15 Tuesday Mar 2022
Posted in Uncategorized
A pioneering physicist and a renowned spiritual healer combined modern scientific evidence with A Course In Miracles to explain what meta-physicians have been teaching for thousands of years.
31 Saturday Oct 2020
Posted in Uncategorized
It isn’t Black or White… conflict divides us more than that. It’s about conflict resolution. Obama may have been oblivious to most of us… but Trump wants to divide us and conquer us. He isn’t a politician. He’s a fascist. Given four more years Trump will take America in the wrong direction so far into suffering, we won’t even recognize what is consensus building. Obama wanted consensus and he was unable or unwilling to do the right things to get it. His mistakes invited the far right into action. They began to look for leaders that can feed their apocalyptic anger.
Let’s not forget Obama failed us… because we don’t want his vision taking us deeper into this divide. BUT most importantly for right now… we must remove Trump… vote Biden / Harris. Four years of Trump has made the world less safe, and the damage to our country and the world might be irreversible.
We’ve seen hundreds of well-known Republicans came out against Trump… and… yet, Trump is competitive. Our people are confused and caught up in conflict. Yet, ask them to look at their bias and most will instantly fall back on their prejudices. Trump is what Obama invited into politics.
The Establishment is no more. It’s time to Build Back Better.
12 Sunday Jan 2020
Posted in Award, B4Peace, Consciousness, Faith, Happiness, Heaven, Inner peace, Inspiration, Lecture, Lessons, Mindful, Peace, Philosophy, Self-improvement, Spirituality
The Course is a system of mind training is what it really is. Its main objective is to reduce fearful thinking and guilt and to promote forgiveness, kindness, healing and inner peace. It is easy going. Students typically share with me that the course opens them to joyfully experiencing and practicing loving kindness. You might begin with this video introduction, <‘What It Says’>.
Friends may join weekly ACIM Zoom sessions.
Any level student will be welcome. All of the study materials are free. There is no charge.
From A Course In Miracles, let’s examine the opening statements:
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.
A Course in Miracles makes a distinction between the real and the unreal; between knowledge and perception. Divine “Knowledge” is truth, under one law, the law of Love. “Truth” is unalterable, eternal and unambiguous. Truth might be unrecognized, but it will not be changed. Truth applies to everything that God created, and only what God created is real and true. This is beyond learning because it is beyond time and beyond the limited awareness of processing thoughts, feelings, and perceptions.
Truth has no opposite; no beginning and no end. Truth is real, unchanging and it is the serene peace of faithfulness.
“It is particularly helpful to remember applying it when we read in the news about such fearful things as terrorist attacks. If there is anything that seems frightening to us, we can remember this opening statement and it can remind us again that we need not make illusions of attack and death real in our mind. We can return to the Truth. It is our choice. We need not make the sharp edged children’s toys of belief in separation real in our mind. We can ask the Holy Spirit for a different way to see what seems to be in front of us. The Holy Spirit reminds us that there is only Love or a call for Love. And no matter which it is, the appropriate response is Love.”¹
Program Description
Introduction and Principles of Miracles from A Course in Miracles
Fear originates from fractured ego mind-like-experiences. An experience of fear is an experience that reinforces belief in separation. Fear is a sharply occurring illusion. Every fearful experience is useful only to remind us that the peace of God is real truth. So, with practice, fear becomes a signal that a fractured ego mind-like-experience is really a call for help and a need for healing, peaceful faith.
The ego cannot understand the difference between real and unreal. With practice, peaceful faith will remove the habits of fear and fearful thoughts. So, if we practice using the opening statement we’ll understand and remember that only Love is real, no matter what sensations or images appear. Consciously return to the serene peacefulness of faith. Practice reinforces our enthusiasm and motivation for continuing training and studying the Course.
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1 “A Course in Miracles” Foundation for A Course in Miracles. Web. 06 May 2016. <facim.org/what-is-acim.aspx>
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Any level student / teacher will be welcome. The training sessions cover all 31 chapters, the Song Of Payer, and the Manual for Teachers. Students will have the reading assignments and online resources before each session. There are no fees or expectations. My main objective is to extend joy and to promote discovering serenity, honesty, openness and comfortable willingness to advance in spiritual growth.
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Is there a science of consciousness?
Eric
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01 Sunday Oct 2017
Posted in Consciousness, Faith, Heaven, Inner peace, Inspiration, Lecture, Lessons, Mindful, Philosophy, Religion, Spirituality
“I am a son of God, well there’s the whole thing in a nutshell.”
Some years ago I had just given a talk on television in Canada when one of the announcers came up to me and said “You know, if one can believe that this universe is in charge of an intelligent and beneficent God, don’t you think he would naturally have provided us with an infallible guide to behavior and to the truth about the universe?” And of course I knew he meant the Bible. I said “No, I think nothing of the kind. Because I think a loving God would not do something to His children that would rot their brains.”
Because if we had an infallible guide we would never think for ourselves, and therefore our minds would become atrophied. It is as if my grandfather left me a million dollars: I’m glad he didn’t.” And we have therefore to begin any discussion of the meaning of the life and teaching of Jesus with a look at this thorny question of “authority.” And especially the authority of Holy Scripture. Because in this country in particular [the USA] there are an enormous number of people who seem to believe that the Bible descended from Heaven with an angel in the year sixteen-hundred and eleven, which was when the so-called King James – or more correctly Authorized – version of the Bible was translated into English.
I had a crazy uncle who believed that every word of the Bible was literally true including the marginal notes. And so whatever date it said in the marginal notes, that the world was created in 4004, B.C., and he believed it as the Word of God. Until one day he was reading – I think – a passage in the book of Proverbs and found a naughty word in the Bible. And from that time on he was through with it. You know, how Protestant can you get?
Now, the question of “authority” needs to be understood, because I am not going to claim any authority in what I say to you, except the authority – such as it is – of history. And that’s a pretty uncertain authority. But from my point of view the four Gospels are I think to be regarded on the whole as historical documents. I’ll even grant the miracles. Because, speaking as one heavily influenced by Buddhism, we’re not very impressed with miracles! The traditions of Asia – Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist and so forth – are full of miraculous stories. And we take them in our stride. We don’t think that they’re any sign of anything in particular except psychic power. And we in the West have by scientific technology accomplished things of a very startling nature. We could blow up the whole planet, and Tibetan magicians have never promised to do anything like that.
And I’m really a little scared of the growing interest in psychic power because that’s what I call “psycho-technics.” And we’ve made such a mess of things with ordinary technics that Heaven only knows what we might do if we got hold of psycho-technics and started raising people from the dead, and prolonging life insufferably, and doing everything we wished.
The whole answer to the story of miracles is simply imagine that you’re God and that you can have anything you want. Well you’d have it for quite a long time. And then after awhile you’d say “This is getting pretty dull because I know in advance everything that’s going to happen.” And so you would wish for a surprise. And you would find yourself this evening in this church as a Human being.
So, I mean, that is the miracle thing. I think miracles are probably possible. That doesn’t bother me. And as a matter of fact when you read the writings of the early fathers of the church – the great theologians like Saint Clement, Gregory of Nissa, Saint John of Damascus, even Thomas Aquinas – they’re not interested in the historicity of the Bible. They take that sort of for granted but forget it. They’re interested in its deeper meaning. And therefore they always interpret all the tales like Jonah and the whale. They don’t bother even to doubt whether Jonah was or wasn’t swallowed by a whale or other big fish. But they see in the story of Jonah and the whale as a prefiguration of the resurrection of Christ. And even when it comes to the Resurrection of Christ they’re not worrying about the chemistry or the physics of a risen body. What they’re interested in is that the idea of the resurrection of the body has something to say about the meaning of the physical body in the eyes of God. That the physical body – in other words – is not something worthless and unspiritual, but something which is an object of the Divine Love.
Now, as a matter of fact, in the text of the Gospel of Saint John the local color, his knowledge of the topography of Jerusalem, and his knowledge of the Jewish calendar is more accurate than that of the other three writers, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And it seems to me perfectly simple to assume that John recorded the inner teaching which He gave to His disciples and that Matthew, Mark, and Luke record the more exoteric teaching which He gave to people-at-large.
Now, what about them, the authority of these scriptures? We could take this problem in two steps. A lot of people don’t know how we got the Bible at all. We Westerners got the Bible thanks to the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church and members of the church wrote the books of the New Testament. And they took over the books of the Old Testament which even by the time of Christ had not been finally decided upon by the Jews. The Jews did not close the canon of the Old Testament until the year 100 A.D. – or thereabouts – at the Synod of Jamnia. And then they finally decided which were the canonical books of the Hebrew Scriptures and embodied them in the Masoretic Text, the earliest copy of which dates from the tenth century – early in the tenth century A.D.. The books to be included in the New Testament were not finally decided upon until the year three hundred and eighty-two – A.D. again – at the Synod of Rome under Pope Damasus. So it was the church – the Catholic Church – that promulgated the Bible and said “we are giving you these scriptures on our authority and the authority of the informal tradition that has existed among us from the beginning, inspired by the Holy Spirit.”
So you receive historically the Bible on the church’s say-so. And the Catholic Church insists, therefore, that the church collectively, speaking under the presumed guidance of the Holy Spirit, has the authority to interpret the Bible. And you can take that or leave it. Because obviously the authority of the Bible is not first of all based on the Bible itself. I can write a bible and state within that book that it is indeed the Word of God which I have received. And you’re at liberty to believe me or not. Hindus believe that the Vedas are divinely revealed and inspired with just as much fervor as any Christian or any Jew. Muslims believe that the Koran is divinely inspired. And some Buddhists believe that their Sutras are of divine – or rather Buddhic – origin. The Japanese believe that the ancient texts of Shinto are likewise of divine origin. And who is to be judge?
“If we are going to argue about this – as to which version of the Truth is the correct one – we will always end up in an argument in which the judge and the advocate are the same person. And you wouldn’t want that if you were brought into a court of law, would you? Because if I say that, “Well, thinking it all over I find that Jesus Christ is the greatest being who ever came onto this Earth,” by what standards do I judge? Why obviously, I judge by the sort of moral standards that have been given to me as somebody brought up in a Christian culture. There is nobody impartial who can decide between all the religions because more or less everybody has been in one way or another influenced by one of them.
So if the church says the Bible is true it finally comes down to you. Are you going to believe the church or aren’t you? If nobody believes the church it will be perfectly plain, won’t it, that the church has no authority. Because the people is always the source of authority. That’s why de Tocqueville said that the people gets what government it deserves. And so you may say “Well, God Himself is the authority!” Well, how are we to show that? That’s your opinion. Well you say “Well, you wait and see. The Day of Judgment is coming, and then you’ll find out who is the authority!” Yes, but at the moment there is no evidence for the Day of Judgment, and it remains until there is evidence simply your opinion that the Day of Judgment is coming. And there is nothing else to go on except the opinion of other people who hold the same view and whose opinions you bought.
So really, I won’t deny anybody’s right to hold these opinions. You may indeed believe that the Bible is literally true and that it was actually dictated by God to Moses and the Prophets and the Apostles. That may be your opinion and you are at liberty to hold it. I don’t agree with you.
I do believe, on the other hand, that there is a sense in which the Bible is divinely inspired. But I mean by “inspiration” something utterly different from dictation, receiving a dictated message from an omniscient authority. I think inspiration comes very seldom in words. In fact almost all the words written down by automatic writing from psychic input that I’ve ever read strike me as a bit thin. When a psychic tries to write of deep mysteries instead of telling you what your sickness is or who your grandmother was, he begins to get superficial. And psychically communicated philosophy is never as interesting as philosophy carefully thought out.
But divine inspiration isn’t that kind of communication. Divine inspiration is, for example, to feel – for reasons that you can’t really understand – that you love people. Divine inspiration is a wisdom which it’s very difficult to put into words. Like mystical experience. That’s divine inspiration. And a person who writes out of that experience could be said to be divinely inspired. Or it might come through dreams. Through archetypal messages from the collective unconscious, through which the Holy Spirit could be said to work. But since inspiration always comes through a Human vehicle it is liable to be distorted by that vehicle. In other words, I’m talking to you through a sound system. And it’s the only one now available. Now if there’s something wrong with this sound system whatever truths I might utter to you will be distorted. My voice will be distorted. And you might mistake the meaning of what I said.
Now so therefore everybody who receives divine inspiration – and I’m using that in a very loose way – you could mean anything you like by “divine” – that’s your option – but anybody who receives it will express it within the limits of what language he knows. And by language here I don’t only mean English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, or Sanskrit. I mean language in the sense of what sort of terms are available to you; what kind of religion were you brought up with.
