THE QUESTERS TWO

 

          * denotes unknown source

                                                                                      [ ] = editorial comment

 

[Continuing on the theme of The Questers’Journal, with further excerpts from literary sources, with the inclusion of items concerning health, science and meta-science.]

 

APPENDICES:

1.The Universe as Hologram

2.Physiological Rhythms

3.The Marriage of Mind and Brain

4.Psychology and Power: Understanding Human Action

 

***

 

WE ARE SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON.                                                 (Wm. Shakespeare)

 

O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.         (Pindar)

 

Whoever sets himself up to be judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.                                                                                                                        (Albert Einstein)

 

A human being is a part of the whole (called by us the Universe) a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and of a foundation for inner security.                                                                                                    (ibid)

 

I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts, the rest are details.                                                                                                                                                                                                                          (ibid)

 

Compared to the Great Way, heaven and earth are like a bubble and a shadow. Only the primal spirit and the true nature overcome time and space. The energy of the seed, like heaven and earth, is transitory, but the primal spirit is beyond polar differences. Here is the place where heaven and earth derive their being. When students understand how to grasp to the primal spirit they overcome the polar opposites of light and darkness and tarry no longer in the three worlds. Only the seeker who has envisioned human nature's original face is able to do this.

                                                                (Richard Wilhelm)

 

Mind is the Master power that moulds and makes,
And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes
The tool of Thought, and, shaping what he wills,
Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills:
He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass!
Environment is but his looking-glass.                                          (James Allen)

Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.                             (ibid)

 

The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg. And in the highest vision of a soul a waking Angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.  (ibid)

 

To do evil, a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good... Ideology - that is what gives devil-doing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.                  (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)

 

Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.                                                                                   (Julius Caesar)

 

ENERGETICS: A completely different medical approach: Instead of killing the struggling cells that are infected -- which after all is killing part of the immune system as well! -- simply help the infected cells immediately change back into normal cells again, by highly amplifying the very mechanism by means of which the body's cellular restorative system works anyway.

(Col.Tom Bearden, in reviewing David Bohm’s hidden variable theory, and the work of Becker, Priore, Popp, Kaznacheyev, Stoney, Whittaker, and Ziolkowski, indicating that not only cells, but bodies -- genetics and all -- can be time-reversed and time-forwarded by application of very weak EM fields)

J.A.Wheeler's principle states: "Space acts on matter, telling it how to move. In turn, matter reacts back on space, telling it how to curve." Since matter is just locally collected (trapped) energy (by Einstein's E=mc2), we may retranslate Wheeler's principle as: "Space acts on trapped energy, telling it how to move. In turn, trapped energy reacts back on space, telling it how to curve."

 Now we can extend Wheeler's principle and add it to electrodynamics to form a powerful corollary. This corollary constitutes the Principle of Vacuum Engines (or the Principle of Vacuum Engineering), as follows: "Nested space-time curvatures tell electromagnetic energy how to internally structure, be trapped, and change; and internal electromagnetic energy structuring, trapping, and dynamics tell local space-time how to internally nest multiple curvatures to form local vacuum engines”.

By this principle, it can be seen that Priore -- in creating and manipulating nested EM energy structuring, was forming local vacuum engines. His method utilized the "template" vacuum engine of the disease's deviation from normal, as the "signal input" to the cell-and-its-parts. Priore's nested, structured biwaves impinging upon these cells constituted pump waves, in the nonlinear optical sense. Thus an amplified anti-engine was formed in the cell and in every part of it, precisely against the specific disease's vacuum engine template. The result was the rapid time-reversal of the cell and all its parts, de-differentiating the affected cell and all its parts back to the previous normal condition.                                                                                 (Col. Tom Bearden)

 

The restorative or reparative system in the living animal is electromagnetic in nature, but of a peculiar kind involving dc currents and dc potentials. This functions as an analog command and control system which is applicable to the entire organism.                                                                (Dr.Robert Becker)

 

We have concluded from our biofeedback work and brain-wave research with hundreds of patients that anything you can accomplish with an acupuncture needle you can do with your mind. (Elmer Green)

 

There are two ways to look at life. You can either believe that there are no miracles - or you can realize that everything is a miracle.                                                                    (Albert Einstein)

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and the new generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning.                        (Max Planck)

Thousands of years ago Chuang Tzu asked, "Is it Chuang Tzu asleep dreaming he is a butterfly? Or is it the butterfly dreaming he is Chuang Tzu."

In the Qigong of transcendence it is asked, "Is the practitioner in the deep Qigong state a person in a moment of transcendent energetic experience, or is manifestation in a physical body actually a brief exploration into substance by an entity whose normal state is one of highly refined, resonating light energy?"    (Roger Jahnke)

 

. . . time is fluid, and so are the boundaries between human beings; the borders separating helper from the one who hurts are always blurry. Wounds, I think, are never confined to a single skin but reach out to rasp us all.                                                                                                                                                    (Lauren Slater)

 

It is in mastering our thoughts that we master the universe. Thoughts are the masculine, electrical component of the universe, and combined with feelings - the magnetic, feminine component - create reality. In other words, thoughts fall into the reservoir of the heart, and act upon the substance of things hoped for.       (Almine Barton)

 

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of words.       (Wittgenstein)

 

A man does not seek to see himself in running water, but in still water. For only what is itself still, can impart stillness upon others.                                                                                            (Chuang Tse )

 

MERIDIAN TECHNOLOGIES:

That thoughts generate energy which affects our bodies is beyond question. Approaching the mind from entirely different perspectives, both David R. Hawkins. M.D., Ph.D., and the Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, M.D. have concluded that the mind, through our thoughts, influences our physical beings at the most elementary levels; that thoughts not only influence the chemicals in our bodies, but even turn genes on and off, and cause the brain to reconfigure itself!

 

Other research indicates that this effect is accomplished via the impact that the energy of our thoughts has on the energy pathways known as meridians. The organizing centers (acupuncture treatment points) of the meridians are responsible for biological morphogenesis. They retain all of their growth functions after morphogenesis and communicate with one another to maintain proper bodily form and function. Kinesiologic testing can demonstrate that the connection between the mind and body is immediate. Positive thoughts make our bodies strong and negative thoughts make us go weak. Since the body's response is immediate, our physical being is influenced from instant to instant to our changing thoughts and emotions. It is the continuity and reiteration of various thought patterns which can ultimately result in manifest disease. Thus, while ideas of all sorts pass though our minds, it is the ones we habitually entertain that impact us the most.

 

Fortunately, the mind-body connection is a two way street: we influence the meridian energy via the energetic pattern of our thoughts; we can also influence the energy pattern of the meridians via direct or indirect stimulation of the meridian points themselves. Proper stimulation of the meridians influences the pattern of energy emitted by the brain, and can destabilize the self -perpetuating energy fields of disease states. The energy fields of disease states are created by our thoughts, and always precede observable disease states. Research has shown that reliable changes in the bioelectric potential of meridian points occur months before any physically observable signs of breast cancer appear in women for example.

 

An individual's existence does not begin with his conception nor his birth. We are not our bodies. Rather we are eternal beings of energy, who have communication devices we call bodies. Our bodies, through the influence of the meridians, become a reflection of the projected energy of our being. As eternal beings, existing in a temporal physicality, the energy of our current ‘here-now being’ is influenced by the energy of our past existence. This influence is our Karma, a constant energetic breeze that colors the context of our current and earliest awareness. At the end of our current physical form, our eternal energy - the True Us - will carry unfinished remnants from this life, in addition to past life unfinished remnants. What are these unfinished remnants? They are energetic attractor fields which maintain our separation from All That Is, that maintain our duality.

 

When we no longer generate low-level energy patterns, we exit the temporal physicality and become one with All That Is. While this may seem to be an unrealistic goal, it is the path we are all on, and will remain on until it is finished. Every step toward this goal is, in itself, a step toward freedom and a step toward love. Love is ultimately total freedom and total acceptance. Love is beyond forgiveness; Love sees no errors in need of forgiveness.                                                          (R.K. Ebert)

 

Never quarrel about religion. All quarrels and disputes concerning religion simply show that spirituality is not present. Religious quarrels are always over the husks. Only when Purity and Spirituality go, leaving the soul dry, do quarrels begin and not before.                                                                         (Swami Vivekananda)

 

The Vedanta [philosophy of the Upanishads] recognizes no sin, it recognizes only error; and the greatest error - says the Vedanta - is to say that you are weak, that you are a sinner, a miserable creature and that you have no power and you cannot do this and that. In you is all power. Summon up your all-powerful nature and this whole Universe will lie at your feet. It is the Self alone that predominates and not matter.         (ibid)

 

The average man looks up at night

And sees thousands and thousands of twinkling stars,

Each different from the others.

But a man of wisdom and achievement

Perceives the one light behind the dark dome of the night-sky;

Whose incandescence peeps at us,

Through all the holes in the night-dome!!

To see the one in the many is the casual vision of knowledge.

To see the many in the one is the mission of wisdom.              (Swami Chinmayananda)

 

Many sensations come, many thoughts and images arise, but they are just waves of your mind. Nothing comes from outside your mind. To realize the pure mind in your delusion takes practice. If you try and expel the delusion, it will only persist even more. Just say, "Oh, this is just delusion," and do not be bothered by it.  (Shunryu Suzuki)

 

All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow. Acquisitions end in dispersion, buildings end in destruction, meetings end in separation, and births end in death.              (Milarepa)

 

The witch doctor succeeds for the same reason all the rest of us succeed. Each patient carries his own doctor within him. They come to us not knowing that truth. We are at our best when we give the doctor that resides within each patient the chance to go to work.                                                                                (Albert Schwietzer)

 

What is the need for so much news from abroad, when all that concerns either life or death is at work within us?                                                                                                                                       (William Law)

 

The teaching which is in written form is not the true teaching. Written teaching is a kind of food for the brain. Of course, it is necessary to take some food for the brain; but it is more important to be yourself, by practicing the right way of life.                                                                      (Shunryu Suzuki - ‘Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind’)

 

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind, there are few.                                                    (ibid)

 

After you have ‘practiced’ for a while, you will realize that it is not possible to make rapid progress. Even if you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little.              (ibid)

 

When you are practicing Zazen, do not try to stop thinking. Let it stop by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it come in, and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try to stop your thinking, it means you are bothered by it. Do not be bothered by anything!                                               (ibid)

 

If you continue this simple practice everyday, you will obtain a wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you obtain it, it is nothing special.                   (ibid)

 

To forget oneself totally, one's mind should keep awake at every moment. A mind that has forgotten the past and the future, that is awake to the now, to the present, expresses the highest concentration of intelligence. It is alert, it is watchful, it is inspired. The actions of a man who has such a mind are exceptionally creative and perfect. Verily to forget oneself totally, is to be in perfection.         (Swami Chinmayananda)

 

Man masters nature not by force but by understanding.                    (Jacob Bronowski)

 

You must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition.

Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. Ask “does this path have a heart?” If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.                                             (Carlos Castenada)

 

The attainment of Nirvana (enlightenment) from the ego's standpoint is extreme death, the death of self, the death of "me" and "mine," the death of the watcher. It is the ultimate and final disappointment.        (Chogyam Trungpa)

 

Meditation is not a matter of trying to achieve ecstasy, spiritual bliss, or tranquility, nor is it attempting to become a better person. It is simply the creation of space where we are able to expose and undo our neurotic games, our self-deceptions, our hidden fears and hopes.                                                                                 (ibid)

 

Happiness is as a butterfly which - when pursued - is always beyond our grasp; but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.                                                                     (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

 

Plough with truth. Plant the seed of desire for knowledge. Irrigate the mind with the water of patience. Supervise your work by introspection and self-analysis. And build the fence of right conduct and rules. Nothing else is required to attain eternal bliss.                                                                          (Tirumurai – ‘Hindu Texts’)

 

The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, nor to anticipate troubles, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly. (Gautama Buddha)

 

...And see that nothing in thy working mind remain but a naked intent stretching unto God-- not clothed in any special thought of God in himself, or any of His works, but only that He is as He is...   (The Cloud of Unknowing)

 

May quietness descend upon my limbs, my speech, my breath, my eyes, my ears; may Brahman [The Supreme] show Himself to me.                                                                          (Invocation, Chandogya Upanishad)

 

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy.... What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.                                        (Richard Bach ‘Illusions’)

 

A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man - the eating, drinking, planting, counting man - does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect; but the soul, whose organ he is, would let it appear through his actions, would make our knees bend.... We lie open on one side to the depths of spiritual nature, to all attributes of God.

                                      (Ralph Waldo Emerson – ‘The Over-Soul’)

 

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears beauty.                                    (ibid)

 

Let men cultivate the moral affections, lead many independent lives. Let them make riches the means and not the end of existence, and we shall hear no more of the commercial spirit.... This curious world which we inhabit is more beautiful than it is useful; Thus it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.

                                                                                                (Ralph Waldo Emerson – ‘The Commercial Spirit’)

 

The Self is eternal; yet men think it mortal. That Self is Infinite; yet men think it finite. Those who possess the Tao are princes in this life and rulers in the hereafter. Those who do not possess the Tao behold the light of day in this life and become clods of earth in the next.                                                    (Chuang Tse)

 

It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense – that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza’s pantheism. For we should have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? What, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you – and all other conscious beings as such – are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance.          (Erwin Schrodinger “My View of The World” – Quoted by

Alan Watts “The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”)

 

Throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely ‘some day’: now, to-day, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.                                                                                                                                               (ibid)

 

The Buddha said: 'Monk, you and you alone are your refuge.
You and you alone are your pathway'.

Would you say that you are enlightened or awakened?
This is a trick question like asking: Have you stopped beating your wife? The realization that is directly realized, is that the ‘I’ that thinks itself either enlightened or not enlightened, does not exist in reality. It only exists as a thought. When all thought is absent, when the mind is quiet, then light shines through the form and senses and expresses Itself through the relative mind of a relative ‘I’. There is no one who is enlightened or unenlightened. I recognize myself to be that.

For many years, in many spiritual traditions I was searching for the secret of a silent mind. This was transmitted by my teacher, Papaji. In this transmission there is no one to say, ‘I am enlightened.’ The one who says, ‘I am enlightened’, is the only obscuration to the flowing of enlightened consciousness. What I have seen is that there is nothing but consciousness everywhere, period. Therefore, everything is consciousness; all is enlightened.

                                                                                (Eli Jaxon-Bear)

 

The energy called desire has been condemned for centuries. Almost all the so-called saints have been against it because desire is life and they were all life-negative. Desire is the very source of all that you see, and the ‘saints’ were against all that which is visible. They wanted to sacrifice the visible at the feet of the invisible; they wanted to cut the roots of desire so there would no longer be any possibility of life… I have a totally different concept of desire.

