THE AETHER TRANSCRIPT

Light & Darkness

This work is the transcript of an original audio recording
produced by M I Finesilver and published
simultaneously by Pathway (Initiatives) Ltd.

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http://aetheraware.org/main.php

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The following excerpts are from pages  92-107 of the Aether Transcript concerning principles of the Aether, wholism, and polarity.

(Italicized text is narration)

NT: We never see light. We only see things with light.

ENGINEER’S ASSUMPTION – The one word, light, has several meanings, about which we need to be clear. For all is not as it seems regarding light and its polar opposite, darkness.

It’s the selfless invisible agent always there. You see it doesn’t intrude upon you. It doesn’t make itself felt; it makes the objects around you felt instead.

KEY QUESTION – How can we scientifically reach a fuller understanding and appreciation of this multi-levelled phenomenon we call light and its relationship to what we call dark or darkness?

OVERVIEW

Modern Quantum Physics has, in a back-to-front way, arrived at an ancient way of understanding light. The ancient way says that at an early, pre-physical stage of the cosmos, there emanated from the oneness a universal, primeval and timeless Radiant Light, also long known in the West as the Aether. It’s invisible to our physical eyes and is thus perceived as darkness.

Arthur Zajonc, Professor of Physics at Amherst College, Massachusetts, and author of the much acclaimed book, Catching The Light, describes in it a very simple demonstration of the principle:

AZ: As part of what I call Project Eureka, a friend and I have designed and constructed a science exhibit in which one views a region of space filled with light. It is a simple but startling demonstration that uses only a carefully fabricated box and a powerful projector whose light shines directly into it. We have taken special care to ensure that light does not illuminate any interior objects or surfaces in the box. Within the box there is only pure light and lots of it. The question is, What does one see? How does light look when left entirely to itself?

Approaching the exhibit, I turn on the projector, whose bulb and lenses can be seen through a plexiglass panel. The projector sends a brilliant light, through optical elements, into the box beside it. Moving over to a viewport, I look into the box and at the light within. What do I see? Absolute darkness. I see nothing but the blackness of empty space.

On the outside of the box is a handle connected to a wand that can move into and out of the box’s interior. Pulling the handle, the wand flashes through the dark space before me and I see the wand brilliantly lit on one side. The space is clearly not empty but filled with light. Yet, without an object on which the light can fall, one sees only darkness. Light is always invisible. We see only things, only objects. Not light.

The exhibit reminds me of a conversation I had over dinner with the Apollo astronaut, Rusty Schweikhart. I asked him about his space walk, specifically about what he saw when looking out into the sunlit emptiness of outer space. He replied that although it was difficult to keep the brightly lit spacecraft and other hardware out of view, if you could do so, then you saw only the dark depths of deep space studded with the light of countless stars. The Sun’s light, although present everywhere, fell on nothing, and so nothing was seen, only darkness.

Regarding light and Aether, Professor Zajonc has also said:
“The figure of sound is borne by the air. What bears the fleeting figure we call light? One thing has become certain, whatever it is, it is not material.”

That non-material ‘something’ has been the subject of much speculation. And the current idea in physics of a universally present, so-called ‘dark energy’ – which implies that it’s invisible – indicates a rather desperate groping for something very much like the non-material Aether.

We can now clearly distinguish two kinds of light:  First, there’s the primary, invisible, pure, aethereal, cosmic light.

And then there’s the secondary kind of light, physical light – visible because it’s Light Aether interacting with matter – whether gas, liquid or solid. And this gives us the familiar colour range of the electro-magnetic spectrum. Light, as the colour spectrum, visible to our physical eyes,
was the subject of much disagreement back in Newton’s time. And his theory is still the one favoured by the science orthodoxy.

But a very different theory of light, proposed by the German poet, playwright and scientist Goethe, makes far more practical sense from an engineer’s perspective.

NT: Goethe studied actual colour and that’s why very few scientists take Goethe seriously, or at least until recently – they’ve started to again more now. But Goethe was never taken all that seriously because he studied colour rather than a theory about colour. And so he studied the red end of the spectrum and the blue end of the spectrum and these phenomena and what happens when light and darkness come into relationship with one another.

