How God Would Manage

A Grand Synthesis

Edited or Printed: December 7, 2015

I have been working for decades to describe the interdependencies of spirituality, evolution, culture and economics. Here is a model of how they fit together.

Winslow Burhoe winslowburhoe@directacoustics.com 617-538-2015

 

Contents

Not a Near Death Experience. 6

Outline. 9

Models of Reality. 13

27 Dimensions. 16

Spirituality. 19

Culture. 23

Evolution (Darwinian) 28

Economics. 30

The Grand Outline of Reality. 39

Interacting with the Spiritual Realm.. 41

Introduction. 41

Cast of Characters. 42

Technique. 43

Communicating. 44

Reincarnation. 45

Economics. 47

Elements of Economics. 48

Economic Cultural Streams. 52

Culture. 55

Structures of Information. 58

Extra Material 62

 

Not a Near Death Experience

 

 

In the ninth grade at Boston Latin School,  I hurried into my morning German class, with less than two minutes to spare before the bell. I immediately went into my newly discovered relaxation routine (which seemed to give me the equivalent of an hour of sleep for each minute I used the routine.)

I put my head on my folded arms and closed my eyes. While quieting my breathing and relaxing all my muscles (starting with my feet and going all the way up,) I focused on the sound of the clock and eliminated all thoughts from my mind. It was only the second time, that I felt I had succeeded in stopping all my thoughts. What happened next stopped me from ever trying again.

 

Immediately, as if in a dream, I found myself flying rapidly across a bleak, sunless landscape. In the distance, I was rapidly approaching a wavy cloudlike wall. As I got closer to the wall, I could see a hole into which I was being drawn. I panicked, fearing I would not be able to get back to my life and clawed my way back to my normal reality.  (I don’t know why I was so afraid, my life wasn’t that great.)

As I woke from my disturbing experience, the bell had not yet rung to start my German class,  and I decided never to perform that relaxing exercise again.

 

It was some four decades later before I realized that there are many more dimensions than we can see and started constructing a reasonable model of the universe that could allow me to contemplate such an experience without terror.

 

I now realize that this childhood experience was a self-discovered form of meditation and that the cloudless landscape was an approach to the spiritual realm.

 

Outline

In order to read this version of the book, you have to be open to spirituality. Until my mid thirty’s, I was not open to spirituality.  My father was a hard science type of guy — a meteorologist and an amateur anthropologist — whose hobby was the scientific study of religion. To him, God was an abstract concept, something like “the amalgam of the principles of the universe.” Much later, when I went to him with my newly discovered theory of spiritual dimensions, he pretended not to understand. I imagine he could see that my model would be a threat to his hard-science model. However, when I was a young man, I had followed right along in his hard-science model.

Now, after many decades, I believe in a spiritual realm, full of spirits who are trying to help humans (including me.) This realm is the home of angels and guardian angels, hunches and good luck. In order to have a fruitful and enjoyable life, all I had to do was to open my mind to their attempts at communication and follow the advice I received.

My mother died young from a brain tumor. After her death, I used to hear her voice in my inner ear, which contradicted my skepticism of a spiritual existence. But it didn’t convince me. A few years later, I was starting a business, and, apparently the spirits were in favor of it. Each day, it seemed, for a year, some kind of miracle or fortuitous event occurred to forward the success of my business. I found parts, tools, helpers and funding. This sequence of improbable events convinced me of the existence of guardian angels.

The turning point for me was the revelation of the reality of a multitude of scientific dimensions I could not see. This revelation implied the existence of an interpenetrating spiritual realm.

It’s not all fun and glory, however. The spirits have their own agenda and it may not correspond to yours. In order to have an easy, prosperous and happy life courtesy of your guardian angels, you have to go in the direction they nudge you, and you may not always understand why. Failing to follow this narrow path leads to the Buddhist idea of a life of suffering.

One of my first questions is, “Why do the spirits want to help me, or humanity?” I don’t have an authoritative answer, so I have to speculate. I am not even sure that my mind is capable of understanding the reasons.

These simple, almost Utopian, ideas can use a lot of explaining and in this book, I am going to do that. The explanations wind through controversial opinions in the fields of culture, evolution, physics and economics.

Of all living species, Mankind is unique in its reliance on culture. It is as if the purpose of human evolution was to develop a brain that was capable of language. Once that was achieved, biological evolution essentially stopped and our history became primarily a history of culture. The technical reason for this is simple although not widely acknowledged. Biological evolution proceeds using the mechanism of survival of the fittest. Survival occurs before procreation. In other species, that survival relies on biological fitness and, therefore, the genes. Because culture provides survival for human children until after they reproduce, that mechanism is null and void.

