Page 108

An American  mathematician  noticed that the earlier pages in books of logariths kept in his university library were dirtier than later ones, indicating that science students, for some rea-son, had more occasion to calculate with numbers beginning with 1 than with any other number.(261)He made a collection of tables and calculated the relative frequency of each digit from 1 to 9.Theoretically they should occur equally of-ten, but he found 30per cent of the numbers were 1, wheras 9 only occupied 5 per cent of the space. These are almost exactly the proportions given to these numbers on the scale of a slide rule, so the designers of that instrument clearly recognized that such a bias existed. This preponderance of the number 1 may have been caused  by the fact that the tables were not really random, but bigger tables provide a similar bias. The ecologist Lamont Cole worked with a rand corporation publication that gives a million random digits.(262)  He selected numbers at regular intervals  to  represent

Page 109 /

the level of metabolic activity of a unicorn at the end of each hour over a long period.There should have been no relationship between numbers and no kind of cyclic pattern, but  Cole is now credited  with the shattering zoological discovery that unicorns are busiest at three o clock in the morning .(77) It is possible that these discrepancies may be due to some peculiarity in our way of counting, but it looks as though the bias follows a natural law. Nature seems to count exponen-tially.  Not 12345, but 124816,  The numbers growing by a logarithmic power each time. Population  increases in this way, and, even  at an individual level, things such as the strength of a stimulus and the level of response to it vary in an ex-ponetial way.This is, however, no more than an observation; it does not explain the anomalous way in which numbers behave.  
The unexpected groupings of similar numbers  is something like the unusual grouping  of circumstances we call co-incidence. Everyone has had the experience of  coming across a new word or name for the first time and then seeing it in a dozen different places in quick succession. Or of finding oneself in a small group of people, three of whom have the same birthdays. Often these coincidences come in clusters: some days are particularly lucky while on others it is just one damn thing after another. Several people have made it part of their life's work to collect information on coincidence of this kind .
The biologist Kammerer was one, and it was he who gave the name of the phenomenon seriality. He defines a series    
"as a lawful occurrence of the same or similar things or events…which are not connected by the same active course"
and claims that coincidence is in  reality the work of a natural principle. (171)
 
The scribe then writ the time and date  31^st December 2000    3-0 pm
Daily Telegraph          dated Sunday the  31^st December 2000    4-0 pm

Page 14  

Article "Guests"  Robert Matthews
"…Ramsey  Theory. Named after Frank Ram-sey, a Cambridge Mathemati-cian clearly destined for great things but
who died in 1930 at the age of 26 Ramsey Theory focuses on the relationships that exist within collections of objects -…'
In 1928 Ramsey showed that when such  groups exceed a certain size,they always contain cliques of mutual interest"
It is when one calculates the size of gathering  required to produce cliques of a given size that Ramsey Theory reveals its hidden depths. One can show that in any gathering of six people there will always be a clique of at least three people who are either mutual acquaint-ances or who have never met …'
Some years ago, mathmeticians proved  that a gathering of 18 people guarantees a clique of four mutual acquaintances or strangers, the number needed to guaran-tee a clique of five is unknown: the best guess is a crowd of between  43 and 49 people.Whatever  the size  of the gather-ing, there is always a chance that people will find things in common  with each other. Indeed the chances are  sur-prisingly high .For example,a random gathering of just five  people give better than evens odds that at least two will share the same star sign. Among a party of 23,there's a 50:50
chance that at least two will share the same birthday. Even a gathering of just four people have a better than even odds
that at least two were born on the same day of the week."
 

Page 109 / 110

".(171)  Kammerer spent days just sitting in  public places  noting down the number of people passing, the way they dressed what they carried , and so on. When he analyzed these records,he found  that there was typical clusters of /
things that occurred together and then disappeared altogether."
" These "coincidental "clusters are a real phenomenon .Kam-merer explains them by his Law of  Seriality, which says that working in opposition to the second law of thermodynamics is a force that tends towards symetery and coherance bringing like and like together. In a strange, illogical way, this  idea is rather persuasive, but there is no good scientific evidence to support it and the theory is not very important to us here .It is enough to know that there is a discernible organization of events.Taken together with musical and artistic harmony, with the non-randomness of numbers, and with the periodicity of planetery movements, we begin to get  a picture of an en-viroment in which there are recognizable patterns. Super-imposed on the cosmic chaos are rhythms and harmonies that control many aspects of life on earth by a communication of energy made possible by the shape of things here and their resonance in sympathy with cosmic themes. "    

Page 490/1

"The novelist Arthur Koestler, who had a great interest in synchronicity, coined the term 'library angel' to describe the unknown agency responsible for the lucky breaks researchers sometimes get which lead to exactly the right information being placed in their hands at exactly the right moment."