Now you see, if you were brought up in the Bible Belt – you came out of Arkansas somewhere – and that’s all the religion you knew, and you had a mystical experience of the type where you suddenly discover that you are one with God, then you’re liable to get up and say “I’m Jesus Christ!” And lots of people do. Well the culture that we live in just can’t allow that. There is only one Jesus Christ. And so if you don’t look like you’re Jesus Christ coming back again – because it said in the scriptures that when He comes back there’ll be no doubt about it: He’ll appear in the Heavens with legions of angels, and you’re not doing that; you’re just old Joe Dokes we knew years ago. Well now you say you’re Jesus Christ. Well, he says that when Jesus Christ said he was God nobody believed him and you don’t believe again. You know you can’t answer that argument. (laughter)
But you see, he says it that way because he is trying to express what happened to him in terms of the religious language which is circumscribed by the Holy Bible. He’s never read the Upanishads. He’s never read the Diamond Sutra. He’s never read The Tibetan Book of the Dead or the I-Ching or the Lao-Tsu, and therefore there is no other way in which he can say this.
But if he had read the Upanishads he would have had no difficulty, and nor would the culture – the society in which he was talking – have any difficulty. Because it says in the Upanishads we are all incarnations of God. Only they don’t mean by the word “God” – in fact they don’t use that word; they use “Brahman” – they don’t mean the same thing that a Hebrew meant by “God.” Because the Brahman is not personal. Brahman is – we would say – supra-personal. Not impersonal, because that is a negation. But I would say supra-personal.
Brahman is not he or she, has no sex. Brahman is not the creator of the world – as something underneath and subject to Brahman – but the actor of the world, the player of all the parts, so that everyone is a mask (which is the meaning of the word “person”) in which the Brahman plays a role. And like an absorbed actor the divine spirit gets so absorbed in playing the role as to become it, and to be bewitched. And this is all part of the game, hereto believing that I am that role. When you were babies you knew who you were. Psychoanalysts refer to that as the oceanic feeling. They don’t really like it, but they admit that it exists. Where the baby cannot distinguish between the world and the way it acts upon the world. It’s all one process. Which is of course the way things are.
But we learn very quickly because we are taught very quickly what is you and what is not-you, what is voluntary, what is involuntary, because you can be punished for the voluntary but not for the involuntary. And so we unlearn what we knew in the beginning. And in the course of life if we are fortunate we discover again what we really are, that each one of us is what would be called in Arabic or Hebrew “a son of God.” And the word “son of” means “of the nature of” as when you call someone a “son of a bitch,” or in Arabic you say “Ibn-kalb” which means “son of a dog,” “Ibn al-Himar”: “son of a donkey.” So, “a son of Belial” means “an evil person.” “Son of God” means “a divine person,” a Human being who has realized union with God.
Now my assumption – and my opinion – is that Jesus of Nazareth was a Human being like Buddha, like Sri Rama Krishna, like Ramana Maharshi, etc., who early in life had a colossal experience of what we call “cosmic consciousness.” Now you don’t have to be any particular kind of religion to get this experience. It can hit anyone anytime, like falling in love. There are obviously a number of you in this building who’ve had it in greater or lesser degree. But it’s found all over the world. And when it hits you, you know it. Sometimes it comes after long practice of meditations and spiritual discipline.
Sometimes it comes for no reason that anybody can determine. We say it’s the “Grace of God,” that there comes this overwhelming conviction that you have mistaken your identity, that what you thought, what I thought was just old Alan Watts – who I know very well is just a big act and a show – but what I thought was, you know, “me!” – was only completely superficial, that I am an expression of an eternal something-or-other: “X,” a name that can’t be named, as the name of God was taboo among the Hebrews; “I am.”; and that I suddenly understand why – exactly why – everything is the way it is. It’s perfectly clear.
Furthermore I no longer feel any boundary between what I do and what happens to me. I feel that everything that’s going on is my doing, just as my breathing is. Is your breathing voluntary or involuntary? Do you do it or does it happen to you? So you can feel it both ways. But you feel everything like breathing. And it isn’t as if you had become a puppet. There is no longer any separate “you.” There is just this great Happening going on. And if you have The Name in your background you will say “This happening is God,” or “the Will of God,” or “the Doing of God.” Or if you don’t have that word in your background you will say with the Chinese “it is the flowing of the Tao.” Or if you’re a Hindu you will say “it is the Maya of Brahman.” “The Maya” means “the magical power,” “the creative illusion,” “the play.”
So you can very well understand how people to whom this happens feel genuinely inspired. Because very often there goes along with it an extremely warm feeling. Because you see the Divine in everybody else’s eyes. When Kabir, a great Hindu Muslim mystic, was a very old man he used to look around at people and say “To whom shall I preach?” Because he saw the Beloved in all eyes, and could see – sometimes I look into people’s eyes, and I can look right down, and I can see that Beloved in the depths of those pools, and yet the expression on the face is saying “What, me?!” Ha ha ha ha, it’s the funniest thing! But there is everybody, in his own peculiar way, playing out an essential part in this colossal cosmic drama. And it’s so strange, but one can even feel it in people you thoroughly dislike.
So, let’s suppose then that Jesus had such an experience. But you see, Jesus has a limitation that he doesn’t know of any religion other than those of the immediate Near-East. He might know something about Egyptian religion, a little bit maybe about Greek religion, but mostly about Hebrew. There is no evidence whatsoever that he knew anything about India or China. And we – people who think that, you know, Jesus was God assume that he must have known because he would have been omniscient. No! Saint Paul makes it perfectly clear in the Epistle to the Phillipians that Jesus renounced his divine powers so as to be Man. “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God thought not equality with God a thing to be hung onto, but humbled himself and made himself of no reputation and was found in fashion as a man and became obedient to death.” Theologians call that “kenosis,” which means “self-emptying.”
So obviously an omnipotent and omniscient man would not really be a man. So even if you take the very orthodox Catholic doctrine of the nature of Christ, that he was both true God and true Man, you must say that for true God to be united with true Man, true God has to make a voluntary renunciation – for the time-being – of omniscience and omnipotence… and omnipresence for that matter. Now therefore if Jesus were to come right out and say “I am the son of God” that’s like saying “I’m the boss’s son,” or “I AM the boss,” and everybody immediately says that is blasphemy. That is subversion. That is trying to introduce Democracy into the Kingdom of Heaven. That is –– you are a usurper of the throne. No man has seen God.
Now, Jesus in his exoteric teaching – as recorded in the Synoptic Gospels – was pretty cagey about this. He didn’t come right out there and say “I and the Father are one.” Instead he identified himself with the Messiah described in the second part of the prophet Isaiah, “the suffering servant who was despised and rejected by men.” And this man is the non-political Messiah, in other words. It was convenient to make that identification even though it would get him into trouble.
But to his elect disciples as recorded in Saint John, he came right out “Before Abraham was, I am.” “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” “I am the resurrection and the life.” “I am the living bread that comes down from Heaven.” “I and the Father are one, and he who has seen me has seen the Father.” And there can be no mistaking that language.
So the Jews found out and they put him to death – or had him put to death – for blasphemy. This is no cause for any special antagonism toward the Jews. We would do exactly the same thing. It’s always done. It happened to one of the great Sufi mystics in Persia who had the same experience. Now, what happened? The Apostles didn’t quite get the point. They were awed by the miracles of Jesus. They worshipped him as people do worship gurus, and as you know to what lengths that can go if you’ve been around guru-land. And so the Christians said “Okay, okay: Jesus of Nazareth was the son of God but let it stop right there! Nobody else.” So what happened was that Jesus was pedestalized. He was put in a position that was safely upstairs so that his troublesome experience of cosmic consciousness would not come and cause other people to be a nuisance. And those who have had this experience and expressed it during those times when the church had political power were almost invariably persecuted. Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake. John Scotus Eriugena was excommunicated. Meister Eckhardt’s theses were condemned. And so on, and so on. A few mystics got away with it because they used cautious language.
But you see what happens. If you pedestalize Jesus you strangle the Gospel at birth. And it has been the tradition in both the Catholic Church and in Protestantism to pass off what I will call an emasculated Gospel. Gospel means “good news,” and I cannot for the life of me think what is the good news about the Gospel as ordinarily handed down. Because, look here – here is the revelation of God in Christ, in Jesus, and we are supposed to follow his life and example without having the unique advantage of being the boss’s son. Now, the tradition – both Catholic and Protestant Fundamentalist – represents Jesus to us as a freak! Born of a virgin, knowing he is the son of God, having the power of miracles, knowing that basically it’s impossible to kill him, that he’s going to rise again in the end. And we are asked to take up our cross and follow him when we don’t know that about ourselves at all! So what happens is this: we are delivered, therefore, a Gospel which is in fact an impossible religion. It’s impossible to follow the Way of Christ. Alright. Many a Christian has admitted it. “I am a miserable sinner. I fall far short of the example of Christ.” But do you realize the more you say that the better you are? Because what happened was that Christianity institutionalized guilt as a virtue. (enthusiastic applause) You see, you can never come up to it. Never.
And therefore you will always be aware of your shortcomings, and so the more shortcomings you feel the more – in other words – you are aware of the vast abyss between Christ and yourself.
[Audience member]
“You are just setting up straw men and knocking them down!”
You will have your opportunity to speak during the question period, madam. So, you go to confession…. (laughter and applause) … and if you’ve got a nice dear understanding confessor he won’t get angry with-at you. He’ll say, “My child, you know you’ve sinned very grievously but you must realize that the love of God and of Our Lord is infinite and that naturally you are forgiven. As a token of thanks-giving say three ‘Hail Mary’s.” And you know, you’ve committed a murder and robbed a bank and fornicated around and so on, but the priest is perfectly patient and quiet. Well you feel awful! “I have done that to the love of God? I have wounded Jesus, grieved the Holy Spirit,” and so on. But you know in the back of your mind that you’re going to do it all over again. You won’t be able to help yourself. You’ll try. But there’s always a greater and greater sense of guilt.
Now, the lady objected that I was putting up a straw man and knocking it down. This is the Christianity of most people. Now there is a much more subtle Christianity of the theologians, the mystics, and the philosophers. But it’s not what gets preached from the pulpit, grant you. But the message of Billy Graham is approximately what I’ve given you, and of all – what I will call – fundamentalist forms of Catholicism and Protestantism.
What would the real Gospel be? The real Good News is not simply that Jesus of Nazareth was THE son of God, but that he was a powerful son of God who came to open everybody’s eyes to the fact that you are too. Now this is perfectly plain. If you will go to the tenth chapter of Saint John, verse 30, there is the passage where Jesus says “I and the Father are one.” And this is – there are some people who aren’t intimate disciples around, and they are horrified! And they immediately pick up stones to stone him. He says “Many good works I have shown you from the Father, and for which of these do you stone me?” And they said, “For a good work we stone you not, but for blasphemy, because you being a man make yourself God.” And he replied “Isn’t it written in your law ‘I have said you are gods’?” (He’s quoting the 82nd Psalm.) “Isn’t it written in your law ‘I have said you are gods’? If God called them those to whom he gave his word ‘gods’ – and you can’t deny the scriptures – how can you say I blaspheme because I said I am a son of God?” Well there’s the whole thing in a nutshell.
Of course if you read the King James Bible that descended with the angel you will see in italics in front of these words “son of God,” “The son of God” – “…because I said I am The son of God.” And most people think the italics are for emphasis. They’re not. The italics indicate words interpolated by the translators. You will not find that in the Greek. The Greek says “a son of God.” So it seems to me here perfectly plain that Jesus has got it in the back of his mind that this isn’t something peculiar to himself.
So when he says “I am the way. No man comes to the Father but by ME,” this “I am,” this “me” is the divine in us which in Hebrew would be called the “Ruach Adonai.” This – a great deal is made of this by the esoteric Jews, Kabbalists and the Hasidim. The Ruach is the breath that God breathed into the nostrils of Adam. It is differing from the soul. The individual soul in Hebrew is called “Nephesh.” And so we translate the “Ruach” into the Greek “pneuma” into “psyche” [see´kay] or “psyche” [sy´kee]. The spirit – and you ask the theologian what’s the difference between the soul and the spirit and he won’t be able to tell you – but it’s very clear in Saint Paul’s writings.
So the point is that the Ruach is the divine in the creature by virtue of which we are sons of, or of the nature of God: manifestations of the divine. This discovery is the Gospel. That is, the Good News. But this has been perpetually repressed throughout the history of Western religion because all Western religions have taken the form of celestial monarchies, and therefore have discouraged Democracy in the Kingdom of Heaven. Until, as a consequence of the teachings of the German and Flemish mystics in the Fifteenth Century there began to be such movements as the Anabaptists, the Brothers of the Free Spirit, and the Levelers, and the Quakers. A spiritual movement which came to this country and founded a republic and not a monarchy.
