Showing posts with label big bang. Show all posts
Showing posts with label big bang. Show all posts
Friday, August 15, 2025
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
Time is an illusion: Power of Now (video)
Time is an illusion, according to Einstein
Does time really exist? Buddhism’s view on the nature of time
 |
| The Time Paradox (social psychology) |
From Albert Einstein's pronouncements to the Buddha's wisdom in the Dhammapada [a collection of sayings], the concept of time as a construct is explored.
 |
| Dhammapada for Awakening |
The neuroscience of time perception is considered, exploring how our brains [thoughts] construct our experience of time's flow.
Buddhist practices like mindfulness meditation are investigated as potential pathways to experiencing the present moment more fully, even transcending the limitations of time.
- 00:00 - Intro
- 00:12 - The Mystery of Time: Where Science meets the Buddha's wisdom
- 05:15 - The Grand Illusion
- 11:17 - Time is mind-made
- 17:05 - Quantum Buddhism
- 23:02 - Our Mind: Time's Creator
- 29:02 - Breaking free from time's prison
- 34:44 - Beyond time: The Power of Timeless Presence and the limits of science
 |
| Quantum Buddhism: Dancing in Emptiness (Smetham) |
 |
| The Power of Now: A Guide... |
The intricate relationship between consciousness and time is examined, and practical methods for cultivating timeless awareness [flow states, jhanas or meditative absorptions, singleminded focus that purifies the mind] are offered.
 |
| Singleminded focus leads to flow and absorption |
- #time #BuddhismPodcast #Buddhism #Buddhist
- The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life (Audible): Philip Zimbardo, John Boyd, Matthew Josdal, Tantor Audio
- Quantum Buddhism: Dancing in Emptiness: Reality Revealed in the Interface of Quantum Theory and Buddhist Metaphysics (Graham Smetham)
- Buddhism Podcast, Jan. 13, 2025; Dhr. Seven, Pat Macpherson, Amber Larson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
Friday, September 20, 2024
Islam explains 'Big Bang' as act of God
 |
| Oh my God, Miriam, can you believe how they dress their girls? - We mustn't judge, Khadija! |
The Big Bang problem for atheists: What Hawking and Tyson get wrong | God’s Cosmos
 |
| Muslim graffiti over Hunza Buddhist petroglyphs |
Shaykh [Sheikh] Hamza Karamali explains that the "Big Bang" marks the beginning of the universe, making it impossible for materialism to explain its origins without invoking some [pre-existing] thing beyond physical matter and time.
 |
| Khilji destroys Buddhist Nalanda |
The Big Bang, once rejected by materialists, now serves as overwhelming scientific evidence for a finite universe that points to a divine creator.
To learn more about a "Why Islam is True" course, go here: whyislamistrue.com/course. To learn more about Basira's classical curriculum in a modern context click here: basiraeducation.org.
Why listen to a Muslim or learn about Islam?
 |
| Why do Jews hate Muslims? |
Salam alaykum. A Buddhist website giving Islam a forum? But they're monotheistic Abrahamic fanatics!
Wisdom Quarterly is interested in all faiths and practices, explanations and views, particularly those we disagree with, so we listen without necessarily expecting to be listened to in return. Why?
In the future, when peace reigns in the world, one can only hope that it will not be because we all agree but rather because we have all learned to respect, enjoy, and celebrate differences.
The Buddha originated the famous simile of the elephant, which like the Aesop Fables (rooted in the Jataka) gained so much popularity people use it without realizing who came up with it: A group of blind men are asked what an elephant looks like. So depending on their sense of touch, they feel a portion of the elephant and extrapolate a global view. The one who feels a leg describes the elephant as a column. The one who feels an ear describes the elephant as a supple palm. The one who feels the trunk describes the elephant as a snake, and so on. Each, going on limited information, proceeds to form a wrong view about the whole.
All of their views combined might get us somewhere, but instead they are with each other: "How can you say a supple palm when this is a post?" "How can you say post, when this is a snake?" and so on.