Culture has its own evolution, which occurs in many different cultural streams. The main streams are in languages, tools, science and economics.

I have begun to understand that this book is a cultural stream. For some eight decades, I have been encountering and accumulating bits of culture and integrating them into an ideologically and logically coherent models.

Economics, although largely hidden from most people, is perhaps the most important cultural stream of all because it is most important for survival. For most people throughout all of history the main activity has been producing food. It is only when work becomes productive through the tools and knowledge of culture that wealth is created. As a result freedom and leisure time also become available.

Leisure time is important for the goals of the spirits because it leads to communication with the spirits and the possibility of evolutionary progress to even more facility in that regard.

A proper understanding of economics is thus essential to a spiritually rewarding society. Because economics is generally misunderstood, I devote a lot of attention to it in this book.

Models of Reality

My mind does not experience reality directly. It creates models of reality that are based on the information it receives about the outside universe. These models are not necessarily true and not even, necessarily, consistent either within themselves or with each other.

The stories in this book are my models of reality. Each model is like a stage set. Although I have tried to make them all consistent with all that I think I know, some are more fanciful than others. This book is mostly about five Models of Reality: one for the Spirit Realm, one for the twenty-seven dimensions of the universe, one for culture, one for Darwinian evolution and one for economic productivity.

Their upshot is that they explain my life (purpose, existence, origin and end) and why I don’t worry about death.  Since I can’t experience reality directly, I have to make it up. Through my senses I do have some information about what reality is. So, I try to make what I make up be consistent with what comes through my feeble senses. One of the simplest examples of a model of reality is a straight line. The eye is not a camera.

When there is a straight line in front of my eyes, the retina experiences not quite random dots in the vicinity of that line. My mind makes up that it is a straight line. This effect is easily demonstrated by magnifying a printed line. Before it is magnified, the mind sees a perfectly straight line, but when it is magnified, it is easy to see the dots of which it is comprised. This characteristic of the mind to create reality is the source of optical illusions. There are many popular optical illusions where the mind switches between two different interpretations of visual material.

These visual tricks are well-known. What is not well-known is that the same kind of interpretation applies to all perception, including abstract knowledge. All scientific theories are synthetic creations based on the available evidence. Does the earth go around the sun or does the sun go around the earth? The answer depends on what you know, not on what you see. Is Socialism desirable or not? Can Government spending jump start the economy?

These are questions whose answers reside in Models of Reality. Different models produce different answers. Disagreements or controversies cannot be resolved outside of a particular Model of Reality

27 Dimensions

To describe this model of reality was the original intention of the book.

Before adolescence, my father gave me the book, “1, 2, 3 Infinity.” It was too difficult for me at the time, but I kept at it, especially when I was home sick from school. One of the ideas I encountered in it was that time is a dimension. It took me more than a decade to comprehend this idea. The key to dimensions is perpendicularity (and the Pythagorean Theorem.) The difficulty was that time is perpendicular to the three dimensions that I could see. If I couldn’t see it where was it?

Years later, as a loudspeaker designer, I encountered two more perpendicular dimensions that I could not see, one for electric force and one for magnetic. The electric dimension is well known to students of the LaPlace plane as the square root of minus one. The magnetic dimension is less well known but is describe in a monograph by Hunt titled “Electroacoustics.” It was some time later when I realized that these mathematical descriptions of electoral and magne5ic forces could be interpreted as dimensions. When I realized the analogy to time as a dimension, I guessed that there could be many more dimensions. I felt reassured when I encountered string theory which talked about 12 or even 28 dimensions.

It was a fairly simple step from the idea of multiple dimensions that I could not see to the idea that some of those dimensions could encompass a spiritual realm.

To say that I was excited by these insights is an understatement. Of course, I wanted to write a book.

Later on, I had a spiritual experience in which it was revealed to me that there were 27 dimensions in three groups.

To recapitulate, all dimensions are perpendicular to each other. For any two dimensions, in a right triangle, the sum of the squares of the two legs equals the square of the hypotenuse. Similar equations are true for additional dimensions. For example, in a room, the diagonal between opposite corners when squared is equal to the sum of the squares of each side of the room.

The Bible says that Heaven is on Earth. I say that the dimensions of the spiritual realm intersect with the dimensions that we see.

 

Spirituality

 

Spirituality is the essence of life.

