The Duality of Seeing “Darkly”: Analyzing Bergman’s Karin in Through a Glass Darkly

The Virgin Spring and The Seventh Seal: A Girardian Reading William Mishler Of his more than forty films, Ingmar Bergman has set two in the Middle Ages—The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, 1956) and The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan, 1959), the latter based on an early ballad and utilizing a screenplay that he co-authored with Ulla Isaksson—which together form an instructive pair. The former, of course, represents his breakthrough as a director of international reputation. Though heralded by the powerful Sawdust and Tinsel from 1953, The Seventh Seal was his first unquestionable masterpiece. It was a film that to Bergman's own amazement "swept like a forest fire across the world."1 Today it continues to maintain its preeminent position with both audiences and critics. The Virgin Spring, however, is a different matter. Compared to his best work as a director, it has been judged a relative failure, first and foremost by Bergman himself. Initially elated by the film,2 he later became sharply critical of it. In an interview from 1970, he stated: "Now I want to make it quite plain that The Virgin Spring must be regarded as an aberration. It's touristic, a lousy imitation of Kurosawa."3 And in his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, he neglects even to mention the film4 and thus tacitly removes it from among the works by which he evidently wishes to be recognized as a director. Bergman's condemnation of The Virgin Spring is in my view excessive. Taken simply on its own terms, it possesses an undeniable power and presents sequences of great visual interest. On the other hand, it is true, the film is a far less captivating work than The Seventh Seal, less surprising to watch and less challenging to think about afterwards. Bergman locates its flaw at the conceptual level, and in my opinion he is correct to do so. After all, there is nothing amiss with the film's actors or technical resources, which are nearly identical to The Seventh Seal's. Speci106 William Mishler107 fically, Bergman locates The Virgin Spring's problem in what he intriguingly calls its "totally unanalysed idea of God."5 In the present essay I would like to open up this "totally unanalysed idea" first of all because I believe that it will hand us an important key for understanding the disparity in artistic quality between the two films and also, I hope, provide some insight into the connecting logic of Bergman's work as a director and screenwriter. To carry out this inquiry I will draw on the work of the literary critic and anthropologist René Girard, whose theories concerning the function of religion in human society strike me as offering a powerfully articulated parallel to the psychological and anthropological insights implicitly present in many of Bergman's films. I It is important in regard to the matter of religion to distinguish the two senses in which the subject is particularly relevant to Bergman—i.e., the personal and the ethical. There is on the one hand the Christianity of his childhood which shadowed him well into adulthood. As the son of a strict Lutheran pastor, Bergman grew up in an atmosphere pervaded by Christian theology and Christian habits of thought from which, as an artist, he struggled mightily to free himself. This endeavor is particularly noticeable in the films of his middle period, extending from The Seventh Seal through the so-called trilogy of Through a Glass Darkly (Sâsom i en spegel, 1961), Winter Light (Nattvardsgästern, 1963), and The Silence (Tystnaden, 1963). These last three record the progressive stages in an examination and rejection of the notion of God as a sufficient response to the ills of the world. Bergman has called the trilogy a "reduction," thereby pointing to the tight interlinkage among the films, each taking the minimal optimism of its predecessor, its faint glimmer of theistic possibility, and subjecting it to destructive scrutiny. By the end of the trilogy, the notion of God even as resonant absence or significant silence has been expunged. In The Silence the trio of the film's principal characters are carried deeper and deeper into a gritty...

