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Written by David Cowles, Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today magazine and explores short, profound thoughts and discoveries about theology, science, philosophy, literature, the arts, society, and prayer. Subscribe today for FREE! Enter your email address here: Subscribe now! Thanks for submitting! Nov 23, 2025 The Limits of Power “Civil laws derive their binding force, neither from the Divine Right of Kings, nor from the Consent of the Governed…” Read More Nov 19, 2025 Time Crystals and Pepperland “The Beatles’ Pepperland could have been considered mere fantasy; then along came…Rondeau Time Crystals.” Read More Nov 17, 2025 Freedom and Time Crystals “Freedom is absolute within the parameters imposed by the topology of the cosmos.” Read More Nov 13, 2025 Time Crystals and Creation “A team of scientists has created a physical entity that duplicates the logic and mechanics of creation. They have provided Proof of Concept for Biblical cosmology.” Read More Nov 12, 2025 Why I Can't Beat a Monkey “So much for all the hours I ‘wasted’ watching games, live and on rerun! I would have been better off wading through a swamp...” Read More Nov 10, 2025 Moses - The Story of Everyone “The story of Moses is the story of one man, but it is also the story of the Hebrew nation, the Middle East, and human civilization.” Read More Nov 7, 2025 In Defense of Miracles “Don’t believe in miracles? No problem. You’re a nihilist. Be proud. But… how do you account for events?” Read More Nov 6, 2025 Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat “Jacob’s gift of a robe is symbolic of Joseph’s special status in the ancient line of mystical succession.” Read More Nov 3, 2025 Universal Theocracy “The King (ruler) is responsible only to the people and the people are responsible only to God!” Read More Oct 29, 2025 Descartes “To be conscious is to be aware of being oneself and to be aware of being oneself is to be aware of oneself as a potential object of another’s awareness.” Read More Oct 29, 2025 It's All About Job “Is the Good good because God wills it or does God will Good because he’s God? Thanks to Job, now we know!” Read More Oct 29, 2025 Navigating Ethics “Are there Values…that apply to everyone, everywhere, in every circumstance and in every possible universe?” Read More Thoughts While Shaving 36 Page 1

< Back The Limits of Power David Cowles Nov 23, 2025 “Civil laws derive their binding force, neither from the Divine Right of Kings, nor from the Consent of the Governed…” On November 19, 2025, a handful of Democratic lawmakers released a video urging members of America’s military to defy orders that conflict with their sworn duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution. Not unexpectedly, the video has triggered a political tsunami with some commentators labelling it as seditious and calling for arrest and prosecution, including the death penalty, for its creators and distributors. It is worth reproducing the text in full: "We know this is a time of incredible stress for all of you. An administration is purposefully manufacturing a conflict between you and the American people. We know you took an oath to protect the Constitution of the United States. We took that same oath. We want to remind you that your oath is not to a president, a political party, or a person. Your oath is to the Constitution. “The threats against our Constitution are now domestic. You can refuse illegal orders. You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders. No one is required to follow an order that is in violation of the law or the Constitution. To all of you in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, Space Force, and within the intelligence community and law enforcement, we need you to be vigilant. And we support you. You swore an oath. Keep it to uphold the laws of this country and the Constitution. We are counting on you." Wow! Regardless of your opinion of this particular video, “Wow!” But it is essential to view this in the context of a millennia old debate on the limits of political power. Our story begins 3250 years ago, immediately following the Hebrews’ Exodus from Egypt. The newly liberated ‘slaves’ had no tradition or training in statecraft. They spent the next 40 years wandering Sinai working out a code of laws and an infrastructure for the execution and enforcement of those laws. These 40 years constitute what is perhaps the first, and certainly the best known, iteration of Rousseau’s famous state of nature . Interestingly, the resulting Old Testament documents, the so-called Pentateuch , make no mention of a ‘state’ in the modern sense of the word. It was understood that any legitimate social order needed to be fundamentally theocratic . The Book of Judges chronicles the quarter-millennium between the death of Moses’ successor, Joshua, and the coronation of King Saul. It repeats four times the anarchist meme: “In those days Israel had no king. Everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” (Judges 17:6, 18:1, 19:1, 21:25) But 250 years of relative peace and prosperity were not enough for the restless Israelites. Like people everywhere, they longed for power…and riches (“other people’s money” – Danny DeVito). They were not content to live in peace with their neighbors; they had to dominate them. Parenthesis : Can anyone think of any more recent instance(s) of a nation, born pursuing freedom from imperialism, eventually imposing its own version of imperialism on others? But back to 1000 BCE. The last legit judge, Samuel, warned the Israelites against the institution of monarchy: “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. 12 Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. “He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves.” (1 Samuel 8: 11 – 17) To no avail. First came Saul, then came David and Solomon, followed by a succession of monarchs characterized, shall we say, by ‘uneven quality and virtue’. 400 years later, it was Israel that was conquered and its most prominent citizens enslaved (in Babylon). A millennium after Samuel, Jesus’ tormentors fell back on the same ancient dichotomy in an effort to catch him out: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?” Knowing that a simple yes or no answer would expose him to either Roman or Jewish law, Jesus came up with the enigmatic meme, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” (Matthew 22:21) Almost immediately, this became the touchstone of Christian civil philosophy, and it remains so today. Of course, its genius lies precisely in the fact that no one knows exactly what it means! As stated, it’s hard to imagine anyone, from Bakunin to Putin, disagreeing; but it begs the question, “What is Caesar’s?” Fast forward 1200 years to Thomas Aquinas, the thousand petal lotus of medieval philosophy: “Human law is only law by virtue of its accordance with right reason; and it is thus manifest that it flows from the eternal law. And in so far as it deviates from right reason it is called an unjust law; in such cases it is no law at all, but rather a species of violence .” God 1, Caesar 0! But 400 years after that, King James the First of England, perhaps channeling Pontius Pilate, reversed course, conflating God with Caesar. “Kings are not only God's lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods... Kings are justly called Gods, for they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth. For if you will consider the attributes to God, you shall see how they agree in the person of a king…God hath power to create, or destroy, make or unmake at his pleasure, to give life or send death, to judge all, and to be judged nor accountable to none…And the like power have Kings...(to) make of their subjects like men at the chess, pawn to take a bishop or a knight…” James’ words are well chosen. Using a chess analogy he slyly turns the spotlight on the clergy and the nobility as the ultimate threats to royal hegemony and he emphasizes the role of the ‘commoner’ (pawn) in bolstering the monarchy. James is following a playbook familiar to us all: demonize the 1% and convince the 99% that the 1% is to blame for their ‘wretched lives’ and that it is an all-powerful central government, the monarch, that will come to their aid. James, and centuries of politicians after him, turned Samuel inside out. Lenin, Mussolini, Peron, et al. made their marks by appearing to champion the cause of the 99 against the 1. Consensus : They created a new 1% to exploit the old 1%...and the remaining 98%. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” ( The Who ) God 0, Caesar 1! Concluding James: “As to dispute what God may do is blasphemy, so is it sedition in subjects to dispute what a king may do…” James has brilliantly articulated the doctrine known as the Divine Right of Kings . As a child attending a parochial school (RCC) in the US in the 50’s, it was James’ version of political philosophy we were taught, not Samuel’s or Aquinas’. But the final word on the subject came just 125 years ago years from the chair of Pope Leo XIII: “ All public power must proceed from God, for God alone is the true and supreme Lord of the world. Everything, without exception , must be subject to Him and serve Him, so that whosoever holds the right to govern holds it from one sole and single source, namely God, the sovereign ruler of all. (ID #3 , see below.) “Whatever be the nature of government, rulers must bear in mind that God is the paramount ruler of the world and must set Him before themselves in the administration of the State. (ID #4 ) “If the will of rulers is opposed to the will and the laws of God, they themselves exceed the bounds of their own authority and pervert justice; nor can their authority then be valid, which, when there is not justice, is null.” (D #15 ) “Civil laws…so long as they are just, derive from the law of nature their binding force (RN #11 )… Laws bind only when they are in accordance with right reason and, hence , with the eternal law of God.” (RN #52 ) Civil laws derive their binding force, neither from the Divine Right of Kings (James), nor from the Consent of the Governed (Locke, et al.), not even from the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Marx, Lenin, Mao). Civil laws derive their binding force, when they do, by compatibility with the Law of God ( aka Torah, Written & Oral, Right Reason and Natural Law). God > Ceasar! after all. D = Diuturnum , 1881 ID = Immortale Dei , 1885 RN = Rerum Novarum , 1891 *** The Oath of the Horatii shows three Roman brothers extending their arms toward their father as they swear to fight to the death for their city, embodying total devotion to civic duty. David contrasts their rigid, masculine resolve with the grief-stricken women nearby, whose family ties guarantee tragedy regardless of the battle’s outcome. The painting ultimately portrays the moral tension between public obligation and private suffering, highlighting the heavy sacrifices demanded by honor and leadership. