Chapter 1: (God Peers at his reflection; The Looking-Glass Universe)
• Time is nothing but a measure of the changing positions of objects in space. (as any scientists knows, in the beginning there were no objects in space).
• A year is a measure of the movement of the earth around the sun.
• A day is the revolving of the earth on its axis.
• Since by its own account neither earth nor sun existed in the beginning, the authors of the bible never meant to say that everything was created in seven days in the usual sense of day.
• Despite this initial absence of matter, space and time, something must have happened to get
• everything started. In other words, something must have happened before there was anything.
• Since there was NOTHING when something first happened, it is safe to say this first happening must have been quite different from the sorts of events we regularly account for in terms of the laws of physics.
• It might make sense to say that the first happening could have been in some ways more like a mental event than a physical one.
• The idea of mental events generating physical effects may at first seem counter -intuitive, but in fact it’s something we experience all the time (ex: struck by the idea of touching someone’s cheek and then an electrical current burns down a nerve in my arm and my hand moves).
• Can this everyday example tell us anything about the origins of the cosmos? In the beginning an impulse must have come from somewhere - but where? As children didn’t, we all feel wonder when we first saw
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crystals precipitating in the bottom of a solution, as if an impulse were squeezing out of one dimension into the next?
• we shall see how for many of the world’s most brilliant individuals the birth of the universe, the mysterious transition from no-matter to matter has been explained
• The scientist might not like what he has to say
• In other words, the only reason why God’s mind might be like ours is if ours was made to be like His - that is, if God made us in His image.
• Everything the author discusses is upside down and inside out.
• You will be tempted to think forbidden thoughts and taste philosophies that the intellectual leaders of our age believe to be heretical, stupid and mad.
• I am going to do, is ask you to stretch your imagination. I want you to imagine what it would feel like to see the world and its history from a point of view that is about as far away from the one you’ve been taught as it is possible to get.
• Today’s intellectual elite believes that if we let these ideas slip back into the imagination, even
• briefly, we risk being dragged back into an aboriginal or atavistic form of consciousness, a mental slime from which we have had to struggle over many millennia to evolve.
• God looked into a mirror and imagined beings such as himself.
• Imagined free, creative beings capable of loving. putting yourself into god’s position involves imagining that you are staring at your reflection in the mirror.
• TODAY’S SCIENTISTS WILL TELL YOU THAT in the hour of your greatest anguish there is no point in crying out to the heavens with any expression of your deepest, most heartfelt feelings, because you will find no answering resonance there. The stars can show you only indifference.
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The human task is to grow up, to mature, to learn to come to terms with this indifference.
• A nineteenth-century depiction of the cabalistic image of God reflecting on himself. The universe that this book describes is different, because it was made with humankind in mind.
• This universe has nurtured us through the millennia, cradled us, helped the unique thing that is human consciousness to evolve and guided each of us as individuals towards the great moments in our lives.
• However, scientists talk about the mystery and wonder of the universe, and rhetoric of mystery and wonder, there is a universe of blind force.
• In the scientific universe, matter came before mind and mind is an accident of matter
• Mind and matter is a living dynamic connection. Everything in this universe is alive and conscious to some degree. Matter emerged from the mind of god.
• Ex: tree falls down in a forest but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Surely we say a sound not heard by anyone can’t properly be described as a sound.
• The secret societies teach that something like this speculation is true. According to them, a tree only falls over in a forest, however remote, so that someone, somewhere at some time is affected by it. Nothing happens anywhere in the cosmos except in interaction with the human mind.
• The author explains how our emotions cause change which in turn, affect our mental state.
• It is important to realize that by these deeper laws are meant more than the mere ‘runs of luck’ that gamblers experience or accidents seeming to happen in sequences of three. No, by these laws the secret societies meant laws that weave themselves into the warp and weft of each individual life at the most intimate level.
4 • If you believe matter comes before mind you have the task to prove how chemicals create consciousness and on the other hand, if you believe that matter is precipitated by the cosmic mind, you also have to come up with a working model.
• History has a deeper structure, that events we usually explain in terms of politics, economics or natural disaster can more profitably be seen in terms of other, more spiritual patterns.
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