#But all the works exist in independent universes from each other. So they technically span an entire year BUT it's not the SAME year

[clownakai]

Ooohhhgrgrgrh I had. A very bad idea. Needlessly complicated and stupid also. This is what liking scotchrye does to a motherfucker

[largemaxa]

Conceptions of God

Before we set out on the spiritual path, our concept of God is necessarily inadequate. This is because at the beginning of the path we are beings with limited, finite perceptions and have no way to grasp the totality of an infinite being like God either intellectually or experientially.  But because the spiritual path is such a long undertaking that may have extended periods with little clarity or external result, it is important to have some sort of mental or philosophical understanding of the nature and workings of God that can support our endeavor before the have direct knowledge of God; we need to come to some provisional understanding of who or what God is if we are to seek him out. For some people it is enough to simply know that there is a God, that he can be reached, that he loves us and that he can be loved—this knowledge is enough to provide them with the support they need to continue. Others enjoy the process of a more intense philosophical speculation which involves understanding the details of the metaphysical structures and justifications left by the sages who have come before us.

Suppose we take a pragmatic approach—what if we don't necessarily need to know everything, but we want some solid enough foundation with which to proceed? Then we ask, what is it can be said and known about God? What are the basics? The overview is as follows: God is an infinite being, transcendent of space and time while manifesting himself as immanent within the space and time of our universe. To say that God is infinite means that he extends beyond all possible limits of time, space, energy, and possibility that we understand. In particular, he transcends every mental representation we could make of him: every concept, word, image we could have of him is only a partial understanding because of the finite nature of our minds in contrast to the infinite nature of God. God is eternal, not confined by time: there was never a time before God's existence, as the notion of time makes sense only relative to the physical universe; yet he is present at each moment of universal time.

Similarly, this vast universe spanning billions of light years illustrates God's expansiveness; but he equally inhabits the smallest microbe or dust particle. Though God in himself is neither big nor small, perhaps the most common size to imagine God is being as big as the evening sky, which is something our mind can handle; it would stretch the mind too much to imagine something large as a nebula, which is much larger than our entire solar system, or even as large as Jupiter, whose Red Spot storm is more than twice as wide as our entire planet Earth—but all these and the universe itself are just so many small lumps of his matter compared to the infinitudes he contains. God is not comprised of any particular substance, like rock or dirt. However, even the hardest metal has only a relative hardness which is a construction of our minds and is insubstantial compared to the reality of him. But the physical universe is also one relative manifestation of God, and there is an aspect of him that is greater than and independent of this physical reality.

God does not only have a merely static, inert existence, like an neutral gas, large, and aloof; God maintains a state of infinite energy and potentiality. Einstein's famous equation showed that an immense amount of energy lies within each atom, and subsequent scientists devised methods to release that energy for the purposes of both electric power as well as mass destruction; the presence of these huge forces gives a hint as to the amount of energy that is contained within God's seemingly inert state. The burning of the suns, the heavings of the tides, the psychological forces motivating billions of humans to wake up each day for their daily work, and the biological urges that propel animals like sharks and whales throughout the the ocean for their hunts are all manifestations of God's energy. Everything in this universe was created by God as a manifestation of his energy—everything that we have seen or conceived of is a portion of the mind of God: tropical birds and spiders; oceans; giant retailers like Walmart and Costco; mouse burrows; philosophical treatises; nebulae; and on and on—and that we have thought of but not yet seen is a latent potentiality within him as well.

But God is not simply a bodiless energy definable by nuclear equations, nor a library of ideas: God is an entity, and a conscious entity at that. God is not a human being, that is, a being of the same physical and biological type as us, but he shares with us the nature of a conscious being. Consciousness for us means faculties like awareness and perception, but his consciousness is perfect awareness, perfect perception, perfect omniscience of everything. Conscious beings can communicate their inner states, so in particular this means is that we may communicate with him, much as we communicate consciously with humans.

And the nature of his being is to have all possible positive qualities. Anything known to the human mind as "good" in any way is brought to its maximum in God. In human life, we know the quality of goodness by how we see it manifest in human deeds and personality qualities; God is the most good being of all. So is love known to be one of the highest things known to us in human life; in God we find Love's source and zenith. In human life, power and glory are known by the achievements and conquests of mankind; immeasurably greater are the power and glory that belong to God.

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These pointers and paradoxes are so many hints that give us an initial idea of God. And for some, these might be all the ideas that are needed to support a sustained and sincere practice. But another paradox we must understand is that God is beyond any mental representation. God cannot be described or limited by any possible word, image, or idea—and that includes the words and ideas given above. This is one of the reasons that there are so many names for God in all the cultures, religions, and traditions that have tried to know him—no one word is sufficient to convey everything that needs to be conveyed by the term "God". Yet, because as humans our main faculty of understanding is mental representation, we need to start understanding God through finite mental representations like the ones in the preceding paragraphs. These ideas are provisional. The eventual goal of the spiritual path is to experience God directly and to live his truth in the world. But it's important to remember that they are like signposts or a railing to guide our way.

But even if we accept these descriptions, something is missing. The indications given so far indicate an unimaginable, far off entity. But how could a God so immense and grand be understood as relating to our actual lives? To illustrate my concern, look out at the landscape visible in the nearest window. Perhaps you will see houses, telephone wires, clouds, a blue sky if you're lucky—while these may be the works of an omnipotent creator, in the understanding given above, the creator himself is nowhere to be found in the view. And he cannot be found—he cannot even be seen—because he is incorporeal, distributed across all space and time. How is such a God, too grand to even be concretely imagined, supposed to be of any use or relevance in our actual lives? How could we come anywhere near him without the risk of being annihilated by his huge forces, or perhaps even overwhelmed by his love?

When we consider the total absence of the immensity of this God in our human-sized experience, we see that there must be an equally immense separation that we must have from him. And in the context of so much immensity and separation, the practices that are commonly known to have spiritual benefit would seem to be impotent. Why would praying, meditating, or doing spiritual service get us any closer to this God, any more than running on the treadmill, walking the dog, or climbing a tree? Rather than attempting to understand the infinite directly, the way to come to a better understanding of God is to start in terms that are closer to our actual experience .

Metaphors for God

Metaphors are one way to make the unfamiliar familiar. A metaphor is a figure of language or thought that transfers meaning between two unlike ideas. Metaphors are perhaps most famous from high-school English class, but as Lakoff and Johnson have shown in Metaphors We Live By, they can be seen universally in human cognition and communication. Notably, we see the frequent use of metaphor as our world adapts to technological change. For example, at the time that automobiles were first introduced, the horse was a major power source used for long-distance land transportation, frequently used as a locomotive power source to drive carriages. Automobiles were therefore called "horseless carriages" at first, as a way for the public to understand the strange new machines in familiar terms: horse-driven carriages were a well-known phenomenon, and the new automobiles were similar to them except they did not need a horse due to the new mechanical engine. The metaphor here being that the new technological invention was likened to an older, familiar invention that worked by very different principles but had a similarity that the mind could comprehend.

Another source of examples comes from the computer world. When computers were first invented, they were giant machines that represented data using punch cards and vacuum tubes with metal frames that took up the space of entire rooms, and they were mostly used for highly technical data processing work. But innovate technologists came up with a great many metaphors to allow humans to interact with these new machines in ways that they were familiar with: the "program" was like the familiar multi-step routines of bureaucratic offices, the command line interface allowed users to "talk" to the computer and "tell it what to do" in a specialized language, and the "window" concept allowed users to visualize the process of shifting between different computer programs. Interface innovations relying on metaphors like these made the abstract world of 0s and 1s accessible—a process which continues with each successive wave of technological change.

But metaphors were used to adapt man's mind to the unfamiliar and unknown long before the development of digital and industrial technology. The poets have always used language to cast new and unfamiliar things in terms of old and familiar things. For example, the sea was known as the "whale road" to poets working in Old English, the archaic version of our current language. The sea was then known as a huge, unfamiliar expanse. Even today we don't have a complete idea of all the life forms and geological phenomena that might exist under the sea in the largely unexplored depths of the ocean which dwarf the familiar dimensions of our towns and cities. But the old Anglo-Saxon people were presumably familiar with whales, perhaps hunting them for their resources, and were also familiar with how humans use road systems to get around. So the phrase "whale road" made the colossal sea understanable: the metaphoric phrase says that the sea is a place where huge animals like whales commute to do their various activities, just as humans commute along roads on land for the activities of human civilization.

From our earlier characterization of God's essential nature, we know that God is something that is too large for our mind to comprehend. God is something infinite, and therefore not fully comprehensible by our finite minds; more than that, his power, immensity, and love are outside the range of our daily, mundane experiences. In our daily lives, we are familiar with the world of tables, chairs, telephone poles, and salt shakers, not transcendent worlds of power and bliss. But as we've seen by considering the use of metaphor, God is not the first concept that we have encountered that lies outside the usual range of our experience. And just as with the other concepts, its possible to use metaphor as a tool to help us wrap our minds around the expansive nature and reality of God in terms of other aspects of our reality that we more fully understand.

1. God is a Creator

One of the most useful and widespread metaphors for understanding God is the idea that God is the creator of the universe and everything inside it. In our everyday lives, the idea of creation or creativity is most associated with creative artists such as musicians, painters, filmmakers, and novelists; when we hear the word "creativity" we might first picture Da Vinci in his studio working out colors and forms on canvas to match the vision seen in his mind.  Artists provide a very clear example of the act of creation because the creative work in these cases has no separate functional purpose other than appreciating it for its beauty—art seems to be a case of "pure creation" . We rightly celebrate and admire these expressions of creative energy.

But this can obscure the fact that objects like tables, chairs, bottles, and cups from the mundane world are created objects too. In fact, every physical object in the world has been brought about by a process of creation, going from a vague idea to a detailed design to a physically constructed object that you can interact with. This is true of complex pieces of machinery like cars, which go through multiple stages of creative effort involving both mechanical engineering and aesthetics in a process of design, followed by construction and assembly where individual parts are created all over the world and then assembled in factories; it is also true of household implements like forks and knives whose basic design has existed for millenia but are still changing in form as they are created with modern materials and processes; and it is true of the dwellings we work and live in themselves, which are architected and then put together physically beam by beam.

It's not just physical objects that are created through a process of design and construction. The organizations and institutions that our lives consist of— governments, businesses, schools— are creations as well. It can be easy to forget this because it seems like they have always existed, but these institutions that operate according to ideas, plans, policies and procedures defined by humans to achieve specific ends. We see that, in fact, creation permeates our lives, from our environments to our institutions to, yes, our art galleries; further, everyone exercises creative energy their work and home life, if not through working to ideate or construct, then daily acts like cooking, interior design, or self-expression.

