A New Science of Heaven

2023 Reading Challenge, book one

The first book I’ve finished in 2023 is A New Science of Heaven by Robert Temple. I got turned on to this book by a friend who shared this interview with me:

After watching the interview, I knew I needed to read the book. It’s a book about plasma, which is a fascinating state of matter. It’s not liquid, solid, or gas. In fact, it’s not generally considered “matter”, because it does not consist of atomic particles, but of what we commonly view as the building blocks of atomic particles. Of course, they are the building blocks of atomic particles, but given that at least 99% of the universe is composed of plasma, plasma is obviously a lot more than just that.

Plasma is composed not of atoms, but of free-floating ions and electrons. The most common kind of ion in a plasma is a hydrogen ion - a single proton. Unlike gasses, where interactions between particles occur mostly due to collisions, particle motion in plasma is mainly guided by electromagnetic forces. Collective movement phenomena such as waves are predominant, and collisions are rare. While plasma fills what is commonly understood as “empty space”, it appears in a variety of earthly phenomena, including neon signs, lightning, ball lightning, sprites, polar aurorae, and the outer layers of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Contained in this book is a scrupulously documented history of the study of plasma, mostly taking place in the 20th century. Sometimes this study has clashed with mainstream science, and the ideologies behind it. And a lot of research was done under contract with the U.S. military, and as such, never publicly published. So a lot of the research is in danger of being forgotten, and Temple does an incredible service by preserving this science and its history. He commonly refers to rare and unique documents that he has in his own personal library, and it must be a marvelous library indeed.

Temple goes on in great depth and breadth about the fascinating science of plasma, from which I will only share a few samples here. One particularly interesting story is of the Kordylewski Clouds. I think every student of science should at least know about these. These are two plasma clouds that interact with the Earth and Moon. What we typically view as a two-body system, is really a four-body system, with two plasma clouds occupying space centered around the L4 and L5 Lagrange points, as shown in this figure from page 4 of the text:

These Kordylewski Clouds are 4.5 times the size of the Earth, presumably by volume, although the text doesn’t make that clear. In a paper included in the book as an appendix, Temple and Wickramasinghe estimate the mass of these clouds at about a million kilograms, or about a quadrillionth the mass of the Earth. Interestingly enough, the L4 and L5 LaGrange points are points of stable equilibria, so long as the mass of the Moon is less than about a thirtieth of the mass of the Earth. And the mass of the Moon is about 1.2% the mass of the Earth. Stable equilibria mean that if some force pushed the center of mass of these clouds off the LaGrange points, they would recenter themselves there.

Like many plasma clouds, the Kordylweski’s contain some atomic matter - tiny particles of highly charged cosmic dust. Temple argues that these dust particles could be manipulated by the plasma in ways that would resemble what we call computation, making these clouds into massive computers. The general theme of this book is that these plasma clouds could be sources of intelligence, and he estimates that the potential computing power of these clouds is far greater than the total computing power of all the human-made computers we have here on Earth.

To his credit, Temple never argues in the book that they are sources of intelligence. It is clear that he wants this to be true, but he does not make any claims not supported by the evidence. Of course, we barely know anything about these clouds. They were only discovered in the last 50 years, and many scientists, despite clear evidence, still doubt their existence. We barely know anything about them, and evidence supporting or refuting the hypothesis would be very hard to come by without further research.

Temple reviews the scientific literature on plasmoids, or self-maintaining balls of plasma. These plasmoids can both be found in nature, and created in the lab. They have some amazing properties. Some have been observed passing through solid lead plates. They have been observed to both merge with other plasmoids, and to avoid other plasmoids when placed on a collision course, each maintaining its integrity. Sometimes, when colliding with each other, they are observed to form shapes resembling galaxies, such as barrel-spiral galaxies, as shown in figure 21 on page 145:

Did I mention that plasma can form into super-conductive filaments, carrying charge across vast distances with nearly zero resistance? There is so much fascinating information in this book, including multiple chapters on plasma in biological organisms here on Earth. Plasma clouds can coexist in the same space as the dense physical matter here on Earth, and Temple explores scientific evidence of plasma in humans, including the etheric field, which we know in Daoism as the qi body, and extends a few inches beyond our physical bodies.