Each of us is imbued (in a temporary prison) with a spirit from other dimensions in the universe.

Of all of my models of reality this one requires the most imagination. It relies substantially on the previous model of reality namely that the universe consists of 27 dimensions.

From my personal experience it is very difficult to be sure that an event is in fact spiritual. Furthermore there are relatively few of these events in my life. In my youth, these experiences were shut off to my by the scientific pragmatism in the culture of my father. For him, it was an absolute that there were no spirits, no ghosts, whatsoever. This absolute taboo, which I inherited, was finally broken after the death of my mother. A few months later, I heard her voice in my inner ear. It was unmistakable.

Soon after that, in my early 30’s I was embarking on what turned out to be a major business venture/experiment. During the year of 1969, I experienced virtually every day a miracle that forwarded the success of my business. After a few months of this I began to feel that this series of fortunate events could not be attributed solely to good luck.

At about the same time, perhaps in the following year, I was introduced to the remarkable book, “I Ching.” The I Ching includes its own model of reality which integrates the spiritual realm with the material. It also provides a method of communicating between them.

Decades later, I started working out that there are a multitude of dimensions that are invisible to our senses and therefore, there is a possibility for the physical existence of a spiritual realm.

Another decade, I spent a year doing weekly sessions with guided meditation during which I became intimate with my guardian angels and the spiritual realm. During meditation, I discovered a location at the back of my head where I could interact with my guardian angels, of which there were five. They were situated on a dividing membrane with the spiritual realm.  I found that it was possible to penetrate the membrane (which resembled a soap bubble) but I was reluctant to do so out of fear of not being able to get back. I noticed that there were conscious entities on the other side of the membrane, one of which (I call him “The Old Geezer”) insisted I move in with Dian, who has become my wife.

Since then I have been working on this book, which has been reformulated several times when I have been informed of new insights. Among them is the concept of evolutionary cultural streams and models of reality.

 

Culture

This is a summary of the model of reality that I have for culture.

When it comes to culture, I do not swim in it like a fish unaware of water, I dance with it as it transmits to me and I transmit to it.

In the context of nature versus nurture, my genetic makeup is like an egg which is then prepared by the chef of culture. Who I am is both – not partly one and partly the other. Nature and nurture are different dimensions not antagonists.

Culture is information that is transmitted from one mind to another.

There are two kinds of culture.

One kind is the kind I receive every day through the radio, the TV, the newspaper, books that I read.

The second kind of culture is when I transmit culture to others from my own experience.

This could really be something I learned from my mother and father or in school or it could be a new creation of mine a theory or teaching or a piece of music.

This is when cultural evolution occurs, that is, when limited elements of culture are selected to be passed on. This selection takes place both in the transmitter and the receiver. Both have to select the information that survives evolutionarily.

Culture evolves in two different ways. Since culture resides in human minds, if it helps humans survive then it gets retained.

Secondly, some culture is either so interesting or so entertaining that human minds want to preserve it.

However the capacity of the human mind to retain cultural information is limited. Therefore, selection takes place; hence: evolution.

 

Cultural streams occur when many related elements of culture are transmitted as a group. Examples of cultural streams, are languages, professions and political structures.

I grew up in a nearly 100% Roman Catholic neighborhood. Our family was conspicuous for never going to church. My father’s father was a devout Presbyterian and Sunday School teacher. My father was not at all conventionally religious or spiritual. Nevertheless, as I approached the age of 12, my father decided that his children were missing out on the culture of religion, so we started attending a Unitarian

Church. The culture of Christianity rained off me like water from a duck. Although I came to love the church and its people, the spiritual language in which its culture was transmitted struck me as superstitious nonsense.

After fifteen years of having been partly immersed in the culture of Christianity, about all I had to show for it was a wonderment that so many people believed in spirits.

On the other hand, my children had almost no experience of Christianity. I never thought it was a culture they needed.

Now, I teach them about 27 dimensions and how they include the spiritual realm, a model that is not all that much different from the Christian Heaven. Who knows whether these ideas will roll off them like rain from a duck?

 

Evolution (Darwinian)

I was very young when my father first explained to me that evolution applied to culture. This was important to him because he used evolution to explain religion as a secular phenomenon rather than a spiritual phenomenon.

I always think of evolution in the Darwinian sense, not in the metaphorical sense of gradual change. Evolution has three essential elements:

• The first element is the transmission of genetic information from one generation to the next so that it is closely duplicated;
• The second element is a mechanism to vary the transmitted information so that the duplication is not perfect;
• The third element is a condition of scarcity in the environment such that not all duplications are able to survive. This is more commonly known as the survival of the fittest.

