Hi Kim,

Very interesting and I love the allusion to Alice, because it is just such a
journey we are all on... Conference you attended sounds lovely as, of course,
was the conference in Boca.

Well as a quickie stab at time and the cosmos I like to think in global and
local terms and I think the question you raise ties in with the other themes i
offered for discussion.

Let's assume that we are indeed very old souls - emergent at the time of the big
bang though perhaps even older than that. For the most part, even as the
universe begins to unfold we start recording and analyzing data. After all, we
really do not have a whole lot more to do than that...

but as we unfold with the universe the instruments we use to measure time and
space also change so that we do not notice some of the things that happen
because all our measurements appear to be consistent. But this consistency is
illusory. we are, perhaps, completely unknowingly, headed toward a massive
collision of universes that will wipe out our small Milky Way galaxy in a
picosecond.

Since we do not know when this massive collision will occur, perhaps it is even
unknowable with our greatest potentials as human beings, all we are left with
about which we can discern orderliness and pattern, is the measuring
instrumentation we have. Here, just to be clear because some will assume only
one, I include quantitative and qualitative measurement...

We can either pale at the challenge of never being able to know what is
essentially unknowable to us, casting off what little orderliness and pattern we
are able to discern and failing to act where we could to achieve what effects we
can in the local environment, or we can, with hearts both burdened and freed,
make the most of what we have, understanding on a very deep level that impacting
the world/universe is ultimately quite meaningless but also the only game we
have to play.

So, we can choose, if we like, to adopt perspectives that incorporate causal
modeling, without I think, abandoning anything, because unlike the sociologists
of the 1940s and 1950s who plodded along with regression models and assumed that
the relationships they were observing were "real," we know that they are not,
they are just approximations, and perhaps very misguided approximations of what
is real. But we do not, by and large, have anything better to offer or to do
with our time...

So, for example, we can stand around like the onlookers at Fulton's steam boat,
the Wright brothers plane, tsk tsking their efforts as misguided, or we can join
in trying to recreate the world in the form in which we would like it to emerge.
Some would like a world of endless and banal competition, a health care debate
conducted largely by the ignorant, misguided, and self serving, and some of us
would like the debate conducted by those with the highest ethical standards, the
Will to learn what they do not know, rather than a thirst for using the excuse
that someone failed to educate them, as our ever so often asserting former pres:
"Who could have imagined...".

We can try to create a humane world of mutual respect and caring, or we can
abdicate any role at all and act as though nothing we could do would matter or
that obstructiveness is the highest ideal we can achieve. We can choose to
imagine all sorts of possibilities, tease out the implications of acting one way
or another, but it the final analysis it is a cosmic dice game for us - because
we do not have any grasp of the impact of the colliding universe is already
having. We can take heart in Einstein's assertion that "God does not roll dice"
while accepting that we will never experience the real "Laws" by which the
universe operates making our appreciation of the pattern of the universe nothing
but a spin of a roulette wheel. Still, I would suggest, learning about the
probabilities of the outcomes on a roulette wheel is easier to embrace than
remaining ignorant about them.

That collision of universes is still going to occur, we will still be
obliterated with no remaining legacy. All our causal models, quantitative
methods, and qualitative inquiries, will have come to naught because we were
incapable of knowing or preventing the moment of our most meaningful collision
with reality, so our scale of measurement of our humanity will have to be of how
we "acted" in the moment, rather than an enduring legacy, written on paper, and
analogue and digital devices.

Now those who prefer not to act will almost always exhibit self-satisfaction
when things turn out as they anticipated - for every Fulton, Wright, Edison,
Nightingale, Tesla, Pauling, and Mother Theresa there are tens of thousands of
almost Fultons, Wrights, Edisons, Nightingales, Teslas, Paulings, and Mother
Theresas who never achieved that moment of 'worlds altering' success, but they
tried no less hard than those who are so recognized...