First: desire itself is God. Desire without any object, desire without being goal-oriented, unmotivated desire, pure desire, is God. The energy called desire is the same energy as God. Desire has not to be destroyed; it has to be purified. Desire has not to be dropped; it has to be transformed. Your very being is desire; to be against it is to be against yourself and against all. To be against it is to be against the flowers and the birds and the sun and the moon… Your desire is as big as the sky - even the sky is not the limit to it… The intelligent person stops desiring objects… he starts living his desire in its purity, moment to moment. He is full of desire, full of overflowing energy. His ordinary life becomes so intense, so passionate, that whatsoever he touches will be transformed.                                                                                                         (Osho Rajneesh)

 

Seriousness - as opposed to sincerity - is the great vice.                           (ibid)

 

I see my work in the world as quite subordinate to my work on myself. I think that to have an idea that I can help, or exert an influence, or have anything of value for the world, is secondary to and dependent upon my having answered the basic question of what my own life is about for me. It seems I have nothing to tell other people until I have got my own act together and my own problem answered.                  (Douglas E Harding)

 

I distinguish three depths of the will. One is the superficial thing which is what I want. The second one is what I really want, which may be quite different from what I think I want, and my behavior may give the lie to what I think I want - you have the superficial will, you have the deeper psychological will which may be contrary to what you think you want. And you have your deepest will, which is the will of who you really are, and the slogan here is 'Thy will be done'.                                                                                           (ibid)

 

I think we must distinguish carefully between seeing and feeling. I think the point about genuine seeing is that you can have it when you want it. You can always have a look at who you really, really are, whatever your mood, however good or nasty you feel. This is not true of feeling. I cannot have feelings to order. I cannot say I am going to have this feeling. If you do, and you seem to succeed, the feeling is not genuine, it is self-deception. I think that feeling is spontaneous or nothing. If it doesn't come to you naturally, if it is artificial, it's not worth having. So exercises with a view to cultivating love and so forth - well, I know the Buddhists do them: they send out loving feelings in all directions, send out waves of love through the cosmos, I wouldn't criticize that. But it's not my way, and it seems to have an element of artificiality which weakens the whole thing. But good luck to them if they can do it. It's not my way.                                                                                                                                   (ibid)

 

The question, obviously, is whether a computer interface can live up to exalted claims. If you can see heaven in a grain of sand, does that mean you will necessarily also find it in the Graphic User Interface (GUI) that is common, in one form or another, to the Macintosh, Windows, and the World Wide Web? Programmers know the GUI as an illusion, the product of operating-system routines meshing so smoothly that the user is never exposed to the sight of icons, menus, windows, and the rest dissolving into the inherently aimless binary digits out of which they are composed. Even so, some programmers are provoked now and again to wonder if the universe isn't built along similar lines, propagating itself at a high-enough refresh rate so that humans don't detect the Supreme Hacker behind trillions of lines of (mostly) bug-free Cosmic Code.

                                      (Harvey Blume, re Steven Johnson – Atlantic Monthly)

 

The Masculine & Feminine Principles in the Creative Process

Coming into your own means the deliberate, conscious, purposeful use of the creative power which you are and which emanates from you. For, unconsciously and unknowingly, without realizing it, you constantly create your life circumstances with this power. What you think and feel, what you believe and conceive of, what you secretly wish and fear -- all of this shapes and determines creative substance. And all of this IS the motor force of this power.
Man connects with his unconscious blocks and subsequently comprehends his obstructions and unhappiness in life. This is a great moment, when an individual suddenly understands that he has done it, how he has done it and what is the secret attitude that has produced the unwelcome fate, so that it is no longer blind fate and he can connect cause and effect. From that moment on, man ceases to be helpless. He has never been helpless in regard to any force or power outside himself. But he is helpless against his own inner processes until he recognizes and changes them.

How do we create?

First, you activate, then you get 'out of the way' and let it happen. This creative principle exists throughout the entire universe and manifests in everything in your life... To activate means that the conscious entity deliberately issues, claims, sets in motion, moves toward, causes, determines, makes happen, uses purposefully, the forces at his disposal. He does so by knowing of these forces and calling them into action... by removing all possible obstruction and by doing himself whatever is necessary. Effort and endeavor are an integral part of setting the creative forces in motion... this represents the masculine principle in creation. It is also a movement, for nothing that is alive can possibly be not moving, but the type of movement is a very different one from the movement of the activating principle. The activating principle moves itself out toward another state; the spirit of letting it be is a movement within itself. It is a pulsating, involuntary movement, while the movement of activation is deliberate and self-determining... The consciousness of the attitude of letting it be is one of patience, of trustful waiting, of letting a ripening process come to fruition, one of surrender to a force set in motion. This may be called the feminine principle in creation.                                                                              (Eva Pierrakos - The Pathwork Guide)

 

In everyday life we learn more, and more truly, through intuition than we do through verbalized observations and logic. We are tempted to be proud of verbalizations, but it is possible that in many of our most important judgments the small and fragile voice of intuition is a more reliable guide.... Verbal processes are additive, while intuitive processes are integrative--It appears that the most important judgments which human beings make concerning each other are the products of preverbal processes--cognition without insight-- which function almost automatically below the level of consciousness...that there is a time for scientific method and a time for intuition--the one brings with it more certainty, the other offers more possibilities; the two together are the only basis for creative thinking.                                                 (Eric Berne – founder of T/A)

 

“Permissions” re. Roles in Life-Scripts  (Transactional Analysis)

1.          To be, to exist, and to occupy space

2.          To live with zest

3.          To experience one's own experiences

4.          To be appropriately close, to trust and to feel secure

5.          To influence one's environment (to be important)

6.          To experience one's own feelings across a wide range of emotions

7.          To be one's self (of appropriate age, personality and sex)

8.          To feel that one belongs (family, friends, community and culture)

9.          To feel OK about one's self, others and the world

10.       To allow oneself to be soothed and nurtured and to soothe and take care of one's self

11.       To experiment, and to change (and also to fail safely and use that failure productively)

12.       To think clearly and to solve problems across a wide variety of domains (be sane)

13.           To be empathetically responsive to others

14.           To "make it" in love and work

15.           To make/find meaning

 

While these permissions do form a kind of hierarchy, it is more useful to think of them as forming a matrix. All are important throughout the life cycle, but each becomes more important at certain times. They also need to be given differently at different ages and their presence or absence manifests itself differently during different life periods. The infant who is learning to make interesting spectacles last, for example, and the adolescent who is comparing religious or philosophical systems can both be conceptualized as manifesting permission to make/find meaning, but at very different levels of development.                                                                 (James R. Allen)

 

When we are caught in addiction it is impossible to experience love. Compulsivity and peace of mind are mutually exclusive… our addictions slowly become the walls behind which we hide… eventually our walls become so high that instead of simply hiding we become prisoners of our own making. The guards in the prison of addiction are our egos, while the bars of our cells are forged with our irrational beliefs.

                                                          (Lee Jampolsky – ‘Healing The Addictive Mind’)

 

There is a grandeur in life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms – most beautiful and most wonderful – have been and are being evolved.        (Charles Darwin)

 

One’s life oscillates, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands. - - And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, diagnoses schizomania and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons.                                                                                                          (Herrman Hesse)

 

The image of every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity. Eternity is the kingdom on the other side of time and appearances. It is where we belong. It is our home. It is that which our heart strives for. - - We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.                                              (ibid)

 

[The Personality Re-build Workshop/ the chess pieces]

“The separation of the unity of the personality into numerous “pieces” passes for madness. Science’s ‘schizomania’ is, in this, so far right as no multiplicity may be dealt with unless there be a series, a certain order or grouping. It is wrong insofar as it holds that there is only one binding, lifelong order possible for the multiplicity of the subordinate selves. In the art of building up the soul we can demonstrate to anyone whose soul has fallen to pieces that he can rearrange these pieces of a previous self in whatever order he pleases, and so attain to an endless multiplicity of moves in the game of life.

“As the playwright shapes a drama from a handful of characters, so do we, from the pieces of the disintegrated self, build up ever new groups - with ever new interplay and suspense, and new situations that are eternally inexhaustible.”

 - [then the demonstration of “chess” personalities in various evolving scenarios]

“This is the art of life. You may yourself as an artist develop the game of your life and lend it animation. You may complicate it and enrich it as you please. It lies in your hands. Just as madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizomania the beginning of all art and all fantasy.”

- - - I knew then that all the hundred thousand pieces of life’s game were in my pocket. A glimpse of its meaning had stirred my reason and I was determined to start the game afresh. I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again at its senselessness. I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being. One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.                                                                             (ibid)

 

During deep meditation it is possible to dispel time, to see simultaneously all the past, present and future, and then everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman. Therefore, it seems to me that everything that exists is good – death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly.  (ibid)

 

When you think that you have found God, ask that He speak to you. Ask that he touch your brow, that He give you a sign, a waft of perfume, a blaze of colour or a heavenly chord of music. If anything comes, it comes NOT from God. He speaks from within. You are God. You must give the sign. Enter the Stream.         (Max Freedom Long)

 

Fortunate is the man who ceases to live as some blind leader of the blind has commanded, and uses his God-given sense in winning through to the normal in all things. To love the High Self is normal. To love the low self is the way to health and happiness. To love and work generously and helpfully with those around us is the sure way to growth and contentment. Success is to have enough so that you can feed a neighbor in distress. To have more than enough and fail to feed the hungry neighbor is the worst of failures. To have life in your body and fail to share it with the Father-Mother is courting disaster. First, come to know yourself. Then, strive to know and understand those about you.                                                                                                                    (ibid)

 

As for man, his days are as grass:

 as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.

For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;

 and the place thereof shall know it no more.                           (Psalms 103: 15-16)

 

It is obvious, once the fact is pointed out, that the character of human history, the character of human conduct, and the character of all our human institutions depend both upon what man is and in equal or greater measure upon what we humans think man is.                                                                                (Cassius J Keyser)

 

People don't have souls in the same way they have arms and noses; they ARE souls, i.e. living centers of energy, thought, and personality; animals, to the extent that they have consciousness, are souls too.

                                                                                                                                      (Tom Harpur)

 

My concept is that the location of human memory (long term) may reside in the “soft discs” of our DNA.   Along with the rest of our genetic coding, perhaps the tracks of imprints of the family, clan or tribe are also stored and flash into consciousness in youth. Using the analogy of silicon chips and their use in computers, one psychologist suggests that ‘protein chips’ in the RNA (which the DNA uses to direct the activities of individual cells) could hold much more information, extending back through one's ancestors and eventually linking all humanity in a unified family.                                                                                                               (ibid)

 

[G.W.F. Hegel (1770 - 1831) - German Romanticist (circa Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron), developed the "Principle of Contradiction" to explain the nature of thought. The core of the Hegelian logic was a ‘dialectic’ or movement of the thought process, consisting of three stages (triads):

1.    a thesis which is contradicted by

2.    an antithesis; and

3.    a synthesis in which thesis & antithesis are reconciled and transcended. The process is dynamic, in that the synthesis then becomes a new theses, which is tested against a further antithesis to yield a further synthesis  (based on earlier experiences/hypothesis) etc.; and in this fashion thought streams are developed.

 

For instance, in the dialectic of “Being ___ Self” ---       {work up from (a)}

 

                                                                                                         ­

              (thesis)                                (antithesis)                               (synthesis)

measure of self-being        ¬®         essence of self-being         =      notion of whole-self (d)

­_________________________________________________

                                                                                                     ­

(thesis)                                         (antithesis)                               (synthesis)

  quality of self-being           ¬®          quantity of self-being      =       measure of self-being(c)

                        ­_____________________________________________

                                                                                                          ­

(thesis)                                            (antithesis)                               (synthesis)

becoming being             ¬®               determinate being           =       being for self         (b)

­_________________________________________________

                                                                                                          ­

(thesis)                                            (antithesis)                               (synthesis)

being                          ¬®               nothing                           =       becoming being     (a)

 

 

- - - in the partial example above (the Being - Essence - Notion triad), each concept (e.g. Measure of Self-Being) is itself the synthesis of a subordinate contradictory triad (Quality-Quantity-Measure) etc. Using this dialectic "key", Hegel's objective idealism system proceeded to a final, all-inclusive triad - Idea, Nature, Spirit, which indicates that synthetic Spirit transcends the contradictory concepts of Ideas and Nature. While a neat package, the Hegelian rationalist system was a product of its times (Newtonian “clock-work”): it was/is useful for linear deductive reasoning but isn’t thought to provide quality yields where accessing multiplexing referent channels - e.g. intuition - must be utilized so as to “process” complex, subtle areas requiring inductive reasoning.]

 

SUBUD:

On its own level each of the life forces (e.g. material, vegetable, animal, human, above human, etc.) constitutes a world of its own; for example, the material world contains millions of worlds analogous to the souls of human beings in this world. The souls of each of these worlds tend to be drawn towards and enter certain focal points of attraction wherever these are available. Such focal points come into existence through the union of male and female. The vehicle, which acts as a magnet to draw a soul towards it, is produced by the union of husband and wife - although it appears merely as a fluid, this may well be called the water of life, able to retain the life force which causes it to move, function and develop to completion.

Since the vehicle has come into existence through the union of husband and wife, it is derived from the essences of these two beings of opposite sex. It acts as a kind of lens to focus the approaching soul that will enter it. And if the thoughts of this couple have been constantly occupied - before and during the union - with the affairs and pleasures of this world, then the fluid can serve only to focus material forces and nothing higher, so that if a new being comes into existence it will be capable of continuing only material forms and the soul of this child will be a material soul.                                                                                     (Mohammed Subuh)

 

The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.                                                                           (Sir Walter Scott)

 

There are two kinds of paradoxes. They are not so much the good and the bad, nor even the true and the false. Rather they are the fruitful and the barren; the paradoxes which produce life and the paradoxes that merely announce death. Nearly all modern paradoxes merely announce death.                               (ibid)

 

A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory - and very few eyes can see the mystery of his life – a life like the scriptures, figurative.                                                                   (John Keats)

The sheep-like tendency of human society soon makes inroads on a child's unsophistication, and then popular education completes the dastardly work with its systematic formulas, and away goes the individual, hurtling through space into that hateful oblivion of mediocrity. We are pruned into stumps, one resembling another, without character or grace.                                                                                   (N. C. Wyeth)

If you don't know where you're going, chances are you'll end up somewhere else.          (Yogi Berra)

 

Commencement of learning something is a flow situation – everything is new and flow absorption is present as one struggles to master the skill. As one progresses, either boredom will ensue because there is no more challenge (the skill has been learned at that level) or anxiety occurs because a bigger challenge than we can cope with presents itself. Either way, one wants to get back to flow, either by overcoming the anxiety challenge by becoming more skilled, or taking on a challenge that will overcome the boredom, thus getting back into flow at a more complex level.                                                                                  (Mihaly Csiksczentmihalyi)

 

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you don't expect an apostle to peer out.           (Lichtenberg)

 

The physical basis of the mind is the brain action in each individual. It accompanies the activity of his spirit. But the spirit is free; no brain mechanism has yet been demonstrated that directs the action of the mind.