Page 221  

"… consider the sequence 31415926535897 (1)
This passes all currently-available tests for randomness.
     Now com-pare it with the sequence20304815424786 (2)
Which also qualifies as a wholly random number. On the face of it, we simply  have two random numbers. However, if we subtract the lower sequence (2) from the higher (1), with the 'wrinkle' that if we get a negative number we add 10 to the result, we obtain the sequence  111111111111111
"This is strikingly non-random.These two 'random' numbers thus have a special property."

Page 25

" One of the most important branches of physics is called Quantum theory, because it deals with the tiny packages of energy  (quanta ) that comprise the subatomic micro world. Light which we normally think of as an electro magnetic wave, can also be visualized as a stream of tiny particles-quanta-called photons. Conversely , Subatomic entities like electrons are commonly considered as tiny particles but under certain experimental conditions they exhibit a wave like character. This wave / particle duality is a cornerstone of quantum physics
The bizarre side of quantum theory comes when we try to figure out what a quantum particle like an electron actually is. One thing it is not is a particle in the ordinary sense of a speck of matter which occupies both a defined amount of space and a defined position in space  Physicists in the 1920s and 1930s discovered that it is impossible to determine the position and the velocity of an electron at the same time. This is not a flaw in in technique. Rather, the electron, in a fundamental sense, does not have a specific position  

/ Page 26 /  

and velocity the uncertainty is an in built feature of our real world, not a fault of our instruments
"A deeper understanding  revealed the quixotic fact that a particle like an electron has only a certain mathematical probability of being found in any one spot.This probability has a ripple or wave-like form, but it is more like a 'crime wave'- a statistical distribution - than a physical undulation
" The basis of matter , then , when examined intimately, dissolves into a ghostlike intangibility ; the quantum wave is a  mathematical wraith , a ripple of possibilities."
"The quantum wave  only  has this  wraithlike character when it is not being looked at. When an  observer intrudes, when a scientist for example, tries to measure the properties of an electron the, the ghostly wave function collapses.The particle becomes real it can now be specifically assigned a fixed location, with a probability of 1,i.ea certainty
This is a staggering conclusion .It means that consciousness is not an observer in the dynamics of the universe; it is an active participant. Consciousness , literally and factually, creates reality , by summoning forth material particles,
definable certainties, from the elusive quantum wave .Objective 'reality' in this perspective falters  on the brink of a profound ambiguity. Subject and object; mind  and matter are not separate;  they interact and interlock."
 
When the thats away the  how's will play said Zed Aliz to the scribe .
The scribe writ simply A cat is said to have said, 'it is said, that a cat has nine lives'.
 
Page 31

"…In the perspective of physics the past does not cease to exist simply because our awareness moves beyond it"

Page 33

" The laws of physics have no inbuilt time asymmetery.They work just as well in the future-to-past sense as the past-to-future sense. We see this clearly when we look at the quantum wave .The wave is a ripple of possibility, not a real thing It has neither past nor future; it can be described as travelling forwards in time and backward in time with equal validity. This is true not just of the quantum wave. Subatomic particles exhibit the same disregard for time. In the last half century physics has unearthed a garden of so-called 'fundamental particles' - mesons, positrons, neutrinos, etc. For each of these particles of ordinary matter there exists an antiparticle of equal mass but opposite 'charge' (antimatter)    

Page 34

According to modern physics, both the quantum wave and the physical particles that constitute matter are symmetric with respect to the direction of time. The spacetime landscape , at least as far as quanta are concerned, can be crossed with equal ease.