One of the best classes to take in college is comparative religion. If they were presented fairly and accurately, we might be drawn to the best religion for us, rather than all being baptized by fire into Scientism. Lots of students would surely become agnostics, and a few might become militant atheists and even fewer pantheists and animists. Who's right?
This is a question of epistemology (the philosophy of determining what qualifies as proof and knowledge), which is very ontological (concerned with being). Go, Socrates! The unexamined life is not worth living, which seems to be what our Western hedonism (pleasure above everything else) seems to really be about. In any case, we already hear the anti-Islam view by its most articulate critic on YouTube.
- Basira Education (video), 9/20/24; Ashley Wells, Dhr. Seven, Shauna Schwartz (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
Thursday, September 5, 2024
Before Big Bang: science has new theory
.
[What was the universe/multiverse like before the before? Only the Buddha knows, and some high-plane devas, and the people he told, and the rishis or "seers" of the Vedas and other knowledge books, given what they saw and were told by extraterrestrial visitors to the Indus Valley Civilization, Emperor Ashoka's Bharat/India. Science does not really want to know for knowing's sake but to argue and posit and prove with the evidence it finds convincing, never mind the actual Truth. Because what if the answer is too weird, like this all being a samsaric simulation, a trap, an endless cycle of karma and becoming in a loop, like Neitzche's nightmare scenario?]
The Big Bang may not have been the beginning of the universe, according to a theory of cosmology that suggests the universe can “bounce” between phases of contraction and expansion. If that theory is true, then it could have profound implications about the nature of the cosmos, including two of its most mysterious components -- black holes and dark matter.
Thus, it's possible that the universe at the Big Bang was teeny-tiny or infinitely large, Carroll said, because there’s no way to look back in time at the stuff we can’t even see today.
It's possible that before the Big Bang, the universe was an infinite stretch of an ultrahot, dense material, persisting in a steady state until, for some reason, the Big Bang occurred.
What happened before the Big Bang?
 |
| It's not really space. But enjoy this artist's rendering as if it were (Shutterstock/Live Science) |
.
(Live Science) The Big Bang is commonly thought of as the start of it all: About 13.8 billion years ago, the observable universe went boom and expanded [popped] into being. [It did not expand into something, as there was nothing to expand into prior to that.]
But what were things like before the Big Bang?
Short answer: We don't know. Long answer: It could have been a lot of things, each mind-bending in its own way.
- Meanwhile, in Religion News: Oklahoma school officials revolt over MAGA superintendent's new Bible mandate (Everyone in public school must read, believe, and revere this Book and no other!!!)
 |
| The Buddha (Gandhara) |
- Related: How massive is the Milky Way?
- Dark day for freedom: Librarians outraged at Utah's statewide ban of 13 beloved books
- One of the universe's biggest paradoxes could be even weirder than we thought, James Webb telescope study reveals
- Anyone looking for answers in Buddhism's Agganna Sutta, "A Buddhist Genesis" or "On Beginnings," will not find it there, as that discourse deals with how human life began on Earth (except in the view of one Buddhist scholar-monk who cheers for a scientific explanation implicit in the symbols of an allegory in his book Dhamma Aboard Evolution).
In the beginning
The first thing to understand is what the Big Bang actually was.
"The Big Bang is a moment in time, not a point in space," said Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech.edu) and author of The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself (Dutton, 2016).
- [It is dumb for science to say there was a Big Bang and then define it as they do. It is like saying, "Religion and spirituality are stupid because they believe in miracles. We don't. So just give us this one miracle at the beginning, unexplained and inexplicable, and we promise not to resort to any more miracles after that. We'll explain everything else and define what is an isn't reality with reason and constructs hammered out by mere reasoning and then constantly update that picture with new ideas, theories, and assumptions, never getting anywhere but having fun and making lots of money along the way, unlike those stupid religionists and magicians talking their nonsense and mysticism.]
