Half a Time – Preface

When a writer without talent wants to fascinate you, through his work, with his own greatness and the significance of his pursuits, his words spill over with talk of inner energy, spiritual strength, consciousness and subconsciousness, freedom, infinity, eternity… When some of those who have read what he has written claim they understand “what the author meant”, they perceive this “ability” as reliable proof of their own uniqueness. When that crowd of the “special ones” – those who profess to grasp the nebulous theories created and declared to be truth by philosophers, psychologists, theologians, researchers, and politicians, gets on your back from early childhood, the best you can hope for is to succeed, with great effort, in becoming one of them. You will find firm proof that your loved ones love you immensely and burn with desire for you to reach that lofty goal as soon as possible, in their eagerness to apply to you every means of coercion known to them! Only God Himself can help you free yourselves from such “love”.

“What does it mean, ‘intellectual’? It means people who think about things longer than other people, perhaps. But many of them just ran over other people, saying, ‘We have figured it out.’… Education to a humanitarian point of view most of the time consists of turning wonderful young people into colorless and self-righteous copies of their teachers… The colossal conceit of our intellectuals is in their belief that they know precisely what humanity needs and their relentless efforts to recreate people in their own sorry image…”[1]

Paul Feyerabend

If you want to, you can find an excuse for your astonishing indifference and ignorance of the “laws of the spirit”, for in the time you live in, such behaviour is, seemingly, your only choice. You “have to” be “normal”?! You have to be average, obedient, and useful because you believe that is the only way to avoid being branded by the special ones as immature, maladjusted, selfish, insolent, or even insane. But how can you justify leaving your behaviour toward those closest and dearest to you entirely to instinct? Can someone truly be called a parent who has no free time, no will, or no knowledge needed to raise a child? Can you be a good neighbour, or a good colleague, or a good friend, or a good life companion, or a good child to your parents, or a useful member of society, if you make no effort to understand what governs both your own behaviour and that of others?

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”[2]

Albert Einstein

While you sleep, do physical work, exercise, breathe, drink, eat, read, or think about something, you are not aware of the very complex physiological processes in your body and brain that make this possible. And that’s a good thing! It means you breathe clean air, drink clean water, eat quality food, maintain bodily hygiene, get enough sleep, move, and rest. Under such conditions, being aware of what’s happening inside your body and brain isn’t really necessary for them to function properly?! That holds only if you were alone in the world! The existence of other living beings brings everything back to the beginning. The proper functioning – indeed, any functioning – of your body and brain also depends on the state of your spirit, which can be strongly influenced by the beings with whom you share your living and working environment. Under psychological stress, you would very quickly become aware that something isn’t as it should be with your body and brain as well. In the case of a more serious mental disorder, your body and your brain would, subjectively, become your primary problem.

You will become aware of your spirit, just as you do of your body and brain, only when problems arise, and by then you will no longer be able to help yourself! Therefore, while you still can, you should also provide your spirit with everything it needs. In addition to the genes that you inherited from your ancestors, the state of your spirit is conditioned by your material and spiritual environment, your body, your brain, and your knowledge of the laws by which the visible and the invisible world, your body, your brain, and your spirit, function. Being able to consciously change these conditions means being able to consciously change yourself!

“Look at all the things we don’t know! We don’t know how the brain works. We don’t know what memory is. We don’t know what aging is.”[3]

Gregory Chaitin

Psychologists have openly admitted it; the disunity of psychology and its inner split are among the scandals of modern science. Darwin, the founder of the theory of evolution, claims that our free will is a delusion, conditioned by our inability to analyse our own motives! Contemporary psychology and the theory of evolution survive on the principle of “something is better than nothing”.

They don’t know?! Who knows, then?

Physicist and mathematician Stephen Hawking claims that physics is the foundation of all science and that every other form of scientific knowledge depends on it. According to him, the fact that you don’t know what consciousness is and don’t understand how your brain works is a problem caused by physicists’ inability to record all the input components the senses deliver to the brain, and by mathematicians’ inability to create and solve a quantum equation for the brain’s operation. How far you are from this kind of help can also be seen from the fact that researchers, at present, are unable to calculate or predict the motion of more than three elementary particles of matter. It is absurd even to imagine, let alone believe, that mathematical equations will enable human beings to know what consciousness is and to understand how their body and brain function, all the more so since those who create these equations do not hide the fact that “mathematics, by itself, never explains anything”, and that it is only “a means that can be used to explain one set of facts by another set of facts, and a language in which those explanations can be expressed”[4]. For example, can you learn what time is from the mathematical equation that relates a body’s speed, the distance traveled, and time? From the mathematical equation you use to calculate a body’s volume, can you gain any sense of the phenomenon behind what you call space? You “can” if you have to, and you will have to in all cases where the logic contained in equations created by physicists or mathematicians is your only link to the laws of nature, that is, to nature itself.

“We finally manage to understand this world by representing the structures of its order in mathematical forms; but if we want to talk about it, we have to be content with images and comparisons, almost like in religious language.”[5]

Werner Heisenberg

“Physicists know that every equation is a lie.”[6]

Gregory Chaitin

“At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.”[7]

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Nobel Prize winner for quantum physics, Richard Feynman, expresses the frustration of an intellect that has encountered the truth in this way:

“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics… Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will get ‘down the drain’, into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.”[8]

Richard Feynman

Physicist Niels Bohr is even more specific:

“Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.”[9]

Niels Bohr

John Archibald Wheeler, one of the most inventive interpreters of quantum mechanics and modern physics in general, quotes Einstein:

“If I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it.”[10]

Albert Einstein

They don’t understand?! Who understands, then?

“So, best of men, we must not pay much heed to what the many will say to us, but to what the one who knows about just and unjust things will say.”[11]

Socrates

“The notion that someone is going to come along and revolutionize everything overnight is a kind of academicians’ disease.”[12]

Clifford Geertz

“You must be prepared for a surprise, and a very great surprise.”[13]

Niels Bohr

“Revolutions are created by men with vision who see clearly the flaws in the old order and have the courage to break with tradition, by men who care far more for understanding than knowledge.”[14]

Leopold Infeld

“Learn from science that you must doubt the experts…”[15]

Richard Feynman

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts… Each generation that discovers something from its experience must pass that on, but it must pass that on with a delicate balance of respect and disrespect, so that the race (now that it is aware of the disease to which it is liable) does not inflict its errors too rigidly on its youth, but it does pass on the accumulated wisdom, plus the wisdom that it may not be wisdom.”[16]

Richard Feynman