Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness – book recommendation

Am presenting a book recommendation on Quantum Mechanics that has been very popular, but at the same time highly controversial. So I am following the book description with a link to a refutation paper and then following that with response to the refutation paper. (It turns out that one of the book authors received his PhD under the physicist that has mounted what is an attempt to refute the book – adds an interesting dimension to the debate to be aware of this.)

Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness
Authors: Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner

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This book is derived from material that one of the authors uses to teach a course on Quantum Mechanics to non physicist majors at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Book Description

The Oxford University Press back cover of Quantum Enigma

In trying to understand the atom, physicists built quantum mechanics, the most successful theory in science and the basis of one-third of our economy. They found, to their embarrassment, that with their theory, physics encounters consciousness. Authors Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner explain all this in non-technical terms with help from some fanciful stories and anecdotes about the theory’s developers. They present the quantum mystery honestly, emphasizing what is and what is not speculation. Quantum Enigma’s description of the experimental quantum facts, and the quantum theory explaining them, is undisputed.

Interpreting what it all means, however, is heatedly controversial. But every interpretation of quantum physics involves consciousness. Rosenblum and Kuttner therefore turn to exploring consciousness itself–and encounter quantum mechanics. Free will and anthropic principles become crucial issues, and the connection of consciousness with the cosmos suggested by some leading quantum cosmologists is mind-blowing. Readers are brought to a boundary where the particular expertise of physicists is no longer the only sure guide. They will find, instead, the facts and hints provided by quantum mechanics and the ability to speculate for themselves.

In the few decades since the Bell’s theorem experiments established the existence of entanglement (Einstein’s “spooky action”), interest in the foundations, and the mysteries, of quantum mechanics has accelerated. In recent years, physicists, philosophers, computer engineers, and even biologists have expanded our realization of the significance of quantum phenomena. This second edition includes such advances. The authors have also drawn on many responses from readers and instructors to improve the clarity of the book’s explanations.

Here is the refutation paper:

Does Quantum Mechanics Require A Conscious Observer?

Michael Nauenberg, Physics Dept. University of Califonia Santa Cruz, CA, USA

Abstract: The view that the implementation of the principles of quantum mechanics requires a conscious observer is based on misconceptions that are described in this article.

http://journalofcosmology.com/Consciousness139.html

Here are responses to the refutation paper:

Co-author Fred Kuttner’s response, also at University of Cal. at Santa Cruz, to Nauenberg (I’ve also add an easy, direct link so folks don’t have to go through the clunky download process to get the paper. Will also note that Kuttner received his PhD under Nauenberg):

Response to Nauenberg’s “Critique of Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness” http://www.researchgate.net/publication/226087467_Response_to_Nauenbergs_Critique_of_Quantum_Enigma_Physics_Encounters_Consciousness

Click to access Response-to-Nauenberg.pdf

Here’s my (the blog author) first personal response to Nauenberg’s paper:

I’ll take a sheet out of Bell’s playbook (in respect to the clever back handed approach that his theorem took) – the simplest and most painfully obvious way to point out that the Michael Nauenberg advocated interpretation is not a settled matter in physics is to point to the Many Worlds interpretation.

That rational people in the field of physics have gone to such heroic lengths to devise an explanation of (or explain away) the QM “role of observer” enigma is a definitive indicator that the enigma exist in the minds of very serious practicing physicist. The Many Worlds interpretation origin sprung from attempt to get rid of the “conscious observer problem” by the brave approach of just ride the abstraction of math all the way to final conclusions. The abstraction of QM math is seemingly supportive of the Many Worlds concept so the conclusion that was drawn was that “we’ll just say it must be indicative of actual reality”.

Taking the math as literal reality arises as an issue to contend with in General Relativity where the continuous math involved leads to mathematical infinities that gives rise to enigmatic entities such as the black hole singularity. But it’s believed that one has to shift gears, so to speak, from using purely continuous math and switch to Quantum Mechanics in order to realistically model what reality may be like under those conditions (leading to Stephen Hawkin’s work describing quantum evaporation of black holes). The Many Worlds approach doesn’t shift any gears, though, but just rides QM mathematical abstraction to ultimate literal conclusions – assuming this to be a valid approach.

Many scientist and physicist are Materialist and when it comes to how they choose to parse the enigma of the the role of the conscious observer in famous, highly repeatable QM experiments, they opt for the Many Worlds interpretation. Those that prefer to remain agnostic on the issue opt for Copenhagen – in a sense side stepping (or ignoring) the dilemma. But the Many Worlds advocates know full well that the matter is not as cut and dry simple as Michael Nauenberg would attempt to explain (hand wave) it away as, hence the energy they expend in pushing the Many Worlds explanation – to this very day: “Yes, consciousness is not present in QM but we had to toss Occam’s Razor principle in the waste bin to get there – inventing the ultimate free lunch of infinitely forking universes that (sorry for this) magically are not observable to each other.”

My (the blog author) second personal response to Nauenberg’s paper:

Nauenberg says he wrote a paper 45 years ago to address von Neumann’s reasoned conclusion that a conscious observer collapses a QM wave function for a system under observation (as there had to be something external to the physical universe that was not itself encompassed by the wave function). His paper has the look of indeed being stuck that far back in time. Since then very unusual experimental variations of the double slit have been performed such as Wheeler’s Delayed choice with quantum eraser.

Delayed choice experiments have uniformly confirmed the seeming ability of measurements made on photons in the present to alter events occurring in the past. On the other hand, if a photon in flight is interpreted as being in a so-called “superposition of states,” i.e. if it is interpreted as something that has the potentiality to manifest as a particle or wave, but during its time in flight is neither, then there is no time paradox. Recent experiments have supported the latter view.

As per usual there is the element of observer knowledge involved (as in why does the universe behave differently based on the state of knowledge of a conscious observer?):

This result is similar to that of the double-slit experiment since interference is observed when it is not known which slit the photon went through, while no interference is observed when the path is known.

However, unlike run of the mill double slit, it also introduces seeming retro-causality:

However, what makes this experiment possibly astonishing is that, unlike in the classic double-slit experiment, the choice of whether to preserve or erase the which-path information of the idler was not made until 8 ns after the position of the signal photon had already been measured by D0.

Despite the seeming retro-causality exhibited in the experiment:

Some have interpreted this result to mean that the delayed choice to observe or not observe the path of the idler photon changes the outcome of an event in the past. However, the consensus contemporary position is that retro-causality is not necessary to explain the phenomenon of delayed choice.

Effectively the consensus view is to reject that there is actual retro-causality involved and instead accept that the system once observed collapse to a state that exhibits a history consistent with the facts of the observation. In other words, the universe is an information computation engine of sorts rendering an outcome of observation to conscious observer that insures inherent consistency. So called seeming retro-causality only manifest once an observer actually observes. Injecting delays for up to a year, etc., make no difference as in the end the observer collapses the system to a consistent outcome to suit what is observed. A state of a system in the past cannot be meaningfully spoken of as having any actual existence because it has not been subjected to any observation by a conscious observer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantum_eraser#Significance

It’s a trippy experiment for sure but it makes mince meat out of Nauenberg’s rhetorical alchemy as couched in an intellectual position he locked onto permanently 45 years ago.

At this point it’s useful to transition to Vlatko Vedral, Professor of Quantum Information Science at the University of Oxford, and his book:

The Universe as Quantum Information – Vlatko Vedral
http://global.oup.com/academic/product/decoding-reality-9780199695744

Vlatko is much younger than Nauenberg so he’s not stuck in ancient QM (as in 19th century ancient) thought modalities.

There has also been recent attempt to revive the old Pilot Wave approach to a concrete reality underlying QM. That’s been dealt what is perhaps a permanent set back by the latest QM experiments that are separating particle attributes from the particles. Pilot Wave theory can’t account for that at all as it is another experimentally reproducible phenomenon that indicates that reality is rendered by a QM information processing substrate (there is no underlying concrete reality).

Scientists have for the first time separated a particle from one of its physical properties – creating a “quantum Cheshire Cat“.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28543990

MyCoreArticles (and some related links)
[awakening, synchronicity, Gnosticism, AAT, nature of reality/consciousness, etc.]

–RogerV

The Invisible Thread

“We’re all connected.” It’s the ubiquitous mantra of new-agey types. Chances are if you’ve ever watched Oprah, were a fan of the TV show Lost, or have read just about anything I’ve written, you are very familiar with this concept. Along with its close cousin “everything happens for a reason,” it’s pretty much become a cliché that isn’t really given much thought. Yet, how exactly are we all connected? Sure, we’re all made of the same elements, live on the same planet, and are plugged into the same Internet, but the phrase usually refers to the idea that all of our minds are somehow connected, that our lives are intertwined, that actions taken by you, now, could somehow affect a struggling shoe salesman living in Uzbekistan. I think it’s about time we explored this concept and saved it from the nether regions of trite, hackneyed banality. After all, if the idea that “we’re all connected” is a given, why doesn’t anyone (with the possible exception of Oprah herself) really believe it?

How to Predict the Future Using the Super Bowl

Life of Illusion by the layman

How to Predict the Future Using the Super Bowl

           

Those who move in spiritual circles often talk about how we are all connected, that our thoughts create our future reality, and that the universe provides us with clues about our direction in life. Personally, I look at spiritual principles as scientific rules that we just don’t understand yet. Not too long ago, the idea that people could get sick from tiny bugs they couldn’t see or that invisible waves could carry images or music was thought to be magical thinking, until science proved it to be true. So if these spiritual principles are indeed a rule of our universe, there should be a way to test and predict their occurrence. Doing this on an individual scale might prove challenging though, since one person’s thoughts may not have enough energy to make something manifest in a testable way. But what if there were an event that millions of people were focusing on, and this event inspired heated, emotionally charged thoughts that could result in only one of two possible outcomes? If only we had such an event, why, we just might be able to predict the future on a grand scale!

When we last left Layman (#28 Fall), I wrote about how our thoughts and emotions carry an energy signature that can move forward or backward in time to manifest as clues in our lives. These clues are symbolic representations of the thought or emotion—much like how the strange imagery we get in dreams reflect our subconscious mind. I also wrote about how this might work when millions of people have a powerful, emotionally charged thought: it manifest as symbols and events on a much larger scale.

The recent example I gave was about how Hurricane Sandy, which had devastated New York and New Jersey, related to the events of the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, CT. While “new” isn’t uncommon for a location name, the fact that two east coast emotional blows occurring within a few months of each other both connected to “Sandy” seemed more than a coincidence to me. I felt that “new” + “sandy” was a coded message for a new earth, which, thanks to all the talk about the Mayan calendar end-date of December 21, 2012, many people were thinking about. This is just one way in which united thoughts on a grand scale can manifest in our reality.

If it’s true that whatever all-powerful, energetic entity that created this universe, created us in its image, then that likeness should also include our own ability to create. Whether you call it God, the Light, the Universe, or Eric Clapton, this being created our reality. Likewise, the beings it created in its image should also want to create a universe. As I’ve written about before, I believe those beings that God first created did create a universe—something we’d liken to a computer simulation of sorts. And since the beings in that simulation were created in their creator’s image, they too wanted to create a universe. So they also evolved to create a simulated world. And on and on it went until you get to our world today.

Eventually, we too will get to the point where we can fully understand the “programming code” of this universe and create our own simulation. But until that time, our world was designed to drop hints to help us evolve so we can get there. In other words, our creators want us to also create. It’s kind of like a universal Ponzi scheme. And the big man at the top is getting all the props.

Whether or not you believe our universe is the first reality ever created or a simulation within a near infinite number of other simulations, the idea that our thoughts manifest as the events we experience still works either way, and is quickly gaining momentum in both scientific and spiritual communities. You’ve probably heard of books like The Secret that discuss the law of attraction or about some of the more bizarre theories of quantum physics—how subatomic particles do not have a definitive position or velocity until we observe them. In other words, both spirituality and science agree that we are creating our experience of reality with our minds!