While we just attempted to show the ubiquity of the creative process, the example of the creative artist does provide one helpful distinction for the clarity of the "creator" metaphor for God: a clear separation between the creator and creation. When Georgia O'Keefe creating nature paintings, it's clear that a single person is the creator and the painting is the creation. There is no single creator for a shiny new Ford sedan, as the creative process long and complicated one involving coordination between hundreds or thousands of people. However, we could perhaps say that the Ford Motor Corporation created the car. So we can say that everything we see here in our world was created by a person, or an entity (like a company), or perhaps by a complex process (like a supply chain).

We see, then, that creative acts and creative entities are ubiquitous in our universe. And we can use this understanding to consider the metaphoric extension that helps us to understand God: every object, whether artwork or implement, in our awareness, had a creator. The universe, too, is a created object like the familar objects of our world. Just as those objects have a creator, we can imagine the entity that created the universe, and consider that entity as God. This leap of thought allows uses the familiar relation of a creator with a created object as a way to understand God as the creator of the entire universe.

There are a few standard philosophical puzzles that this might seem to lead to. First, if the universe must have had a creator because it is a creative object, then wouldn't the creator need a creator as well? Second, this metaphor may remind some readers of the classic "watchmaker" argument, which asserts that the universe must have a creator because anything so complex as a universe or human intelligence must have been deliberately created. For the advanced metaphysical studies that I alluded to earlier in this essay, these sorts of arguments may have their place, but they are not relevant to this discussion. I am not arguing that the universe *must* have had a creator, whether on account of its complexity or just the bare fact that it has been created at all. There are philosophical arguments for or against these ideas which I am not addressing, as I'm not addressing the *existence *of God here. Rather, the purpose here is to show those who are open to the existence of God how to use metaphor of creator to understand what God is.

And those who are willing to entertain this thought may find that it can bring you into relation with an entity or force that has this sort of relation to the unverse—the relationship that a creator has to a created thing. So if you are willing to, simply allow yourself to entertain the concept of this first metaphor to understand God—that God is the creator of the universe. As Victor Hugo was the novelist who created the novel Les Miserables, or Frank Lloyd Wright was the architect of the Guggenheim Museum, so we can understand God as the one who created the material universe, which includes our own lives and everything we see in our surroundings. If we can look around at at our material and social environment and see the handiwork of God, we have understood what it means to say that God is the Creator.

2. God is the Heavenly Mother/Father

Closely related to the metaphor of God as creator is the metaphor of God as parent. At first, it might even seem to be a special case of the previous metaphor, because parents can be thought of as the creators of the child. But actually, the similarity stops there, as the relationship between a parent and child has quite different character from the general or abstract idea of creation. Parenting is about more than a single act of creative energy. It's a process that involves supporting and teaching a child as it goes through the stages of life, from a helpless infant who is totally at the mercy of physical protection and nourishment of the family, to a child who goes through an intensive social and cognitive learning process, to an adolescent who starts to form his or her own identity but still needs guidance, to an adult who participates in an ongoing mutual relationship with the family. For a parent to look at their child and feel that they are a primarily a "creation" would feel dehumanizing; the parent-child relationship is a long-term relationship characterized by guidance, protection and love.

The character of this relationship is so fundamental that it can be seen as a metaphor for many relationships and institutions in our society, even where it is not used as an explicit model. Any teacher-student relationship is modeled on the parent-child relationship to some extent, as a schoolteacher assumes partial responsibility for the child's growth and welfare for a portion of the day; in a therapist-patient relationship, the therapist is aware that the theraputic process will bring up parent-child attachment dynamics; even the relationship between a government and its subjects or citizens is tinged with the resonance of this relationship, as a government provides essential services for adults in a similar way to the way the family provides an environment for its children.

The parent-child relationship is an important metaphorical model both at a theoretical level as well as a psychological level for thinking about a variety of relationships. So it's not surprising that it is one of the most prominent ideas that structure man's relationship towards God. Metaphorically, God can be thought of as being like our father or mother, but in a spiritual rather than in an earthly sense. The earthly parent shows us how to navigate a complex world through example and direct instruction; God as spiritual parent provides us with the outer experience we need to grow and the inner intuitive guidance we need to make the right choices. The earthly parent provides support and consolation; God as the spiritual parent provides the consolation and strength needed to face the world if we are willing to lean on him or her. The relationship has is an element of seniority as well: having gone through the experience of adult life, the earthly parent is older and wiser than the child; so is God as a spiritual being wiser and more knowledgable than us, even when our mind and ego think that they should know better. Since we have all had parents of some sort, whether natural or adopted, we all have an idea of what a parent-child relationship should look like, and so we can model our interactions with God on this relationship that we already understand.

But using this metaphor is not without its difficulties. Even though we have all experienced the earthly parent-child relationship, we have all also experienced some sort of problem or pathology in this relationship. Even the most well-adjusted family inflicts the shadow side of its parents onto the children, and the stressful circumstances of life invariably add to this strains. There are also more severe issues that can happen such as parental abuse or abandonment or voluntary/involuntary separation from the children.

Still, the metaphor is meant to serve an initial jumping off point, a way to structure a relationship to God in our understanding. Even if there were flaws—even grave ones—in our earthly parental relationships, we can still understand the way in which our parents enacted the fatherly and/or motherly function, or at the very least understand by contrast what a father or mother should have been through understanding their failure. And we can extrapolate the nature of a spiritual parent from there. The flaws in our personal psychological relationships with our earthly parents can lead to issues coloring our relationship with God, but these can be healed as we deepen our relationship with God over time.

So far I have discussed the metaphorical idea of God as Divine parent as being either mother or father with no preference or even difference implied. But there has in fact been divergence in these conceptions historically, and there continues to be a difference as a practical matter of spiritual practice. In the West, the conception of God as Father has been dominant for many centuries, with the unfortunate result of the suppression of the feminine aspects of God going hand in hand with the social and political oppression of women. But God as the Divine Mother has also been worshipped in cultures throughout history and has many faces, including Quan Yin, the Buddhist Bodhisattva of Compassion, the Virgin Mary honored by Catholics, bestowing mercy and grace, and the Hindu God Kali, a figure of terrible Divine strength; even the modern idea of Mother Earth or Gaia can perhaps be seen as a figure of the Divine Mother, being a secular or religious expression of reverence for the interconnectedness of life revealed by ecological science.

The reason for the special importance of the mother metaphor are clear. The earthly mother is the figure that gives birth to the child and provides a supportive, loving environment for him or her; there is a conception of the Divine Mother that holds that she is the very matrix and possibility of creation, in the same way that the mother's womb gestates the child and the mother's support provides the necessary psychological environment for the child. In the midst of difficulties the earthly mother consoles, as does the Divine Mother. The earthly mother provides encouragement and strength to face the difficulties of the world, and so does the Divine Mother. We turn to this form of God with affection and tenderness, sometimes in severe contrition, and sometimes in awe of her strength and power.

There are overdue and necessary critiques of masculinity in our society that may well need to be extended to our theological conceptions as well; overemphasis on the mascuine or father concept of God has led to the concept of Divine strength being perverted into needless aggression, and Divine wisdom being perverted into unfeeling, compassionless logic. But even if the concept of masculinity and fatherhood is critiqued or reformed, it is not likely to be destroyed completely; fatherhood itself has not gone away, at least for now. If our understanding of the meaning of fatherhood changes, then our conception of how the metaphorical spiritual father may well change as well. But so long as the idea and institution of fatherhood is still relevant, the conception of God as spiritual father will continue to be relevant. And perhaps waking up to the negative effects of "toxic masculinity" may help us to discover the grace and power that can come from a closer relationship to the father aspect of God.

3. God is the Ruler of the Universe

Who is in charge of affairs here on Earth? When asked this question, we do not immediately think of God in his timeless and spaceless infinity: it's obvious that it's the rulers of the world are the presidents, prime ministers, ayatollahs, chancellors, and members of parliament who are in charge of governments along with those who are in charge of various aspects of functional power—bankers, industrialists, CEOs, cardinals, bureaucrats, military commanders and so on. These are the people who make decisions who affect our lives, who command military campaigns, scientific initiatives, and industrial production. They create the policies and regulations that define the structures of our world, manage the flow of supplies, control where resources are allocated, and determine how coordinate complex endeavors and react to unexpected events.

The concept of power and control is also seen at smaller scales than the worldwide. A governor of a US state is less powerful than a president, but he or she still has control over many aspects of the state's affairs, including its public school system. As an agent in this system, a principal of a school is responsible for the work of dozens of teachers, hundreds or thousands of students, and must deal with issues affecting the students' parents themselves and the entire community more broadly. And at the next level down, a teacher is responsible for the classroom experience of twenty or thirty students and their learning throughout the year. They need to make decisions about disciplinary actions and grade assessments and are empowered to do so, leaving marks that stay on the student's educational record for years. And the next level of power, the student is responsible for their own school career—they may study or procrastinate, figure out how to balance the workload of their classes, and perhaps choose to participate in extracurricular activities. Power, agency, and control can be seen at every locus of human activity, including every human organization of any size and scale, and every individual human being and his or her affairs.

The metaphor we explore here uses the aspect of power that is seen in human affairs to understand God: just as there are human leaders in charge of earthly affairs, from the world-wide to the local, so can we understand God as being the one who rules the Universe. God manages the affairs of the world with his or her executive capacity just as a great CEO or a President would manage the affairs of a company or a country. He manages both the big picture and the details, allocating the required resources and determining the ends to which they are put. We bow down to this aspect God in awe of the ability to coordinate such a complex endeavor as the management of all universal affairs. A starting point for relating to this aspect of God is to relate as we would a revered human leader, doing what he thinks is best and trusting in his judgement as he fits our work into the whole.

As with the previous metaphors, it's important to remember that this is a metaphor that reveals one aspect of God and should not be taken literally or absolutely. Like with the case of the earthly mother and father, all of our human leaders on earth are imperfect and make imperfect decisions; we only use them as an imperfect version of leadership and power to help us understand what Divine and perfect qualities of leadership and power would look like. Further, this metaphor is certainly not meant to encourage a blind worship of earthly power and authority—the days of Pharaohs being regarded as incarnations of God or of the doctrine of Divine Right of Kings are long gone, as we have seen the problems that this leads to.

Power is also not the only Divine principle, and God is not a figure of overpowering brute ruling strength alone. One example to consider is how much of the advancement of morality and justice through the ages has been by working against the existing order in power; justice is another Divine principle, even though it sometimes conflicts with power, and time and again those with limited political power but justice on their side have counted on God. And, of course, besides justice, there is the Divine principle of Love, which may sometimes align with Power, but as often as not seeks its own quite different ends.

It can be difficult to accept this metaphorical idea of God as ruler because it brings up difficult questions—namely, if God is in charge of everything that happens on earth, is he also responsible for the pain, disaster, and suffering here? There are explanations and answers that can be given—for one, it must be considered the material with which he starts and the eventual aim of his works to be able to evaluate his results, and God has started from the raw unconscious matter and is attempting over aeons to evolve a Divine working. And if it is difficult to imagine a benevolent God in this universe of suffering, surely it would make even less sense to imagine a God that was not in control of the universe, one who was somehow usurped by a malignant force that was greater than him. These arguments may or may not be convincing; but the person who finds them absolutely too discordant simply may not be able to countenance the existence of a benevolent God at all, much less one who rules over the universe.

