Virtue is a tradition that is characteristic of a particular class, or even smaller groups, such as a neighborhood, or a family. The result is often what we call "character." To violate a virtue is a sin, which is something forgivable, unlike the utterly unforgivable evil of violating conscience.

I once had a strange feeling, much like vertigo, when I contemplated the possibility that the universe is finite and closed, which means that the Big Bang will be followed by a Big Crunch in a hundred billion years or so. At that point, all the individuals will coalesce into the ONE, which will dream a new dream, and a new universe shall come into being. Or at least, that's one theory.

Mystics throughout the ages have claimed that ONE is the only reality and that Nature is the dream of ONE. Even though this has been called the "perennial philosophy" by Aldous Huxley, I don't think we should take it on faith. I'm not sure that I am totally convinced. My chief reason for holding it as a liklihood (not a certainty) is the Revelation of the Nameless One, a series of 22 symbolic books, which agree with all that I know from personal experience, including my own three kinds of mystical experiences. Thus, I am inclined to believe the rest of the revelation. The Yogis say there are ten kinds of mystical experience, so it is possible that anyone who experiences all ten will know with certainty that the Idea of One is true. Insofar as metaphysics becomes a science, it must investigate this question, for on it hinges the truth or falsity of Immortality.

In any case, I have defined "soul" as "that which is conscious," not consciousness itself. Thus, the soul can never see itself in the mirror. The soul is not among the items in the contents of consciousness, and is therefore not in nature. Nature is in it. This may seem like a very strange idea, but make this simple thought experiment. Ask yourself how big is my soul? Well, right now, it is as big as this room, because it contains this room. Don't tell me that the room I see is not the real room. This is as real as it gets. And this reality includes depth and three dimensions at least. If I step outside and look at the milky way, my Soul includes the local neighborhood in the galaxy, a matter of thousands of light-years. And when I study pictures of distant quasars and galaxies, billions of light-years away, my Soul is as big as the known universe. Of course, science has all sorts of explanations for why the room has the properties it does, but none of these descriptions imply that the room I see does not exist.

Divinity has no gender. To speak of "Him" is totally wrong. Divinity has no personality, so there is no personal god. Mind is in nature, and personality is a property of mind. Since the ALL is the container of nature, we cannot associate any particular mind or personality with it. And mystics never do. People who talk to god are talking to themselves. People who say that god has a plan obviously have no experience of divinity. Only mystics have experienced divinity. Plans are limited, finite thoughts of the mind. So there can be no divine plan. Only a divine purpose. See the difference? This much I know from the Illumination of Fire.

There is a higher power that we all have potentially which could have given rise to the concept of angels. The mind exists in a kind of extended now, not a point in time, t, but an infinitesimal, dt, stretching a little into the future and continuing from the past. Thus, the higher Self knows when one is about to step into danger and can inform the ordinary self, usually with a peremptory command "Stop!" or it may be less than that, perhaps just a sudden intuition. Let us call it precognitive intuition. Successful warriors in combat tap into that skill, which is the only way of surviving something like World War Two, where replacements were usually killed within hours of arriving at the front, while a few old veterans went unscathed from Omaha Beach to Berlin. People who have had NDEs often have lasting after-effects, in the form of higher powers, and a common one is this precognitive intuition, which takes the form of a voice warning them of danger ahead.

Archaeologists can make a pretty good case for Atlantis being the volcanic island of Santorini, an island harboring an outpost of the ancient Minoan civilization, which blew up about 1400 BCE. All we have to do is assume that the Egyptians, or Solon, or Plato couldn't distinguish between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and couldn't distinguish between 1400 BCE and 10,500 BCE! It is a little like claiming that Julius Caesar was really George Washington.

Fully modern humans, just like us, have been around for 40,000 years, 30,000 of which was spent in the coldest phase of the last ice age. Anything we can do, they could do. We built a civilization in less than 10,000 years, and so could they. But where? Certainly not on the northern continents, which were covered by two miles of ice, and what wasn't ice was subject to incredibly harsh climactic conditions. Instead, let us look at SE Asia, where the Sunda Shelf would be exposed, and let us look at the Bahamas, where a huge expanse of shallow water would have been dry land in the Pleistocene, when sea level was 400-600 feet lower than today. Islands in the Gulf Stream, never inhabited by the large animals and predators of the Pleistocene, would make ideal living conditions for a late Pleistocene culture to flourish. Of course, all signs of that civilization are now buried under the sediment of 10,500 years, under 400-600 feet of water. So only a very expensive expedition could test this hypothesis.

As for astrology, C.G. Jung was once able to match the male and female halves of the couples in his audience, just by looking at Sun-Moon, and Mars-Venus aspects in their horoscopes. In the two great love affairs of my life, I found the same thing. My Mars was in trine with her Venus, for my exotic Schwarz Deutsch liebchen, while my Sun was on her Moon for the green-eyed philosopher. So there is anecdotal evidence for some truth to astrology, but no systematic scientific investigations have been made that I know of.

The biggest obstacle for astrology is explaining it. I believe a combination of quantum gravity and advanced psionics could someday provide an explanation in terms of de Broglie waves and the rapid formation of new psionic matter after a baby takes its first breath.

I don't really believe in fortune-telling. What the Tarot shows is a picture of the extended now, with recent influences in the past, and projected probabilities for the future. Scientific tests of the Tarot could be made, but first we must complete the development of the New Tarot. Any artist volunteers?

I know of no real tests of palm-reading. In order to rule out other psi powers, the readings should be made of xerox copies of palm prints. Of course, it would take many years to complete such a test, since the palm is supposed to reveal an entire lifetime.

The 10 plagues could all be explained by the explosion of Santorini, about 1550 BCE. The winds were blowing in the direction of Egypt. Pumice from the Santorini explosion has been found in the Delta. The parting of the Sea of Reeds could be the withdrawal of the sea before the tidal wave, which covers up Pharoah's chariots. 1550 BCE is also about the time when Ah-Moses drove out the Hyksos tyrants, defeating them in their homeland of Palestine, at Sharuhen (the Vale of Sharon). The Hyksos, or Shepherd Kings, ended the Middle Kingdom by their invasion of lower Egypt about 1700 BCE.

Traditionally, Exodus is dated to the time of Ramses the Great, about 1250 BCE. But that does not agree with the archaeology at Mount Hertom, which places the Moses revelation at 2000 BCE. Nor does it agree with the Santorini explosion, about 1550 BCE. Note that about a century before Ramses II, Egypt had a monotheistic monarch, Akhnaten, the father of Tutankhamen, owner of the only royal tomb that was not robbed in ancient times. It was during the reign of Akhnaten that the tribes of Habiru captured Palestine, which had been an Egyptian province since the defeat of the Hyksos, and the beginning of the New Kingdom, about 1550 BCE.

The question is, what stopped the Anglo-Saxon advance? I'm sure it wasn't kindness. In the Irish poetry of the dark ages, we first hear of Artos (which means "bear") and he is placed all over the British Isles, now fighting on the borders of Scotland, now fighting on the borders of Cornwall or Wales. Modern scholars place Arthur far too early, in the 400s. In fact, he lived in the 600s CE, possibly as late as 700 CE. And he wasn't a Romanized Briton. He was a wild Celtic warrior, although Christian, using Viking style longboats to outflank his Anglo-Saxon enemies. He was so successful that Offa (a Saxon) built Offa's dike, which was a barrier right across the border of Wales. This marked the end of Anglo-Saxon expansion.