And how could you say that a republic is the best form of government if you think that the Universe is a monarchy? Obviously, if God is top on a monarchy, monarchy is the best form of government. But you see, ever so many citizens of this republic think they ought to believe that the Universe is a monarchy, and therefore they are always at odds with the republic.
It is from, principally, white racist Christians that we have the threat of Fascism in this country. Because you see, they have a religion which is militant, which is not the religion of Jesus – which was the realization of divine son-ship – but the religion ABOUT Jesus which pedestalizes him and which says “Only this man – of all the sons of woman – is divine, and you had better recognize it.” And so it speaks of itself as The Church Militant, the onward Christian soldiers marching as to war. Utterly exclusive. Convinced, in advance of examining the doctrines of any other religion that it is the top religion. And so it becomes a freak religion, just as it has made a freak of Jesus, an unnatural man. It claims uniqueness, not realizing that what it does teach would be far more credible if it were truly “Catholic” – that is to say: restated again, the truths which have been known from time immemorial, which have appeared in all the great cultures of the world.
But even very liberal Protestants still want to say, somehow – so as, I suppose to keep the mission effort going or to pay off the mortgage – “Yes, these other religions are very good. God has no doubt revealed himself through Buddha and Lao-Tsu. But…!”
Now, obviously, it is a matter of temperament. You could be loyal to Jesus just as you’re loyal to your own country, but you are not serving your country if you think that it’s necessarily the best of all possible countries. That is doing a disservice to your country. It is refusing to be critical where criticism is proper. So of religion. Every religion should be self-critical. Otherwise it soon degenerates into a self-righteous hypocrisy. If then we can see this, that Jesus speaks not from the situation of a historical deus-ex-machina [god from the machine] – a kind of a weird, extraordinary event – but he is a voice which joins with other voices that have said in every place and time “Wake up, Man. Wake up and realize who you are.”
Now I don’t think, you see, until churches get with that that they’re going to have very much relevance. You see, popular Protestantism and popular Catholicism will tell you nothing about mystical religion. The message of the preacher, fifty-two Sundays a year, is “Dear people, be good.” We’ve heard it ad-nausea-um! Or: “Believe in this.” He may occasionally give us a sermon on what happens after death or the nature of God, but basically the sermon is “Be good.” But how? As Saint Paul said, “To will is present with me, but how to do that which is good I find not; for the good that I would I do not, and the evil that I would not, that I do.” How are we going to be changed?
Obviously, there cannot be a vitality of religion without vital religious experience. And that’s something much more than emoting over singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
But you see what happens in our ecclesiastical goings-on is that we run a talking shop. We pray. We tell God what to do, or give advice as if He didn’t know. We read the scriptures, and remember: talking of the Bible Jesus said “You search the scriptures daily, for in them you think you have life.” Saint Paul made some rather funny references about the spirit which giveth life and the letter which kills. I think the Bible should be ceremoniously and reverently burned every Easter. We need it no more because the Spirit is with us. It’s a dangerous book. And to worship it is of course a far more dangerous idolatry than bowing down to images of wood and stone. Because you can –– nobody’s senses can confuse a wooden image with God, but you can very easily confuse a set of ideas with God, because concepts are more rarefied and abstract.
So with this endless talking in church we can preach, but by-and-large preaching does nothing but excite a sense of anxiety and guilt. And you can’t love out of that. No scolding, no rational demonstration of the right way to behave is going to inspire people with love. Something else must happen. But we will say “What are you going to do about it?” Do about it? You have no faith? Be quiet. Even Quakers aren’t quiet.
They sit in meeting and think. At least some of them do. But supposing we get really quiet; we don’t think; be absolutely silent through-and-through? We say “Well, you’ll just fall into a blank.” Oh? Ever tried?
I feel then, you see, that it’s enormously important that churches stop being talking shops, they become centers of contemplation. What is contemplation? “Con-temp-lum” – It’s what you do in the temple. You don’t come to the temple to chatter, but to be still and know that “I am God.” And this is why, if the Christian religion – if the Gospel of Christ – is to mean anything at all instead of just being one of the forgotten religions along with Osiris and Mithra we must see Christ as the Great Mystic. In the proper sense of the word “mystic,” not someone who has all sorts of magical powers and understands spirits and so on. A mystic – strictly speaking – is one who realizes union with God, by whatever name. This seems to me the crux and message of the Gospel, summed up in the prayer of Jesus which Saint John records as he speaks over his disciples praying that “they may be one even as you, Father, and I are one.” That they may be all one. All realize this divine son-ship, all oneness, basic identity with the eternal energy of the universe and the love that moves the Sun and other stars.
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Is there a science of consciousness?
Eric
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26 Tuesday Sep 2017
Posted in B4Peace, Consciousness, Faith, Happiness, Heaven, Inner peace, Inspiration, Lessons, Mindful, Philosophy, Prayer, Self-improvement, Spirituality
The Course is a system of mind training is what it really is. Its main objective is to reduce fearful thinking and guilt and to promote forgiveness, kindness, healing and inner peace. It is easy going. Students typically share with me that the course opens them to joyfully experiencing and practicing loving kindness. You might begin with this video introduction, <‘What It Says’>.
Anyone may join weekly meetings.
7-8:15 pm (USA Eastern times) Saturdays… My email, eric.samsung.email@gmail.com
Any level student will be welcome. There is no charge. From A Course In Miracles, let’s examine the opening statements:
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.
A Course in Miracles makes a distinction between the real and the unreal; between knowledge and perception. Divine “Knowledge” is truth, under one law, the law of Love. “Truth” is unalterable, eternal and unambiguous. Truth might be unrecognized, but it will not be changed. Truth applies to everything that God created, and only what God created is real and true. This is beyond learning because it is beyond time and beyond the limited awareness of processing thoughts, feelings, and perceptions.
Truth has no opposite; no beginning and no end. Truth is real, unchanging and it is the serene peace of faithfulness.
“It is particularly helpful to remember applying it when we read in the news about such fearful things as terrorist attacks. If there is anything that seems frightening to us, we can remember this opening statement and it can remind us again that we need not make illusions of attack and death real in our mind. We can return to the Truth. It is our choice. We need not make the sharp edged children’s toys of belief in separation real in our mind. We can ask the Holy Spirit for a different way to see what seems to be in front of us. The Holy Spirit reminds us that there is only Love or a call for Love. And no matter which it is, the appropriate response is Love.”
Fear originates from fractured ego mind-like-experiences. An experience of fear is an experience that reinforces belief in separation. Fear is a sharply occurring illusion. Every fearful experience is useful only to remind us that the peace of God is real truth. So, with practice, fear becomes a signal that a fractured ego mind-like-experience is really a call for help and a need for healing, peaceful faith.
The ego cannot understand the difference between real and unreal. With practice, peaceful faith will remove the habits of fear and fearful thoughts. So, if we practice using the opening statement we’ll understand and remember that only Love is real, no matter what sensations or images appear. Consciously return to the serene peacefulness of faith. Practice reinforces our enthusiasm and motivation for continuing training and studying the Course.
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“A Course in Miracles” Foundation for A Course in Miracles. <facim.org/what-is-acim.aspx>
.My main objective is to extend joy and to promote discovering serenity, honesty, openness and comfortable willingness to advance in spiritual growth.
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Is there a science of consciousness?
Eric
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31 Monday Oct 2016
Posted in B4Peace, Consciousness, Culture, Faith, Happiness, I can improve today, Inner peace, Inspiration, Lessons, Mindful, Peace, Philosophy, Self-improvement, Spirituality
Tags
Practice recalling that love knows being loving.
What is Awareness:
Being the presence of that which is aware.
How Awareness Sees:
Experience comes to us, in one awareness.
The Absolute Certainty Of Awareness
The suggestion that Awareness does not know itself is an expression of ignorance.
Awareness Cannot Know Fear:
If we want to live without fear we have to learn that awareness cannot know resistance.
Love Turns Attention Towards Home:
Awareness is serene. . . is the still loving, knowing space.
Thanks for visiting.
Eric
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18 Tuesday Oct 2016
Posted in Consciousness, Faith, Happiness, I can improve today, Inner peace, Lecture, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Self-improvement, Spirituality
Reblog: Experiences Using The Law,
Neville Lancelot Goddard (1905-1972) was a prophet, profoundly influential teacher, and author. He did not associate himself as a metaphysician, with any ‘ism’ or ‘New Thought’ teaching as commonly advertised by these collective groups. Goddard was sent to illustrate the teachings of psychological truth intended in the Biblical teachings, and restore awareness of meaning to what the ancients intended to tell the world.
Neville Goddard : Eternal States (transcript)
Program description
This is a reading of a 09-09-1968 lecture by Neville . There is only a TEXT version of this lecture by Neville’s students. We now offer a read audio version of this lecture to you.
Related: Neville Goddard Wiki
I’ve been wanting to get back here again, posting blog updates, articles, and recommendations for self-improvement. So, I’ll look forward to connecting more often again with my WordPress friends.
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Is there a science of consciousness?
Eric
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16 Friday Sep 2016
Posted in Consciousness, Faith, Happiness, Inner peace, Lecture, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Spirituality
Alan Watts… “I warn you, that by explaining these things to you, I shall subject you to a very serious hoax.”
Here we have a video and transcript (Part 1, Being Let Go; Samadhi):
This particular weekend seminar is devoted to Buddhism, and it should be said first that there is a sense in which Buddhism is Hinduism, stripped for export. Last week, when I discussed Hinduism, I discussed many things to do with the organization of a Hindu society because Hinduism is not merely what we call a religion; it’s a whole culture. It’s 
a legal system, it’s a social system, it’s a system of etiquette, and it includes everything. It includes housing, it includes food, it includes art. The Hindus and many other ancient peoples do not make, as we do, a division between religion and everything else.
Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it. But you see, when a religion and a culture are inseparable, it’s very difficult to export a culture, because it comes into conflict with the established traditions, manners, and customs of other people.
So the question arises, what are the essentials of Hinduism that could be exported? And when you answer that approximately, you’ll get Buddhism. As I explained, the essential of Hinduism, the real, deep root, isn’t any kind of doctrine, it isn’t really any special kind of discipline, although of course disciplines are involved.
The center of Hinduism is an experience called moksha, liberation, in which, through the dissipation of the illusion that each man and each woman is a separate thing in a world consisting of nothing but a collection of separate things, you discover that you are, in a way, on one level an illusion, but on another level, you are what they call ‘the self,’ the one self, which is all that there is.
The universe is the game of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever. When it plays ‘hide,’ it plays it so well, hides so cleverly, that it pretends to be all of us, and all things whatsoever, and we don’t know it because it’s playing ‘hide.’ But when it plays ‘seek,’ it enters onto a path of yoga, and through following this path it wakes up, and the scales fall from one’s eyes.
Now, in just the same way, the center of Buddhism, the only really important thing about Buddhism is the experience which they call ‘awakening.’ Buddha is a title, and not a proper name. It comes from a Sanskrit root, ‘bheudh,’ and that sometimes means ‘to know,’ but better, ‘waking.’ And so you get from this root ‘bodhih.’ That is the state of being awakened. And so ‘Buddha,’ ‘the awakened one,’ ‘the awakened person.’ And so there can of course in Buddhist ideas, be very many Buddhas.
The person called the Buddha is only one of myriads. Because they, like the Hindus, are quite sure that our world is only one among billions, and that Buddhas come and go in all the worlds. But sometimes, you see, there comes into the world what you might call a ‘big Buddha.’ A very important one. And such a one is said to have been Guatama, the son of a prince living in northern India, in a part of the world we now call Nepal, living shortly after 600 BC. All dates in Indian history are vague, and so I never try to get you to remember any precise date, like 564, which some people think it was, but I give you a vague date–just after 600 BC is probably right.
Most of you, I’m sure, know the story of his life. Is there anyone who doesn’t, I mean roughly? OK. So I won’t bother too much with that. But the point is, that when, in India, a man was called a Buddha, or THE BUDDHA, this is a title of a very exalted nature. It is first of all necessary for a Buddha to be human. He can’t be any other kind of being, whether in the Hindu scale of beings he’s above the human state or below it. He is superior to all gods, because according to Indian ideas, gods or angels–angels are probably a better name for them than gods–all those exalted beings are still in the wheel of becoming, still in the chains of karma–that is action that requires more action to complete it, and goes on requiring the need for more action. They’re still, according to popular ideas, going ’round the wheel from life after life after life after life, because they still have the thirst for existence, or to put it in a Hindu way: in them, the self is still playing the game of not being itself.