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Time Crystals and Pepperland David Cowles Nov 19, 2025 “The Beatles’ Pepperland could have been considered mere fantasy; then along came…Rondeau Time Crystals.” The plot of the Beatles’ iconic movie, Yellow Submarine , relies on a cosmology that has only just now (October 14, 2025) been found to be operational IRW. Previously, the Beatles’ Pepperland could have been considered mere fantasy. Then along came Leo Joon Il Moon & team ( Nature Physics ) with their discovery of Rondeau Time Crystals . Remember the film? The Beatles are living lonely and unsatisfied lives in Liverpool. Like Eleanor Rigby, they are prepared to “lie alone in their grave(s).” They know nothing of an alternate reality known as Pepperland . Well actually, they know all about Pepperland … they just don’t know that they know (“a bit like you and me”). Ringo is being Ringo on a rainy Thursday morning when he finds himself pursued by something unexpected: a yellow submarine, captained by a newly commissioned, superannuated admiral, paradoxically known as Young Fred . Bottom line : There’s trouble in Pepperland and only the Beatles can help. But it’s a tall order. To reach their destination, the Fab Four, Young Fred, and an over-educated hitchhiker (JHB PhD) they pick up along the way, must cross their version of Ginnungagap (the ‘Gap’), a chaotic hole in the well-ordered fabric of the Old Norse cosmos . According to Snorri Sturluson of Iceland , compiler-author of the Prose Edda (c. 1220 CE), “It was at the beginning of time, when nothing was; sand was not, nor sea, nor cool waves. Earth did not exist, nor heaven on high. The mighty gap ( Ginnungagap ) was, but no growth… Sparks from Muspell and icy rime from Niflheim spilled over into the ‘gap’ and formed a vapor…There was a quickening from these flowing drops due to the power of the source of the heat, and it became the form of a man…” As in Genesis (“ the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters” 1: 2 ), the Norse Creation Myth begins with chaos and ends with human beings (a humanoid in the Edda ). But how do you portray primal chaos on a movie screen? The creators of Yellow Submarine came up with an ingenious solution: They distilled ‘the gap’ into a series of constituent branes (or ‘seas’) each constituting a virtual world of potential entities. The result is a succession of ‘seas’ (Seas of Time and Space, Monsters and Minds, et al.), ending in a sea of ‘negative being’, the Sea of Holes, and a monotone sea of pure potential, the Sea of Green. Taken together, these branes function as a series of ‘filters’ that, superimposed, yield an end product that captures the chaos of Genesis and the Edda . But the ‘chaotic uber-sea’ is not untethered: it begins at the Pier in Liverpool and ends on the monochrome plane at the entrance to Pepperland . Now a series of events ends with the restoration of order in Pepperland and the conversion of the Blue Meanies, a race of hominoid miscreants terrorizing Paradise . But that is secondary! The essential event in this segment is the Beatles’ recognition that they are and always have been co-located : ‘musical mops’ in Liverpool, a ‘trim and tidy’ bandmates in Pepperland . In Remembrance of Things Past , Marcel Proust describes his own realization of co-location. For Proust, it was the tactile feel of cobblestones that stimulated awareness. For the Beatles, it is music. Turns out, music is the universal language: it means the same thing in Liverpool, Pepperland , and everywhere in between. Cute story but just a story, right? So wrong! You might have gotten away with such fuzzy thinking back in 2024…but not in 2025! Not now that we know what we know about Rondeau Time Crystals . To understand what’s happening we first need to understand ‘ordinary’ Time Crystals . Here patterns repeat across time , forming a regular, repeating cycle that returns ‘home’, i.e. to its original position, over and over again, without any input of energy or any output of heat (entropy). Time as we know it is effectively frozen. Yes, Jim Croce, you can put time in a bottle! Fascinating as this idea is, its applications are limited. The cyclical progression in an ordinary time crystal is completely deterministic. Therefore, it is a poor model for most real world phenomena – i.e. any phenomena that include a random or an intentional (free will) element. Rondeau to the rescue! Time crystals of this newly discovered type include an element of indetermination, i.e. chaos, in their constitution. As in Norse Mythology, there is a chaotic ‘gap’ separating two ordered bookends (call them Alpha and Omega, Muspell and Niflheim , or Liverpool and Pepperland ). The strange, fecund, and highly entertaining seas separating Alpha and Omega have been specially chosen to culminate in negation and chaos, void (Sea of Holes) and monotony (Sea of Green). However, each sea has its own logos , its own unique rules of order, and those logoi build on each other. Within each brane, there is the capacity to encode information (order). But in the end, these branes are like the sets and scenes in Shakespeare’s Tempest : “… Our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air; and—like the baseless fabric of this vision— the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.” Welcome to “Nowhere Land” and the featureless Sea of Green. Why choose green for the monotone? Perhaps because it is the color of spring, of new life, of the slime from which we all sprang. It symbolizes Aristotle’s pure potentia . And what of the sub itself? It is the insubstantial (ever mobile) medium linking the potentially ordered states of Liverpool and Pepperland across the chaotic Gap. It is the ‘bridge over troubled waters’ (chaos), the virtual link between Ringo’s Pier and Khan’s Pleasure-dome . It is the Milky Way linking Earth to the stars; it is Kermit’s rainbow and Dorothy’s Yellow Brick Road. In Judeo-Christian terms, it is Torah, Covenant, Eucharist, and Church. Fundamentally, it is the superposition of what was, what is, and what is to come. It is eternal Presence, per se . *** Van Gogh’s Die Zugbrücke depicts a quiet rural drawbridge near Arles, where bright sunlight, clear skies, and strong, rhythmic brushstrokes create a vivid sense of movement and everyday life. The painting emphasizes the connection between people and their landscape, turning an ordinary bridge into a scene of harmony, color, and human activity. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Freedom and Time Crystals David Cowles Nov 17, 2025 “Freedom is absolute within the parameters imposed by the topology of the cosmos.” How can anyone talk about ‘free will’ when events seem to follow one another in a certain lock step we call causality? “Everything has a cause; actions have consequences.” How can anyone be free in a world where the course of events is determined by inexorable laws (aka physics)? This question was, in my view, conclusively settled forever ago, i.e. back in the 20th century. A French novelist, Marcel Proust, a German scientist, Werner Heisenberg, a French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, and a Butterfly from Borneo each made an essential contribution to the solution. Heisenberg demonstrated that the world is not ‘determined’ after all. A system can only be deterministic if every element has precise values, e.g. position and momentum, at each moment of time (T): “Where am I and where am I going?” This assumption seemed too obvious to question in the context of Newton’s world, but Heisenberg proved that it cannot be the case in any world governed by Quantum Mechanics. The more precise the position of an entity, the less precise its momentum…and vice versa. Therefore, determinism is incompatible with Being as we know it. But there is an even deeper problem. Being is Process and Process requires multiplicity. To quote Buckminster Fuller, “The universe is plural and at minimum two.” If the universe were determined then the universe would function as a single entity, which means it could not act ( or be ). Determinism (like quiet Laplace) is just nihilism all dressed up with nowhere to go. Enter Jean-Paul Sartre with a brand new model of freedom . Well, not that new! Turns out, consciously or not, Sartre was channeling Pope Leo XIII . Freedom is absolute! What we do is neither caused nor even influenced by anything else. In the language of the Scholastics, every human event is sui generis and causa sui , i.e. a manifestation of perfect freedom. Sartre: “Man is free. Man is freedom…… Man is nothing other than his own projects… There is no difference between free being – being as a project, being as existence choosing its own essence – and absolute being… Life is nothing until it is lived, it is we who give it meaning, and value is nothing more than the meaning we give it. ” ( Existentialism is a Humanism ) Every agent (e.g. me) is free to do anything at any time and my trying to ‘explain’ my actions based on something in my past is classic bad faith : “I was overserved, poorly parented, born posh.” I might just as well say, “The devil made me do it.” In fact, I did it and I did it freely. I am totally responsible. But if I am totally free, why then can’t I leap tall buildings in a single bound? Well, I’m welcome to try. Neither my age, nor my weight, nor the pesky force of gravity compromises my freedom . But my efficacy ? That’s another story. Say I decide to go to Los Angeles; can’t imagine why I would, but I’m totally free to do so. But that does not guarantee that I will actually arrive in LA. How far away am I? How mobile am I? What modes of transport are available to me? Can I afford a ticket? It goes on… Chances are, I won’t be going to Los Angeles any time soon, which is fine by me, but that’s not because I’m not free to do so. I am totally free, but I can only exercise that freedom in the context of facticity , i.e. physical limitations imposed by the external, material world. We are free to choose to do anything we wish; and we are free to try , but our ability to accomplish our goal may be externally constrained. I cannot realize my dream of playing basketball for the Boston Celtics, but I am perfectly free to show up at team headquarters and request a tryout. Enter Butterfly! It flaps its wings and a tornado ravages Chicago. No flap, no tornado…maybe. Fact is, the tornado in Chicago is the result of everything that has ever happened anywhere in its rearward light cone. One less flap may mean one less tornado…or not; on the other hand, nuclear war might have no impact on today’s weather. That’s chaos for you! This is not ‘the three body problem’, it’s the ‘every body problem’. Everything causes everything else, so nothing causes anything. No wonder we’re all crazy! Welcome to Cloud Coo-Coo Land . In Marxist terminology, what we actually do is alienated from what we intend. In Christian terminology, “What I wish I do not do and what I do I do not wish.” (Romans 7: 19) Colloquially, “There’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip.” A team of scientists headed by Leo Joon Il Moon ( Nature Physics , October 14, 2025) has discovered a new phase of matter, Rondeau Time Crystals , named for the musical figure known as a round . A Time Crystal is a pattern that repeats in time rather than in space. Rondeau Time Crystal is a special class of Time Crystal consisting of just 3 ‘states’ that recycle indefinitely through time: An atemporal Alpha state that is perfectly ordered (zero entropy); An Omega state, also atemporal, also entropy free, structurally identical to Alpha but phenomenally different. In a simple example, the