Culture consists of information transmitted (incompletely) from one brain to another. The culture we swim in is the result of evolution.

As soon as humans developed culture, biological evolution ceased, because human parents and tribes tend to keep their young arrive through puberty. There is no non-survival of the genetically unfit.

Economics

Most of what I know about economics is from participation, observation and common sense. Also, I have read a lot of books and articles, most of which seems to be either nonsense or deliberately false.

In my model, prosperity is the result of productive work. Period.

Without productive work, there is no prosperity whatsoever. No amount of “demand” creation or “stimulus” can substitute for work.

I use the term “work” to distinguish it from the corrupt idea that all labor is equal in value. There is no difference in economics between grunt work and desk work. There is however great difference in the value of wealth produced. The work of a medical doctor is more valuable that that of a carpenter. In general, the value of work is proportional to the amount and quality of culture acquired by the worker, culture in the form of education, tools and environment.

A certain amount of prosperity is essential to biological survival. Without food and shelter, people die. Throughout most of history, the value of work, for most people, has hovered around the survival level. In rare cases, culture has flourished and the value of work has increased to the extent that excess prosperity has resulted in the accumulation of wealth.

A man works in order to provide food, shelter and leisure time. If he is productive and thrifty, he will accumulate wealth.

Once wealth has accumulated, it can be increased by mutual trade. Two agents do not mutually trade unless each expects a benefit. What is traded is the value of his work. The value of one’s work is thus increased by trade. In a sense, every trader is an entrepreneur. (Note that the impetus for trade is not created by demand but by the accumulation of wealth.)

Prosperity can be greatly increased by entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur is someone who conceives of and implements more productive methods in either work or trade.

A society where great wealth accumulates necessarily tolerates entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial activity and fosters freedom of choice in where and how work is done. It also protects the wealth of those who have rightfully acquired it.

Economics and culture are symbiotic: without economics, there is no culture and without culture there is no economics. Economics is about productivity and generating wealth.

There are, among others, two philosophical attitudes towards economics. One side thinks that prosperity is a good thing and to be encouraged. In opposition are those who think that prosperity is undesirable or that it should be shared equally. My economic model is about how prosperity is achieved and is silent on whether prosperity is desirable. On the other hand, my spiritual model (the theme of this book) holds that prosperity is desirable because it makes spiritual communication more available.

The twin engines of economic prosperity are work and trade. Without work there is nothing produced, nothing to trade. Trade is necessarily mutually beneficial. Otherwise, no one would trade.

The value of a person’s work is multiplied by various cultural factors, such as, education, tools or environment.

The key to increased prosperity is innovation. Innovation is what an entrepreneur does. It is his job to invent new tools or new ways of trading.

Enhancements in the value of trade come from entrepreneurs who see new opportunities in combining customers with services or products.

In our overall culture there is enormous misinformation about economics. I consider that almost everything I encounter in the media – books, newspaper, magazines, the internet, radio and television – is not true.

My explanation for this has two parts. On the one hand there are many honest, good-hearted well-wishers who would like to see all people benefit equally. These people are eager to believe fabulists who promise ways to make that possible.

On the other hand, people who are already wealthy beyond comprehension are jealous of their status and are happy to make it difficult for other people to become similarly wealthy. These people use the media, the universities and the government to provide misinformation that is attractive to the do-gooders and well-wishers.

What is true is that although equality is impossible, prosperity is easy. In general, people like to work and to create prosperity.

Entrepreneurs and innovators run up against the wall of government. Without governments provision of physical security, financial systems and legal justice, they cannot operate. Against the impediment of government’s taxation and regulation they are nearly immobilized.

The mechanisms that produce prosperity are fragile. They rely on culture:

• For creating the value of work;
• For providing an environment where people are safe to work and to trade;
• For providing a legal and judicial environment where agreements are enforced.

 

My Political Model of Reality

I guess, in order to provide context for the rest of the book, it is necessary to reveal my personal opinions about what it is good and bad in the world today.

 

This is more likely to turn into a political manifesto than a model of reality. A political organization, or a state, serves many purposes. In my opinion, the most important of these is to provide an environment for economic activity.

 

Personal safety

Contract adjudication

Stable currency

Freedom to work

Freedom to trade

Right to own property

I am not a fan of democracy. It seems that the majority will always vote to have rich people give them their money. Therefore, in order to have a stable government, political power must always be in the hands of the wealthy.