But the Buddha’s doctrine, based on his own experience of awakening, which occurred after seven years of attempts to study with the various yogis of the time, all of whom used the method of extreme asceticism, fasting, doing all sort of exercises, lying on beds of nails, sleeping on broken rocks, any kind of thing to break down egocentricity, to become unselfish, to become detached, to exterminate desire for life. But Buddha found that all that was futile; that was not The Way. And one day he broke is ascetic discipline and accepted a bowl of some kind of milk soup from a girl who was looking after cattle. And suddenly in this tremendous relaxation, he went and sat down under a tree, and the burden lifted. He saw, completely, that what he had been doing was on the wrong track. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. And no amount of effort will make a person who believes himself to be an ego be really unselfish.
So long as you think, and feel, that you are a someone contained in your bag of skin, and that’s all, there is no way whatsoever of your behaving unselfishly. Oh yes, you can imitate unselfishness. You can go through all sorts of highly refined forms of selfishness, but you’re still tied to the wheel of becoming by the golden chains of your good deeds, as the obviously bad people are tied to it by the iron chains of their misbehavior.
So, you know how people are when they get spiritually proud. They belong to some kind of a church group, or an occult group, and say ‘Of course we’re the ones who have the right teaching. We’re the in-group, we’re the elect, and everyone else outside.’ It is really off the track. But then comes along someone who one-ups THEM, by saying ‘Well, in our circles, we’re very tolerant. We accept all religions and all ways as leading to The One.’ But what they’re doing is they’re playing the game called ‘We’re More Tolerant Than You Are.’ And in this way the egocentric being is always in his own trap.
So Buddha saw that all his yoga exercises and ascetic disciplines had just been ways of trying to get himself out of the trap in order to save his own skin, in order to find peace for himself. And he realized that that is an impossible thing to do, because the motivation ruins the project. He found out that there was no trap to get out of except himself. Trap and trapped are one, and when you understand that, there isn’t any trap left. I’m going to explain that of course more carefully.
So, as a result of this experience, he formulated what is called the dharma, that is the Sanskrit word for ‘method.’ You will get a certain confusion when you read books on Buddhism, because they switch between Sanskrit and Pali words.
The earliest Buddhist scriptures that we know of are written the Pali language, and Pali is a softened form of Sanskrit. So that, for example, the doctrine of the Buddha is called in Sanskrit the ‘dharma,’ we must in pronouncing Sanskrit be aware that an ‘A’ is almost pronounced as we pronounce ‘U’ in the word ‘but.’ So they don’t say ‘darmuh,’ they say ‘durmuh.’ And so also this double ‘D’ you say ‘budduh’ and so on. But in Pali, and in many books of Buddhism, you’ll find the Buddhist doctrine described as the ‘dhama.’ And so the same way ‘karma’ in Sanskrit, in Pali becomes ‘kama.’ ‘Buddha’ remains the same. The dharma, then, is the method.
Now, the method of Buddhism, and this is absolutely important to remember, is dialectic. That is to say, it doesn’t teach a doctrine. You cannot anywhere what Buddhism teaches, as you can find out what Christianity or Judaism or Islam teaches. Because all Buddhism is a discourse, and what most people suppose to be its teachings are only the opening stages of the dialog.
So the concern of the Buddha as a young man—the problem he wanted to solve—was the problem of human suffering. And so he formulated his teaching in a very easy way to remember. All those Buddhist scriptures are full of what you might call mnemonic tricks, sort of numbering things in such a way that they’re easy to remember. And so he summed up his teaching in what are called the Four Noble Truths. And the first one, because it was his main concern, was the truth about duhkha. Duhkha, ‘suffering, pain, frustration, chronic dis-ease.’ It is the opposite of sukha, which means ‘sweet, pleasure, etc.’
So, insofar as the problem posed in Buddhism is duhkha, ‘I don’t want to suffer, and I want to find someone or something that can cure me of suffering.’ That’s the problem. Now if there’s a person who solves the problem, a buddha, people come to him and say ‘Master, how do we get out of this problem?’ So what he does is to propose certain things to them. First of all, he points out that with duhkha go two other things. These are respectively called anitya and anātman. Nnitya means permanant, so anitya is impermanance. Flux, change, is characteristic of everything whatsoever. There isn’t anything at all in the whole world, in the material world, in the psychic world, in the spiritual world, there is nothing you can catch hold of and hang on to for safely. Nuttin’ … not only is there nothing you can hang on to, but by the teaching of anātman, there is no you to hang on to it. In other words, all clinging to life is an illusory hand grasping at smoke. If you can get that into your head and see that is so, nobody needs to tell you that you ought not to grasp. Because you see, you can’t.
Buddhism is not essentially moralistic. The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile. Because what happens is he simply sweeps the dust under the carpet, and it all comes back again somehow. But in this case, it involves a complete realization that this is the case. So that’s what the teacher puts across to begin with.
The next thing that comes up, the second of the noble truths, is about the cause of suffering, and this in Sanskrit is called trishna. Trishna is related to our word ‘thirst.’ It’s very often translated ‘desire.’ That will do. Better, perhaps, is ‘craving, clinging, grasping,’ or even, to use our modern psychological word, ‘blocking.’ When, for example, somebody is blocked, and dithers and hesitates, and doesn’t know what to do, he is in the strictest Buddhist sense attached, he’s stuck. But a buddha can’t be stuck, he cannot be phased. He always flows, just as water always flows, even if you dam it, the water just keeps on getting higher and higher and higher until it flows over the dam. It’s unstoppable.
Now, Buddha said, then, duhkha comes from trishna. You all suffer because you cling to the world, and you don’t recognize that the world is anitya and anātman. So then, try, if you can, not to grasp. Well, do you see that that immediately poses a problem? Because the student who has started off this dialog with the buddha then makes various efforts to give up desire. Upon which he very rapidly discovers that he is desiring not to desire, and he takes that back to the teacher, who says ‘Well, well, well.’ He said, ‘Of course. You are desiring not to desire, and that’s of course excessive.
All I want you to do is to give up desiring as much as you can. Don’t want to go beyond the point of which you’re capable.’ And for this reason Buddhism is called the Middle Way. Not only is it the middle way between the extremes of ascetic discipline and pleasure seeking, but it’s also the middle way in a very subtle sense. Don’t desire to give up more desire than you can. And if you find that a problem, don’t desire to be successful in giving up more desire than you can. You see what’s happening? Every time he’s returned to the middle way, he’s moved out of an extreme situation.
Now then, we’ll go on; we’ll cut out what happens in the pursuit of that method until a little later. The next truth in the list is concerned with the nature of release from duhkha. And so number three is nirvana. Nirvana is the goal of Buddhism; it’s the state of liberation corresponding to what the Hindus call moksha. The word means ‘blow out,’ and it comes from the root ‘nir vritti.’ Now some people think that what it means is blowing out the flame of desire. I don’t believe this. I believe that it means ‘breathe out,’ rather than ‘blow out,’ because if you try to hold your breath, and in Indian thought, breath–prana–is the life principle. If you try to hold on to life, you lose it. You can’t hold your breath and stay alive; it becomes extremely uncomfortable to hold onto your breath [moksha: release from the cycle of rebirth impelled by the law of karma… a transcendent state attained as a result of being released from the cycle of rebirth].
And so in exactly the same way, it becomes extremely uncomfortable to spend all your time holding on to your life. What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do. They spend enormous efforts on maintaining a certain standard of living, which is a great deal of trouble. You know, you get a nice house in the suburbs, and the first thing you do is you plant a lawn. You’ve gotta get out and mow the damn thing all the time, and you buy expensive this-that and soon you’re all involved in mortgages, and instead of being able to walk out into the garden and enjoy, you sit at your desk and look at your books, filling out this and that and the other and paying bills and answering letters. What a lot of rot! But you see, that is holding onto life. So, translated into colloquial American, nirvana is ‘whew!’ because if you let your breath go, it’ll come back. So nirvana is not annihilation, it’s not disappearance into a sort of undifferentiated void. Nirvana is the state of being let go. It is a state of consciousness, and a state of, you might call it, being, here and now in this life.
We now come to the most complicated of all, number four and magha. Magha in Sanskrit means ‘past,’ and the Buddha taught an eight-fold path for the realization of nirvana. This always reminds me of a story about Dr Suzuki, who is a very, very great Buddhist scholar. Many years ago, he was giving a fundamental lecture on Buddhism at the University of Hawaii, and he’d been going through these four truths, and he said ‘Ah, fourth Noble Truth is Noble Eightfold Path. First step of Noble Eightfold Path is called shoken. Shoken in Japanese means ‘right view.’ For Buddhism, fundamentally, is the right way of viewing this world. Second step of Noble Eightfold Path is—oh, I forget second step, you look it up in the book.’
Well, I’m going to do rather the same thing. What is important is this: the eight-fold path has really got three divisions in it. The first are concerned with understanding, the second division is concerned with conduct, and the third division is concerned with meditation. And every step in the path is preceded with the Sanskrit word _samyak_. In which you remember we ran into _samadhi_ last week, ‘sam’ is the key word. And so, the first step, _samyak- drishti_, which mean–‘drishti’ means a view, a way of looking at things, a vision, an attitude, something like that. But this word samyak is in ordinary texts on Buddhism almost invariably translated ‘right.’ This is a very bad translation. The word IS used in certain contexts in Sanskrit to mean ‘right, correct,’ but it has other and wider meanings. ‘Sam’ means, like our word ‘sum,’ which is derived from it, ‘complete, total, all-embracing.’ It also has the meaning of ‘middle wade,’ representing as it were the fulcrum, the center, the point of balance in a totality. Middle wade way of looking at things. Middle wade way of understanding the dharma. Middle wade way of speech, of conduct, of livelihood, and so on.
Now this is particularly cogent when it comes to Buddhist ideas of behavior. Every Buddhist in all the world, practically, as a layman–he’s not a monk–undertakes what are called pancasila, the Five Good Conducts. ‘Sila’ is sometimes translated ‘precept.’ But it’s not a precept because it’s not a commandment.
When Buddhists priests chant the precepts, you know: pranatipada: ‘prana (life) tipada (taking away) I promise to abstain from.’ So the first is that one undertakes not to destroy life. Second, not to take what is not given. Third—this is usually translated ‘not to commit adultry’. It doesn’t say anything of the kind. In Sanskrit, it means ‘I undertake the precept to abstain from exploiting my passions.’ Buddhism has no doctrine about adultery; you may have as many wives as you like.
But the point is this: when you’re feeling blue, and bored, it’s not a good idea to have a drink, because you may become dependent on alcohol whenever you feel unhappy. So in the same way, when you’re feeling blue and bored, it’s not a good idea to say ‘Let’s go out and get some chicks and have some sex fun.’ That’s exploiting the passions. But it’s not exploiting the passions, you see, when drinking, say, expresses the vitality and friendship of the group sitting around the dinner table, or when sex expresses the spontaneous delight of two people in each other.
Then, the fourth precept, Musavada, ‘to abstain from false speech.’ It doesn’t simply mean lying. It means, abusing people. It means using speech in a phony way, like saying ‘all niggers are thus and so.’ Or ‘the attitude of America to this situation is thus and thus.’ See, that’s phony kind of talking. Anybody who studies general semantics will be helped in avoiding musavada, false speech.
The final precept is a very complicated one, and nobody’s quite sure exactly what it means. It mentions three kinds of drugs and drinks: sura[?], mariya[?], maja[?]. We don’t know what they are. But at any rate, it’s generally classed as narcotics and liquors. Now, there are two ways of translating this precept. One says to abstain from narcotics and liquors; the other liberal translation favored by the great scholar Dr Malanesecreta[?] is ‘I abstain from being intoxicated by these things.’ So if you drink and don’t get intoxicated, it’s OK. You don’t have to be a teetotaler to be a Buddhist. This is especially true in Japan and China; my goodness, how they throw it down! A scholarly Chinese once said to me, ‘You know, before you start meditating, just have a couple martinis, because it increases your progress by about six months.’
Now you see these are, as I say, they are not commandments, they are vows. Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by some kind of cosmic lawgiver. The reason why these precepts are undertaken is not for a sentimental reason. It is not that you’re going to make you into a good person. It is that for anybody interested in the experiments necessary for liberation, these ways of life are expedient. First of all, if you go around killing, you’re going to make enemies, and you’re going to have to spend a lot of time defending yourself, which will distract you from your yoga. If you go around stealing, likewise, you’re going to acquire a heap of stuff, and again, you’re going to make enemies. If you exploit your passions, you’re going to get a big thrill, but it doesn’t last. When you begin to get older, you realize ‘Well that was fun while we had it, but I haven’t really learned very much from it, and now what?’ Same with speech. Nothing is more confusing to the mind than taking words too seriously. We’ve seen so many examples of that. And finally, to get intoxicated or narcotized–a narcotic is anything like alcohol or opium which makes you sleepy. The word ‘narcosis’ in Greek, ‘narc’ means ‘sleep.’ So, if you want to pass your life seeing things through a dim haze, this is not exactly awakening.