elements in Omega may be the reciprocals of those same elements in Alpha ; in any event they are related to the Alpha state deterministically . A temporal state we’ll call Delta that bridges Alpha and Omega . What is ground breaking, and mind boggling, about this…and what makes it relevant to our topic (Freedom)…is that the Delta state is chaotic . To paraphrase Stephen Hawking, ‘It’s butterflies all the way down’. Oddly, this model corresponds perfectly with Sartre’s. The absolutely undetermined ‘freedom’ that exists in the Delta state is bookended by two perfectly ordered templates. Nothing in the Alpha or Omega states causes, influences, or in any way constricts what happens in Delta . Likewise, nothing that happens ‘on the Delta ’ impacts the structure of Alpha or Omega . Yet Alpha causes Omega through the medium of Delta . How can this be so? Delta is chaotic, but it does have an underlying topology, ‘the shape of things to come’, which is the relationship between Alpha and Omega . Delta evolves chaotically but only in the context of Alpha and Omega . The topology of Delta corresponds to Sartre’s facticity . Freedom is absolute within the parameters imposed by the topology of the cosmos. Let’s be clear. No event in Delta is caused by Alpha , Omega , or the topology that connects them. To reiterate, every event in Delta is sui generis and causa sui . What is guaranteed is Omega . Someway, somehow, some day, the chaos of Delta will yield up the order of Omega … but the how and when of it are unknowable. Like the Second Coming of Christ, it might be a long wait. It is the topology of the phenomenal world that prevents me from leaping over mountains. Likewise, it is the topology of the noumenal world that assures me that Omega will ultimately emerge from Delta . Critics will say that the notion of a vectored topology is unacceptably prescriptive (or restrictive or proscriptive). But that is so only to the extent that you find my 5’ 9” height and my 70+ years of age to be ‘unacceptable’ limitations on my goal of playing professional basketball. In fact, there is no freedom without facticity , no Delta without Alpha and Omega . Implicit in the notion of ‘freedom’ are the consequences of its absence. Without topology, freedom would be anarchy and ‘free will’ would be nothing more than an accidental sequence of random, disconnected events. Sartre makes that point clearly by associating freedom with negation. He even calls the agency Le Neant . British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead also argues that novelty (i.e. a unique actual entity or event) begins with a critical assessment of the Actual World, i.e. things as they are, the status quo ante . Concrescence starts with a rejection of that Actual World in the active pursuit (‘project’) of the Eternal Values (Beauty, Truth, Justice) that constitute the essence of Alpha and Omega . These Values are Being itself and so they constitute the topology of Delta , permitting the emergence of Order in an otherwise chaotic medium. Moon et al. describe the immanence of Alpha/Omega in Delta as ‘fine tuning’. Think radio. The ‘tuner’ enables the set to unscramble the chaotic EM spectrum revealing islands of order, i.e. signals, limited in space, time and quality, by noise , i.e. entropy. These islands do not take from or add to their chaotic medium; their existence is ephemeral but nonetheless significant. They constitute the world as we know it. Which of course makes Shakespeare the greatest of all philosophers: “ Our revels now are ended. These, our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air; and—like the baseless fabric of this vision— the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on…” ( The Tempest ) You and I and everything we know will ‘melt into thin air…dissolve and…leave not a rack behind’. We are the image and likeness of Alpha and Omega in Delta . And now, at last, it’s time for Proust . (Did you forget or have you been waiting patiently?) In Remembrance of Things Past , he demonstrates that time and place are epiphenomenal. Pattern (Buber’s ‘relationship’) is substructural. “At the foundation is the Logos.” (John 1: 1) When Proust experiences the same pattern of sensations in France that he had previously experienced in Italy, he is instantly co-located, obliterating space and time. There is one event, bilocated in time and space. Odd? Not at all! It’s the norm. Think of ‘entangled’ particles (John Bell). Now, when the ‘image’ that we are in Delta , resonates with the Eternal Values immanent in Alpha and Omega , we are instantly co-located in the Garden of Eden ( Alpha ) and in the Kingdom of Heaven ( Omega ). This is the meaning of Salvation and Redemption. This is eternal life. *** States of Mind II: Those Who Go (1911) by Umberto Boccioni portrays travelers departing by train, rendered in fragmented, swirling forms that capture the emotional turbulence of leaving. The sharp diagonals and fractured faces convey both anxiety and anticipation, suggesting movement that is physical, psychological, and existential. Through Futurist dynamism, Boccioni turns the act of departure into a powerful symbol of modern mobility and the uncertain freedom found in moving toward the unknown. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back The Norns David Cowles Jun 17, 2025 “Norns are part of an older tradition that grounds fundamental cosmic structure in Being itself.” Penelope is a major character in Homer’s Odyssey . She is the wife of Odysseus, King of Ithaca, hero of Troy, father of Telemachus. Ithaca’s first family serves as the model for Dublin’s: Penelope for Molly Bloom, Odysseus for Leopold Bloom and Telemachus for Stephen Dedalus ( Ulysses ). She is also a Norn! You know Norns, like the 3 witches in the Scottish Play? Or if you’re of a more operatic frame of mind, you’ll think of Wagner’s Ring . But most of what we know about Norns comes from Norse Mythology, especially the pre-Christian Poetic Edda and their modern re-presentations in the Marvel Universe and in the works of Neil Gaimen. Norns are a cross-cultural phenomenon but, happy you, we won’t be exploring that aspect of things…today. Suffice to say, the tradition apparently has Indo Persian roots and spread westward finding a cognate or a home in most every culture. So what is a Norn? No two sources will give you the same answer – which means we don’t know but don’t want to admit we don’t know. But why should we know? We are used to gods armed with hammers and thunderbolts, capable of parting a sea…or walking on it. The Norns are not like that. They are obscure, barely detectable in fact. If Norns were a force, they would be gravity; if they were subatomic particles, they would be neutrinos. They are a faint whisper in the cosmic symphony, and yet… While Norns appear in many guises, their characters tend to have some traits in common. First, they are not gods or goddesses. They precede Odin and Zeus and even Cronos. In Judeo-Christian Cosmology, Norns do not appear per se , but their niche is filled by Logos in the New Testament, by Sophia in the Old, and by Oral Torah (Natural Law) in both, all co-terminus with God. Natural Law is inherent in Being itself; it governs everything that is, even God. ( Book of Job ) When Sartre says that God’s essence precedes his existence, that ‘essence’ equates to Natural Law. Norns are almost always female, and they most often appear in threesomes - three sisters, or three witches, for example. The Trinitarian formula, so important in Christian theology, is anticipated here in pagan lore. Norns are always linked to fate, broadly defined. For the most part they do not determine day to day events, rather they steer the overall trajectory of those events. They shape the ‘event space’ we call World . Take Robert Frost , for example. He may choose to take either of the two roads that ‘equally lay’ before him; the Norns (civil engineers) ensure that whatever path he chooses brings him to his same, desired destination. In the Cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead, there is no causality per se . Every event is causa sui and sui generis . Yet the underlying structure of the Cosmos ensures that all events eventually lead to metaphorical ‘Rome’, aka the Kingdom of God. Lastly, Norns are usually presented in association with thread. In some traditions, they spin the thread of time; in some, they twine three strands (unfortunately often mistaken for past, present, and future); and in others they weave the course of history on a loom (Penelope). They are often pictured unspooling strings, patiently tying knots in the string as they go. In plying their craft, Norns propel the course of history and give it guardrails. In this last model, the string represents the nearly continuous structure of spacetime. The knots represent the events that populate, and punctuate, that spacetime. Events are ruptures in the fabric, suspensions of the continuum. Within the event, time stands still; outside the event, it flows on. When the Norns abandon their posts, or when their string breaks, the world as we know it will end. This ‘knot model’ is especially well chosen. Knots are inherently recursive. The string doubles back on itself, thereby suspending the flow of time: “The clock ticks and fades out…” (Ezra Pound) Knots are eddies in Heraclitus’ cosmic river. More technically, a knot can be represented as the intersection of two 360° circles, which is the equivalent of four 180° triangles, which is the equivalent of one 720° tetrahedron. According to Plato ( Timaeus ) and R. Buckminster Fuller ( Synergetics ), tetrahedra are the building blocks of our Universe. So knots are 720° topological entities. As such they are isomorphic with entities in non-orientable geometries (like Mobius Rings) that have 720° symmetry. Likewise, they are isomorphic with fermions, e.g. electrons and quarks – sub-atomic particles with half integer spin (e.g. spin ½ = 720° symmetry). The knot-in-sting model is consistent with real world phenomena across a wide range of scales: galaxies are knots in cosmic strings, objects (per Whitehead) are tangles of knots in the fabric of spacetime, particles are interference patterns, knots in waves, or loops ( String Theory). And the knot is the perfect model for the concept of ‘event’. First, it is recursive; arguably, it is ‘recursion’ per se . It requires the string of time to double back on itself, thereby interrupting and temporarily reversing its one directional flow. Second, it is discontinuous; arguably, it is ‘discontinuity’ per se . In fact, that is the very definition of an object or event, i.e. something that stands out against an otherwise continuous background. Events shake things up. Every event is a disruptor; it replaces ‘what is’ on the way to becoming ‘what is not’. Events turn ‘is’ into ‘isn’t’ and ‘isn’t’ into ‘is’; arguably that is the definition of Event . Events are concentrations of energy, of course only at the expense of entropy in their environs. They are what give existence its intensity, its color. Every event is an opportunity to project Value into the World. Today, we believe we are each the captain of our own ship, that we alone determine the course of history, that we shape the future in our image and likeness. Prior to this so-called ‘Enlightenment’, those functions were subcontracted to a