I’ll have to go with the closer source which is his family.

[there is clearly something missing which leads them all astray, but their great minds seem unable to acknowledge this. This is very frustrating to me. More frustrating still is sometimes I feel that I can almost see what is wrong...]

This is a normal feeling, this, what they try to capture, is only an aspect of reality, and it is always receding, moving away. The Divine Law is based on progression; it exists by movement and would be dissolved by cessation of it. This creates the opposites of unity and multiplicity, cleavages of time and space, different circumstances and causality.

The Isha Upanishad, verse 5, states:

“That moves and That moves not; That is far and the same is near; That is within all this and That also is outside all this.”

They see the many without seeing the One. The Unified Field Theory would be the comprehension that every object in the universe is its front, verily the whole universe, a holographic universe. Creation is not the making of a universe out of nothing; but a self-projection of Brahman into the conditions of space and time.

Whitman was most certainly a profound thinker.

“I had never heard a serious theory that Ney was trying to kill himself, only that someone on the battlefield had said something to that effect upon observing his behavior”

This was Victor Hugo’s idea in Les Miserables, as Ney had 3 horses shot under him and was apparently courting death. He was executed for his big mouth, promising to bring Napoleon “in an iron cage”.

[And indeed everything that exists IS perceived – by God.]

There also exist the ability for humans to increase their perception to include the Cosmos, which some call Cosmic Consciousness. A certain Dr. Bucke wrote in 1900 that Walt Whitman had that quality. Whitman was certainly one of a kind.

I don’t say that Newton or Descartes were wrong. You can apply them to most things nowadays still, but it is a fact that relativity shattered the Euclidean, Cartesian, and Newtonian systems, incorporating time to space in a continuum, so, since then the famous fact that the shortest distance between 2 points is a curved line became reality. This independently from the possibility of a Unified Field theory.

Descartes’ famous theorem does not say that nothing could be without thinking, only that the fact that he was thinking proved that he existed. One would have to come up with another proof to show that something that was not thinking did exist – and he did this, too, quite well.

Again, I disagree with the way Berkeley approaches being and perception, but it now brings to my mind the creationist argument that if there is a creation there must be a Creator. And indeed everything that exists IS perceived – by God.

Newton was not wrong (nor Descartes) and this is easily provable by any experiment that you want to conduct here on earth. I don’t think Einstein disproved him, I think he discovered something important that is not fully understood yet, and this is why quantum mechanics has come up with all kinds of wild theories that contradict Newton – and each other. In the end I think the answer is as Einstein envisioned a Unified theory that explains everything without contradictions, and quite simply, too, so that we will say, “How could we have missed it for so long!” It would be as if we went back in time to show the ancients that the earth moves and circles the Sun: the evidence would redden their faces – and yet it had escaped them.

On Napoleon: I believe Victor Hugo’s thesis, that the Almighty Himself told Napoleon: Enough! So, like you say, everything went wrong for him. But indeed the rain was the key, for he always started positioning his artillery early in the morning, and in Waterloo towards noon, and if he would have done that, the appearance of von Blucher later in the afternoon around 6 PM would have had no effect, as the battle would have been over by then. On Blucher, it was the mediocrity of Grouchy that allowed Blucher to faint him and return to Waterloo, and for that Grouchy has been skinned alive in history books. The cavalry commander you mentioned was red-haired Marechal Ney, a while back he had promised the king to bring Napoleon in an iron cage, but succumbed to Napoleon’s charm, according to Victor Hugo, he was trying to commit suicide on the battlefield, when he realized things were nor going well (he was shot by the king later for treason). Finally, failure to scout that trench in front of the British was not a show stopper, but another show delayer. The Irish Opportunist (Lord Wellington) had chosen this battlefield years ago.

According to the Bhagavad Gita definition of a Vibhuti, Napoleon, like Caesar, was a Vibhuti. Krishna in the Gita defines an Avatar as a direct incarnation of God that occurs only when things are going in the wrong direction. A Vibhuti, on the contrary, comes to set a course in a given theater, is often an atheist, like Caesar and Napoleon, is also often not even aware of the great picture, but it is usually imbued with tremendous will and charisma. Another recent important Vibhuti was Churchill (he was no atheist though).

Descartes, and Newton, were partially correct, as they described well a portion of reality. That science has gone around them “schwerkpunt” style is not their fault. However, “cogito ergo sum” is flawed, for you can definitely “be” without thinking. This is a fact that escaped Descartes, however brilliant he was.