So, so much for the conduct side of Buddhism. We come then to the final parts of the eightfold path. There are two concluding steps, which are called Samyak smriti and Samyak Samadhi. Smriti means ‘recollection, memory, present-mindedness’ … seems rather funny that the same word can mean ‘recollection or memory’ and ‘present-mindedness’ Bbut smriti is exactly what that wonderful old rascal George Gurdjieff meant by self-awareness, or self-remembering. Smriti is to have complete presence of mind.
There is a wonderful meditation called ‘The House that Jack Built Meditation,’ at least that’s what I call it, that the Southern Buddhists practice. He walks, and he says to himself, ‘There is the lifting of the foot.’ The next thing he says is ‘There is a perception of the lifting of the foot.’ And the next, he says ‘There is a tendency towards the perception of the feeling of the lifting of the foot.’ Then finally he says, ‘There is a consciousness of the tendency of the perception of the feeling of the lifting of the foot.’ And so, with everything that he does, he knows that he does it. He is self-aware. This is tricky. Of course, it’s not easy to do. But as you practice this–I’m going to let the cat out of the bag, which I suppose I shouldn’t do–but you will find that there are so many things to be aware of at any given moment in what you’re doing, that at best you only ever pick out one or two of them. That’s the first thing you’ll find out. Ordinary conscious awareness is seeing the world with blinkers on. As we say, you can think of only one thing at a time. That’s because ordinary consciousness is narrowed consciousness. It’s being narrow-minded in the true sense of the word, looking at things that way. Then you find out in the course of going around being aware all of the time–what are you doing when you remember? Or when you think about the future? ‘I am aware that I am remembering’? ‘I am aware that I am thinking about the future’?
But you see, what eventually happens is that you discover that there isn’t any way of being absent-minded. All thoughts are in the present and of the present. And when you discover that, you approach samadhi. Samadhi is the complete state, the fulfilled state of mind. And you will find many, many different ideas among the sects of Buddhists and Hindus as to what samadhi is. Some people call it a trance, some people call it a state of consciousness without anything in it, knowing with no object of knowledge. Some people say is is the unification of the know-er and the known. All these are varying opinions.
I had a friend who was a Zen master, and he used to talk about samadhi, and he said a very fine example of samadhi is a fine horse rider. When you watch a good cowboy, he is one being with the horse. So an excellent driver in a car makes the car his own body, and he absolutely is with it. So also a fine pair of dancers; they don’t have to shove each other to get one to do what the other wants him to do. They have a way of understanding each other, of moving together as if they were Siamese twins. That’s samadhi, on the physical, ordinary, everyday level. The samadhi of which Buddha speaks is the state which, as it is, the gateway to Nirvana; the state in which the illusion of the ego, as a separate thing, disintegrates.
Now, when we get to that point in Buddhism, Buddhists do a funny thing, which is going to occupy our attention for a good deal of this seminar. They don’t fall down and worship. They don’t really have any name for what it is, that is, really, and basically. The idea of anatman, of non-self, is applied in Buddhism not only to the individual ego, but also to the notion that there is a self of the universe, a kind of impersonal or personal god, and so it is generally supposed that Buddhism is atheistic. It’s true, depending on what you mean by atheism. Common or garden atheism is a form of belief; namely that I believe there is no god. The atheist positively denies the existence of any god. All right. Now, there is such an atheist, if you put dash between the ‘a’ and ‘theist,’ or speak about something called ‘atheos’–‘theos’ in Greek means ‘god’–but what is a non-god? A non-god is an inconceivable something or other.
I love the story about a debate in the Houses of Parliment in England, where, as you know, the Church of England is established and therefor under control of the government, and the high ecclesiastics had petitioned Parliament to let them have a new prayer book. Somebody got up and said “It’s perfectly ridiculous that Parliament should decide on this, because as we well know, there are quite a number of atheists in these benches.” And somebody got up and said “Oh, I don’t think there are really any atheists. We all believe in some sort of something somewhere.”
Now again, of course, it isn’t that Buddhism believes in some sort of something somewhere, and that is to say in vagueness. Here is the point: if you believe, if you have certain propositions that you want to assert about the ultimate reality, or what Paul Tillich calls ‘the ultimate ground of being’ you are talking nonsense. Because you can’t say something specific about everything. You see, supposing you wanted to say God has a shape. But if god is all that there is, then God doesn’t have any outside, so he can’t have a shape. You have to have an outside and space outside it to have a shape. So that’s why the Hebrews, too, are against people making images of God. But nonetheless, Jews and Christians persistently make images of God, not necessarily in pictures and statues, but they make images in their minds. And those are much more insidious images.
Buddhism is not saying that the Self, the great Atman, or what-not… it isn’t denying that the experience which corresponds to these words is realizable. What it is saying is that if you make conceptions and doctrines about these things, your liable to become attached to them. You’re liable to start believing instead of knowing. So they say in Zen Buddhism, “The doctrine of Buddhism is a finger pointing at the moon. Do not mistake the finger for the moon.” Also, we might say in the West, the idea of God is a finger pointing at God, but what most people do is instead of following the finger, they suck it for comfort. And so Buddha chopped off the finger [metaphor], and undermined all metaphysical beliefs.
There are many, many dialogues in the Pali scriptures where people try to corner the Buddha into a metaphysical position. ‘Is the world eternal?’ The Buddha says nothing. ‘Is the world not eternal?’ And he answers ‘nuttin’. ‘Is the world both eternal and not eternal?’ And he don’t say ‘nuttin’. ‘Is the world neither eternal nor not eternal?’ And STILL he don’t say ‘nuttin’. He maintains what is called the noble silence. Sometimes called the thunder of silence, because this silence, this metaphysical silence, is not a void. It is very powerful. This silence is the open window through which you can see not concepts, not ideas, not beliefs, but the very goods. But if you say what it is that you see, you erect an image and an idol, and you misdirect people. It’s better to destroy people’s beliefs than to give them beliefs. I know it hurts, but it is The Way.
Transcript source: deoxy.org
T47:28
Dharma: is a key concept that signifies behaviors that are considered to be in accord with the order that makes life and universe possible. Dharma is “cosmic law and order” and includes duties, rights, laws, conduct, virtues and ‘‘right way of living” as taught by the Buddha.
Moksha: in Indian philosophy and religion is a liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth (saṃsāra); derived from Sanskrit, the term moksha literally means freedom from saṃsāra.
Samadhi: a state of intense concentration achieved through meditation. In Hindu yoga this is regarded as the final stage, at which union with the divine is reached (before or at death).
Saṃsāra: is a Sanskrit word that means “wandering” or “world”, with the connotation of cyclic, circuitous change. It also refers to the theory of rebirth and “cyclicality of all life, matter, existence” and liberation from Saṃsāra is called Moksha, Nirvana, Mukti or Kaivalya.
The Noble Eightfold Path: is the fourth of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, and asserts the path to the cessation of dukkha (suffering, pain, un-satisfactoriness). The path teaches that through restraining oneself, by cultivating discipline, in practicing mindfulness and meditation, the enlightened ones stop their craving, clinging and karmic accumulations, and thus end rebirth and suffering. It is used to develop insight into the true nature of reality, achieve liberation from rebirths in realms of Samsara, and to attain nirvana. In Buddhist symbolism, the Noble Eightfold Path is often represented by means of the dharma wheel (dharmachakra), with eight spokes representing the eight elements of the path. The eight Buddhist concepts in the Noble Eightfold Path are:
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Thanks for visiting.
Eric
Only One Word Was On My Mind
morning Meditation
Rippling
Gratitude is essential
Mindfulness – it is improving us
What is the happiest person in the world saying?
Meditation Changes Brains!
23 Tuesday Aug 2016
Posted in Consciousness, Faith, Philosophy, Psychology, Spirituality
Tags
awake my soul, BBC Face to Face, Carl Gustav Jung, Face to Face, John Freeman, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, The Red Book
Man cannot stand a meaningless life
Carl Gustav Jung and John Freeman
BBC’s Face to Face
Echoing Anaïs Nin’s meditation on the fluid self from a decade earlier, Jung confirms that fixed personality is a myth.
Legendary Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (July 26, 1875 – June 6, 1961), along with his frenemy Freud, is considered the founding father of modern analytical psychology. He coined the concepts of collective consciousness and introverted vs. extroverted personality, providing the foundation for the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Though famously accused of having lost his soul, Jung had a much more heartening view of human nature than Freud and memorably wrote that “the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”
On October 22 of 1959, BBC’s Face to Face — an unusual series of pointed, almost interrogative interviews seeking to “unmask public figures” — aired a segment on Jung, included in the 1977 anthology C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters (public library). Eighty-four at the time and still working, he talks to New Statesman editor John Freeman about education, religion, consciousness, human nature, and his temperamental differences with Freud, which sparked his study of personality types.
Watch>
Jung speaks with Freeman on a range of subjects, from his childhood and education to his association with Sigmund Freud and his views on death, religion and the future of the human race. At one point Freeman asks Jung whether he believes in God, and Jung seems to hesitate. “It’s difficult to answer,” he says.
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Is there a science of consciousness?
Eric
The Red Book… Jung’s Awakening
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09 Saturday Jul 2016
Posted in Consciousness, Happiness, Health, I can improve today, Mindful, Self-improvement
Empathy is the ability to see the world as another person, to share and understand another person’s feelings, needs, concerns and/or emotional state… understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another… not trying to solve the problems of another, the goal being to share the experiences of feelings; to let them know you’re there and that how they feel matters to you.
Being an empath is much more than being highly sensitive and it’s not just limited to emotions. Sometimes life is unconsciously influenced by others’ desires, wishes, thoughts, and moods.
If sensitivity is a deficiency and a burden, we become weary, needy and very vulnerable… retracting joy into fears and upsets… and self-destructive harm. At this layer of development, the adolescent or adult empath will model co-dependent behaviors… children that are not growing up in an openly accepting loving home may begin modeling co-dependent behaviors before even two years old.
All of us need strong, healthy community supports, shared language at these, and empaths may need to have opportunities to unload the burden of fatigue and emotional upset. With belonging, progress to cultivate personal preferences and learned practices that increase healthy social interaction within the support community. This will strengthen mind, body, extend calm and help remaining grounded.
Empaths need not resign themselves to belief founded on anxiety or past emotional upsets that they must suffer the consequences of a tel-empathic interaction. With guidance from adepts, you may even begin to alter the mood and emotion of others… adjusting them into your calm. Insecurity and immaturity, lack of awareness, inappropriate co-dependent behaviors, use of manipulation, psychosocial drams, etc. can be addressed.
A happy empath extends joy. The ability to perform so, to extend joy always reduces any vulnerabilities.
<Empath support (The Empath Haven) on Facebook>
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Eric
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Related:
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11 Saturday Jun 2016
Posted in Book review, Consciousness, Happiness, Health, Inspiration, Near-death experiences
Tags
Don't take consciousness for granted, Rise and Shine, Simon Lewis, TED Ideas worth spreading, TEDTalks
Simon Lewis is a film and television producer and author. After earning law degrees from Christ’s College Cambridge and Boalt Hall, Berkeley, Lewis moved to Los Angeles, CA. Hollywood experiences include managing writers, directors and stars, and producing “Look Who’s Talking” and critically acclaimed films such as “The Chocolate War” which was an Emmy-winning international production for HBO and ITV Central.
The Extraordinary Story of One Man’s Journey from Near Death to Full Recovery
Lewis is the author of Rise and Shine, his memoir that uses his personal story of recovery from coma to illustrate insights about consciousness. Lewis uses visualizations from medicine, scientific research and digital art to illustrate solutions for society’s pressing problems such as the erosion of consciousness and our need for solutions to extend mind by cognitive and other therapies.
As an advocate for change to educate our children and ourselves, Lewis says we must not take our consciousness for granted. We must screen and detect learning problems diminish barriers, and prevent academic failure to bridge gaps of potential mind and maximize consciousness.
“When I was thirty-five, my wife and I were both reported dead by the first paramedics to arrive at the scene of a seventy-five-mile-an-hour hit-and-run. My wife Marcy died instantly that day. With brain damage from a massive stroke and my body broken, I wasn’t expected to survive either.”
So begins Rise and Shine, a dramatic story of Simon Lewis and his remarkable recovery from a horrific car accident to navigate the health insurance maze, Rise and Shine is an extraordinary first-person account of unexpected tragedy and life-affirming courage.
Rise and Shine demonstrates that patients achieve maximum regeneration to rebuild their lives probably only when there is a great deal of help and support from their family and caregivers.