non-union shop, i.e. God. But the Norns are part of an even older tradition – one that grounds fundamental cosmic structure in Being itself. They constitute an order that even God cannot overstep ( Book of Job ). Welcome to their world! Image: The many shifting "braids" of the Yarlung Zangbo River are part of the world's highest waterway, which winds its way through the Tibetan Plateau. (Image credit: NASA/Landsat 9) Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Time Crystals David Cowles Feb 1, 2024 ”Would you trade that rock you’re sporting on your finger for a crystal of time? What if I threw in Knicks tickets?” We are used to straight lines. We love them in fact. They make us feel comfortable…and powerful. “I can do it!” The Little Engine that Could moves straight ahead. Time lets us turn our backs on the settled past and our faces toward the undiscovered future. We are plough-horses, churning our fields, leaving our furrows. We draw a line on a map to indicate our route. It’s ‘the shortest distance’; it’s the very definition of what we value most these days: ‘efficiency’. Who doesn’t hate connecting flights? We think of logic as a sequence of deductions which we refer to as a ‘chain of reasoning’. So, we may be forgiven for thinking that all process must be Linear Process (LP): A → B → C We are even tempted to say, “What else could it be?” We have such poor imaginations! In fact, IRL nothing is ever perfectly linear. Better said: non-linearity approximates linearity. Better? “Looks straight to me” means “it’s not straight - but it’s straight enough for government work”. There are no straight lines in nature! We’ve known at least since Newton that a reciprocal version of LP applies outside the realm of intentional behavior. Every action entails an equal and opposite reaction: A ↔ B Lex Telonis , ‘an eye for an eye’, may have been our species’ first attempt to codify social justice. Although harsh to our ears, in its day it was an attempt to reign-in ‘street justice’. We can use the form of the LP schematic (above) to illustrate it: A → B → A Curiously, the much renowned Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) relies on the same modified LP, but this time inverted: B → A → B Makes sense: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ is the reverse of ‘Do unto others as they have done unto you’. Pay it forward…not payback ! It required the correction known as the Great Commandment (‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ - Leviticus and Matthew ), to get us off-the-line : But that’s just us. Our Eastern cousins have understood this longer…and perhaps more deeply; they call it ‘Karma’ – we call it, ‘what goes around comes around!’ This is a quantum of Pure Process (PP): A → B, B → C, C → A. I believe it is an irreducible ontological minimum. It’s also the schematic for a game you might know: Rock-Paper-Scissors . It’s the Great Mandala; “take your place” anywhere: there are no preferred spots, no asymmetries, no singularities; it has no beginning and no end. It’s a spiral – with a ‘degenerate’ 3rd dimension. Here, process is not a means to an end (because there are no ends). We mistakenly think of acts as open ended bits of string. That is not what an act is. An act is a closed loop. An act leaves nothing to chance. It is ‘objectively immortal’ (but not yet ‘eternal’); it is a settled matter of fact after the fact ! It is the process of its own confection. In school, we learned to diagram sentences by separating the subject from the predicate; IRL that’s the one thing you can never do! Naked subjects and naked predicates don’t just bump into one another on the senior prom dance floor; they must at least be ‘going steady’ first. Pure Process (PP) can be diagrammed differently by other thinkers in other contexts. Christians, for example, could use a similar schematic to illustrate Trinitarian Process (TP): Karl Marx might have used the graphic to illustrate the Dialectical Process (DP): Then there’s The Beatles’ variation: “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together…” ( I am the Walrus ) Note that this has the same structure as ‘Trinitarian Process’ (above), just rotated: There are even ways to model Pure Process for non-orientable spaces. In common with fermions (massive subatomic particles), non-orientable spaces are characterized by 720° symmetry vs. (the 360° we’re used to): Jim Croce promised us ‘time in a bottle’. Well, what if I could give it to you in a crystal instead? Plain, ordinary crystals, like the Hope Diamond for example, consist of molecules arranged in a fixed pattern that repeats in space. What if we could do the same with time? Would you trade that rock you’re sporting on your finger for a crystal of time? What if I threw in Knicks tickets? In ordinary crystals, like salt or quartz, atoms are arranged in a repeating spatial pattern. But in time crystal patterns repeat over time, in a regular, repeating cycle returning to the same positions over and over. This movement happens without using energy – it's stable, perpetual motion at the atomic level. A time crystal is a state of matter that has periodic motion ‘built-in’ to its structure. We are used to states of matter where energy dissipates, motion slows. Stasis, aka my couch, is the Great Attractor; it is thought to be the most energy efficient state of affairs. My rounded body can attest; it is powerful! But oscillation (motion) in a time capsule turns out to be more energy efficient even than stasis. Crazy? Maybe not. “Everything moves.” People often rock back and forth from one foot to another, they bounce when they hunker, and my dad could not relax unless his hands were fidgeting and his toes tapping. We are just beginning to unlock the mysteries of this new state of matter. It demonstrates what Process Philosophers (e.g. Alfred North Whitehead) have been saying all along: Process is primary; time is just one possible aspect of process. Just ‘yesterday’ (October 14, 2025, Nature Physics ) a team of scientists headed by Leo Joon Il Moon announced the discovery of a new family of time crystals they’re calling Rondeau Time Crystals ( rondeau for the musical form called a ‘round’). ‘Ordinary’ time crystals (as if ‘time in a bottle’ could ever be ordinary) evolve through their cycle smoothly and deterministically. Not so, Rondeau ! These crystals are characterized by the presence of a chaotic phase between two perfectly determined bookends . Rather than enjoying a continuous identity (as with ordinary time crystals), Rondeau Time Crystals exhibit ‘stroboscopic’ identity ( aka Eigenstate order): “ the coexistence of temporal disorder on short timescales and temporal order on long timescales.” (Moon) “This enables us to freely engineer the form of non-deterministic micromotion dynamics (chaotic phase), without compromising the stability of the coexisting long-range temporal…order (deterministic phase).” English : What happens in Vegas (disorder) stays in Vegas; it does not compromise the order that surrounds it. As if the 21 st century discovery of time crystals was not mind-boggling enough, Moon has taken things to an entirely new level. In our view, this discovery has major philosophical and even theological implications, as well as physical. We look forward to exploring those implications in detail in future posts on this site. Bookmark us…and as always, “Stay tuned.” (The best is yet to come.) Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Dark Universe David Cowles Oct 20, 2025 “We can put a good figure on how much we know about the universe: 5%.” It’s straight out of MIT: We’re all in the dark ; well, 95% dark anyway. One is tempted to paraphrase Lincoln: “Some of the people are in the dark all of the time, all people are in the dark 95% of the time, but 100% of the people cannot be 100% in the dark 100% of the time”… but I won't go there. Now, thanks to the blunt edge philosophers at the world’s leading school of technology, the universe just got a tiny bit darker. Consider the following excerpt from the 5/19/2025 issue of the MIT Technology Review : “We can put a good figure on how much we know about the universe: 5% . That’s how much of what’s floating about in the cosmos is ordinary matter—planets and stars and galaxies and the dust and gas between them. The other 95% is dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious entities aptly named for our inability to shed light on their true nature... Cosmologists have cast dark matter as the hidden glue binding galaxies together. Dark energy plays an opposite role, ripping the fabric of space apart .” A brilliant piece of scientific discovery! It even earned the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. We stuck in a thumb and pulled out a plum and said, “Oh what a good boy (sic) am I?” Except it’s not true (if that matters anymore), or at least, it may not be true. Dark energy is the name given to the mysterious force that seemed to be accelerating the expansion of the Universe. This 'anti-gravity' force has been largely accepted among the astronomical community for about three decades, based on ‘research’ showing that the Universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. But now a team of astronomers say their measurements show the expansion of the Universe is actually slowing down , not speeding up. So how did we end up in this mess? Consider the original Dark Universe hypothesis (above). Now imagine this same paragraph written by a theist talking about ‘God’. It might go something like this: “We can put a good figure on how much we know about the universe: 5%. That’s how much of reality is knowable via our senses and reasoning faculties. The other 95% is what we call Mystery . Observation and reason alone are unable to shed light here. Only Revelation can enlighten us re what must otherwise remain dark . Theologians have cast God as the hidden glue binding all things together ( logos ) and as the force ( physis ) ripping apart what is now to make way for what is to come.” Public reaction would constitute a Tsunami. The Capitol itself would shake. Who knows, SCOTUS might even get involved. Does the 1st Amendment protect such nonsense? Should it not be a crime to pollute the minds of our youth with such a superstitious clap trap? Is this not a crime against humanity? Or should we skip SCOTUS and bring the matter directly to The Hague? After all, Socrates was sentenced to death on these very same grounds: corrupting the youth (of Athens). Should modern day theologians not pay the same price? I mean, how dare these idol worshipers, these conjurers of spells, these alchemists place limits on the scope of my all powerful reasoning ability? Their so-called ‘God’ is merely a god-of-the-gaps . Whatever we don’t know, whatever we don’t understand, they call that God – as if that settles anything. Like preschoolers everywhere, they imagine that giving something a name makes it real. Neither God nor Adam claimed that power ( Genesis ) but our modern day astrologers do not hesitate to claim it for themselves. This is the hypocrisy of secularism: Science has now replaced Roman Catholicism as the self-proclaimed one true religion. It is ‘established’ to the sometimes brutal exclusion (or marginalization) or all other faiths: direct contravention of the 1st Amendment. There is no gnosis , and therefore no