Thursday, February 26, 2015

Quasar Awakening




a
Artist's impression of a quasar with a supermassive black hole in the distant universe.

First its size
Then the simultaneity
a startling quick 
quantum formation..
Hints as these
are alerts for
Awakening
to the identity
of our Consciousness
with our Reality
our inner Universe
our larger Self...

("Astronomers have discovered a truly colossal black hole. It's 12 billion times as massive as our sun and about 3,000 times the size of the black hole at the center of our galaxy. What's more, the distant hole appears to have ballooned to its supermassive size very early in the universe's history -- just 900 million years after the Big Bang -- and that's got astronomers baffled. 
Black holes should take billions of years to get that big, according to current theories, and there are theoretical limits on how fast they can grow. So the existence of the newfound monster is raising serious questions about how black holes evolve.
"The discovery of this record-breaking monster black hole ... raises an embarrassing unanswered question: how did it form?" Dr. Max Tegmark, a MIT cosmologist who was not involved in the discovery, told The Huffington Post in an email. "If it started out as a collapsing star, then this black hole ate about a billion times its birth weight to get this heavy: how did it manage to eat so much in so little time?"
The black hole lies at the center of a bright cloud of material, a celestial object known as a quasar, called SDSS J0100+2802. This object is located 12.8 billion light-years from Earth and is 420 trillion times brighter than the sun.
The quasar was spotted by a team of researchers using the Lijiang Telescope in Yunnan, China -- and the mass and distance of the black hole were confirmed by observations made with telescopes in Arizona, Hawaii, and Chile. Though black holes can't be seen directly, astronomers can infer their existence and size based on observations of the matter falling into them.
The researchers hope that further observations of the quasar, using the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Telescope, will shed new light on the formation of black holes and galaxies in the early universe.
"This quasar is very unique," co-researcher Dr. Xue-Bing Wu, an astronomy professor at Peking University and the associate director of the Kavli Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, said in the statement. "Just like the brightest lighthouse in the distant universe, its glowing light will help us to probe more about the early universe."")
 |  By )

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Pen and Sword



Pen and Sword

Manuel Garcia is our writer
assigned to a nocturnal ring..
His world saw external failing
but failed to perceive 
a larger Self remained..
This Self saw a world in wholes
not in partialities of thought as
  he his dangerous moments met..
His way was most direct
in wielding pen and sword..
Automatic instincts blanked
a weary brain's slow words..
He knew of his knowing
a chance was all he sought..
Others watched his slow demise
 imploring but then a shrug..
They had failed to see
his wielding of inner beauty
 his living pen and sword...

See Ernest Hemingway's
""The Undefeated"

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

HAPPINESS NOW!




+++

Kingdom of Heaven  Inherit Earth  

Children of God  Shown Mercy

Filled   Comforted 

See God


   - - - - NOW + + + +


Mourn

Are Merciful 

Hunger and Thirst   

  Peacemakers  Pure in Heart 

Poor in Spirit    Meek      Persecuted

- - -

Sunday, February 22, 2015

The upside down Life


Faith Formation for March, 2015
Sunday Mid-Hour
10:00 to 11:00 AM
Broadmoor Community Church

The theme for the five Sundays in March will be:
"Beatitudes..The upside down Life"

Source materials for our discussions will
come from the teachings of Brian McLaren,
 Richard Rohr, Cynthia Bourgeault, and others, including
 the following websites:

http://www.ssje.org  (excellent short
daily Lent meditations from 
"The Brothers")

http://brianmclaren.net/archives/blog/on-the-beatitudes.html
(Richard Rohr comments on the Beatitudes...Brian Mclaren's blog)

The BCC Faith Formation Team will
facilitate the discussions...



Thursday, February 19, 2015

Prodigal hunter


Prodigal hunter

Venturing to that other land
they from a savage culture 
which gloried killing the 
noble eternal lion
and other stately beasts..
To that attraction they came
searching the land for that
which would grant a happiness
a happiness eluding them in
self-engaged lives..
Only one of the three
was to obtain the gift awaiting..
The gift of Fear.. genuine Fear
entering his self and penetrating
his wasting artificialities..
Authentic Fear
 became the key
No..more than a key
a Fear transforming..
This his glimpse of
real happiness..
Grace unveiled...

"For the first time in his life
he really felt wholly without fear.
Instead of fear he had a feeling
of definite elation."

"Macomber felt a wild unreasonable
happiness that he had never known
before."

"Macomber's face was shining."

from Ernest Hemingway's
"The Short Happy Life of
Francis Macomber

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Science of Consciousness


All that is ever known in experience is the knowing of it. Try now to find anything other than the knowing of your experience. Let your attention go wherever it wants. Ask yourself, ‘Do I ever know or come in contact with anything other than the knowing of experience? Could I ever come in contact with anything other than the knowing of experience?
It doesn’t sit comfortably in our culture to say, ‘I am God’. You used to get crucified for it! But to say ‘I am infinite Consciousness’ is just a confession of our most intimate and fundamental experience. It is to say ‘I am a finite self’ that is the true blasphemy. To say that there is a finite mind that knows a finite world made of matter, that is true blasphemy.
If we want to know the nature of the world, we have to know the nature of that with which the world is known. The ultimate science is not the science of physics; it is the science of Consciousness.