If this were true, it would have so many implications about life. For starters, it would mean that your life is pretty much a reflection of our thoughts. Do you generally have negative thoughts? Then you probably have had a life fraught with negative occurrences. Are you more of an optimist? Then you’ve probably been blessed with happier occurrences. It’s why drama queens attract drama, lucky people have more luck, and why complainers always have something to complain about. You created it. What you see in your mind is literally what you get.

What’s a bit unfair about all this though, is that it’s kind of a vicious cycle. If you are happy you create happy events that cause you to think about more happy things and so on. That’s great if you’re wired to be a happy person. But what if you weren’t? Then your life just seems to always attract crap. And when you’re surrounded by crap, it can be a challenge to think about anything other than crap. The trick, and this is a major aspect of kabbalah, is to not live life reactively. Always focus on what you want, instead of everything that might go wrong. And if something does go wrong, look at it from a more objective perspective about how it might contain an opportunity. That’s what a happy person would do.

These principles have been written about in self-help books and talked about by motivational speakers for decades. But what no one really discusses much, is how the collective thoughts of the world shape world events. If all of our thoughts are creating our realities, and then that reality brings about new thoughts based on what we’ve experienced, then we will likely create another event that’s energetically similar to the one we were reacting to. There’s a world event, millions of people react to that event, and those reactions create more similar events, which get reacted to, causing more similar events—and on and on! This is the reason why history is always repeating itself. President Lincoln who was succeeded by a vice president named Johnson is killed just as slavery has been abolished. President Kennedy who was also succeeded by a vice president named Johnson is killed just as new civil rights laws are being established. These highly charged emotional events echo through time, creating similar scenarios in every age.

Of course, these events all had to originate at somewhere right? Yes, and we all know the stories about most of them! They are the collective mythology of our cultures. I believe that myths are the original stories, programming, or events that had such a major impact on our collective consciousness they continually echo through the ages, causing similar themes to show up again and again. This is why it’s possible that myths can relate to real truths about how our world really works and how understanding them can help us in life.

At some point, these major events were set in motion causing the feedback of our thoughts to continually create ripples in our realities. Just as we may live in a world that’s within a world of a world created by the thought of an almighty being, we—as reflections of this almighty being—are continually creating events, that came from thoughts about events, about previous events, that began from a simple truth about our reality. In this way, our world is a reflection of the first world. Kabbalists have a saying, “as above, so below.”

The myth about the Tower of Babel is about a population that believes it is advanced enough to create a tower that can touch God. The tower falls. This ripples through time in the form of the Titanic, a ship so huge and mighty it’s thought to be unsinkable but it sinks. This echoes to the powerful World Trade Center twin towers that topple…the banks too big to fail that fall…and a world economy too massive to tank until it does. The Bible is the bestselling book of all time yet few truly get its wisdom: once you rely on the material world for your strengths, you will fall because the material world is an illusion. This illusion includes time itself, which is why these repeating themes can happen one year apart or thousands of years apart. Just as you can access any moment of a 3-hour DVD instantaneously, such it is of our world from an outsider’s perspective, i.e., God, angels, spirits, aka the programmer, avatars, and gamers.

Because of the illusionary nature of time, it can be challenging to figure out when our collective thoughts will manifest. However, as I’ve written, since our experience of time seems to be speeding up, the cause and effect of our thoughts and creations are making themselves increasingly more obvious. So, if we had a major event that millions of people had a vested emotional attachment to—giving it lots of highly charged energy—we should be able to see ripples from that event occur not long afterwards. But where might we find such an event? There is perhaps no better arena from where our modern mythology plays out than from the world stage of professional sports championships.

Pro sports can trace their evolution back to the days of family clans and tribal rivalries. Since there aren’t any tribes in modern society anymore, we had to create them. In this way, people get to feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves—a tribe of Braves or Vikings or Pirates or even mighty Ducks. The name isn’t nearly as important as the unity that it stands for: the team color, chant, logo, mascot, uniform, face-painting design, taunts, traditions, and tailgating powwows. Almost everything that people love about being a sports fan, is derived from ours days of being in tribes. Many sports teams have even gone so far as to reenact tribal rituals like the Brave’s tomahawk chop or Brown’s Dawg Pound barking. In some sports like rugby, teams like the New Zealand All Blacks even go through a warrior tribal dance to intimidate the opposing team before the game. It’s all about the united energies of being in a tribe.

Once you know this truth about the subconscious reason behind the existence of sports, you may notice something interesting—the spiritual explanations behind team victories. You start to see that they’re dependant upon the united energies each team represents, in relation to those energies prevalent in the world at the time. You see why the Redskins and Cowboys continually slaughtered the Buffalo Bills (’92-’94). Why the Buccaneers and the Raiders both played in the Super Bowl when the theme of that year was corporate scandal (2002-2003 season). You realize that when the stock market was skyrocketing, the Bulls and Rockets swept the NBA championships (’91-’98), and once it sunk to new depths, the Lakers took over (’00-’02). You notice that right before 9/11, the Colorado Avalanche won the Stanley Cup (’01). Right after, when the country was joined together in a united patriotism, the Patriots won the Super Bowl (2001-2002 season). Besides the stock market, this could also explain why the Lakers (water as a symbolic representation of our emotional turmoil) won the NBA championship (’00-’02). The Diamondbacks—a snake (representing the perpetrators)—won the World Series that year (’01), and right after the one-year anniversary of 9/11, it was the Angels (’02).

If you like betting on sports, just seek out someone who could tell you what the spiritual energy of each team represents. You’ll have a much better chance of being able to figure out the winner based on the what’s currently going on in the world (assuming your source knows what he’s doing and that the event (or events) signifying the dominant energy of the day has already happened.

For example, let’s say you’re a New York Jets fan. What’s the energy that the Jets represent? Most likely, the Jets represent advancement in technology—particularly in flight. Consciously or subconsciously, when fans are rooting for the Jets, they are projecting this energy (J-E-T-S! JETS! JETS! JETS!). When the theme of the day relates to technological advances that allow us to explore new horizons— physically or symbolically, the Jets will do well. That’s because the predominant energy is aligning with that of the Jets’ fans—giving the team more energy. In order for them to win however, you’d probably need technology to play such a huge role that it would need to take us places no man has ever gone before. So basically, when there’s excitement about robots landing on Mars, the Jets will be a team to be reckoned with, but when man finally steps foot on the red planet, I’d bet on the Jets winning it all that year.

Of course, they could win before then—as long as major technological advancements are a big theme of the year. But when we finally get to Mars, I’d say the Jets winning the Super Bowl would be highly favored. After all, the last year they won was back in 1969—the year man finally landed on the moon. The fact that our space program has been slowly crumbling ever since, explains why the Jets haven’t been to the big game ever since. So if you’re a Jets fan, my recommendation is to support space programs if you’d like to see your team really take off.

Sometimes the symbolism is a little harder to see. Like, back in 2004 you had the Red Sox and the Cardinals in the World Series. Now, what was the most prominent theme of the day? Obviously, it was the tight presidential race between George W. Bush and John Kerry. Our country was split, but the Republican themes of religious righteousness and Iraqi conquest won the election. How does this relate? Well, a cardinal is a bird—but it’s also a high-ranking religious figure. A sock, goes on feet—used to walk, trample, and kick others. Religious morality and kicking other countries’ asses were the two most prominent Republican themes, and that’s why both teams made it to the World Series. In the end though, the idea of us having to protect our country by trampling on others won the day. And isn’t it interesting that both teams are red? The Democrats never even had a chance.

When did they have a chance? In 2008 and 2012, when the country was throwing tons of energy into the election those years as Barack Obama was running and ultimately won. The Democrats are represented by the team known as Big Blue—the Giants. And when did the Giants win the Super Bowl? 2012 and 2008. Now, this obviously doesn’t mean that the Giants will win whenever the Democrats will take the Whitehouse. The election has to be the predominant theme of the year. It also doesn’t mean that they will only win when the Democrats take the Whitehouse. Sometimes, congressional elections are major themes, or just Democratic topics are the theme of the day. So if you’re a Giant fan, donate generously to the Democrats—even if you’re a Republican (and lots of Giants fans are!). After all, what’s more important, your team winning or your candidate? Most Giants fans I know would probably say the former.

Speaking of politics, one of my favorite examples of sports championships relating to energetic themes comes from the 2008 primary race. Energetic themes don’t only relate to major sporting events like football and baseball. Even sports with smaller crowds can jump on the energy bandwagon. Take horseracing.

Back in 2008, Big Brown and Eight Belles were the horses to watch at the Kentucky Derby. Big Brown was the 2-1 favorite. Eight Belles was a filly (female horse) and the first filly in history to win the Martha Washington Stakes (note the political connection to the track name). Of course, the major theme of the day was the primary race between the first Black contender for the Democratic ticket, Barack Obama, and the first female contender for the role, Hillary Clinton, who’d already spent eight years in the Whitehouse with her husband. First Black contender=Big Brown. First female contender with eight years under her belt=the filly, Eight Belles.

So, what happened in the race? Big Brown won over Eight Belles who actually broke both of her front legs and had to be euthanized after the race. As for the political race, despite a strong lead by Clinton, Obama pulled out in front to take the Democratic ticket, killing Hillary’s chances for the presidency that year. For the record, Big Brown went on to win the Preakness too but lost at the Belmont—a  sign that Obama would go on to win one other term perhaps? Or, a sign that Obama wouldn’t turn out to be the savior everyone had hoped for, and therefore, not deserving of a Triple Crown.

While it may sound like I’m really reaching to come up with these arguments, realize that there are no coincidences. Wordplays and metaphors happen in the Bible for a reason, just as they happen in life. There is a symbolism to everything around us—it’s the instructions for how the world really works. It’s how our material world translates the coded energies (program code) of the spiritual (outside reality) world. Just like a video game, our world has a code, and so, our thoughts have a code. When our coded thoughts are uploaded into the program that runs our world, it creates certain images and events that are as similar as possible to the essence of those thoughts. (For a more scientific explanation as to how symbolism in life and sporting events can actually be reflective of our thoughts, I wrote about it in a previous pos you can find here: http://thelaymansanswerstoeverything.com/2012/12/20/diary-of-a-layman-28-fall-fasten-your-safety-belt/.)

Just as with the parallel political allegories between a political race and a horserace, sometimes the actual way a sporting event plays out specifically relates to the way the resulting world events have played out in the recent past…or will play out in the near future. Let’s take a detailed look at this past Super Bowl (2013)—Super Bowl XLVII, as an example.

For this year’s Super Bowl, for purely energetic purposes I was initially rooting for the 49ers. The 49ers absolutely relate to material success (the gold miners) and their ability to make it to the Super Bowl relates to the recovering economy and people’s belief that it is recovering (signified by Obama being re-elected despite Romney’s claims of economic doom and gloom.) As for the Ravens, I’d always associated Ravens with negativity and death. They are scavengers that often pick at the remains of fallen warriors on the battlefield; there’s, “quoth the raven, ‘nevermore.’” from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem about the death of a lover; ravens are also often known as a witch’s familiar, and also show up in superstition, being seen as bad omens.) Hmmm, riches versus doom, gloom and death—I voted for the riches, or else it might seem that the Republican gloomy forecast would be right after all!

To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure what the Raven’s really represented, so I looked it up and was surprised by what I found. Yes, the scavenger and superstition things were there, but ravens represented much more, including oracles, wisdom, and revealers of hidden mysteries. Putting this together, to me this represented worldly challenges that would reveal spiritual wisdom. And in my book, that’s a good thing—in the long run. So in the battle between the 49ers’ material riches versus the Ravens’ spiritual enlightenment after hardship, I think that ultimately the Ravens energy is better for mankind overall. (As I’m proofing this, I just looked it up and the last time the Ravens won was in 2001, eight months before the events of 9/11, making the enlightenment-after-hardship theme seemingly correct. Despite the short-term challenges however, because we did grow significantly after those events, I still think the Ravens’ energy is good because of its eventual positive outcome. No pain, no gain. That’s the Ravens. Actually, their mantra should be, “pain and gain.”)

