Discoveries

Starfarers, 42.

The pattern and process of life might impose:

its trace on the vacuum;

direction on randomness;

change in the metric -

- and thus continue after death.

The zero-zero drive does not destabilize but stabilizes the universe because the energy transfer makes a bond like transfers of virtual particles creating forces holding atoms together. The Holont has received messages from the future confirming this.

Fourteen hundred Tahirian years of demolition, weather and growth have erased not only the human base but also its site. Instead of forest surrounding a stream flowing through a meadow, sparse darker gnarled trees grow near a brown river flowing across turf. Wildlife is different and climate is warming. Future history is summarized.

Sundaram says that a "'...secret Eastern spiritual technology...'" is "'...a myth.'" (p. 487)

- but Dayan replies that:

"'Self-command, perception - there are right ways and wrong ways to try for them, aren't there? The same as with anything else. You know at least some of the right ways. Now everybody needs your counsel.'" (ibid.)

Nothing inner is a "technology." Any spiritual practice is only as good as its practitioners. We need the first two steps on the Buddhist Eightfold Path: right understanding and right effort - understanding that practice is necessary and perseverance in practice.

"The means of training are thousandfold but pure meditation must be done."

-Dogen's Rules for Meditation, recited in our Zen group.

"Means of training" are techniques whereas "pure meditation" is "just sitting with no deliberate thought." In the absence of deliberate thought, undeliberate thoughts arise and pass and we gradually lessen their hold on the mind.