A Plain Man's Universe - No maths.

Let's take a quiet squint at Universe and its reality.

As we are inextricably part of its process and our sight is therefore distorted by our involvement, it is better that we step outside and view it from its exterior, otherwise we are trying to study herd-management from within the mucky depths of a cow's omasum - her third stomach.

Universe is biggish? Comparative to our size, yes, so let us reduce it to something more manageable that, like an amorphous balloon, we can hold handily before us for our inspection.

This is the complete Universe we have here, containing within it all that has ever happened in it. It is complete, the miniature of true macrocosm. It contains any beginning that it has ever had, whatever it may be, through to and including its final state, finite or infinite. It's all still there; it has nowhere else to 'go'.

From this perspective you may note - look, just there - the formation of planet Earth, never far in on this Universal scale, and on it the scum of life formed and eventuating, as on so many other planets on countless stars within countless other galaxies.

Universe, as seen from here, is rather different from what humans normally perceive. For the chemical organisms that living things are, observation and perception require the action of their chemical processes, so that, as they move across space, their impression of anything and everything necessarily has to be always fleeting and transitory, from within a moving and limiting bubble of consciousness and with the illusion of 'time'. We living things can see only a moving universe instead of also the aspect of its 'timeless' stillness at all stages of what we see as its 'action'.

This rock here requires the atomic action of its constituents to sustain it as rock. Is it here now? You can see it. Touch it. So now you know it is 'here'. Now, was it 'there' ten seconds ago? You were touching it so you know it was there. But you surely don't think that rock stopped existing just because it is out of your sight, do you? So it still is 'there'. Simply the continuity of your bubble of consciousness has come on to be 'here'. And so it and you, too, are still 'there'. Simply the continuous action permitting your bubble of consciousness to say 'now' has now acted so you are able to say 'now' when you are 'here'. Similarly, your future 'now' is already here, but you are not inhabiting it yet. All Universe is already 'here' - or 'there', as you may wish.

Suppose you take a photograph; though light has actively to enter the camera, this is the closest we can get to seeing a true state of Universe. An inert crystal of quartz requires its atomic action to maintain it as quartz, but even with its movement and its atomic action both utterly stilled the space which engenders it still exists. The instant 'now' of an event still remains, as an ineradicable part of Universe, but your bubble of consciousness, as provided by the ever-continuing action of your materials in their movement with your consciousness in and across expanding space, has moved on. Say "now and now and now", and each 'now' is twenty miles removed from the last, as the planet girates onward on its path around the sun, apart from the movement of the sun around the galaxy, or the galaxy onward relevant to other distant galaxies. But the previous 'now' still exists; it cannot 'go' anywhere, and it is no less real just because our fleeting 'awareness' is no longer inhabiting it in the continuous sequence of our bubble of consciousness moving across distance in a world seen only in action.

So the reality, as we now see, is that 'yesterday' is still there, the microbial ancestors of dinosaurs still exist, and all the future to and including the final completed state is already there. Thus, as we see, 'time' as a separate entity does not exist; what the humans call 'time' is really only a conceptual relative position in space and distance in and across which our materials act, thus giving us the impression of 'time' and a view of Universe only 'in action'.

Can we see the past? Sure, in a general sense. If you want to see what something was like eight or nine minutes ago, then look - very carefully - at the sun; or a hundred-millionth of a second ago, at the girl across the room from you. You can kiss her if you like; she won't have aged much. But if you want a reprise of her just saying she loves you, you will have to look slippy; sight of the earth - with the image you want even so long as just half a minute ago - is already on its way far out beyond the moon towards Mars and the great beyond, so you will need a pretty good telescope to see any such detail from there. (This, in case you have ever wondered, is why you can't physically see things in 'the past'. To see the dinosaurs you would have to be a hundred million light years away from here now, and what kind of image could you see from there? - or the supposed 'big-bang' sixty or a hundred billion light years away now.) And the only time any part of you will be together in the same space with her is when you embrace and, even more specifically, when sperm hits egg. But to review the past, why not use the fabulous equipment that nature in practice evolved and gave you: your memory?