(Wilder Penfield)

Does anybody honestly believe that human progress originates in the composite brain of the majority and not in the brain of the individual personality?                                                                      (Mein Kampf)

One truth which must always be borne in mind is that the majority can never replace the man. The majority represents not only ignorance but also cowardice. And just as a hundred blockheads do not equal one man of wisdom, so a hundred poltroons are incapable of any political line of action that requires moral strength and fortitude.                                                                                                                               (ibid)

When men’s hearts are breaking and their souls are plunged into the depths of despair, their great forebears turn their eyes towards them from the dim shadows of the past – those forebears who knew how to triumph over anxiety and affliction, mental servitude and physical bondage – and extend their eternal hands in a gesture of encouragement to despairing souls. Woe to the nation that is ashamed to clasp those hands.

                                                                                                                                                (ibid)

 

Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I:

But when the trees bow down their heads,

The wind is passing by.                        (W.O. Mitchell – quoting Christina Rossetti)

 

High above the prairie, platter-flat, the wind wings on, bereft and wild in its lonely song. It ridges drifts and licks the ripples off; it smoothens crests, piles snow against the fences. The tinting green of Northern Lights slowly shades and fades against the prairie nights, dying here, imperceptibly reborn over there. Light glows each evening where the town lies; a hiving sound is there, with now and then some sound distinct and separate in the night: a shout, a woman’s laugh. Clear, truant sounds.

As clouds’ slow shadows melt across the prairie’s face, more nights slip darkness over. Light then dark, then light again. Day then night, then day again. A meadow lark sings and it is spring. And summer comes.

A year is done.

Another comes and it is done.                                                       (W.O. Mitchell)

 

My observations and theoretical studies of life and mathematics, mathematical foundations, many branches of sciences, also history, history of cultures, anthropology, ‘philosophy’, ‘psychology’, ‘logic’, comparative religions, etc., convinced me that:

1) Human evaluations with reference to themselves were mythological or zoological, or a combination of both; but

2) Neither of these approaches could give us a workable base for understanding the living, uniquely human, extremely complex (deeply inter-related) reactions of Smith1, Smith2, etc., generalized in such high-order abstractions as ‘mind’, or ‘intellect’; and

3) A functional analysis, free from the old mythological and zoological assumptions, showed that humans - with the most highly developed nervous system - are uniquely characterized by the capacity of an individual or a generation to begin where the former left off. I called this essential capacity ‘time-binding’. This can be accomplished only by a class of life that uses symbols as means for time-binding. Such a capacity depends on and necessitates ‘intelligence’, means of communication, etc. On this inherently human level of interdependence, time-binding leads inevitably to feelings of responsibility, duty toward others and the future, and therefore to some type of ethics, morals, and similar social and/or socio-cultural reactions.

In the time-binding orientation I took those characteristics for granted as the empirical end-products of the functioning of the healthy human nervous system.                                 (Alfred Korzybski)

 

Electrical phenomena in living tissue are mainly of two more or less distinct characters. The first include electromotive energy which produces electrical currents and membrane potentials in nerve tissue. The second are called electrokinetic, and include cataphoresis, agglutination, etc. There is much evidence that the mechanical work of the muscles, the secretion action of the glands, and the electrical work of the nerve cells are closely connected with the colloidal structure of these tissues. This would explain why any factor (semantic reactions included) capable of altering the colloidal structure of the living protoplasm must have a marked effect on the behavior and welfare of the organism.                                                         (ibid)

 

Korzybski’s Uncertainty Principle

“I accept the absolute individuality of events on the unspeakable objective levels, which necessitates the conclusion that all statements about them are only probable in various degrees, introducing a general principle of uncertainty in all statements”.

 

In regard to the nature of things, knowledge is only an empty shell - a form of symbols. It is knowledge of structural form, and not knowledge of content. All through the physical world runs that unknown content, which must surely be the stuff of our consciousness. Here is a hint of aspects deep within the world of physics, and yet unattainable by the methods of physics. And, moreover, we have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature.

We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And Lo! it is our own.                                                                                       (Arthur S. Eddington)

 

The empiricist thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

                                                                                       (George Santayana)

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.           (William James)

To progress again, man must remake himself. And he cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor.                                                                                 (Dr. Alexis Carrell)

 

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.                    (Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield )

 

I resist the idea that the body of scientific knowledge accumulates by the confirmation or verification of hypotheses. Hypotheses are worthy of acceptance only if they resist falsification. It is easy to find confirming instances of hypotheses – too easy for this to be the right methodology. In general, I should try as hard as possible to falsify my own hypothesis. If the scientist accepts hypotheses by finding [only] confirming instances, he will end up believing a great many false hypotheses and following a great many dead ends. On the other hand, if he has a hypothesis that has withstood tough attempts at falsification, then he can accept that hypothesis – not as true, not as confirmed - but as the best hypothesis available - -so far.

                   (Karl Popper)

 

The crux of my argument against reductionism depends on the idea that there exists a world of abstract, nonphysical objects with which we interact when we reason, discover a proof for a theorem, find consequences for a physical theory, use language, think about arithmetic or quantum mechanics or Gödel’s incompleteness results. I call this realm of abstract objects  “World 3”, and its denizens include arithmetic objects such as the integers, the irrational numbers and the relations between them, mathematical objects, logical objects and relations between them, scientific theories, the as-yet undiscovered proof for Goldbach’s conjecture, and the as-yet undeduced consequences of theories in physics, neuroscience, and so forth. It also contains some “embodied” objects such as books and musical scores. I call the physical world that conforms to physical laws “World 1”, and mental events and processes belong to a distinct “World 2”                 (ibid)

 

In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly.                                                                                (Alfred North Whitehead)

 

We often read scientists who refer to “the beginning of the universe”. They are being careless with their language, for to the best of our knowledge the universe had no beginning. It apparently underwent a tremendous transformation some twenty billion years ago but the transformation was not a beginning in any absolute sense. Scientists shouldn’t be giving fodder to those theologians who are determined to find God somewhere.                                                                                   (Deane Starr)

 

You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars.                                                 (Traherne)

 

First, they came for the terrorists,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a terrorist.
Then they came for the foreigners,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a foreigner.
Then they came for the Arab-Americans, and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't Arab-American.
Then they came for the radical dissenters, and I didn't speak up,
because I was just an ordinary troubled citizen.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
                                      (Adapted from Pastor Niemoller's 1945 quote about the Nazis)

 

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.                                                               (Rudyard Kipling)

 

To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden, or a redeemed social condition, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.                                                                 (Emerson)

 

Though age and infirmity overtake me and I come not within sight of the castle of my dreams, teach me still to be thankful for life and for time's oldest memories that are good and sweet, and may the evening's twilight find me gentle still.                                                                                          (Max Ehrmann)

 

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.             (Alan Watts)

 

The sensation of "I" as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the eons of time--a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy that ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence "I" am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.             (ibid)

 

There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real.                                          (G.K. Chesterton  “Chaucer”)

 

Each was bound by a chain; the heaviest chain ever tied to a man - it is called a watch-chain.

                                                                   (G.K. Chesterton “Daylight and Nightmare)

 

A man has been lucky in marrying the women he loves. But he is luckier in loving the woman he marries.

                                        (G.K. Chesterton  “Brave New Family”)

 

Lost somewhere in the enormous plains of time, there wanders a dwarf who is the image of God, who has produced on a yet more dwarfish scale an image of creation. The pigmy picture of God we call Man; the pigmy picture of creation we call Art.                                                         (G.K. Chesterton – “Everlasting Man”)

 

The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.                              (ibid)

 

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.    (ibid)

 

There are two ways in which a man may vanish - through being thoroughly conquered or through being thoroughly the Conqueror. . . For a man may vanish as Chaos vanished in the face of creation, or he may vanish as God vanished in filling all things with that created life.                                     (Tennyson)

 

I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him - rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.                                                                                                                             (ibid)

 

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music. To love life through labor is to be intimate with life's innermost secret. All work is empty save when there is love, for work is love made visible.                                                                                                    (Kahlil Gibran)

 

Mitogenetic radiation from cells can be seen as a sort of "waste" from a virtual electromagnetic field with a high coherence. This field has a tendency to become stationary over the whole organism. In addition, it includes the storage of "virtual" coherent photons.                                                                (Fritz Albert Popp)

 [In other words, there is a master EM field with high coherence, stationary over the whole body. This is the cells' master control system. Storage of virtual photons -- i.e., scalar signals -- occurs in this field.]

                    

The mind that sees itself as whole and another as sick, unquestionably requires healing. True healing is thus expressed within the mind of the healer and not within the body of the patient. When a healer sees that he or she is not separate from the patient - and only love holds this vision - healing is already accomplished.    (Hugh Prather)

 

People need trouble -- a little frustration to sharpen the spirit and toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.

                   (William Faulkner)

 

Most men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and continue on as if nothing had happened.                                                                                                     (Winston Churchill)

 

Dr. Robert Becker studied not just the immune system — which "heals" nothing at all, not even its own damaged cells — but also the cellular regenerative system.  He and others found that tiny trickle currents and potentials — either steady or pulsed — placed across otherwise intractable bone fractures, would result in a rather astounding set of cellular changes which led to healing of the fracture by deposit of new bone.  Eerily, Becker showed that the red blood cells coming into the area and under the EM influence, would shuck their hemoglobin and grow cellular nuclei (i.e., de-differentiate back to an earlier cellular state). Then these cells would re-differentiate into the type of cells that made cartilage. Then those cells would differentiate into the type of cells that make bone, and be deposited in the fracture to "grow bone" and heal the fracture.

Incredibly, this is the only true "healing" modality in all Western medical science — which is otherwise built upon the theory of intervention rather than healing. After the intervention (which may be quite necessary!), the body's cellular regenerative system — or what is left of it after damage by such interventions as chemotherapy, etc. — is left entirely upon its own to restore the damage (heal the damaged cells and tissues).

Becker was twice nominated for a Nobel Prize - but because he also testified in court against power companies, giving testimony as an expert witness that EM radiation from power lines could indeed induce harmful conditions in some exposed people, he was suppressed and eventually forced to retire.

                   (Col. Tom Bearden)

 

There appears to be "natural selection" of universes. In some sense the universes that allow complexity and evolution reproduce themselves more efficiently than other universes. The ensemble itself is thus evolving in some complicated way. When stars die, they sometimes form black holes. Inside a black hole it's possible for a small region to, as it were, sprout into a new universe. We don't see it, but it inflates into some new dimension. The laws of nature in the new universe are related to those in the previous universe. What that would mean is that universes big and complex enough to allow stars to form, evolve, and die, and which can therefore produce lots of black holes, would have more progeny, because each black hole can then lead to a new universe; whereas a universe that didn't allow stars and black holes to form would have no progeny. Therefore the ensemble of universes may evolve not randomly but by some Darwinian selection, in favor of the potentially complex universes.

                                        (Physicist Lee Smolin)

Perhaps for the first time in human history, we know enough to imagine how a universe like ours might have come to be without the infinite intelligence and foresight of a god. For is it not conceivable that the universe is as we find it to be because it has made itself; because the order, structure and beauty we see at every scale are the manifestations of a continual process of self-organization, of self-tuning, that has acted over very long periods of time.                                                                                                      (ibid)

Belief in a final theory shares with a belief in a god the idea that the ultimate cause of things is something that does not live in the world but has an existence that, somehow, transcends it.      (ibid)

"Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes and volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves… So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations…It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our [counter-terrorism] efforts."

[Secretary of Defense William Cohen at an April 1997 counter-terrorism conference sponsored by former Senator Sam Nunn. Quoted from DoD News Briefing, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, Q&A at the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy, University of Georgia, Athens, Apr. 28, 1997.].

Hypothesis of Chronotopology: (Charles Muses) Time itself has a flux, a wave motion. These waves are standing waves. In quantum physics there's this notion that the underlying basis for the physical universe are probability waves -- nonphysical, nonmaterial waves -- underlying everything. Actually the wave-particle so-called paradox is not that bad, when you consider that a particle is a wave packet, a packet of standing waves. That's why an electron can go through a plate and leave wavelike things. Actually our bodies are like fountains. The fountain has a shape only because it's being renewed every minute, and our bodies are being renewed. So we are standing waves; we are no exception.

Time is the master control. As an illustration of that, if you take a moment of time, this moment cuts through the entire physical universe as we're talking. It holds all of space in itself. But one point of space doesn't hold all of time. In other words, time is much bigger than space.

A line of time is then an occurrence, and a wave of time is a recurrence. And then if you get out from the circle of time, which Nietzsche saw as the eternal recurrence -- if you break that, as we know we do, we develop, and then we're on a helix, because we come around but it's a little different each time. The dimensions of time can be thought of through such symbols as point, line, wave, helix, and so on.

Symbols themselves -- words, pictures -- point to the deeper structure of things, including the deeper structure of time. The mind is part of a nonphysical, mathematically definable reality that can interface and interact with physical reality, and in which physical reality is embedded.

For instance, there can be some things which are physically effective which are not physical. I can give you, as an illustration, the zero-point energy of the vacuum. The vacuum is defined in quantum physics as space devoid of radiation or matter -- no energy, no matter. Yet there is an inherent energy in there which can be measured -- this is one of the great triumphs of modern physics -- and that is physically effective. This is known as the energy of a pure vacuum. Yet it obviously is not a pure vacuum. The so-called savage would say to us, "The room is empty, and the wind is a magic spirit." We know it is air. So we are like the savage in saying that the vacuum is empty. Yet there is something there.                                                                                (Charles Muses)

I do not believe in astrology; but then, people of my sign never do.         (Charles Tart)

 

Boldness has genius, power and magic. Engage, and the mind grows heated. Begin, and the work will be completed.

                                                                                                        (Goethe)

Better to wear out than rust out.                                                                  (Bishop Cumberland)

When my creative energy flowed most freely, my muscular activity was always the greatest. The body is inspired: Let us leave the "soul" out of consideration. I might often have been dancing; I used to walk through the hills for seven or eight hours without hint of fatigue. I slept well, laughed a good deal--I was perfectly vigorous and patient.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844-1900) talking about his inspiration for ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’)

 

When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.               (Franklin D. Roosevelt)

 

Science and religion are best seen not as two bodies of doctrine but as two forces - the force of our religious intuitions, and the force of our impulse to accurate observation and logical deduction - forces acting in opposition to each other.                                                                                             (Alfred North Whitehead)

 

The whole method of Zen is to try to break up the iron Aristotelian bent of the conscious (serial processor) mind, and get into the far broader unconscious (totally conscious, massively parallel processor) mind.

