God is Love

God is love, and
he who abides in love abides in God,
and God in him.
(1 John 4:16)

Listen! Love Never Fails

My favorite Christian worship song and band!

Your Love Never Fails, by Jesus Culture

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoezWBPGRAc

The title of this song is based on the following verses from the Bible:

1 Corinthians 13 (New International Version)

Love

 ¹If I speak in the tongues^[a] of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. ²If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. ³If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames,^[b] but have not love, I gain nothing.

 ⁴Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.⁵It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

 ⁸Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.⁹For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. ¹¹When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. ¹²Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

 ¹³And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Law of Conservation of Energy -- and Transformation

The Law of Conservation of Energy (First Law of Thermodynamics) states that 
        energy cannot be created or destroyed,
        only transformed.


Thoughts possess energy, so I wondered what happens to thoughts?  And then I wondered about the soul.  After this law became widely accepted, how did religious leaders respond?   


I found two religious responses:
1) The Catholic Encyclopedia has a section on the Conservation of energy and the human soul, which I am still striving to understand.
2) A page from a site about Buddhism has the following:

Karma

Karma is a Sanskrit word from the root "Kri" to do or to make and simply means "action." It operates in the universe as the continuous chain reaction of cause and effect. It is not only confined to causation in the physical sense but also it has moral implications. "A good cause, a good effect; a bad cause a bad effect" is a common saying. In this sense karma is a moral law.

Now human beings are constantly giving off physical and spiritual forces in all directions. In physics we learn that no energy is ever lost; only that it changes form. This is the common law of conservation of energy [emphasis added]. Similarly, spiritual and mental action is never lost. It is transformed. Thus Karma is the law of the conservation of moral energy.

By actions, thoughts, and words, man is releasing spiritual energy to the universe and he is in turn affected by influences coming in his direction. Man is therefore the sender and receiver of all these influences. The entire circumstances surrounding him is his karma.

With each action-influence he sends out and at the same time, receives, he is changing. This changing personality and the world he lives in, constitute the totality of his karma.

Karma should not be confused with fate. Fate is the notion that man's life is preplanned for him by some external power, and he has no control over his destiny. Karma on the other hand, can be changed. Because man is a conscious being he can be aware of his karma and thus strive to change the course of events. In the Dhammapada we find the following words, "All that we are is a result of what we have thought, it is founded on our thoughts and made up of our thoughts."

What we are, then, is entirely dependent on what we think [emphasis added].  Therefore, the nobility of man's character is dependent on his"good" thoughts, actions, and words. At the same time, if he embraces degrading thoughts, those thoughts invariably influence him into negative words and actions. 

          Source: http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/reincarnation.htm

Sounds of Auroras and Astral Phenomena

Annotated links to videos and sounds from auroras, 
planetary magnetospheres, and the sun.


Listening to the Northern Lights
(A Minnesota Planetarium Video: Natural Radio)
When solar flares hit the Earth's magnetic field, they create auroras, and the auroras emit low frequency electromagnetic waves, a type of natural radio that can be picked up around the globe.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHvdZdsIZxg

Auroral Radio Emissions (Auroral Kilometric Radiation)
This page has the sounds of auroral radio emissions,
and an animation of how they look.
http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/space-audio/sounds/EarthAKR/earthakr.html

Selected Sounds of Space

from Professor Don Gurnett, NASA / University of Iowa

http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/space-audio/sounds/

     My favorite sound is Earth Chorus, a recording of chorus waves in Earth's magnetosphere.  The chorus waves sound like chirping birds in a tropical rain forest!

Jupiter Sounds (So Strange!) NASA-Voyager Recording

The complex interactions of charged electromagnetic particles from solar wind and Jupiter's planetary magnetosphere create vibrating soundscapes.  Like Earth, Jupiter has auroras -- but Jupiter's auroras are bigger than our entire planet!  (See NASA Science | Science News, "Big Auroras on Jupiter," March 29, 2007).  The sounds of Jupiter can be eerie or mystical or relaxing, depending on your mood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3fqE01YYWs

NASA's Sounds of the Sun
This video is from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).

NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) recorded the sounds of the sun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWCJkG31h0c

The Persistence of Sound, by Charles Harper Webb

A word is dead / When it is said, / Some say.

Sounds never die, some scientists say.
They fade from hearing, but keep rolling up
and down -- smaller and smaller waves -- forever.
Churchill orating, "We will never surrender,"
Nixon whining, "I am not a crook,"
Caruso singing Vesti la giubba,
Savanarola screaming "I want a hat
of blood!" -- the right machine might amplify
the air-squiggles their voices made,
pluck them like worms from a wriggling pot.

I'd love to hear my dad ask Mom to marry him.
What did they sound like, conceiving me?
(Dad yelled, Mom whimpered, is my guess;
I'd love to be surprised.) I'd love to hear
Demosthenes's Greek, and the first Indo-European,
and what those Caucasians spoke
who left their perfect mummies in Xianping.
Anthropologists could hear the first human
step onto North America and know,
by plotting sound-decay, exactly when.

The air could prove a treasure trove dwarfing
Pompeii (Vesuvius still thundering;
Romans shrieking, buried alive.) Still, I hope
some sounds didn't survive: You poison me!
I picture Kevin when I come with you!
Maybe sound slops up and down just briefly,
then is cancelled out.  Otherwise,
someday we'll buy tapes of Jurassic birds,
of trees toppling in forests with no one to hear,
the crash retained in air the way a gold
bracelet torn by a Viking off an Irish
arm and melted down, retains traces
of serpent form, and the soft freckled skin
that warmed it, that the girl passed down to me --
the way a pterosaur's atoms (returned
to earth, re-used over and over) retain
in their vibrations every fish it ate, the squawks
it made feeding its young, the splash
when its heart -- so like mine -- stopped
and dropped into the undulating sea.

(Source: Verse & Universe: Poems about Science and Mathematics, Edited by Kurt Brown, 1998)

Good Vibrations: The Healing Power of Sounds & Music

"Practice creative listening.  Get quiet so that insights can come through your mind." -  from the entry for September 22 in Positive Thinking Every Day, by Norman Vincent Peale

The book The Mozart Effect by Don Campbell (1997) explains how sounds and music can help heal people, and even accelerate learning and creativity.

[This post is incomplete, as of 11:30pm, PST, Sept. 22, 2010]

Sound Creates Form (Let there be sound!)

In the beginning, God said, "Let there be light."  But before there was light, there was sound -- because God spoke.

Let there be sound!

In my last post, I discussed the power of positive thoughts.
Now, I am researching sound waves (words and music).

Here are some links:

Seeing Sound Waves

[Caution: Do not listen to this with earphones]

This video shows the geometric forms created by increasing sound frequencies, or sound waves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9GBf8y0lY0

Water, Consciousness & Intent: Dr. Masaru Emoto
Dr. Emoto has shown that water is affected by sound vibrations and thoughts.  This video includes a lengthy explanation of Dr. Emoto's research.  [The book The Secret Life of Plants has scientific evidence that plants are also affected by sound vibrations.]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAvzsjcBtx8

NASA Sound of the Sun Exposed to Water (Experiment by David Sereda and Saida Medvedeva)

This experiment builds upon work done by Dr. Masaru Emoto.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0aLUJscQnM

Sound Vibration Creates Form (David Icke)
Mr. Icke talks about sounds at the molecular level (how they affect our health), as well as the cosmic level.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCmGjD9j9bU

[This post is not complete, as of 10pm PST, September 24, 2010.  More will be added later....]