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Babbage, Charles - The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise
Identifier
004026
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Where do thoughts go? Where are they stored? Are they accessible and are they deleted or do they remain forever? This was another of Babbage's questions to himself and his higher self helped him.
Thoughts, he concluded, like all related to the mind is spirit - software. But they are recorded and they are stored, so they have to be somewhere and he concluded that there is a part of every atom that stores perceptions - thoughts. It is, he concluded, never deleted, a permanent record of everything that went on and as a consequence the 'truth'.
It is from Babbage's hypotheses that Sir James Jeans and later scientists [includng Einstein] conceived of the idea of an expanding universe - one expanding to allow the storage of this forever executing thinking activity that was being undertaken. The 'log' had to be stored somewhere, and it was increasing all the time as the universe got 'older', as such every atom expands and as a consequence the entire universe expands.
A description of the experience
every atom, impressed with good and with ill, retains at once the motions which philosophers and sages have imparted to it, mixed and combined in ten thousand ways with all that is worthless and base. The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. There in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as with the latest sighs of mortality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each atom, the testimony of man's changeful will