                             (Col. Tom Bearden)

 

The entire universe is already "alive" in a very special sense. There is no death; there is mind (I use the term "mind" in the most general sense, not just the conscious mind which is merely a "periscope" put up and taken down from the unconscious). And mind is not a part of the brain, and it is indeed separated from body but intimately linked to it by the mind-body coupling dynamics. Further, any life that has "ever existed" still dynamically exists in a special kind of more fundamental electrodynamics infolded inside all normal EM fields, waves, and potentials. The Tibetans knew much of this very well, but of course in terms that our materialistic science rejects or completely fails to understand (as we stated, most of our scientists believe the human is a robot and the mind is simply the electrochemical reactions of a "meat computer"!).        (ibid)

 

Potential energy must be referred primarily to standing waves, and kinetic energy primarily to non-standing waves.
Such a view harmonizes with the proven quantized nature of fundamental energies, and also sheds light on the nature of the quantum, unifying it with more familiar phenomena by the aid of the time-wave conception. In fact, this conception tells us more, for it requires that every quantum be surrounded by a wave-field, as are electrons.
The quantized appearance of energy is necessitated by the wave-nature of time. The waves of time breaking on the beach of occurrence, so to speak, in releasing their energy create the effect of discrete particles or quanta of energy, while actually the source of the continuity of the phenomena lies in the wave itself. The celebrated wave-particle paradox of the nature of energy remains a paradox only so long as the chronotopological phases of the phenomena are left unrealized in the analysis.
In fact all paradoxes are not so much brilliant or profound as they are simply symptomatic of the presence of reductive or omissive thinking at some point. If the conception of the phenomenon is accurate and clear enough, and the understanding of it full and deep enough, apparent paradoxes will disappear, except in those regions where understanding is not adequate and problems still remain. Paradoxes and dilemmas are to be preferred to even more arbitrarily reductive distortions, but they are by no means to be mistaken for final solutions or for the whole truth of their universes of discourse. The reductive mind overlooks the return track of the railroad and then glories in the "insoluble paradox" that the trains must run both ways on the same track. Until we cease desiring love affairs with paradoxes we shall never know the grace of truth.                            (Charles A. Muses)

 

It is thus literally true, translating the basis of such a process from time waves to sound waves for the sake of more concrete imagery, that all natural forms were generated and are maintained by music or song, in the most profound sense. Anciently we have the vak of the Hindu tantras, the enem of Sumerian cosmology, the heka of ancient Egypt, which, transplanted and transformed by Greek thinkers, became the logos of Hellenic and Alexandrian thought from Pythagoras and Herakleitos to Plotinos and Philo ]udæus, and later, of the Christians. It is interesting that practically every theology of the ancient world, including early Christianity, had hit upon this profound natural truth intuitively. "And God said let there be light; and there was light."  The third word holds the sentence's power.

                                                                                                (ibid)

 

The entire gamut of natural morphology appears to stem from the felicitous recombination of actually a few basic forms - archemorphs we may call them. These comparatively few archemorphs are found arranged and rearranged with each other, with appropriate thematic variations of form and size, much as the letters of the alphabet in the various type styles and sizes of printing, - yielding the rich language of all the numberless natural forms of the world about us. The forms of a perfect walnut meat removed from its shell, and of the human brain removed from the skull, are examples of this subtle archemorphic variation. A butterfly with outstretched wings stands archemorphically between those two and a pair of veined leaves on a stem, as well as the two lungs and trachea. And the leaves are also the breathing organs of the tree. Archemorphic interrelation is the key to the continuity of all natural forms. A vast field of mapping the wave functions of archemorphs and their thematic variations lies before us, from nuclei to nebulae. Characteristic integers and certain common fractions, infinite series, and transcendental numbers will become extremely important in such investigations, as preliminary calculations have proved.   (ibid)

 

All the mind functions, even of the deepest and most unconscious nature, and even of collective species unconsciousness domains — exist electro-magnetically in the infolded EM domain. The “conscious mind” is a serial processor, though extremely rapid. The unconscious is a massively parallel processor. The reason the conscious mind cannot directly “see” the unconscious is that “seeing” innumerable things in the “single snapshot” at once, just obliterates all singular discrimination because of the intense summation. Mind functions are time-like, so consist of specialized structures, functioning, and dynamics inside the time domain. Since the infolded structuring captures this entire domain, it also involves a physics of mind and matter interaction, but as a science instead of as a mysticism. In theory man-made devices (vacuum engines) are also possible that engineer the mind at any and all levels.

The Russian weapon scientists refer to this mind area which can be engineered by novel electro-dynamic means as psycho-energetics.                                                                                  (Tom Bearden)

 

The very expression 'energy source' is actually a misnomer.  As is known since the early days of thermodynamics, and formulated as the first law, energy is conserved in any physical process. Since energy cannot be created or destroyed, nothing can be an energy source, or sink. Devices we call energy sources do not create energy, they convert it from a form not suitable for our needs to a form that is suitable, a form we can do work with.                            (Ibraham Semiz – via Tom Bearden)

 

Physics is approaching the limits of observation achievable with NON-LIVING instruments.

                                                          (Malcolm Rae, alluding to dowsing)

 

(From the “Divining Hand” – by Christopher Bird:

Harvalik circled DeBoer’s body with a 3” wide belt of aluminum sheeting over the kidney area [where the horizontal sensors are thought to be located], AND an aluminum “headband” to occlude the vertical sensor – the both areas being necessary to pick up ‘gradiometric configurations’ for location of underground objects.

It was found that screening the adrenal glands at the top of the kidneys resulted in cessation of all dowsing signals. A dowser who has his kidney, but not the associated adrenal gland removed by surgery retained his full dowsing capacity. Another dowser who had both kidney and adrenal gland removed lost his dowsing capacity.

A 2 inch x 1 inch patch of aluminum foil pasted to the forehead on a line slightly higher than, and midway between, the eyes also blocked any frontal dowsing signal.” [apparently blocking external access from the pituitary or pineal area]

 

“Paul Clement Brown, oil field and mineral dowser, used a pendulum inserted into an empty gallon-size ice cream carton (to protect the pendulum from side winds); then ‘I use my transmitter (“quester”) to send down a mental wave which is reflected by deposits of whatever I’m searching for. The answering reflection is not instantaneous but has a few minutes time lag. The signal seems to proceed out at exactly 90’ a minute, for some reason. I therefore made a new dial for my stopwatch graduated in feet of depth. Strength of pendulum movement (intensity of whirling motions) predicts the amount of oil a well will produce from a given zone.

‘I press the button on the stopwatch and hold my pendulum steady and motionless – the watch reads off 90 feet per minute. At one point, when say the watch has recorded a given depth of 5,000 feet, the pendulum will start swinging in a circle counter-clockwise, at which point I say “In” – indicating the top surface of the bed of oil producing sand. The pendulum continues to rotate counter-clockwise until the watch hand reads, say, 5120 feet. I say “Out”, and know the deposit is 120 feet thick. I then continue down to locate lower deposits, if present.’

‘Concerning map dowsing, I put the tip of my pencil on the map where, say, a mountain peak is indicated. I then project myself, mentally, down into the section of the country surrounding the mountain. I put my pendulum, containing whatever it is that I am looking for, into motion so that it will swing. It settles into a backward and forward motion along one azimuth and I get behind it to see exactly what direction it is tracing. When I see the line mark the map with a ruler.

‘Then I begin again at approximately right angles to the line I’ve marked and when the pendulum settles into an even back-and-forth swing again, I draw another line. Where the two lines cross is my starting point.

‘From the starting point, I use the same pencil and begin moving it away in any direction. At the same time I set my pendulum to rotating. When the spinning stops, I know that I’ve reached the approximate edge of the deposit. Of course this can only be precisely determined by going personally to the location itself and “shooting” straight down. I’ve done this procedure from the ground, from automobiles, helicopters and airplanes.’        (Christopher Bird)

 

Nothing is lost; the universe is honest,

Time, like the sea, gives all back in the end,

But only in its own way, on its own conditions:

Empires as grains of sand, forests as coal,

Mountains as pebbles. Be still, be still, I say;

You were never the water, only a wave;

Not substance, but a form substance assumed.              (Elder Olson)

 

While there are many techniques of “reflexology” massage for self or other, the preliminary approach is the application of pressure to the specific reflex points of the ears, hands or feet. These reflex points are called Microsystems. A Microsystem is an area of the body that is a small representation of the whole body. It has been found through thousands of years of experience that the ears, hands and feet are such areas. Each part of the whole body has a reflex point on the ear, on the hand and on the foot. The iris of the eye is also a Microsystem. Microsystems are linked through the brain and nervous system. When the whole body was just a few cells in size, during its first few hours of life, it carried within it the potential for a mature, full sized self. As growth occurred, the extremities carried the imprint of the whole system with them, as nerves and other tissues, as they grew in size. As the organ systems grew they too carried their relationship of the Microsystems to all of the body's parts and functions. By stimulating the Microsystems one can stimulate the related body parts and organs.                                                                                                             (Roger Jahnke)

It seems to me that if you or I must chose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.                        (John Steinbeck)

No matter how much restriction civilization imposes on the individual, he nevertheless finds some way to circumvent it. Wit is the best safety valve modern man has evolved; the more civilization, the more repression, the more need there is for wit.                                                                                   (Sigmund Freud)

A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor’s book.               (Irish proverb)

 

Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.

                                                                             (Lazarus Long /Robert Heinlein)

 

Where beliefs and points of view are seen as tools rather than final Truths, a world-view is held together by many strands: some may break from changing circumstances, or simply from old age, but the structure as a whole is flexible enough to withstand it. A tatty collection of old ropes of thought may not look so neat as a so-refined single strand of logic, but it least it isn't fragile; the structure may sway a little in the winds of change, but it's not so likely to collapse without warning in the minor earthquake of some 'scientific revolution'.           (Tom Graves)

Nature, the world we live in, is not an inanimate 'thing': seen as a whole, it is a living organism of which we are part. This concept has always been part of traditional magic, perhaps because of its pagan roots, perhaps also because of its greater concern with an overall awareness; yet it also comes through in more recent scientific research, such as James Lovelock's work on the Gaia Hypothesis - that the condition of the Earth is actively made fit for life by life itself, working interactively as a whole. An appropriate choice of name for a scientific hypothesis: Gaia is an ancient Greek name for Mother Earth.                                                                                (ibid)

We can only really start, perhaps, from who we are. Not defined in terms of what we do, but more described in terms of where we 'be'. In a context in which 'anything goes', and in which (through that paradox of 'things have not only to be seen to be believed, but also to be believed to be seen') we play a direct part, our approach to reality, and working on that reality, is a distinct and distinctive part of that reality. Beyond the normal 'default reality' of physics, and the not-so-normal games of the natural world, we decide what is real and what is not: for others as well as for ourselves.

The world and its effects are of our choosing. If we want to change it... ...we can change it. By looking at ourselves, through the technology that is the expression of ourselves.

We are all magicians, whether we like it or not: we play a direct part in the reality of the world that we and everything else around us will experience.                                                            (ibid)

 

Man demands a beginning and a boundary, so in the beginning there was a sea of spirit, and it filled all space. It was static, content, aware of itself, a giant resting on the bosom of its thought, contemplating that which it was.

 

Then it moved. It withdrew into itself, until all space was empty, and that which had filled it was shining from its center, a restless, seething mind. This was the individuality of the spirit; this was what it discovered itself to be when it awakened; this was God.

God desired to express Himself, and He desired companion-ship. Therefore, He projected from Himself the cosmos and souls. The cosmos was built with the tools which man calls music, arithmetic, and geometry: harmony, system, and balance. The building blocks were all of the same material, which man calls the life essence. It was a power sent out from God, a primary ray, as man thinks of it, which by changing the length of its wave and the rate of its vibration became a pattern of differing forms, substance, and movement. This created the law of diversity which supplied endless designs for the pattern. God played on this law of diversity as a person plays on a piano, producing melodies and arranging them in a symphony.

(Thomas Sugrue – The Philosophy of Edgar Cayce)

 

If the surface of the globe should be shaken to-day by some seismic convulsion and if a new Himalaya would emerge from the waves of the sea, this one catastrophe alone might annihilate human civilization. No State could exist any longer. All order would be shattered. And all vestiges of cultural products which had been evolved through thousands of years would disappear. Nothing would be left but one tremendous field of death and destruction submerged in floods of water and mud.

If, however, just a few people would survive this terrible havoc, and if these people belonged to a definite race that had the innate powers to build up a civilization, when the commotion had passed, the earth would again bear witness to the creative power of the human spirit, even though a span of a thousand years might intervene. Only with the extermination of the last race that possesses the gift of cultural creativeness, and indeed only if all the individuals of that race had disappeared, would the earth definitely be turned into a desert.

On the other hand, modern history furnishes examples to show that state institutions which owe their beginnings to members of a race which lacks creative genius are not made of stuff that will endure. Just as many varieties of prehistoric animals had to give way to others and leave no trace behind them, so man will also have to give way, if he loses that definite faculty which enables him to find the weapons that are necessary for him to maintain his own existence.                                                                                                        (Mein Kampf)

 

It's the action, not the fruit of the action, that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.

                                                                                                                                       (Gandhi)

 

I expect to pass through this life but once. Therefore, if there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do for another human being, let me do it now, for I shall not pass this way again.      (William Penn)

 

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.

                                                                                                (Reverend Theodore Hesburgh)

 

On the road between the homes of friends, grass does not grow.               (Norwegian proverb)

 

Oh, the worst of all tragedies is not to die young, but to live until I am seventy-five and yet not ever truly to have lived.                                                                                                     (Martin Luther King Jr.)

 

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life - it goes on.             (Robert Frost)

 

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.                        (Benjamin Franklin)

 

Breath is the very life in beings, and what holds all the particles of the body together is the power of the breath, and when this power becomes less then the will loses its control over the body. As the power of the sun holds all the planets so the power of the breath holds every organ....Breath is a channel through which all the expression of the innermost life can be given. Breath is an electric current that runs between the everlasting life and the mortal frame.                                                                        (Hazrat Inayat Khan)

 

You see things as they are and you say, why? I dream of things that never were and I say, why not?