His theory was that you have darkness and light and when the two interact with one another in a real way you get polarity. You take a prism, and what a prism does according to Goethe is to make dark and light interact with one another and then you get the glorious colours that you get in a prism.

AZ: Let me give you a simple example drawn from Goethe’s own work in colour theory: We stand in an open field, we look out into the blue of the sky and we can ask the question which every child asks: Why is the sky blue?

And the answer which conventional physics will give you will be in terms of Rayleigh scattering. Or if it’s a little more elaborate, in terms of what’s called mie scattering. And there’ll be the polarisability of small aerosols under the impress of electromagnetic fields. The differential cross section goes, like,the fourth power of the frequency, which means that high frequencies are scattered first. High frequencies correspond toblue and therefore the sky is blue. (Audience laughter) And it’s true. It’s not a lie. But it’s a kind of account. Can you feel the kind of account that it is?

It is in terms of a model. It is terms of the sign and word that Goethe was talking about. It’s very powerful. It’s very attractive. At least to me. But it’s also a danger. A danger where we explain everything, including ourselves, our illnesses, our sufferings, all those perennial questions. We can’t really account for them in terms of those signs and words.

And there’s another way of seeing. And this way of seeing actually requires a certain transformation of the person in order to achieve. But nonetheless you can get a glimmer of it by standing in that same field and as opposed to seeing small aerosols you see the air itself has a quality to it. And that quality is, you could say, ambiguous. It can act either, you might say, as an agency of light or as an agency of darkness, depending on the circumstance. Imagine the sun over to the side filling the air above us with its glory, with its light…

And then we look through that medium of the atmosphere. We look through it into the depths of space. We know that if that air was absent, like it is on the Moon, we would see a black star-strewn heaven. Air carrying, you could say, the luminosity of the sunlight – we look through it and instead of looking through it into blackness we have the experience of blue. No location to that blue, just blueness throughout.

In other words there is a relationship between the darkness of space, the light of the sun and this medium of the air. And as long as that perceived relationship is present you actually have the conditions, you could say the organic conditions, in which blue will arise. And wherever you stand and wherever those conditions arise you see the congruence, the coherence in Nature which produces, you could say, or allows to arise, the experience of blue.

Another thing which is present, and which to me is very important, is that experience of blue is a felt experience.

When you laughed that sort of giddy little laugh about the fourth power of the differential cross section with the fourth power of the frequency, there’s this sense of wonder and also estrangement. Right? You don’t feel that differential cross section. It takes some work to get to feel differential cross sections. (laughter) But as you stand between darkness and light in this great medium of the atmosphere there’ssomething which you have as you triangulate and you put yourself into that place of experience. And then the blue is not only an abstract production but actually a lived experience. 

We can envisage Professor Zajonc standing in his field, right at the threshold of the physical and the aethereal. From there he is able to  appreciate the truth and beauty of both views – in that complete, wholistic picture he sketches.

We’ll briefly refer now to three of Western science’s attempts to understand the nature of light, each of which seems fundamentally flawed on closer inspection.

And we’ll remember that this kind of science treats all light as if it’s physical – when it clearly isn’t.

NT: First, Newton’s Theory of Coloured Light.

Newton passed a beam of light through a prism and obtained a spectrum as a result and made the assumption that light then contains those colours, and that the prism, as it were, analyses or splits the light up.

But this approach lacks the real balance, the sense of polarity, which after all Newton did apply in some other areas of his work. And the result is a limited, and inadequate, account. For instance, Goethe pointed out that if you look through a prism, simply at a white wall or something, you don’t get any colours at all. You only get colours as soon as there’s an edge. And then one becomes aware of this role of polarity.

Professor Arthur Zajonc recalls in his book a re-run of a historic mid-20th century validation of Goethe’s theory of light over Newton’s – by none other than the inventor of the Polaroid camera:

AZ: In November of 1957, Edwin Land, the inventor of instant photography, lectured on colour, with demonstrations, to the National Academy of Sciences and to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. His presentations, widely reported in the press, had startled the scientific community. In them, Land challenged the very foundations of contemporary colour theory. Six months later, Land lectured to the Royal Photographic Society in London. Land’s demonstrations were truly astonishing. Nothing I had learned at the university could
explain what I was seeing. 