Born: July 14, 1918, Uppsala, Uppsala lan, Sweden Died: July 30, 2007, Faro, Gotlands lan, Sweden Ingmar Bergman was not only Sweden's but also one of the world's most important filmmakers of the twentieth century. He was an artist with extraordinary breadth, also an author, dramaturge, and director of theatre and opera. Music was the foremost inspiration throughout his life. In Sweden, Bergman's position, not least as a filmmaker, was undeniably paradoxical. On the one hand, he was hailed and canonized, whilst on the other, constantly questioned and regarded as being too complex, too private, and too theatrical. Following his death, his notability is fully recognized. From an international perspective, the picture of Bergman is uniform, synonymous with Swedish film. What made Bergman unique was, not least, the long span of his working career, which was framed by two periods of writing: the first as a screenwriter in the 1940s and then, toward the end of his career, writing deeply personal works which, having left filmmaking behind him, allowed others to direct. But perhaps the most striking fact is that his films, however headstrong, integrate fully with film history, from the silent era when Victor Sjostrom's films were an enormous influence, and through the following decades. Bergman was one of those directors who, with an insatiable voracity, fed off film, eagerly watching films over and over again, and allowing himself to be inspired by what he had seen to make his own. For Bergman, the 1940s was the most important decade for experimentation, when he learned his craft through testing, discarding, and trying anew. It could well be that none of the earlier films from Crisis to Prison or Thirst, are particularly distinguished in themselves, but in them he experiments with style, for example, flashbacks or themes and central narratives that deal with alienation, all of which recur in his later films. In reality the films of the 1940s present the key to Bergman's breakthrough. It takes years of apprenticeship to achieve mastery, a luxury very few filmmakers are granted in such a costly enterprise. International recognition came in the 1950s after some considerable difficulties, amongst which Bergman left Svensk Filmindustri for Sandrews in order to make Sawdust and Tinsel with its stark portrayal of the artist's suffering which lay close to his own heart. But after films such as The Seventh Seal, Smiles of a Summer Night, or Wild Strawberries, which reaffirmed Swedish film internationally, restraint was at last cast aside. Most strikingly, perhaps, is that Smiles of a Summer Night, a comedy, won the director's prize at Cannes. The difficult and introspective brooding had evidently added strings to his bow, as the classic lift scene in Waiting Women had shown three years earlier. The contrast between the light colors and the commanding lightness of tone with darker passages often dominated interpretations of the director's work which became evident in the 1950s. Another turning point came in 1960 when Bergman discovered Faro, the significance of which can only be measured in retrospect. It is as if the barren island landscape, which became the setting for a long series of films beginning with Through a Glass Darkly, revealed an expression that had lain dormant in scenes set by the sea in earlier films, such as Sawdust and Tinsel and The Seventh Seal, and had at last found a home. Bergman's narratives were finally anchored in their appropriate element. It was during this decade that it became clear that Bergman's films had started to challenge filmic conventions. In a period which produced a new international generation of filmmakers for whom documentary simplicity was the order of the day, Bergman continued to make such deeply personal films as Winter Light, The Silence, Persona, Hour of the Wolf, and The Shame as if the rest of the world ceased to exist. In certain respects these were extremely unfashionable films, and it was no coincidence that during these years Bergman's premieres gave rise to fierce media debates. …

In this chapter, I am going to interpret the early work of Slavoj Žižek (between 1989 and 1994) as proposing what is in effect a theory of language as theatrical. That would be a theory of speech in which speaking was not only action, but also act, that is, an attempt to affect auditors by speaking, as well as to coordinate efforts through speech. In the examples that Žižek discusses, as well as the example that Žižek’s own work itself provides, these effects are mainly shock and seduction, but other effects — persuading, delighting, amazing, frightening and so forth — are also possible. Regarding speech as inherently theatrical means focusing on the ways in which the speaker, in seeking to affect an audience, expresses their subjectivity as well as engages with social conventions and refers to the objective world. Based on pragmatic theories of language, a dramaturgical theory of language includes an acknowledgement that speech involves social coordination with a normative dimension, as well as information exchange in the interests of referential descriptions of things in the world. Going beyond language pragmatics, though, including theories of communicative action, recognition of the theatricality of language means acknowledgement that speech happens between embodied subjects and depends for its effectiveness upon the dialogue partners’ mutual presuppositions about their speech community.

Maaret Koskinen examines Ingmar Bergman’s trilogy on “God’s silence”—Through a Glass Darkly (1960), The Communicants (U.S. title Winter Light, 1963), and The Silence (1963)— in light of his Lutheran background to demonstrate how each of the three films manifests his notion of aesthetic reduction. The trilogy, she argues, documents Bergman’s endeavor to rid his movies of what she calls “sacred clutter” (religious superstructure, film aesthetics, and language), creating a cinematic opposite to the conventions and traditions of most Hollywood religious films. Koskinen takes hold of a strand in which Bergman’s art and religion meet—namely, the question of faith and doubt, which in various ways turns out to deal with religion, aesthetics, and Protestantism on-screen.