In the talk I linked to above, Temple allows himself a little more free speculation than he does in the book. He imagines these Kordylewski Clouds to contain an intelligence that monitors the events occurring on Earth, and sometimes intercedes in human affairs, appearing to us as gods, angels, and other divine beings. The book is a bit more dry, and the speculations are more along the lines of what you might expect from a scientist. For me, the most compelling evidence he presents that plasmas might actually represent an intelligent force in the universe appear in chapter 6, where he talks about ancient religions across the globe. He is slightly apologetic about this inclusion towards the end of the first chapter, where he writes:

I will not enter into theological discussions and will confine myself to the new science, with the exception of a brief historical review in Chapter 6 of some early religious texts that have relevance to our subject.

There are a string of fascinating examples in this chapter. I will confine my discussion to one: Moses and the burning bush. The story starts in Exodus 3:1-5, Robert Alter translation:

And Moses was herding the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, priest of Midian, and he drove the flock into the wilderness and came to the mountain of God, to Horeb. And the LORD’s messenger appeared to him in a flame of fire in the midst of the bush, and he saw, and look, the bush was burning with fire and the bush was not consumed. And Moses thought, “Let me, pray, turn aside that I may see this great sight, why the bush does not burn up.” And the LORD saw that he had turned aside to see, and God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” And He said, “Come no closer here. Take off your sandals from your feet, for the place you are standing on is holy ground.”

God and Moses proceed to have a conversation of the current plight of the Israelites, and how Moses should lead the people out of Egypt, and back to their homeland. I was personally struck, just now, by the “take off your sandals” bit. In Daoist practices, we typically remove our shoes, because they inhibit the energy flows between our body and the Earth. Temple provides some insights that are more directly relevant to the matter at hand. From page 68:

Moses encountered this brilliantly shining and burning plasma, which spoke to him, and he described it as being like a burning bush that was however not consumed by its own flames. In other words, it was not a real bush but was round and ‘burning’ as if it were a bush, which is the only way a person of that early pre-scientific time could hope to describe it.

He speaks at length on this bush in a footnote, which I will quote here in full as an example of the depth of research that Temple has put into this work. Pages 331-333:

In one translation known as the Darby Bible Translation, the bush is described as a thorn-bush. Commentators point out that the Hebrew word for the bush is seneh, which is the name of a thorny bush, a species of acacia, common in Sinai. But the original Hebrew language version is lost, and seneh is a translation into Hebrew from the Greek Septuagint where the Hebrew translator has used creative license. (Seneh is thus a product of reverse-engineering by a Hebrew translator who has added it, thinking that he was thus being helpful to readers.) In the Septuagint, which is the oldest text of Exodus in existence, the Greek work for the bush is batos. That means a bramble, not any other bush or plant such as buckthorn or acacia.

Theophrastus, the colleague and successor of Aristotle, was the founder of scientific botany, and the authoritative expert on Greek botanical terminology of the fourth century BC, taking precedence even over the herbalist Dioscorides, who lived AD 40-90 and was three centuries later. In his Peri Phyton Historias, III, xviii, 4, Theophrastus explains that batos is a broad term for bramble-like plants.

He says: ‘Of the bramble (batos) again there are several kinds, showing very great variation; one is erect and tall, another runs along the ground and from the first bends downwards, and when it touches the earth, it roots again; this some call “the ground bramble”. The “dog’s bramble” (the wild rose that we today call the dog rose, thus continuing the ancient Greek name associated for unknown reasons with dogs) has a reddish fruit like that of the pomegranate, it is intermediate between a shrub and a tree; but the leaf is spinous.’ (Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants, translated by Arthur F. Hort, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Vol. I, 1916, pp. 270-1.)

Obviously the Burning Bush could not have been either the creeping bramble or the dog rose, and can only be the one that is ‘erect and tall’. As for the masculine noun batos meaning a blackberry bush, it is worth noting that the neuter noun baton specifically means ‘a blackberry’. The other word for a prickly shrub, often applied to buckthorn for instance, was rhamnos, and there was also the word philuke, which referred to an evergreen prickly shrub. It seems therefore that if the Septuagint had intended a prickly shrub other than the bramble, such as buckthorn, the word rhamnos would have been used instead of batos. And if acacia had been meant, its Greek name akantha would have been used. Hence the translation of batos as seneh was evidently incorrect.