- Stern opposition faced in Deep Red States pushing Christianity in public schools
- Space photo of the week: Milky Way's galactic twin captured by dark energy camera
[There's a new beginning! It's called the Big Bounce, which isn't exactly new
 |
| The gods did it. |
With this in mind, a recent study suggests that dark matter could be composed of black holes formed during a transition from the universe's last contraction to the current expansion phase, which occurred before the Big Bang.
 |
| You can be happy. Here's how. Grab some paper |
If this hypothesis holds, the gravitational waves generated during the black hole formation process might be detectable by future gravitational wave observatories, providing a way to confirm this dark matter generation scenario. (Ergo, we just figured out a way to make a lot more money, funding new kinds of super-expensive observatories. And while we're at it, we need a bigger electron collider.)
Observations of stellar movements in galaxies and the cosmic microwave background — an afterglow of the Big Bang — indicate that about 80% of all matter in the universe is dark matter, a substance that doesn't reflect, absorb, or emit light (even though it's all around us, not just off in deep space where we can't see it because it's so far away).
 |
| Oh, Buddha, give me some insight it all. |
Despite its abundance, scientists have not yet identified what dark matter is made of. In the new study, researchers explored a scenario where dark matter consists of primordial black holes formed from density fluctuations that occurred during the universe's last contraction phase, not long before the period of expansion that we observe now.
They published their findings in June in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. More:
- UPDATE: New theory! Throw the old science books in the trash: The universe had a SECRET LIFE before the Big Bang, new study hints]
[Back to the old theory]
 |
| Demiurge: Check it out, Chugs. Quiick, give me your lighter. I'm going to create something. |
(Family Guy) God (Demiurge) created the universe
Thus, it's possible that the universe at the Big Bang was teeny-tiny or infinitely large, Carroll said, because there’s no way to look back in time at the stuff we can’t even see today.
- [Dumb. All we do is look back. And there are ways of looking back, not to mention the beings who were there when it happened because the universe, this universe, is far older. And we live in a multiverse. And it is possible to know things by direct perception, but that requires purification of mind and development of the dibba cakkhu or "divine eye," the human capacity to exhibit marvelous powers of perception, even us, even now.]
All we really know is that it [It? What? The pre-universe, something was preexisting?] was very, very dense and that it very quickly got less dense.
- Hey, Everybody, sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now. Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to an inbox. By submitting your information, you agree to be legally bound to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16+.
As a corollary, there really isn't anything outside the universe, because the universe is, by definition, everything.
- [Unless we mean the multiverse, but they're separate, except for trans-dimensional travelers who have found a way to break through to other dimensions and universes, but they haven't told us how to do it, I mean they've told us, but they haven't gotten it published in a peer-reviewed journal of our liking and raked over the coals by friends of ours in the elite circles of The Academy who are gatekeepers to keep Truth and the riff-raff out, so until then there is just no way to be outside the All which is the Everything and the only Reality that we know of and can ever know.]
 |
| Question. Answer. I've got it! |
So at the Big Bang, everything was denser and hotter than it is now, but there was no more an "outside" of it than there is today. As tempting as it is to take a godlike view and imagine you could stand in a void and look at the scrunched-up baby universe right before the Big Bang, that would be impossible, Carroll said.
The universe didn't expand into space; space [you know, that stuff that is nothing but holds everything, defined as the delimiting distance between things, yeah, that stuff] itself expanded.
"No matter where you are in the universe, if you trace yourself back 14 billion years, you come to this point where it was extremely hot, dense, and rapidly expanding," he said.
No one knows exactly what was happening in the universe until 1 second after the Big Bang, when the universe cooled off enough for protons and neutrons to collide and stick together.
Many scientists [that we approve of and never mind the others] do think that the universe went through a process of exponential expansion called inflation during that first second. This would have smoothed out the fabric of space-time and could explain why matter is so evenly distributed in the universe today.
Before the bang
 |
| Secret life before the BIG bang |
This extra-dense universe [the previous universe before the current universe] may have been governed by quantum mechanics, the physics of the extremely small scale, Carroll said.