So, now that we know what energies the two teams represent, let’s take a closer look at the game. Since the 49ers couldn’t get on the ball during the first half, I’d say this relates to the economy being unable to get a real drive going in early 2013. Then, an energetic event will empower people to personal callings and to achieve their destiny. This is related to the energetic Super Bowl halftime show featuring Beyoncé and Destiny’s Child. And yes, the names of the music groups matter too—everything matters because we are creating it. If it weren’t relevant to our thoughts and emotions it wouldn’t be there.

Near the second half of 2013, a strange event will occur that will cause the whole world to pause. The event will knock out our modern conveniences causing us to slow down the pace of life a bit. This, of course, relates to the blackout at the game. Perhaps the energy diverted to our destiny will put a pause on business as usual. Eventually, our lives will be back on track but with a strong sense of urgency to catch up. (The 49ers began to catch up at this point.) This feeling will drive the economy and begin to get us back on track. But then, just as it seems as though the economy will have a complete comeback (49ers near-comeback), an unforeseen force will hold it back, but this will go under the radar (the holding penalty not called on Ravens.) Distracted by this, some confusion will set in, causing us to question whether this is truly the direction we want to go in.

From that point forward, we will purposely take some proactive sacrifices (the last minute safety) in order to secure our destinies (Michael “The Blind Side” Oher of the Ravens, finally completing his hero’s journey as a Super Bowl champ). At this stage, hidden wisdom about our world will be revealed to us. Initially, however, most of us will only be able to see it through the superficial, materialistic lens that we are so accustomed to looking through (Ravens kissing the Vince Lombardi trophy). Feel free to add any other revelations you noticed below.

And there you are—the Super Bowl can predict the future!  Unless…it’s the other way around, and the events of 2012 predicted the Super Bowl—a result of strong thoughts and emotions about what we’ve already experienced. Of course, that may be even cooler since it would mean that once you got good at this, you could get rich betting on sporting events. As I wrote above, since time is an illusion, there’s no way of knowing when the energies from our subconscious thoughts will manifest to us consciously. I believe that these days, they wouldn’t be spaced too far apart because the metaphorical veil that separates the illusion of time and space from reality is thinning. Technology requires less and less material matter to be more and more powerful, we can get places with less and less time. Everything is speeding up. So our karma—the space between an action and its causal reaction—is becoming more instantaneous. This is amazing because it causes us to more directly see the results of our actions!

So, while I am sure that the events of the game are reflective of real life events, I’m still not sure if they reflect the year that passed or the year ahead. In fact, the analysis above actually fits really well with 2012. For example, the strange event that could knock out electricity and technology and bring the economy to a temporary halt could’ve been Hurricane Sandy, which temporarily shut down NYC and the stock exchange with a massive blackout and flooding. The materialistic 49ers could also represent the Republicans while the Baltimore Ravens (a black bird) could represent Obama, and there was some confusion by Republicans on thinking how much of a lead they had. The revealed hidden wisdom could be from the 12/21/12 Mayan end calendar date as only some seem to recognize that we are now in a new age. But thanks to blogs like this and the wisdom being channeled by many others, that recognition is growing.

Which is it then? Is the Super Bowl predicting the future or do current events predict the Super Bowl? I think it’s a bit of both.  Energy comes in waves that don’t respect the boundaries of time. What I can tell for sure is that the battle between materialism (49ers) and spiritual wisdom resulting from hardships (Ravens) is the theme of the day. And there will be major challenges that knock out our technological comforts. At first, this will make us even more focused on the materialism, as we’ll need to spend much to get back to where we’re comfortable. But then, realizing that our destiny and soul wisdom give us more pleasure than superficial riches, spirituality will win out in the end.  It always does.

Regardless of whether the game predicts the future or the events predict the game, the important thing to notice is how we are the ones creating this. These games are reflections of our thoughts from our past and future that echo through time. It’s the same with any world event. We experienced a major event in the past (revealed in our mythology) that caused us to react and think about this event which, unknown to us, caused us to create another similar event, which we then also reacted to and so on.

Even our modern-day shaman—those who write the mythology of our day—continually come up with stories of repeating themes. We go on an adventure in a dream world (Alice In Wonderland). We go on an adventure in a dream world (The Wizard of Oz). We go on an adventure in a dream world (Tron, Total Recall, The Matrix, Lost, Avatar, Inception, etc.) And for the record, the timeless tune, Row Your Boat sums up this myth perfectly. We already know all this. We’re taught it through nursery rhymes, fairytales, and myths since we were tots.

Here’s another one: We are all on a journey that will present us with challenges but calling on our inner strength is our secret weapon that can defeat a massively powerful evil force (Harry Potter, Star Wars, King Arthur, Aladdin, The Odyssey, David and Goliath, etc.) And each of these myths contains details of how our world works: the cast of characters we meet on the yellow brick road, the wisdom behind taking a leap of faith, the ability to use two negative situations to cancel themselves out, the dream world within a dream world. It’s all there.

You already know the truth of this world, and now you’re reading something that completely spells it out in case you didn’t catch it, and yet, as a result of society brainwashing (notice all the zombie stories lately?), most everyone who reads this will just go back to living life as they always have. And wondering why they keep experiencing so much crap. I get it. It’s hard to break a lifetime’s worth of bad habits. I struggle with it myself and I’ve known about much of this stuff for the last twenty years! Of course, you may not even be buying any of this. But then, why have you read this far?

The feedback that we are continually creating with our thoughts is reflected in the events that repeat throughout history and also reflected in the idea that we live in a world within a world within a world. Hell, it’s even reflected in the famous equation of what energy is! E=MC². Energy is what powers this world. It consists of mass—the physical elements of matter that we can touch, multiplied by the speed of light and the reflection of the speed of light. Our experience of reality is the result of the projection (or upload) of mass (the programming code) and its reflection (or download) back to us. It’s as though we are the projection of a holographic reality, and our thoughts (a form of energy) from within it help to continually create it. Everything is cycles within cycles.

Thoughts, words, and emotions have power to create. This is why numerology, spells, and symbols have historically been seen as having a mystical power. There is no magic here. It’s simple science. We are literally codes (our DNA is a code) in a world made up of codes (each atom has a different atomic number), and our energetic thoughts create more codes, which add to our experience and promote more coded thoughts that create and so on.

Sounds kind of complicated, but it’s so simple. And like I said, we are being given this message subconsciously in all of the modern myths we are given because we already know all this and so do the modern shamans who create it! That’s why in Inception there were realities within realities. That film resonated because it spoke a truth.

The theme of cycles within cycles was also expressed in Lost. The second season had a storyline about having to enter a combination of certain numbers into a computer in order to prevent a powerful energy from escaping and destroying the world. When they weren’t pressed, a man named Desmond used a failsafe key to prevent the destruction. Then, in the final season, it was revealed that the numbers that had been input into the computer represented certain candidates on the island who could prevent a certain evil energy from escaping and destroying the world. And when they didn’t come through, Desmond turned out to be the key to preventing the destruction. (More details on this in Lost In Myth: Unwrapping “The Package.”)

The message for us is that patterns exist within patterns and they keep repeating themselves. Typing the numbers into the computer was a mini-version of the big event that echoed in time to create the earlier scenario, just as sports championships are mini versions of the world events that they symbolically relate to. How did the Lost writers know this truth of our world? The truth of that very message is what enabled them to know it. As modern day shaman they are open vessels to the truth we will all one day uncover—a truth that is currently echoing through time and already lives in the timeless dimension of our souls. Clear away the clutter or the material world and you too will be able to sense it.

Okay, so now that you’re in the know about what major sporting events reveal and reflect, naturally you probably want to take advantage of this. Besides the uncertainty of whether the energy comes from the past or the future, the other major issue with this is figuring out what, exactly, is the prominent theme of the times? There can only be one winner, and it’s kind of a fuzzy distinction. In 2012, there were a lot of major themes: the election, the recovering economy, Hurricane Sandy, the Sandy Hook school shooting and resulting gun legislation debate, and my favorite, the Mayan calendar end-date. All those energies relate to teams that probably made it to the finals (Broncos represent untamed, chaotic events; Seahawks relate to the hurricane; Patriots, the election; Texans the gun debate, etc). But which was the most powerful? Hard to say for certain.

It’s also hard to say which team’s energy most closely relates to the event. For all I know, the death symbolically represented by the Ravens could’ve reflected the Sandy Hook shooting. What I do know is that these games definitely relate to the major themes of the times, what’s a bit unclear is the details, and unfortunately, that’s what’s needed to be able to consistently win bets. Still, you now have a slight edge, and sometimes that’s all it takes to come out on top. Sometimes.

When a friend asked me who’d win the Super Bowl back in 2009, because there seemed to be a plethora of mining accidents happening at the time, I told him to pick the Steelers. He did and they won. Then, a couple years later when there was that Chilean mining disaster, it was the Packers and the Steelers—both representing blue collar jobs—in the big game, but the Packers won that year. Perhaps because the mining incident wasn’t in the States or that the many factory closings happening here was a bigger theme of the day—a theme more closely aligned with Packers’ energy. Just glad I didn’t bet on it that time. I’m still working out the details, but for now, I’ll just enjoy using various pro sports games to see what the world seems to be focusing on, and to try to guess what events that might create in the days ahead. In fact, that’s pretty much the only reason I ever watch pro sports.

As wonderful as professional sports are for revealing the prominent energies of the times, I still feel like they represent a myth we need to outgrow. I’m talking purely about professional spectator sports here. Sports represent a myth of division, not unity. They cause billions of people around the world to focus on an “us versus them” mentality that manifests as wars, prejudice, discrimination, selfishness, and even aggressive weather patterns and “natural” disasters. As long as we cling to our need for separation, of tribal wars and battles, they will exist in the real world as well. We are creative beings created in the image of God—the supreme programmer. And our energies create our realities.

If people want to put their passions towards a particular energy, much better it should be an energy of unity, not division. If they find that they have a subconscious longing for a sense of tribal camaraderie, they still can. But instead of them thinking that their tribe is restricted to their region, or school, or state, or country, they should think of it as consisting of their entire planet. We’re all in this together. And we are all of a tribe that is taking part in the greatest sport of all. It’s a quest to find out who we really are before time runs out. The name of this game is the human race. Now there’s something worth cheering about.

May your inner spark grow to light your way,
The Layman

 

Marc Oromaner is a New York City writer whose book, The Myth of Lost offers an alternative solution to Lost and uncovers its hidden insight into the mysteries of life. He can be contacted on the wall of The Myth of Lost Facebook page or on his blog The Layman’s Answers to Everything.

The Myth of Lost is available on Amazon and barnesandnoble.com.

Scientific Proof We Live In A Simulation

Back in June 2009, I wrote an article titled “Proof That We’re Living a Life of Illusion.”  In it, I provided what I felt was overwhelming evidence that we all live in some kind of computer simulation. I also offered some simple explanations as to why I thought we did. At the time, the people who are open to believing in such fantastical theories excitedly agreed with the premise, while those who rely on hard-core scientific proof, did not. Well, a funny thing’s happened in the years since I wrote that article. Scientists are beginning to see the evidence that the non-believers require. The question now is, whether those skeptics will decide to take the blue pill or the red pill?

Living Forever Might be an Option

Who doesn’t want to live forever? A lot of people, it seems. I’ve introduced the topic with friends and family, and many of them say they do not. They fear that life would get boring, or that future generations would suffer with so many immortal people around, using up all our resources. Others cite various religious concerns, or just feel that eternal life would be unnatural or taboo. I think that these fears are actually based on the current paradigm of aging: We see loved ones age, break down and lose their ability to live life with dignity. It’s hard to imagine life being otherwise.