salvation, outside of the Academy. Even to question one of its doctrines is tantamount to heresy. We are all now self-appointed Grand Inquisitors, reporting superannuated, tie-dye wearing science skeptics to the proper authorities. By the age of 8, we are already rooting out apostasy like pigs with truffles. Like Russian children in the days of Stalin, we are encouraged by our teachers to turn in non-conforming adults to the local ‘science police’; doing so can earn us a Fauci Medal (called the Hawking Medal in the UK), the highest honor a pre-teen can receive. As parents, we want our children to have every advantage. So…we encourage them to join science clubs at school, and we send them to science camp every summer. Bully! As a young boy, I joined the Scouts (ages 8 up). Had I lived in Russia in those days, I might have been a Little Octobrist (ages 7 – 9) and worn a star-shaped badge sporting the image of a young Lenin. Later, if I showed promise and commitment, I might have been invited to join the Pioneers (Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization); my parents would have been so proud to see me wearing their distinctive red scarf. Now please don’t misunderstand me: there’s nothing wrong with children receiving an education in the sciences. In fact, it’s absolutely essential, especially in our contemporary culture. But there was also nothing wrong with my friends and I learning survival skills at scout camp; nor was there anything wrong with Russian children learning to campaign for social justice. The problem comes when we substitute dogma (“rite words in rote order” - Joyce) for discovery. Dogmatism breeds intellectual laziness. It was dogmatism that condemned Galileo, not true religion; it was dogmatism that undermined Glasnost, not true justice; and it is dogmatism, not true science, that’s placing the intellectual promise of the 21st century at risk. Dogmatism encourages us to accept easy answers, even when those answers make no sense. We are no strangers to such dogmatics in the US. For 60 years, we lived under the spell of a race based ‘separate but equal’ education system ( de facto and de jure ). Then in the 1950’s a doctrine known as ‘my country right or wrong’ became part of our national identity. Today it’s ‘follow the science’. What’s interesting is that these dogmas all have something in common: they are not just moronic , they’re oxymoronic . How can two things be equal once you’ve invested even a quantum of energy to separate them? How can any country be right if it’s wrong? Worst of all, how can I trust something that I cannot verify? I can verify certain propositions within the scientific canon, but I cannot verify the canon itself. The essential nature of good science is to question everything and accept nothing solely on another’s authority: experimentation is to replace revelation. Inquiry is the antithesis of trust . I hear you: “You seem very sure of yourself. How can you be certain that the Dark Universe hypothesis won’t turn out to be true?” Ok, I’ll do you one better: “It will turn out to be true!” But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong either. Huh? How so? Scientists invented the Dark Universe hypothesis to give a name to things that they don’t understand and can’t explain. Based on what we know, the Universe shouldn’t work. There’s not nearly enough mass to hold galaxies together. In fact, however, galaxies do exist, 100’s of billions of them with more forming ‘every day’. So something’s wrong and the Dark Universe hypothesis seems to solve the problem. Of course, it is merely ‘solving’ one unknown in terms of another. But the headlines are already in the can: “Dark matter confirmed!” Of course it will be confirmed because any advance in our understanding of the Universe will now be labeled dark . And why not? ‘Dark Universe’ has no denotative content, nothing that might subject it to the risk of falsification. It’s a place holder for whatever we don’t know now but may discover later. Once we learn something about the universe that we don’t already know, it will ‘fit the definition’ of ‘dark’. Of course it will. We don’t know what Dark Matter is so whatever turns out to solve the paradox will be quite correctly labeled Dark , and we will say, “Of course that’s what Dark Matter is, we knew it all along.” Except of course, we didn’t. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Time Crystals and Creation David Cowles Nov 13, 2025 “A team of scientists has created a physical entity that duplicates the logic and mechanics of creation. They have provided Proof of Concept for Biblical cosmology.” The Bible, from Genesis through Revelation , tells the story of the Universe from its origin as a spark in the mind of God ( Alpha – “Let there be light”) to Parousia ( Omega – “God will be all in all”). In other words, it is the story of everything. But good luck with that! ‘Project Bible’ was two millennia in the making and reflects contributions from literally hundreds of ‘priests, prophets, and kings’ and their editors. Worse, it tells its story using a variety of literary forms including lyric and epic poetry, rhetoric, law, narrative, myth and legend, anthropology, history, biography, cosmology, philosophy, theology, etc. It’s a great story but in the end it’s just speculation, right? I mean, it’s just as likely that the Universe came to be in a Big Bang brought on by negative vacuum pressure and that it will end in some form of Heat Death…no ‘God’ required. But because there are so many oddities and mysteries about our Universe, it is tempting to look beyond the cosmos for answers. But aren’t we just mapping one set of mysteries onto another? Is God any more likely a scenario than negative vacuum pressure? And is there even any verifiable, denotative difference? The Judeo-Christian model of cosmos assumes that the world begins and ends in a state of perfect order ( aka the Garden of Eden and the Kingdom of Heaven). The author of the Book of Revelation (John of Patmos) called these two states ‘Alpha’ and ‘Omega’ respectively; Alfred North Whitehead called them the ‘Primordial’ and ‘Consequent’ Natures of God. Noting that both states are states of perfect order, we speculate that Alpha and Omega are identical in substance (pattern) even though they have no proper elements in common. In fact, the two states can be noumenally identical only because they are phenomenally disjoint. That said, contrary to Bertrand Russell , both states ( Alpha and Omega ) are proper elements in God while God is an improper element in both states. This is the mathematical version of the Doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity. Nice model… but there is absolutely no reason to think that such a structure exists or even could exist. It’s 100% speculative; compare that with ‘negative vacuum pressure’ which is about 99% speculative (in its role as the agent of creation). Still, 1% is 1%... just ask your favorite billionaire. So for all our blood, sweat, and tears, we’re in approximately the same place today as the Pre-Socratics were…2500 years ago. That is, we were …until now! A team of scientists has created a physical entity that duplicates the logic and mechanics of creation. They have provided ‘Proof of Concept’ for Biblical cosmology. Now no one is saying that this new ‘device’ is God. It’s no Higgs Boson (God Particle) for cryin’ out loud. It’s just a model… but it proves that a Universe like the one we live in is physically possible and consistent with Judeo-Christian cosmology. To understand what’s happened we need to understand Time Crystals . In ordinary crystals, like salt or quartz, atoms are arranged in a repeating spatial pattern. But in a Time Crystal patterns repeat across time , forming a regular, repeating cycle that returns ‘home’, i.e. to its original position, over and over again. Best of all this ‘perpetual motion’ happens without any energy input. It creates no entropy (heat) so theoretically it could cycle on forever. But how is that possible? A time crystal is a state of matter that has periodic motion ‘built-in’ to its structure. It’s who it is. Motion is not something it does or something that is done to it: “Move or I’ll move you!” It’s not something added to what already is. Motion is what a time crystal is. No motion, no crystal. The crystal is motion per se ; it’s motion, crystallized . A series of experiments by Leo Joon Il Moon, et al. resulted in the critical paper published in Nature Physics on October 14, 2025: “Using carbon-13 nuclear spins in diamond as a quantum simulator, we use microwave driving fields to create tunable short-time disorder in a system exhibiting long-time stroboscopic order … with controllable lifetimes exceeding 4 seconds… (Plus) we demonstrate the capacity to encode information …” English…please! The Alpha point is an instance of perfect order. So is the Omega point. However, the order of elements @Omega is the precise reciprocal of the order @Alpha. Like arrows reversing orientation along a Mobius strip, what goes around comes around (inverted)…and then comes around again (reverted). The periodic alternation of Alpha and Omega states is unbounded: potentially, it continues on forever. But between Alpha and Omega we find disorder, aka chaos. So to paraphrase Shakespeare ( The Tempest ), ‘our chaotic lives are rounded by perfect order’. However the Alpha-Omega Gap need not be perfectly chaotic. Islands of local order may emerge as information from experience is encoded. We create our own order. “The quest to define notions of order and disorder as organizing principles of the natural world is one of the oldest endeavours of science and philosophy.” At regular intervals during the drive cycle, the nuclear spins flipped their polarization deterministically, exhibiting the periodic behavior characteristic of time crystals. But halfway between these regular measurements, the polarization fluctuates randomly, showing no predictable pattern. This coexistence of predictable long-range order and random short-time fluctuations is the hallmark of this so-called Rondeau (round) Order . “…Realizing the coexistence of temporal disorder on short timescales and temporal order on long timescales, stroboscopic order in the drive cycle coexists with a tunable degree of temporal disorder…” Something until now believed to be impossible! So what? What relevance does this have for us? First, it offers a fully satisfying model of life as we experience it and, second, it offers a concrete, physical analog of Judeo-Christian cosmology. The perfect but reciprocating order of Alpha and Omega corresponds to Whitehead’s Primordial & Consequent Natures of God and to the Bible’s Garden of Eden (Paradise) & Kingdom of Heaven (Paradise). Between Alpha and Omega , the Ginnungagap of Norse Mythology, kaos prevails: “…the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters.” (Genesis 1: 2) However, this disorder is ‘tunable’, permitting local islands in order to emerge out of chaos and endure for ‘short’ periods, subject always to the inexorable vicissitudes of entropy. We call such islands ‘entities, organisms, events’. The states of perfect order that bookend the primordial chaos do not control the timing or the details. However, the Alpha and Omega points do embody certain essential Values (e.g. Beauty, Truth, Justice), organizing