The Big Bang, then, would have represented the moment that classical physics took over as the major driver of the universe's evolution. [What is Quantum Mechanics?]
 |
| Try hedonism. I liked it. |
For [horndog atheist] Stephen Hawking, this moment was all that mattered: Before the Big Bang, he said, events are unmeasurable, and thus undefined. Hawking called this the no-boundary proposal: Time and space, he said, are finite, but they don’t have any boundaries or starting or ending points, the same way that the planet Earth is finite but has no edge.
"Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory and say that time began at the Big Bang," he said in an interview on the National Geographic show "StarTalk" in 2018.
Or perhaps there was something else before the Big Bang that's worth pondering. One idea is that the Big Bang isn't the beginning of time, but rather that it was a moment of symmetry.
In this idea, prior to the Big Bang, there was another universe, identical to this one but with entropy increasing toward the past instead of toward the future.
Increasing entropy, or increasing disorder in a system, is essentially the arrow of time, Carroll said, so in this mirror universe, time would run opposite to time in the modern universe and our universe would be in the past.
- [Strangely, the mathematical functions and Einstein's equations do not have an arrow and therefore time can run in either direction without violating math rules or fundamental quantum mechanics, what with retro-causation even being shown to possibly exist.]
 |
| E Questions, Buddha Answers |
Proponents of this theory also suggest that other properties of the universe would be flip-flopped in this mirror universe.
For example, physicist David Sloan wrote in the University of Oxford Science Blog, asymmetries in molecules and ions (called chiralities) would be in opposite orientations to what they are in our universe.
A related theory holds that the Big Bang wasn't the beginning of everything, but rather a moment in time when the universe switched from a period of contraction to a period of expansion.
- [Ah, this would be in line with Buddhist and Vedic cosmology and the views of the other Dharmic religions, which speak of periods of expansion and contraction within a great aeon or maha yuga, a staggering period of time humans had no business imagining if it were not for space beings filling their minds with explanations of what goes on out there in boundless reaches of space known as the akasha deva loka or "world of light beings in the sky."]
This "Big Bounce" notion suggests that there could be infinite Big Bangs as the universe expands, contracts, and expands again.
- [Ah, now we're getting somewhere, and the Indian books of the subcontinent have been reaching Western scientists by various means after all. This is exactly what the East posits, not a finite first point or cause, but only cycling that neither has a need for a beginning nor any end in sight. There is. And when is it? Now, the eternal now.]
The problem with these ideas, Carroll said, is that there's no explanation [that I know of] for why or how an expanding universe would contract and return to a low-entropy state. [But, of course, I haven't read the ancient texts, have I?]
 |
| Let's send this one up and see if it flies. |
Carroll and his colleague Jennifer Chen have their own pre-Big Bang vision.
In 2004, the physicists suggested that perhaps the universe as we know it is the offspring of a parent universe from which a bit of space-time has ripped off.
It's like a radioactive nucleus decaying, Carroll said: When a nucleus decays, it spits out an alpha or beta particle. The parent universe could do the same thing, except instead of particles, it spits out baby universes, perhaps infinitely.
"It's just a quantum fluctuation that lets it happen," Carroll said. These baby universes are "literally parallel universes," Carroll said, and don't interact with or influence one another.
If that all sounds rather trippy [then you have been smoking 5-MeO-DMT or regular DMT or], it is — because scientists don't yet have a way to peer back to even the instant of the Big Bang, much less what came before it.
There's room to explore, though, Carroll said. The detection of gravitational waves from powerful galactic collisions in 2015 opens the possibility that these waves could be used to solve fundamental mysteries about the universes' expansion in that first crucial second.
Theoretical physicists also have work to do, Carroll said, like making more-precise predictions about how quantum forces like quantum gravity might work.
"We don't even know what we're looking for," Carroll said, "until we have a theory."
- When you purchase through links on Live Science's site, they may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how that works.
- Does the Earth rotate? Why does the Earth rotate?
- How did the Milky Way get its white name?
- Black holes are awesome [fearsome, but they should live away from the Milky Way in their own neighborhoods] and why are their names usually so boring?