In my opinion, not being able to think past our current life cycle long enough to even imagine immortality is a poor excuse. We can compare our lives now to the past quite easily, and in the process see that we’re already living to ages that our ancestors might have found “unnatural.” Only a few hundred years ago a 40-year-old man would have been considered quite old. A few thousand years ago the same man might have been considered old at 21. It is ironic that the same people who are avid consumers of technology—the same people who will stand in line waiting for the next iPhone—can’t, or won’t think of life-extension technology, as not only an option, but an inevitability. Technology, like the aforementioned iPhone, evolves exponentially. A scant few decades ago, we were talking on clunky bag phones in our cars while listening to our music on cassette tapes. Now your phone is in your pocket and synched with your car’s speakers, pumping out music from your own personal jukebox of thousands  of songs.

Aubrey de Grey, Chief Science Officer at SENS Foundation, in his TED Talk, admits that a future generation will have to decide if they want a lower birthrate or a higher death rate. When the current aging paradigm changes for the better, provided our eating and lifestyle choices improve,  with technology we will live longer and as the planet gets more populated at  what point do we have a population problem? At 7 billion people, now and according to a 1973 encyclopedia I threw  in a bon fire two summers ago, the population was 3.5 billion. That’s a doubling of humans in roughly forty years.

As a fan of technology, even I have been guilty of thinking the aging curve toward longer life may plummet, in my lifetime, and my generation may be in nursing homes sooner than retirement age– due to drugs, bad food, environmental pollution, genetically modified organisms,  and of course, general laziness. I get frightened that technology will increase but our health will continue to get worse and instead of healthy, scientifically advanced humans, we end up more like those big fatties on the space ship in the Disney animated film WALL-E.   Not having to move a muscle ruined their bodies and their self worth.

Improving our biology, living longer, and eventually being able to download one’s essence or a copy of one’s consciousness into a super computer is not only an idea explored in science-fiction, it’s an idea being tackled, dissected, and discussed, by many people in different areas of research and people from different backgrounds—from inventor, Ray Kurzweil, filmmaker and philosopher, Jason Silva, biomedical gerontologist,  Aubrey de Grey, the first professor of Cybernetics, Kevin Warrick, or philosopher Nick Bostrom, whom believes we already live in a simulation.

When I heard Mr. Kurzweil ask, “Will machines of human complexity make their own decisions, or will they just follow a program, albeit a very complex one,” I have to admit I thought about the Terminator films and an Issoc Avinov book.  I don’t pretend to be smart enough to know if a singularity is possible in my lifetime. But I can think of the tools we currently have that weren’t available a few short years ago. If you’re a baby boomer, you’ll remember having an attendant wash your windshield, check your oil and pump your gas at a filling station. From what I’ve been told, you weren’t allowed to handle the pumps back then. Now we swipe a debit card, fill our tank and leave with a receipt in hand—never entering the store, unless we want a snack or something to drink.

Nanobots are machines or robots nearly on the nanoscale or .1 to 10 meters and constructed of nanoscale or molecular components.  With large companies competing to master nanotechnology like some modern day alchemists–Northrop Grumman, General Electric, and Hewlett-Packard, to name a few–advances will be seen in the medical field, theater of  war, and of course computing.

Once we gain the ability to talk and interact with machines—using a device such as the google classes, augmenting our reality with a digital heads up display—our lives will benefit in unimaginable ways, throwing those old preconceived fears and ideas about the future out the window. Technology will continue to make our lives easier, doing less and less physical work.  Any physical human work can be benefitted by a computer tool, assisting with any tasks adding digital overlays and 3-d imaging, that will   envelope our reality, continually blurring the line between what’s a machine and what’s human.

What if money was all it took, money and a doctor visit—say a pill or a needle–to change how long one lives? If it were available right now, we’d read about it and look to see which famous people have tried it. Then we’d hope a few years would go by and the technology would become accessible to all, once the  price came down, much like those early  flat screen TV’s  priced at $15,000–out of reach of the typical consumer in the late 90s—and now less than $1,000. It would take years but eventually the masses would finally gain access to these advances. By this time culture could be celebrating these advances–or perhaps demonizing them—in an attempt to collectively decide how long humans should be allowed to live.

The technological singularity is believed to be possible, if you agree with Ray Kurzweil, around 2045. A merging of machine and human intelligence, in a time when machines actually become self aware and surpass human brain power.   Kurzweil claims nanobots will soon wipe out cancer, back up our memories, slow aging, and control our consciousness. I have to admit I think about the Terminator films as an archetypal tale of advancing technology’s dual edged sword and hope whatever intelligence surpasses us respects Issac Azimov’s three rules of robotics.

Most people have a personal cell phone they carry with them, even a cheap one like mine can access the internet—though without the capability of watching YouTube  videos—in a few clicks it surfs the net, sends and receives e-mails, make phone calls, and my favorite function: text messaging.  Texting is the modern day telegraph. 1n 1836 the first telegraph message was sent two miles. In the 1920s a ten word telegram could be sent for 20 to 60 cents—depending on the distance the message had to travel.  To get this telegram to its recipient you needed to call a telegraph office and recite the message you wanted delivered, or you could appear in person and write on a blank form to be converted into Morse code. We now have this ability to send notes back and forth, using personal devises, without physically going anywhere. The price was a factor, giving a telegraph message a shortened style, not too different from today’s abbreviated text messages. We can do this job on own without someone transcribing the message.

Some new cars can brake on their own when the cruise control is engaged and warn the driver with sound and light if a crash is being sensed by the vehicle. Beeping sounds can be heard from different sides of the vehicle, warning of obstructions and back up cameras allow you to use reverse without turning your head to physically see if anything is behind you. The urge to look behind you dulls after time as you continually use this technology. Many new cars lack keys to turn locks; absent in others is an ignition switch and the car comes alive, starting with a push of a button. We’ve all seen car commercials where the vehicle parallel parks itself, so what’s next? Will we one day not have to drive at all and be able to be fully immersed in our digital world as our vehicle handles all of the driving? We pump our own fuel. We write our own messages. We push start.

A few years ago people had slow internet connections, and texting was new and awkward with buttons you had to type a few times to make the correct letter combinations. Now we use kindles, iPads, we Skype, podcast and send video through social media with absolute ease. Toddlers are now photographers and filmmakers.

Everything is advancing and getting smaller.  Even the world feels smaller with how interconnected trade and social media allow all of us on earth to get ideas, physical and digital content, to each other quickly. Modern day grocery stores make eating in season, a choice, not a necessity. We can make one-click purchases online, swipe a credit card at a vending machine and rent a movie, just like you’d buy a  soda, chips, or candy.

Actor, and comedian Dave Foley spoke of a day when humans build a computer so smart that it would download a copy of reality and then wouldn’t know the difference between the copy and original. And if people can think up this type of scenario, then how do we know it didn’t already happen? Nick Bolstom says you wouldn’t know the difference between reality and a simulation.

Can we take our consciousness and store it somewhere else—forever, living out numerous fantasies in the digital universe? Eventually people will gain the ability to move our awareness off-site, if you will, copied and moved to a large super computer that has downloaded our memories, preserved them given us the ability to live out our lives in the digital space of unlimited possibility.

I Would gladly update my biological software, and if I could, run a heads up display similar to what we see in a first person shooting game, just so I could keep updated on my organs and their functioning, similar to when we hit a button in our vehicles checking the machines oil life.  How many people would take a vaccine with nanobots, or whatever the latest technology happened to be, if they gained the ability to monitor blood sugar levels, kidney functioning, heart rate and current cellular damage?  Living to be over 100 years may become common.  With the computer revolution moving into the world of biology, is where I envision the extra years of life becoming  more than possible; actually becoming a reality.  At some point, leaving the earth suit with a copy of your consciousness seems like an eventual step.

A universal wireless connection that all humans will connect to, sending their thoughts everywhere, is something I imagine google will invent.  We’ll look back at a time when we were scared to share our private thoughts, much like we did a few years ago when many people were nervous to do business over the internet with their credit card numbers —just like a time when people worried about sharing their social security numbers.

Not only does technology increase, exponentially, our acceptance, ease of use and interconnectedness, increases our reliance on technology, moving us towards a merger with machines.  Access to information is constantly evolving, becoming effortless to interact with.  No longer does one need to understand computers and code to copy info and send audio and video, bypassing numerous steps and spending a lot of time in the process.

Once our thoughts can be stored, accessed, and retrieved by anyone, forget passwords—future generations of people will be able to go for a ride in each other’s consciousness—and privacy becomes obsolete. Much like cloud storage became normal so quickly, future inventions undoubtedly yield advanced communication enhancements through new technologies. Using new platforms to recall info—whether our thoughts or someone else’s–might be immediately accessible, without performing a google search on a physical machine.  This kind of access might be some type of virtual display you’d scan through in your minds-eye, similar to flipping through apps the way we currently do on smart phones and tablets.

People are accustomed to the nursing home idea of getting older; using a walker or wheel chair, loosing hearing, and independence; then acquiescing at some point and taking the death plunge. It’s all been written for us, from birth to death. This is the pattern and everyone must follow it. I’d rather we fight aging, looking at aging differently, like Aubrey de Gray, and thinking more of death as a disease we haven’t cured yet. If we cure death or beat it back by 30 years as Mr. Gray suggests we can, in the near future, then such a technological advance will mark a day when aging as we know it currently will become something future generations read about in the history books—perhaps in disbelief that it took us so long to think differently about aging.  As The SENS Foundation’s Chief Science Officer, Aubrey de Grey is looking past trying to understand metabolism and its complexities and is interested more in the damage that causes pathology and ways we can do what he calls “maintenance” on our bodies, much like we do on our vehicles to keep the machine running. The general idea is this: keep the body within normal ranges of health before molecular side effects of metabolism (damage) lead to disease and death. This certainly beats geriatrics, where we essentially try to beat back symptoms of aging, to make old age more comfortable, all the while doing next to nothing prior to getting old, when it is then too late to repair years of damage.

Comedian Joe Rogan used to say “what are you going to live forever?” in various comedy bits as a way to remind people that our time is indeed finite and we should live our lives without fear. What’s the point of continually maintaining our safety, and avoiding risk, when we all inevitably die? One day we will expire and if we live to be old and can no longer work or play, we’ll reflect back on our lives and wish we would have done more; been kind to others and ourselves; we’ll wish we hadn’t been scared of ridicule, failure, or even success, while pondering thoughts of sadness and joy. That which gives each individual purpose and joy, should be addressed, and a decision made, now, then pursued and put into action. Remember, no one lives forever—at least not yet. It’s going to take the same mindset we have as consumers of technology to translate into us using technologies we can embrace and extend our age, no longer only thinking of technology as gadgets used to make our current life more convenient.

I’m Gonna be Dead Someday, the name of a comedy CD Joe Rogan released in 2000, is a  statement, one you inherently believe, much like the sky is blue. People once scoffed at the idea the earth may in fact be round. Maybe dying is our current flat earth theory—one that at the moment seems logical—only in the near future, considered to be a punch line for old ways of thinking.

Peter Diamandis, Chairman and CEO of the  X-Prize Foundation, and Chairman of Singularity University, talks about our society being adverse to risk taking. He says, “a true breakthrough requires tremendous levels of risk.”  Our gadgets undoubtedly make life easier, productive and more fun. Although the majority of consumers  do not look at technology as anything other than entertainment and certainly not in terms of  how technology can be used to extend human life, but more in terms of the next toy or form of entertainment. But most of us aren’t explorers, pioneers or inventors and we’re not thinking of ways to break out of current paradigms. And I can’t think of a more obvious paradigm than aging to analyze and make steady process toward living healthier, longer, and eventually, forever.

Blade Runner 30th Anniversary (2012)

(Originally posted on: 11/18/2012)

Apple’s iTunes has this promotional verbiage for the film Blade Runner:

The #1 Sci-Film of all time is turning 30! Visually spectacular, intensely action-packed and powerfully prophetic since its debut. Blade Runner returns in Ridley Scott’s definitive Final Cut, including extended scenes and never-before-seen special effects. In a signature role as 21st-century detective Rick Deckard, Harrison Ford brings his masculine-yet-vulnerable presence to this stylish noir thriller. In a future of high-tech possibly soured by urban and social decay. Deckard hunts for fugitive, murderous replicants – and is drawn to a mystery woman whose secrets may undermine his soul. This incredible version features the definitive Final Cut of Ridley Scott’s legendary Sci-Fi classic. Also includes over three hours of special features with purchases of iTunes Extras.