Enjoy this story about what it means to return to life after a near-death experience. Rise and Shine is an exploration of the nature of consciousness itself, and its a fascinating tale of survival and recovery.
Description: After a catastrophic car accident that left him in a coma, Simon Lewis found ways to recover — physically and mentally — beyond all expectations. At the INK Conference he tells how this remarkable story led him to concern over all threats to consciousness, and how to overcome them.
Thanks for visiting.
Eric
I’m on Facebook. If you are using Facebook, check out my
group: Consciousness Academy of Science and Spirituality
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03 Tuesday May 2016
Posted in B4Peace, Consciousness, Faith, Happiness, Inner peace, Self-improvement
What if (I ask this seriously) our minds are the surroundings? Happiness is a wondrous achievement that seeks us. Striving instead for pleasure is the greatest sin against one’s self. How shall I perceive this world? It’s my choice, isn’t it.”
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The awakening of the self is to a new and more active plane of being; new and more personal relationships with reality; new and more work which it will accomplish. It is the transcendent in the physical plane; the shifting of consciousness from lower to higher levels. This awakening places a person in a higher order of reality, past the instincts of self-preservation. Larger consciousness impresses the individual consciousness and alters the attitude regarding the world and reality. It is a momentous change of tastes regarding life itself.
“You can quite literally measure how well you are doing in your spiritual journey or personal development by focusing on your perception of the world and of others. When our light within grows we stop resonating with the “shadow” parts of the world and actually don’t see things from this perspective any longer.”
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Have you ever noticed that happy, peaceful people seem to see a world that is becoming more loving, accepting and open minded? And people who seem to be negative or are always complaining about things seem to be convinced that this world is “going to hell in a handbasket.” Why do you think that is? What many do not realize is that the world is only a reflection of our inner world. The more shadow we have in our emotional and mental body the more shadow we see in the world. You can quite literally measure how well you are doing in your spiritual journey or personal development by focusing on your perception of the world and of others. When our light within grows we stop resonating with the “shadow” parts of the world and actually don’t see things from this perspective any longer. While some may say this is…
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24 Sunday Apr 2016
Tags
10 Principles for Success and Inner Peace, B4Peace, Don't die with your music still in you, embrace silence, forgive, Forgiveness, free mindfulness exercises, Give Up Your Personal History, Have a Mind That Is Open to Everything and Attached to Nothing, life is beautiful, Love without resentment, Principles for Success, success, Treasure Your Divinity, Treat Yourself As If You Already Were What You'd Like to Become, Wayne Dyer, Wisdom Is Avoiding All Thoughts Which Weaken You, You Can't Solve a Problem with the Same Mind That Created It, You can’t give away what you don’t have
“Authentic wisdom is the ability to monitor yourself at all times to determine your relative state of weakness or strength, and to shift out of those thoughts that weaken you.” Wayne Dyer, 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace
I was reflecting on authenticity and that as I am out and about or busy with my work that the love that I seek is not really Love… but that it is a state of consciousness in my mind and that it really is based on body sensations and notions, however subtle, that are not true and wholesome like the ideal of love. True love does not come and go and it cannot be found in the world and as I stayed with this, with the stillness, I knew love cannot be found one moment and then lost in another. This presence with Love is timeless, without objects and it might be characterized, although there are no properties in the stillness, I’m saying it is a Self-knowing, Self-recognizing peaceful and serene consciousness of I know this awareness.. a consciousness I recall the experience of as like I’d been in a deep sleep and it is refreshing like a deep object-less sleep.
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Thanks for visiting.
Eric
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06 Sunday Mar 2016
Tags
Cellular.Eric, Gregg Braden, Karpman Drama Triangle, seven mirror patterns, Victim Rescuer Persecutor
Inner Work
“we are holographic”
John Wheeler demonstrated “the universe is a self-referential ‘strange loop’ in which physics gives rise to observers, then rise to information, which in turn gives rise to physics.” What we find here is something quite similar. We’ll discover that mirror relationships create a strange loop as well. An observation changes the perceiving when we focus upon the lessons, changes the information, changes the relationship, changes the information, changes the evolution, changes the observers, changes the physics.
Within, consciousness is fractal-holographic to the exact same awareness and health and state of mind in our every fiber as the mind is aligned. It is as though the past is healed when we heal an emotional wound in the present. THIS IS TRUE: When a pattern occurs in the present and it is healed, the pattern is healed throughout the past… everywhere.
David Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, overall worldview, and Special Relativity use what he referred to as the holomovement. Holomovement is “undivided wholeness” in process of becoming by “universal flux” not static oneness. By dynamic wholeness-in-motion, everything moves with an interconnectedness as though separared in space and time and yet is always every thing connected with everything else. Bohm expanded his ideas in his book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980. He included this in Special Relativity afterwards in 1981.
In this note (post), I include a course for you in holo-mirror, holo-movement. This is VERY POWERFUL work as this video demonstrates:
— everyone is a mirror —
every important person is an important mirror
— this always applies —
every important person is an important mirror
— everyone is a mirror —
seven mirror patterns
The First Mirror is my presence in the now moment… what we reflect by others in the present… what we radiate in the moment.
The Second Mirror is only very subtlety different but it reflects back to us that which we judge. It is what we have been wounded by and have an emotional charge on. It can be something we have done in the past that we have not forgiven. It is good to discern however that when we condemn another with an emotional charge we are most likely judging ourselves. This mirror is more difficult to understand as most people find it difficult to see the deeply wounded emotions within. We often think we have forgiven people and situations, when in fact they weaved subtlety into the very fabric of our being.
The Third Mirror reflects back to us something we have lost, given away or had taken away. When we see something we love in another it is often something we have lost, given away or that has been stolen within our personal lives. Every relationship is a relationship with the self and often we try to reclaim what we lost, gave away or had taken away as a child. All of which can be reclaimed within self. When we give away our power to another person, we suffer a form of soul loss, without realizing we send out a subtle frequency that others can feel, if they are experiencing the same energy loss, you will attract the same pattern of behavior back to you.
The Fourth Mirror reflects back to us our most forgotten love. This could be a way of life, or a lost or unfinished relationship. Often it is a past life where a wrong conclusion from a prior experience was made. These will recreate themselves over and over and over again until the conclusion is registered in the soul as wisdom. This is the most difficult to come to terms with as we all have made these sort of choices in our life, to leave someone, a place or much loved home, the pain of such a decision will imprint upon the soul or body hologram, once the lesson has been recognized you no longer attract these circumstances to you.
The Fifth Mirror reflects back Father/Mother. It is frequently stated that we marry our father or mother. We may display both healthy and unhealthy patterns we learned as a child. Our father and mother are often like Gods to us and so we will often reflect aspects of our relationship with them onto our partners. We often choose our partners based on our relationship with our parents.
The Sixth Mirror reflects back to us the Quest for Darkness or what is often referred to as a dark night of the soul. This is where we meet our greatest challenges, our greatest fears, and have been gathering the tools from life to confront and deal with. The most important thing to remember is that our soul is giving us the opportunity to grow and evolve, this will help us remove the vibration of victim. If we see these as opportunities for spiritual growth and from a perspective of soul advancement, they do not have to be feared; it is just passing through our life, asking us to seek answers from within rather than relying on others for answers.
The Seventh Mirror reflects back to us our self-perception. Others will perceive and treat us according to how we perceive and treat ourselves. If we are under a low self-esteem and do not accept our wisdom and beauty, others will not acknowledge them. If we are angry, bitter and unloving to others, they in turn will often react in the same way towards us. If we find another perception of ourselves, we alter the world. Maybe it is time to be kind, loving and compassionate with ourselves and others.
Combine mirror work with asking yourself… “Am I playing a role?” If you can recognize that you or the other is playing a role as Victim, Rescuer, or Persecutor, you will be able to accomplish far easier use of the mirror lessons.
If you have time, visit me on Facebook:
The Enlightened Victim, June 5, 2015
Self-mastery skills in 5 minutes for a life changer overhaul
of Victim, Rescuer, Persecutor – Karpman Drama Triangle
Thanks for visiting.
Eric
I’m on Facebook. If you are using Facebook, check out my
group: Consciousness Academy of Science and Spirituality
29 Monday Feb 2016
Posted in Consciousness, Lecture, Philosophy, Universe
Tags
A. H. Almaas, Cellular.Eric, Chris Fields, consciousness, Consciousness Studies, David Chalmers, Donald Hoffman, Hameed Ali, Henry Stapp, Julia Mossbridge, Roger Penrose consciousness, SAND 2015, science and nonduality, Stuart Hameroff, The hard problem of consciousness, what is consciousness, Why Is Consciousness So Mysterious
This is a summary of a panel conversation with scientists that have varying experiences and approaches to what is consciousness, or, mind and awareness. The two hour program is facilitated by A. H. Almaas (the pen name of Hameed Ali) featuring panelists Chris Fields, Henry Stapp, Julia Mossbridge, Stuart Hameroff, and Donald Hoffman (right to left).
I was asked to comment on this program at Facebook and as I watched it, I made some notes and I gave the program content some serious thought. This is not deeply steeped in scientific jargon. It isn’t an easy conversation for the average person either though. I do my best here to break it down. Here is the video program first, and my notes follow.
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Notes:
First off, as Descartes said, “I think, therefore, I am” means to me that I cannot doubt that I have consciousness and awareness. Each of us may agree or not that what Descartes said is true or not. What I mean is that I cannot deny or doubt that consciousness is fundamental and essential to and for advancing human life. We may know little about how to advance awareness, and we may even doubt that our own past awareness is valid or reasonable, but we cannot doubt that there is awareness and that we are conscious. Consciousness is fundamental and essential for normal living; we must agree. Yet, our own experiences demonstrate that there are limits of conscious awareness.
So, I’d expect that if we are attempting to define consciousness that we’d agree to contemplate the present moment and what awareness we can attain in a moment so as to progress. Working together for evolving collaborative science requires expanding this awareness, realizing of course that we each have a different realty. We’ll each benefit if we pay attention to the sensations of breathing; notice the feeling in our feet when walking; and whenever finding that the mind wandered simply call our awareness back to sensations. We begin this way to discover contemplative science; evolving science and our own awareness.
Science, according to Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary simply is “knowledge attained through study or practice,” or “knowledge covering general truths of the operation of general laws, esp. as obtained and tested through scientific method [and] concerned with the physical world.” Science can move us forward into studies of consciousness by focusing on experiences of life, with increasingly good questions about consciousness and how consciousness is evolving in us as we attain awareness that we are connected in consciousness. Pause… we may not agree presently on that this occurs within consciousness. However, that we may explore, scientifically.
We all will agree that our awareness may expand to include more of what we had previously been unaware. Thus, as humans evolve awareness consciously, science may progress, and we might evolve further in truth toward global peace, human integrity, personal freedom, and social harmony. Or is that right? Do we care about those ideals?
My disappointment is that this discussion panel program is not really science, yet. I was surprised, these scientists stop short of agreement on a purpose. Consciousness science is necessary even though we do initially not understand that the varying experiences and limitations of a collective awareness. For example, the program did not advance a better question even as to what to look at…. such as, “How did absolute consciousness—indivisible, still, and unchanging—become this world of multiplicity and change?”
The purpose of science is to advance our understanding of reality. A purpose for advancing scientific studies of consciousness may include any hypotheses (scientific guesses) as to the outcome of experimentation. We’ll need a process that will be inclusive and still produce the best explanations for what we observe about consciousness. However, if consciousness is also evolving individually, indwelling, and cosmic, then reality is evolving and we may advance in progress to evolve language.
I hope that my comments are worth something, so, I did my best to live up to the commitment that I made and to give this program an honest look, to provide some notes for readers, and to give some useful feedback about it.
The panel conversation presents contributions, individual working experiences and views related to consciousness, exploring scientific theories, consensus about anything relating to consciousness, and attempts at an operating definition of consciousness with an eye on a non-dual view of consciousness… looking deeper into assumptions and conclusions of perceptions.
They present a program that discusses consciousness, yes. However, as the program moves along, we discover that the distinguished participants do not each have a solution for making progress that is agreeable.
Panel Questions (paraphrased and just briefly summarized with my notes):
Q-1) As we explore the hard question of science – what is consciousness… What is your working definition for consciousness (in your scientific work)?
Youtube Fast-Forward Question 1
Chris Fields begins the field focusing upon RAW (phenomenal) awareness… touch, taste, auditory, visual … giving emphasis to how people experience memories as distinguishing them from now experiences. I wondered as I listened if many even have an awareness of self or that some experiences occur in the present (moment) more so than others.
Henry Stapp recalls William James declares that ‘States of mind’ succeed each other. According to James: (1) Every ‘state’ tends to be part of a personal consciousness. (2) Within each personal consciousness states are always changing. (3) Each personal consciousness is sensibly continuous. (4) It is interested in some parts of its object to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects — chooses from among them, in a word — all the while. I am not sure from the initial description what is causing joining of mind into matter.