- 33 pictures straight out of the 1950s (Ebaum's World)
- Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience, April 17, 2019: Chugs and the Editors, Wisdom Quarterly (fluffed, interpreted, and debunked for readers)
Wednesday, August 7, 2024
The Second Moment of Creation (PBS)
 |
| The beginning of stories is not the real first point |
The curious mistaken assumption about "creation" as understood in the West and in the Abrahamic faiths is that it is treated as absolute when it is no such thing. Any creation is The Creation, when it is just a story, a myth meant to explain current things. These narratives do not reveal existential questions. For example, say the God "created" Adam and Eve. They were not the first. They are just the current generation, the latest Adama (a group, not an individual). Eve was not the first woman in that story; Lilith was, but she's erased and divorced and sent away. What happened to the God's wife, Asherah? She was widely venerated as the Queen of Heaven in the past, but then all her temples were wiped out and her votive totem pole statues were smashed. They are found all the time, so widespread was devotion to her. That God, the God of the Bible, had a wife? He/It sure did.
Even if one could show that the Elohim, the gods, created humankind in their image, as is written, it was not the first creation of those means, merely this earthly vehicle, this generation of body (or bodies, koshas), not a "first creation" at all. It may be those gods think they did create something out of nothing, or bodies out of dust, and that may be. They are/were very advanced extraterrestrials/extradimensionals. But the us we imagine existing now existed before. There was karma in the past, and those old deeds have more to do with what happens to us now, what we experience seemingly by chance or fate.
 |
| Ven. Dr. Suwanda H. J. Sugunasiri, Ph.D. |
The Agganna Sutta perhaps does not actually qualify as a creation myth because it does not say, "There was nothing and then there was this." Rather, no first point is asserted, discerned, or claimed. The Buddha may have seen one, but he did not state that. What he did state was that this plane was in such a way, and beings alighted on it. They came as they were, having (pre)existed elsewhere, and they began to devolve here. Surely there is evolution in Buddhism, but it is cyclical, bound up with devolution.
 |
| Having eaten, it's time to start making art. |
Being can terraform platforms and places, bring life and set it a'rolling. Things might even originate on their own when circumstances permit -- such as when stardust, full of amino acids, crashes on suitable ground for organic things to arise. Or space traveling beings may have set up countless worlds.
Whatever the case, those organic "beings" who come to be are not beginning out of nothing. They have been, and they will be again, cyclically. Thiis is samsara, the endless round of rebirth. It is not the same being being reborn, but it is not quite right to say it is another as that does violence to the language. Ultimately, they are not the same. But conventionally, one having given rise to the other, they may be said to be the same string, the same line, the reappearing of the former version.
Then, having arrived, having devolved, beings became humanoid earthlings, and in the second moment, they did stuff -- art, civilization, farming, survival...karma, giving us what we have now. What we do matters. It will give future earthlings what they will have.
 |
| Proto-India: Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) |
It would be far better to first purify the mind/heart, see things with the third eye (pineal gland), and understand things in context. And most of that context extends long before this slice of life and goes on long after. In this way, undertaking "science" with a cleansed instrument of understanding, we will not be misled by our six senses or jump to conclusions or favor certain answers. And when we see things as they really are, we can be set free. The delusion entraps one, whereas the Truth sets one free.
The Second Moment of Creation | Civilizations | Episode 1 | PBS
Images and artifacts found in South America, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Australia testify to the urge to develop civilizations. Liev Schreiber narrates. (Originally aired in 2018).
This program is made possible by viewers. Support local PBS station: pbs.org/donate. Subscribe to the PBS channel for more clips: pbs. Enjoy full episodes of favorite PBS shows anytime, anywhere with the free PBS App.
FOLLOW: Facebook: pbs. X: pbs. Instagram: pbs. TikTok: pbs. Shop: shop.pbs.org.