Rotten Tomatoes tomatometer rating: 92%

Fresh: This is perhaps the only science-fiction film that can be called transcendental.
Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly, Nov. 8, 2011

Fresh: A motion picture masterpiece on the short list of Reasons Why This Medium is Worthwhile.
Rob Vaux, Mania.com, June 25, 2012

Fresh: Probably close to being on par with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in terms of grandeur — although of a stunningly different and far more unsettling kind.
Ken Hanke, Mountain Xpress (Asheville, NC), February 19, 2008

Fresh: These days, it’s almost impossible to find a gritty science fiction motion picture that doesn’t owe at least a small debt to Blade Runner’s visual style.
James Berardinelli, RealViews, May 29, 2007

Fresh: It is, in fact, an amazingly sophisticated, sumptuously visionary treatise on the consequences of attaining god-hood.
Rita Kempley, Washington Post, November 16, 2001

Now “#1 Sci-Film of all time” strikes one as just excessive promotional hyperbole. However, this film truly has arrived at a highly regarded cult status over the years and it would certainly be fair to place it in the top ten list. For my personal list I’d place it somewhere in the top five.

Blade Runner is often noted as a breakthrough for its combination of a particular noir style and a futuristic dystopic atmosphere. My own analysis – and is not a surprising finding given that the film is based on a Philip K. Dick novel – is that Blade Runner is really an esoteric work that is laden in meaning through symbolism and allegory.

As I later was writing an analysis of Ridley Scott’s film Prometheus I found that Scott’s three films Alien, Blade Runner, and Prometheus are all interconnected by the theme of the Mesopotamian civilization of Sumer/Akkad.

The film Alien prominently displays the Sumerian Winged Solar Disk emblem in one rather long running scene of dialog, Blade Runner depicts the ruling elites living in Mesopotamian-style step pyramids and relates classic Sumerian theology in allegorical form, Prometheus presents Mesopotamian civilizations as an ancient source of information about the alien race, the Engineers (those that created all life on Earth including our own race – thus corresponding to the Sumerian Anunnaki gods). Prometheus also portrays these Engineers as resembling the Gnostic Demiurge in temperament, which the Gnostic Christians regarded the Hebrew Elohim/Yahweh as the Demiurge – a lesser divinity that is not by any means the most high God or true source of all things (the Hebrews are derivative in terms of cultural influence from prior Sumer/Akkad civilization via their patriarch, Abraham, whom emigrated out of the Sumerian city Ur).

Blade Runner also depicts the Replicant Roy as a Gnostic Revealer and thereby is a catalyst for transcendent awakening in Deckard. The Gnostic Christians viewed Yeshua (Jesus) as a Gnostic Revealer – that he was an ultimate spiritual teacher and initiator into higher truth for humanity. (Philip K. Dick had a transcendental experience in 1974 and became a self-described Gnostic in his last years.)

In all these respects and associations the film Blade Runner was just not a run of the mill science fiction film.

Another great science fiction film, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey relates some of the same concepts that are conveyed in Scott’s Blade Runner and Prometheus films. The screenplay for 2001 was co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. It depicts a highly advanced alien race coming to Earth and intervening with a primitive hominid species from which a technologically adept human race arises as an outcome of that artificial intervention.

This is the very core interpretation of Zechariah Sitchin in respect to his reading of Sumerian theology – Homo Sapiens (Adamu, Adam, Mankind) is an artificial hybrid species. This is the cornerstone concept of Ancient Astronaut Theory; it is the story that Blade Runner tells allegorically; it is the story that Prometheus tells out right; it is the very centerpiece of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Our best, highest concept science fiction films actually are just a retelling of a very ancient story – one that is at least 250,000 years old.

But the most ancient story not only concerns humanity’s origins as a biological species, it also pertains to our destiny. Consider the “spirit dove” rising toward Heaven. Consider the Christian cross that Elizabeth clings to. Consider Dave returning to Earth as an ascended pure energy being. Our physical manifestation is just a portion of the story, yet it is not the ultimate conclusion of the matter.

Do we have a non-material aspect to our individual existence as these films imply? In the 21st century the answer to this question is known. Really has been since the 1930’s and John Von Neumann’s mathmatical treatment of Quantum Mechanics. Von Neumann posited that the observer of wave function collapse must be external to the physicality of the universe.

Von Neumann argued that the entire physical world is quantum mechanical, so the process that collapses the wave functions into actual facts cannot be a physical process; instead, the intervention of something from outside of physics is required. Something nonphysical, not subject to the laws of quantum mechanics, must account for the collapse of the wave function: the only nonphysical entity in the observation process that von Neumann could think of was the consciousness of the observer. He reluctantly concluded that this outside entity had to be consciousness and that prior to observation, even measuring instruments interacting with a quantum system must exist in an indefinite state.

Von Neumann extended the Copenhagen interpretation by requiring the measurement process to take place in a mind. He was reluctantly driven to this conclusion by his relentless logic: the only process in the von Neumann chain that is not merely the motion of molecules is the consciousness of the observer. His arguments were developed more completely by his illustrious followers, most notably Fritz London, Edmond Bauer, and Eugene Wigner. Wigner, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics, wrote, “When the province of physical theory was extended to encompass microscopic phenomena, through the creation of quantum mechanics, the concept of consciousness came to the fore again; it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”

Carter, Chris (2010-08-23). Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death (Kindle Locations 1015-1026). Inner Traditions Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

Thanks Sir Ridley Scott for Blade Runner.

In the year 2012 – which also happens to coincide with the concluding year of the 13th Baktun of the ancient Mayan Long Count calendar, which has marked off 5125 years since its start – this film speaks more profoundly to us than it did in 1982 as so many are now coming up to speed.

MyCoreArticles (and some related links)
[awakening, synchronicity, Gnosticism, AAT, nature of reality/consciousness, etc.]

–RogerV

Nice Pictures of Ancient Enigmas

Baalbek Platform in Lebanon

Ruins of Stone Circles in South Africa

MyCoreArticles (and some related links)
[awakening, synchronicity, Gnosticism, AAT, nature of reality/consciousness, etc.]

–RogerV

Number 11 Synchronicity

(originally posted on: October 13, 2012 12:00)

I sync with special numbers on the order of about 30 times a day. (Estimate based on weeks of logs I kept back when was still rather shook up by this phenomena.)

When I happen to glance at any manner of digital display throughout the day, these special numbers predominantly show up. Usually it’s a clock of some kind, but could be an odometer, or work out equipment, etc., etc. I can’t force it – my mind will be on something else and will then just happen to glance at some digital display and the numbers will be there. Or when I first get into a car, or right as I arrive at a destination, or wake up in the morning and first glance at the time. My daily routine has been utterly synced with this phenomena for going on for over a year and a half. By now I’ve settled down and am no longer bothered by it.

The number 11 and multiples of 11 predominate: 11, 22, 33, 44, 55, and then a triple digit variation on these: 111, 222, 333, 444, 555. The 11, 33, and especially 44 are the most frequent. On displays that can show it, 77 and 777 are also prominent as are these particular combinations: 11:11, 9:11 and combination of 7 with 11, as in 7:11 or 11:07. The 444 number is also special for some reason and crops up a lot. (There’s a movie that even uses 4:44 in its title as there is a “folklore” that this is a numerological symbol of the end of the world or the end of time. For the record, I don’t personally ascribe to any manner of apocalyptic view.)

One other thing – syncs to these numbers can spike out the roof when I’m in, say, physical vicinity of someone that is in my Soul Group (people that I’ve had vivid dreams about which is later confirmed via a waking life synchronicity involving the respective person).

I one time contacted Mike Clelland of the Hidden Experience web site (and podcast) by email and related to him the paranormal phenomena that started happening back in Spring of 2009 – and, of course, the number 11 syncs (emailed him the logs to demonstrate). He then inquired about my year, month, and day of birth. He and I were born 1 year apart, same month, and only 4 days apart. Since he’s established his web site people have gravitated to it and that when contacting him, many tend to fall into a similar profile. There is a clumping of birth date that is clustered within a 3 to 4 year range and centered around a birth month. He too marks 2009 as a particularly noteworthy year in the onset of an awakening process. We also tended to line up on other profile matters. Mike’s web site is thus a sort of unofficial clearing house.

The hypnotherapist and prolific author Dolores Cannon says that in her work she has learned that there are waves of volunteers. Her profile of these individuals bears some similarity to the things in Mike’s working profile.

The one thing that this phenomena demonstrates, even if one is unsure of its precise meaning, is that the fabric of reality is not a random cake walk – it is not objective and separate from ourselves. The fabric of reality is (or can be) highly orchestrated. Which probably boils down to that everything unfolds to plans where we exert freedom of choice in pivotal situations that arise through life. And that reinforces the concept that this is a training ground virtual reality in which we strive to perfect ourselves spiritually.

To me personally (given this number 11 syncing started happening just a matter of about 18 months ago) this is the Higher Self signaling to wake up and get on with what I’m supposed to do. Since 2009 I’ve started writing articles on esoteric matters – starting with this article, Heiser vs. Sitchin. Before then, I wrote articles on subject matters pertaining to my profession. A switch of some sort flipped along the way and now the passion is about the esoteric matters. The two articles on the films Blade Runner and Prometheus I think encapsulate the entirety of what needs to be said. These articles in particular tend to really upset people but they very much are intended to assist in the waking up transition to the true nature of reality and certain things about who we are. They ultimately point people to what is vitally important – the engagement of personal gnosis.

MyCoreArticles (and some related links)
[awakening, synchronicity, Gnosticism, AAT, nature of reality/consciousness, etc.]

–RogerV

Prometheus the Film – Thematic Confluences

(original posting date: July 3, 2012 01:11)

Introduction

As I write this, director Ridley Scott’s newest film, Prometheus, is still making the rounds at the theaters. However, it’s already clear that this film does not enjoy the same level of mass audience appeal as his 1979 science fiction horror film classic, Alien. For many, the first film in the Alien franchise set the standards bar for that particular genre – Prometheus is certainly a decent film with film-watching entertainment value, but Alien remains secure within its claim of top position of the sci-fi horror genre.

There are other kinds of rewards to be garnered in a watching of the film Prometheus, though. However, you will not find any film critics of the conventional ilk making note of what those rewards are. Well known film critic Roger Ebert is illustrative, in this article, just how clueless conventional critics are when it comes to a film that has a primary purpose of putting forth certain thematic concepts into mass consciousness. Even on the contextual basis that Ebert editorialized this particular take on the film’s content (which he presses the film into service of an ideological political agenda – Ebert is a very political kind of guy, I know as I follow him on Twitter), he even gets that completely wrong; painfully obvious elements in the film refute his particular take-away.

The political arena is a completely inappropriate one to be in when examining any of the themes of this film anyway. The conventional film critics should all just step aside and let those with a better equipped background (esoterica) handle this one. The usual reasons, to go see a film, are not the most relevant ones here. When I went to see this film, there were those in the audience that were there with very much the same motivations as me – what interesting (and perhaps provocative) things is Ridley Scott out to try and say with this film?

Ancient Astronaut Theory of Origin of Life (and Humanity)

The provenance of alternative history researchers, the Ancient Astronaut Theory (AAT) as explanation for the origin of life on Earth, or specifically the origin of the species Homo Sapiens, is a front and center literal depiction in this movie. An alien race of technologically advanced space traveling humanoids, dubbed as the ‘Engineers’ by the human characters in the film, are the responsible agents. Later on in the film, the arch protagonist, scientist Elizabeth Shaw (played by Swedish/Icelandic actress Noomi Rapace), discovers that human DNA is derivative from the DNA of the Engineers. This alien race is thus the progenitor of our own species. An Earth girl could conceivably have an Engineer’s baby, so to speak.

