Occult Physics of the New Atlantis & New Jerusalem
Does a Moment Not Always Do As God Commands?
Introduction
My aim with the present piece is to lay a foundation. I must state that now or else, it will seem puzzling that I should have chosen to commit to the subject at hand.
The primary purpose of a discussion on the basics of four-dimensional spacetime geometry is to serve as an introduction to thinking in higher dimensions more generally. It will provide an imagistic toolset with which to grasp the principles at play and the landscape within which they operate — not for calculation, but for visualization and the expansion of the imagination.
According to Platonic tradition, engraved above the door of Plato’s Academy in Athens was the phrase:
LET NO ONE IGNORANT OF GEOMETRY ENTER HERE.
While this is just a legend, within his own writings, Plato’s insistence upon the learning of geometry is well attested.
…The knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal, and not of aught perishing and transient… geometry will draw the soul towards truth, and create the spirit of philosophy, and raise up that which is now unhappily allowed to fall down. Nothing will be more likely to have such an effect…
…Then nothing should be more sternly laid down than that the inhabitants of your fair city should by all means learn geometry. Moreover the science has indirect effects, which are not small…
…In all departments of knowledge, as experience proves, any one who has studied geometry is infinitely quicker of apprehension than one who has not.
- Plato (Republic, Book VII)
From the time of Pythagoras, Euclid and Plato to the time of Einstein and beyond, it has been maintained that geometry is one of the ultimate keys to the secrets of the universe.
Unfortunately, much of the terminology surrounding the kind of geometry used today for such purposes has been bent and blunted by popular misuse. This is largely due to extravagant and sensationalist interpretations of orthodox physics.
This mishandling of the language of physics appears to be stimulated by science communication which, driven by market forces (and of course marketed to those unfamiliar with the subject matter) often provides a picture intended to awe and entertain rather than clarify and illuminate.
That notwithstanding, the collective hunch which has propelled new age “dimensionism” to its present and abiding popularity in the culture is not mistaken. These intuitions are simply misdirected and misapplied.
Extra dimensions are invoked without a proper knowledge of what they are, how they work and for all the wrong reasons, often flatly eschewing the explanatory economy which defines real science and which a seeker of truth should always strive to attain.
As the boundary which divides scientific and spiritual reality continues to collapse, it will increasingly become the case that the best religious thinkers will be practiced with the tools of the sciences, and the best scientific thinkers, with those of religion and the hard line between these will be revealed for the transient illusion that it was.
My secondary aim is to familiarize those who read my work with a rudimentary picture of the science available for public consumption so that we may begin to make informed inferences about the science which is not.
It is a game-theoretic fact that many iterations of a game in which knowledge predicts victory will produce increasingly exclusive alliances which share knowledge, sow confusion and in turn produce increasingly large inequalities of weaponizable insights. This is the reason that since time immemorial, the secret society has been an omnipresent fixture of the civilizational game.
While it is true that the sciences have generally thrived during periods of open collaboration, this is not a point of contention. Science itself benefits from the free-flow of knowledge between individuals, but the same cannot necessarily be said for the individuals and/or groups, who may stand to gain much from secrecy, even if at the expense of the broader social and scientific community.
It is a perennial truth that the summit of any body of knowledge will tend over time to become a trove of closely guarded secrets, protected from and unavailable to the uninitiated. True knowledge is a sword which privileges those who possess it and has the power to cut through illusions which might disadvantage one’s enemies. Ignorance (the blissful kind in particular) is the ultimate weapon of the tactician familiar with the supreme art of war.
It seems probable based on these theoretical facts and many observational ones that someone or something has used obfuscation, misdirection and control over the institutional structure of the intelligentsia to conceal the true nature of space and time from the public. That an accretion of initiatory stratification — a structure resembling that of a secret society — is almost certain to have formed around state-of-the-art scientific doctrine.
Whether this knowledge was acquired by a body already hieratically arrayed or nucleated that structure around itself is impossible to discern from outside.
Ostensibly, the purpose of this kind of concealment is to retain a strategic advantage over the enemies of the authority under the aegis of whom our present technological enterprise conducts its activities. These enemies would include anyone who might use said knowledge to serve ends contrary to the interests of the aforementioned alliance.