principles that work to ‘fine tune’ what comes in between. So the discovery of so-called Rondeau Time Crystals , named for the ‘round’ form in music (think Bolero ), is a major development because it demonstrates that perfect order and pure chaos are not incompatible. The consequences of this demonstration are mind-boggling: The creation/discovery of Rondeau Time Crystals demonstrates that freewill can survive and thrive in a Universe that is ultimately ordered. Accordingly, it puts to rest forever the idea that what happens in the phenomenal world is the result of some masterplan cooked up by some omnipotent, transcendent entity ( aka God). ‘Faith’ then is the perception of noumenal order through the veil of phenomena. ‘Art’ is the material demonstration of that harmony, restoring art’s original liturgical function. ‘Grace’ is the manifestation of fine-tuning in the phenomenal world. ‘ Miracles ’ reflect the impact of Grace on phenomenal events. Logos is the flip side of faith. It is the manifestation of the noumenal in the phenomenal: “At the foundation is the logos and the logos is with God and the logos is God…all things come to be through logos .” (John 1: 1 – 3a) Logos constitutes the immanence of Good which manifests phenomenally as the so-called Divine Values (e.g. Beauty, Truth, Justice). Whenever we experience beauty, truth, or justice we witness the impact of logos in the phenomenal world. Logos fine tunes Kaos to permit the emergence of enduring order. Logos does not compel that emergence nor does it dictate its qualia; it simply makes it possible. Events are causa sui and sui generis . You and I must do the work! That’s the burden of free will . One final point : The Problem of Evil is most often cited by non-believers as their primary objection to Judeo-Christianity: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Although the issue was thoroughly addressed 2500 years ago in the Book of Job , it remains a hot button item. The discovery of Rondeau Time Crystals should put an end to this debate once and for all. God has no control over the specific course of events in the created world! If he did, the world would not be created but just imagined. We do not live in the Mind of God; we are not figments of his imagination. The created world is real and we , not God, are its caretakers. Since we launched in 2022, Aletheia Today Magazine and Thoughts While Shaving have been dedicated to highlighting and promoting the convergence of science and theology. In our view, these are not contrary views of reality, or even alternative views, but rather two words for a single, unitary vision. That said, we never dreamed that things would move this far this fast. The day is coming and indeed it is ‘already here’ (albeit still largely unrecognized) when no one will be able to call herself a scientist without admitting to theism. Like Job, albeit unexpectedly, I have lived to see this day ‘from my own flesh, with my own eyes’. (Job 19: 26) “Without logos nothing would come to be.” (John 1: 3b) Chaos would remain forever chaotic : think cosmos prior to ‘creation’. (Genesis 1: 2) Any apparently emerging order would be de minimus and instantaneous. Enduring events require subjective aim and that aim must originate in Value (i.e. the Divine Values). That’s what values are, targets, lures. Values are what motivate events and events are islands of order, an archipelago bridging Alpha and Omega , made possible by the Grace of God. “That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” (Keats) *** The Energy of Explosion – Twenty-four Billion Years B.C. by Vance Kirkland uses his signature “dot” technique to depict an immense cosmic burst unfolding across space. Dense clusters of tiny points radiate outward from a luminous core, suggesting the violent energy and expansion of a primordial universe. The painting blends abstraction and astronomy, inviting the viewer to imagine creation on a scale far beyond human comprehension. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Why I Can't Beat a Monkey David Cowles Nov 12, 2025 “So much for all the hours I ‘wasted’ watching games, live and on rerun! I would have been better off wading through a swamp...” A millennium ago, when I was still in my 20s, I was so impressed with my ability to pick football winners (NFL & College) that I fantasized about forming a closed-end mutual fund that would allow me to invest Danny DeVito’s money (and other people’s) with my local bookie…or, eventually, with an authorized Vegas sportsbook through my Nevada subsidiary. But as with most concerns of my 20 something self, I got distracted and only just woke up, 40+ years later, to ask, “What ever happened to…?” Not that I regret my 40 years in the Wilderness! Far from it. During that time I helped raise a full roster of kind and creative children and grands and I helped guide well over 100,000 people through the vicissitudes of the American healthcare system, enabling them to receive higher quality care for less out-of-pocket cost. (Park your cynicism at the curb: it is possible to do something positive.) But in the process, I lost touch with many of my adolescent dreams including my plan to eliminate injustice on a global scale and my plan to bankrupt the Vegas’ casinos via my insightful handicapping. A few years ago, sports gambling was legalized in my home state; the timing was fortuitous: it coincided with my retirement. At this point, I won’t be investing anyone else’s money but there’s no reason I can’t make a little bit for myself and my family, right? So, so wrong! Let’s set the stage. The simplest way to bet on football is to bet on the winners of individual games. The Vegas sportsbooks set ‘the point spread’ - all I need to do is pick the winners. Now, without knowing a single thing about football, you or I should be able to break even (minus the house vigorish, of course). If I pick teams at random it stands to reason that I should be right half the time. Case in point: My aunt Mabel from Missouri loves a flutter, but sports is not her thing; so she bets on teams with birds in their names (e.g. the Baltimore Ravens ). She should win approximately 50% of her wagers…and she does. The laws of probability stand! Therefore, you can evaluate my football acumen by comparing my win-loss percentage with the 50% standard established by ornithologists like Mabel. Would you pay me for my expertise if I could show you a 3 rd party audited track record of, say, 55% wins? Ok, how about 60%? How about 75…or 40? 40%? In my three years as a professional gambler I have never come close to duplicating, much less exceeding, my twitcher aunt’s track record. Why did I waste money on Lions, Bengals and Bears when I could have been betting on Cardinals and Falcons? So much for all the hours I ‘wasted’ watching games, live and on rerun! I would have been better off wading through a swamp with a pair of binoculars around my neck. But why? How is it possible that I cannot at least duplicate the results of a ‘monkey’ (sorry, Auntie) who picks winners randomly? Here’s where I went wrong. I assumed I was pitting my expertise against that of professional handicappers who are paid 7 figure salaries for their insight. I’m oddly OK with that…but that’s not what’s happening. I am trying to outsmart something much more powerful than mere expertise. I am going up against the collective wisdom of the gambling universe. (As we learned from the Soviet era, centralized intelligence, no matter how prodigious, can never beat distributed wisdom, no matter how inefficient. This is why models of God as a personal ‘Central Intelligence Agency’ are inherently flawed.) Here's how it works IRL. A game is posted with certain preliminary odds set by the illuminati . Immediately those odds shift as punters around the world weigh in. Assuming no unexpected mid-week developments (e.g. injuries, trades) the so-called ‘line’ will quickly settle on a consensus figure, reflecting the collective wisdom. Now along comes yours truly shopping for a bargain, a mismatch, an anomaly. I see an attractive proposition: The Buffalo Bills are 3 point favorites against the New York Giants. No way! Buffalo is a much better team; they should be favored by at least a touchdown. Let me lock it in before the line changes. Presto, bet made. I can’t believe my good fortune. This proposition is simply too good to be true. Aye, there’s the rub. It is too good to be true. There’s some relevant factor I’ve not considered (snow is in the forecast or somebody has the flu): the big money gamblers know something I don’t. I am smart enough to detect the anomaly but not smart enough to figure out what it is I’m not seeing. But it gets worse. The line on Buffalo has just dropped from 3 points to 2 and I’m still locked in at 3. Maybe I should place a second bet, taking advantage of the extra point. In any event, I should have a 50% chance of winning, like Mabel, right? Wrong again! As the odds drop on Buffalo, the probability that Buffalo will ‘cover the spread’ (i.e. win by more than 3, or even 2, points) is now much less than 50%. How so? No matter how much the odds drop, there will always be punters like me who think they’ve found a bargain. While all the smart money is moving to New York (as usual?), me and my lot are doubling down on the Bills. No matter how much the line shifts, the real shift in probability is even greater. Game day! By kickoff time, the game is rated a toss-up, no points. I should be afraid, very afraid, but at this point I’m all-in on Buffalo. So I place a third bet on the Bills, order Door Dash, and sit back to watch my ship come in. Like a Nantucket widow on her walk, I’m about to have a very long wait. No ship! The Giants win the game outright, of course. Everyone says, “It’s the upset of the week…” but that’s cold comfort; I lose all three of my bets. So, I called my aunt to commiserate. But no ‘joy’ there; she bet on the Eagles and the Seahawks and broke even. Of course she did. Mabel may not know football but she does know her birds. And me? My so-called ‘knowledge’ of the game did me in, proving once again that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” (Alexander Pope) And so I lose to monkeys…not occasionally but steadily, week after week, over 3 long seasons. What to do now? Stop betting on football, of course! Or…watch the lines move and bet on teams that are moving up rather than down the ladder. Look for bargains…and then bet against them. Assume that ‘knowing’ whatever it is I think I know is knowing less than nothing. Sidebar : There’s a school of philosophy ( Nicholas of Cusa et al.) that claims that all knowledge (e.g. re God) is ‘negative knowledge’. The closer we can get to “I know nothing”, the closer we are to the truth. Now that I know nothing , I’m ready to make some serious ‘bread’ and leave Auntie in a pile of feathers. (Note: no actual birds were harmed in the process.) Wish me luck; perhaps I’ll let you know how it goes. Perhaps. *** Edvard Munch’s By the Roulette Table (1892) captures the tense allure of gambling, where shadowed figures lean toward fate’s spin under dim light. The scene reflects Munch’s fascination with human anxiety and the fragile line between chance and despair. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? 