This is the great center piece concept that the film intends to inculcate into the minds of the mass audience that is assured to come to see a Ridley Scott film (especially one built up with the hype and anticipation that Prometheus enjoyed). There is nothing at all subtle in the presentation of this concept by the film – no one in the audience will miss this fundamental edifice of the Prometheus narrative. It is literally related – no symbolic decoding required whatsoever.

Prometheus is now saying it all out in the open

My entire motivation to write any manner of analysis on Prometheus the film is that I see the narrative and thematic details that it relates as essentially an out in the open disclosure of the occulted back story that was told in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner film of 30 years ago. So from my esoteric point of view, Prometheus actually has much more in common with the 1982 Blade Runner film that it does the 1979 Alien movie. I’m going to mark out the comparative overlaps between Prometheus and my decoding of Blade Runner so a reading of Blade Runner – An Astro-Gnostic Fable (of the past – not the future) is a prerequisite for what follows.

Prehistoric Shaman and Ancient Cave Art Work

The human side of the narrative tale in Prometheus begins with an archeological discovery in a newly found cave depicting the artwork of some prehistoric tribal shaman. What is illustrated in this ancient cave artwork is significant in that it shows our human forbears having knowledge pertaining to our extraterrestrial creators going back in human history tens of thousands of years.

In the section of my prior Blade Runner article dealing with the symbolism of the owl, I relate how humanoid owl imagery has been found depicted in cave artwork dated to 15 thousand years ago. What ancient prehistoric shaman experienced then in their consciousness-altered state, employing hallucinogenic mushrooms, references the same imagery as described in contemporary UFO abduction cases – the visage of the humanoid owl. Thus in Blade Runner the symbolic device of the owl turns out to be a kind of linkage to the most ancient times of expressive human artifacts – shamanic cave artwork.

It’s unlikely there was any intentional linkage here on the basis of the owl vis a vis cave artwork. It is merely a kind of emergent indirect connective thread that after the fact is discernible. My decoding of Blade Runner ended on prehistoric cave artwork – Ridley Scott’s Prometheus inaugurates its human-related story from prehistoric cave artwork.

Sumer/Akkad/Mesopotamia

When the human space travelers in Prometheus arrive at their destination, the crew is given a background briefing as to the purpose of their journey. Numerous reliefs and clay tablets stemming from ancient Sumer/Akkad and derivative Mesopotamian civilizations are shown to the crew. A very clear reference to ancient Mesopotamia in conjunction to AAT is thus established.

My Blade Runner article likewise ascribes the surface story of desperate Replicants to be a Gnostic-style allegorical retelling of the ancient Mesopotamian literature. Principally its narrative is the centerpiece of Mesopotamian theology – that Mankind was created as a lesser race by the gods to be their servants. My analysis noted other elements in Blade Runner that referenced ancient Mesopotamia as well (e.g., the style of pyramidal buildings in which the elites resided in the top most chambers).

Interestingly, the 1979 Alien film has a scene depicting a subliminal reference to ancient Mesopotamia:

Sumerian Winged Solar Disk Emblem

This is a fairly lengthy scene of dialog and the winged solar disk symbol occupies the center space of the screen for its duration. It might not even be fair to categorize this as subliminal symbolism as the camera shot places it right at the level of the actors’ heads – right to where the viewers’ eyes will be focused. If one was already familiar with this symbol it would never escape notice.

The winged solar disk is rampant in ancient Mesopotamian iconography:

Today, thanks in large part to various popular alternative history books and the Internet, the winged solar disk is rather well known (back in 1979 – probably not so much):

Prometheus makes explicit what Alien and Blade Runner encoded.

The Darwinian Fallacy

Prometheus on one level relates an account of the origin of life (and Mankind) on planet Earth that contradicts the materialist Darwinian belief that life originated on Earth through random processes of nature. Instead, Prometheus depicts that life was seeded by an extraterrestrial intelligence, which that concept is known as Directed Panspermia.

Some Darwinians are friendly to Panspermia and even perhaps the Directed Panspermia hypothesis. It remains a great conundrum that there still remains no scientifically viable explanation of how first cellar life arose on Earth. One ostensible way out of the dilemma is to posit that first cellar life came to Earth from outer space – from some other point of origin in the cosmos.

At one point in the Prometheus film, the protagonist character, scientist Elizabeth Shaw, is confronted on this matter. She is asked if she is effectively ready to jettison the presumed rationality of Darwinian Evolution (where the tone of the verbiage employed in the dialog treats it as well accepted fact) to account for the origin of life in favor of a Directed Panspermia explanation. Shaw’s retort is who created the Engineers? In other words, Directed Panspermia is not any kind of ultimate answer to the question of the origin of life.

As prominent real life Darwinian Evolutionist sometimes cozy up to the Panspermia hypothesis, Shaw’s critique stands as their rebuttal, i.e., you can’t run and hide under the Panspermia umbrella as a means to explain the ultimate origin of life. Panspermia is just another run of the mill circular argument that’s tossed up as obfuscation of the root dilemma. The Prometheus film depicts Shaw’s character savvy enough to see that ruse for what it is. (So instead of being a dogmatist, her character is a scientist that is about the business of science – searching for actual explanatory answers.)

(Per Elizabeth Shaw (Ridley Scott) rejoinder – a more in-depth rebuttal of the Darwinian Fallacy here.)

Transhumanism/Immortality

In the Blade Runner article there was a section that addressed the subject of achieving immortality via a transhumanism agenda of engineering a Replicant suitable for consciousness download – the Replicant Rachel being suspected as a research prototype with this purpose in mind.

The Prometheus spaceship is sent on a journey to encounter the Engineers, Mankind’s creators, as the character Peter Weyland (portrayed by Guy Pearce) hopes to learn how to reverse the condition of his decrepitude of old age. Thus he is looking for a genetic engineering solution to achieving immortality and rather reasonably expects that Mankind’s creators would possess that kind of know how.

This theme appeared somewhat obliquely, yet visibly, in the Blade Runner film. It becomes a front and center component of the Prometheus plot narrative.

Engineers as Gnostic Demiurge

The Prometheus film sets forth that the Annunaki gods of ancient Mesopotamian civilizations are essentially one and the same as the Engineers. Prometheus portrays the Engineers as having the following characteristics:

• Gigantism
• Pale complexion
• Piercing eyes
• Super human strength
• Great intelligence
• Malevolent attitude toward humanity

The Annunaki gods were depicted on the ancient reliefs as being giants in comparison to Mankind. The Hebrew Old Testament of the Bible describes the Anakim tribe in the land of Canaan as being great in stature (the Israelites were as grasshoppers by comparison). The height of Goliath, noted in various sources, ranged from 6 foot 9 inches to 9 feet tall – King Og of Bashan perhaps 11 to 12 feet in height.

The Book of Enoch has this description of Noah at his birth:

For unto my son Lamech a son has been born, one whose image and form are not like unto the characteristics of human beings; and his color is whiter than snow and redder than a rose, the hair of his head is whiter than white wool, and his eyes are like the rays of the sun; and (when) he opened his eyes the whole house lighted up.

Lamech was fearful that his new son had been sired by one of the angels of heaven given his physical appearance (Genesis Chapter 6 relates how the sons of the Elohim took human wives and had offspring – the demigods referred to as Nephilim, which has typically been translated as giants).

The Engineers of the film Prometheus are of a very pale complexion. Also, the eyes of the Engineers are of a notable piercing characteristic. The Engineers are physically much taller and definitely much stronger than human beings. The Elizabeth Shaw character determines through DNA analysis that humanity is derived from the Engineers (and hence in theory there could be offspring from a mating of the two species). The fact that the Engineers can travel in space and engage in genetic engineering is indicative of their intelligence.

Finally, the most paramount attribute of the Engineers is the unmitigated malevolence they harbor toward Mankind, their progeny, given their fervent intent to seek Mankind’s eradication.

This last point mirrors what is related in the ancient Mesopotamian account of the Deluge, where the Annunaki god, Enlil, wished to see Mankind eradicated by the device of a great destruction that was foreseen by the Annunaki to soon befall the Earth. Enlil forbade providing any foreknowledge or assistance to Mankind in respect to this looming great catastrophe. The Book of Genesis relates that the Hebrew god, Yahweh, likewise desired to see Mankind totally destroyed:

6:7 And Yahweh said, I will destroy Man, whom I have created, from the earth — from man to cattle, to creeping things, and to fowl of the heavens; for I repent that I have made them.

The more ancient Sumer story recounts that the god Enki wanted to instead see humanity survive and therefore assisted the Flood hero (thus thwarting Enlil’s intent of bringing about absolute extinction). The Biblical account of the Flood, in contrast, depicts a monotheistic god that is sort of schizophrenic – wanting to utterly wipe out Mankind on the one hand, while deciding to spare Noah and his family on the other. (It is a kind of further evidence of how the very ancient stories coming down from Sumer/Akkad were edited into a monotheistic Reader’s Digest version as they were incorporated into the Book of Genesis.)

An innate malevolence as a characteristic of the so-called creator god is a fundamental tenet of Gnostic Christianity in respect to their theological conception of the Demiurge. (My article on Gnostic cosmological dualism goes into this in more depth.)

In a sense the portrayal of the Engineers in the film Prometheus is essentially a revisionist formulation of the Gnostic Demiruge – where it is now informed and updated by the Ancient Astronaut Theory.

The Engineers as the Gnostic Demiruge…is it reasonable to bring Gnostic Christianity into a comparative analysis of Prometheus to Blade Runner?

Christian Gnosticism

When plumbing the back story of Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner, it will be necessary to take into consideration the author of the book on which the film was based – Philip K. Dick.

Here is an excerpt from The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick:

Or consider P. K. Dick’s The Ten Major Principles of the Gnostic Revelation as recounted in this Examiner article by Miguel Conner, What are the main principles of a Christian Gnostic? From the article:

But if a list is demanded on defining Gnosticism, it might as well come from a person whose first passion was music– Philip K. Dick, considered by many as the latest and greatest Gnostic bandleader.

Dick’s visionary Gnosticism is best known from his novels (‘Valis’ and ‘The Divine Invasion’) and films (‘Bladerunner’ and ‘Minority Report’). Yet Dick spent much of life expressing his mystic discoveries in his ‘Exegesis’. Although the ‘Exegisis’ is a massive work, Dick managed to produce a list that might satisfy those needing to perfect their musical ear.

Here is item 5 from Dick’s list:

5. Each of us has a divine counterpart unfallen who can reach a hand down to us to awaken us. This other personality is the authentic waking self; the one we have now is asleep and minor. We are in fact asleep, and in the hands of a dangerous magician disguised as a good god, the deranged creator deity. The bleakness, the evil and pain in this world, the fact that it is a deterministic prison controlled by the demented creator causes us willingly to split with the reality principle early in life, and so to speak willingly fall asleep in delusion.

In Blade Runner I denote two visual allusions that depict the character Roy as a Christ figure, and that in particular he is a “Christ as Gnostic Revealer” in that he awakens the character Deckard.

Both the film Alien and the film Prometheus have main protagonist characters that are female (Ripley and Elizabeth respectively). Gnostics revere wisdom as expressed in the feminine divine, Sophia. The Christian Gnostics were denounced as heretics by their so-called “orthodox” counterparts. The Gnostic sects tended to be egalitarian and permitted women to participate at any function and capacity. One of the graver denouncements that Irenaeus of Lyons leveled against them is that they even permitted women to perform baptisms. (In contrast to the Gnostic Christians, the early church fathers of what became the orthodoxy tended toward misogynist attitudes.)

In Prometheus, the protagonist Elizabeth Shaw wears a Christian cross in necklace fashion. Significant attention is brought to bear on this symbol over the latter course of the film. At one point the android character, David (portrayed by Michael Fassbender), removes this cross necklace from Elizabeth while she is unconscious. Later on Elizabeth very insistently demands that it be returned to her and she begins to wear it again. This is a very deliberate story element – absolutely no doubt about that – no subtlety involved, no audience member misses this.