Soren Kierkegaards radical protestant philosophy of the individual -- in which a persons leap of faith is favoured over general ethics -- has become a model for many contemporary political theorists. Thinkers such as Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou have drawn on its revolutionary spirit to position truth above the constraints of political systems. In Kierkegaard and Political Theory, contributors from a wide range of disciplines -- including theology, sociology, philosophy, and aesthetics -- examine just how crucial Kierkegaards anti-institutional thinking has been to such efforts and to modernity as a whole. The contributors convincingly position Kierkegaards radical philosophy as the starting point for contemporary political theory. They show how he pioneered a modernity defined as an argument -- an experience -- of the impossibility of rationally comprehending a system of thinking. They show how religious and aesthetic experiences function as a response to this impossibility, how their coherence in politics must always be questioned, especially in historys extreme example: totalitarianism. Engaging this and many other subjects, they provide a compelling new line in Kierkegaard studies that illuminates new contours of our political thought.

Orly Castel-Bloom's well-known novel Dolly City, first published in 1993, is a story of an abusive mother named Dolly. Told in first person and set in a future dystopian Israel, the novel concentrates on Dolly's violent anxiety regarding the health of her adopted son. She worries that he might be suffering from various medical conditions ranging from cancer to missing an internal organ. Her response is repeatedly to open him and needlessly operate on him. (1) A typical passage describes her actions thus: I succumbed to the chronic doubt from which I suffer. I wanted to check and see with my own eyes that everything was really in order, and then to check up on my checkup, and then to make sure that there hadn't been any slipups in the re-examinations, and so on and so forth. I gave the child anesthetic, I put him to sleep, and I did it. I slipped my hands into white gloves and began slicing into his thorax. His internal organs were revealed to my searching gaze, his heart, his lungs. Once I'd opened him up, I poked around in there too. Then I opened up his stomach, I held an organ roll call, I demanded to know if they were all present and correct. (31) (2) Such passages repeat themselves incessantly, marking the basic emotional tone of the novel. Dolly is more than just an excessively anxious and abusive mother. She is prone not only to fits of violent anxiety regarding her son, but often suffers from murderous rage and a flat affect coupled with extreme promiscuity. It is to Dolly as a character and as a narrator that most readers responded when reading the novel, often couching basic emotional reactions in intellectual or ideological terms. The initial reception of the book was varied; some saw it as expressing the linguistic and even moral deterioration of Israeli literature, while others prized the book as a breakthrough in Hebrew fiction. (3) Two leading Hebrew literary critiques by Dan Miron and Gershon Shaked claimed Castel-Bloom as the most original of a new generation of writers, urban and non-i deological; her writing resists and scorns social norms and public taste (see Miron; and Shaked 76). Following the strongly evaluative response that the book stirred up in reviews, the academic critical reception which followed has chosen to interpret it through the conceptual lenses of Post-modernism and Post-Zionism. Post-Modernist interpretations concentrate on the free play of language (signifier) used in the novel, on the lack of coherent reality, the mixture of high and low linguistic styles, and on the lack of depth or real affect. (4) Post-Zionist interpretations have either characterized the novel as disengaging from the national meta-narrative or as an explicit critique of Zionist claims. (5) Some interpretations saw the novel as a parody, a grotesque exaggeration of Jewish/Zionist mothering, an impossible endeavor composed of anxious sheltering, and preparing the child to be a soldier (Shiffman; Mendelson-Maoz). While there is some truth to these interpretations, they evade and assimilate this emotionally difficult text into a familiar grand narrative and try to assuage the reader with the comforting schemes of Modernism, Zionism and their respective posts The novel's main impact on readers, I argue, did not follow directly from its role in reconfiguring national narrative but from the shock and attraction of the narrator Dolly, a figure who combines a unique style and a grotesque violence. The main claim of this article will be that far from hovering in an unengaged postmodern way above reality in the realms of linguistic play and psychosis, CastelBloom's novel shows what recent theory calls the passion for the The concept of the Real was first articulated by Lacan and then elaborated by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek. While there are differences in their emphases, an ideal type (Weber 90) (6) of the concept of the Real can be readily sketched. …