So what is physically there between now and last week or last year? Well, you were there, you saw it; you tell me. I imagine it is very much what we all saw, albeit fleetingly and 'in action': the same crop of corrupt politicians bowing obeisance to the same crew of swindling financiers who traditionally corrupt them with their tool of totally fictitious cash - Yes, these things are not going to change until we change them. Or, long before that, what the dinosaurs saw. We are all, dinosaurs too, still there, but 'now' we are also 'here', as we always say in our moving bubble of consciousness amid the ever-changing circumstance that it observes.

So now we can see, 'time' as such not existing, that Universe is all formed of just the one ingredient: space. Active distorsions in mere space give the effect of sub-atomic particles, which combine to form the effect of atoms and their concomitant action, which combine to form the effect of molecules, and so inanimate and animate matter. It is this Universal action that on an atomic scale animates our materials and enables our observation and also our decomposition and fossilisation when our observation finishes and we are what the still-alive then call "dead".

Matter also gives the effect of the integrating binding energy of atoms, their weak repulsive force when their stability is disturbed, gravity, and galactic repulsion over vast distances, which is caused by the distant expansion of space which carries the receding galaxies static within it. In fact, it seems that gravity and the atomic binding energy are also the effect of the compression or contraction of space. And all these different forces are merely harmonics of the single force provided by these products of the same basic ingredient of space - Yes, how simple!

I will mention that you can neither add nor subtract a single atom to or from Universe. Furthermore, you cannot influence its totality differently in any way. You may thrash about in your own little locality within it if you wish, but if you do, then your wanting to and doing so was previously (prior in space) caused by the combination of your experience and the influence of your genetic programming, so that it had to happen and was always prescribed and predestined within completed Universe, irrespective of what you might intend or try. If it were possible to run the process of this Universe a million times, it would have no alternative than to happen in exactly the same way, every time. Every particle is as it has to be at any point in space, and when it has to change, due to external influence or to the instability of its composition, then it changes to the state prescribed by its circumstance. It has no other option, and in that respect, Universe is perfect. (Yes, I know, a bus parked on your foot may give you a different impression, but that is the difference between 'perfect' and 'ideal'.)

Incidentally, we can also see that the acceleration of expanding space causes these galaxies here to recede from those galaxies remote from them over there at many times the speed of light. It is simply a matter of sufficient distance between them. If, as some say, this fact offends scientific decorum in some sense, that's unfortunate, but that's just the way it is and complaints should be taken up with Universe.

Is Universe alive? Well, like some of the foregoing, that question may be a little 'unscientific' and depend on terminology and so on, though is none the less real or pertinent for all that.

Here is a grain of sand. With some more of the same it can be made into a silicon chip which, in a computer, can 'think'. But is it alive? Between my ears I have half a pound of somewhat yucky greyish meat, with which I am able to process evidence from my view of the world and to 'think'. Am I alive? (One moment . . . Ye-es, at the moment of writing, still slightly so.) But Universe contains not only all of us, together with all other thinking life-forms that undoubtedly exist, it also contains everything that exists in the Universe, all interconnected by attractive and repulsive energies and electro-magnetism . . . Does it think? It would be very surprising if awareness and perception did not exist in it, in ways and means of which we presently can have no conception.

So, is Universe 'alive'? Is it aware of us? - I remember 'scientists' forty-odd years ago, in yet another baby-step to gut all creeds, pontificating gravely that "The only thing of which we can be quite certain is that it is unconscious of us". - Oh?

What is Universe? - Well, what is a grain of sand? No, WHAT is it? . . . So WHAT is Universe?

Well, obviously, it is what it is: IT is ITSELF. And WHAT is that? Well, you might just ask, with all respect due to something probably infinite, naturally and implicitly infallible, perfect and absolute, creating us of itself and within itself and sustaining us totally as an inextricable part of itself, and which our materials automatically return to be as our personal atomic action ceases and we stop tenanting it as 'I', whether it might just be what most of us think of in one way or another as 'God'. Mightn't you? - I'm just asking.

But isn't Universe simple? Just one ingredient, already complete, perfect . . . . In fact, since it is, and has no other option, it is absolutely simple. Is that simple enough for you?

We might even ask why 'scientists' should want to make something so perfectly simple so incomprehensibly complicated - as if we didn't know.

No maths? - Sorry, no maths.

In fact, wouldn't it be a little unnecessary - not to say tricky - to try to say all that with maths?

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