But there is a subtlety that is unaddressed... Long before we come to the moment
of collisions of universes, there are chunks of space trash floating through the
cosmos, some of which, no doubt, are headed, along entirely predictable
trajectories, toward our little blue planet. How absurd would it be to fail to
evolve the technology that could protect us from a minor, albeit world ending
event, because we invested all our energy in a futile manner, considering only
the possibility of a massive collision and none in developing the ability to
explode a threatening piece of space junk a billion years earlier than the
collision of universes?

All of which brings me to a question I have been pondering the last few days...

Was, would, or could Martha Rogers (be) a Rogerian?

My own thinking is that she would not and could not be...

bear
--- In Martha_E_Rogers@yahoogroups.com, "KimS" <streamsitter@...> wrote:
>
> Bear, thank you so much for sharing the stories of numbers with us, I was
deeply moved! As I read your posting, I felt like Alice in Wonderland,
travelling with you through the portal/rabbit hole of numbers on a page to
experience a much larger pandimensional world beyond the surface appearance of
the figures.
> In a wonderful synchronicity, on the same weekend as the Rogerian
conference I attended a workshop held closer to home by Richard Tarnas,
"Understanding our moment in history: The archetypal perspective." Rick is one
of the founders and teachers of the philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness
doctoral program from which I graduated a couple years ago, and after a decade
of listening to him, I continue to be fascinated with his unitary approach to
life and incredible expertise in pattern recognition. His most recent book,
Cosmos and Psyche, correlates astrological archetypal transits with historical
events based on 30 years of research. I see him as the Martha Rogers of the
astrological world, he has to explain over and over again that astrological
transits do not "cause" anything and cannot be used for concrete predictions,
but are archetypal patterns emerging from an underlying field that correlate in
a synchronistic manner with planetary pattern manifestations emerging from the
same underlying field. The expression of these archetypal patterns is
co-participatory and unpredictable as human consciousness evolves and plays a
co-creative role with repeating cycles. In the beginning of the workshop, Rick
reviewed two perspectives on time: the first being cyclical, the second being
unidirectional, combine the two and you get a spiral (Rogers). OK, so here's
Part A of the mystery for me: Planetary movements/transits occur in "fixed time"
in the sense of being very mathematically predictable (so far) in terms of when
alignments occur, i.e. each planet in our solar system has been pretty stable
in the length of time it takes to revolve around the sun for millennia. Mental
image: predictable cycling when certain archetypal patterns/seasons emerge for
re-engagement with our co-participatory consciousness. The view through this
lens: some "fixed/stable/predictable" cycles of time.
> Now for Part B of the mystery concerning time, based on Gregg Braden's
recent book, Fractal Time. During 9/11 Gregg also became fascinated with
repeating "moments" or "conditions" of time. He approached it from a different
mathematical perspective and came up with a Time Code calculator. Much like
Tarnas's description of astrological transits, Braden says that the calculator
is not useful in predicting concrete future outcomes, but can provide clues
about when repeating conditions of the past will re-occur to be re-engaged with
historically informed consciousness. What intrigues me about his formula is that
the repeating intervals of time get shorter, making me think about Rogers'
theory of accelerating time, which for now I am visually picturing as the coils
of a spiral compressing (is this correct?). One can use Braden's formula to
anticipate different repeating timeframes for different themes. For example, an
economic timeline might be different from a relationship timeline, etc. (Ken
Wilber's lines of development just came to mind). But back to summarize: the
view through this lens is fractal, repeating, "accelerating" time in the sense
that the time between repeating cycles gets shorter.
> The mystery: how do these two different views of time, each generated by
numbers, correlate with each other? How do they correlate with the spiral
metaphor (or don't they?) At first I thought Braden was tapping into
astrological archetypes through a back door somehow, but the mathematical
calculations of the two perspectives are not congruent. Would love some help
with this puzzle! Thoughts anyone?
> Kim
>
> Kim Stiles, PhD, RN, AHN-BC
> Professor, Ohlone College
> Fremont, California
>