---Rupert Spira

Monday, February 16, 2015

Our place in the cosmos



Cosmologist Joel Primack argues that the universe, far from being a meaningless void, was meant for us. Sort of. Primack was a particle physicist who became interested in cosmology in the late 1970s, coinciding with the field's transformation by inflation theory and supersymmetry - the latter a theory that relates the properties of particles of force and matter, giving rise to predictions about invisible, or "dark," matter with not even a convincing conjecture about the nature of "dark energy". The center of the universe is not, of course, a geometric point in space, but a metaphor for humanity's place in the cosmos and the authors' intent is to relate these discoveries to the macroscopic, earthbound realm of human perception as a meditation on our place in a universe of visably known, unknown and perhaps unknowable mystery.

Center View


STRETCH

Monday, February 23rd, 2015
MacKenzie Place
(Corner of Union and Fillmore)
4:00 to 6:00 PM
Video and discussion
Facilitator:  Charlie Coon
No cost

“The narrow, local kind of mythic explanation that sufficed when cultures rarely mixed will never work in the emerging global culture. We now need myths that are not only scientifically believable but allow us to participate – all of us. To experience the human meaning of modern scientific cosmology, and to turn it into a working cosmology – a meaningful universe – in which we feel like participants, our culture will gradually have to transform it into myth. However, mythmaking is no longer a purely imaginative, spiritual endeavor. Today, the leeway for speculation about the nature of time, space, and matter has narrowed. Now that we have data, whole classes of possibilities have been ruled out, and science is closing in on the class of myths that could actually be true”
----Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams
The View from the Center of the Universe (New York: Riverhead/Penguin, 2006) p.36).



Saturday, February 14, 2015

Virtual Reality


Ray Kurzweil says by the 2020s most diseases will go away as nanobots become smarter than current medical tech. Normal eating will be replaced by nanosystems.

The Turing test — a test where artificial intelligence becomes indistinguishable from human intelligence — is passed

Self driving cars will take over roads, and people won’t be allowed to drive on highways.

He says by the 2030s, virtual reality will feel 100% real, and people will upload their minds by 2040.

In the 2040s, he says non-biological intelligence will be a billion times more capable than biological intelligence. Nanotech foglets will be able to make food out of thin air and create any object in the physical world at a whim.

By 2045, humans will multiply their intelligence one billion fold by linking wirelessly from their neocortex to synthetic neocortex in the cloud. [...]

in the Forest


in the Forest

A fair teacher
is a Tree..
All at once appears
my branching
my history
my splitting
my bifurcating
I seem to claim
so many tributaries 
all with shadow
some with pain..
Our separate selves
these branches mimic..
Yet this teacher
insists in haste
branches are my coloring
my inner vibrating
look anew!
see me whole
and be my Joy...



Friday, February 13, 2015

Cancellations


Cancellations

result in unexpected emptiness
which we rush to fill 
with things needing doing..
Afterward reflection:
Opportunities were presented
empty invitations
 not recognized
for renewal
for stillness
for being...


Wednesday, February 11, 2015

High mountain snow


High mountain snow

At last
after piercing the darkness
a smile and whiteness..
departing the hyena
the knowing death..
departing the quarrels
death wrapping words..
those writing beacons
shaded with death..
and brief happiness
 from death rising..
At last
a smile and such
whiteness..
and the hyena's
welcoming cry...

(Hemingway's 
The Snows of
Kilimanjaro)

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Dance of Being



In reality there are no polar-opposites; duality and contrast are of the mind only and not of reality.

Language and concepts are utterly compelling, so much so that we might find ourselves desperately pursuing some spurious 'oneness' in an attempt to move away from life's conceptual opposites. But we fail to realise that 'oneness' is yet another part of a pair: 'oneness' requires 'twoness' in order to apparently exist. Both counterparts are extremes, and extremism will always bring with it much pain.

Instead, without intellectual effort, we might find ourselves naturally walking the sublime space of equilibrium. A placeless space where every life expression arises and dissolves, where all is lovingly held and released in what you are, where opposition (however extreme) is seen to be a wondrously balanced dance of being.

~ Ha Chi Ming

Sunday, February 8, 2015

Precipitation


Precipitation

We are those
many precipitins
from sweeping
Awareness..
Our minds and all else
cells to galaxies 
the many scales
of precipitation..
Precipitations
which veil and reveal
their shining source...

Darwin's Eye..


Darwin's Eye

“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree...The difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection , though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory.”
--Charles Darwin


Thursday, February 5, 2015

The corner


The corner

Between two sides a corner joins
a new joining meets the world..
The corner gains perspective
with a new eye
new in-sight...

Sunday, February 1, 2015

Quantum awareness







Quantum awareness


Our present awareness
brings an infinite and undefinable space
into available experience and realization
a simple means of knowing ourselves..
Awareness of non-locality
a leap of insight  
a gift from science which is
not yet appreciated by science..
And there's more:
returning to those seeming externals
an experienced entanglement
dissolves subject and object
uncovering a hierarchy and
a science of love...



The Tenets of Quantum Physics

Non-Locality: We are all interconnected - even without signals, 
and experimental evidence is proving our inherent unity.
Tangled Hierarchy: In our brain, we become one with the 
neuronal images of an external object because of a tangled-hierarchy, 
a circularity. The observer is the observed.
Discontinuity: The discovery of something new of value in thought 
is a quantum leap of Aha! insight.