Page 95  

'…1923'…'Kahil Gibran'…
             " Forget not that I shall come back to you
               A little while, and my longing shall gather dust and form for
              another body
               A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another
               woman shall bear me"
 
Page 209

"At this stage in the evolution of our minds, our experience of reality is like that of a shadow, a limited, impoverished ghost-image projected into the three dimensions of our present (average) mode of consciousness by the invisible (to us ) four-dimensional 'truth structure' that lies beyond and behind it, extended in time as we are extended in space. I cannot stress too bly that it is this four-dimensional truth structure which is the universe's reality. What we call objective reality, our everyday commonsense world, is but a dim phantom construct of the timeless hyperstructure that exists, in or perhaps as, the 'mind of God', to use religious imagery. Yet, just as our present three-dimensional state of consciousness evolved from the one dimensional mode of our remote ancestors, so there is abundant evidence that the four-dimensional mode is struggling to be born in the homo sapiens species at this human moment in the cosmic story we are almost there."  
"…This seems to bring us to the end of our quest.Yet one problem remains and like all final problems, it is the greatest one of all, sticking like a thorn in the vision of hope which the inner eye holds out to us. The cosmos is a spacetime continium and in this regard, the poet's intuition of a timeless state of consciousness merely      

/ Page 210 /  

reflects the facts of the physical universe as science depicts them.However timelessness implies foreverness and the same science that reveals spacetime to us also tells us that the universe will one day end in fire or ice.
The death of forever. The fact that the very cosmos in which we live is 'mortal' This was where this journey started and it is from this existentialist crisis of truly universal proportions that this book gets its name.At the finish of the race, we seem to run head-on into one last, unresolvable paradox, just as light was dawning. Something that seems to make our intuition of timelessness as insubstantial as a lovely vision, dreamed by a dreamer  in a quiet time but dissolving like a snowflake at first contact with brute fact.
Is this really the case? In chapter 7, I discussed a recent model of spacetime put forward by Stephen Hawking"
"…Hawking built a model of the cosmos which he called the 'no boundary' model because in his theory, time does not begin at a 'point' nor does it end in one (Figure 7.3.).From the earlier perspec-tive of Chapter 7, this model seemed from many points of view unsatisfactory, because it used imaginary time, not real time. Chapter 9  gives the model a new source of credibility for it is characteristic of the inner eye that it can disregard the 'commonsense' aspects of experience and penetrate to the inner logic of nature.
Thus when the inner eye 'sees a circle, a mandela, and recog-nises therein some form of flawnessness, it is, at a different level, seeing the endless number 3.1415926…It may be significant we call such numbers trancendental. Indeed, science builds its deepest truths using numbers that are, in an important sense, 'illogical'. The square root of minus one is imaginary (it is in fact, part of the number system Hawking uses to build his model ). The square root of 2 is irrational. And so it goes on.
Moreover, the word 'imaginary', like all symbols invented by the conceptual mind, confuses the issue by implying that such numbers are in some way 'unreal' This is fundamentally false. As Hawking's colleague
mathematician, Roger Penrose, says cryptically:

Page 211

It is important to stress the fact that these 'imaginary' numbers are no less real than the real numbers we have become accustomed to…the relationship between such real numbers and physical reality is not as direct or compelling as it may at first seem to be…  
We find a similar situation in particle physics where the so-called ultimate building blocks of matter (quarks) are given such mythic names as 'strange', charmed etc. At this deep level of reality, the distinction between scientist and poet breaks down and scien-tists use the language of song and parable in their intuitive attempts to seek out the basic structures of the world.
To return to my point, I find it fascinating that Hawking himself  recognises that his use of imaginary time, far from being a ruse or  trick, may in fact be a door to a higher order of insight. Listen to his own words:
  
This might suggest that the so-called imaginary time is really the
real time and that what we call real time is just a figment of our
imaginations. In real time, the universe has a beginning and an
end at singularities that form a boundary to space- time and at
which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time,
there are no singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we call
imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just
an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the
universe is like.
 