The standard basis for understanding colour had been laid down by Newton. With the subsequent advent of the Wave Theory of light the connection between colour and wavelength then became commonplace. Together these formed the orthodox framework for the understanding of colour. Land’s experiments seemed to challenge the scientific notions of colour with a greater force than any previous experiments.

Newton had shown that if one extracted, say, yellow light from the spectrum produced by a prism and mixed it with orange light similarly produced, then a colour intermediate between the two, a yellow-orange, appeared. Its particular hue depended upon which colour dominated the mixture – orange or yellow.

Land performed the same experiment, but with a single important modification: he projected yellow and orange light beams through black and white photographic transparencies. The transparencies depicted an identical still life scene, but photographed through different coloured filters. With only the yellow image projected, one saw a purely monochrome yellow still life on the screen. None of the original colours of the scene were present. Only shades of yellow. The same was true when the second image alone was projected through the orange filter. The still life was entirely in shades of orange.

With Newton in mind, what would you expect to see if both images were projected on top of one another? Hues somewhere between yellow and orange, as before – that is what I expected. And most of the members of the National Academy of Sciences expected the same. However, you do not see yellow-oranges. Far from it. Re-enacting Land’s demonstrations I saw what happened to be a full range of colours, including reds, blues and greens. But these were colours I knew simply could not be there.

My eyes told one story. My training as a physicist told another. What was going on? 

One answer, from this engineer’s perspective, would be that Newton’s theory of light is seriously flawed. Goethe’s more wholistic and polarity-based theory, however, can help explain the apparent mystery.

And it’s perhaps worth noting again that Edwin Land’s invention is called the polaroid camera.

NT: The second flawed idea of Western science regarding light is the supposition that light has a constant velocity or speed.

Now according to ordinary physics, light travels through space with a definite velocity. This goes back some hundreds of years to the work of Romer who observed the moons of Jupiter appearing apparently late. And he explained that with the idea that light has a velocity. However, when one looks more closely at light and the way it behaves, it should be observed that all our physical measurements are measurements of what happens in the apparatus at the moment of absorbtion of light.

One cannot do any experiments on light without absorbing it into physical substance. And the assumption is then made that what happens at that moment of interaction between the light and the apparatus is happening all the way out.

For instance, it’s imagined that because, at the last minute, as the light is absorbed into the apparatus, a wavelike nature can be discerned and a velocity apparently determined, the assumption is that it’s a wave with a velocity all through the whole universe. That is only an assumption.

And with our Aether concept we come to realise that what is thought of as the velocity of light is nothing of the sort. It’s actually a constant of a different kind. 

Pure light itself, being Aether, is universally present and therefore does not ‘travel’, and consequently does not have a velocity as such. The exception would be in the very limited case of the front of a beam or cone of physical light instantly filling a space. And its speed would depend on the density of the medium in that space.

This process can be loosely compared with the way air instantly fills a vacuum and is thereafter simply present in that space.

So, given that there is no universally constant velocity of light, questions inevitably arise concerning Einstein’s famous E = mc². For we’re left with cextrapolate back out as a meaningless symbol, representing the non-existent velocity of light multiplied by itself, and serving only as the required constant in the equation.

The c2 is inaccurate in that what it represents is not a universal constant, however precise the measurements involved.

EB: You can have something that’s very precise that’s totally fallacious. And people confuse quantitative precision with qualitative accuracy. You can have the graph to twenty-one decimal points but if your assumptions are wrong… and this is the whole point about a lot of science – far too much emphasis is put on logic and far to o little emphasis is put on the underlying assumptions. 

You can build an Eiffel Tower of logic on very shaky sands. And the logic and the superstructure can be impregnable but it will topple over if your fundamental assumptions are shaky.

However, and for whatever reasons, once adopted by the Western science establishment, E = mc2 soon became a central dogma of twentieth century physics. But to an openminded engineer it looks like a perfect example of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Alternatively, if the constant in the equation were, instead, the ever-present, all-pervading Aether, it would all be logically and scientifically consistent.

Nick Thomas has re-presented the c part of the equation, in mathematical terms, as a scaling constant representing the relationship between the realms or spaces of the aethereal and the physical.

Given the worlwide iconic status that Einstein’s equation has acquired some further explanation is required. However, such an explanation would not be appropriate to this Report but can be found elsewhere, in the project.