Originally and officially, these would likely have been the agents and sympathists of the Soviet Union. Today, its stated enemies would vary depending on what narrative would guarantee the cooperation and usefulness of the one asking, but its true enemies, of course, would be anyone and everyone not subject to its authority.
Such an edifice, built around secrecy and the maximization of its own private power is one exceedingly unlikely to attract the kind of altruist who would decompartmentalize and give up its secrets and advantages in the spirit of charity simply because its official mission had been fulfilled. It would never be in the interests of its architects and overseers to do this, especially if it were compromised — and such organizations are compromised by definition.
Please stick with me. Our subject matter may be unfamiliar and difficult, because I will have to explain the principles of the exoteric doctrine before we may consider the esoteric doctrine in a way that will make any sense.
One must always understand the outer truth before the inner.
Despite possible challenges, the ramifications of what I am about to tell you are extremely relevant to our primary areas of focus, and these things must be fully understood to perceive our present place in history clearly.
Mass and Spacetime Geometry
Do you know why the Earth follows the path it does around the sun?
If you know anything about relativity, you almost certainly know that “mass warps spacetime.” What you may not know is what that means, or why it causes the phenomenon that keeps you on the Earth and keeps the Earth on its orbital path.
You probably picture some variant of the classic demonstration: there is a bowling ball. You’re told it represents the sun. It is placed at the center of a trampoline or some other surface with a bit of give to it. The surface of the trampoline forms a depression around the bowling ball due to its mass. This surface, you are told, represents warped spacetime.
A marble is placed on the trampoline to represent the Earth and allowed to roll down the slope. It then spirals along the depression, drawn toward the bowling ball’s mass.
We are then told that if the marble were not losing energy to friction, it would circle the bowling ball indefinitely, and that’s what’s going on with the Earth as it travels through the vacuum of space.
It has been pointed out before that this analogy is recursive. It uses gravity to explain gravity. This is a problem in itself. However, the issue is deeper, because it doesn’t just use gravity to explain gravity, it uses the wrong kind.
The picture is not really Einsteinian at all. It’s using the imagery of relativity, but that’s where the resemblance ends. Behind the superficialities, it is designed at every step to reinforce the Newtonian assumptions of its audience rather than displace them.
Tangential velocity and a “downward pulling force” are still implicitly suggested to be driving the orbital behavior, just as in classical mechanics.
What does it mean to warp the geometry of space and time?
To explain, I’ve designed a more advanced thought experiment. It’s a little technical, but still relatively straightforward.
These are Earth’s five Lagrange points:
Lagrange points are points in an orbital system where an object can stably co-orbit with another. If we built a space station at one of the Earth’s Lagrange points, it would remain at that same place relative to us. Our orbits would be synchronous.
Let’s imagine then that we have two space stations suitable for long-term habitation; one of them is at L1, the other is at L2.
We start our experiment on Earth. We have three clocks that measure time with near-perfect accuracy using light. These clocks are in perfect sync. For our experiment, we will send a crew of personnel to each station. Each crew will take one optical clock with them. The third clock will remain on Earth as a control.
The two crews live and work at the L1 and L2 stations for one year before returning.
Because these twin stations co-rotate with the Earth around the sun, all three complete one solar rotation at the exact same time after 365 days, concluding our experiment. However, when they return to Earth thereafter, all three clocks will be slightly out of sync. The difference will be miniscule, just a few milliseconds, but this does not match the common sense expectation.
At departure, all three clocks were perfectly synchronized. They completed their round trips in the same amount of Earth time, and yet, each optical clock has measured a slightly different period.
What we are seeing is the way mass-energy affects space and time.
At the end of the experiment, ground control’s clock will be a few milliseconds behind both of the station clocks because time passes slower on Earth. You may know that GPS satellites have to correct for this.
The clocks at L1 and L2 are equidistant from the Earth’s center of mass, so our planet’s gravity affects them both equally (and not very much). On the other hand, the station at L1 is ~3 million kilometers closer to the sun than the station at L2. This means the L1 clock is passing through time a little bit slower than the L2 clock.
Here’s why this is important:
We can think of these three orbital paths as different regions in a gradient of proper time flow around the sun. What you’ll notice is that each path remains in the same part of the gradient the whole way around. The L1 station is in a region of slightly slower time flow. The L2 station is in a region of slightly faster time flow.
