a few words on the speed of light!

It takes 8.3 minutes for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth (a distance of 1.58 × 10-5 light years).
The most distant space probe, Voyager 1, was 13 light hours (only 1.5 × 10-3 light years) away from Earth in September 2004. It took Voyager 27 years to cover that distance.
The nearest known star (other than the Sun), Proxima Centauri is 4.22 light years away.
The center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 26,000 light years away. The Galaxy is about 100,000 light years across.
The Triangulum Galaxy (M33), at a bit under 2.6 million light years away, is the most distant object visible to the naked eye.
The nearest large galaxy cluster, the Virgo Cluster, is about 60 million light years away.
The particle horizon (observable part) of the universe has a radius of about 46 billion light years, but light from the edge of the observable universe was emitted only 13.7 billion years ago (the age of the universe). The figures differ because distant objects have continued to recede from us due to cosmological expansion (see Hubble's law).
One gigaparsec is equal to approximately 3.26 billion light years.

tummo

on the icy slopes of the himalayas adepts of a yogic technique known as tummo are said to be abe to generate so much body heat that they require little or no clothing. through various vizualisations and breathing exercises, the adept imagines a tiny blaze of fire at the base of the spine, which he causes to extend to the limits of the body and expand to fill the entire universe. to test the success of the adept at tummo, the guru may require him to sit naked on a mountainside throughout a winter night. during this time the adept must dry sheets dipped in icy water one after another by wrapping them around himself and subjecting the sheets to the blaze of psychic heat.

TANTRA AND WAVES AND PARTICLES from Mysticicm and the New Physics Michael Talbot

the hindu concepts of nada and bindu are identical to the concept of matter being both a wave and a particle. when brahma creates matter, nada is the first produced movement in the ideating cosmic consciousness. bindu means a point. when matter is viewed as separate from consciousness, it can be seen as made up of many bindu and objects appear to be extended in space. however, when matter is more accurately perceived as being projected by consciousness, physical objects no longer possess many three-dimensional points in space. everything collapses to one dimension and becomes a single point bindu. pratyagatmananda wrote that every object or process has to be studied nadawise and binduwise (as a wave and a particle).

the tantras assert that the universe may be considered an emanation of the mind. the appearance that it is physical and objective is mahayama, the greatest illusion. but the universe is not a projection of only one mind. each of us contributes to the creation of the projection.

keith floyd 'of time and the mind'

it now seems higly plausible that 'the seat of consciousness' will never be found by a neurosurgeon because it appears to involve not so much an organ, or organs, but the interaction of energy fields within the brain. these patterns of energy would be disrupted by surgical intervention, and have long since disappeared in cadavers. neurophysiologists will not likely find what they are looking for outside their own consciousness, for that which they are looking for is that which is looking.