The simple truth is that the way of God's working in the world is extremely complex and it needs a great deal of spiritual maturity and wisdom to begin understanding it. And a full understanding and accounting of this working is beyond the scope of this essay. But for those are willing to entertain the possibility of a benevolent God supporting the universe and who wish to understand his workings in the universe, this metaphorical idea presents a departure point: to imagine and to understand God as the ruler of the universe. Like those who wield power on earth, God creates the conditions for our world and for our lives; God sets our course; as a leader and ruler, God is just, wise, and powerful.

4. God as the Higher Self

So far we have been looking at the outside world to gather material for our metaphorical understandings of God. Most of our usual experience consists encountering and interacting with the world outside ourselves: the objects of the world, small and large, occupy our field of vision and bodily awareness; we are absorbed by our daily routines and activities; our lives and experiences take place within the context of social structures, some of which are close and immediate, others which are larger, more widely distributed, and are controlled by people outside of our immediate sphere. But there is one relationship that is even closer than all of the these—and for that reason is harder to see: the relationship with ourself. Our eyes point outward and it is easier to see our surroundings than the contents of our inner world. We never get to see the outside of our own face, except in the occasional glance in the mirror. As our outer appearance is paradoxically hidden, so is our inner experience. Even though we are submerged in a 24/7 stream of internal thoughts, emotions, and sensations, for that very reason we lose the view of the essence of our own consciousness and our consciousness tends to stay fixes on "outer" problems: worries, concerns, mundane occupations, TV shows, social discourse, and sometimes even addictive behavior.

But no matter how distracted we are, we all ultimately have a relationship with our own selves, and it is the most intimate relationship we know, or could even conceive of. In fact, all our relationships with others are wholly insubstantial in comparison. No matter how close you are to a best friend, a parent, or a lover, no matter how completely and totally you think you understand them, you will never know what it is to actually be them and feel like them, no matter how close you get. And there are inevitably periods of distance and alienation in even the closest relationships where one is able to apprehend the difference and separation one has from any other person. The experience of being a human, the very experience of all we know about being alive in the world— is ultimately experience of being oneself, an experienced which cannot be shared or even communicated in its fullness.

We all have a deep understanding of what it is to be a self—an understanding that is informed by decades of experience being our own self. And a powerful way of understanding God is that God is the higher version of our own selves. Like us, God is a conscious entity who deeply knows its own consciousness because its own consciousness consists of the entirety of its experience. Like us, God is an entity who has a form but also has an existence that is beyond form, defined by abstract consciousness.

But isn't it self-aggrandizing to to say that the best way to understand God might be though ourselves? And if we must liken a human to God—perhaps a dubious enough idea for those who don't believe that man could rise to the level of God—shouldn't it be someone with known and admirable qualities, like a religious leader, perhaps the most admirable, moral human we know? We know our own flaws too well to believe that we could learn anything by a direct comparison.

But like the example of the mother and father and the ruler, the point is not to deify our actual flawed selves any more than the previous metaphors were about deifying our existing and flawed parents and rulers. Rather, the idea I ask you to understand here is to use your understanding of your relationship to yourself to understand God, just as the previous examples involved understanding your relationship with others to better understand God. And just as those examples prove to have a unique aspect of God that is hard to understand otherwise, so it is with the idea of the metaphor of God as the higher self. The point is not to assert that we ourselves, with our human limitations and defects are literally God, but to point out how we can conceive of God by using our understanding of our own self as a starting point.

God is the highest possible version of oneself, containing all the possibilities and potentialities that we can understand for ourselves and many more; he or she has a pure consciousness that expresses the essential essence that we know by experience as our self. God has goals and motivations; and he or she also has a state of pure being aside from any goal or motivation. Of course, these goals and motivations will be pure and from the highest part of yourself, not from the selfish motives of the lower self. This "highest self" can only be perceived as an essential consciousness and is far beyond the grandest ideas of what we can hope to be here on earth; the actuality may not be achieved for a long time. If you have a long-term goal of being in some respected position in your career, or of accomplishing great deeds, or experiencing some deep happiness, that future vision of yourself will be closer to expressing a part of this "higher self", though it still will not be exhausting all the potentials of the higher self. If you project this higher self it forward far enough, into greater levels of consciousness, it merges into the general idea of God, because God is the essence and source of all consciousness and spirit; but even in this highest vision of self, you can still detect a part of it that is identifiably "you", like the color induced by a tinted lens.

The idea that we ourselves can have the same state of consciousness as God is an idea that rests on a metaphysical assumption that God is one with our present nature and there is a way to grow into that nature. And there are forms of spiritual discipline which seek the highest realization of this idea through learning to see how the purest form of one's own awareness is, in fact, the awareness of God. If this idea seems sacriligeous to you—if it doesn't make sense to compare yourself to God in any way, even as an exercise—you may wish to simply understand the idea that there is a higher, spiritual version of oneself that can be closer to God. In this way of understanding this section's metaphor, God is another self that is like us, and we understand God as another being that has a self just as we do. But the fuller sense of this metaphor does in fact suggest what may be seen as self-aggrandizing or heretical to some perspectives: that there is an aspect of God which can be understood as being the highest form of our very own consciousness.

What do we do with all these metaphors?

The goal of the spiritual path, or the spiritual life in general, is to advance towards God. But in order to do this, we need to have an initial understanding of what God is in order to understand just what we are pursuing and why we should pursue him. But we find that the most general or metaphysically correct description of God proves to be something too expansive, too abstract the mind to concretely seize. This led us to consider several metaphors that allow us to extend knowledge of the world and familiar human figures and relationships within it to a knowledge of God, and perhaps the beginning of a relationship with him.

But the variety of these metaphors and their worldly character has the potential to be confusing as well. Is it really possible for God to be so many different things—both mother and father, ruler and heavenly artist and more? What do these many forms, models, and aspects of God have to do with God himself? One must first understand that there is no contradiction between these various concepts. God is complex and multifaceted; each aspect of truth that we shared can be understood more deeply in itself, and there are many more possible aspects to learn and consider. Each spiritual or religious tradition is filled with at least one novel conception about God. God is an entity that is beyond any finite mental description or conception; but this means that there may be multiple mental conceptions used as provisional guides as long as we understand that they are partial and do not contain the entirety of God's truth.

Further, no matter what concept of God you start with, if it has some degree of truth and serves to connect you to God, it will converge with all other concepts in the end; there are no true contradictions in the nature of God. Whatever symbols or metaphors you use to understand God, the relationship will grow deeper and deeper, displaying newer and more subtle facets,  as you continue to relate through them. A true symbol is one that continues to reveal deeper and deeper levels of meaning, in the same way that a personal relationship with a friend, spouse, or child can continue to grow for years or decades while deepening in meaning and richness. But it is also possible is that to be drawn to many different forms and symbols over time, always learning to see new aspects of the Divine. We can see this process for humanity at large if we look at the the history of spiritual and religious symbolism: different symbols, forms, and figures held resonance with the human spirit in different cultures and time periods.

If some of these metaphors, images, or ideas are not helpful, not appealing, or seem to contradict other ideas, one can simply choose to disregard them—if the conception of spiritual parent hits too close to home, or if the conception of Divine ruler seems too harsh, for example. Or if all of the above ideas are helpful at different times, one could simply live with the contradictions and think of them as just so many incompatible ways to think about God; there are different seasons of the soul, and each may accommodate different clothing and attitude with its different weather.

Ultimately, any structures that you use to relate to God will be provisional understandings that may have to be revised as you deepen in spiritual knowledge and experience.  God has infinitely many aspects and a unique relationship with each person, so each person needs only to find the way of relating that works for them; the four ideas shared here are just a few initial templates. The important thing for those who are interested is to try to use these ideas to come into contact with a concrete reality, not just a mental abstraction.

[aurelliocheek]

25 years of Frontier Developments

The 25 year tale of Britain’s most ambitious indie.

If there’s one thing that Jonny Watts has learned during more than two decades at Frontier Developments, it’s that the act of making the games is just half of the equation. As chief creative officer and longtime stalwart of one of the UK’s most inventive and ambitious studios, Watts has been at the forefront of many its most famous titles – from classics like Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and LostWinds, to its most recent successes: Elite Dangerous, Planet Coaster and Jurassic World Evolution. But as he explains, the secret to Frontier’s success as a fully independent, self-publishing development house required the whole team to analyse, study and adapt to the changing industry in order to become the success it is today.

Based in the heart of leafy Cambridge, England, Frontier is one of the most eclectic video game studios in the development business, not just in the UK but the world over. Celebrating its momentous quarter century milestone this year, Frontier‘s games have featured everything from cute interactive animals to scientifically accurate black holes; death-defying theme park rides, to authentic recreations of prehistoric lizards. Now with around 30 fully fledged titles under its age-worn belt, this is a truly veteran studio, but one that exudes a passion and a verve that belies its age.

Perhaps more importantly, there’s an inherent intelligence to Frontier that comes across in its games. There‘s an artful comprehension for how interactive experiences need to make players feel; a mechanical understanding of the detail and depth required to create specific niche interest titles; and an operational rigour that allowed the studio to pinpoint how it wants to communicate with and sell to its players. This last bit, crucially, is what has made Frontier Developments such a shining case study for the many benefits of studio independence.

The rise to indie darling was never an overnight transition; in many ways, it was 25 years in the making.

Elite Dangerous, Frontier’s massively multiplayer space epic let’s players take control of their own starship. They can fight, explore and travel throughout an expansive cutthroat galaxy, consisting of more than 400 billion star systems.

The DNA of a startup For Watts himself, the game development dream begun back in 1987, when he would run home from school, leap up the stairs to his bedroom and get to work coding games on his own personal computer. Naturally, his mum didn’t approve of Watts’ creative flights of fancy, insisting there was no financial future in playing games. At the time, she was largely right, but little did she know that it wasn’t playing games that Watts ever dreamed of turning into a feasible profession – it was making them. “I got just as much enjoyment destructing how games worked, learning how to code, learning how to do art,” he says.

Watts did, despite his initial childhood dreams, follow his mum’s wise advice in the latter half of his education – at least through university, where he studied a zoology degree. He was still creating games while studying, though. It was something he could never escape from, and which sustained his creativity through his university career until he pivoted to study a masters in computer science. Back in those days, this was the main academic currency if you wanted to be a video game developer – there were far fewer routes into the industry then, so Watts capitalised on his opportunities where he could.