Elizabeth soundly rejoined the materialistic Darwinian perspective earlier in the movie (that which passes for “mainstream” rationality). By the end of the film she remains the lone human survivor – all others (and their perspectives toward life and reality) have been washed by the way side as ultimately irrelevant (and futile). She encountered the creators of Mankind and what transpired was neither enlightening nor what anyone had anticipated. She came face to face with the Demiurge and it found her presence as intolerable.

In the face of all that takes place in the latter half of the movie, Elizabeth, scientist by training, fervently clings to a symbol of Christianity. As this film ends, Elizabeth’s determination remains to seek an ultimate answer – to seek ultimate truth. For an awakened Gnostic, this is the great obsessive calling that cannot be repressed or denied.

From 1979 to 2012, what has Ridley Scott told his audience?

Zecharia Sitchin published his book The 12th Planet in 1976 in which he intimately connected the Ancient Astronaut Theory to be one and the same as the Anunnaki gods of the ancient Mesopotamian civilization, Sumer.

Jacques Vallée published Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers in 1969 or Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults in 1979. These books have been instrumental in the deconstruction of UFO contact phenomena from a nuts and bolts extraterrestrial visitation to that which is something playing on the very fabric of what constitutes perceived reality. For the generation of ufologist today, this point of view has become more persuasive and dominant – the nature of reality is not what we might suppose as per our education in school and universities. So-called UFO contact phenomena are actually quite ancient and seemingly shifts in nature to suit the cultural memes of the day. Yet things like the visage of the humanoid owl remain an identifiable constancy through the millennia.

Elaine Pagels published the highly influential The Gnostic Gospels in 1979. This work brought awareness of the Nag Hammadi texts and the Gnostic Christians of the first few centuries AD to an audience beyond academia, as her writings are very accessible to the lay person.

Philip K. Dick in 1974 had an experience that culminated in his writing of the VALIS trilogy. Dick, from this experience, began to conclude that the times of the Roman Empire (and the Roman Church that supplanted it) persecuting Gnostics Christian is a struggle that has really never ceased (a tenet of Gnostic Christianity, Bogomilism, Catharism is reincarnation of the evolving soul – arch conflicts may span through the ages).

There were indeed pre-existent works in literature that Ridley Scott may have been drawing on in respect to the symbolism, allegorical storytelling, and overt narrative themes that he went on to embed in the three notable films that have been referred to herein. Sources such as these could have been plausible inspiration – or Ridley Scott may have also been tapping into the lore (and agenda) of some secret order. Again, the owl symbolism in Blade Runner was simply not a meme that has garnered much awareness until more recent times.

What remains is that starting in 1979 and to the present year, Ridley Scott has made three significant films that in certain ways link together. In this last film, Prometheus, that which was previously occluded is now made overt. Life on Earth is the product of intelligent intervention. Yet the creator may not be of a nature that we presuppose. The cosmological dualism and the Demiurge concept of the Gnostic Christians were essentially right – it need merely be updated to reflect the Ancient Astronaut Theory as explanation of the Demiurge. There is a higher spiritual existence that transcends this current perceived reality – in this too the Gnostic Christians were correct. The Demiurge is actually not that big a deal – there is still yet a much greater truth. If we can come to grasp these things, then we too can awaken to gnosis.

MyCoreArticles (and some related links)
[awakening, synchronicity, Gnosticism, AAT, nature of reality/consciousness, etc.]

–RogerV

Blade Runner – An Astro-Gnostic Fable (of the past – not the future)

(Originally posted on: May 20, 2012)

Introduction

Mary Sean Young recently appeared as guest on a RedIce interview. Mary is the actress that portrayed the character Rachel in the 1982 Ridley Scott sci-fi classic film, Blade Runner.

Mary Sean Young in 1982

Mary Sean Young

In the film, Rachel ultimately becomes the love interest of leading actor Harrison Ford’s character, Rick Deckard.

There was a bit of discussion during the RedIce interview about the film and its symbolism. The mention of owls perked my attention and I recalled that, yes, the owl was indeed a very pronounced symbol in that film (I encounter the owl meme frequently so its appearance in a film is intriguing). This prompted me to go and re-watch the film, as I had not done so in a few years. I was curious to see what the symbolism of this film would say to me today?

What follows will definitely contain spoilers, so if you’ve not seem the film, you need to stop reading and go watch it. And if you haven’t seen this film, what planet have you been living on for the last three decades?

Also, I will be referencing the Director’s Cut version of the film – not the theatrical release version.

Do Artificial Minds Dream?

Let’s start with the source material. Blade Runner is based on a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” P. K. Dick is a legendary writer and is quite the topic unto himself – just go hit a search engine for material on P. K. Dick. What I will note is that an over arching theme of many of his works is that apparent reality is illusory – there is some deeper hidden, or less apparent context as to what is really going on. So in respect to the film Blade Runner is there possibly a veiled subtext that is actually what is being told as the story? After all, why all the trappings of the symbolism? Such things may be messages in and of themselves or serve as pointers or guides as to a more proper understanding. Let’s just dive in and start making thematic connections and see
what we come out with.

Thematic Connections

Epic of Gligamesh

The apparent story of Blade Runner revolves around a group of Replicants, led by Roy Batty (actor Rutger Hauer), that have made their way back to planet Earth in search of a longevity of life span comparable to that of their creators. Replicants only live for four years. Replicants have a short life span but enhanced abilities. They are sent to outer space to take on the harsher challenges that are involved in colonizing other worlds.

Roy’s quest is reminiscent of the demi-god Gilgamesh and the arduous journey he undertook to search for the longevity of the gods as recounted in the Sumerian Epic
of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh was born part mortal and part god. He is a superman in prowess (as is Roy) but is fated to a mortal lifespan. After the death of his companion Enkidu, Gilgamesh sets out on a quest to obtain the longevity of life span enjoyed by the gods. He travels to a land where the gods have permitted the hero of the Deluge (Noah’s Flood), Utnapishtim, to reside. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh, “The life that you are seeking you will never find. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping.”

These words closely echo what Roy’s creator, Dr. Eldon Tyrell (actor Joe Turkel), says in the movie when Roy finally confronts him with the object of his quest.

Thus in both stories we have mighty men undertaking risky journeys and in each case are rebuffed of their objective (which is an identical one) by the “creator gods”. Both Roy and Gilgamesh in the end must find solace in the accomplishments of their mortal lives.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is amongst the earliest of literature and thought to be Sumerian in origin, though extant versions of it date to latter derivative Mesopotamian civilizations.

More Akkad/Sumer Linkage

We also learn during the course of the movie that the shortened lifespan of the Replicants is quite deliberate. They are intended to be an artificial species purposed to slavery. The shortened lifespan should keep the slaves from becoming too highly self aware or from developing a sense of their personhood. They need to be rather intelligent in order to be
effective slaves, but they shouldn’t be overly mindful of a sense of individuality to the point they recognize and place value on their own sense of inward identity.

We see this theme of constraining lifespan likewise coming down to us from ancient literature:

Genesis
6:3 And Yahweh said, My Spirit shall not always plead with Man; for he indeed
is flesh; but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.

Earlier in Genesis 3 there was a sense of anxiety expressed regarding the potential lifespan of Mankind:

Genesis
3:22 And Yahweh Elohim said, Behold, Man is become as one of us, to know
good and evil. And now, lest he stretch out his hand, and take also of the tree
of life, and eat, and live forever …!

This matter of gods wanting to artificially constrain the lifespan of their created species looks to be sourced from the same motivation as depicted in Blade Runner – to thwart the arising of a possibly rival species.

My 2010 article Heiser vs. Sitchin, as well as this treatment on Cosmological Dualism, explores these associations in greater detail and builds the case that this literary material and the events in Genesis of the Hebrew Bible are derivative from the earlier Akkad/Sumer civilization that the Biblical patriarch Abraham migrated out of.

So we’ve identified two themes from the Blade Runner story outline that can be tied to ancient Sumer.

Yet More Akkad/Sumer

Pyramidal Buildings

The cityscape of the Blade Runner environ is dominated by huge pyramidal buildings. These more resemble the style of the step pyramids of Mesopotamian civilizations than the smooth (by comparison) Egyptian pyramids. In Blade Runner, the pyramid buildings are where the elite class resides and those that serve the elites come to work. The Anunnaki gods of Sumer were said to reside in the topmost floors of the step pyramids that were built as temples to them.

The Replicant Roy goes to confront his “creator god” in a top chamber of one of these pyramidal complexes.

Sumerian Creation Story of Mankind

In the Atra-Hasis tablets, the Anunnaki gods were recounted to be the creators of Mankind and that Man’s purpose was to do the work of the gods, as per this Wikipedia synopsis excerpt:

Enlil assigned junior divines to do farm labor and maintain the rivers and canals, but after forty years the lesser gods or dingirs rebelled and refused to do strenuous labor. Instead of punishing the rebels, Enki, who is also the kind, wise counselor of the gods, suggested that humans be created to do the work. The mother goddess Mami is assigned the task of creating humans by shaping clay figurines mixed with the flesh and blood of the slain god Geshtu-E, “a god who had intelligence” (his name means “ear” or “wisdom”). All the gods in turn spit upon the clay. After ten months, a specially made womb breaks open and humans are born.

In my Heiser vs. Sitchin article we see that Man, as related in the first chapters of Genesis from the Hebrew Bible, is created by the Elohim and assigned to toil at the task of food cultivation.

The Sumerian word for Mankind is Adamu (Adam in the Bible). So substituting Replicant for Adamu (or vice versa), and the parallelism of these mythologies (one presumably futuristic, the others ancient) distill to the same essential narrative. Highly adept beings create an order of subordinate beings to do arduous labor for them. In each of these accounts the creators work from a pre-existent substrate (as opposed to ex nihilo creation).

A Damaged Planetary Atmosphere

The atmosphere of the Blade Runner world is ecologically damaged.

In Zechariah Sitchin’s thesis, as presented in his 1976 book, The Twelfth Planet, the atmosphere of the Annunaki gods’ home world is in crisis and they journeyed to Earth to obtain gold in large quantities. From the ore they would presumably refine it into a form suitable to be dispersed into their home world’s upper atmosphere. (NASA has used a thin layer of gold shielding in astronaut helmet visors – is it conceivable to deploy gold into an atmospheric layer for similar purpose?).

A viewer of Blade Runner presumes that that world’s dilapidated environment is the result  of poor environmental stewardship. A cause of the Annunaki Nibiru atmospheric crisis is indeterminate.

This factor of the movie is a more indirect or tenuous connection to ancient Sumer mythology, but it’s still plausible to make. It is the gamut of the other Sumerian connections that tend to likewise suggest this one.

 (A more contemporary adaptation of Sitchin’s original thesis is that the Anunnaki home planet, Nibiru, would likely be in orbit in a miniature solar system around a brown dwarf star. The consequence of a close proximity orbit around such a star, in order to achieve sufficient warmth, might be a continual balancing act of deflecting the undesirable portions of the radiation spectrum – as well as deflecting the brown dwarf’s charged particulate solar wind. The planetary orbital arrangement of such a miniature solar system would likely be artificial in origin instead of natural. A wondering brown dwarf star, with planets in tow, would be one way of making a trek through the galaxy. The question only remains: can a civilization arise to the point of engineering at this scale? The Saturn moon Iapetus, due to the perfectly linear 3 mile high ridge that runs half way around its equator, has been suggested to be an artificial body. There are other characteristics too such that it actually appears to be polygonal instead of circular over the curvature of its body.)

The Omni Observant Owl

An owl perched in Dr. Eldon Tyrell’s chambers gets a lot of screen shots in Blade Runner – thus it’s really a rather heavy handed symbolic reference. Owls have a tie to Mesopotamia as well, but I will save owls for last.

Other Themes

Transhumanist Singularity Agenda

The Replicants are a product of genetic engineering. In many ways the designers sought to enhance their creations. Rachel is representative of their state of the art. She is perfect physically – an ideal feminine form – but also neurally she is much more sophisticated than previous generations. She, more so than other Replicants, has a human-like emotional construct to her consciousness (its one thing to be intelligent like Roy, but it’s also vital to feel as a human does). Instead of wanting to constrain Replicant mental development, as was the case with the off-world slave models, the Rachel model represents an effort to go the other way – see how human-like a Replicant can be engineered to be – in respect to the seat of consciousness, that is.