The first part of this writing span in general terms of what may be called the direct experience; vision of God. It takes into accounts the religious experiences that seem to indicate the feeling of the moment and then distinguishes between this direct perceiving of God and other kind of conscious experiences. The examples quoted in this part have been taken from various religions, mainly Christianity and Hinduism. Thereafter, in the second part of the writing, it tries to show how visions of God fail to provide evidence for religious claims. There will be four main reasons in arguing that this concept does not seem to be available to support any claim for the existence of God. The discussion will go on further to discuss the arguments that seem to give a cognitive status to the mystical experiences of God. However, the essay will finally conclude the discussion with the suggestion that the concept of vision of God lacks the consistency and predictability needed to form the basis of any factual belief at all.The Concept of Vision of GodReligious experience is an umbrella term covering many different types of experience - charismatic phenomena, numinous feeling, possession, conversion experience, mystical involved in this discussion. The word vision means a mental picture of a possible situation now. It is also a mental picture which you have as a result of divine inspiration, madness, or taking drugs (Cobuild 1989: 1627). In line with the above meaning, vision is one of the five main sensations - sight, hear, smell, taste and touch. All these kind of physical sensations, along with the intellectual processing (reasoning), are the fundamental characteristics or elements of the cognitive aspects of our ordinary consciousness. Vision, however, in this context does not merely involve empirical objects which can be perceived by our sensory - kinds of objects are those divine being which could not be seen by our eyes as they are nonphysical. Because of the characteristic and they are seldom occur in our life, this kind of vision is totally different from that we normally experience.Let us first consider the claims that the theologians have made. Some of their experiences are usually described as follows: I have direct experience of I saw a vision of Archangel Gabriel, I seem to see the Blessed Virgin and 'I saw Christ at my side. These assertions are found among Christians and we will discuss later the visions of other religions. We should compare these assertions with the statement of seeing worldly objects, such as: I saw a black I seem to see a red tomato, and I see a car in front of the house. Firstly, we will start by examining the last three examples of the physical objects perceived by our ordinary visions. We can touch the black horse, taste the tomato and listen to the car engine. We can examine these objects with certainty by other physical sensations. On the whole, our sense experiences typically involve the conviction that the object on which the experience is focused and 'is really there', that it exists and that one 'experimentally' apprehends it. This conviction is not an interpretation which is placed upon the experience, but a part of the experience itself.Obviously, as mentioned above, vision or perception requires a real object. Perception could be analyzed into a conscious experience (CE) of a perceiver (P), the object (O) perceived, and a relation (R) between the object and the perception. R is a causal relation. O causes CE or is an indispensable part of the cause (Matson 1965: 12-13). If the perceiver is prevented from perceiving any objects, for examples, the eyes are closed, or he is a blind man, no relations occur, and he perceives nothing, even if there happens to be an object in front of him. We can say that his claim of experiencing the objects is only an imagination or hallucination. The case is different when we look at the vision of God, of the Virgin Mary, and of the Archangel Gabriel. …

According Virginia Woolf, painting and writing ... have much in common. novelist after all wants make us see .... It is a very complex business, mixing and marrying of words that goes on, probably unconsciously, in poet's mind feed reader's eye. All great writers are great colourists... . While sound and sight seem make equal parts of [her] first impressions, Woolf stresses their painterly quality.2 In To Lighthouse, Woolf's search for spiritual essences is expressed in light and color.3 Johannes Itten's metaphysic of light and color illuminates relation between creative source (Mrs. Ramsay/the Lighthouse) and creative artist (Lily Briscoe/the painting) in Woolf's novel.4 Itten (AC, p. 153) further affirms that the end and aim of all artistic endeavor is liberation of spiritual essence of form and color and its release from imprisonment in world of objects. Woolf's art does not reach so far toward abstraction, but she does imply that luminous halo of consciousness should be conveyed through equivalents of form, and notes that fiction is given capacity deal with 'psychological volumes.' 5 Roger Fry thought literature should parallel painting: The PostImpressionist movement ... was by no means confined painting.... Cezanne and Picasso had shown way; writers should fling representation winds and follow suit. But he never found time work out his theory of influence of Post-Impressionism upon literature-as Woolf ironically remarks (RF, p. 149). She herself accepted challenge of designing a literary art closer plastic values of painting. While Fry championed post-impressionists' 'attempt express by pictorial and plastic form certain spiritual experiences' (RF, p. 154), Woolf urged novelists to convey this varying, this unknown and uncir-

This study aims to determine the position of the author in women narration. With Rahimi’s background as a feminist, he said that with his novel he voiced the voices of Afghan women. Rahimi offered a strong female figure in the middle of the patriarchal shackles who is able to fight the system. The problem of this study is Rahimi’s ambiguity in narrating women. To determine the position of the author, the research uses the concept of the lure of the image belongs to Lidia Curti. The lure of the image is an offer provided by the author to give positions to women that are in fact not provided by them. Based on the research conducted, the results show that Rahimi keeps women as objects in a patriarchal world. In this case he is not able to pull the women out of the patriarchal zone. The space given to women by Rahimi reinforces male power. What Rahimi written in this novel is the lure of the image according to Curti’s concept which explains it as an image of women given by author or known as female gaze.