As an alumnus, he went almost directly to development, firstly at the fellow Cambridge studio, Sensible Software. “[They] were in the same location as where Frontier was founded,” he says, “they were just north of Cambridge and we were south of Cambridge. It’s a development hub, so we all knew about each other, and I’d known about David [Braben, Frontier’s legendary founder] from when I first got my Spectrum, playing Elite on it. Everyone at our age was influenced by that game but I was actually more influenced by another Braben game called Zarch. It was a polygon game but it had real-time particles, light source shading, real-time generated shadows. It was an absolute technical tour de force, so much so that it influenced me to do my masters in computer science, because I was just so interested in graphical programming.”

Little did Watts know that, only several years after he left university he would begin working with his development hero. He reminisces about the earliest days of the studio‘s history, when the studio was based out of a farm in the Cambridgeshire countryside with just ten staff to its name. “My first memory was going through the door – it was all open plan – and seeing David with a microphone doing chicken sounds for some of the proto sound effects in Dog’s Life,” he says, laughing. Braben’s chicken impression was just for the placeholders, but there’s no doubt it’s uncanny. “You saw a very human side to a very friendly company,” Watts continues. “It was very technologically advanced, but if something needed doing we’d all muck in.”

The expansion from ten staff to now over 400 has taken many years, but the studio still retains the DNA of that startup. Elite, co-developed by David Braben and Ian Bell, along with Zarch and Virus were created before Braben founded Frontier Developments. The studio was born out of a desire to make a wider range of games and to make them faster, rather than spend five or six years in a single development cycle. Establishing Frontier allowed Braben to hire like-minded individuals that brought ideas to the table, in order to create a collaborative space where, as Watts puts it, “the egos are left at the door”.

Fast forward 25 years and Watts is still sat just a short way from Braben’s desk at Frontier’s brand new office premises – a pristine multi-level labyrinth of glass and steel that houses the 400+ strong team, all of which are working on their own individual projects. From the talented group still developing updates and expansions for Elite Dangerous, to the developers that are still adding content and new ideas to Jurassic World Evolution. Frontier continues to update its existing games heavily with new ideas and content, but that’s not to say it isn’t busy at work on future unannounced projects that span far into the future. What‘s perhaps most impressive is that the team has retained the spark and soul that made it such a brilliant upstart back in the early nineties.

The highly acclaimed Planet Coaster gives players limitless freedom to build rides and scenery piece by piece, with advanced management simulation gameplay and a connected global village where everyone can share in the creativity of players around the world.

Fired up by new technologies It must’ve been an alien prospect to think about back in 1994, when Braben and his team were hard at work in their tiny studio on a Cambridgeshire farm. But the technological power of Elite and its resounding popularity paved the way for a studio that relied on powerful, advanced proprietary technology to create some of the most believable worlds in video games. “David is a man who, along with Ian Bell, built an entire galaxy on the comparably unpowered BBC Micro, before creating Zarch for the Acorn Archimedes,” Watts says. “It wasn’t a big gaming machine, at all, but it fascinated him because of how powerful it was and what he could do with it. He did similar with Darxide for the 32x, which wasn‘t really well-supported by third parties but he looked at the technology and thought ‘I bet I can do some really crazy stuff with the technology in here’ Sure enough, it‘s one of the most technically advanced games on 32x.”

You can trace this trend all the way through Frontier’s history – instances where the company just saw an exciting piece of new technology and got fired up about it, using the bleeding edge advancements in hardware to enhance the game experience. And not just doing it for visual‘s sake, but learning how to leverage the machines to make the experience even more visceral, real, believable and authentic. With time the games machines themselves have, of course, become more advanced, with storage space and memory reading capacity increasing to the point where games can render enormous 3D environments, improve graphical fidelity to resolutions like 4K, not to mention feature more voice work, deeper simulations and much more. Features like shadow technology all sound like obvious and even boring, unimpressive staples of modern games nowadays, but the team at Frontier has been one of those driving this technology forward for 25 years, always revolutionising and always innovating.

A galaxy like no other Elite Dangerous is perhaps the purest example of this, taking the core components established with the original Elite and using Frontier’s newly expanded, talented team to build a modern 1:1 recreation of the entire Milky Way galaxy. It is, at its very core, a natural evolution of the game created in 1984, its enormous scale and detail made technically possible by the many advancements that Frontier has made since then. At the heart of it is a team who bring untold levels of talent to the process.

“The guys who did the stellar forge – the way we calculate the galaxies from real scientific data – one has a PhD in astrophysics, and one did astronomy in university,” Watts says. “There’s maybe five people in the whole country, in the world, who could do that, who have the strange crossover between a degree in astrophysics and a degree in computer programming, an interest in video games, and an interest in Elite. And of course David has his Cambridge science degree. A lot of us have science backgrounds. We’re, at worst, amateur enthusiasts. At best we’re actually pretty clued up people who have an absolute passion for the subjects we work on. We’re still reading, researching, looking at articles, stimulated by it.”

Elite Dangerous is a wonderful melding of passion and intelligence, and one of the the largest video game worlds ever created. It boasts a scale unlike few others, but the magic of Frontier is that there is depth and detail to match the scale. Not only can you gawp at the macro features of the game; faster-than-light travelling across the galaxy, zipping close to distant stars, landing in space stations and rovering around the rugged, rocky surface of exoplanets; you can also invest hundreds if not thousands of hours into role-playing in an interconnected universe that rewards your intelligence. Players can communicate, trade and fight with one another; team up and explore distant star systems; invest and sell trading goods in an ever changing economic world; create clans that fight it out for territorial control of the many segments of this galactic world. There is politics, economics and real struggle in this universe. It’s not just huge – it’s believable. “It feels very real,” Watts says, “and when you’re in it you feel very vulnerable.”

Authenticity and real science The two other of Frontier’s most recent games – Planet Coaster and Jurassic World Evolution – follow similar trends, creating worlds that are believable despite being completely different to galaxy sized space role-playing games. Planet Coaster revels in a beautiful, charming and gentle aesthetic that welcomes you into its colourful simulations and lets you spend dozens of hours creating your dream theme parks. But hidden under the hood are complex codes and authentic simulations all based on the real life flow systems utilised in actual theme parks. Watts himself is an avid theme park enthusiast, regularly visiting parks across the UK and beyond to get his roller coaster thrills with his two daughters, and it’s an intense passion that clearly comes through in the finished games.

“My favourite theme park is – and this is really hard – Disneyland,” Watts says, explaining how the team had the chance to build a 1:1 recreation of the original Disneyland, in Anaheim, which happens to be the only theme park Walt Disney saw before his death. It was re-created for Disneyland Adventures and Frontier captured the sights and sounds of this original landmark down to the most minute of idiosyncrasies. “We were so committed to authenticity. When you feature a Disney princess from the 60s or 70s we had to use, where possible, the original stars. That kind of detail really did transport you into that magical world.”

“Disneyland is a strange place because once you go there, all your troubles just evaporate. I went there with my 18 and 20 year-old daughters and I‘m suddenly a dad again rather than the person giving them a lift back from the pub or something,” he says. “It‘s a wonderful place. And I really like the theming in parks. It transports me to another world. Again, it goes back full circle to another believable world.”

This hidden authenticity enforces the realism and believability of Planet Coaster, despite the otherwise cartoon looks. It’s an approach that allows Frontier’s game to further stand the test of time simply because the foundations themselves are built on real science. It’s not surface entertainment that relies entirely on the graphics or the characters, instead utilising the real world information that’s baked into the very code itself.

In Jurassic World Evolution players take charge of operations on the legendary islands of the Muertes archipelago and bring the wonder, majesty and danger of dinosaurs to life.

Dinosaurs and Kinect experiments As for Jurassic World Evolution, the real life science is less concrete simply because of the 65 million year old nature of the creatures in question, but it’s “unbelievably authentic to the films,” Watts says. “We’re using the original actors, the things that have been derived from the films and the books. There’s actually a bit of zoology in there; the genetics, going back to my zoology degree. We use science and reality and authenticity to make things believable. We have so much accuracy in our games, and everything we do we want to have this grounding. We had a guy called Dr Jack Horner, and he was a consultant paleontologist on the Jurassic films back in the day, actually working with Michael Crichton. We asked him to come over [to talk about the game] and I like to think he didn’t do it just because of the paycheque, but because he saw that we had a passion, and an intelligence, and a dedication to doing these things.”

Frontier doesn’t just limit that adventurous and authentic approach to scientific accuracy to its software. Many of its hardware experiments have similar traits, including the Kinect experiments that it embarked on in the mid noughties with the Xbox 360, when the team was still partnered with publisher Microsoft. What makes this all fundamentally possible is Cobra, the studio’s own game engine, which it has been consistently and steadily updating for many years. Rich Newbold has been the Executive Producer at Frontier for a while now, joining over 10 years ago. “Cobra is constantly evolving and growing,” he says. “It has a dedicated code team working on improving it as well as us generating new technology for each game and merging that into it. On Kinectimals, we developed technology to improve our animation system to allow a more usable way to use state machines and logic on a character. This then got developed more and more with Kinect Disneyland Adventures and again with Zoo Tycoon, Planet Coaster and Jurassic World Evolution. The constant improvements to the render system for each release feeds back into Cobra and we then use that in the new projects. We‘re always looking to develop and re-use the core technologies across our projects. It’s a huge asset to have such a flexible engine in-house.”

The entire brief for Kinectimals was to create animals that look, sound and feel alive to the players. It was a challenge that Frontier relished as it had the chance to bring its creativity into even more physical environments, connecting cute animals on the screen with players in the real world. It hadn’t really been done before – at least not in such a mainstream way – and Frontier was the mastermind behind the code and tech that would give Kinectimals a real sense of life to the players.

“Even though [the animals] are beautifully cute, the AI behind them is super sophisticated,” Watts says. “There’s something like 500, 600, 700 animations on there, all reacting to make that animal feel alive.” The expertise the team built up animating the animals in A Dog’s Life proved beneficial for the work on Kinectimals. “I remember doing a Dog’s Life lecture at Bournemouth university,” Watts continues. “One of the students came up with a question – he said, ‘are those animals alive?’ A few seconds later I realised it was the first time he’d seen an animal on a computer game screen that was reacting in an organic, non-repetitive way. There’s a lot of attention to detail that stands the test of time.

“The thing I was most proud of was the subtle things that we did; the way you move your head, the way you move your body, the animal would react and position itself to you,” he continues. “If you didn‘t do anything, the animal would try and get your attention. It was always monitoring you. It was always trying to stimulate you to do something and that‘s what I was quite interesting in with Kinect – we can obviously do the clever stuff where you throw a ball [but] it’s what we can do behind the scenes which made those animals come alive. To be honest, it‘s what Kinect did the best; interpret what you could do behind the scenes. We also did something which I thought was really cool in Zoo Tycoon with Kinect. We wanted to do animal enrichment with chimpanzees. And what was really good is that you could move your face and move and blink and the chimpanzee would come up to the screen and mimic you. That‘s what they try doing in real life. What‘s even better is when it didn‘t quite work, you thought – and this is the illusion of game creation – that the chimpanzee was being a bit cheeky even though it might not have recognised it. That was really subtle. It was really interesting to see people properly interact with human natural movement with essentially what is an AI ability.”