Julia Mossbridge says that there is great importance in that our conscious experience and unconscious experience differ. Here she focuses initially on that our personal experiences of consciousness differ and that this is greatly important and reminds us that there is an importance to our experiences of “me, not me.” Stapp and then Almaas pipe in regarding states of consciousness “waking, sleeping, dreaming, enlightenment.”
Stuart Hameroff, not at all addressing the question, asserts that there are collapses (by the uncertainty principle) due to separation in underlying of space-time geometry instabilities that will self-collapse randomly entangling with the quantum ‘environment’ and without ‘history’ or ‘memory’ of occurring in whatever state, one or another, they manifest into these cease in time. In living systems he says, shielding from random environment occurs. He then describes a bit about this as an evolution process. He says in defining consciousness, “it’s kind of like pornography, you know it when you see it.” So, as it seems from Hameroff, consciousness with memory, meaning and causal behavior is ‘tied’ to living being and platonic (space-time) values orchestrate consciousness with wisdom. He qualifies that the source entity of consciousness space-time geometry (matter not being fundamental). I’m not sure but how matter and mind are being joined in the initial statements that Hameroff is making at around 21 minutes in the program. Stapp points out that personal values seem to be entering into the evolution (rather? from platonic values). Hameroff describes how he and Sir Roger Penrose determined that platonic values govern choices as predominant influences. He eventually explains that there is structure at the Planck scale to develop space-time fractal geometry. Hameroff finishes up his introduction saying that consciousness is driving the evolution of the universe.
Donald Hoffman begins in agreement that consciousness experiences are important and summarizes many of the previous points of the definition. He adds that for moving forward, the assumption that consciousness has a structure that can be mathematically described. He summarizes that space-time is a representation of some consciousness and that space and time are not at all fundamental. Essentially, he’s saying that space and time are useful for experiences and to reproduce – a species specific solution for living situations.
So, there are functions of consciousness that the panel describe. However, as Almaas points out, a fundamental universal definition for consciousness is not defined. A common understanding, so far, is that consciousness is active; doing… feeling for example, perceiving, experiencing, and thinking. However, that consciousness is a fundamental and underlying unifying spiritual medium of living is not agreed upon with scientists. Yet, apparently, there is agreement that consciousness may be a fundamental necessity for human life. [I’ll note here, none of the scientists specifically address consciousness that interests me; that is the consciousness that is me.] Julia Mossbridge indicates that using the term, here, consciousness is confusing. She says spiritual teachers are referring to something different from what the scientists are discussing. The scientists are talking about consciousness is the fundamental ingredient for experiencing – anything. The spiritual teachers are saying consciousness is the fundamental essence of life; one mind. Chris Fields points out that the core concept of physics is energy and that energy is an undefined term similar here to the way this discussion is going about what is consciousness. He says it may be that it must be left undefined.
[Note: The hard problem of consciousness (David Chalmers 1995) is of explaining the relationship between physical phenomena, such as brain processes, experience, and qualia (phenomenal qualities). [Chalmers on the “hard problem” of consciousness and Chalmers, “Why Is Consciousness So Mysterious?”]
Q-2) How is your research/work addressing “the hard problem of consciousness” to contribute toward understanding that?
Youtube Fast-Forward Question 2
Stuart Hameroff leads off this time. Mental states/events with phenomenal qualities or qualia are accessed via human experiences and these are organized into full rich conscious experiences. He relates this to an orchestra warming up. Each musician has been piping in random notes and then in concert, we hear them produce a whole beautiful symphony. He adds that an orchestra has a conductor but with consciousness that the brain must self-organize the rich experiences [I somewhat disagree]. Hameroff says, “You can have consciousness even without biology” [I didn’t expect that]. He said, “I believe that consciousness is a process on the edge between the quantum and classical worlds.” He mentions that molecular geometry may be involved in the process of giving rise to consciousness.
Henry Stapp introduced a complex function of change into this saying, “we are left with a fundamentally idea-like universe” as he describes how matter forms according to mathematical rules and this is well defined and predictable but when we get knowledge about the structure, changes occur based upon the findings and the new form is compatible with the information and yet evolved. This, he indicates, is similar to how an idea leads to changes based on the findings of how useful the idea turns out to be. He says “matter really behaved like an idea, and so, we are left with a fundamentally idea-like universe.” Stapp indicates later that it must be taken to be a fundamental fact that consciousness is there… as the essential fact, we must become accepting that the hard problem takes us further from materialist views.
Chris Fields says, “If we understand the hard problem as why is there any awareness at all and if the question is have we come any closer to explaining why there is any awareness at all, I would say the answer is no. I don’t think we have a theory, at all, as to why there is awareness anywhere in the universe [I agree].” He points out that scientific work is contributing towards what awareness does, why awareness is useful, under what conditions a system will be aware of a particular phenomenon (mathematics allow prediction) but not why there is awareness. He thinks that pushing ahead, that science will recognize that awareness must be a fundamental assumption. “We really do have to drop this business of awareness being generated by a particular organization of neurons, which is the standard view in neuroscience, or a particular of something else [material]. It became very clear in the early twentieth century that there aren’t any material objects. We all agree that there are objective boundaries around things. We believe that there is an objective boundary around me and around the lectern and so on and so forth. If you look at the formulas… those boundaries cannot be objective.” Modern physics and science of particles demonstrate that boundaries do not really nicely divide realities that we perceive via our physical senses. Physical reality is not really so much what Newton taught.
Julia Mossbridge: “I don’t know that I agree that out individual consciousness does anything….” She acknowledges that to her understanding that the questions put to science as “the hard problem” originating from David Chalmers is the wrong sort of tact for questioning for scientists to answer and that she didn’t think that science might ever get answers that are fully philosophical or theologically satisfying. There can be correlations of the brain to consciousness. She explains that since experimentation indicates that the past can occur after the future, this makes investigating consciousness not the most interesting question for a neural scientist. For a neural scientist, ordering things occurs in time in one direction. [I didn’t understand what she’d think is unattractive. The next part made sense to me.] She makes a distinction between that she has private observer awareness but that everything else of which she does not have conscious awareness is so much more… that consciousness for her is the awareness that she has as ‘the observer’ and everything else is part of her unconscious. [Interestingly, Almaas asks, “…but they are happening? Where are they happening?” Now, here is what is interesting to me… I don’t agree that what is unconscious for me is happening. That is in my opinion a delusion. I cannot agree that we are one if I cannot know you consciously. I cannot agree that I am part of this body if I do not know it consciously.] Julia’s point is well taken, I think to agree that I am not conscious of most of what is perceived as reality. [Thus, perhaps this brain that I am linked to by some awareness is making up reality mostly unconsciously because reality is not something that I can comprehend. This seems consistent with what we know about how the unconscious works. It makes a cohesive experience from what is in the awareness and then it fills in the gaps.] Now, Stuart pipes in making an example that consciousness can occur in the brain before a dilemma that gets solved by the brain and that we can respond correctly, yet unconscious of what has occurred as processed in the brain then as we respond correctly. [I’ll add here that I have read many stories about people saying that time slowed or even stopped while they acted to save themselves or a loved one or a pet. I agree that consciousness must therefore be able to place in the brain the correct information that the brain then can use and thus, it may seem as though time slows or even stops as the person acts on that was stored by consciousness in the brain even though the person actually records the event differently, as though time slowed down or even stopped for several seconds.]
Donald Hoffman wants a mathematical model of consciousness and to work from that to solve the hard problem. So, from there, with consciousness assumed, a given, science must demonstrate how we get useful consciousness laws out of our physical reality. What I do find in published works is more in line with what Julia Mossbridge suggests… for example, a paper entitled “Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem” PDF seeks to explore relationship between biology and consciousness.
I mention (earlier, above) that this ‘hard problem’ is not well-stated as a question.
Almaas points out that spiritual teachings indicate that we must ‘know’ consciousness and that in the knowing, there is release from suffering—of human suffering—occurring; that happiness depends upon this.
Q-3) How is science going to address the human need to discover consciousness is essential for progress in successful living that eliminates suffering?
Youtube Fast-Forward Question 3
Julia Mossbridge suggests the question for science ought not to be the hard question of consciousness, saying: “How do I bridge the gap between this fundamental duality of individual consciousness and everything of which I am [we—individually—are] not conscious?” Julia says that Almaas is speaking about a different consciousness. So, here we have the division. This being a conference of exploring non-duality, bringing into conference scientists is in dialog discovering that individual experience is something that we hold to dearly. Julia makes reference to ‘the one mind state’ as the unconscious.
A successful science of consciousness must address aspects of ending suffering. A successful non-duality that begins with idea that the universe and all its multiplicity are ultimately expressions or appearances of one essential reality must guide science. Where we are exploring the brain, our experience of consciousness, science is reducing its focus onto mechanisms. Where we are exploring the mind and consciousness, non-duality is advancing non-physical awareness.
Donald Hoffman says that a mathematical theory that describes consciousness will include in it surprises of the greater, as yet, unknown reality.
Stuart Hameroff pipes in that spiritualists tend to classify his works as materialist and scientists complain that it is mystical but that there are advancements in medicine occurring because his science is undertaking to include contemplation on the hard problem of consciousness. Microtubules have quantum resonant vibrations in megahertz and kilohertz frequencies and from qualia form by quantum microtubule vibrations inside brain neurons 1) conscious experience, and 2) regulate neuronal firings and synaptic plasticity. As synapses are formed, these are maintained and regulated by microtubules and the associated proteins. Hameroff gives examples of medical breakthroughs.
Where Hameroff considers the qualia primitive, Donald Hoffman pipes in to assert that neurons do not exist, at all, when they are not perceived; nor do microtubules or space and time. These are forms of perception.
Who is who?
A.H. Almaas is the pen name of A. Hameed Ali, an author and spiritual teacher who writes about and teaches an approach to spiritual development informed by modern psychology and therapy which he calls the Diamond Approach.
Chris Fields is an independent scientist interested in both the physics and the cognitive neuroscience underlying the human perception of objects.
Henry Stapp is a mathematical physicist, known for his work in quantum mechanics and the place of free will in quantum mechanics.
Julia Mossbridge teaches courses in consciousness, cognition, perception and the influence of music on the brain. She is the CEO and Research Director of Mossbridge Institute, LLC.
Stuart Hameroff is an anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona known for his studies of consciousness.
Donald Hoffman is Professor of Cognitive Science, University of California, Irvine.
So, it is a diverse panel and they are operating with a variety of definitions about consciousness. I didn’t take much time to accurately record the opening statements and some closing statements and their views are not mine, so, please listen carefully and make your own interpretations. I am not a fast typist so I left out much of what was said so I could keep on moving through this presentation. I may inadvertently have changed the meaning of what was intended… not on purpose, I surely didn’t do that. I’ll appreciate any comments on how I might improve this article… thanks in advance.
Additional video and other resources are found in the comments following this post.
Thanks for visiting.
Eric Continue reading
24 Thursday Dec 2015
Posted in B4Peace, Consciousness, Culture, Faith, Happiness, Inner peace, Peace, Philosophy, Religion, Spirituality
‘Tis the season for some to take offense when a store clerk says “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas,” or when a coffee chain converts to plain red cups for the holiday. The “war on Christmas” trope seems to surface with Black Friday sales, but who is actually at war?
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It is easy to imagine saying “merry Christmas” as another cudgel in the culture wars between Christians and the irreligious. The actual story, however, is much more nuanced. Public Religion Research Institute asked a nationally representative sample of Americans whether retailers should greet their customers with “happy holidays” or “season’s greetings” — rather than “merry Christmas” — “out of respect for people of different faiths.” Although a slim majority of those with a preference want retailers to say “happy holidays” or “season’s greetings,” we found that preference depends on your level of tension with the culture where you live. To explore these cultural tensions, we analyzed the PRRI data jointly with the 2010 Religion Census results.
According to the findings, evangelicals, on average, strongly favor “merry Christmas” and seculars prefer “happy holidays” or “season’s greetings.” But the war on Christmas is not simply a religious divide. One of the more surprising findings is that the Bible-Belt South does not show the weakest preference for “happy holidays” (54 percent). That distinction belongs to the Midwest (44 percent). One reason for the difference is African-Americans (20 percent of the South in this sample), who strongly prefer “happy holidays” despite their high levels of religiosity.