One of the ways we know this gradient is real is because Mercury is so deep in the slowed time region that Newtonian physics could not perfectly model its orbital behavior, because Newtonian gravity doesn’t predict distortions in the flow of time. The time dilation produced measurable anomalies which conformed perfectly to the predictions of general relativity.
This gradient also affects the Earth itself, albeit at a smaller scale: the sunny half of the Earth is slightly closer to the sun, and therefore, it lies in a slightly slower region of the time gradient. The dark half of the Earth is slightly farther from the sun. Therefore, proper time flows ever so slightly faster at night.
Because the difference is so small and the planet is rotating, this is self-corrective for our clocks, but consider the moon, which is tidally locked so that one side always faces the Earth. If we placed an optical clock on the front side of the moon and another on the back side of the moon, measured time would accrue on the back:
So if one lunar hemisphere is moving through time (and therefore through space) at a slightly faster rate than its counterpart, the result can only be a curved path:
In relativity, this path is called a “geodesic.” A geodesic is a term from geometry and it is defined as the straightest (shortest) path between two points on a given surface.
But isn’t this a curved path?
Yes. But it’s also straight. If you adjust for the distortion so both clocks tick at a uniform rate of one second per second, you don’t get a circle, you get a straight-line path which the entire universe seems to whirl around, just like what we see from our point of view on Earth.
This means circular orbits are actually artifacts of 3D coordinate systems. A geodesic is the straightest possible path the curvature along the 4D geometry will allow.
The Natural Philosophy of Relativity
Now perhaps you’re wondering: why is it important to know how gravity works?
And the answer is: because it has natural philosophic implications.
If you want to do natural philosophy — which is essentially what we do here — you need to know what nature is doing, and then you have to correctly infer why it’s designed that way.
I wrote about Saturn not too long ago and showed that Saturn is symbolically associated with both time and gravity. What we’ve just shown is that this is not just a metaphor, it is as true physically as it is symbolically. Time and gravity are the same ontological principle.
It was also shown that Saturn, the outermost classical planet, is symbolically “the shadow,” the antagonist of solar consciousness. What we’ve seen here is that the Earth circles the sun because its shadow is moving faster through time. Time is stronger toward the Saturnian end of the Sun-Saturn axis.
We find therefore, that the symbolic picture we were using anyway also functions as a working picture of relativistic gravitation.
And so these two pictures also end up mnemonically reinforcing each other.
There is of course no causal relationship between sunlight and the passage of time, nor the physical planet Saturn and the passage of time, but there is still a synchronistic correlation between the two which reflects the symbolism.
We can even liken this dichotomy very straightforwardly to that of relativity itself:
☉ Light (+)
♄ Spacetime (-)
We see therefore that relativity conforms to the symbolic schema which we’ve used elsewhere to understand something as apparently remote as astrological archetypes. In this way, we have found the fingerprints of truth within general relativity.
This is how symbolic thinking allows us to suss out truth and falsehood far more effectively than one using reason and feeling alone.
It also shows us that the increasingly common opinion that we ought to retreat into more archaic paradigms whose symbolicity is more straightforward is ultimately misguided. If symbolic meaning is an essential property of truth, then it is inevitable. One need not “return” to it. That would imply it is possible to get away from.
Let us take it further now: the same kind of asymmetric progression through causation we have examined via relativity is what causes the circumambulation of a teleological object while traveling along a “straight path.” A straight line is the shortest path between two points. Thus, the shortest distance between a point A and a definite or even an abstract point B is technically a straight line through a high-dimensional vector space.
Likewise, a sequence of causes and effects is also a straight line. But if the “gravitational potential” of a micro (or macro) eschaton warps the underlying psychoid geometry of causation, then these straight-line paths can be likened to the geodesics of relativity
(I would also add: cannot be likened by simple analogy to anything pre-Einsteinian.)
Therefore, at bottom, Einstein’s picture not only agrees with our symbolic one, but actually provides us with new tools and information to attain even more penetrative insights than those we have received.