With Kinectimals Frontier succeeded in creating virtual animals that felt, sounded and looked alive to players.

Military doctrine and a DIY approach The same too goes for VR, which the studio invested in heavily for Elite Dangerous. Again, earlier work stood the team in good stead – Frontier had already worked in secret on software for Microsoft’s Hololens. The goal was to create one of the most immersive virtual reality experiences available. In many ways it was the perfect fit – a beautiful, expansive world in which you remain stationary as a player, controlling a moving vehicle without having to move your own body. It dodges the usual problems associated with VR – namely, the gimmicky tacked-on movement controls that mean virtual reality shooters or sports games are nigh on impossible to get right. In Elite, you control your spaceship from the cockpit, but are treated to the immense scale and scope of a space game.

“If you launch in a Lakon ship – they‘re with the ones that have a glass bottom – you come out of the station and look down and you almost have a sense of vertigo,” Watts says. “When I‘ve really got the lights turned down, I almost feel like I‘m insignificant in the world and I‘m just trying to make my way. That was really cool.”

“The second thing from a combat point-of-view; in combat you have an amazing competitive advantage. That‘s why all the canopies are glass – because when you are in VR, if a spaceship goes over the top of your craft, you can move your head and look at them. This is military doctrine – in dogfighting, he who sees first wins and really the absolute premise is that we wanted to get dogfighting to be absolutely as visceral as possible and as accurate. What‘s really interesting is in space, if we were really being super accurate, in space you‘d be going so fast that dogfighting wouldn‘t [really work]. All the best space games mess around with speed to make it more akin to World War Two. There was quite a lot of research in combat, which facilitated the use of VR and that‘s why it‘s an amazing experience, because it‘s not just a mechanism to make you feel part of the world, it gives you a competitive advantage in a very large component of the game.”

Kickstarting Frontier’s success Frontier has always had a DIY approach to its development, typically finding and hiring the right people for the job – rollercoaster experts, astrophysicists and more. It’s created a studio that has a wonderful camaraderie that encourages collaboration, and which allows them to go all in on projects. However, it was the transition to being self-published and fully independent that allowed them to take those risks to the next level, making decisions based on what the studio as an entity wanted to embark on, and not being beholden to outside influences. Digital distribution was the catalyst that made all of that possible.

“In the old days, you release your cassette or your 3.5“ disk and never update it,” Watts says. “Maybe, just maybe, you‘d get another disk as a cover disk on a magazine to do a critical flaw but now we‘re distributing digitally and being independent, we can make decisions and keep telling more stories. It‘s fantastic.”

It’s generally regarded that Elite Dangerous was Frontier’s first real self-published game, but in fact it was LostWinds that paved the way for Frontier’s future. “The beautiful thing about Lost Winds is it‘s highly acclaimed, won awards, people really liked it,” Watts says. “It had a beautiful vibe but it was a game that we started and finished without any publisher involved. But publishers can be very helpful. When you make a game, I think there needs to be a little bit of antagonism like in The Beatles, you need someone to critique what you have done to make it better and not settle for second best. We had to fulfill both roles and be our own harshest critics.”

The happiness clearly inspired the team to push further towards full autonomy over their own destiny. Toward the end of 2012, the team unveiled the aforementioned Kickstarter program for Elite Dangerous, which was one of the most successful crowd-funding projects of the time. It propelled Frontier forward and gave them an answer to the question that Braben, Watts and the other senior team members had been asking themselves: is Elite still relevant? Does it still retain the popularity to be a big hit?

Fast-forward five or six years and it’s a model that Frontier adopts for all of its games. “It’s good from a profit point of view, but we also engage directly with players,” says Watts. “We know what they want and it’s an amazing partnership. One of the things that people say that when you self publish it’s so good because you can do what you want and haven’t got this external producer – when we had the Elite Dangerous kickstarter we had 20,000 external producers. They were our conscience. We had exactly the same goals, obviously different ways of getting to those goals, but they really stimulated us to do better. What was really good about it was that it was sort of a validation for our idea. It gave us such confidence to make the game that we all wanted.”

Elite Dangerous is continually evolving, adding new features, narrative and in-game content with each new season.

A clear vision for the future The transition itself was made possible by learning from their excellent working relationship with major publishers like Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. Frontier had always had a fantastic game-making ability from the beginning, but there’s a whole host of other things involved in releasing and selling a video game rather than just producing it on the creative side. Frontier learned a huge amount about maintaining quality, and all the nuances of how publishing works, from working with publishers in the decades prior. “We had such an amazing relationship that [publishers] were very open with us,” Watts says, “and we had insight into the other half of releasing a game. We spent thousands and thousands of hours understanding that and being exposed by these very gracious yet demanding publishers, and that really trained us.”

When the Elite Dangerous Kickstarter was launched, Frontier‘s publishing team was a team of no one. A few years later and that publishing team is over 35 people strong, complete with dedicated product managers, graphics artists, trailer editors, a dedicated community team and its own in-house PR and Marketing teams. The entire company approached publishing very seriously, and dedicated a lot of resources to making the publishing side of the business successful, ramping it up at such an incredible rate. Over the last 25 years the studio has gone from the Cambridgeshire farm, to a single space on the Science Park industrial park, to three individual offices on the Science Park, to its own space on the Science Park. It‘s remarkable.

“We‘re still really friendly with the people that we dealt with,” Watts says. “It‘s quite interesting that when we released Elite Dangerous on Xbox, it was like dealing with old friends again. Microsoft, Sony, whoever we work with knew that we were obviously super professional and hit our deadlines and our budgets, but our quality would always exceed. We exceeded it because we are so passionate about making games. In some way, it was never a development issue transitioning. Yes, we can develop games, but guess what: we can also sell them and we can communicate with our players, we can communicate with the world, we get our story out.”

“The relationships we have across every single component of what it takes to get a game out there has grown magnificently. We‘re a super professional company and I think we managed our transition so well on so many levels. Again, I just think that from where I am sitting, I think it‘s an absolute pleasure to be in the games industry. Between developers and publishers we all know how hard it is to make a game, we know how much passion we put into a game and we‘re all working together. It‘s just a really nice industry.”

As for the future, it looks very bright for Frontier. There’s still the passion and love for video games that existed 25 years ago, only now it’s distilled, straight from the makers themselves without any middle men. What you see is what you get, and it seeps into every aspect of the games – from development to PR and community events. “We still approach games in a very similar way,” Watts says, “and the passion that I put into Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 is 100 percent [the same level of] passion I put into Planet Coaster. We‘ve grown so much and over the last few years it‘s just this on-going process. Now we‘re relying on our own IP.”

The team are understandably tight-lipped on what’s next, not ready to reveal whatever creative, ingenious project they’re cooking up behind the scenes. No doubt it’ll be something packed with detail, and rich with a British soul. But Frontier is quick to reassure that there’s still an ongoing commitment to the many games they’ve already got out there in the world – Watts himself is still excited about all of them, and they fit exactly into the creatively unique, technologically challenging framework that they want to achieve at Frontier.

  The timeline of Frontier Developments

1994 David Braben had actually been making games since 1983, so he was almost a decade into his development career by the time he founded Frontier Developments. It was a monumental time, with Frontier’s first actual game being the CD32 port of Frontier: Elite II. Braben’s own older games – Zarch and the original Elite (created with Ian Bell) – are considered archival Frontier titles. While they weren’t made under the Frontier name, they influenced the studio’s output and are part of its DNA even today.

2004 It was ten years into Frontier’s life and the team had a huge success with Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. It was a much loved theme park simulation game, and one that sold well over 10 million copies worldwide, making it Frontier’s best-selling game to date. Thanks to the studio’s hard work, it was also a technologically bold game with graphical settings that stretched the most powerful graphics cards of the era. That meant that the game itself had a very long shelf life and didn’t begin looking dated until long after release.

2008 LostWinds acted as one of Frontier’s experimental games, letting the team dip its toes into the water and see how self-published games could be made and marketed. Originally released on the Nintendo Wii, the popularity of LostWinds saw it later ported to iOS and later to PC for a wider player base to experience. It isn’t the most well-known of Frontier’s 30 or so games, but it’s arguably one of the most important in its transition to a fully independent studio.

2014 While 2014 marked the official release of Elite Dangerous, the game’s story starts much earlier. In 2012 the studio embarked on a Kickstarter project to fund the game’s development. It was a resounding success, with players desperate to get a new, modern version of the much-loved space franchise. It also marked the real turning point in Frontier’s history, launching the studio onto the stock market and capitalising on the upticking trend of digital distribution to create a fully independent studio. It’s a model that’s made Frontier and several other studios like it a great success.

2018 Jurassic World Evolution saw the many lessons learned with the success of Elite Dangerous applied to a widespread release across multiple platforms. Whereas Elite Dangerous had a staggered launch across PS4, Xbox and PC, Jurassic World Evolution was released on all three at once. While the team worked with Universal on several parts of the project, it was developed and published by Frontier themselves. When it released last year it fast became the team’s best launch of all time, selling one million copies in just five weeks.

Wolfgang Fischer

The post 25 years of Frontier Developments appeared first on Making Games.

25 years of Frontier Developments published first on https://leolarsonblog.tumblr.com/

[watchilove]

The UR-100 takes us on a journey through both time and space, two concepts at the very core of URWERK. Using its orbiting satellite hours and minute hands, the UR-100 displays both time (hours and minutes) and space (distance travelled), merging these two concepts in the creation of the all-new UR-100 SpaceTime.

The UR-100 SpaceTime features URWERK’s iconic orbital hour satellites, differing however in one significant way. Rather than the red-arrow-tipped minute pointers on the hour satellites disappearing after 60 minutes when replaced by the next, the UR-100 minute arrow passes beneath and between subsidiary dials, reappearing to display intriguing new astronomical indications: distance travelled on Earth and distance travelled by Earth.

URWERK UR-100 SpaceTime

Distance travelled on Earth

The first indicator at 10 o’clock evaluates the distance in kilometers that we have travelled on the Earth without even leaving our desks! It is based on the average speed of the rotation of the Earth on its axis at the equator, covering a distance of 555 km every 20 minutes.

URWERK UR-100 SpaceTime

Distance travelled by the Earth around the sun

Directly opposite at 2 o’clock, the same hand (well it looks like the same hand, but is actually one of three) continues its journey to another celestial indication featuring the distance the Earth has travelled in its orbit around the sun – a journey spanning some 35,740 km every 20 minutes.

The UR-100 simultaneously presents three different space-time realities, providing a thought-provoking reminder of our voyage through time and space.

URWERK UR-100 SpaceTime

“For me, watches have a philosophical dimension. They are a physical and abstract reproduction of our situation on Earth, with the dial representing the equator, simultaneously in constant motion while seemingly stationary for us,” says Martin Frei, chief designer and co-founder of URWERK.