It seems that in the earliest surviving text we are struck with the unlikely and somewhat inglorious bramble, which sprawls at the sides of most English roads and hedges and from which country children pick berries to make jam in the autumn. Somehow, that is extraordinarily mundane for a divine epiphany. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that we are never told this by theologians, as the ideas that Moses went up onto a mountain in order to converse with a burning blackberry bush is unimpressive.

Robert Alter’s footnote on the term “bush” provides an interesting counterpoint:

The Hebrew seneh, a relatively rare word, intimates Horeb’s other name, Sinai, by way of a pun. Some have conjectured that the name Sinai is actually derived from Seneh. In the ancient Near East, deities were often associated with sacred trees, but not with bushes. Rashi construes this epiphany in the humble bush as an expression of God’s identification with the abasement of Israel enslaved.

In any event, the picture that Temple is painting here is that of a plasma ball, splaying across the ground, conveying a voice speaking in a tongue native to Moses, that urges him to take his people out of Egypt. This plasma, “the LORD’s messenger,” is envisioned as an intermediary between the human realm and the divine world where Yahweh lives. Perhaps the abode of Yahweh is within these Kordylewski Clouds, or perhaps it is simply in our upper atmosphere, which is largely plasma, and governed by magnetic forces.

Chapter 6 provides many other examples along the same lines from ancient religions across the globe. What is most fascinating to me here is the contrast between this view of these ancient phenomena, and the explanations provided by people like Mauro Biglino, which interpret them in a more mechanistic way, in terms of aliens, spaceships, and other alien technology. Personally, I have always preferred to view phenomena such as UFOs as extra-dimensional, rather than extra-terrestrial.

These insights put me in a position to develop an alternative hypothesis of the stories told in the Bible and other ancient religious texts. This is all highly speculative, but I think it works, and I hope to develop these ideas further. Roughly speaking, some four-thousand years ago, we lived in an age where there was much more plasma phenomena occurring on the Earth. This allowed for divine entities - that is, plasma entities - direct interaction with our physical world, such as when Yahweh rained fire down upon us, destroying Sodom, Gomorrah, and the surrounding lands. It also allowed for phenomena described by Julian Jaynes in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, where the voices of gods would speak to us from within our own minds, in a commanding manner so compelling that we could not resist. This divine energy began to saturate more deeply within us, providing a more direct connection between the divine world and the human mind, culminating in divine mortal beings such as Jesus. Part of the reason why we are capable of following in the path of Avatars like Jesus is because, despite the withdrawal of these divinities from our external environment, they are still present within each of us.

I want to explore these ideas further in a vaguely planned series of essays on the Ark of the Covenant, which is a truly perplexing phenomenon for anybody trying to piece this all together. You could imagine the Ark to contain some advanced technology of alien origin, but in the descriptions we have of the Ark, it is either empty, or contains only stone tablets inscribed with Yahweh’s commandments. It might be better explained as a vessel containing some sort of plasma energy, which could easily be invisible to human eyes. It will take a great deal of exploration to flesh this out, and I really want to take this on. Unfortunately, I have at least two series of theological essays planned that are higher priority, so it will probably be a while before I get to it.

To sum up this review: This is a fascinating book about plasma, incredibly well researched, with a plethora of examples of its behavior. I am only able to share a very small subset of these ideas here. Temple provides a thorough record of the history of the scientific study of plasma that bridges three centuries. This history is at some risk of being forgotten, and Temple’s work is so valuable because he shares this fascinating story with us, and preserves it for future generations. It also provides a lot of critical food for thought into the nature of divine phenomena, and how we can understand them from a firm scientific footing. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. In the interview I linked at the start, he mentioned that he had a second book written on the subject, more scientific in nature, that he ran into a little trouble getting published. I eagerly await my opportunity to get my hands on it when it finally makes it to print.