This study aims to determine the position of the author in women narration. With Rahimi’s background as a feminist, he said that with his novel he voiced the voices of Afghan women. Rahimi offered a strong female figure in the middle of the patriarchal shackles who is able to fight the system. The problem of this study is Rahimi’s ambiguity in narrating women. To determine the position of the author, the research uses the concept of the lure of the image belongs to Lidia Curti. The lure of the image is an offer provided by the author to give positions to women that are in fact not provided by them. Based on the research conducted, the results show that Rahimi keeps women as objects in a patriarchal world. In this case he is not able to pull the women out of the patriarchal zone. The space given to women by Rahimi reinforces male power. What Rahimi written in this novel is the lure of the image according to Curti’s concept which explains it as an image of women given by author or known as female gaze.

The study examines interactions on Facebook and Twitter from a communicative action perspective. The objectives of this study are to: identify the nature of action(s) by interlocutors on Facebook and Twitter and examine the world(s) portrayed by these interlocutors. The study adopts Habermas’ theory of communicative action to study the nature of actions and the three-world concept that exist among users of Facebook and Twitter. Insights from interpersonal pragmatics and politeness were also found useful in the analysis of data. A total number of 275 messages were used comprising five posts from Facebook with randomly selected 165 comments and three tweets with randomly selected 102 comments. The research observes that most participants on Facebook and Twitter acted or commented strategically in the sense that the stance they took were motivated by reasons and facts and not merely opinions or emotions. The findings also reveal that many interactants showed that they operate in the objective world by abiding by the social norms and facts.

The article analyses the dialectic of the immanent and transcendent in the works of the Ukrainian folklore lyro-epic literature. Often in a folklore work, the adjustment to comprehend a certain idea occurs through certain material forms, to pass through ordinary things that are important in specific circumstances, in a particular life, to timeless entities. At the same time, the folklore image itself in dumas, historical songs, songs-chronicles, ballads, etc. can be considered in the aspect of self-transcendence: the heroes of folklore works are presented in moments of spiritual and aesthetic experience; they give an essential moral assessment of what is happening and go through the stages of self-knowledge and self-affirmation, thus trying to overcome their own ontological imperfection. The article aims to delve into the intricacies of Ukrainian oral non-ceremonial poetry, specifically focusing on dumas, ballads, historical songs and chronicle songs, to understand the universal model of being that intertwines the immanent and transcendent realms. This exploration seeks to highlight the distinctive characteristics of spirituality within the artistic macrosphere of folklore. Analysing the works of non-ceremonial poetry, the authors note that the very essence of the transcendent, which at first seems to be something indistinct, fundamentally unknown, located outside the objective world, is identified only intuitively. The artistic macrosphere of the lyro-epic work is aimed at finding those reflexive facets that will help to comprehend the transcendent, and, in the future, the dialectic of the immanent and transcendent itself. It is emphasised that in some chronicle songs there is an attempt to comprehend the history of the region through magic, which is defined in real existence.

My kulturBOT 1.0 is a robotic art critic that attends exhibitions and produces tweets and captioned images for social media. kulturBOT indiscriminately takes pictures of the artworks, as well as the venue and the exhibition visitors. It integrates randomness in its movements and its language usage. We use the robot to stress the cognitive agency of artifacts and the inherent vagueness of what Bourdieu described as the ‘demarcation line between the world of technical objects and the world of aesthetic objects’. Bourdieu critically reflects on whether this demarcation depends on the intention of the producer of those objects. Rather, he claims, these so-called intentions are themselves a ‘product of the social norms and conventions which combine to define the always uncertain and historically changing frontier between simple technical objects and objects d’art’ (Bourdieu 1984).

