Time is spiral; history is a sine curve; tomorrow is yesterday all over again. “Everything that is happening in this country has happened before: in Rome, in Egypt, before the comet.”

An evening with Bryan Burnside, 66 year-old retired veteran and nuclear medicine tech, and his 29-year-old twin sons Brian and Bob, dressed identical black polo shirts that contrast their pale skin, is its own cyclical experience. The boys pace through the living dining room of their snug cottage buried in the Virginia woods, lightly touching the computer table, the chair back, the doorframe along their repeated path, as if physically manifesting the electron energy that occupies their mind. Bryan sits solid in the middle of the movement, the family nucleus. Each has his own perspective in the cyclical conversation: Bob is focused on energy, Brian math, and Bryan on religion, yet their notions so tightly reinforce one another, the originator of one pronouncement simply fuels another’s idea.

Bryan was born in Illinois, outside of Chicago. He worked for Plymouth at the Belvidere plant. “The neon I own now was made there.” He lived in various places in the west, was in the army in Alabama, met his wife Joy and has lived in the south ever since: Tennessee, North Carolina, and now Virginia. Bryan was an x-ray tech and eventually a nuclear medicine tech. He recently retired from the local hospital in Farmville after his Lyme disease and related asthma caused increasing problems.

Bob and his wife Joy have four children, whom Joy home schooled. Their two daughters have grown and moved away, to NC and Tennessee. Their twin suns, Bob and Brian, 29, have always lived at home.

Our conversation, which was more of a dissertation, filled over twenty pages in my journal. I will offer readers only a few snippets of ideas that ricocheted across the universe, and beyond.

“We do not live in a steady state universe. We live in a catastrophic universe. Something happened to the apes we were and we became the men we are.

“Fire is the impetus of change. It could have led to our advance. Or it could be have been a virus or an environmental disaster. We have lived through catastrophes before, the last one probably 11,000 years ago, maybe from comet impact. That created the climate conditions that enabled our agricultural society.

“I was raised as Christian but have always been analytical. When I was a young man, I was involved in fundamental Christianity. There were a dozen different types of Christianity when Constantine unified it. American Christianity has nothing to do with what first century Christians believed. American Christians are the Pharisees of the modern day.

“Man as been on this planet, as homo-sapian, for at least 250,000 years. The commonalties of all ancient civilizations are the zodiac, the stars, and the shamans- extra-sensory experiences. Look at the cave paintings in France. They are psychedelic imagery and imagery of man transforming into animals. The tribal basis of human groups, families of seven to twelve individuals in communities of 150 has been expanded beyond our capacity to work beneficially. All over the world there are unexplained lighting effects: the Brown Mountain Lights of North Carolina, the Marfa lights in Texas. These could be Piso electrical effects. Ancient people saw natural phenomenon every day, they was energy every day, they are shaman-based. Our society works against nature. Modern doctors don’t have a clue. The minute you think you know everything, you know nothing. There is only one system that grows unabated in its natural state: cancer.

“There’s evidence of advanced civilizations that pre-date us by millennia. An archeologist in Mexico found an intact hammer in limestone dated 400,000 years ago. We have found fully human remains from 250,000 years ago. Yet we still have ‘prehistoric’ animals like alligators on our earth. We cannot know when traits become dominant in our world. What we do know is that science has developed a story and evidence that doesn’t reinforce that story is discredited.

“The Sphinx is at least 10,500 years old. The king’s tomb is giant fuel cell used by the Pharaohs to create flashing light shows to demonstrate their dominance over the people. The center of the earth is a nuclear reactor.

“The Black Death may have been the best thing that happened to Western Civilization. It killed indiscriminately but it changed society and overthrew the repression of the Dark Ages.”

As the conversation ranged from nineteenth century religious revivals to Nazis to ancient Egypt to comic books to string theory to… I asked the three animated men if their life views bring solace. Bryan said, “Every day I give thanks that I have a level of consciousness that most Americans lack.

“We talk like this every day, this is what we do.” Bob and Brian were home schooled. They each got a GED and went to community college. Bob studied electronics, Brian mathematics. Brian then went on to NC State and UNC Greensboro but never completed his degree. These days, the Internet provides the main source of their study. Joy left us to read James Patterson. The three of them continued to speak over each other; their ideas reinforcing, feeding, and building on each other.

“What people have done forever has been to try something, see if it works, and tweak that. Most of us life in one reality and perceive another one because we believe our perceptions. Mathematics is a construct that we built and tweak. It’s based on certain assumptions, for example that a point exists, even though a point has no size, shape, or weight. But we accept the reality of a point. Math is limited by our bounds. We cannot escape them.

“Arthur C. Clark says that we are all moving toward a uniform consciousness. We will lose our physical bodies and merge into one consciousness.

“There is no duality, right versus wrong. They are two sides of the same coin. All change happens with interaction. Perfect order cannot exist because it cannot change. It cannot interact with anything. It’s like a noble gas. Chaos is everything in motion. The only certainty in chaos is that, with everything moving, a point is not where it was.

“This is the range of our civilization, a helical, repeatable cycle, a sine wave oscillating between perfect order and total chaos, neither of which is sustainable.”

About 9:00 p.m. they pull out a vibration oscillator to try an experiment to get salt crystals to arrange into patterns at different frequencies. They have seen it on you tube. They don’t have exactly the right speaker or metal plate to transmit the sound, but they tweak until Brian announces, “We could talk all night. It’s time for bed.”

How will we live tomorrow?

“My background is in energy. I think we are sitting on technology we are not using. We have microwaves and induction stoves. That is the most energy efficient way to heat water. What if we broadcast radiation directly into the water? Like a microwave that uses less power over a longer period of time. If this works, it will change everything. It can be scaled up. I want to see every house have a generator that creates energy and feeds the grid. The idea is to create very efficient steam power.

“Another idea is to create a thorium molten salt reactor. This produces very low radiation in a closed loop system. 98% of the material is turned to power with only 2% waste; the opposite of conventional reactors.

“The comic books of the 40’s and 50’s with jet packs and flying cars predicted a future of revolutionary power. What we got instead is a revolution in communications.

“Look at electrons. They defy thermodynamics. They operate a different level in the space-time continuum. They operate a different level than our understanding. What is it? We don’t know. It could be dark energy. They say dark energy makes up 72% of our universe. Is that the basis of electron energy?

“Now I’m considering this comic that describes the zero point of the universe as an infinite energy source – a black hole. Black holes convert matter into energy that generates supernovas. Electrons act like water. Water changes phase as it moves through its cycle. Electrons are energy that show up in one place and then shift to another.” – Bob

“Civilizations come and go. I don’t think we came from the apes. I think we’ve always been smart.” – Joy

“I am interested in where biological and genetics research will go. Every system has corruption in it. Can we locate and tweak that corruption? Can we reverse aging? Can we genetically engineer ourselves?” – Brian

“When we go to the electron level the ‘particle’ becomes ‘energy’. It is no longer information. It’s consciousness. DNA is not just information. It is the direction of consciousness. I think how will we live tomorrow is to return to that energy. Call it the creative god.

“This society will die and be purged.” – Bryan

“The ancients worked with vibration, song and dance to address any problem. We work against nature. They worked with nature. We have to find the vibration that allows us to work with nature. We have to find the song.” – Bob