An object’s path always seems straight in its own frame of reference. All crookedness is projected onto the rest of the universe. This is a truism of both physics and psychology. It is as physically and mathematically true as it is morally instructive, calling to mind Judges 21:25
In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right (straight) in his own eyes.”
This analogical relation between physics, ontology and ethics is not incidental. The geometry of general relativity generalizes by analogy to domains far beyond physics. The principles which govern frames of reference in GR instantiate those which govern frames of reference everywhere else as well.
Like chemistry and alchemy, physics and metaphysics are inextricably linked. Physics is applied ontology, and if you want the best ontology, you can find a great deal of it by looking to the most powerful physics.
You may remember this frame from Secret Passage Theory.
It shows that even a winding path through a maze can be represented as a straight line. The technical reason that you can do this is because it connects a past and a future. Therefore, it is a time axis, which is straight in some frame of reference.
However, when you straighten the timeline, the projection of the teleological object whose vertices it intersects becomes distorted. It stops looking like anything.
If we instead want those lines to be straight, we have to shift the distortion onto the red path, which twists and convolutes it back into an impression of the maze itself.
Now we have straight teleology but warped causation. Both projections are valid referential frames. So valid in fact, that when you move between them, neither one seems manifestly wrong or unreal, they just don’t agree with one another. Reality seems to change, but the felt sense that “this is the real world” remains intact from one to the other.
So all the lines in my diagrams are geodesics (in the geometric sense, not the stricter relativistic sense) and the manipulations I’m making are reminiscent of Lorentz Transformations. The only real difference is that we’re using pure geometry without formulae and 5+ dimensions instead of 4; but the basic movements are the same.
It is evident from history that these thinking tools open cognitive and creative doors that are otherwise almost impossible to unlock. They can be derived from many places precisely because the principles generalize to everything and the analogies are reversible — there would be no point in acquiring them unless this were the case. But it is also true that you have to get them from somewhere, and as a rule, the shortest path is physics to metaphysics.
Here Time Becomes Space
Let’s collapse 3D space into a 2D plane. What we’re going to do is create a relativistic “frame of reference.” A spacetime coordinate grid, also known as a Minkowski diagram. What we’re exploring here will come back when we start talking about reference frames in a more phenomenological context later.
All you really have to know is that you can do this arbitrarily. You can do it for anything, anywhere at any time. For this one, we’ll just imagine you’re an astronaut floating through space — this is much easier than anything on the ground.
This grid is a snapshot of the universe at the time coordinate t = 0.
We’re going to put your center of mass at the origin.
You’re in 4D spacetime.
Your first thought might be to ask at what velocity you’re traveling at, but in 4D, that’s not a valid question. The answer here is always the same: the speed of light.
The speed of light is not the speed of light. It’s actually the speed of everything. It is the rate at which things happen.
You are a thing. You’re happening. Therefore: speed of light in 4D.
There is no velocity in spacetime. To even talk about “the speed of causation” is somewhat misleading. Velocity is a measure of distance over duration, but we’re entering a world of pure geometry where time becomes space. Here, lightspeed is not a velocity. It’s a property of form itself.
What we call “velocity” in 3D is simply “direction” in 4D.
So what is your direction, then?
The answer is: it can be whatever you want, as long as you observe rules 1 and 2:
I. You must always travel at the speed of light.
II. If you have mass, you must travel along the time axis.
Each unit of our grid represents a tesseract measured in (light minutes)4. This means at every point on the time axis, all legal moves lie within a ninety degree range of motion known as a light cone.
So if space is geometrically arbitrary, let’s make it simple and define the astronaut (you) as stationary. You’re at rest at (0, 0, 0). This means we are defining our time axis as your geodesic, your “default path” which you will follow unless acted upon by an outside force.
If you want to build one of these coordinate grids around anything, like the Earth, moon or sun, the time axis will be the object’s geodesic at t = 0. That’s the simplest way to set it up.
What our diagram says is that you are moving at exactly the speed of light, but all of that momentum is through time (therefore we’ve observed rules 1 and 2).
Now let’s imagine there’s another astronaut. From your perspective, he’s traveling at half the speed of light. That means his geodesic is tilted in your grid because his spatial coordinates are changing.
To make things simple, let’s say that he flew past you at t = 0.
Now, if the same rules apply, two things have to be true:
That line has to be his time axis.