                                                                                        (George Bernard Shaw)

 

The mind is a terrible master, and it’s a wonderful servant.            (Swami Vivekananda)

 

Each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbols which we call languages.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed and petrified by language. The various "other worlds," with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large.                                     (Aldous Huxley)

 

Prior to the eighteenth century, people who committed heinous crimes and acted strangely were thought to resemble wild animals. Hence, the antiquated "wild beast" model of insanity and the defence based on it. Seeing the "deluded" person whose "voices" command him to kill as similar to an automaton or robot - that is, an object that performs human-like motions but is not human - is a modern idea. Accepting the assertion of a "schizophrenic" that he killed his wife because God's voice commanded him to do so is not evidence of the validity of the explanation. In my view, such a person kills his victim because that is what he wants to do, but he disavows his intention; instead of acknowledging his motive, he defines himself as a helpless slave obeying orders. The so-called voices some mentally ill people "hear" are their own inner voices or self conversations, whose authorship they disown. This interpretation is supported by the fact that neuroimaging studies of hallucinating persons reveal activation of Broca's (speech) area, not activation of Wernicke's (auditory) area.                           (Thomas Szasz)

 

TIME is a river which sweeps me along,

but I am the river; it is a tiger which

destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire

which consumes me, but I am the fire.                   (Jorge Luis Borges)

 

In the ages of the rude beginnings of culture, man believed that he was discovering a second real world in dream, and here is the origin of metaphysics. Without dream, mankind would never have had occasion to invent such a division of the world. The parting of soul and body goes also with this way of interpreting dream; likewise, the idea of a soul's apparitional body: whence, all belief in ghosts, and apparently, too, in gods.

                                                                (Neitzsche, Human, All-Too-Human)

 

Swami Vivekananda, pointing out that the unity of all religions must necessarily express itself by an increasing richness of forms, said that the perfect state of that essential unity would come when each man had his own religion, when not bound by sect or traditional form he followed the free self-adaptation of his nature in its relations with the Supreme.                                                         (Sri Aurobindo – “Synthesis of Yoga”)

 

Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm.

                                                                (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

 

I have lost all wish for my own salvation; may I be born again and again and suffer thousands of miseries so that I may worship the only God that exists, the only God that I believe in, the sum-total of all souls – and above all, my God the wicked, my God the miserable, my God the poor of all races, of all species – is the special object of my worship. He who is the high and low, the saint and the sinner, the god and the worm: Him worship - the visible, the Knowable, the real, the omnipresent; break all other idols. In whom there is neither past life or future birth, nor death nor going nor coming, in whom we always have been and always will be one, Him worship; break all other idols.                                                                                                (Swami Vivekananda)

 

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost, that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.                                                                  (Henry Thoreau)

 

Desire for liberation or awakening also must be relinquished, for finally, to identify with any desire keeps me separate from God.                                                                                (Swami Vivekananda)

 

The greatest insanity is surely to see the world only as it is, and not as it might be.

                                                                                                (Miguel de Cervantes)

 

I opposed the ‘Big Bang” theory of creation since I could not see how something could arise from nothing. In its place I proposed the creation “Quasi-Steady State Theory” --- a constant greater Universe wherein the creation tap opened in our part of the universe 15 billion years ago, unleashing a flood of matter and causing the expansion of galaxies we observe all about us. Quasars and active galaxies are powered by relatively modest creation events, rather than black holes, and such phenomena are highly condensed aggregates of matter producing very strong gravitational fields.                                                                         (Sir Fred Hoyle – Royal Astronomer)

 

In the future civilization, the power of human creativity will be valued as the greatest resource of the planet.

                                      (Mathew Fox and Brian Swimme)

 

Life is a Universal phenomenon, and that form of consciousness has a fundamental role in the cosmos. Consciousness actually creates the Universe, forcing reality into being out of a quantum mechanical haze of possibilities. It is we who make the microscopic world real. We decide what the Universe has already done by looking at it. A little bit of God operates in all of us. We are his observing instruments. He observes the Universe through us. The Universe which we look at is an intellectual structure, not mere chance.                         (Sir Fred Hoyle)

 

The well expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune.               (Fitzgerald)

 

Of all things the most difficult to contain is the expansion of an idea. It is enough for truth to appear just once, to a single mind. From that moment nothing can prevent its spreading until it lights up the world. For whatever is truer will come to light, and whatever is better will ultimately become reality.                    (Teilhard de Chardin)

 

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help you create the fact.

                                                                                                (William James)

 

The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God? For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realization of that which she secretly is. . . . If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the Divine in himself and the realization of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth.

                                                                                                                (Sri Aurobindo)

 

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when grownups are afraid of light.                                                      (Plato)

 

Dream, dream, dream

Love, love, love

your dreams

Work, work, work

for your dreams

And you will find

heaven on Earth                  (Robert Muller)

 

Unknown to most of us, we are traveling in the midst of an enormous company of allies: a large population of creative people, who are the carriers of more positive ideas, values and trends than any previous renaissance period has ever seen.                                                                                                        (Paul H. Ray)

 

One of the basic elements of the theory of image is that it is the image which in fact determines what might be called the current behavior of any organism or organization. The image acts as a field. The behavior consists in gravitating toward the most highly valued part of the world.                                                      (Kenneth Boulding)

 

Humanity has reached the stage of knowledge and creativity when we must acquire a global and cosmic consciousness, and a long term consciousness into the future. An age of unprecedented, flourishing ideas has come which will make of humanity an entirely new species, a transcendent, elevated, cosmic species.

           (Robert Muller)

 

The beginning of every act of knowing, and therefore of every science, must be our consciousness and perception of things.                                                                                                                 (Max Planck)

 

I do not need to hope to give birth to a new idea;
I do not need to succeed to persevere
A new idea is God speaking to me.                                    (Robert Muller)

 

Imagination is more important than knowledge.                                      (Einstein)

 

Your happiness depends on three things, all of which are within your power: your will, your ideas concerning the events in which you are involved, and the use you make of your ideas.             (Epictetus)

 

Mental anticipation now pulls the future into the present and reverses the direction of causality.   (Erich Jantsch)

 

Small minds discuss gossip, average minds discuss events, but great minds discuss ideas.         (old proverb)

 

Only a new spiritual vision - cosmic in its dimensions and global in scope - can rescue civilization.    (Vaclav Havel)

 

TIME is TOO SLOW for those who wait,
TOO SWIFT for those who fear,
TOO LONG for those who grieve
TOO SHORT for those who rejoice,
BUT TIME IS ETERNITY FOR THOSE WHO LOVE.                     (Henry Van Dyke)

 

Use the light that dwells within you to regain your natural sight.               (Lao Tze)

 

I know, I truly know, that you would not find any difference between matter and consciousness, if only the distinction between truth and imagination could disappear.                             (Rabindranath Tagore)

 

It is useless to close the gates against ideas; they overleap them.            (Metternich)

 

Mind, I believe, exists as fleeting energy in parallel universes. The universe we perceive consists of the overlap of these fleeting flashes of energy. The patterns create mind as surely as they create matter. Both the existence of matter and the perception of it are the same thing.               (Fred Allen Wolf, Parallel Universes)

 

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

                                                                        (Goethe)

 

The collective unconsciousness seems to be not a person, but something like an unceasing stream or perhaps ocean of images and figures, which drift into consciousness in our dreams or in abnormal states of mind. I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me.                                                      (Carl Jung)

Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive . . . . To be 'cured' against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.                                                                               (C. S. Lewis)

Everything we experience is hallucination, maya. The reality is a structural-mathematical-logical principle that we don't see. That is, each person creates his own universe out of his own neurological processes. Science is nothing else but the search for the unseen structural integrities that underlie these appearances.

                                                                             (Paul Segall, Ph.D. on a lecture by Timothy Leary)

 

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited.                            (Plutarch)

 

What makes men of genius is not new ideas, it is the idea by which they are obsessed that what has been said has still not been said enough.                                                                               (Delacroix)

 

For the operation of the nervous system, there is no inside or outside, but only maintenance of correlations that continuously change - like the indicator instruments in a submarine.

                                                (Humberto Maturana The Tree of Knowledge)

 

Self-consciousness, awareness, mind - these are phenomena that take place in language.                 (ibid)

'Mind' is not an entity but can be ascribed to a system exhibiting regular behavior.                      (ibid)

Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I could keep the truth and let God go.

                                                                                                (Meister Eckhart)

 

Liberty is the prevention of control by others.                                                          (Lord Acton)

 

No one seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?

(George Orwell's (1949) nightmarish vision of Nineteen Eighty-Four nears its climax, and O'Brien explains the functional anatomy of power to Winston)

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison.                                                            (Einstein)

The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.                                                              (Voltaire)

 

Mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life; and that its virulence springs specifically from the circumstance that life depends upon interlocking circuits of contingency, while consciousness can see only such short arcs of such circuits as human purposes may direct.
Unaided consciousness must always tend toward hate; not only because it is good common sense to exterminate the other fellow, but for the more profound reason that, seeing only arcs of circuits, the individual is continually surprised and necessarily angered when his hardheaded policies return to plague the inventor.

                        (Gregory Bateson)

 

Thought is a thread of melody running through the succession of our sensations.

(philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who introduced the term "pragmatism" in philosophy)

 

Scientific spirit requires a man to be at all times ready to dump his whole cartload of beliefs, the moment experience is against them. The desire to learn forbids him to be perfectly cocksure that he knows already.

                                                (ibid)

 

Each energy calls for its complementary energy to achieve self-contained stability based on the play of energies.

                                                (Paul Klee via Robt Genn)

Metaphors and similes, parables and comparisons may be used to describe anything belonging to the relative, the intellectually dichotomized world, but even the simplest and commonest experience of reality, the touch of hot water, the smell of camphor, are incommunicable by such or any means; how much more so the Fatherhood of God, the Meaningless of Meaning, the Absolute Value of a popcorn.                 (Robert Blyth)

To be used to its best advantage, a metaphor should be taken lightly and quickly for it is at best an incomplete and only suggestive construction. The personal anarchist metaphor is no exception, and is intended only to propose some alternative ways of construing the human situation. Few specific techniques have been mentioned, and then quite briefly. This is in keeping with the anarchist insight for, ultimately, there can be no rules governing a personal anarchist.                                                                       (ibid)

Come to recognize that creative fictions allow expressions of psychological life that mere facts can never achieve. The make believe of fictional modes encourages the imagination to soar to possibilities which may yet allow the building of new worlds within which the fact-making activities of the developer can follow on from the fiction-creating capacities of the explorer.                                                                           (Miller Mair)

So there it is in words
Precise
And if you read between the lines
You will find nothing there
For that is the discipline I ask
Not more, not less
Not the world as it is
Nor ought to be –
Only the precision
The skeleton of truth
I do not dabble in emotion
Hint at implications
Evoke the ghosts of old forgotten creeds
All that is for the preacher
The hypnotist, therapist and missionary
They will come after me
And use the little that I said
To bait more traps
For those who cannot bear
The lonely
Skeleton
of Truth.                                          (Gregory Bateson – Angels Fear)

Mind without matter cannot exist; matter without mind can exist but is inaccessible. Transcendent deity is an impossibility…..The steadfast faith of an Einstein or a Whitehead is worth a thousand sanctimonious utterances from traditional pulpits.                                                                                        (Gregory Bateson)

As to the difference between map & territory, Carl Jung's Seven Sermons to the Dead insisted upon the contrast between Pleroma, the crudely physical domain governed only by forces and impacts, and Creatura, the domain governed by distinctions and differences. The two sets of concepts match - there could be no maps in Pleroma, but only in Creatura. That which gets from territory to map is news of difference, and that ‘news of difference’ is a synonym for information… Information can be defined as a difference that makes a difference.                                                                                                                             (ibid)

Before you criticize people, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away. And you have their shoes.                                                            (J K Lambert)

You've no idea what a poor opinion I have of myself -- and how little I deserve it.            (W. S. Gilbert)

The essential functions of the mind consist in understanding and in inventing: in other words, in building up structures by structuring reality.                                                                                                                      (Jean Piaget)

Knowledge and wisdom, far from being one,
Have oft times no connection.
Knowledge dwells in heads replete with thoughts of other men;
Wisdom, in minds attentive to their own.
Knowledge is a rude, unprofitable mass,
The mere materials with which wisdom builds,
Till smoothed, and squared, and fitted to its place,
Does but encumber whom it seems to enrich.
Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.                         (William Cowper)

Ethical argument is not primarily directed at those who are bent on doing evil. It is directed ... at good people whose convictions are being drained by intellectual and moral confusions. Ideas matter... they are needed in difficult times to strengthen the conviction and dedication of well-intentioned people.    (Robert Kane)

The Irish philosopher George Berkeley stated quite clearly that the only form of ‘being’ his rational thought could grasp was a being which his senses could substantiate with repeatable evidence. In order to ‘exist’ in itself, that is without a human observer, the world required faith in a God who could keep it constant by His divine perception. But Berkeley’s logic was generally misunderstood - and so was his metaphysics. He did not claim that our picture of the world is ultimately like God’s reality, he merely posited God’s world as an independent substrate that allowed the human mind to construct its own.  In 1710, the year of Berkeley’s first major work, Giambattista Vico published a thesis on epistemology in which he comes to similar conclusions. Rational knowledge, he said, does not concern what exists in a real world, but is the knowledge of how we make the world we experience. Only God can know what reality is like, because He Himself has created it.                                                  (Ernst von Glaserfeld)

I am afraid it is the measure of our profound inner insecurity that we are so damnably tidy, that we cannot tolerate the presence of saints or lunatics, that we cannot really live with people who disagree with us about anything serious, that we conceal emotions, and make ourselves more and more into the semblance of Kipling's monkeys, the Bandalong, crying, 'We all say so, so it must be true!'             (Alan Watts)

In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce and brave man, hated and scorned.
When his cause succeeds however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.      (Mark Twain)

Fear not the path of truth, for the lack of people walking on it.                          (Robert F. Kennedy)

 

 

Protect me from my friends, I will take care of my enemies.                               (An old American proverb)

 

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.                                                                                                 (Gilbert K. Chesterton)

 

'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.                                                  (Thomas Paine)

 

W.B.Yeats powerfully describes a dark night in "The Second Coming."

Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

 

Do not depend on the hope of results . . .you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. .  .you gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people . . ..In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.       (Thomas Merton)

 

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.                                                                                      (T.S. Eliot – from the "Four Quartets")

 

A young boy traveled across Japan to the school of a famous martial artist. When he arrived at the dojo he was given an audience by the Sensei-
"What do you wish from me?" the master asked.
"I wish to be your student and become the finest kareteka in the land," the boy replied. "How long must I study?"
"Ten years at least," the master answered.
"Ten years is a long time," said the boy. "What if I studied twice as hard as all your other students?"
"Twenty years," replied the master.
"Twenty years! What if I practice day and night with all my effort?"
"Thirty years," was the master's reply.
"How is it that each time I say I will work harder, you tell me that it will take longer?" the boy asked.
"The answer is clear. When one eye is fixed upon your destination, there is only one eye left with which to find the Way.                                            (Dogen's famous dictum that 'one does not meditate in order to become a

 Buddha, one meditates -- because that is what Buddhas do')

 

Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: it transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural & spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.

