothering the earth’s last warm sweet odour.

The autumn fog enswirled, the mist upcurled;
Into nothingness the wisp slow unfurled.
November flew by, a colorless dearth,
And December, amid death, a festive birth.

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.

Long since have the winds scattered the leaves
Of the trees to make of them a
Burial shroud for the flowers that died
Grieving at summer’s passing. All is death.

The fall is now nearly lost to memory.
Winter is summer’s ungrateful heir,
Squandering his riches and abusing his gifts.
It’s not Old Man Winter’s fault, but his duty.

Summer lies underground now, forgotten,
Silent and crusty, covered by winter’s
Stern mantle. Only April’s tears can make
His grave green again, in the spring-tide.

As seasons pass, the world comes to our door:
Spring sings through the wingèd troubadour;
Summer calls with the rose, ’midst the wood-lore;
Autumn crows, plump and sweet, through frosty hoar.

Joy and exuberance are spring’s largesse.
Sunlight, warmth, and growth are summer’s bequest.
Autumn brings wealth with the mellow harvest.
Winter’s fruit is peace—its bounty is rest.

Past us is the flower of spring’s soft breath;
Though not ended our summer of promise;
Soon enough will come the autumn of care;
Beheld, at last, the dull white shroud of death!

March, April! spring! We’ll reign as we May there,
Between June and her sister, September,
Then prolong the fall, till November come
December, when we can sweet Remember.

In the whisperings of the after-years
The winds of time slowly dry the tears;
Nor would I take back a single drop, for
From those tears the flowers grew without fears.

In spring we rise from the garden at birth.
Summer blooms long with the roses’ fresh mirth.
Autumn creeps in—we wither on the vine.
Last comes winter, when we return to earth.