In view of my finding that dreams are the precursors of waking life, its blueprint in fact, dreaming and waking must be seen as an interdependent unit. Both are equivalent occurrences with the dream being the primary aspect. This interdependent relationship can best be compared with Einstein’s famous formula of E=mc 2 where E stands for the dream and mc 2 for waking life. For mystics, both states are solipsistic projections . The world is not an objective reality. To argue that it is a permanent and shared experience is based on a double premise . We can’t have the sleeper’s point of view and that of the waking individual at one and the same time. In other words, just as dreams come and go, the waking world disappears as we go to sleep and resurfaces as we wake. Clearly, the world, like our dreams is a cerebral projection . Karl Pribram agrees when he sees the brain as a holographic machine that projects the universe as we wake , in the same way as a holographic plate projects its images in 3D outwards when a laser light strikes it. He states: “ The rules of quantum mechanics apply all the way through to our psychological processes, to what’s going on in the nervous system – then we have an explanation perhaps, certainly we have a parallel to the kind of experiences that people have called spiritual experiences”. The precursor of the holographic plate ‘containing the world’ may be found in a poem by the mystic Shabistari who writes: “Know that the world is a mirror from head to foot, in every atom are a hundred blazing suns”… And as in quantum mechanics, this projection is characterised by ‘omnipresence’ much as it is described in Hindu mysticism: “In the Heaven of Indra, there is said to be a network of pearls so arranged that if you look at one, you see all others reflected in it. In the same way, each object in the world is not merely itself, but involves every other object, and in fact, is every other object”. All this is only possible because we are ‘suspended’ in an all-pervasive medium: CONSCIOUSNESS. Indeed consciousness is the sine qua non of existence. It is therefore the prime factor in any theory of existence. It is in fact that which lends reality to all there is. This is in perfect agreement with quantum mechanics, which states that ‘energy’, typified by an interactive dualism, only ‘coalesces’ to matter as we focus on it. In short, the world cannot exist as such, but only unfolds in a living medium, the mind - in consciousness . In turn, the necessity of a living matrix for the ‘creation’ of the universe underpins the argument that the world only exists while we are awake. It also demonstrates how right Chuang Tzu was when he said: “I and the universe are one”, and such oneness is not just a theoretical unit, but a living whole . In a theory where the world is an objective reality, consciousness emerges from complex computations among neurons. (Hameroff) But the medically induced NDE of Pam Reynolds that was observed by twenty staff assigned to Dr. Spetzler’s operation on Pam and is recorded in detail, demonstrates in incontrovertible terms that consciousness exists outside the brain , and is in fact the fundament of existence . It also demonstrates that consciousness is non-intermittent and hence the only entity that can claim reality status. In fact as E, the creative energy that in quantum mechanics is typified by an interactive dualism, where photons and particles are an ‘hermaphroditic emulsion’ of potentialities, where unitive E is better described as ‘not two’ than as ‘one’, we understand at once that mc 2 , the material expression of E, is never pure matter, but also energy, and ultimately a form of consciousness. Such toppling of our antiquated western perceptions is rocking the foundations of our science. Clearly, a massive paradigm shift is under foot. East and West are moving closer together, paving the way for a new worldview and a new kind of spirituality. In that climate the dream and its function as a messenger will gradually be saved from confusion and underestimation. Indeed, like Hermes, it will eventually be recognised as the messenger of life’s most fundamental information. Instead of being dismissed as Prospero’s vacuous wisps of smoke, it will be recognised, once again, as the DNA of life on earth.

A model of the Universe is proposed in which three-dimensional space consists of positive and negative charges which are exactly equal and opposite. The charges are separated by a distance d, which is a random variable of the order of 0.1 nm. The charges are produce by continuous creation from nothing and the Universe doubles in volume every 2 to 3 billion years. Vast tracts of space move relative to each other and they meet whirlpools that are produced in which the charges are forced together producing protons and neutrons. Each proton and each neutron consume a pair of charges every 917 seconds and this creates the force of gravity in which space physically contracts around large objects. This concept of gravity is consistent with Newton’s and Einstein’s equations and allows one to visualize curved space and space-time. Focal areas in which the charges are ordered create information and energy. Electromagnetic radiation is a wave of energy in which order forms at the front and dissolves at the rear. Large objects move in a straight line because their electrons order adjacent space and the object moves with a surrounding wave. The quantum world and the world of large objects are not dissimilar and we can construct physical models of the Universe that all intelligent humans can understand. This includes a physical understanding of Schrodinger’s equation and its parameters. Everything in the Universe is composed ultimately of positive and negative charges, which can be combined in an infinite number of ways. This applies to abstract concepts as well as concrete objects. The only difference is that the former is four dimensional and involves complex information flow. Thus human consciousness, behavior, religious beliefs and spiritual experience are just as real and susceptible to scientific study as are anatomy and physiology.