                                                                                                                                      (Albert Einstein)

 

It's unnecessary to think in terms of an intelligent designer - the idea that the complexity and beauty we see around us was intended by a single intelligence is silly. Instead we understand, in the biological context, that the living world has created itself — organized itself — because of the action of simple principles - primarily natural selection - that inevitably operate. I believe that the same will turn out to be true about the laws of physics and the structure of the cosmos.                                                                                        (Lee Smolin, physicist)

 

It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them -- the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.                                                                              (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

 

There are two paths in investigating the world: the reductionist path and the synthetic path. In the science of complexity, it's essential to recognize that there is this second path. Complexity amounts to more than mere complication. It's more than just a large number of simple systems coming together in conjunction. Complex systems really do have their own laws and principles, and their own internal logic.

In the next few decades, physics will be going in the direction of complexity. One of the key questions for physics is, ‘Can the reductionist program be completed?’  Stephen Hawking said, in his famous 1979 address on his inauguration to the Lucasian Chair, that the end might be in sight for theoretical physics, by which he meant that the end of this reductionist program might be in sight. Indeed, we may complete it and be able to write down a formula you could wear on your T shirt — some mathematical statement, or a set of principles encapsulated in a single piece of mathematics, describing all the fundamental particles and forces out of which the world is built.

That would still leave this path of complexity, this synthetic or holistic way of looking at the world. There, what I see as the real excitement is the dissolving away of the division between physics and biology. We see a very curious phenomenon at the moment: while physicists are increasingly recognizing the importance of looking at the collective, organizational, and qualitative features of complex systems, and recognizing that they have their own laws and principles and qualities, in a way that makes them every bit as fundamental as the elementary particles out of which the world is built, at that same time the biologists are going the other way, becoming overly reductionistic and regarding life as nothing but a collection of individual particles interacting in an unwitting manner by means of blind and purposeless forces.                                                      (Paul Davies, physicist)

 

The universe as we know it is an artifact in a computer in a more "real" universe.            (Edward Fredkin)

 

The world will always be here, and it will always be different, more varied, more interesting, more alive, but still always the world in all its complexity and incompleteness. There is nothing behind it, no absolute or platonic world to transcend to. All there is of Nature is what is around us. All there is of Being is relations among real, sensible things. All we have of natural law is a world that has made itself. All we may expect of human law is what we can negotiate among ourselves, and what we take as our responsibility. All we may gain of knowledge must be drawn from what we can see with our own eyes and what others tell us they have seen with their eyes. All we may expect of justice is compassion. All we may look up to as judges are each other. All that is possible of utopia is what we can make with our own hands. Pray let it be enough.                                           (Lee Smolin)

 

Everything that forms in nature incurs a debt which it must repay by dissolving so that other things may form.                                                                                                                   (Anaximander)

 

Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.                                                                               (microbiologist Lynn Margulis)

 

Contemporary scientists are becoming aware that the basis of the universe is energy. They are discovering what the ancient sages of India have known for millennia: that it is consciousness which forms the ground, or canvas, on which the material universe is drawn. In fact, the entire world is the play of this energy. Within its own being, by its own free will, it manifests this universe of diversities and becomes all the forms and shapes we see around us. This energy pervades every particle of the universe, from the supreme principle to the tiniest insect, and performs infinite functions. ... Just as this energy pervades the universe, it permeates the human body, filling it from head to toe....this conscious energy powers our bodies.     (Swami Muktananda)

 

All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.

Having realized that we can depend on no outside authority in bringing about a total revolution within the structure of our own psyche, there is the immensely greater difficulty of rejecting our own inward authority, the authority of our own particular little experiences and accumulated opinions, knowledge, ideas and ideals. You had an experience yesterday which taught you something and what it taught you becomes a new authority --and that authority of yesterday is as destructive as the authority of a thousand years. To understand ourselves needs no authority either of yesterday or of a thousand years because we are living things, always moving, flowing never resting. When we look at ourselves with the dead authority of yesterday we will fail to understand the living movement and the beauty and quality of that movement.

To be free of all authority, of your own and that of another, is to die to everything of yesterday, so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigor and passion. It is only in that state that one learns and observes. And for this a great deal of awareness is required, actual awareness of what is going on inside yourself, without correcting it or telling it what it should or should not be, because the moment you correct it you have established another authority, a censor.                                                                         (J. Krishnamurti)

 

The stuff of this universe is ultimately mind-stuff. What we recognize as the material universe, the universe of space and time and elementary particles and energies, is then an avatar, the materialization of primal mind. In that sense, there is no waiting for consciousness to arise. It is there always.

                                                                                                (Nobel laureate George Wald, Harvard biologist)

 

Ikkyu, the crazy Japanese monk, has a poem:

You do this, you do that
You argue left, you argue right
You come down, you go up
This person says no, you say yes
Back and forth
You are happy
You are really happy

What he is saying is: Stop all that nonsense. You're really happy. Just stop for a minute and you'll realize you're happy just being. I think it's the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit, it's right here.

                                        (James Hillman)

 

The one thing in the world of value is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all men it is obstructed, and as yet unborn.                  (Henry David Thoreau).

 

Origins

In the beginning was neither existence nor nonexistence:

Neither the world nor the sky beyond.
That one breathed, without breath, by its own impulse;
Other than that was nothing at all.

 

In the beginning was love,
Which was the primal germ of the mind.
The seers, searching in their hearts with wisdom,
Discovered the connection between existence and nonexistence.

 

They were divided by a crosswise line.

What was below and what was above?
There were bearers of seed and mighty forces,
Impulse from below and forward movement from above.

 

Who really knows? Who here can say?
When it was born and from where it came -- this creation?
The gods are later than this world's creation --
Therefore who knows from where it came?

 

That out of which creation came,
Whether it held it together or did not,
He who sees it in the highest heaven,
Only He knows -- or perhaps even He does not know!

          RIG VEDA

 

The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; the person to whom every soil is as a native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom every soil is as a foreign land.

                                      (Hugo of St. Victor - twelfth century monk)

 

Consistency is the refuge of the unimaginative.               (Oscar Wilde)

 

There is a light that shines beyond all things on Earth, beyond us all, beyond the heavens, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens.
This is the light that shines in our heart.                           (Chandogya Upanishad 3.13.7)

 

Reuven Bar-On, a clinical psychologist and lecturer in medicine at the Tel Aviv University Medical School, coined the term "emotional quotient" (or "EQ") in 1985. Bar-On devoted more than fifteen years of research to developing a formal psychological survey that aims to measure people's emotional intelligence. Based on his research and results, Bar-On summarized the qualities that contribute to emotional intelligence as follows:

It is thought that the more emotionally intelligent individuals are those who are able to recognize and express their emotions, who possess positive self regard and are able to actualize their potential capacities and lead fairly happy lives; they are able to understand the way others feel and are capable of making and maintaining mutually satisfying and responsible interpersonal relationships without becoming dependent on others; they are generally optimistic, flexible, realistic and are fairly successful in solving problems and coping with stress without losing control.

The ABCs of emotional intelligence include self-awareness, seeing the links between thoughts, feelings and reactions; knowing if thoughts or feelings are ruling a decision; seeing the consequences of alternative choices; and applying these insights to choices.                                                                        (Daniel Goleman)

 

To live and let live, without clamour for distinction or recognition; . . . to write truth first on the tablet of one's own heart -- this is the sanity and perfection of living, and my human ideal.      (Mary Baker Eddy)

 

To assert and to prove that deceit and injustice lead man to ruin is unquestionably proper and necessary. This, however, is not enough. Ethics is not satisfied with the mere knowledge of this fact; it must also explain why the deceitful and unjust life leads to ruin. Is it because such was the will of the Creator of nature, to which Christianity refers, or because lying always means self-debasement, the recognition of oneself as inferior, weaker than the one to whom the lie is told, - and consequently, by losing self- respect, making oneself still weaker? And to act unjustly means to train your brain to think unjustly, i.e., to mutilate that which is most valuable in us - the faculty of correct thinking.

While the mode of life is determined by the history of the development of a given society, conscience - on the other hand - has a much deeper origin: namely in the consciousness of equity, which physiologically develops in man as in all social animals.                                      (Peter Kropotkin – Ethics: Origin and Development)

[In Dr Rupert Sheldrake’s book ‘A New Science of Life’, he rejects the idea that the brain is a warehouse for memories and suggests it is more like a radio receiver for tuning into the past.  Memory is not a recording process in which a medium is altered to store records, but a journey that the mind makes into the past via the process of morphic resonance.]

Many enlightened capitalists, and socialists who connive with them for the sake of economic growth, believe that solving the problems of production will lead people - once they have enough - to turn towards the higher things of life: beauty, spirit, art, love. They are wrong. Making the market the principal instrument of human development has transformed it - in the form of shopping - into society's principal cultural expression. It is no use changing the goals from economic growth to basic needs or sustainability, for example, if the means, the economics, remains the same. It is the means that determine where we end up. The challenge is not only to decide on another destination…but also to design an economics, and a development process to go with it, that is as sustainable, participatory, equitable and satisfying as the end that is in view.                                      (Paul Ekins)

Transpersonal Psychology views 'normal' consciousness as a necessary and useful, but defensively contracted, state of reduced awareness that enables the individual to live in a social world but blinds him or her to greater spiritual potentials that lie beyond the ego or world-self. Consciousness itself is structured into levels, and a large spectrum of altered states of consciousness exists, some states tapping capabilities greater than are possible in the ordinary state, others being more limited in potential. From any given level, most human beings have a capacity to expand into higher realms of awareness that possess all the possibilities of the lower levels together with some additional ones. Under adverse conditions, consciousness may contract into primitive forms, stripping the individual of capabilities necessary for him to adapt to modern society.

                                                                                                          (John Nelson)

 

All forms of healing can be understood as either modification of the time sense or of energy. Concerning the many forms of complementary therapy, some are seen as addressing disorders arising from an individual's inner sense of time (e.g. relaxation, hypnosis, visualization, meditation, auto-genic training). Others are seen as therapies relevant to disorders of psychic energy (e.g. acupuncture, reflexology, kinesiology, homoeopathy)    (Helen Graham)

 

The moment you proclaim your oneness with God, others will proclaim your partnership with Satan. The moment you speak the highest truth, others will say that you speak the lowest blasphemy. And, as happens with all masters who gently demonstrate their mastery, you will be both worshipped and reviled, elevated and denigrated, honoured and crucified. Because while for you the cycle will be over, those who are still living in the illusion will not know what to make of you.                                   (Neale Donald Walsh)

 

I am dead because I lack desire;
I lack desire because I think I possess;
I think I possess because I do not try to give.
In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;
Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;

Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing;
Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become;
In trying to become, you begin to live.                    (René Daumal)

 

There are three basic human responses to the great changes and uncertainty we are all experiencing these days. The most common reaction is the "neurotic response" or "defensive response". This consists, essentially, of withdrawing into that which you think is certain and safe. This response is characterized by high levels of anxiety, insecurity and uncertainty, and by a general shift towards conservatism, denial, rigidity, hierarchical authority, dependence on experts, and resistance to change. It is what most societies and organizations seem to be stuck in.

The second type of response, much less common, is the "psychotic response", which is characterized by breakdown in civil order, institutional and economic collapse, loss of national or individual purpose and meaning, and a distinct lack of cultural coherence and social capital.

The least common response, perhaps the one we should all be aiming for is the "transformational response" and it is typified by cultural vitality, openness to pluralism and diversity, adaptiveness, low levels of anxiety and insecurity, good all-round health, playfulness, and the general sense that consciousness is advancing.

                                                                (Dr Maureen O'Hara, of the Saybrook Institute in California)

 

As I look more deeply, I can see that in a former life, I was a cloud. And I was a rock. This is not poetry; it is science. This is not a question of belief in reincarnation. This is the history of life on earth.

                                                                   (Thich Nhat Hahn)

 

Karma is as much collective as personal. Our minds are part of an extended web or field of consciousness composed of all living beings who are simultaneously sharing this present moment.

                        (Christopher Bache “ Dark Night, Early Dawn”)

 

The ultimate One descends downwards into material existence by a series of stages. At the lowest level this produces the four fundamental forces, and I postulate four basic particles of energy to carry these forces in addition to the usual zoo of quarks, gluons and gravitons. These particles are the photon, the phonon, the neutrino and the conformon. The photon and the neutrino are known to present day science. The phonon carries time and the conformon carries information.                    (A.K. Mukhopadhyay)

[The conformon has been proposed by Ilya Prigogine to explain how life manages to defy entropy.]

 

There is the story of Big Mike, a lonely figure who goes out fishing on his own, but no one knows his secrets until the end, when he reveals that 'night after night, I cast the net of my mind into the ocean of experience. Into it also I cast the net of my heart'. But he neither catches the great knowing nor does he find the final healing: 'Final healing isn't healing of the mind, nor is it healing of the heart. It is healing beyond them, into the Divine Ground. Divine Ground within'. This is the ultimate fishing, fishing in the Divine Dark, the Divine Deep, like a turtle that plumbed the depths of the abyss and came back up with precious pearls.                        (John Moriarty)

 

Then another told the story of Mendelssohn's discovery and first performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion. The composer was only 20 and the work was unknown. He needed two orchestras and choruses to perform it! However, word spread about the rehearsals so that, for the public performance, every seat was taken and the work has been a classic ever since: The beauty and power of the inner spirit poured forth into the outer world to entrench an envisioned man into our hearts and lives.                   (Sir John Templeton)

Learning involves managing the relationship between the external world (objective conditions) and the individual world (subjective experience). Experiential learning theory recognizes and equally values internal, subjective experiences - and external, environmental 'objective' reality. It advocates that the two interpenetrate and interrelate in subtle and complex ways - and that, through the relationship, both change. Learning transforms experience in both its objective and subjective forms.                                                      (D Kolb - The Blaker Foundation)

When the body ceases to function as a body, there is still a very subtle form of consciousness and that is independent of the body. The fact that the body is able to act as a basis for mental events is dependent on the pre-existence of a subtle form of consciousness.

What you call consciousness has its basis in a subtle type of awareness. There is a capacity for awareness, a kind of luminosity which is of the nature of awareness itself, which must arise from a preceding moment of awareness ... there is a continuum of awareness that does not itself arise from the brain. This basic capacity exists ... prior to the formation of the brain itself.                                       (the Dalai Lama)

 

There is no time for the Enlightened Ones. This, however, does not mean that for an Enlightened One the past has been extinguished or memory blotted out. On the contrary, the past ceases to be a quality of time and becomes a new order of space, which we may call the Fourth Dimension, in which things and events which we have experienced piecemeal can be seen simultaneously, in their entirety, and in the present. .... Only if we recognize the past as "a true dimension of ourselves," and not only as an abstract property of time, shall we be able to see ourselves in proper perspective to the universe, which is not an alien element that surrounds us mysteriously, but the very body of our past, in whose womb we dream until we awake into the freedom of enlightenment.       (Lama Govinda)

Energy is the 'outside' of consciousness and consciousness is the 'inside' of energy throughout the universe. Consciousness isn't just a different level or wave form of vibrating energy; it is the 'inside' of energy - the pole of interiority perfectly understandable to every person who has had a subjective experience of any kind.