Felix Baumgartner, master watchmaker and the other co-founder of URWERK agrees: “We live in a universe governed by three dimensions — time, rotation, and orbit — that we attempt to measure and master, but what escapes us is this notion of spacetime.”

URWERK UR-100 SpaceTime

Calibre 12.01

Powering the UR-100 SpaceTime is the automatic Caliber 12.01, with baseplates in ARCAP and a power reserve of 48 hours. The automatic winding rotor is regulated by a flat turbine, the Windfäng (Swiss German for “air trap”) that minimizes shocks to the rotor bearing and reduces over-winding and wear and tear. The rotor, which is partially supported on its periphery by the flat turbine, also has a larger diameter, resulting in a lower mass and therefore less wear.

In-house testing of the flat turbine rotor regulation system found that it provided significant and exponential protection against excessive rotor speeds (the Windfänger rotates six times for every rotation of the winding rotor).

URWERK UR-100 SpaceTime

The design and construction of the URWERK Caliber 12.01 required incredibly high precision because of the extremely tight tolerances between the minute hand and three different dials and domed sapphire crystal it passes between.

The shape of the case may remind URWERK aficionados of the aesthetics of the brand’s early watches. As Martin Frei explains, “Towards the end of the 90’s, we unveiled the UR-101 and UR-102, the UR-100 is a little like our ‘Back to the Future.’ We broke down our approach and used some of the original design elements of our early constructions. The case of the UR-100 is a deconstruction of an early URWERK case. The steel dome of our historic models is reproduced in sapphire crystal. The form is emphasized by the titanium and steel case. I constantly question the diktat of symmetry and played with proportions to catch the eye.”

URWERK UR-100 SpaceTime

Genesis

The URWERK UR-100 was inspired by a nineteenth-century pendulum clock — a present to Felix Baumgartner from his father Geri, a now-retired renowned clock restorer — made by Gustave Sandoz for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.

The regulator-style dial does not show time. Instead it shows the distance of the Earth’s rotation at the equator. The extra-long pendulum beats every 2.16 seconds, making every oscillation one kilometer. The main dial has a scale of 10,000 kilometers, shown in units of 100 kilometers, so that each tick (half oscillation) indicates 500 meters traveled on the Earth’s surface (at the equator). The top subdial (10 km) is divided into 10 units, while the lower subdial showing a total of 40,000 km — approximately the equatorial circumference of the Earth — is divided into increments of 1,000 km.

URWERK UR-100 SpaceTime

Urwerk UR-100 SpaceTime Technical Specifications

URWERK presents two introductory editions: the UR-100 Iron (titanium and steel) and the UR-100 Black (titanium and steel with black PVD), both limited to 25 pieces.

Movement

Calibre: UR 12.01 with self-winding system governed by low-profile planetary turbine minimizing over-winding and wear

Jewels: 39

Frequency: 28,800 vph – 4Hz

Power reserve: 48 hours

Materials: Orbital satellite hours turning on Geneva crosses in beryllium bronze; open-worked aluminum carousel; triple baseplates in ARCAP

Finishes: Circular graining, sanding, brushing

Chamfered screw heads

Hour and minute indications in Super-LumiNova

Indications

Orbital hours; minutes, distance travelled on Earth’s equator in 20 minutes, distance Earth travels around the sun in 20 minutes

Case

Materials: Case in black PVD-coated titanium and stainless steel

Dimensions: Width 41.0 mm, length: 49.7 mm, thickness: 14.0 mm

Glass: Sapphire crystal

Water resistance: Pressure tested to 3ATM (30m)

Price CHF 48,000 (Swiss francs / tax not included)

ABOUT URWERK

“We don’t try to bring out yet another new version of existing complicated mechanisms,” explains watchmaker Felix Baumgartner, co-founder of URWERK. “Our watches are unique because they are all designed as original works, which makes them rare and priceless. Our main aim is to go beyond the traditional horizons of watchmaking.” The original styling of each URWERK model is signed by chief designer Martin Frei, the company’s other co-founder. “I come from a background where creativeness has no limits. I am in no way prisoner of the traditional constraints of watchmaking, and I can therefore be freely inspired by my cultural heritage.”

Felix Baumgartner, a watchmaker like his father and grandfather, has time running through his veins. A graduate of the Solothurn watchmaking school, Felix learned the secret language of minute repeaters, tourbillons, and perpetual calendars at his father’s bench. Martin Frei is the artistic counterpart to his partner’s technical expertise. Accepted into Lucerne’s college of art and design in 1987, Martin delved into every form of visual artistic expression from painting and sculpture to video, emerging as a mature artist. The two men met by chance and discovered a common fascination with the measurement of time, spending hours analyzing the gap between the watches they saw in the shops and the vision of their future creations.

While URWERK is a youthful company established in 1997, it is regarded as a pioneer of the independent watchmaking scene. Producing just 150 watches a year, the company sees itself as an artisanal studio where expertise coexists with avant-garde styling. The company manufactures modern, complicated, and unprecedented watches that are still in keeping with the most demanding criteria of fine watchmaking: independent research, expressive design, advanced materials, and handcrafted finishes.

The name URWERK comes from the ancient city of Ur of the Chaldees in Mesopotamia, founded nearly 6,000 years ago. It is here that the Sumerian inhabitants first established units of time based on the shadows cast by its monuments. “Ur” also means “primeval” or “original” in the German language, while “Werk” can mean either an achievement or a mechanism. Therefore, “Urwerk” can be translated as an original movement — a tribute to generations of watchmakers whose work has resulted in what we know today as haute horlogerie, or superlative watchmaking.

URWERK UR-100 SpaceTime Gallery

URWERK UR-100 SpaceTime

URWERK UR-100 SpaceTime

URWERK UR-100 SpaceTime

URWERK UR-100 SpaceTime

URWERK UR-100 SpaceTime

URWERK UR-100 SpaceTime

URWERK UR-100 SpaceTime

News: URWERK UR-100 SpaceTime The UR-100 takes us on a journey through both time and space, two concepts at the very core of…

[harryandmeghan0-blog]

Dating A disabled girl: Rules to understand and Follow

New Post has been published on https://harryandmeghan.xyz/dating-a-disabled-girl-rules-to-understand-and-26/

Dating A disabled girl: Rules to understand and Follow

Dating A disabled girl: Rules to understand and Follow

Any relationship with an individual with disabilities indicates the current presence of strong love plus the feeling you need that it is this person. Just such facets enables going right through all of the issues and problems of residing as well as a person that is disabled. Disabled singles someone can that is dating over come their dilemmas – there are numerous samples of it.

The selection of this true love needs to be last and aware because by entering into wedding having a disabled individual, you are taking complete duty for their present condition. Because of the nature of this full life of individuals withdisabilities, you shall need certainly to simply take care of her or him, choose the right items, as an example, active wheelchairs – a crucial product for numerous people who have disabilities.

Frequently, the existence of a liked and person that is loving an extremely useful impact on the disabled individual. You can find a huge number of instances where dependable help and love aided a ill individual to deal with the illness or reduce its manifestations. There are also understood situations of complete recovery of individuals whenever health practitioners predicted immobility that is complete of bones.

Family life with a disabled person is an amazing duty that the Healthy partner shall need certainly to just take in. And you also will need to take care perhaps perhaps not Only of yourself and the young kids but in addition for the partner, who’s restricted, as being a guideline, in movement. A relationship having a person that is disabled be doomed to disintegration if your person that is healthy maybe maybe maybe not show proper understanding and persistence.

The recovery of individuals with disabilities in a wedding centered on love and persistence does occur as being a outcome of this look of plans and hopes for the bright future having a loving and one that is loved. It really is these facets that add perseverance and energy to conquer problems linked not merely with the illness but additionally with life. For instance, in this undertaking, individuals with disabilities consent to operations that are risky they might perhaps maybe maybe not choose until that point, they stubbornly undergo rehabilitation procedures, devote more time for you exertion that is physical which could sooner or later resulted in renovation of lost motor functions. Dating when it comes to disabled may be the real option to live a complete life.

What exactly is It Like Dating a Disabled Individual

Relationships with someone having an impairment are basically different from normal relationships. Although, for certain, you have got heard various things from those who don’t have experience that is relevant. Such individuals are frequently led by their ideas that are own one thing. Consequently, they are perhaps maybe not the most effective advisers.

In fact, a relationship having a disabled individual is a test for your courage, commitment, and persistence. The test which you will need to over come over and over repeatedly – at the very least in the beginning. Like in any relationship, you need to cope with society in most its manifestations. Friends, family members, public viewpoint – all of these are facets that may influence your daily life.

It takes place to make certain that a person that is healthy into a relationship having a disabled individual becomes the thing of emotional analysis by other people. Particularly cynical individuals may see this being a mercantile interest (within the occasion that the disabled individual or their loved ones has significant product wide range) or a craving that is unhealthy “adventures” (yes, i’ve also come across this viewpoint). If you should be someone who is delicate to public viewpoint, it’s going to be difficult for you personally. You are going to create a brand new development for your self: there is certainly just the specter of universal understanding in culture. This is applicable also towards the modern nations associated with the West.

In culture, you can find a large number of urban myths and prejudices associated with intimate relationships with individuals with disabilities. I happened to be especially aggravated bythe subject of intercourse – as always, the best quantity of incredible conjectures hovers around intimate life. As an example, we usually heard that individuals with disabilities are often horny. They have been therefore sex that is lacking they’ve been prepared to get it done with anybody whenever you want. Can you picture that? And also this is the genuine viewpoint of lots of individuals i am aware. But there is however yet another extreme: Ihave met the reluctance of some of my friends (who, by the real means, can be smart and mature) to generally share intercourse. In the beginning, I didn’t actually know very well what ended up being happening. It took me personally a complete large amount of tiresome reasoning to finally find out what was incorrect. I’ve been coping with and dating a disabled girl for 36 months. This woman is wheelchair bound. So, it appeared to them which our intercourse is just a specific as a type of pathology. This really is one thing from the ordinary.

Well, I’d to consult with every one of them individually – and just from then on, they understood that it was the essential sex that is ordinary some technical nuances.

In reality, to conquer all problems and develop your algorithm that is own of behavior, you ought to glance at just just just just how a disability responds to your partnerto situations that are certain. If she or he prefers to be separate – allow him or her stay such. Usually do not impose your assistance when it’s maybe not required. Please feel free to inquire of concerns – as with any relationship, this will be a key success element.

I believe, girls dating a man that is disabled comparable issues and misunderstandings with culture. A relationship with a disabled individual is an ongoing discussion. We should bear in mind this. When you look at the initial phases of our relationship, we usually forgot concerning this and place myself in unpleasant (although I could just ask what I should do in those or for me) situations other circumstances. As time passes, we acquired this type of discussion skill so it also aided me in my own expert activities 🙂

Online dating sites for Disabled: Advice And Tips

Exactly what can you state about online dating sites? It really is every-where. This can be an important an element of the life of many people – it, you may if you do not believe simply google the statistics. Online dating sites has long been complicated, whatever marketers working in you would be told by this industry. But exactly what if you are disabled and attempting to get a true love online? The principles of online dating for the game that is disabled alot more complicated at this stage. My gf explained about this. Despite all of the problems, we nevertheless handled to create relationships, compliment of certainly one of free sites that are dating for disabled that will be placed in the section that is next of article. We shall maybe not state just what this web site is mainly because no one will pay for marketing 🙂 we went a long way before we found each other.