double slit experiment from QUANTUM by jim al-khalili

Since i can only use adjectives such as weird strange and mysterious just so many times, i will waste no further time with this fanfare and get on with it. what i will describe is a real experiment. first, a beam of light is shone on a screen with two narrow slits in it that allow some of the light to pass through to a second screen where an interference pattern is seen. this is a sequence of light and dark bands that are due to the way the separate light waves emerging from the two slits spread out, overlap and merge before hitting the back screen. where the two wave crests meet (or troughs) meet, they combine to form a higher crest or lower trough that corresponds to a more intense light and hence a bright band on the screen. but where a crest of one wave corresponds with the trough of the other, they cancel each other out resulting in a dark patch. it is therefore only because light behaves as a wave washing through both slits simultaneously that the interference pattern appears.
a special atomic gun fires a beam of atoms at a screen with two narrow slits. on the other side, the second screen is treated with a coating that shows up a tiny bright spot whenever a single atom hits it.
of course, atoms should behave in a manner similar to sand, as opposed to spread-out waves, capable of overlapping both slits at once.
first we run the experiment with just one slit open. not surprisingly, we get a spread of light spots on the back screen behind the open slit.
nest we open the second slit and wait for the spots to appear on the screen. you would expect a cluster of spots to build up behind each slit like two piles of sand. well, surprise, surprise, atoms dont behave like this. instead we see an interference pattern of light and dark fringes just as we did with light. the brightest part of the screen is in the centre where we would not expect many atoms to be able to reach.
we could have a stab at what is going on. despite the atom being a localized particle (after all, each atom hits the screen at a single point), it seems that the stream of atoms have somehow conspired to behave in a way similar to a wave. they wash up against the first screen, and those that manage to get through the slits interfere with each other's paths. maybe the atoms bump into each other in a way so as to guide each other onto the screen. atoms (we would reason) are not like spread-out waves (such as light and sound).
so here is where this comforting prop is knocked away. to begin with, we see that the pattern of fringes on the back screen is connected somehow to the way the two waves interfere. just as with normal waves, its details depend on the width of the slits, the distance between them and how far away the back screen is.
this in itself is not proof that the atoms are behaving in a wavelike fashion. however, not only has the double-slit experiment been performed with atoms, but it has also been done by firing individual atoms one at a time! there is only ever one atom traveling through the apparatus at one time. each atom that manages to get through the slits leaves a tiny localized spot of light somewhere on the screen.
what we see is quite incredible. the spots gradually build up on the screen and light bands of an interference pattern slowly emerge where there is a high density of spots. in between these bands are dark regions where no or very few atoms land.
the interference pattern cannot be the result of collective behaviour. so what is going on? what makes this result particularly spectacular is that there are paces on the back screen where atoms were arriving when only one of the slits was opened. by opening the second slit we are providing another route for the atoms to go through, so you would expect to increase the chances of atoms reaching these places. instead, with both slits open no atoms arrive at all. somehow, if the atom really does go through only one slit then it must already know whether or not the other one is open and act accordingly!
how does a tiny atom, which leaves the gun as a particle and hits the screen at a definite point go through two slits at once!
With a detector in place we can lie in wait behind one of the slits and see what the atoms actually do. With this detector, the interference pattern disappears. it is as if the atoms do not wish to be caught in the act of going both ways at once, and only travel through one slit or the other. two bands form on the screen adjacent to the slits as a result of particle like behaviour, similar to what happens with sand. with the detector turned off, we have no knowledge of the route taken buy each atom. they revert to their mysterious wave-like behaviour and the interference pattern comes back. here, clearly the act of observing the atom is crucial.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry i could not travel both
And be one traveller, long i stood
and looked down one as long as i could
to where it bent in the undergrowth;
(robert frost)

a single atom can travel down both road in frost's yellow wood. they can sample all possible experiences simultaneously. this is known as superposition.

jorge luis borges 'other inquisitions'

let us admit what all idealists admit- the hallucinatory nature of the world. let us do what no idealist has done- let us search for unrealities that confirm that nature... ' the greatest wizard (novalis writes memorably) would be the one who bewitched himself to the point of accepting his own phantasmagorias as autonomous apparitions. wouldnt that be our case?' i surmise it is so. we (that indivisible divinity that operates in us) have dreamed the world. we have dreamed it as enduring, mysterious, visible, omnipresent in space and stable in time; but we have consented to tenuous and eternal intervals of illogicalness in its architecture that we might know it is false.

bubble chamber atomic patterns

the reason we are afraid of death is necessary for our growth, and the growth of our species. For when we die, we DO live again, but imagine if we knew that for sure. The fear of death would go, and there would be nothing keeping us from doing ourselves in and going on to a new life if problems arose in this present one. We wouldn't want to cope, to deal with anything. There would be no pain and no suffering, for surely if we were faced with such, we would think "fuck that" and go on to the next life. The fear of death, the uncertainty of what happens next, therefore, enusres that we continue to try; that we do our best to overcome seemingly insurmountable difficulties, the hardest of times, for it is through these times that we grow. And we take these lessons we have learned to the next life and, having grown, we continue to make things better.

from HUXLEY "Doors of Perception"

Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, "that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful." According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various "other worlds," with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate "spiritual exercises," or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception "of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe" (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above ah something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.brain