If the total velocity along all 4 dimensions has to equal lightspeed, then any motion through space is motion not through time. He must have traded time momentum for space momentum.
Both of these mean you two aren’t on the same kind of time. He doesn’t relate to your past-future dimension the same way you do because some of what he calls “time” is “space” for you (and vice versa). His time will be stretched through your space, and that means his clock will tick slower than yours.
This is what it looks like for him:
Kinematic time dilation is symmetric, so it’s the same diagram.
From his perspective, you’re the one with the slow clock. His clock seems normal.
So you see him in slow motion and he sees you in slow motion. This seems absurd and paradoxical. Shouldn’t one see the other sped up?
We have to frame it the right way if we want it to make sense:
You two are traveling to different futures. From your perspective, you’re going to get to “the future” first, and from his perspective, he’s going to get to “the future” first. Both of these can be true at the same time, because even though you both call your destinations “the future,” this does not reflect the reality that those are two different positions in spacetime.
From your perspective: the point you’re traveling to 30 minutes in your future, is 30 light minutes away (on the time axis). But if he’s moving at half light speed, the place he will be when your 30 minutes are up is ~33 light minutes away.
That path is, the hypotenuse of this triangle:
It has to take causation longer to travel 33 light minutes than 30, but both paths have a 30 minute length on your time axis. Something’s got to give, and that something ends up being the rate at which he exists from your perspective.
So Pythagoras tells us the distance, Minkowski tells us how these timelines relate to each other.
We’re going to use this formula:
Here τ (tau) is subjective or “proper” time and Δ (delta) signifies that we’re using the coordinate difference from point A to point B.
It’s just the Pythagorean Theorem, but 4D and time units are negative.
The difference in time (Δt) is 30 light minutes. The difference in space (Δx) is 15 light minutes. There’s no motion through y and z space, so (Δy2 + Δz2) = 0.
Therefore, τ = 25.98 minutes.
That’s how much time the other astronaut experiences in 30 minutes of your time.
Now you can calculate time dilation in flat spacetime and you know why it happens. That’s special relativity (general relativity involves curvature and a lot more math beyond the scope of this piece).
In summation: nature has to resolve a paradox whose only solution is the ineluctable conclusion that these are simply not the same kind of minute, and the reason no one sees the other in fast forward is because along your own time axis, you’re in fast forward. You just don’t see it that way. You project the entire difference onto everything else. This is what it means to have an angled past-future axis.
The Secret Doctrine
We have now laid out the core of the exoteric doctrine of relativity. Nature is conserving the invariance of the causal velocity in all frames of reference.
Gravity is geometry is time dilation.
All these are the same emergent properties of a universe which ticks optically.
I believe that this doctrine has an esoteric counterpart. One occulted by concentric layers of mystagogical obscuration and reserved for an initiated elite.
When the issue is raised of reconciling gravity with the other three forces — which is to say, reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics — one is usually confronted with two pictures whose incompatibility, in my opinion, seems somewhat exaggerated. Perhaps that’s because I’m not a physicist; but I do know enough physics to know that my perspective is a valid frame of reference.
I am by no means an expert in either of these fields, I am a mere layman looking in through the window. Central to the question of quantum gravity are very technical, “what” and “how” type questions about which I know I can offer no meaningful or productive commentary.
The more philosophical “why” questions are of interest to physicists, but of secondary interest to physics itself.
That said, I’d wager this is the crux of the issue.
I’ve never renormalized an infinity, but I have gotten stuck before, and in my experience, it happens when you hit a problem you can’t solve by looking at problems the way you have been. You need a new kind of solution — one that tends to feel anticlimactic if you were very invested in getting the kind of answer you expected.
Both quantum field theory and general relativity seem to have hit the same wall. I think it was a wall that physics, by nature of what it is, was always going to hit: the limit of instrumental or so-called “objective” measurement and calculation.
Quantum Field Theory (QFT) says that measurement in some manner actually physically defines a quantum object. If nothing else, it forces the object to define itself. The measurer is inextricably connected to whatever is happening during measurement in the sense that no matter what the relationship is, we cannot ever disentangle the two.