                                                                                                                             (Mark Woodhouse)

 

We don't become enlightened by sitting in the light but by going into our darkness              (Carl Jung)

 

I am inclined to think that the worst feature of modern life is its failure to believe in beauty. For human life, beauty is as important as truth - even more important - and beauty in life is the product of true feeling. The strongest condemnation of modern life is not that it is cruel and materialistic and wearisome and false, but simply that it is ugly and has no sense of beauty.                                            (John Macmurray)

 

***

 

APPENDIX 1

The Universe as Hologram

In 1982 at the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

 

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

 

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

 

To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film.

 

When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears. The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose.

 

Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

 

The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

 

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

 

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

 

Particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that ultimately is as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these “eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram. In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.

 

The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky.

 

Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.

 

At its deeper level, reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

 

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be - every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."

 

Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

 

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage

 

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

 

Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica). Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage. Simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

 

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions.

 

Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens - a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions. Our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain. It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected.

 

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions. But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?

 

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.

 

We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram. This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm. In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level. It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual - to that of individual - at a far distant point; and helps us to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Stanislov Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.    *

 

***

 

APPENDIX 2

Physiological Rhythms

(Russian physicist S.K. Lisitsin – referred to by Tom Bearden)

The longest periods of physiological rhythms can be formed from shorter periods with the aid of simple circuits similar to a trigger and composed of neurons. This assumption will contradict, however, the fact at least eleven EEG rhythms of a man have non-multiple frequencies and appear as statistically independent oscillating processes.

It is known that the electrical rhythms of the brain are synchronized with external light and sound signals, and are also under the influence of electrical and magnetic fields. In work, it has been shown that the EEG and EKG of a man to a known degree are synchronized with sounding music. This synchronization is especially distinct in lovers of jazz music. It is possible that our love for music is associated with the mechanisms for synchronizing the biological processes. It is possible that "good music" is that music by which the brain is maximally unloaded from cares with regard to the synchronization of a complex system. In another work it has been said that under the influence on both eyes by discontinuous light with non-multiple frequencies, heavy disturbances in the nervous system occur. (It is natural to propose in this case the disturbance of synchronizing on a number of rhythms, disorder of the biological clock, short duration failures in the code, large errors in the system for tracking the alpha-rhythm frequency). All this on the whole also leads to the death of experimental animals. Apparently, the organism compensates for noise, if it is alone. But if through each individual eye two independent interferences penetrate into the brain, then compensation does not occur.

In conclusion it follows to recall the words of the scientist A. S. Zalmanov: "there occur cases - and they are frequent - when the death of a patient cannot be explained either by the development of an unhealthy phenomena, or by insufficiency in the most important forms of activity of the organism (breathing, blood circulation, excretion), or by serious pre-mortal complications. There remains a probable hypothesis: the breakdown of the synchronous enrhythmia i.e. of normal rhythmics.

- - - but not only synchronization of the frequencies (in the statistical plan) is the necessary condition for normal activity in the organism. The shift in the phases of the biological rhythms can also be substantial. Thus, the shift in the phase with respect to time which on a flight from Europe to America requires a greater adjustment than a flight along a meridian. It is considered, for example, that time distortions, amplified on activity of the stomach and liver lead to gastritis and stomach ulcers. All this indicates the need for research on the phase relationships even for an electroencephalogram. Considering the complexity of the organism, it is possible to comprehend that for synchronization and control of a large number of organs and functions, a considerable number of different frequencies is required. Many of these rhythms, up to radio frequencies, are already registered. To deny the possibility of detecting rhythms on other frequencies is not possible. Carefully conducted experiments and special equipment are necessary.

Biological Code of the Electroencephalogram (S.K. Lisitsin)

The poly-modal character of the density of distribution of "half-cycles", "periods" and more of the long chains of clipped EEG signals of a man with open eyes indicates the possibility of a reference of each of the modes of distribution to the appropriate digit of the positional code.

The characteristic criterion that finds that the observed combinations of digits of the code reflect not a random wandering, but are subordinated to a certain restricted number of rules, is the series change in the curves of distribution of increasingly longer chains from the time intervals. The discrete and slender character of the distribution for the very long chains serves as convincing proof of the existence of the code in the statistical meaning.

The calculation of the probabilities of transition from one digit to another showed that the greatest probability for the observed 11 digits is the zero digit (alpha-rhythm). The probability of transition to the zero digit after any of the given digits, is greatest when the delay does not exceed several units. Already now it can be said that blocks with a length on the order of seconds exist. These blocks slip relative to each other.  There is no doubt, that before us is an extremely complex code which can be described as non-systematic, i.e., with a different number of signs in the block; block type because there exist strictly constant-in-duration long groupings; uneven because the number of signs in the group is varied; recurrent because blocks are of different duration and slip relative to each other; incomplete (great excessiveness in comparison with language); conditionally binary for each of the positions.

In a healthy organism the number of digits of the code does not seem to exceed 44. Utilizing the code relationships of the EEG-signal, it is possible to considerably extend the sensitivity of the EEG method of research.

***

APPENDIX 3

The Marriage of Mind and Brain

The Field Substance of Mind - A Hypothesis

Robert A. Charman

Department of Physiotherapy Education, University of Wales College of Medicine, Heath Park, Cardiff CF4 4XN.

http://www.datadiwan.de/SciMedNet/library/discdocs/mind.htm 

The central nervous system (CNS) is a physiological system like any other bodily system, such as the digestive system or respiratory system. but, unlike any other system, the brain end of the CNS is burdened with the responsibility of being a conscious mind as well. Neurophysiology becomes psychology but remains neurophysiology. Stimulate parts of the brain with an electrode and you will experience mental images or emotions, think a thought and the brain thinks with you. This two-for-the-price-of-one is the working hypothesis of most neuroscientists, and most current theories concerning their relationship attach mental processes to localized processes of physiological synaptic activity that occurs when groups of neurons send impulses to each other in endless reciprocity. In this hypothesis the mental processes of Mind are attached to the molecular processes of Brain as a subjective addendum, so that we no longer have the brain and mind relationship of popular belief, but brainmind unity in one substance.

Atkins (1995), for example, says that "The principal activity of the brain, that of sustaining a sense of consciousness throughout a lifetime, is open to explanation rooted in its physical structure". In the next paragraph he goes on to say that "The brain is subtle and capable, it seems, of infinite understanding of its self, its origin, its cosmic origin, the origin of the cosmos, and of that cosmos's immediate, intermediate, and long term featureless future" (my italics and bold).

This level of understanding is not bad going for a rather hot, very wet, and very floppy body organ that lies completely enclosed inside of a bony box with no direct contact between its own substance and the varied nature of the substances of the cosmos outside, except for the limited range of such substances that pass to it from the cosmos through the bloodbrain barrier. It seems an even more remarkable feat of omniscient insight into its self, the cosmos, and all the rest, when you consider that the only mechanisms available to the physical brain to achieve this knowledge are streams of traveling ionic fluxes and electrochemical squirts of synaptic transmission across the electrically charged membranes of its myriad neurons.

This hypothesis of brainmind unity is adopted by all of the well known galaxy of writers of popular science books on the brain, such as Blackmore, Boden, the Churchlands, Crick, Damasio, Dennett, Edelman, Gazzaniga, Humphrey, Sacks, Scott, Searle, and so many others. In sum, what they, with Atkins, are saying is that 'It is the physical brain that feels the psychological pain'.

This must mean that when amino acids, glucose, minerals, and so on, cross the bloodbrain barrier and are absorbed into the brain they are not only converted into the chemical formula, physical structures and physical properties appropriate to their new physiological status, but they also acquire the attributes of mental functioning, including all of the thoughts, desires and emotions of conscious experiencing, as they interact with each other. In effect, during their sojourn in the brain, they become molecules with attitude, and lose this attribute of qualia when they leave the brain. The neurophysiological mechanisms that effect this astonishing transformation into qualia do not seem to be listed in the index of any neurophysiology text to date, but there is obviously a tacit agreement between all who believe that the physical brain is the ground substance of mind.

Current models of brain function are based, by analogy and metaphor, upon the computer sciences and the science of cybernetics. Brain processing = mental processing, which includes all experiencing. Why is this prevailing zeitgeist so dominant? The simple answer to this is that every finding from the neuroscience laboratories can be interpreted as supporting this conclusion in ever more convincing detail. There has not, so far, been a single recorded instance of anyone, whose brain is being monitored by a well known acronym such as EEG, PET, MRI, or MEG, who has thought a single thought, however spiritual, without the mental act being associated with recognizable changes in brain activity. All conscious mental activity, whether it is a silent recitation of the alphabet, or the experiencing of grief or physical pain, or a decision to move, is accompanied by the expenditure of real micro-joules of synaptic energy that have to be replenished by brain activity. Thinking is physical energy intensive and real electrochemical work is done. If the total energy expenditure of the body is taken as roughly equivalent to 100 watts, then the brain uses 20 watts in its psycho-physiological processing. They are so united that a physiologically distressed brain results in a psychologically distressed mind, and a psychologically distressed mind results in a physiologically distressed brain.

Occam's famous razor therefore leads to a reasonable reductionist conclusion of a two-in-one unity. Neurophysiology and neuropsychology from the same molecular coin. We can call this philosophical position - Neural Monism, and it is the consensus opinion of the majority of neuroscientists. At an operational level it is very successful. If a brain disfunction can be identified and rectified, then the corresponding psychological disfunction is usually rectified as well, and the brainself is returned to normal. If, on rather more uncertain ground, a psychological disfunction can be successfully rectified, then the corresponding brain disfunction will be returned to normal.

But a question remains unanswered. If mind and brain are one, why are the mechanisms and properties of brain function, and the mechanisms and properties of mind function, so different that they do not appear to share any common measure? The incredible monotony of ionic flux and synaptic activity inside of a brain inside of a bony box is in stark contrast to the world of conscious experiencing, which is a world of infinite sensory and emotional richness, full of personal relationships and set within an endless world of light, sound, and space with which one is in direct contact. Brainminders say that this is an interpretative error of the findings because, as the physical brain creates the mental world within its own physical substance in the act of its own physical functioning, it literally is the experiencing. When they are asked how this is done, they say that they do not know. It is a working hypothesis that gets results.

Those who feel that the brain-mind disparity is too great a divide for neural monism to span, and that the lack of a common brain-to-mind measure is a real lack, usually turn to the dualistic, two universe, alternative of brain and mind, as separate entities whose quantitative and qualitative properties interact by mutual correlation. A dual universe, they feel, is the minimum hypothesis that Occam's razor can cut down to. In practice, the dual universe hypothesis has also failed to resolve the problem because no one has found a mechanism whereby the non quantitative properties of qualitative mind can act upon the quantitative properties of physical brain. If the response to this dilemma is to say that qualia may have quantitative properties that we have not yet discovered, then we are back to monism, because dualism, by definition, assumes that matter and mind in general, and brain and mind in particular, are denizens of two co-existing, but mutually separate, universes. Neither is constrained by the properties of the other.

The Problem Re-stated.

If two systems interact, as brain and mind assuredly do, they must share a common currency of energy interchange whereby work can be done by each upon the other. In other words, they must share a mutual, inter-convertible, source of energy at their interface that each can transduce. Sometimes the brain must be the driving force, as when sensory information comes in, and sometimes the mind must be the driving force, as when an intentional act is decided upon. Each is of its own world but must share a common measure at the interface of their interaction.

If Mind, by dualistic definition, has no physical properties, and is not bound by physical constraints, it cannot, by that very definition, interact with a physical brain that requires real micro joules of incoming synaptic energy to alter its ongoing activity towards a mentally desired outcome. Dualism also faces the problem that each mind, at the experiential level of conscious intention, is utterly unaware of the physical brain that it is supposed to control. Considering the literally mind boggling complexities of neural functioning this lack of awareness of the existence of the brain upon which it is supposed to act seems to be a major control problem. Imagine trying to drive a car with no sensory awareness of its existence.

If dualism cannot offer a feasible mechanism, can this common measure of mutual energy interaction between the separate structures and properties of brain and of mind be found within the constraints of a monistic universe? I suggest that it can, and that the answer lies comfortably within the evolutionary model. If this assumption is correct, it implies that all of the mental processes of thinking, feelings and emotions that constitute each mind-in-action must be fashioned out of a biologically generated physical substance that possesses the property of experiencing.

A Proposed Solution

What I am proposing here is that the process of experiencing is biologically generated and that it is possessed by all cellular systems. It is a primary experiential reality that entered the universe when the first cellular Eve survived and replicated against all the odds, but it is not, in itself, a biological substance. This proposal ties in with the increasing realization, discussed below, that the role of many cell proteins is to function as cellular computers.

Bio-electro-magnetism

All cells, including neurons, can be considered as consisting of three interacting systems.

1. Biochemical reactions. These operate under interactive genetic control to power the metabolism of the cell, to build and maintain its structural integrity, and to determine its activities and functions. Bray (1995), has reviewed the mounting evidence indicating that many of the proteins in the cell are manufactured to form hundreds of computational circuits for storing memory and guiding cell activity. These self-regulating sub-systems are united into a mutually interacting system that controls the whole.

2. Bio-Electrical activity. This takes the form of momentary currents of protons, electrons and charged atoms (ions) of varying frequencies that are generated at the thousands of sites of enzymic activity in the cell, and the tens of thousands of ion pumps situated in the pores of the external cell membrane, and the multitude of internal membranes that enclose the cell organelles. These pumps work to store energy as a surface electrical charge on each membrane, and the ions lining these electrified surfaces create a static electrical field that extends outwards from each surface and influences the movement of ions in the vicinity. Each cell is a cytoelectric microcosm of structured electrical activity that is comprised of a complex web of currents and fields that are generated and powered by enzymic biochemical reactions under genetic control.

3. Bio-magnetic field activity. This is generated by the fluctuating currents in the cell, as all movement of electrical charge creates a magnetic field around itself. These fields rise and fall at the same frequency as the parent current strength rises and falls and they, in turn, can cause new currents to flow as the energy of their lines of force, or flux, acts upon electrical charges that are free to move. Electrical currents and magnetic fields always move perpendicular to, or at right angles to, each other. Magnetic field energy is generated during current rise, is stored during steady current flow, and released back into the current during its fall. This electrical to magnetic action, and magnetic to electrical reaction is called electromagnetic induction. With multiple sources of currents flowing in short pulses, or oscillations, across a wide range of frequencies, the cytomagnetic fields form a complex, close range, web of field energies within and around the cell as their lines of force, or flux, interact with each other. They may, for example, form patterns of beat frequencies. Beat frequencies are stable frequencies in field space that are the sum of the difference between two interacting frequencies. For example, if 100Hz and 90Hz frequencies cross each then the beat frequency is 10Hz. Different frequencies will act to reinforce or suppress each other as their paths cross. If two separate sources are at the same frequency they will create a series of standing waves in the space between them.