As soon as my gf discovered an article that is similar which it absolutely was told just what a disabled individual should achieve this that his look for one other half on the world wide web wouldn’t normally end up in failure but result in an innovative new, bright future. Guidelines which you see might seem trivial to you personally. This can be their strength that is main most readily useful advice is actually the easiest one. Individuals simply want one thing special, some type of secret. But this will not take place.

Therefore, what’s going to help you with online dating sites?

Honesty. Yes, you’ll find nothing more powerful than sincerity and honesty from ab muscles start of growth of your relationship. Particularly if you are disabled. You have to genuinely inform individuals regarding your impairment and about all the nuances connected with it. This is actually the only method to develop a happy relationship. Impairment impacts not merely the life span of this disabled individual But also the full life of men and women with who he or she lives. You need to actually inform precisely how a person’s life can change she decides to build if he or a relationship to you and begin a household.

Self-esteem. Before you begin looking for a couple online, think of your self-esteem. Possibly there are many points you nonetheless still need to exert effort on. If you aren’t certain it will be very that you are an independent person burdensome for you. Individuals feel poor and sometimes look for to make use of it. Right while you perceive your self in a confident means, your success in the intimate front side will significantly enhance. This might be a successful fact.

live talk sexy Organize a primary date in a familiar and place that is convenient. Whenever happening a date when it comes to time that is first ensure that absolutely absolutely absolutely nothing will distract you against chatting with a brand new buddy. This perfect destination should function as the one you understand well and in which you are feeling confident.

Usually do not drink way too much. Even if you’re simply hunting for a partner for a dating website. These tips might seem a bit strange. I happened to be additionally astonished whenever I first heard it from my gf. As it happens that a large amount of individuals are drinking alcoholic beverages (our company is perhaps perhaps not speaking about 1 or 2 cups of wine, needless to say) and are also attempting to establish relationship online. Being outcome, they lose the capability to evaluate and finally realize that they failed to inform one thing about by themselves, they lied, and their partner, the truth is, is not exactly just just what he/she had been final evening whenever you drank a few extra whiskeys.

Most Useful Disabled Internet Dating Sites

Match.com

This website possesses actually huge individual database. Included in this, there are numerous people who have disabilities. As soon as we talk about “many people”, we actually suggest it. Internet dating is quite determined by exactly exactly exactly just how numerous pages you can studybefore a mate is chosen by you. This web site offers such a chance, though it won’t have any specificity – it is simply a large and proven dating internet site, where several thousand individuals find mates each and every day.

Elite Singles

The viewers for this site that is dating dramatically not the same as the market of other services that are similar. right right right Here more severe and internet marketers are going out. Significantly more than 80percent of the viewers possesses college level and a good degree that is scientific. This significantly impacts the standard of interaction, including among people who have disabilities. right right right Here individuals are mainly thinking about your intellect, and never in particularities of the physiology.

Impairment Match

This web site is based in britain. It had been specifically made to enable individualswith disabilities to communicate and look freely for the partner without Spending time that is too much their issues. The website is quickly developing and today it’s utilized by residents of numerous nations.

Meet Disabled Singles

Another task made for the absolute most communication that is comfortable individuals with disabilities. The website has its own filters and a convenient search system, thanks to which your chances of success shall be really great. In the event that you are searching for online disabled relationship for free, test it.

[anarchistbanjo]

The Astral Planes

We have explored how cellular life evolved from a photon driven energy system that forced evolutionary changes and quantum leaps into new organizational patterns. This is basic chaos theory. We have also spoken about how cellular life gave off living energy into the astral. There was something that remains stable and allows the cell to remain a cell even when it attracts nutrients and expels waste matter.  

This organizing intelligence seeks to keep the cell alive and vital. In higher organisms this forms the rudimentary Shadow or Id. It is a secondary personality responsible for keeping us alive and healthy. The Shadow creates the neural pathways inside our brain. When our awareness is linked with the Shadow it remains within our physical bodies. It is also the beginning of our Soul.

Upon death the life force leaves the dead physical matter and leaves an astral ghost or memory trace of the entire life time from birth to death. These memory traces exist within the time/space universe as the astral worlds. The astral worlds show memory traces of the ghosts of the past and of the future as it  has already happened.

Our awareness is an individual energy pulse that has selected one particular life time and is traveling through that life time experiencing it as full 3 dimensional sensory awareness in the present moment. Metaphysically we are where our awareness is.

The astral worlds cover the entire earth. The pulse of our awareness can travel through the astral worlds as well. In Jungian psychology this is known as the Collective. Freud called it the Super Ego. Mystics call it Cosmic Consciousness and magicians call it the Holy Guardian Angel.

It is not really alive until we encounter it. Our awareness brings it to life once more as we re-live things that have happened before. In reality the astral consists of astral cords or pathways through time and we can choose where the pulse of our awareness will go. The pre-existing routes we term destiny or fate. They lie in our future and in the astral we can explore them ahead of time so to speak.

The thing is that we don’t need to travel these old ghost pathways. History does not need to repeat itself. We can create new pathways through time. Magic work is the forging and creation of new astral pathways and experiences that have not existed before. It is changing the future and perhaps even the past.

Individual awareness has evolved beyond cellular life. It has evolved into human life. When we consider life as a photon driven energy system that makes quantum leaps it means human awareness is a photon driven energy system.

Our awareness contains compound molecules and the cells of our physical body. Our awareness contains the bions or emotions and thoughts our bodies generate. Our awareness travels in astral bodies as we sleep and travels the entire earth and the astral planes. Our awareness also travels as a pulse through the memory traces of individual souls giving us the illusion of being that person.

Even more important, just as the organizing intelligence of the cell is independent of the physical matter that passes through it, our own awareness is independent of our physical bodies and continues as an energy pulse of conscious awareness upon the death of our physical bodies. Awareness is independent of matter.

The fact a particular life time exists in the astral as a memory trace is proof such a life time existed but the fact that in the astral the future can be seen is also proof it has already happened. We, as a pulse of awareness are simply re-living and re-enacting a massive video game in the hopes of getting a better score than the last pulse of awareness that moved through it.

When we are born the game begins and when we die the game is over. The trick is to create the future we desire astrally before we experience it physically. When we can do this we have won. The future, HGA or collective traps us within a destiny. Our Shadow is the only hope we have of breaking free. Our physical bodies and physical circumstances are illusions that we trap ourselves within. We break free of the illusion by developing the seven astral bodies and integrating them with our Shadow aspect.

Occult and mystical literature are filled with references to the astral planes and the creatures that are said to inhabit them.  The entire topic is highly controversial and subjective.  Some of the more pragmatic call the astral planes our dream world.

I don't remember how many times I've been told not to confuse the levels.  Something that I am apparently pretty good at!  What are these mysterious levels anyway?

Organic Gnosticism takes a harsh, scientific view of the astral planes and comes to a few interesting conclusions that are sharply at odds with some widely held beliefs while supporting others.  

Organic Gnosticism maintains that each physical object and each living thing is a resonant circuit made up of both inductance and capacitance.  The physical body stores and discharges energy.  The aura or soul is the magnetic field that surrounds the body.  The strong current of bio-electric energy that flows through both the capacitive body and the inductive soul is what causes self-awareness.

To briefly summarize in non-technical terms, everything that physically exists forms a resonant circuit.  Light causes it to grow and expand in complexity and to interact with its environment.  A return current is generated that is electrical in nature. This life current is forced to circulate endlessly within the circuit until physical death.

Without the physical body self-awareness does not exist.  Death of the physical body breaks the resonant circuit and all remaining energy tries to return back to the source as electrical energy which is met by an outgoing burst of light energy and forced into another physical body that is more advanced and complex than the old one...ect.

What is important is to perceive all physical objects as having both a physical body and an aura or soul.  These two components are inseparable and work together to stabilize the physical object or life form.

In a similar manner the earth is surrounded by a large magnetic field and is a resonant circuit.  The earth's magnetic field contains the collective magnetic fields of everything that exists upon it.  This huge resonant circuit works to stabilize the entire earth and everything that lives upon it.  It is a dynamic force of raw nature.  The universe we live in is made up of photo/electrical energy, magnetic field energy, and physical atoms and molecules.  While higher, more complex forms of energy do exist they are all reducible to photo/electrical components as described in previous posts.

There is no need to create fantastic magical worlds and creatures when it is possible to use existing technology to explain subjective experiences.  These subjective experiences involve individual awareness and how life energy flows through us in a resonant circuit.

While everything is reducible to photo/electrical components, individual awareness is not normally found in photo/electrical energy or in magnetic field energy over long periods of time.

Illumination may come if a person's awareness is advanced enough to transform into photo/electrical energy.  This subjective state does not last any length of time and a more normal state of awareness always returns, albeit higher and more advanced than before the illumination experience.  This  suggests that awareness does not normally exist as photo/electrical energy over long periods of time.

Magnetic field energy is by nature a vortex energy and awareness transformed to this type of energy would find itself either strongly focused by South pole energy or rapidly dispersed by North pole field energy.  Either way awareness at this level is not stable but is in a transition phase.

For all practical purposes individual awareness would not appear in a lasting manner as either photo/electrical energy or as magnetic field energy.  It does exist however, in physical life forms.  This is important evidence that a physical body is needed for individual awareness.

Individual awareness is obviously more than a physical body. For example, every physical atom is surrounded by its own magnetic field.  An atom is both  one or more electrons circling around a nucleus and a magnetic field that encloses it.

The more complex the atom or molecule the more complex the magnetic field or aura that it has.  In electronics a magnetic field is termed inductive and has flux lines within it.  It is usually generated by passing electrical current through a coil.

Also in electronics physical atoms and molecules have both resistance and capacitance.  Resistance is something's ability or inability to conduct electrical energy.  This is not of interest to us at this time.

Capacitance is a physical objects ability to store or discharge electrical energy.  This is very important to us because when capacitance and inductance are equal in an electrical circuit a resonant circuit is formed.  

This resonant circuit stabilizes itself and resists change. ��It also has a large flow of energy within the circuit itself with a very small amount of energy entering it or leaving it.  If not for the resistance within the circuit itself the flow of energy would be perpetual once it began to flow.

Resonant circuits allow us to listen to radio stations or to watch television channels.  They are a very important part of the electronics industry.  The portion of the circuit that is resonant is called the tank circuit.