This goes to the heart of the matter for the defining quality of the inner eye in its most highly evolved form is that it can 'see' the deepest hidden  structures of reality without impediment. If timeless-ness is an authentic feature of consciousness - and the evidence I have summarised in this book very bly suggests that it is - then consciousness may just as well 'exist' in what the mathematicians call 'imaginary time as in 'real time. Indeed it may be precisely because the ego-self lives in real time that it 'knows', death. While it may be precisely because consciousness lives in imaginary time that it 'knows' eternity.
I now want to build on Hawking's model, but I want to do so in a particular way. I want to use it in the poetic sense of a metaphor not in the rigid sense of a mathematical model. There are three reasons for this:first, Hawking's model presupposes that the uni-

/ Page 212 /

verse is closed (that spacetime is positively curved ) and this is as yet unproven. Second I do not believe Hawking's model (despite the credentials of its creator) is science's last word on the subject. Third, we are, by any definition, crossing into uncharted psychological  territory by thinking about human hopes for the future in terms of imaginary time or any other mathematical representation of time that science may discover.
The key feature of the Hawking metaphor is that time closes back upon itself to form a loop. This is why
in this metaphor we cannot talk of a beginning or an end to time,for a circle has neither except for the arbitrary points we choose to mark on it. It may be no accident that the inner eye has for long sensed that reality is eternal, for in this higher-order understanding, foreverness is restored to its ancient position as the foundation stone of consciousness.  
The most fascinating consequence of the 'loop of time ' meta-phor is summed up in Figure 7.3. Here, we see evolution starting with the 'north pole'(the Big Bang) and progressing around the circle to 'now', represented by the 18 th line of latitude (say )
 
At this point Alizzed said the '18^th line of latitude' ocurrs on the 18^th line down of page 212
The scribe writ, not including  title heading The Death of Forever
 
Page 212 continues /

From this 'now' perspective, we can look 'back' at our past, hidden behind the 'southward' spacetime rim .Yet this is illusionary , a hangover of the flawed way we look at time through the ego-self window. The loop of time metaphor shows that when we look forward into the future we are also looking back into the past because the arrow of time traces out the full circumference of the circle, eventually coming back to itself.  
In this 'song of reality'. The distinction between past and future vanishes. The process of 'seeing'is then symetrical in both directions. In  T.S. Elliot's apt words:
        
         Time present and time past
         are both perhaps present in time future
         and time future contained in time past
 
If this is what consciousness 'sees' it is 'timeless' in a deeper and different sense than we ever dreamed possible. In real time, such a closing of the loop would play havoc with our notions of causality, cause becoming effect and effect cause."
"…The unexpected feature of the loop of time metaphor is that a signal from the future becomes a signal from the past. Nothing is

/ Page 213 /

wholly new, for information is always travelling where it has been before. This is why I find the loop of time parable so satisfying. It resonates deeply with a poem cited earlier - T.S. Eliot's 'Little Gidding':
          
         we shall not cease from exploration
         and the end of our exploring
         will be to arrive where we started
         and know the place for the first time
         through the unknown, remembered gate
         when the last of earth left to discover
         is that which was the beginning

The famous line 'know the place for the first time' is critically significant in the context of this book."
 
"…It is said of the renaissance artist Michaelangelo that he approached a block of marble believing that the perfect sculpture he sought to create already existed in the unhewn stone. The artistic act was thus an act of discovery not creation, and the long hours of painstaking work were devoted to revealing what was already there."
"…This is I believe, the stamp of an authentically creative act : one discovers what is already true.
When a human being 'sees' a pre-existing truth, already known to

/ Page 214 /  

the cosmos, in a very deep sense, the universe recognises part of itself,comprehending it at a higher level of understanding. This kind of incremental knowing is the self-realization of the cosmos
In other words, there is a deep knowing about consciousness that is utterly distinct from mere intellectual comprehension. This deep knowing is a remembering of what is already there. One becomes, in the full sense, conscious of what one has always subconsciously been aware of. In terms Eliot's poem the 'gate'is remembered even though it is unknown. We arrive before we started and know the place for the first time!
We do not create the future, we discover it.
Roger Penrose captures something of the flavour of the mode of knowing in The Emperor's New Mind, when he says:
         Recall my proposal that consciousness, in essence, is the
        'seeing' of a necessary truth: and that it may represent some
         kind of actual contact with Plato's world of ideal mathemati-
         cal concepts. Recall that Plato's world is itself timeless. The
         perception of Platonic truth carries no actual information and
         there would be no actual contradiction involved if such a
         conscious perception were even to be propagated backwards
         in time
The loop of time metaphor goes a long way towards explaining a puzzle that many readers will have picked up as they worked their way through the pages of this book.
The argument I put forward in Chapters 8 and 9 "
 