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< Back Moses - The Story of Everyone David Cowles Nov 10, 2025 “The story of Moses is the story of one man, but it is also the story of the Hebrew nation, the Middle East, and human civilization.” How is the biography of a 20 th century Anglo-American (I can’t speak to the 21 st century…yet) like the ancient history of the Middle East? It recapitulates it! The Old Testament Book of Exodus records the birth of the Hebrew nation in the second millennium BCE. Additional ‘histories’ extend that story through to the onset of ‘senility’ c. 600 BCE. Our story begins with young Moses tending sheep (a boy’s job) for his future father-in-law, a priest of Midian, Jethro. Not to press the analogy too far (but who can pass this up): puberty dawned for Moses in the form of an inexhaustible, perpetually burning, bush. (There, I’ve got that out of my system, thank you for indulging me.) The newly adolescent Moses observes an Egyptian mistreating a Hebrew slave and he suddenly becomes aware of the gross injustice baked into the social order, an order he’d previously taken for granted and, as a sometime member of Pharoah’s household, benefited from. Only the poshest private schools for Pharoah’s ward! Moses resolves, with the help of God, to correct this injustice – preferably before noon so he can get back to tending sheep…and wooing Jethro’s daughter. A lifetime later, on his death bed, gazing into the Promised Land, Moses realizes that ‘he’d only just begun’. Still, what he did accomplish in his lifetime was enough to make him one of the best known figures in all of Western history. Like adolescents everywhere, Moses rebelled against ‘the rents’ (par ents , governm ent , etc.). But unlike most, Moses’ adoptive father was the government! His version of the stern but well-meaning beat cop was none other than the commander of Pharoah’s charioteers. His ‘parish priests’ were wizards attached to Pharoah’s court. This couldn’t be any ordinary adolescent rebellion! Fortunately, Moses had help from his older siblings, Miriam and Aaron, and oh yeah, from God. These were the days when God’s intervention was not confined to a well-placed pep talk, though he certainly gave those when needed; God still got his hands dirty! The recently discovered screenplay for an unmade movie, Young Moses , intended as Part I of the larger project which ultimately became The Ten Commandments (Heston & DeMille), clarifies matters: the most powerful man in the Middle East is challenged by an adopted foundling, his sister (Miriam), his brother (Aaron), and one very big best friend, the kind we all wish we’d had growing up. Marginal notes indicate that teen Moses was to be played by Mickie Roonie, a wimpy kid with a not so wimpy sidekick (YHWH), to be played by Arnold Schwartzenager. (Pardon the anachronism.) Today, a temper tantrum might lead to a broken vase or a fist through a wall. Moses expressed his displeasure in a different way: he rained down hordes of pests (frogs, flies, gnats, locusts) on the rents . Today, a mischievous tween might put salt in the sugar bowl. Moses turned water into blood. You get the picture! Finally, Moses and his ‘father’ reach an understanding: they agree to disagree. Moses will leave home with Pharoah’s blessing…or not: even after agreeing to emancipate his wayward son and his entourage, Dad has second thoughts. He sends law enforcement to bring Moses home. Happily, this last ditch effort by a helicopter parent who couldn’t let go fails and Moses is finally free to go his own way – but which way is that? (Think Truffaut’s 400 Blows .) Free at last! But free to do what? After all this, is freedom “just another word for nothing left to lose?” ( Joplin ) Time now for the dreaded “OMG, what have I done?” Who has not been there ? So young Moses sets off to find himself . He needs to discover who he is or, more accurately (per Sartre), who he wants to become. He needs to survive on his own, support himself and his dependents, and leave footprints in the sand. Compared to this, rebellion was a piece of unleavened bread. Moses was an adult now with all the privileges and responsibilities attendant thereto. Metaphorically, we sometimes describe this 40 year period of our lives as ‘wandering in the desert’. In Moses’ case, that was literally true. Fortunately for his immediate dependents and for the rest of Western civilization, Moses was successful. He found himself ; he reached Cannan, the Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey. Gold watch in his pocket, 401k money in the bank, and travel brochures in his tunic, Moses was ready for blessed retirement. But before he could enjoy it, his body gave out, and he died. Ring any bells? Truth to tell, Moses on his death bed had much to be proud of; but he also realized that the job was far from complete. Fortunately, Jethro had previously advised Moses to set up a robust ‘judicial system’ to govern in the event of his absence, temporary or permanent. His successors, Joshua and the Judges , had a tough road. They faced their own challenges, their own trials. They wandered in deserts of their own but for a time at least, they too succeeded. The story of Moses is the story of one man, but it is also the story of everyone! (Think Odysseus, Quixote, Hamlet & Leopold Bloom.) It is the story of the entire Hebrew nation, the Middle East, and by analogy, it is the story of human civilization per se . *** Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s Moses at the Rock of Horeb (c. 1669–1670) depicts the moment when Moses strikes a rock to miraculously bring forth water for the parched Israelites in the desert. The painting captures both divine power and human desperation, with light dramatically illuminating Moses and the cascading water while weary families and animals gather to drink. Murillo’s warm color palette, soft brushwork, and emotional realism transform a biblical miracle into a deeply human scene of faith, relief, and compassion. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Quantum Consciousness David Cowles Oct 14, 2025 “It seems likely that all living organisms emit a bio-photonic aura…” Remember the ‘60s? Of course, you don’t. You weren’t born yet. Or if you were, you killed off those brain cells decades ago. But if you could remember the ‘60s, you’d remember that time (was it at Woodstock?) when a bead-bedraggled, tie dye wearing shaman, asked if she could ‘read your aura’. Of course, she could! It’s the ‘60s, man; everything goes! “Oh, you’re gorgeous. I see purple and a lovely shade of pink. It shows you’re a kind, generous, loving person. I do see a spot of green you might want to work on but overall, it’s magnificent. By the way, you wouldn’t be able to spare some change by any chance?” It was fun while it lasted…but you heard Wall St. calling. Now, more than half a century later, it turns out your shaman was right after all. A recent article by Darren Orf (published 5/13/2025 in Popular Mechanics ) confirms what hippies knew ages ago: “You’re glowing!” Recent studies confirm that living organisms emit ‘biophotons’…lots of them. A live mouse, for example, can emit up to 10⁵ photons per second. “You could even say it glows,” Rudolf, so why don’t we see it? (It would make life so much easier for my cat.) The trouble is, these biophotons are incredibly weak, well below the perceptual threshold of most humans. Just how weak are they? An advanced digital camera requires a full hour of exposure before it can record enough data to form a coherent pattern. It seems likely that all living organisms emit a bio-photonic aura, even prokaryotes (e.g. bacteria), single celled organisms without a nucleus. But, of course, we can’t know that for sure, at least not yet. What we do know is that plants do have auras. If a plant suffers some sort of injury, the aura at the site of the injury is especially intense. This suggests that organisms shift into overdrive to repair damage and that they emit more photons in the process. How is this related to consciousness? In the 1990s polymath Roger Penrose proposed that consciousness consists of quantum processes that take place in microtubules in the brain. The theory was and is controversial, for a number of reasons. But unexpectedly, experimental evidence is piling up in support of Penrose conjecture. We live in a World that spans c. 60 orders of magnitude…“from the Redwood Forest (the cosmic event horizon) to the gulf stream waters (the Planck measure).” (Woody Guthrie) Our lives are confined to just one such order. For example, our touted human awareness ( aka consciousness) is limited to events with durations between one-tenth of a second and one full second, one order of magnitude: “Our little life is rounded with a sleep.” ( The Tempest ) In recent experiments, scientists have shot photons into microtubules. Amazingly, the light was re-emitted after a period of time no shorter than one tenth of a second and no longer than one full second. Light travels through the microtubules roughly 10 orders of magnitude more slowly than in a vacuum. Whatever is happening in the ‘black box’ results in the phenomenon we call consciousness . Sidebar : I rank Roger Penrose as one of the three great intellects of the 20 th century, along with Einstein and Whitehead. Even so, I guffawed when I first heard his theory of consciousness: “Ridiculous!” But these days, more and more skeptics are coming around to his point of view… and now I am one of them. But this story is not all unicorns and rainbows! These findings have a potentially more disturbing aspect. To confirm their hypotheses, scientists need a control group. What better control group for a living organism than a deceased one? You might expect that the bioluminescence would switch off at the moment of death. If so, searching for an aura could be a useful way to determine whether a particular organism is alive. But nature may not be as neat as we’d like it to be. The evidence is equivocal but seems to suggest that life and death are more of a continuum than a dichotomy. In one study, 30 minutes after ‘death’, mouse bodies continued to radiate photons, albeit at an average rate approximately 40% lower than when they were fully alive. These findings suggest that biological activity continues long after ‘clinical death’. Intriguingly, this is one more bit of evidence to reinforce the emerging ‘ bio-continuum ’ consensus. Collectively, these discoveries constitute a double edged sword. On the one hand, they might increase the window available for resuscitation…or even resurrection. On the other hand, they could challenge the way we customarily handle organic remains. The assumption that clinical death is synonymous with a total loss of conscious sentience is eroding. What if the deceased organism retains some level of awareness? At the risk of sounding ‘gross’, these findings challenge the morality of treating a ‘dead body’ as ‘refuse’. Sticking a loved one in a body bag and then into a refrigerated cabinet to await cremation and/or burial doesn’t seem so attractive any more. Most pre-industrial societies follow a more prolonged and potentially less terrifying process when saying goodbye. We’re all familiar, of course, with the Tibetan and the Egyptian Books of the Dead . Two civilizations with little if any cross contact developed remarkably similar traditions. This suggests that these rites rose in response to something fundamentally cross-cultural, e.g. the intuition that life is a continuum. The traditional Irish wake and the Jewish practice of ‘sitting shiv’ are further manifestations of this tendency. The Nordic tradition of placing a corpse in a boat and sending it into the sea is another. Clearly, these are areas that require additional exploration. In the meantime, it seems that somewhat more humane funerary practices are ethically indicated, at least until we have more data. *** Hilma af Klint’s The Ten Largest, No. 10, Adulthood (1907) bursts with swirling pastel forms that suggest blossoming consciousness and the invisible forces animating life. Executed in egg tempera on paper mounted to canvas, it merges organic curves and floating symbols into an ethereal visualization of spiritual growth and human energy. Part of a series inspired by mystical revelation rather than formal aesthetics, the work channels the aura of adulthood as a transcendent state between earthly experience and higher planes of existence. