Encountering the Theory

The story of my involvement with Arthur Young is intertwined with Frank Barr, MD, without whose influence I might have never encountered Arthur Young and his Theory of Process.

Frank and I grew up in a small East Texas town, San Augustine. My first realization that Frank was ‘different’ from my other classmates was when we had a ‘show and tell day’ at school. I brought two small U-shaped magnets plus a metal circle and metal seal. I demonstrated how the magnets would attract each other in one direction, and when one was rotated, they repelled each other, and so forth.

As I went around the room to each classmate’s desk to show the magnets, most kids simply seemed bored. Then I got to Frank’s desk. He picked up the magnets, did the attraction and repulsion test, then the conductivity test, and then repeated them all, until the teacher told me to “move along” so that everyone got a chance to see the exhibits. It was at that moment that I realized Frank and I shared a deeper appreciation of science and of the mystery of magnetism than all my other classmates. It was the start of our lifelong friendship.

We began to have discussions of life, science, the Universe, and religions. We realized that we were both in ‘vastly’ different churches–he was a Baptist, and I was a Methodist. His religion believed in ‘Once Saved, Always Saved’ and baptism by total immersion in a tank of water. My religion believed that you could ‘fall away’ from being saved, and needed to ‘confess your sins’ during an ‘altar call’ at the conclusion of the sermon, plus we only had to get ‘sprinkled with holy water’ on our heads, to be baptized and ‘Saved.’

When we were in seventh grade, Frank shocked me and his local church when he asked his preacher the unthinkable, heretical question –“If God created the Universe, and everything in it, then Who created God?” To make matters worse, he asked “If God is so Holy, and He created Heaven, and He is All Powerful, All Knowing, then Why did He create the Devil and Hell?” Frank really wanted answers, but he was told “You are not allowed to ask these kind of questions; you are just to read and believe in the Holy Bible, and it will give you all the Answers that you need.”

Frank was not satisfied with that answer but to avoid excommunication and condemnation by his church and by our classmates, he backed off on these public questions. However, he and I discussed what the answers might be. Frank began to go to the library to seek information in other books, and that led us to further discussions of cosmology and evolution.

We went on to college where we were educated about a purposeless, accidental, material Universe, without need for a ‘god’, which was quite a paradigm shift from our East Texas roots. Not having to worry about ‘Burning in Hell for Eternity’ was quite a relief-we were taught that death was only like going to sleep, and never waking up.

Then we both went to medical school. We learned about neurology, how the brain is organized, and how drugs could alter the brain pathways to cause anything from mental illness, to mystical experiences, which themselves may just be another ‘hallucination.’ Yet, during all our medical training, Frank and I continued to ask the question “What’s it all about, Alfie?” It seemed there was no coherent answer; anything was possible. The only certainty was that we had left our religious upbringing far behind.

When it came time to do our Internship and Residency in Internal Medicine, Frank headed out to the Mecca of the 60s, San Francisco, while I went to Salt Lake City, Utah, where I found a culture much like the one I had left in Texas. During my vacation time, I escaped to visit Frank once a year in California, where he introduced me to the Exploratorium, Sufi Dancing, John Lilly and his theory of the mind as a BioComputer, Gurdjieff, Transpersonal Psychology and Charles Tart, and all his other philosophical investigations. I always returned with a load of books to read and a realization that Utah was just a stop on my way to California and its wide open spaces of philosophies, religions, mad scientists, gurus, and who knew what else.

Finally I moved to California and stayed with Frank for a while. He was still on his philosophical quest to find ‘The Answer’ to how the Universe worked. Once again, he was without a firm belief system to trust in. He had found that the Gurdjieff system had more questions than answers, and that while John Lilly was a true ‘psychonaut’ of the mind, his BioComputer theory was also incomplete.

