CHANGE YOUR ASSUMPTIONS -

CHANGE YOUR BELIEF SYSTEM

I’ve thought about the title and what the central theme of my thoughts are today. And I came up with it. Our beliefs are based on the Assumptions we make. If we change our assumptions we change our belief. You’ll never get anywhere with the EST organization, for instance, if you don’t first buy into the assumptions they make about human nature. Soren Kirkigard said that in order to become a Christian we make an “Unreasoned leap of faith” but then goes on to back that up by saying that it’s all in the basic assumptions we make, and we all make them. Scientists make them. Dick Schimmel, a Sunday school teacher I had in my high school years said “Math is based on the assumption that the number One exists”. Dr. Laura makes assumptions about her callers all the time that I would never make. To me what she does is un Christian. Let me define that. I believe two Christian precepts that aren’t in the Bible are as follows. They are a part of my ethical code. One is “What if everybody did what you were doing”. In the case of evangelists, with all the cars and plans and gasoline they consume if everyone used as much of the earth’s resources as they did, we would all be in big trouble. The other is “Walk a mile in the other person’s shoes”. If you are going to have a conversation with a caller, that involves two people, so put your outlook in the other person’s place. That sounds pretty simple. Many will point to my changing beliefs over the years, particularly in metaphysics and cosmology, and they might say to me “If you are going to change your opinions on things all they time, why should we listen to you?” I can point to changing political beliefs. Society makes them. The republican party makes them. The 1956 Republican Platform under Eisenhower was a whole lot more liberal sounding than the Republican platforms are from recent conventions. What changed? The “memes” or assumptions of the party faithful must have changed. What accounts for this? This is the $64,000 question. I have often said, but it bears repeating, that my beliefs haven’t changed all that much in ten years when I was voting for Bush. I don’t think I changed; I think society changed. I think the political atmosphere is much more toxic now than it was then. I don’t see, for instance, how John Mc Cain could make such a wholesale leap to the Political Right in ten years or less. He went from Mc Cain – Feingold and Mc Cain – Kennedy - - to now opposing his own bills. It takes a mighty caticlismic psychical event to make such a change in a person. I have changed a few assumptions along the way and I have pointed them out. In 1998 I believed President Clinton should be impeached. Then I saw the sort of crimes and atrocities the Bush Administration had committed and it kind of put things in perspective for me. Robert Byrd was interviewed in early 1999 and he said that although he believes President Clinton committed High Crimes and Misdomeanors, that he wasn’t sure he’d vote to convict. His reasoning was based- - on an Assumption- - that “Appearences can be more damaging than the real thing” and having the appearance of a corrupt President would be so damaging to our country and to history, it would be better to just shove this under the rug. Just like BP sprays oil dispersant to shove the oil under the “rug” of the ocean. Another change in assumption I had was that “People who invest privately save up more money for their retirement than the government could possibly save up for you, so they should be given the choice”. My assumption was “People ought to be responsible for their own actions”. I also did not believe then that retirement pensions were part of “the commons” as Thom Hartman would say. I also didn’t have the input of the last few years of the stock market weighing on my decision. To advocate playing the stock market seems a case of financial Russian roulette to me now. By the time I began blogging in late April of 2006 I had more or less undergone my political metamorphisis, although remnants of conservatism, still remain as part of my beliefs.

Another big area of change for me is in my cosmology. For instance in June of 2006 I said that I didn’t believe in the Big Bang or in Predestination. Although I did say that “the two beliefs seem to fit together into a logical system. Further I said that I didn’t want to believe in predestination because I believed it was psychological unhealthy to do so. I still believe that. But there are times when God or Nature or whatever demands that certain items of belief be left for God alone to know. “Gee, that sounds mysterious”. OK take the notion of animals killing one another for food. Does a lion worry that he might be killing an endangered species when he kills and eats it? Do animals worry about the ecology? And yet nobody would question that the food chain of life is part of God’s plan for nature. As I look over previous years I see a lot of stuff I have changed my opinion on. But are my beliefs right now and wrong then? Well, not so fast. A lot of my beliefs about Black Holes now, or the absence of them, is based in Einstein’s math. After all if Neil Savedra says “No object will ever go faster than the speed of light” who am I to doubt him. It goes back to assumptions again. If I assume that the whole speed of light thing is not an insurmountable barrier, then we can be open to other ideas. Scientists, who now believe in Black Holes, obviously believe now that matter can be made to go faster than the speed of light. But I don’t want to say that my beliefs in 2006 and 2007 were wrong because I don’t know what I’ll be believing in ten years. Hopefully it will be better than what I believe now if I change. And if I change I will try and sell you people on the new belief. There are two models for belief evolution. One is the ripening fruit analogy where an Apple reaches the peak of perfection and you pick it before it begins going bad. In classic rock or classical music we speak of “early” or “late” periods and also a certain “peak productivity” period. In this case we look back to a classic as the standard. But a different view is children growing up. The inference of any child is that one day he too will grow up to be an adult, and so sees adults as role models to be emulated. I don’t get feedback from my writings on line. Perhaps I need to make adjustments in the “comments” sections. I thought I made them but perhaps I need to take another look. With your feedback I will evolve faster. A big part of my problem as a Christian is that I didn’t have any real role models. There was nobody else, no one’s personality that I cared to emulate. This hindered my “growth” as a Christian. It is said that we all should be growing all our lives, like a tree. And as such by the time 20112 rolls around I’ll be a different individual than I am now. We’ll see.