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat David Cowles Nov 6, 2025 “Jacob’s gift of a robe is symbolic of Joseph’s special status in the ancient line of mystical succession.” The Book of Genesis is many, many things. It begins with a Hymn of Creation (1:1 – 2:4) and continues with a Prologue (2:5 - 11:32) reprising various Middle Eastern myths (e.g. the Flood), reinterpreted a millennia later in the light of now fully developed Jewish theology. From there Genesis moves onto the proto history of the Hebrew nation (12:1 – 36:41). These are the stories of the Patriarchs (Abraham, Issac, and Jacob) and they represent a transition from myth to legend. (Think King Arthur.) The final 14 chapters contain the story of Joseph, son of Jacob ( aka Israel). They form a bridge connecting the legendary Patriarchs with the historical Exodus and they introduce another dimension to our narrative: the mystical . Mysticism here refers to a fabric of super-ancient spiritual practices, woven across cultures, irrespective of boundaries, topological or political. It would appear that this wisdom precedes the development of religions per se . Let’s listen in: “Now Israel (Jacob) loved Joseph more than any other of his sons…and he made him a long sleeved robe ( aka a ‘coat of many colors’). When his brothers saw that their father loved Joseph more than any of them, they hated him… (Then) Joseph had a dream and they hated him still more.” Jacob’s gift of a robe is symbolic of more than just parental favoritism. It is a recognition of Joseph’s special status in the ‘ancient line of mystical succession’. In the 1st Book of Kings (19: 17 – 21), Elijah passes the prophetic mantle to Elisha in a very similar ceremony: “ So Elijah…found Elisha son of Shaphat. He was plowing with twelve yoke of oxen, and he himself was driving the twelfth pair. Elijah went up to him and threw his cloak around him. Elisha then left his oxen and ran after Elijah… He took his yoke of oxen and slaughtered them. He burned the plowing equipment to cook the meat and gave it to the people, and they ate. Then he set out to follow Elijah and became his servant.” Interpretive Notes : The coat and cloak are the veil of maya , the woven garment (shroud) covering noumenal reality (Kant), i.e. Aletheia ( Parmenides ). The 12 yoke of oxen are the signs of the Zodiac, signifying the cosmic dimension of mystical initiation, corresponding to Joseph’s welcoming the 12 tribes of Israel (his brothers) to Egypt. The Electro-Magnetic (EM) spectrum (Joseph’s colors ) is an alternate way (vs. signs of the Zodiac/yoke of oxen) of representing entirety, i.e. kosmos . In the spirit of the New Testament Letter of James , both Joseph and Elisha give expression to their faith by ‘feeding the people’ (see below). Jesus picks up on this critical theme by feeding first 5,000 and then 4,000 hungry followers . We are indebted to Kings . It’s only that light that we can confidently interpret Jacob’s ‘anointing’ of Joseph as a sacrament in the Mystical tradition. It is unclear (intentionally so?) whether the bestowal of the robe is an acknowledgement on Jacob’s part that Joseph has a special connection with the divine or whether the gift itself confers new powers on the son. I am reminded of Mary Poppins : “ What I want to know…is this: Are the stars gold paper, or are the gold paper stars?” (Jane Banks) In each case, of course, the answer is both ! The world is maximally recursive. What goes around comes around. IRL, all verbs need to be Middle Voice (vs. Active/Passive). The Jacob stories are nothing if not down to earth. Neither Jacob nor Joseph model what we would call virtue . Joseph is a right Eddie Haskell ( Leave it to Beaver ), a goodie-two-shoes intent on currying his father’s favor by ‘tattling’ on his older brothers. Joseph is only too eager to lord his advantage over his senior siblings. Shamefully, he exploits his spiritual gifts to tease and demean them; his behavior is so egregious that even the doting Jacob is offended: “Must we come and bow low to the ground before you, I and your mother and your brothers?” “His brothers were jealous of him, but his father did not forget.” Like all marks of social distinction, Joseph’s coat inspires jealousy, and even hatred, in those less favored (e.g. his brothers). Any modern day parent could have written this script. Out of 13 siblings, one is ‘the favorite’… and treated as such. What could possibly go wrong? Pity Jacob that he did not have Dr. Spock to advise him! The Hebrew phrase translated as ‘many colors’ in the Septuagint is obscure. That said, much is baked into the traditional panchromatic symbolism. First, of course, there is allusion to the rainbow, bridge to Me Pot o’ Gold , nature’s symbol of harmony and peace, token of YHWH’s covenant with creation. On an even deeper level, the rainbow represents the essence of all Process, i.e. Being per se , described by Alfred North Whitehead as the creative flux of one into many and many into one. The noumenal EM spectrum becomes the phenomenon of white light which in turn refracts to give us that rainbow. As Genesis comes to a close, the Hebrews (descendants of Jacob), the Edomites (descendants of Esau), and the Ishmaelites (descendants of Ishmail) have all carved our successful niches in the Middle East. Our origin story is poised for a happy ending…but of course, human frailty ( aka sin) soon intervenes. Following his angry confrontation with Joseph, Jacob sends his chosen one to accompany his brothers ‘in the field’. Was this intended as punishment? Or was it Jacob’s attempt to toughen up his pampered offspring? Or was it done in the vain hope that sibling rivalry might be resolved? In any event, it was yet another miscalculation by the hapless Jacob; he certainly did not anticipate, much less intend, what happened next: “Seeing him approach from a distance, the brothers immediately conspire to do away with this Lord of Dreams .” Fortunately, Reuben commutes Joseph’s death sentence and instead they arrange for him to be sold into slavery. Soon Joseph is in Egypt where holds a series of administrative posts and earns his Pharoah’s respect and trust: “…The Lord is with Joseph and gives him success in all things.” While managing various offices of state, Joseph continues to interpret dreams. Pharoah dreams of seven fat cows followed by seven lean cows who proceed to devour their more corpulent predecessors. Based on that narrative, Joseph predicts seven years of ‘feast’ followed by seven years of ‘famine’ in Egypt. Pharoah acts on Joseph’s intelligence: he stores surplus during the fat years to cover the needs of the realm during the lean years to follow. As a result of God’s favor and Pharoah’s wisdom, Egypt alone prospers during an historic, region-wide famine, recorded simultaneously throughout the Middle East. The Book of Genesis is many things. It is history, legend, mythology, anthropology and ethics. But going back to the Hymn of Creation , Genesis also has a cosmological dimension. Pharoah’s dream allows the narrator to introduce a theory of time crucial to the later development of Judeo-Christian cosmology. Ask most people how they would describe time and you’re likely to hear a lot about beads on a string, buds on a branch, birds on a wire, Xmas lights on a strand. Why not? It’s a natural way to think of the succession of events that constitute our lives. But it is not the Judeo-Christian way. Genesis uses the story of Jacob’s sojourn into Egypt to propose a radically different way to imagine ‘sequence’. The Future does not follow the Past, it consumes it! A perpetual Present projects what has been into what is coming to be. It’s the Blob of cinematic fame (1958), consuming everything it touches. It confers eternal life, or at least potential immortality, on what is no more substantial than a “mist” (James 4:14), i.e. our mortal lives. We see this model displayed again and again throughout Judeo-Christian scripture and practice: YHWH is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; he is the God of the living , not to the dead. The Patriarchs (above) are consoled knowing that their descendants will be numerous as grains of sand on a beach or as stars in the sky. King David is promised that the Messiah will be from his house . At the Transfiguration, Jesus reveals Moses and Elijah, ‘alive’ in him. Roman Catholics, et al., consume Jesus in Eucharist and are simultaneously ‘uploaded’ into his Mystical Body. The fat cows don’t become lean, nor do the lean cows simply succeed their plumper forebears. Nope! In a stroke that would have made another Josef (i.e. Stalin) blush, the lean cows devour the fatties. Pity the bourgeoisie! Incredibly, you have just entered the Twilight Zone , i.e. the bizzarro world of 20 th century mathematics. Welcome to the non-Archimedean (non-A) universe. Here, all events are either embedded in one another or disjoint . Events B and C are inert quanta until they are uploaded (embedded) into Event A. In A, B and C ‘interfere’ and that interference, X, in turn interacts with and modifies both B and C. Reality is on a perpetual, non-linear loop. B and C do not interact, but they do interfere…in A. Each contributes to A (in the form of X, their interference pattern) and through the intermediation of X, A modifies B and C. In this model, A corresponds to the future, B and C to the past, and X to the present. X is what we call History (or Process). So no, Dorothy, we’re definitely not in Kansas anymore! To find out more about this world where we actually live, check out: What’s the Matter with Archimedes? Archimedes and Christianity But in the meantime, bear one thing in mind: This is the real world. This is how things actually work. Deal with it! *** Diego Velázquez — Joseph’s Tunic (1630) depicts the dramatic moment when Joseph’s brothers present his blood-stained coat to their father, Jacob, leading him to believe Joseph has been killed. Velázquez uses strong chiaroscuro lighting to heighten the emotional intensity, illuminating Jacob’s grief and the brothers’ tense deception. The painting exemplifies Velázquez’s early mastery of psychological realism, conveying profound human emotion through gesture, light, and shadow. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? 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