Director Ridley Scott accentuates this understanding of Rachel’s genetic perfection through the manner that Rachel first makes an appearance in the film. Even though it was 30 years ago I can still recall a sense of my first time reaction. Rachel’s entrance was one of those moments in film like when Ingrid Bergman enters Rick’s bar in Casablanca, or when Grace
Kelly leans over to kiss Jimmy Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

Rachel appears suave, urbane, and stunningly attractive – but within an appropriate dystopian ambiance via the film noir style of low key lighting, shadows, framing…the close fitting outfit, the high heels, a unique slant on a 1940’s hair style:

And there will naturally be the obligatory film noir cigarette smoking:

(From the scene where Rachel is tested we also become introduced to a sense of underlying vulnerability in Rachel that’s always there – both in her speech and in her eyes. Despite the initial impression conveyed by her entrance, we begin to see that Rachel is fragile. This plays to another angle of this character as meshed to over-arching themes of the film that we’ll circle back to later.)

In this perfected Rachel Replicant there is an inference here – as we listen in on the dialog between Dr. Tyrell and Deckard in the aftermath of Rachel’s test – that the genetic engineers are working toward an ultimate “Raymond Kurzweil” Transhumanist Singularity. That is, a point at which the advanced Rachel model would be a truly suitable host for downloading an existing human consciousness into. So-called immortality achieved via the technological means of genetic engineering and a mechanistic view of consciousness – pragmatic immortality, if you will.

Of course we’ve seen this particular theme more recently in the SyFy Battlestar Galatica TV series. However, Blade Runner was touching on this idea in 1982. Star Trek episodes dealt in this concept as well but Blade Runner conveys more realism with respect to the tangibility of the genetic engineering it portrays.

Through this lens of transhumanism we infer that the ruling elites of the Blade Runner world are looking to obtain immortality and enhanced vibrancy of life through materialist technological pursuit. Perhaps this is their means to a pathway to “salvation”.

Rachel’s Trauma

From Rachel’s testing scenes, we also see Rachel confronted with the realization that she is an artificial being – that she is a Replicant too. This begins to visibly dawn on her as she is asked by Dr. Tyrell to leave the room so he can talk privately with Deckard. Later she confronts Deckard at his flat. She is in shock and denial at the outset of this traumatic realization. Yet Deckard is able to recite some of her “private” memories as they have been merely implanted in her mind so as to simulate having an historical past.

It’s a shattering moment for her sense of self-identity as a person. (The operating presumption in the Blade Runner world is that a Replicant, as an artificial being, is not truly   person.) The vulnerability we detected in Rachel’s speech and the look in her eyes during her testing by Deckard suggests she had already been harboring doubts well before being subjected to the test. For the moment, Rachel is crushed psychically.

Taking Stock…

So far we have seen how Blade Runner is a recasting of narratives that come to us from ancient Mesopotamian sources and that the film has symbolic references that connote association to that particular milieu of ancient civilizations.

As such, the film can be seen to work as an allegorical retelling of the creation of Mankind by the Annunaki/Elohim – the gods of these Mesopotamian civilizations, or their close cousin derivatives such as Abrahamic influenced Hebrew culture.

In the debut of Rachel, her testing scene, and subsequent dialog from Dr. Tyrell, we see possible implication of a transhumanism agenda to be afoot.

The trauma of Rachel’s self-realization of whom and what she really is works allegorically as representing the existential crises of those that encounter the Ancient Astronaut Theory of human origins, and are exposed to the voluminous circumstantial evidence thereof (e.g., the allegorical parallel of Deckard telling Rachel of her presumably private memories proving they’re not authentic memories). The Rachel character, then, is representative
of each of us of the human race in grappling with the ramifications of AAT.

Those are some potent themes to be telling as an occulted back story in 1982. Yet let us now switch gears as the film will take us into a rather different slant of symbology (still holding off for now on the owl, though).

Gnostic Revelation

Up to this point the narrative of Blade Runner has been decidedly dystopic. The viewer receives no particular satisfaction (there’s no resounding moral affirmation) in watching Deckard terminating the Replicants. He’s a tool of the ruling elite and is compelled to carry through regardless. Replicants strike back – sometimes in defense or in desperation to obtain their quest, but mostly from a sense of nihilism that ebbs from the starkness of their fate due to what they are. The film moves through various bleak and unsettling exchanges and acts of deadly violence. Of course, it’s also the kind of plot conflict narrative that fuels the ticket sells for Hollywood sci-fi action movies.

Yet in the concluding scenes of Deckard having his show down with Roy, Blade Runner in its own fashion repudiates the nihilism inherent in the preceding violence. It does so through the device of Gnostic transcendence.

Instead of culminating in a final pitched struggle to the death between the two combatants, in Roy’s last moments he chooses to spare Deckard’s life. Roy’s life essence at this point is rapidly ebbing away and he knows he will soon die. Instead of spitefully insuring that Deckard dies with him, he saves Deckard and then begins to recount the wonders of things he’s seen and done. (It is a memorializing of Roy’s mortal life that parallels the memorializing that Gilgamesh accomplished as King, where his deeds were later recounted to his glory – thereby achieving a form of immortality.)

The Gnostic Revealer

We also see use of visual symbols in this portion of the movie that portray Roy as a Christ figure – not a Christ as sacrificial lamb but Christ as Gnostic Revealer.

The Christ association is established by these visual cues: Roy pulls a nail from a plank, a long, wedge shaped nail that resembles a Roman crucifixion nail. He then pierces his hand with this nail. Later when Roy finally breathes his last, he releases a dove that ascends into the sky – symbolizing his spirit released and ascending into Heaven. It is a manner of visual allusion to the baptism of Jesus where the Spirit descends on Jesus as though a dove:

John 1:32 “And John bare witness, saying, I have beheld the Spirit descending as a dove out of heaven; and it abode upon him.”

Coauthors Marvin Meyer and Willis Barnstone in their book The Gnostic Bible: Revised and Expanded Edition write this describing Christ as a Gnostic Revealer:

“The role of the gnostic savior or revealer is to awaken people who are under the spell of the demiurge—not, as in the case of the Christ of the emerging orthodox church, to die for the salvation of people, to be a sacrifice for sins, or to rise from the dead on Easter. The gnostic revealer discloses knowledge that frees and awakens people, and that helps them recall who they are.”

Roy as Gnostic Revealer initiates a gnosis in Deckard that awakens him. He awakens to the worth of all life – even the lives of an artificial slave species that his society has dehumanized.

Later this revelatory gnosis culminates in Deckard’s understanding that his dream of a unicorn racing through the forest indicates that he too is a Replicant – that he’s really in the same lot and just as expendable as the those he’d previously helped herd and cull on behalf of the ruling elites.

[Update] Masonic scholar Manly Palmer Hall, in his 1928 book, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, cited the unicorn as mythical symbol of the awakened pineal gland:

The single horn of the unicorn may represent the pineal gland, or third eye, which is the spiritual cognition center in the brain. The unicorn was adopted by the Mysteries as a symbol of the illumined spiritual nature of the initiate. . . .

As the movie ends, both Rachel and Deckard have now fully confronted their existential crisis of personhood. For both Rachel and Deckard, their internal crisis arises because of what their societal context has programmed them to believe. They ultimately must reject those external precepts of normalcy and trust in their personal gnosis of their own individual sense of personhood and thus self value.

The allegory here to the perceptive audience: It is not for others to determine personhood; in the final analysis we each have only our individual conscious experience from which we assert our full sense of personhood. It doesn’t matter really what we are in terms of the physical shell (artificial slave species or not). It is instead the spirit that sojourns therein (the spirit rising to Heaven as a dove) that is the true seat of our personhood.

The Owl Archtype

Excerpts from Graham Hancock’s 2007 book, Supernatural, pages 324-325:

“The abduction experience of a woman on the west coast of the U.S.A began when an entity that she construed as a “five-foot-tall owl” strode down the highway towards her parked Jeep and started at her over the hood.”

“A registered nurse from the north-eastern United States, Carol’s abductions were of special interest to me because another of her encounters with strange, compelling owls included further levels of transformation, as well as unexpected symbolism that she herself recognized as shamanic.”

“Remembering his childhood in the Amazon, he told John Mack about an occasion during a tribal ceremony when the figure of an owl was seen perching at the top of a tree. The elders chanted, ‘Ikuya! Ikuya! Ikuya!’ Bernardo asked them why they thought the creature was an ikuya and not simply an owl: They said that, because they were in a trance, they could see light and force around the owl, which told them it was a humanoid in disguise. Also when they shoot arrows at the ikuyas disguised as owls, the arrows seem to pass through them without killing them.”

Excerpt from page 328:

“That the onset of some shamanic initiations and of some UFO abductions should be marked by the sudden materialization of owls – or of other birds and animals with huge owl-like eyes – is mysterious enough in itself. But what I thought made the coincidence even stranger was the way this sort of imagery seems to pick up a reflection from the caves of Upper Paleolithic Europe. A prehistoric engraving on the wall of Trois Freres in south-west France, described in Chapter Four, features two large owls, which archaeologist judge to have distinctly humanoid characteristics.”

In Babylonian demonology, Lilith was a monster who roamed at night taking on the appearance of an owl.

The visage of the humanoid owl figures frequently in the realm of reported incidents and phenomena that are characterized as manifestations that are not of conventional physical nature that, say, accord with what we regard as the normal operation of our reality context.

Often the humanoid owl is recounted as an implacable silent observer (though not always) to these incidents of high strangeness. In the Blade Runner movie, the owl is an implacable and present observer of the travails of the human drama.

That director Ridley Scott chose to reference the owl (to the point that it has become iconic as evidenced in the poster) as such a high profile symbol – back in 1982 no less – is perhaps the most intriguing riddle in respect to this film. It is intriguing as to what does Ridley Scott really know about such things? And how did he come about such knowledge at that time frame?

The owl symbolism speaks to a whole other level of special occluded knowledge than just mere Ancient Astronaut Theory – it hints that there lurks a possible cognizance about the very fabric and nature of reality (or super reality). That really would be something surprising for a film director to be plugged into in some fashion.

Epilogue

Blade Runner began as a dystopic tale of a world run by a ruling elite bent on a materialistic transhumanist agenda – all the while artificially crafting beings as slaves with no respecting of the lives of said slaves. To be found as one of the slave race is a despairing condition – if that reality is realized for what it is (hence the various precautions to keep the slaves in the dark).

Some would say that pretty well summarizes the human condition today on planet Earth (the ruling elites determined to keep the masses in the dark as to what and who humanity really is, as well as various other matters that may be going down).

Yet Blade Runner, via the methods of its various symbolic overlays, imparts at its conclusion that waking up to the nature of slave status is merely incidental – it is not really crucial in respect to authenticity of personhood. What is crucial is Gnostic awaking. The spirit that ascends from the physical shell into Heaven is that which is our vital selves and is what we need to awaken to.

Acknowledgments

• Astro-Gnosticism is a term Christopher Knowles uses in his writings at The Secret Sun. The term denotes themes of Ancient Astronaut Theory, Gnosticism, and gnosis of the manifestation thereof. Reading Chris’s treatment of comic book artist Jack Kirby will embody the sense of how this meme may manifest in popular cultural.
• Thank you, Mary…for being a catalyst – or muse, as you Hollywood folk would say.

  The act of penning and then sharing that brief synopsis with you was a nudge that caused one of those instant insights to fire in the brain: there are some really significant underlying themes to this film and those are even more relevant in today’s situation than 30 years ago. Those themes deserved to be expanded on in light of our current zeitgeist.

  There is now a much broader and more developed public domain knowledge base by which to understand and interpret those themes, there is the Internet, and in riding the wave of synchronicity we can go at this all together.

MyCoreArticles (and some related links)
[awakening, synchronicity, Gnosticism, AAT, nature of reality/consciousness, etc.]

–RogerV