E t h e r i a C a l l i n g!
Dion Fortune says somewhere, in effect, that the phenomena or any particular happening, on any plane, can never be fully explained in terms of that plane alone. Always, back of the facts and theories of science and the superficialities of 'common sense‘, lie forces, laws, and types of energy unknown to us - and the omniverse itself, since everything in existence is related to everything else. So, all 'explanations'- of the flying discs or anything else - must always be partial, proximate, and conditioned by a vast ignorance and only a little knowledge. But for all that, men must continue to try to think, to understand, and to expand consciousness. The alternative is stagnation, and a rudderless drifting on the tides of cosmic life.
With these reservations, Round Robin has presented many times what its Editor believes to be the correct, tho' limited interpretation of the flying discs. The data have been itemized, not only by RR but by half a dozen magazines of national circulation as well, but only in RR has attempt been made to analyze it from the viewpoint of a single hypothesis. This hypothesis (which RR holds to be more than that) give an account which is logical and satisfactory, not only to the occultist and metaphysician, but to the physical scientist who is liberal-minded and somewhat informed. in 'unorthodox' investigations as Well. The gist of this explanation is, that the discs (and many other strange sky craft) come from "Etheria" - and that Etheria is an invisible, intangible, yet wholly material world, which lies all about us, and in a sense interpenetrates with our own.[*] What I wish to deal with for the moment is the very great mental difficulty people experience, in trying to grasp the idea of a dense material world close at hand, which we are unable, not only to see and hear, but even to touch.
Easy enough, in a way, to understand the first two of these failures of our senses. There are colors (or wave lengths and frequencies) above the violet and below the red of our spectrum; and an object 'colored' in this way would not be visible to us. Everyone knows, too, that there are sounds (waves, frequencies, vibrations) too fine and high or too low for our ears to apprehend; all the world is filled with such sounds, and we do not hear them at all. Not so easy, tho, in this matter of touch. "Do we not" (we say) "touch solid objects whether we see them or not? Your soundless, colorless world must at least be tangible! if, [2] as you maintain, it is really dense and solid. No, it must be vaporous, or like air or gases, or emanations, radiations, and rays, which we cannot usually detect by direct touch, tho' sometimes by instruments."
(I am told by those gifted with etheric vision, that on the very of this city where I am now writing, there is also another city, with towers and palaces, far more fair to see, and with a great lake in the center of it; and the waters of this lake submerge all our fine building and our homes are beneath its waves, and the spires and towers of the rise where ours also stand, in them and through them, disregardful of touching them and us not at all. It is said, too, that a wonderful people live there, giants to our pigmy stature, with golden and Titian hair flowing about their shoulders, men like Gods or godlets, and women like the houri of paradise (who indeed were no fiction to the inspired etheric vision of the prophet). We hear these things, and think of them as fantasy and dream; yet, what is dream? and where is fancy bred? Of all the planes of illusion (and there are none other) this solid-seeming earth World of ours is worst or best, where every brick and stone is an airy dance of electrons and pattern of unseen intangible forces.)
To this aforesaid hypothesis of 'commonsense', that etheric stuff must be vaporous and rare in texture, there are important consideration to be opposed. In the first instance one must reply, that ours is the thin and fanciful domain of vapors and rarefactions - in the vast ever lasting thickness and density and durability of matter; and that this matter and prime cosmic stuff is to us in our foolish language, Space; and that Space is Life, or is alive, is consciousness or the well-spring Of consciousness; and that matter and energy and space and life are all ONE THING - "the unfathomable universe" which Whitman and every seer and prophet have worshipped in the stillness of the indrawn breath. Yet, to repeat, it is hard and hard for us, to lay hold of this mystery with the fingers of the mind, integrating it with daily life and common experience.
Let us take note of one elementary fact, that (according to present-day science at least) there is plenty of room for Ethereans, their Cities and palaces and laboratories, right in and with and alongside ours. Why, let us suppose that an atom, be magnified (by the microscope of mathematics) so that the orbit of the spinning electron (if it spins) have a diameter equal to that of the earth about the sun (is it 184 million miles or thereabout?); then the diameter of the electron itself will be half the radius of the earth, 2000 miles - and the diameter of the nucleus (where weight and mass chiefly lie) can be taken as two miles only. Consider these magnitudes, of nucleus and electron, in comparison with the enormous distances separating them. Distance, however, which does not separate, but unites; which is not empty nothingness, but Space, but stuff, but matter, but reality - but mind-life and mind-stuff all stuffed with manifestations of its own. So, the spin and dance of our atoms is a thinning and spreading out, a kind of holes or bubbles rare as 'swimmers in the vast deep'. And of the ethers (if we must have that word) there is no end, but an endless interplay of each thru each, so that of homogeneous stuff there is none, and of "empty space" none at all, and of mystery upon mystery there is no end - but of man's thought there is an end.
Now, the physicist, who does not like these popularizations of his hard-won facts, will say that for him the centers of the atoms, the nucleus seldom approach each other much closer than one angstrom - and an angstrom if you please, is a hundred-millioneth of a centimeter, and a cm is a bit shorter than this line ( ----- ). A negative electron has a diameter of about 35 millioneths of an inch (.000035), so that it would take about 3 thousand electrons, touching each other, to measure one angstrom and reach from one nucleus to another. Consider again, in these terms, the comparative vastness of the space (the matter, the mind, the stuff) which separates-and-unites the parts of the atom. How many other atoms, other things, other worlds (if they are imperceptible to us), MAY lurk: in these huge, these 'stellar' interspaces!