In March of 1976, Frank told me he had ‘discovered’ a man named Arthur Young, whom he had heard about while attending meetings of the Physics Consciousness Group. Young’s two books, Reflexive Universe and Geometry of Meaning, had just been published. After Frank read them, he heard that Arthur had an Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley and began to attend classes there. I detected a familiar pattern–Frank would become enthused by this new theoretical philosophy, learn all about it, and would become disillusioned when he found it lacking in explanation of how Reality came to be, and is. But to my surprise, that did not happen this time. He continued to delve into Young’s Theory of Process and told me that this Theory seemed to be the Real Thing.

So I began to attend the classes at ISC. I met Arthur and his wife Ruth, and the assorted ‘regulars’ who went to the various events there. I knew nothing about Arthur or his invention of the Bell Helicopter; he never bragged about it. Although he had written two books that outlined his Theory of Process, he did not behave like a guru, did not tell people to ‘believe’ his Theory, but instead wanted them to understand it, then critique it, and change it or revise it if it did not ‘fly’.

I was amazed at the quality of speakers that were invited to speak at the ISC, including physicists from U.C. Berkeley, philosophers, and also authentic mediums, channelers, ESP researchers, and UFO researchers. A wide variety of topics were discussed, including “who wrote the Shakespeare plays,” with Francis Bacon as the prime suspect.

Throughout it all, I was impressed that Arthur did not force his Theory on anyone; rather, he listened to the invited speakers and the audience members, eager to see what they knew from their research and their life experience. He wanted to know if what they talked about had a place in his Theory, or whether his Theory could or should be modified to account for this new information. .

Arthur would give lectures from time to time, emphasizing certain aspects of the Theory. His demonstration of the difference between Form and Substance was always astonishing. On at least three occasions, I saw him take a piece of white chalk, a “Formed Substance”, and put it in his mouth and chew it, turning it into a Substance without a Form. This was a demonstration I never forgot, and it was perfect in showing the difference between these two states of matter.

Over the years, I began to really appreciate Arthur, the man, and Arthur, the genius. I had to agree with Frank that the Theory of Process was the most comprehensive paradigm that I had ever seen or investigated; it was both holographic and fractal, and Arthur had invented it before those terms were commonly known. I began to see that his Theory was confirmed in other areas that I investigated. It made much more sense of all the information that I had learned in college and medical school. For example, Arthur made chemistry easy by showing that there are only four types of chemical bonds, and while the combination of atoms into molecules are endless, they all occur with only these four bonds. He made the critical observation that Form only begins with atoms, and that the so-called ‘sub-atomic particles’ are not really particles at all, but are energetic substances that are being seen like a strobe light photo. They are inappropriately called particles, for they are really manifestations of energy transformations. And his decision to leave blank the second stage of his Grid, noting it to be a ‘work in progress,’ was brilliant. It demonstrated that he did not want to force the data to fit his Theory, but chose to stay true to what the Theory was showing him and to allow the Grid to be completed as science progressed in the future.

For me, there is one overwhelmingly convincing confirmation of the Theory: the work that Frank Barr did to try to disprove it since it seemed “too good to be true.” Frank’s efforts led him to make an important discovery for biology and medicine. Using the Theory, he was able recognize that a molecule ignored by science, neuromelanin, was actually the ‘missing link’ that was needed as an organizing molecule for the animal cell. It functions as a ‘silicon chip’ for the cell, yet because it doesn’t seem to ‘do anything’, it is ignored by most scientists; it doesn’t fit their belief that DNA controls the cell, and proteins get the work done. But ignoring is not disproving. More and more of Frank’s subsequent predictions using the Theory in the area of “BioProcess” are coming to pass, most strikingly in the new science of epigenetics–the control of the genes by something outside of or prior to, the genes.

In sum, I was led to Arthur Young and his work by a series of synchronicities that began with the realization of the mystery of the magnet (with its Toroidal energy field from the aligned metal atoms), and also by a lifelong friendship based on a mutual quest to discover how the Universe Really Works. I truly think that Arthur Young is a genius whose stature surpasses that of Darwin, Freud, Jung, Einstein, and others, and whose recognition by science and society is inevitable.