A question: can the electron exist without being perceived? According to Bishop Berkeley it could not, for he said “Esse est percipi” (”To be is to be perceived”), this is a cryptic statement well ahead of his time. According to Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the electron position and momentum is only a statistical probability that coincides with the exclusion principle of Pauli where an electron, for example, behaves either as a wave or as a particle, but not both. Actually, the electron behaves as “he is asked to”. If you ask from a particle point of view, that he answers; if you ask as a wave, he answers like that too. However, the famous paradigm, take 2 electrons way apart, so far apart as, let’s say five minutes-light, as one turns his spin up, the other answers down. Even Einstein could not divest himself from the Cartesian scenario on this one (after shattering Cartesian and Newtonian physics with relativity), for Einstein thought the information would travel at, at least, the speed of light, but THOUGHT is instantaneous, consciousness is instantaneous, and the 2 electrons were never, really, apart. Likewise, the perceiver of the electron is never, really, outside the electron, and vice versa, so it proves the fact that to exist you must be perceived. So, the Pindanda is the Brahmanda, and every part of the universe is also its front, and contains it, nothing is unrelated, everything within the Matrix.

I disagree that Descartes’ theorem is incorrect: it simply states the obvious truth that if something (himself) is thinking then therefore that something (himself) must exist; and it is self-evident that he is thinking, otherwise the question could not be asked – but it was. I agree that Berkeley was quite brilliant and has much to teach us with the inverse. The inverse does not disprove the obverse, however, but rather is its reflection; not its opposite but its counterpart. This is clearly seen.

In sum: I agree with Descartes. I do not agree with Berkeley, but I also cannot disprove it, and there is much of value there and in his other writings.

I admit, with my Abrahamic roots, that I have trouble believing that a rock has consciousness, but I acknowledge that logically I cannot say that it doesn’t. Even from a scriptural standpoint it would be difficult given Psalm 98:8 and Luke 19:40, “…if these should keep silent, the stones would immediatly cry out.”

Agreed that all times are present and the same with God: Christ is yet and always on the cross dying for our sins.

Napoleon did not lose Waterloo because of his tardy cannons; it’s doubtful they could have saved him in any case. But rather his general allowed Blucher’s army to escape and return to aid Wellington, and additionally by his arrogant cavalry commander kept charging without infantry backup (or orders) in ,a foolish attempt to gain the glory of victory for himself. Meanwhile Napoleon himself was almost completely debilitated by the stomach cancer that would ultimately kill him. That Napoleon lost Waterloo is the most amazing military fact in history (in my humble opinion (and of course given what I know – I’m no military historian)): everything had to go wrong for him to lose – and everything did.

Descartes, like Augustus McCrae from a little farming town in Southern Texas, Lonesome Dove, was one of a kind.

It is fashionable now to bash Descartes for even highschoolers are being taught to recognize the rigidity inherent in the Cartesian and Newtonian systems, not to diminish them, but it is probably a sign of the times. Knowing Madame Marie Claude, I advanced an incipient case of Frenchism, together with hardheadedness from La Bretagne. It is obviously, very obviously now, that “Cogito Ergo Sum” (I think, therefore I am) is not tenable, for Descartes inverted the terms, as it should be “EGO sum, proinde EGO reputo” or I am, therefore I think. Bishop Berkeley, not as well known as Descartes, but his contemporary, had it right all along, when he enunciated: “Esse est percipi” (“To be is to be perceived”), and for that you can read Paul Brunton, who admired and recognized the Bishop as an scientist of mentalism, for from mentalism, you must arrive at the essence of everything: CONSCIOUSNESS, being this creation no more no less than an idea in the Godhead, and for that the great Swami Krishnananda from Rishikesh, with whom I had an epistolary interchange, used to repeat that everything happens in the Godhead at the same type, so even now Krishna is advising Arjuna on the plain of Kurukshetra, near Delhi, Achilles is fighting Hector, and Napoleon is maneuvering his cannons too late in that fateful and rainy morning at Waterloo.

So far as humanity as a group is concerned the only common denominator of its improvement or degradation is the strength or weakness – or perversion or ABSENCE – of the nuclear family; not poverty or wealth, or freedom or tyranny, or peace or war. The most degraded and debased societies (once referred to as savage, then primitive, then pre-literate (when they’re more likely post-literate – the detritus of disintegrated civilizations) and I’ve no idea what the PC crowd is onto now (who can keep up)) have no family structure whatsoever. And I think the upshot of all of our observations since they have been studied is that these groups do not perpetuate themselves indefinitely: that they were in fact dying out when we discovered them. When the data is looked at objectively the conclusion is that these groups have not existed perpetually from prehistoric times and that the human race in fact CANNOT SURVIVE AT ALL without the nuclear family structure at the root of its society.

Now I wrote 60 before 59 was posted so, I’m glad my logic was correct on narciso. But, really, we shouldn’t need a secret decoder ring to figure out what you’re saying: that’s what GRAMMAR is for.