There are pseudo-explanations which get tossed around. Some claim that “interaction” or “the act of measuring“ collapses the wave function. But this is unfalsifiable nonsense and it betrays a lack of epistemic discipline on the part of the person making such assertions. We cannot ever observe the unobserved measurement, and this is exactly what nature seems to be throwing in our faces.
General Relativity says that measurements themselves are ambivalent. There is no absolute space or absolute time. If you’re stationary and I’m traveling at 99% the speed of light, it’s equally true that I’m stationary and you’re traveling at 99% the speed of light. This means every hour on my watch is eight and a half minutes on yours and every hour on yours is eight and a half minutes on mine, because we’re slicing up time on different angles.
This effect, as we have seen, is independent of the optical lag that results from a finite speed of light. It is a perspectival artifact like circular orbits, but at the same time, it is a property of intrinsic geometric facts about how things are connected and allowed to relate within time and space.
There is no absolute simultaneity. No true “now” except your now.
What relativity really says is that the universe is not a place of measurements, but a place of measurers — or at least that that is the only sensible way of looking at it.
It is a common misconception that the underlying metaphysic of relativity is simply: everything is relative. But this is too unsubtle of a reading. The true philosophical takeaway is twofold:
I. Everything is relation.
II. Perspective is real.
These are subtly but importantly different implications, and they lead at last to the real point I have been driving at:
What exactly is being conserved in general relativity and holding the causal fabric of spacetime together? Is it an invariate rate of causation across all reference frames, or might it be the consistency of the reference frames themselves?
Is nature just particular about how fast things go, or is she working to ensure that your subjectivity and my subjectivity remain transjectively compatible and capable of coexistence within the same manifold of spacetime continuity?
You can see this does not represent a radical revision of the physics itself. It is a mere exegetical inversion. A shifted coordinate system from one centered on the object to one centered on the subject.
Once you grasp even this very simplified picture of we’re actually working with, you also start to see that it seems like an obvious conclusion, and that physicists don’t take decades to put two and two together.
Why do distance and duration distort themselves in the ways we’ve observed?
To conserve the consistency of the observer’s frame of reference.
Why do quantum probability distributions choose a state when observed?
To conserve the consistency of the observer’s frame of reference.
Once again, it does not directly solve any of the hard, empirical and mathematical problems, but it offers a different ontology to apply. It tells you how to look at these, and it tells you to look in a quite different way than the a priori assumptions of a Newtonian do. This just makes me wonder why so much science education — at least the kind intended to reach absolute laypeople — has, until very recently, seemed designed to preserve those assumptions rather than correct them, when this is so plainly the conclusion that both pictures are apparently pointing us to.
In the defense of the brilliant minds who have worked on these things, this would have been taboo and heretical in the intellectual climate of the twentieth century and if such speculation had indeed been occurring, it would understandably leave rather few traces. It would have been entertained quietly between trusted associates who would not want their names publicly associated with such ideas.
The question is, if that is the direction that things evolved in, where does that leave us now? I’m simply considering what seems likely given what I do understand, which is:
How esoteric knowledge has historically been handled.
Why that is the most game-theoretic way to handle it.
If the most powerful knowledge we have is uncompartmentalized and openly accessible, then we are in a time of historically unprecedented transparency, living under the most benevolent and unselfish elites to ever exist.
Conclusions
I’m going to end this line of thought here for now to avoid too much speculation.
Again, the primary purpose of this piece is to introduce ideas applicable to our usual topics, and to make the present physical paradigm tactile at least at a basic intuitive level so that the implicit metaphysical paradigm is more accessible.
Now we can discuss reference frames, higher-dimensional geometry and post-Newtonian metaphysics without relying so much on soundbites and interpreters.
We can also see the philosophical flies in the ointment (determinism and physicalism in this case) discern that they are not necessarily inherent to the broader picture of spacetime geometry, and do not have to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
We can also make informed guesses about how these ideas might have evolved within the closed circles of those with above-civilian security clearance through the Cold War and beyond.
Hopefully this exploration has been illuminating and interesting in at least a few ways and we can begin to build upon the foundation of intuitive techne which we’ve laid.
Thank you for reading and be well.
Wow. Thanks. Will be chewing on this for the rest of my life.
Great piece. Got me thinking about the “the self as a centre of narrative gravity” concept I’d read about previously. ❤️