At another moment  in the now of know time the scribe noted that the line containing  
' The argument I put forward in
Chapters 8 and 9' had 9 further words in the line.
As in
         ' that ego cages consciousness, is not a novel one -'
 
Further the scribe added  8 x 9 is  72
 
Page 214 continuing  /

" The argument I put forward in
Chapters 8 and 9, that ego cages consciousness, is not a novel one -
it is an ancient tenet of many religions. In particular, much of what I said in those chapters could be described as a scientific interpreta-tion of a set of  beliefs mapped out in the Hindu Upanishads thousands of years ago. Hindu belief, for example, sees the ego as a deception (maya) which seperates the ' I ' from the ultimate. When the mirage of ego is dissolved, the underlying union is made plain -
Thou art That  (tat tvam asi) is the illuminating recognition of this oneness. This is essentially the message of Chapter 8.
Even the metaphor of the ego-smudged mirror of consciousness that I have used repeatedly ( Chapter 8 to 10 )
has a Hindu parallel. Yoga teaching uses the simile of wind blowing across water to describe the relationship
between self and reality. While the wind blows , the water's surface - the mirror - is fragmented, shift-ing, the 'reality' it reflects continuously disrupted into half-truths

/ Page 215 /

and confusing images. However, when the wind stops, the surface of the water like that of the mirror, becomes still and perfect, reflecting the wholesome majesty of God, beheld in motionless serenity.    
Hence, the origin of the much misunderstood word 'nirvana', ( nir = beyond;  vana = wind ).
Moreover, Eastern religions seem to have arrived by mystical contemplation and insight at an understanding of the deep structure of physical reality that Western science has only recently been able to formulate in empirical mathematical terms . Consider these two descriptions of the nature of time, as quoted by Fritjof Capra in his well-known text, The Tao of Physics

It is believed by most that time passes; in actual fact it stays
where it is.This idea of passing may be called time, but it is an
incorrect idea,for since one sees it only as passing,one cannot
understand that it just stays where it is.

 

This passage captures the essence of the relativistic picture of time.
A further insight into time comes from a Buddhist text:
  
It was taught by the Buddha oh Monks that …the past, the future
physical space… and individuals are nothing but names, forms
of thought, words of common useage, merely superficial realities.  
 
This passage not only enca psulates the modern scientific view of our subjective sense of time , with its false tense structure (past present future); it also aptly summarises the formative role of language in the creation of the ego-self.
Is all I have done in this book retell, in the imagery of science, a story of reality that has been known to mystics for centuries? In one sense the answer is no. I have tried to derive my argument entirely from known scientific premises, attempting at all times to keep my logic internally consistent. However, in another sense the answer is yes. I have already said that the linear logic of the left brain has, from one point of view, been compelled to create science so that it could 'see' in its own conceptual way, the image of unity that the right brain had, through intuition, glimpsed aeons ago.
This leads me to an adventurous speculation. The time when many of the 'deep myths' of our species crystallised out - about 5000 to 3000 years ago in the West - corresponds remarkably with the period of the Fall, the emergence of the ego-self. At this

/ Page 216 /

transition stage of human evolution, consciousness was by the definition of my argument, ber in highly evolved individuals because the confounding distractions of the still evolving ego had not yet hardened into their final form. It is not surprising that the visionaries or prophets of that period possessed a more powerful insight than we do today, submerged as we are in the fallacy of our tick-tock time.
What I am suggesting is that the prophets who formulated the deep intuitive insights common to the major religions of humanity were in some sense tuned in to the future,'seeing the dim and far-off image of knowledge still unborn, listening perhaps to the holistic message of a science thousands of years away, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries of the modern era I propose that this is precisely what consciousness recognises, not just a premonition of the past but a memory of the future.