The tank circuit in any physical object would include both the physical body and the magnetic or astral body.  Large amounts of energy would constantly flow from the physical body to the astral body and back to the physical body in an endless loop.  This tank current is what causes life and individual awareness in higher life forms.

In elements and compounds this tank current determines the behavior and life span of the physical object itself.  Because of this the magnetic layers around the earth contain a large tank current that determines the behavior and life spans of everything on earth.  All living things including humans must conform to the greater needs of the earth itself.

If there is a need for a massive earthquake to relieve internal stresses there is nothing that man can do to prevent it from occurring.  The massive tank currents of the earth's astral planes shape man's destiny and not the other way around.  Man must find a way to conform and live in harmony with these mighty forces of nature.

Now it's time to take a closer look at the earth's astral planes and its characteristics.

The lightest elements like hydrogen and helium are at the outer edge of the earth's atmosphere and their magnetic field would naturally be found at the outer edge of the earth's atmosphere.  The heaviest elements like #118 if it exists would naturally be found deep within the earth's surface as would it's magnetic field.

Many elements do not exist in their pure form in nature, they exist as compounds.  Still, they are individual elements and the magnetic field for each element exists as does a composite magnetic field for the compound.

Organic Gnosticism proposes that there is a magnetic layer around the earth for each element that exists.  This would mean that there were 118 inductive layers surrounding the earth as part of the earth's resonant circuit.  These 118 layers are known more commonly as the astral planes.

In addition Organic Gnosticism  also proposes that the astral planes around the north magnetic pole are what is commonly known in metaphysics as the spiritual/astral plane having all layers from the lowest to the highest but with expansive energies.

The astral planes around the south magnetic pole form what is known as the magical plane and is involved with the formation of physical reality. In magic they have been termed the qlippotic or demonic planes.

Probably the best way to understand the astral planes is to explore them one at a time.  To do this an assumption is made that an element's astral layer will share the characteristics of it's physical counterpart.  This follows the time honored phrase, "as above,  so below".  This refers to the occult tradition that astral events are intimately connected to physical events.

If this phrase holds true it should allow us to map the astral layers that surround the earth and give us insight into it's true nature.  Also following occult tradition we will begin with the heaviest, material levels and work our way upward to the lightest, spiritual levels.

The reasoning for this approach is that our astral body normally resides inside the physical body.  Together they create a resonant circuit.  The astral body will not travel outside of the physical body unless the physical body has stored enough energy to propel it outward for short periods of time.  This happens in our dreams as we sleep.

During dreams astral contact is made with other astral objects or life forms. This always results in an energy loss or energy exchange where the dream ends. The physical body did not have enough stored energy to maintain the connection. The physical body is depleted of its energy and the astral body is forced to return to the physical body.

This energy draining aspect of the astral is why we begin with the lowest astral levels in our exploration.  They are the closest to physical reality and most important to our physical survival.

[watchilove]

“Louis Moinet has its very own way of celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first transcontinental railroad connecting the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the USA. The innovative mechanical creation in question is both a tribute to the pioneers of yesteryear and an invitation to those of the present day – for whom it is available on a pre-order basis of two limited edition of 18 and 69 watches.” Jean-Marie Schaller, CEO & Creative Director Louis Moinet

  150 years ago, A LEGEND WAS BORN…

The idea of building a railroad spanning the North American continent from one ocean to the other dates back to the early nineteenth century. It was a complex undertaking, with a huge continent to be crossed amidst an acute lack of technical and financial resources. Initially, President Thomas Jefferson convinced Congress to allocate $2,500 to Lewis and Clark, who organised the first expedition across the United States from east to west. They faced all kinds of danger – and took two years (1804-1806) to complete their mission. And so the adventure began…

Years of reconnaissance were then needed to identify the route: through the Sierra Nevada mountains, avoiding Death Valley, bypassing the Yosemite Peaks – as well as all the canyons and rapids of the Missouri. In 1862, even as the American Civil War raged, President Abraham Lincoln’s vision involved unifying and reviving the country. He promulgated the Pacific Railroad Act, allocating the construction of the railway to the Union Pacific and Central Pacific companies. Once work had started, each company drew nearer to the other at a rate of forty miles per month.

The project was finally completed on May 10, 1869. After 6 years’ effort, marked by a whole host of unexpected and varied challenges on a daily basis, the first transcontinental railroad was ready! The two companies’ tracks met at Promontory Summit, Utah, linking Sacramento, California to Omaha, Nebraska. A huge number of bridges and tunnels were required, in addition to 1,766 miles of track to connect with the existing railroad network in the east of the USA, thus linking the Pacific coast and the Atlantic coast.This feat revolutionised the nation’s economy, demographics, and mindset. The age of covered wagons travelling along perilous trails was over; modern-day, powerful America had arrived!

Driving the last spike: the legendary “Golden Spike” ceremony. 

East and West shook hands as the last piece of track was laid at Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869. To symbolise the event, a Golden Spike was driven in (later replaced by a steel crampon). This iconic symbol of the transcontinental accomplishment is now carefully preserved at the Stanford University museum in California.

Louis Moinet Transcontinental Steel & Rose gold

Reserved For TODAY’s global pioneers only: the “Transcontinental by Louis Moinet” PRE-ORDER

 Louis Moinet has a particularly keen sense of human endeavour; previously, the manufacture has celebrated the exploits of cosmonaut Alexey Leonov and triple Formula One racing world champion Nelson Piquet. It has also supported tropical forest research with the Geograph Rainforest, as well as the installation of water wells in Africa with 123 Action.

Today, in a blend of respect and admiration, Louis Moinet is paying tribute to those who devoted all their energy and knowhow to pushing back boundaries and shaping the world as we know it. One hundred and fifty years after the first transcontinental railroad was completed, Louis Moinet has devised a commemorative watch, destined for the pioneers of the new world we have inherited.

“Transcontinental by Louis Moinet” pre-order

In the spirit of the great human adventures of the nineteenth century, the “Transcontinental by Louis Moinet” pre-order is now open!

From now until September 10, 2019, it is being made available to the descendants of the transcontinental pioneers – as well as to forerunners and innovators everywhere. All of them will recognise the same unique values that enable them to successfully complete their own human endeavours.

  Pre-order offers them three key advantages:

1) Ensuring they will be able to possess this collector’s watch, of which there will be just two limited editions (18 watches in rose gold and 69 watches in steel and rose gold);

2) Choosing a customised number (on a first come, first served basis);

3) Benefitting from an attractive launch price, the pre-order amount is very reasonable: USD 57,500.00 in rose gold and USD 38,500.00 in steel and rose gold. It should be borne in mind that the retail price fixed after the pre-order period will be higher. In both cases, delivery will be carried out by one of Louis Moinet’s partner retailers.

Those interested in the pre-order are invited to request further details from transcontinental@louismoinet.com

  Louis Moinet Transcontinental Rose gold

  The “Transcontinental by Louis Moinet” watch

An innovative mechanism

A clever automaton has been developed to reproduce the coupling rod systems on “Jupiter” and “119”, the two locomotives that made the final connection at Promontory Summit in 1869. A wheel arrangement comprises two large wheels and one small wheel, concentrating energy into continuous power.

The coupling rod passes on power to two reamed, anodised aluminium piston rods – except that here, rather than a piston, the system showcases a reproduction of the legendary Golden Spike, moving up and down in recollection of the thousands of crampons driven in all the way along the route.

The hours and minutes can be read off in the centre of the watch, while the seconds are displayed at six o’clock, on a segment representing the front of a locomotive.

The movement is an automatic winding mechanical movement.

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Louis Moinet Transcontinental Rose gold

Louis Moinet Transcontinental Steel & Rose gold

Design

Ateliers Louis Moinet have won 29 prizes over the past ten years, including a large number of design awards from all over the world. Creating meaningful pieces remains the Ateliers’ absolute priority.

“Transcontinental by Louis Moinet” plays on the contrast of a black plate and a rose-gold-coloured dial with a high copper content. While frosted decoration is a watchmaking classic, this particular finish is of an entirely different order. To produce such dense frosting, a micro structure was developed using laser technology. The individual number of each watch is engraved at 12 o’clock, on an 18-carat “Golden Spike” head, framed by the date – 1869.

Innovative technical solutions were devised to create an unprecedented case shape. Everything is arranged around two stylised, openwork bridges. These span the watch, securing the strap at either end of their lugs. The bridges hold the movement’s container – and the precious mechanical mechanism it houses – in place. Last but by no means least, the signature six-screw bezel, a hallmark of the Louis Moinet style, adds a distinctive touch to the piece.

The alligator strap, meanwhile, comes with a folding clasp decorated with another historic Louis Moinet symbol: the Fleur de Lys.

The box features an original design illustrating the 150th anniversary of the Transcontinental Railroad, with the inside done out to resemble the piping of a steam locomotive. A medal commemorates the event; at its centre sits a newly-fashioned crampon made from a genuine American rail spike dating back to the nineteenth century.

Transcontinental by Louis Moinet will be available in autumn 2019 in two exclusive limited editions. To commemorate the 1869 achievement, just 18 watches will be available in 18-carat rose gold; and just 69 more will be available in steel and 18-carat rose gold.

  Louis Moinet Ecrin Transcontinental

  About Louis Moinet

Ateliers Louis Moinet was founded in Saint-Blaise, Neuchâtel, in 2004. The fully-independent firm was established to honour the memory of Louis Moinet (1768-1853): master watchmaker, inventor of the chronograph in 1816 (certified by Guinness World RecordsTM), and pioneer in the use of very high frequencies (216,000 vibrations per hour). Louis Moinet was a watchmaker, scholar, painter, sculptor, and teacher at the School of Fine Arts – as well as the author of the Traité d’Horlogerie, a watchmaking treatise published in 1848 that remained a definitive work of reference for a century. Today, Ateliers Louis Moinet is perpetuating this legacy. The firm’s timepieces, produced in limited editions only, have won some of the most coveted honours, including a UNESCO Award of Merit, five Red Dot Design awards (including one Best of the Best award), gold and bronze medals in the Chronometry Competition, eight Good Design awards, three Middle East Watch of the Year awards, two Robb Report “Best of the Best” awards, a German Design award, a Moscow Grand Prix award, and a “Chronograph of the year” distinction from Begin Magazine, Japan. Louis Moinet creations often make use of unusual materials, such as fossils and meteorites, combined with bespoke fine watchmaking complications in a unique creative approach. The brand’s core values are creativity, exclusivity, art and design.

Transcontinental by Louis Moinet – based on an idea of Juan F. Deniz.

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Louis Moinet Transcontinental Steel & Rose gold

Louis Moinet Ecrin Transcontinental

Louis Moinet Transcontinental Rose gold

Louis Moinet Transcontinental Rose gold

Louis Moinet Transcontinental Steel & Rose gold

Louis Moinet Transcontinental Rose gold

Louis Moinet is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first Transcontinental railroad in the world, connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts of the USA “Louis Moinet has its very own way of celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first transcontinental railroad connecting the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the USA.