I would now like to delve into more detail, if you are interested, in this whole Einstein and Black Hole thing. It was March or April of 2008 that I declared that Black Holes were not a part of this universe and therefore were unprovable. Prior to this I believed heartily in their existence and incorporated them into my beliefs. Sometimes I come across one of my own statements that’s a head scratcher. No doubt you’ve encountered them too, where you say “Could somebody just explain the last sentence”. Let me lay one on you. I said in summer of 2006 that “Matter that takes up more space moves through time more slowly”. I’ll tell you what I meant by that. I could have clarified saying “Matter with big molecules moves through time more slowly”. Or put another way “Matter that isn’t subject to Einstein’s incredible shrinking machine of relativity- - moves through Time more slowly. That is, put another way, things just take longer to happen. Feel better? I believe it was August 2007 in “The Ten Commandments” blog that I made the statement “I know what hyper space is. Hyper-space is matter inside a Black Hole. I no longer believe that. My “model” for the Universe back then was based sort of on a Vitamin D info-mercial on KTLK like they have Saturday mornings. Picture a big mountain. Now water is pouring in over the top of it and it’s filling up a pool or indentation in the ground at the top of the mountain, and that water is slopping over and filling up all the pools below it, one by one. My view of the Universe a few years ago was as a “perpetual falling machine”. That is I believed at the center of this universe was one or more black holes, like a program subroutine. And that material fall into these Black Hole lower realms like variables being passed to a subroutine. To put it more simply, I believed that Black Holes were a part of this universe and functioned like someone pulling the stopper out of a sink filled with water and the water would slowly drain out. So you would gradually have matter being sucked into black holes like a giant vacuum cleaner into this lower level. But this falling notion would be one way, of course. I did not bother to ask whose supplying the constant stream of new matter, only that the new matter came from a higher level (with bigger molecules) and fall into our level of the universe and thence to a lower level inside a Black Hole. I’d like to review for new readers and emphasize that my views on Special Relativity have changed over the past few years, and here’s how. With special relativity and this means “matter not inside a gravitational field” or a very strong one, there is a thing called “reciprocal relationship” and the word Reciprocal means exactly the opposite of what it means in ordinary math.. I’ll make it easy for you. Don’t even think of math. When you see reciprocal just substitute “phony”. Much of special relativity is just an apparent optical illusion that people say are real. People say that gravity is a ray and acts like light. It’s “radiation”. Light as such is called “ultimate reality”. What you see is taken to be real. This isn’t that complicated. As such the shrinking and the time dialation and also the stretching and time hastening - - are all optical illusions in Special Relativity. As such the only variable we haven’t handled is mass. I would like to review this for you new people. In the Smallville series Clark Kent had not yet become Superman. And he wasn’t yet able to fly. So he gets from place to place in a hurry by dashing. So they came to call him “the blurr”. Now the problem is that all of that dashing and rounding square corners violates the physics of physics and inertia for someone of his weight. So you get what I’m driving at? So for this whole “dashing” thing to work, Clark has to lose a whole lot of mass or become a whole light lighter, for this thing to work. Is this all jelling for you? If you fail to adjust the mass values, the time values no longer make sense. So this means that the opposite is also true. For time to slow down- - the opposite has to happen and the same matter suddenly defacto gains a whole lot of mass even though it’s the same matter. Nothing magically happens to the matter. So let me wrap this whole thing up in a bow for you. There is this thing called the “Event Horizon” scientists believe in where it’s as if you’re traveling into a black hole and new objects appear before you that were invisible and “new space” appears to open up as you shrink and so space appears to expand, so that there is a whole lot more of it. And I just assumed that given a strong enough gravitational field pulling on the matter that by definition it would have to exceed the speed of light. And once hyper-space was achieved I more or less assumed it would continue to travel at hyper light speed in it’s new space continuoum. So the whole area inside a black hole would be shrunken matter but it would all be relative. “Big” and “Small” would no longer be relivant but only “Bigger” and “Smaller”. Questions like “who’s supplying the new matter” and “Where does all that matter go when it goes down the drain” aren’t supposed to bother you.

Yesterday, July 7^th was Ringo’s birthday and he turned seventy. He still looks amazing for his age. We all have to revise our notion of what a seventy year old man looks like as we, one by one approach these decade milestones. Ringo said his favorite song was “all you need is love” and still wants us all to focus on Peace and Love. If it’s true that we all are evolving to some higher level- - -one can hope this reactionary fever we’ve seen in this country these past two years is soon to be a thing of the past. Let us hope so. I fear that some cataclysm is still necessary to shake mankind out of its lethargy- - like some nuclear war or something that causes One World Government. Not that I’m a fan of that I’m just saying that the carrot and stick principle is a powerful one and given a frightening enough stick- - mankind can change its beliefs quickly. They will see themselves as having no choice, that is if they reflect on the change at all.