Civilizations: Survey the history of art from antiquity to the present on a global scale. Civilizations reveals the role art and creative imagination have played in forging humanity and introduces viewers to works of beauty, ingenuity, and illumination across cultures. Download. #ancienthistory #worldhistory #anthropology #CivilizationsPBS
- Woman Follows Bear into the Forest After It Unexpectedly Approaches Her at Bus Stop | Happy in Shape
- 40-mile Cave System Shocks Scientists and Leaves them Confused
- Incredible Find: Miners in Far East Russia Unearth Carcass of 10,000-Year-Old ‘Perfectly Preserved’ Woolly Rhinoceros
- Algerian Olympic Women's boxer Imane Khelif is not a transgender athlete but a kind of high testosterone biological female, allegedly | indy100
- Life in ‘Devil’s Paradise’: Experiencing the Highest and ‘Most Horrific’ Town on Earth (pastchronicle.com)
Thursday, June 13, 2024
Universe 46 BLY wide but only 13.8 b-y-o?
How can the visible universe be 46 billion light-years in radius when the universe is only 13.8 billion years old? How can the visible universe be 46 billion light-years (BLY) in radius when the universe is only 13.8 billion years old?
And how can we detect light 46 billion light-years away when the universe has been in existence for only a fraction of that time?
Astronomers widely accept that the universe formed in a Big Bang [with no precedent, everything blowing up into existence out of nothing, with scientists claiming to be superior to religieux IF they be given just this one miracle to explain how everything began] approximately 13.8 billion years ago.
It has been expanding ever since [which it has not but how else to explain the Doppler effect redshift than to say everything is moving apart when it is not].
This expansion explains how a 13.8-billion-year-old universe can be so much larger than 13.8 billion light-years across.
First of all, [scientists] should explain that the light-speed limit that relativity imposes on objects within the universe does not apply to the universe itself.
- [Why? God doesn't follow His own rules imposed on everyone else like "thou shalt not kill" because as God and the model, He kills everyone he wants like the Demiurge of which the Gnostics speak.]
 |
| UFO or capsule debris on the surface of Mars |
We can only gauge the "speeds" of distant galaxies that are receding from us relative to our own position.
Apart from those that are gravitationally bound (such as, say, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies), all galaxies appear to be moving away from each other as the "space-time" in which they're embedded expands.
The more distant the galaxy, the faster its recession velocity, as noted by the Hubble Law. As a consequence of this expansion, a galaxy's location changes considerably during the period of time that its light requires to travel to us. More
- Southworth Planetarium Director Edward Herrick-Gleason, University of Southern Maine, Portland, Maine, Astronomy Magazine staff (MSN.com) How can the visible universe be..., June 12, 2024; Sheldon S., Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
Thursday, February 29, 2024
Metal therapist reacts: SOAD, Korn, Slipknot
Licensed therapist Taylor Palmby,; Seth Auberon, Ashley Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
Therapist reacts to System of a Down's "Aerials" and "B.Y.O.B"
 |
| What are these singers singing about? |
But the truth is there is so much we will never be able to control. So the best path to a free life is by shifting our perspective to a larger "aerial" overview. This SOAD song calls us to release control and trust that in the big picture everything makes sense.
We are all connected yet many of us live in a state of blissful ignorance until we suddenly realize something isn't right.
Maybe it's politically, maybe it's in our personal life. But once we realize that something isn't right, we have the opportunity to courageously confront that thing to try to enact change.
Taylor reacts to Slipknot's "People=Shit" on Feb. 13, 2024: People often adopt this belief as a way to protect themselves from the pain of loss or disappointment. This belief also prevents us from the power of connection. The song calls us to FIGHT against this belief and take responsibility for creating a better life for ourselves and those around us. #slipknot #coreytaylor #therapist. The sweetest Slipknot song, Vermillion Part 2
——
👉 If you open up about your mental health in the comments using @heartsupport, HeartSupport will write back.
If you want direction on your mental health journey, you can go to heartsupport.com/compass to take a self-assessment test and get personalized PDF results.
Here are all of HeartSupport's other links:
- Anonymous Mental Health Forum: forum.heartsupport.com
- Volunteer on a Reply Team: heartsupport.com/swat
- Website: heartsupport.com
- HeartSupport Instagram: heartsupport
- HeartSupport Facebook: heartsupport
- HeartSupport Twitter: heartsupport
- HeartSupport TikTok: heartsupport
Donate to HeartSupport at heartsupport.com/donate
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