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Preferences, not surprisingly, are filtered through a political lens, with Republicans opposing “happy holidays” at the strongest rates and most consistently across the nation. Republican responses probably reflect opposition to political correctness as much as (and perhaps more so than) spiritual sympathies. Republicans as a whole (30 percent) outpace even evangelical Republicans (38 percent) in their anemic support for saying “happy holidays.”1
Since Christmas is such a public holiday — people put out displays and pass out cookies, and they feel compelled to wish people some version of merriment — it is no surprise that reactions to it vary across communities. Non-Christians and the nonreligious in states with large white Christian populations are the most likely groups to urge stores to adopt a “happy holidays” regimen. Support for “happy holidays,” however, drops dramatically for secular citizens in largely nonreligious states like Oregon. In these areas, the social stakes are low — Christmas is not an entre to conversations about what church you attend, but more about presents, ugly sweaters and Santa. In such nonreligious states, secular’ support for “happy holidays” is the same as it is among evangelicals nationwide (48 percent).
The next time you hear or read a media dispatch about the war on Christmas, such as Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller’s threat to slap the next person who says “happy holidays” to him, realize that it does not reflect a national war but rather local skirmishes. There is no orchestrated war against saying “merry Christmas,” but it is important to recognize that Christmas can be a potent symbol that reflects inter-group tensions and signals exclusion to some Americans.
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source: fivethirtyeight.com
My latest Facebook project:
Consciousness Academy
of Science and Spirituality
Thanks for visiting.
Eric
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Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is error, the truth;
Where there is doubt, the faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled, as to console;
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
Other WordPress Peace bloggers:
http://wordpress.com/tag/b4peace/… please, join us!
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18 Sunday Oct 2015
Posted in Afterlife, B4Peace, Consciousness, Culture, Entertainment, Movie, Spirituality, Universe
Tags
B4Peace, Cellular.Eric, cinematography by Matthew Libatique, Darren Aronofsky, drama romance, fictional Tree of Life, Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz, SciFi, The Founain movie review, The Fountain
Spiritual revelations relating to love,
life and living life for love, and as being love.
Spanning over one thousand years, and three parallel stories, The Fountain is a story of love, death, spirituality, and the fragility of our existence in this world. The story occurs in three different time lines; 16th Century Spain, present day America and in the far future in the unknown of deep space. In all three times there is the character played by Hugh Jackman and a parallel romantic figure played by Rachel Weisz.
Watch it on youtube or bibilibibili/tv, https://www.bilibili.tv/en/video/2000997600
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Tom (Hugh Jackman) experiences and re-experiences [meditatively] three simultaneous lifetimes; a quest for immortality and to save Isabella, his wife, the woman (Rachel Weisz) he deeply adores and loves.
As a 16th-century conquistador, Tomás searches for the legendary Fountain of Youth. As a present-day scientist, he desperately struggles to cure the cancer that is killing his wife. Finally, as a 26th-century astronaut in deep space, Tom discovers the inner experience of mysteries of life; love, dying, and the path to eternal joy.
In one sense, the stories all take place in the present and there is one “real” Hugh Jackman character, Tommy. The conquistador, named Tomás is the hero of the novel his wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz) is writing, and the spaceman named Tom Creo is the hero of that novel’s final chapter, a chapter that Tommy writes after his deathbed promise to his wife. Creo is Spanish for “I believe.” Spanish is a language the conquistador would speak, and from the stories inspirations, Tommy comes to believe that a cure will be found for death. The tree sharing the exospheric space bubble with Creo is the Tree of Life that Tomás sought in the early chapters. The spacecraft is en route to a nebula that Tommy and Izzy saw which was believed by the Mayans to be the place for the origins of life.
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Darren Aronofsky’s “The Fountain” (2006)
With cinematography by Matthew Libatique;
following the graphic novel storyline.
Youtube video link: “The Fountain” recut/remix .
The Fountain is a drama and a romance story. It’s an intricately designed and conceived work of science fiction. In my opinion it is a story of a meditation on existence. The story is of a spirituality awakening guiding subtle senses day by day on life’s quest.
In narrative terms each time is a journey in itself. However, the story is best understood as that all three ‘livetimes’ effectively occur at once with the beginning and the end of the stories in the quest being the joining to the central lifetimes.
As parts of the whole: The first lifetime is in Spain beginning the quest to find the tree of life, the second in modern times is central as a professional and personal race against time to find a cure for cancer and to stave off death by love, and in the third part an ambiguous and minimal narrative is experiential of the journey of an exospheric space craft containing the Jackman character and the tree of life as it is passing through a nebula toward the great re-birthing of a new cycle of now greater possibilities and expansion of the three livetimes.
All three times intersect with each other throughout the film. Although there is a clear and purposeful flow, it may seem disorientating, especially in the beginning. Get used to the rhythm and the pace and the time shifts and clarity emerges.
The film was in the making for about seven years. Aronofsky said that science fiction has been hijacked by over use of technology and he strongly wanted a film with psychedelic sci-fi when it came to The Fountain. Filming of future Tom and his exospheric space craft took more than four years for Aronofsky to perfect and he was quite proud of it finally. To avoid CGI effects, they photographed chemical reactions through a microscope for the elements that surround Tom’s ship. Linking the past, present, and future, many shots were re-rehearsed and shots were added and edited. This too was time consuming work of perfection. One element that is often missed is that the three times represent three spiritual revelations relating to love, life and living life for love, and as being love.
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In her past life, Isabella is the Queen of Spain. There, she is relying on Tomás, the conquistador, to find the Tree of Life. She believes that with it, she can stop the struggle for the throne between herself and a cleric who is attempting to take it from her. Isabella promises to wed Tomás when they return to Spain but Tomás never makes it back. .|
Tomás is the past life version of Tommy, and a conquistador commissioned by Queen Isabella of Spain, the past life version of Izzi, to travel to the New World in search of the Tree of Life. Tomás fights hordes of Mayans until he gets to a temple. The priest protecting the temple stabs him, then realizes that he is carrying a ceremonial dagger that was given to him before. Tomás then passes and carries on to what he believes is the tree of life. He uses the sap to heal his wound, then drinks it. But, like the Mayan myth about the First Father told by Izzi, he gives birth to new life as vegetation sprouts from his body, killing him.
In 2500, future Tom is always with the Tree. It sustains him and keeps him alive. The bubble is his exospheric space craft for he and the tree, a means of transportation to get to the nebula, Xibalba, as the Mayans called it. He is going there to see Izzi’s life restored. But, moments before he arrives at Xibalba, the tree dies and Izzi appears to him. He finally realizes that they will be together again and accepts his death as the dying star explodes. The tree then blooms and Izzi picks fruit from it and gives it to Tommy, who plants it on Izzi’s grave in 2005; which is where the tree cycles about from in the film. This particular tree then is the symbol of enduring love throughout the linked lives and circumstances of these particular manifestations of Thomas and Isabel.
Also noteworthy, another interpretation is different. In it, Izzy is writing the story of the Spanish quest and she is unable to finish the story. Thomas picks up where she left of and evolves the links to the future, using his conversations with Izzy as inspirations for the story..
In Tommy’s lifetime, after Izzi dies, he plants a seed on her grave in reference to a story she told him about how a Mayan’s dead father lived on in a tree nourished by his dead body buried beneath it. I believe that this is Izzi’s tree that Tom won’t leave, he continues to attempt to find a cure for death so that he and Izzi can be together again. As they make their way to the nebula that Izzi pointed out in 2005, the tree dies. Realizing that there is no way around dying, Tom finally accepts his death and realizes that he will see Izzi again.
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Provided here (so far) also:
The Fountain Analysis
Time=9:17
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Darren Aronofsky Director’s Commentary
Time=1:36:347
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Image: An exospheric space craft vision with the tree of life is passing through a nebula:
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Image: The tree of life is found:
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Image: The exospheric space craft is a vision to carry the tree of life in preserving love in our memories:
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Image: Queen Isabella commissions Tomás on his quest:
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Image: Conquistador Tomás is receiving the commission for his quest
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Image: Mortally wounded, Tomás is passed on as his future life enters to dispel the wound and receive the knowledge of eternal love.
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ALSO featured … Music by Clint Mansell
The Road To Awe, time=6:30
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Image: “Don’t worry. We’re almost there.”
Video screen shot:
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Image: Tomás discovers The Tree of Life:
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Praying and cherishing God’s Holy Love,
I am thankful for your visit today.
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Eric
My other online blogs:
Eric Samsung, Cellular at WordPress
Facebook: Cellular.Eric
All of the images and copyright content are provided as promotion for the film. Please consider purchasing The Fountain for your home library.
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08 Saturday Aug 2015
Posted in B4Peace, Consciousness, Culture, Happiness, I can improve today, Inner peace
In five sets of studies in the laboratory and one field study at comedy performances, Dr. Dunbar and colleagues tested resistance to pain both before and after bouts of social laughter. See: Social laughter is correlated with an elevated pain threshold
I connected with more than 1600 friends at Facebook during this past year and my work consumes most of my online time. I hope you will drop on by my FB page if you’d like… really.
My Facebook address is facebook.com/Cellular.Eric
Thanks for visiting.
Eric
04 Saturday Jul 2015
Posted in Uncategorized
The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things.
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So, statements tend to be true and yet, we tend to be misled since we cannot let go of the need to imagine anything as an object. FOR EXAMPLE, reality is immediately associated with all of the objects we recall as being reality and we are done with and cannot remotely comprehend the next quote even before we can read it:
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“A fundamental conclusion of the new physics also acknowledges that the observer creates the reality. As observers, we are personally involved with the creation of our own reality. Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a ‘mental’ construction. Pioneering physicist Sir James Jeans wrote: ‘The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. Get over it, and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial-mental and spiritual.’” – R.C. Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, “The Mental Universe”; Nature (436:29,2005)
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The mental Universe, NATURE Vol 436:7 July 2005
“Shut up and calculate”
… OR …
No, be still and contemplate. The new physics, QBism offers a way to put yourself in the picture. Personally, I choose to believe that I can make my own reality if only I can remove from me the conditioning of this culture.
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Ought we believe that a chance as a probability is actually completely determined? For instance that any particular chance really is on a “bell curve” of “normal distribution” of random outcomes… that in fact there is no real chance occurrence.This seems so consistent that once educated, most believe there is underlying deterministic law governing individual occurrences of an event.
So, chance is regarded as inconsistent with causal determinism and with physical or mechanical determinism.
In his lecture at Zurich in 1922, Erwin Schrödinger argued that the evidence did not justify our assumptions that physical laws were deterministic and…
View original post 402 more words
30 Tuesday Jun 2015
Posted in Entertainment, Faith, Happiness, Inner peace, Inspiration, Lessons, My wordpress experience, Philosophy, Science, Spirituality, Universe
This is my third year beginning at WordPress. To tell you in one sentence what I’ve learned in these past two years at WordPress, I’ll put it this way:
All of creation is to comprehend together that reality is the experience of expanding kindness.
There is no other need for time. We are not humans, planets and stars blowing on a solar wind. We are mind. We are with all that is when we are with being in God’s will. True mind is in His love. This is what is important.
The truth is in our kindness.
I’ve known no greater kindness than contemplating a sense of love with Almighty God.
I’ll share with you a kindness today is that I am worthy of love. You are the worth of my love. My challenge today is to understand that. I pray that God will expand in me today, absolute awareness; His love of you in Him.
I was wondering what I’d most love to share as a kickoff into my third year here. I settled on one of my favorite subjects. I’ve always wanted Einstein to be fun at least and maybe even easy-peezy to understand. So, here is my conclusion for today’s contribution. I hope that this is easy as 15 minutes of your time and as wonderful as a visit with your friend may be.
Enjoy:
Einstein: “Any person moving at a constant velocity will observe the same laws of physics that a stationary person observes.”
Since the speed of light is part of the laws of physics, Einstein postulated that all observers will measure the same speed of light regardless of their state of motion. But speed is just a measure of distance moved in a given time and in order to agree on the speed of light different observers might have to disagree about distance and time.
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In 1915 Albert Einstein formulated the theory of general relativity which fundamentally changed our understanding of gravity. He explained gravity as the manifestation of the curvature of space and time. Einstein’s theory predicts that the flow of time is altered by mass. This effect, known as “gravitational time dilation”, causes time to be slowed down near a massive object. It affects everything and everybody; in fact, people working on the ground floor will age slower than their colleagues a floor above, by about 10 nanoseconds in one year. This tiny effect has actually been confirmed in many experiments with very precise clocks. Now, a team of researchers from the University of Vienna, Harvard University and the University of Queensland have discovered that the slowing down of time can explain another perplexing phenomenon: the transition from quantum behavior to our classical, everyday world.
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I connected with more than 1500 friends at Facebook during this past year and my work consumes most of my online time. I hope you will drop on by my FB page if you’d like… really.
My Facebook address is facebook.com/Cellular.Eric
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Thanks for visiting.
Eric
1 PM, 6/30/2015.
the Hunt for Truth 