 

I have always thought that the U.S. Constitution shows the best way of doing that. Unfortunately, however, it has evolved away from its original intentions to the point where, now, the majority votes to have the wealthy give them their money.

 

Until today, I had been discouraged about the course of the American government. I now see the possibility that the apparent coup occurring here is by the wealthy to recover their control of the government.

 

 

The Grand Outline of Reality

The universe is closed and consists of 27 dimensions, grouped into three realms. Our material world is in one realm; the spirits inhabit the second realm. Perhaps the third realm is for god. If so, that gives us an analog to the Christian trinity: three entities unified into one.

From reading and from my own experience, I am convinced that there are many spirits, some of whom act as guardian angels, others who volunteer to give our physical forms an essence of spiritual life and others whose role is unclear to me.

It seems to me that the purpose in our lives and generations is intimately associated with the spiritual 1

In the long run, I expect the material and spiritual to be integrated.

This can only happen after some further evolution of our minds and of our culture. Among other things our time must be freed from the struggle to survive. The misinformation about economics corrected and our aversion to wealth and leisure time removed.

In the meantime, we can enhance our own lives by seeking and being open to spiritual guidance

Interacting with the Spiritual Realm

 

Introduction

I like the model of reality provided by Dzogchen, a branch of Buddhism. However, like most spiritual models, the purpose of Dzogchen is to achieve enlightenment and to provide guidance in the difficult passage to reincarnation. I think that is a half-way point.

For me, the goal of spiritual interaction is collaboration. It seems to me that the physical laws of motion and energy do not apply to the spiritual realm. Yet, the actions that we humans are able to achieve are sometimes valuable to the agendas of the spirits. My intention in spiritual interaction is to carry out the spiritual agenda. My spiritual guidance is to write this book.

Cast of Characters

 

In sessions of guided meditation with Mike Elkin I discovered a circle of five Guardian Angels at the boundary with the spiritual realm. A few times, I experimented with passing through that boundary and discovered more spirits on the other side. It seemed to be a vast empty space with a bright light at the center. Around the spherical periphery were many windows similar to the one I had transited. At each window on the spiritual side was a replica of what I called “The Old Geezer,” each one looking through the window at the person on the other side.

Another time, when I was trying to pursue the reason why my eyes continually close involuntarily, I followed a red laser-like fishing line into the far reaches of the spiritual side and discovered a wraithlike entity whom I came to know as Hilda. She resembled an illustration in one of my Dzogchen books.

Most of my interactions have been with the head person of guardian angel council, whom I call Serena. It was Serna long ago who got me to give up coffee altogether and to quit alcohol for a year. It was the Old Geezer who instructed me to move in with my now wife, Dian.

 

Technique

 

Since the Spiritual Realm cannot be perceived with our normal five senses, it is important to shut them off, along with any psychological anxiety or intention. Deep breathing, relaxing muscles and closing my eyes help achieve this state. Physical comfort and leisure time are also helpful.

Once I get into the meditative state, I direct my consciousness to the back of my mind where I find my Council of Guardian Angels (along with a bunch of  avatars for various mental functions.)

This is also where I find the boundary with the spiritual realm.

 

Communicating

 

Human hearing doesn’t work so any conversation has to be telepathic. When a spirit has something important to tell me, all I need to do is to keep my mind open. I don’t even need the meditative state.

Another technique is to pose leading questions and then to keep my mind open to an inaudible answer.

Reincarnation

 

Reincarnation has never made sense to me as a logical proposition, and I have never understood why it is such a big deal in eastern religions. This morning (Sept 2015) my wife, Dian, asked me why.

My off-the-cuff answer was that the eastern religions never considered that the universe consists of 27 dimensions. Part of that concept is that time is a dimension and therefore does not pass. Our minds have invented the illusion of the passage of time because, otherwise, experience would be beyond our comprehension. Our brains do not have enough memory to comprehend more than one moment at once.

When one experiences Satori, or oneness with God, the mind has a similar problem. There is just too much to experience and the reality of 27 dimensions, and the fact that time is a dimension is just overlooked. In such a universe, the ideas of reincarnation are irrelevant.

This is especially so in light of my opinion that the Spiritual realm has its own dimension of time, which would be, of course, perpendicular to ours.

Therefore a spirit considering a human in whom to incarnate would have the whole of human history to consider. Such a spirit could choose first someone from our future, and, after that, someone from our past. Such a sequence would be impossible in the popular view of reincarnation which assumes the conventional view of time.