EB: Modern science has done Einstein a great disservice, for a start, in turning ‘the speed of light is constant’ almost into a religious cult. This is nonsense. The speed of light is not constant. There is a lot of evidence, experimental evidence, to show it is not constant. It was made constant in order to make the results of Michelson-Morley fit Relativity.

And among the many serious implications arising from this fallacy are questions about the currently supposed size and age of the universe.

NT: As far as the size of the universe is concerned, here I need to touch upon the completely different concept of light that I’m working with: light doesn’t travel.

It is a misconception of physics that light travels. It doesn’t travel at all. And so we judge the size of the universe on the assumption that light travels at a certain velocity. If that assumption is wrong, as I believe it is – and I know that’s total heresy but I’ve written a book where I justify it – if that heresy is correct, if light does not travel, then it means the judgements we’re making about the size of the universe must
be wrong because they’re based upon that assumption.

What the size of the universe actually is, of course, remains a question. It could be very small. It could be much smaller than we think. Because it’s quite possible that the light is coming into us… as the light, in its aetheric form, interacts with our apparatus, with our eyes, momentarily, in that moment of interaction – it’s only very very short – then a wave arises and then we make all our calculations based on that wave. And we think it’s come all the way as a wave. But actually it’s a wave only at the very last minute. But we extrapolate back out. But it could have become a wave…it could have originated in something that’s not very far away.

So, for me, the size of the universe is a totally open question. But I don’t swallow the current figures in physics and astrophysics because, from a common sense point of view they’re ludicrous.

I mean, stepping back a minute – you talk about the density of a neutron star, or the density of a Black Hole, you talk about the impossible processes that are supposed to take place in them – time having a different scale from what we know, an ‘infinite singularity’ that nobody’s ever been able to explain … And in fact, there was an article not so long ago. in a scientific magazine, where actually the astronomers and cosmologists have come clean and said that the whole theory of Black Holes is creaking at the seams. (It always has but they’ve only just admitted it) And why? I think the reason is because we’ve made these assumptions based upon the velocity of light being just that. We think light travels. If it doesn’t then the whole thing is up for re-interpretation.

Of course for the age of the universe – how this affects our thinking about the age of the universe is equally profound because we judge the age based on the velocity of light again. We think it’s travelled from such a huge distance, therefore it’s been travelling for a huge amount of time. And of course that is also then an assumption which has to be questioned. 

The rhythmic pulsating of the Aether behind the physical is a clue to understanding how Western science came to the idea of light travelling in waves – as opposed to the idea of light being composed of particles.

NT: The third flawed idea of Western science regarding light is the wave or particle paradox.

Quantum Physics regards the smallest amount of light that you can have as something called a photon. And a photon is imagined, in the first instance, to be something like some sort of little particle. Then experiments show that light also has a wave-like quality, apparently.

And so it becomes a little bit difficult to think about this photon in any clear way. Sometimes experiments give results as if light consisted of particles and other times experiments give results as if light was a wave – like a wave on water, with interference effects and those kinds of things. So, the question which has dogged science for the best part of a century or more now is this question: Is the photon a wave or a particle?

Now, in Quantum Mechanics such questions have no answer. Quantum Mechanics does not try to give any kind of factual answer of that nature. It’s simply says that there are certain probabilities.

You don’t need an in-depth knowledge of Physics to recognise this kind of practice – that is, experts using jargon to cover up their own failings.

NT: And so there they were wrestling with these things and a man called Schroedinger came up with something known as his wave equation. And he thought that matter was made of waves. It seemed to be quite a good idea at the time because there’s always been this problem: Is it made of waves? Is it made of particles? Maybe it’s one, maybe it’s the other…. which has gone on since Newton….. Sometimes one, sometimes the other. We think. (I’ve got other ideas, but …) 

Anyway, Schroedinger thought that, Yes, electrons for instance, can act as waves. And he very brilliantly developed wave mechanics and thought these waves were real waves of something. And then gradually, as the experiments got cleverer and cleverer and weirder and weirder, the idea that they’re waves of anything disappeared. They couldn’t be waves of anything for various technical reasons. So what were they waves of?