We spoke of the nucleus of the atom as holding nearly all its mass and weight. The lightest atom is hydrogen, and its mass is nearly 1840 times that of a negative electron. But it is not larger in volume - let us take good note of that. "The larger the mass the smaller the diameter is axiomatic in present-day science. The negative electron has the greatest volume of any individual body in the atom. "If the distance from center to center of nearest atoms is, say, 2 angstroms, and if the negative electron is of the order of 10-13 (1 over 10-plus-13 ciphers), the volumes are to each other as the cubes of these figures, or 1015 (10 plus 15 ciphers). That is to say, the volume of the atom is 1015 times as much as the volume of one negative electron."[**]
A diamond is a very dense substance (3.55 as dense as water). Suppose we could put such pressure on a diamond that it was crowded into a density equal to that attributed to the star Wolf 457 -, to 500 million times the density of water. (Wolf, by the way, has a mass 60 times that Of our sun but is only about the size of our moon, some 3000 miles in diameter: "the greater the mass the smaller the diameter"). Well, a cubic inch of our condensed diamond (or of the star mentioned) would Weigh about 9000 tons on our earth; but the nuclei would still be distant from each other, 10 to minus 10th power - 10 to minus 11th, centimeter. This means, that the distance between the nuclei of atoms would still be between 10 and 100 times the diameter of the atom itself.
Everywhere in the omniverse, space - and rarefactions of space - because space, being stuff, mind-stuff, energy-matter-mind stuff, can be rarefied or increased in density. Room for other universes? Even our Science declares, there is practically nothing but "room" in the universe. But what "room" means, and what may be "in" it is unsolvable mystery, which nevertheless we must make some mental gesture toward solving.
For reasons that will appear, we must give a few definitions. Weight is a force, the pull of gravity. Amount of matter and weight are not quite the same (a cubic inch of iron weighs more at the poles). MASS is the quantity of matter in a body without reference to weight. In the same location, weight is proportional to mass (2 cc of water weigh 2 grams; have a mass of 2 grams and a density of 1 gram per cc). Now a [4] curious fact came to light in connection with the development of Einstein's equations. The mass of a body (the quantity of matter in it) increases with velocity, when the velocity approaches that of light. Mass, therefore, is a function of velocity, depends on velocity. In any given body, the volume (space occupied) remaining constant, and its velocity being increased, the mass increases; consequently the quantity of matter per unit volume, or DENSITY, also increases.
When we say that the invisible, intangible etheric world is also far more dense than ours, our incredulity largely arises from a wrong conception of density. The speed of the atomic particles determines density. Atoms of innumerable sizes may exist within what we call the interspaces of the atoms of our matter (and remember that "empty space" has no meaning at all), and if their velocity exceeds that of the atoms of our "dense matter", substances made up of them will have a much higher density, far beyond anything we experience directly or otherwise. And again, "the smaller the particle the greater the mass." "The higher the velocity, the greater the mass." Density is the amount of matter per unit volume. If the volume is constant, increased mass means increased density.
If all this seems extraordinarily dull, remember our objective. We are trying to understand how an etheric world can be present all about us, with unseen colors and unhearable sounds, and made up of particulate matter more dense than ours. Physicists have no trouble with this; the properties of a hypothetical ether were investigated mathematically decades ago; it was found to be more dense than steel - and yet we are unconscious of its presence and move in it freely. We believe now, there are innumerable ethers, but probably no homogeneous ether. And we might also note, that the ether postulated and investigated by mathematicians, besides its density, has many other properties which do NOT belong to any form of matter known to us.
Going back for a moment to the spectrum of color and of sound, it may help us most simply to use an analogy; there should be, by Such reasoning, a spectrum of touch also. We are familiar with its up- per limits, since we cannot touch air or gases or radiations because (as we say) they are too thin, not dense enough, like stone or wood. It does not seem to occur to us, that on the lower end of the touch spectrum there may be substances too dense for touch - like colors below red, and sounds below our hearing range. This offends our 'common sense' and our experience - and so, becomes perhaps the greatest single obstacle to 'putting across' the idea of the material reality of the etheric worlds. But mathematics and speculative physics are fast invading these worlds - and the flying discs are coming out of them, invading ours. Or shall we say, they are here all the time, and we are there? It behooves us students of borderland sciences (and everybody else too) to try to understand a few elementary concepts, to be receptive, even to odd ideas - and for a book full of eminently practical reasons. Also, to mistranslate Holy Writ, by taking thought one can perhaps add some cubits or less, at least to his mental stature.
M.L.
Footnotes
- * RR editors are fully aware that experimental craft and even guided missiles may occasionally be overhead, but this has almost no bearing on the true problem of the discs and other craft. We cannot constantly restate or even summarize the data, which now would run to book-length. The earlier stages however are summed up in the RR booklet, "Mystery of the Flying Discs"
- ** Crehore, Albert C. Atomic Theory: Its Application to Chemistry And Crystal Structure, With Especial Reference to the Steady States of Atoms. Cleveland, Ohio: The J.E. Johnson Co., 1942. <http://amzn.to/1MrRuUs>