Of the three systems the cytomagnetic field is the least known and the least studied in detail. Textbooks of biochemistry and biophysics bristle with laws, equations and formulae related to biochemical pathways and electrophysiology, but far less is said about cell magnetism (see Malmivou and Plonsey (1995) for the biophysics). The probable reasons for this relative neglect in mainstream physiology are that the fields are difficult to detect, and are generally assumed to be of fleeting irrelevance to cell function. In other words, it probably does not matter whether they are there or not. This assumption may be based upon analogy with ordinary electrical circuits where the circuitry is tailored to allow for any magnetic field effect upon current movement, and such fields are often treated, in practice, as if they did not exist.

To assume a similar irrelevance of these magnetic fields to the functions of living systems may be misplaced. Nature rarely wastes anything that incurs the expenditure of energy and is associated with survival, and this leads directly to the following hypothesis:

Biologically generated magnetic fields form the substance of Experiential Reality.

I suggest that the biomagnetic field created and sustained by each cell forms the substance of its experiential reality, which is a primary property of biological systems. Each cytomagnetic field forms the experiential self of the cell, which acts as its experiential control system by interacting with the cellular computer circuits that Bray has described. Because cytomagnetic fields are continuously generated by primary cytoelectric currents they are a permanent feature of the living cell. They, in turn, will induce secondary cytoelectric currents that will oscillate at frequencies determined by the outcomes of magnetic field interactions. These secondary currents could interact with the sites of biochemical activity as their energy is absorbed, either reinforcing or reducing enzymic activity, thus altering cell function. Because the non magnetic structures of the cell are 'transparent' to the cytomagnetic fields that permeate them, the fields create a separate reality of magnetic space as if those cellular structures did not co-exist in the same space.

I suggest that the first successfully replicating cell was successful precisely because its experiential control system included sufficient survival strategies to maintain its physical and experiential integrity against adversity.

Principle of Flicker Fusion

During conscious experiencing flicker fusion frequency is the mechanism whereby individual images of momentary duration fuse together into an experiential solidity of image continuity in mental space. Let us assume that flicker fusion is the mechanism that applies to the interaction of magnetic field so that stable experiential features emerge, say, when beat frequencies appear and take structured form in field space. The implication would be that interacting cytomagnetic fields would form, through flicker fusion, the experiential self of the cell. Because the field configuration patterns would be established by the genetically determined drive of the biochemical reactions of the cell, a mean range of field energy configurations would be created that would act as the cytomagnetic givens of cell experiencing, becoming the experiential reference values for the normal functioning of that cell. Any unwanted deviation from the mean would engage feedback mechanisms to re-establish the norm, and any deviations from the mean that implied benefit for the cell would receive positive feedback until a required new norm was established and maintained.

In the preface to his book Cell Movements Bray (1992) describes his sense of utter fascination and wonder at watching the apparently purposeful movements of these tiny scraps of life, saying that he still finds it "hard to accept that such complex, integrated, seemingly sentient structures can arise from dumb molecules. The mystery is of my own making, a form of closet vitalism ". But what if the 'dumb molecules' are not so dumb after all? What if they create a sentient self from the substance of their cytomagnetism that gives their activities a true, purposeful, direction?

Let us take this idea of a biologically created experiential reality that can interact with its creator through the energy of electromagnetic induction and apply it to the brain and mind.

The functional unity of the CNS

The physical contacts that individual neurons make with each other through their extensive synaptic framework, together with the endless firing of impulses along the axons that connect them, and the resulting bursts of excitatory or inhibitory electrochemical synaptic activity that occurs on their electrically polarized membranes, creates a structural and functional unity of continuous processing that extends from the cerebral cortex to the tail end of the spinal cord. The problem for our understanding of the CNS is that we do not know how this functional whole knows, of itself, what is where, and what is doing what. All that a neuron receives is synaptic activation. It can have no knowledge of anything beyond its own surface so it cannot know the source of the impulse, any more than a telephone by itself can know the location of the external source of the electrical signal that causes it to ring. The various components of vision, for example, are processed by many physically separated modules in the occipital lobe and elsewhere, but we do not know how the modules link together to form the singular unity of vision that we experience. This is known as the binding problem and is a major brain ache for brainmind theorists.

Neuro-magnetic fields

The ever changing patterns of electrical activity that are created by the myriads of active synapses that cover the bodies and dendrites of the densely packed CNS neurons generate a multitude of localized magnetic fields in the space around themselves, and these oscillating magnetic fields may provide the spatial continuity whereby the CNS knows what is going on where throughout its structure. If the mosaic of cortical modules and related sub-cortical nuclei that serve particular functions 'resonate' at preferred oscillatory frequencies, which have been recorded as being mainly in the 5Hz to 150Hz frequency range, so will their associated magnetic fields, and these micro-fields will interact with each other. Because the physical structure of the brain and spinal cord is 'transparent' to the magnetic fields that they are generating, the fields permeate through it and maintain their own magnetic field integrity as if it was not there. As far as the fields are concerned the physical brain does not exist. What does exist is a supra-cellular synapto-electric framework in free space where electrical currents and magnetic fields interact. This neuromagnetic field is a separate reality from the physiological CNS that generates and maintains it, but it has one property in common with the CNS, it shares the common measure of energy interchange by electromagnetic induction. This has led me to the idea that the experiential reality of mind, as a continual process of mentation that spans an experiential spectrum from reflex non conscious level control, to everyday ordinary consciousness and states of altered, or extra ordinary consciousness, has the substance and properties of an infinitely variable field.

The mind as neuromagnetic field

The hypothesis is that the mind, and all of the conscious and non conscious mentational processes that it contains, is formed of the substance of the neuromagnetic field, and that all mentation consists of experiential properties of the neuromagnetic field based upon different frequencies and field intensities. Seeing a colour, or smelling a perfume, may be the experiential nature of the field at particular flicker fusion frequencies, and the intensity of the sensory experience, and associated emotional affect, may be determined by the intensity of the field within a particular frequency range. Different areas of the brain that are related to different forms of experiencing may generate preferred field frequencies, intensities, and field configurations, that are peculiar to them. For example, recent brain scan research on emotions has shown that the right amygdala nucleus is intensely active in memory recall of unpleasant emotional scenes. In neuromagnetic theory this would be interpreted as implying that it is the neuromagnetic field frequencies and intensities peculiar to this nucleus that are the emotional affect. The brainmind theory is that it is the amygdala neurons and/or their oscillatory circuitry that actually feel the fear and loathing.

Discussion

Nothing in this theory alters, or challenges, any aspect of our knowledge of neurological structure and function. What it does is to move the locus of mind from physical brain to brain generated field. In this theory the mind is not of a molecular substance and circuitry but is formed from the substance of the neuromagnetic field whose energy is generated by synaptic activity. The site of brain-mind interaction is placed at the synaptoelectric/synaptomagnetic junction, and the mechanism of interaction is electro-magnetic induction from brain to mind, and magneto-electric induction from mind to brain. Field energy is mind energy in 3 dimensional field space. This theory offers a practical solution to the spatial problem of binding the separate functions of the modular brain into an integrated whole because neuromagnetic field integrity can bind the whole. The magnetic transparency of the brain suggests an explanation for our lack of experiential awareness of it, and the direct synapto-magnetic relationship of brain and field, whereby, it is suggested, modules of field 'imagery' are created by the mosaic of cortical ensembles, neuronal gestalts, or synchronized oscillatory networks of physical brain theory, offers an explanation of how the mind can selectively activate the brain because its immediate, brain-field configuration is formed at the synaptic interface..

What this theory suggests is that MEG sensors are in direct contact with the mind, and that magnetic frequencies passing through the head from outside are interacting directly with the mind. Persinger and colleagues (Ruttan et al 1990) have pioneered research into the experiential effects of extremely weak, low frequency, magnetic fields as they pass through the temporal lobes of volunteer subjects from helmet mounted electromagnets, and Blackmore (1995) has given a graphic account of the peculiar distortions of body image and sudden changes of mood that she experienced when she acted as an experimental subject in Persinger's laboratory.

For those who believe, like Lazslo (1996) that experimental evidence conclusively demonstrates that living systems can interact with each other across space without sensory system contact, as in telepathy, psychokinesis, and healing by intention, the hypothesis that mind has the substance of field lends support for the theory that we are, at sub quantum level, linked by a universal subtle energy field that can interact with the experiential patterns of individual mind energy .

The brain, in this hypothesis, does not contain the substance of mind. Rather its function is to create and sustain the synapto-electric template by which the two systems can interact in ceaseless correlation throughout life.

References

Atkins PW (1995) The limitless powers of science. In Nature's Imagination. Cornwell J (ed), Oxford University Press.

Blackmore S (1995) Alien Abduction: the inside story. New Scientist Vol 144: No1952: 29-31

Bray D (1992) Cell Movements. Garland Publ Co. New York, London.

Bray D (1995) Protein molecules as computational elements in living cells. Nature Vol 376: No 6538: 307-12

Malvivou J, Plonsey R (1995) Bioelectromagnetism: Principles and applications of bioelectric and magnetic fields. Oxford University Press.

Laszlo E (1996) The Whispering Pond. Element Books.

Ruttan LA, Persinger MA, Koren S (1990) Enhancement of temporal lobe related experiences during brief exposures to milligauss intensity extremely low frequency magnetic fields. Journal of Bioelectricity Vol 9, No1:33-54

***

APPENDIX 4

From Psychology and Power: Understanding Human Action

David Smail

An individual is not the originator of action, but the, so to speak, transmitter and host of powers which flow through him or her. An individual can in this way be defined as an embodied locus in social space through which power flows. People are thus held in place within the social environment by the influences which structure it, and their freedom to change position or influence people and events is strictly limited by the availability of power within the sub-systems in which they are located. In fact, no significant amount of power is available to the individual beyond that which is (or has been) afforded by the social environment.

--- Individuals may indeed be free to act in a variety of ways on their environment, but the extent of that freedom depends entirely on the availability to them of powers which originate not from some interior source of ‘will power’, but from powers and resources which are accorded to them (and become embodied by them) from outside.

This brings us to the whole question of subjectivity and its relation to language: a question much reflected upon by psychologists and philosophers. There are two principal strands to my argument:

a)    that we are misled by the irresistibility of our own experience into seeing ourselves as the origin and cause of much of what we do, and

b)     that we are further misled into thinking that the vocabulary we have developed to describe our experience actually represents substantive internal, psychological processes.

The most compelling evidence we have of what moves us to action comes from the sensations of our own bodies. We may have an intellectual appreciation that the reasons for our conduct lie out in material and social space-time, but what we actually experience is the involvement of our flesh and blood and nervous tissue as we are impelled into action. In these circumstances, it is almost impossible for us not to conclude that it is we who are the origin of our conduct and that the impulses we feel are attributable to rational processes of weighing pros and cons, intending, deciding, willing, etc., etc. Sometimes we will find these processes easy and sometimes effortful, in which case we are directed to notions of confidence, determination, will-power, etc., which in turn lead to the elaboration of moral concepts such as virtue and responsibility as personal qualities. And there we are, so to speak, as individual, autonomous selves at the center of a psychological universe that is more inside than outside – a privilege we accord to no other object, animate or inanimate, on earth.

The ‘inner world’ that we construct inside our heads – the last vestiges, perhaps, of an immortal soul not many of us any longer believe in – is packed with a luxuriant range of entities that, at our most naïve, we take as independently potent psychological mechanisms of ‘cognition’ and ‘motivation’, etc. In my view, these represent not so much the hard-won insights of psychological science as the spin-off of a kind of running commentary we learn from a very young age as an accompaniment for our activity. Let me give an example:

 

accords with:-

 

 

my actions

what I feel

my account to others

the best available account

Result

My commentary

 

 

 

YES

 Insight

 

YES

YES

 

 Sincerity

YES

YES

 

 

 Authenticity

YES

 

NO

 

 Deception

NO

NO

 

 

 Self-deception

In the case of supposed personal qualities like sincerity, authenticity, insightfulness, etc., (qualities often felt to be, and represented as, of the first importance in judging moral probity) we are, I suggest, not so much dealing with relations of inside to outside, of what people do to what, for instance, are their ‘true’ motives, but rather with a far less morally and epistemologically loaded relation of action to commentary. In other words, what we have here are merely psychological processes arising out of the way we try by means of language to make sense of our felt experience of what we do. The actual wellsprings of our conduct are to be found elsewhere, in social space-time that figures here hardly at all.

The same kind of analysis could be made for all sorts of supposedly causal ‘cognitive’ processes – for example, intentions and decisions (which I think are far more to do with, respectively, prediction and post-diction than with cause). What I am trying to suggest, then, is that what actually matters in the real world is what we do and why we do it, while those aspects of our conduct that we often tend to take as personal qualities, abilities or virtues in fact have no substantive motivational power in and of themselves, but are, rather, the product of what we do, what we feel and what we call it.

The constructive power of language is of course something that has not been lost on some critics of conventional psychology, as is testified by the relatively recent craze for ‘social constructionism’, ‘discourse analysis’, ‘narrative therapy’ and other variants on the theme that ‘there is nothing beyond the text’. But these critics have leaped from the frying-pan of a hard objective reality supposedly independent of human interests, straight into the all-consuming flames of an idealism that implodes the universe into a black hole of individual consciousness.

I suppose some comfort may be derived from the fact that, despite our seeming inability after n years of philosophy to get beyond a simple opposition between a world in which we have no say and one which we invent, we do in some areas nevertheless make reasonable progress in getting to grips with our cosmic predicament (I’m thinking, obviously enough, of the natural sciences). Psychology, though – and not least clinical psychology – has got some serious catching up to do.

As part of this we need the elementary recognition that language, while indeed we cannot hope for it directly to describe a reality that has otherwise nothing to do with us, cannot either validly be used simply to construct versions of reality in which we’d prefer for one reason or another to believe. The task, rather is to develop a language that articulates our relations to reality as accurately as possible.

Though as psychologists our concern is inevitably with individual subjectivity, that does not mean that we have to look to subjectivity for the explanation of how we get to be the way we are. There are, I believe, powerful social influences at work that render make-believe an attractive option, but if ever we are to get at least a conceptual grip on those pervasive and intractable aspects of human suffering that are of our own making, we are going to have to struggle with the ways in which power and interest shape the material conditions of our lives as well as the structures of meaning that filter our understanding of our plight.

 

 

 

Keith and Marnie Elliott’s “REMEDY” Site

 

Home

Our Stories

The Sublime

Our World and Times

Book Reviews

Marnie's Images

The Journal

Gleanings

From The Writings Of. . .

Allegories