They were giving exquisite predictions of the outcomes of the experiments. And so in the end a man called Max Born reinterpreted those waves and said they are underlying the sort of statistical basis of the system. Those waves – you have to do a certain clever calculation of the waves and then you can calculate the probability of the particle that will pop up here … or somewhere.

But to a practical engineer this is no more than an attempt to conceal an embarrassing gap in the theory with some abstract mathematics.

Now with the work I’ve been doing, I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re really dealing with something Aetheric here. Waves but on completely another level. They are waves.

They’re genuine waves. Not physical waves. So of course they can’t be found physically.

The N C Thomas version says that pure, invisible light itself is aethereal and consists of neither particles nor waves. This version of photons agrees with the ancient idea of a universal polarity between the whole of cosmic space and any particular point.

NT: I think light is Aetheric in nature, by which I mean that light always bears a wholistic relationship to all its surroundings, rather than consisting of little rays or particles shooting out from a source, and is capable of relating at any moment any one specific location in the cosmos to any other specific location.

If you imagine a star, supposedly billions of miles away, emitting a lot of photons: it always amazes me that we can see that star. Isn’t it rather lucky that enough photons happen, after coming through billions of miles, happen to exist in that minute solid angle in which the Earth exists as seen by that star?

I would have thought most of them would miss us and we’d get a flash of a photon from the star once every hundred years. Not at all. We see the thing the whole time continuously. And when you reflect on that you realise that there is some wholistic relationship between the star and us, mediated by its photons. The photons aren’t particles. They can’t be. We’d never see the distant stars.

Anyway, I could go on and on for ever, but perhaps that’s enough for the moment.

THE ENGINEER’S 3 TESTS
– regarding Western science and its approach to Light and Dark

TEST 1: SOUND PRINCIPLES?

From what we’ve just been hearing, Western science is seriously lacking in sound principles regarding the essential nature of light and darkness.

NT: People try to identify colour with a wavelength of light or something. Well that’s, of course, a confusion of categories. I’ve never quite understood how anybody can think that. It’s just a simple confusion. What I experience as a colour is entirely different from what I might describe with maths as a wavelength. These two are different: one is a number, the other is the experience of a colour – a primary and a secondary quality. You can’t just confuse them like that. It’s nonsense.

TEST 2: ELEGANT DESIGN?

What we find in Western science are inconsistent and therefore inelegant theories concerning light. For ignoring observable evidence is always a sign of bad scientific practice, and for an engineer this would amount to professional irresponsibility.

TEST 3: EFFICIENT OPERATION?

When there are still so many unresolved paradoxes after so many years, Western science’s approach evidently doesn’t amount to an efficient operation.

Yet simply taking on board how light is both an aspect of the invisible Aether and how it also appears as colour, when combined with matter, could re-inspire and re-invigorate the whole of Western science.

With the overview we’ve gained here, many poetic and mystical sounding descriptions, ancient and modern, spiritual and otherwise, can be understood in a more direct and practical way – as expressions of humanity finding its place in the polarity of the cosmos.

For example, in the many references to the light and dark aspects of our world or to transcendental experiences. We already have the notion clearly expressed in the idea of ‘enlightenment’. We start out ‘in the dark’ regarding some particular aspect of the world in our consciousness. Then instantaneously, it seems, faster than any other event we can imagine, ‘the light dawns on us’, and ‘in a flash’ we realize that our consciousness and world is now ‘illuminated’, ‘lit up’ in a way that it wasn’t before that moment. We are immersed, bathed in or filled with that light which is simply present in its dynamic, living way. We experience being in an ‘enlightened’ state, which does not mean we are being bombarded with waves or particles of anything coming from anywhere else.

Spiritual enlightenment would seem to mean an intuitive realizing of the unity of the cosmos, including our part in it at all levels of our being. This is a knowing beyond religious belief and beyond scientific proof.

The polar opposite of enlightenment would be what we might call ‘endarkenment’ – both individual and collective – an unavoidable fact of our incarnation in bodies of dense earthly matter, but also perhaps a result of our being kept ‘in the dark’ for whatever reasons.

And in this respect, as we realise how closely the Aether is identified with light, the expression “The brighter the light, the darker the shadows” takes on increasing significance.

From the polarity of light and darkness, we next consider an equally fundamental pair of cosmic polar opposites, Levity and Gravity.

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Download the Goethean Colour Theory Collection HERE