We all have changed over the years and I’m not an exception.
Maybe I wondered a lot in the past about the future. But I don’t much these days. If I have a motto that expresses what I feel now, it is this: “It is what it is”.
I know we are not getting out of here alive and I feel at peace with the fact.
I know that the more I’ve learned about existence, the more I know I will never understand it. It is increasingly a mystery.
Many years ago, about the time I graduated University, sitting in the screened in porch in the house where Rose and I lived on Dawson Street just around the corner from the Art Theater, you and I were discussing higher consciousness and enlightenment. I recall clearly that you said to me, that if you knew anyone who was going to achieve it (enlightenment), then it would be me. I think you were referring to my unrelenting drive to know and understand things.
Well, all these years later, I think there was some truth in what you said. But like so many things, the imagination of it before you have it, never measures up to what it is like in actual fact.
These days, I don’t think there is ‘enlightenment’ in the glamorous, extreme and magical way most folks think about it. But rather, there is a simple and deep acceptance of “it is what it is”.
There is a dropping of belief in your own Ego and personhood.
There is an untangling of all the voices in your head that were placed there by your family, your church, your school, your society, the media and your friends. And this untangling involves a discarding of all the ‘shoulds’ that permeate us. Dropping them one by one (or adopting them as our own, if they are good) until there is nothing left but our own inherent ‘wants’. And at this point, we can say that we ‘own’ ourselves and that we are the real chooser of what we choose.
There is a steady dropping of beliefs, hopes, fears and opinions. All of these things are simply ways that we try to ‘negotiate’ with existence.
They reflect that we cannot simply accept existence as it is. But rather, that we want shape it to be as we want to it to be.
Existence, seen without beliefs standing between us and it, can be a frightening thing. A thing of mystery, omnipotence and a thing that is utterly unaware of our existence.
So, we ‘fear’ when it may be as we don’t want it to be. And we ‘hope’ that it will be as we want it to be. And we form ‘beliefs’ and opinions about how it is.
Belief systems like reincarnation, Islam and Christianity.
And these belief systems seem to frame the nakedness of reality and make it a more palatable thing for us to deal with. Our beliefs give us the feeling that there is purpose and meaning to our lives and that existence cares about us.
Least you think I’ve fallen into a Nihilist hole and cannot get out, it isn’t so.
Day to day, subjectively, I feel like one of the luckiest people I’ve ever met. I deeply love my life and how it is going. I feel deeply blessed – though I haven’t a clue why it is so.
But I’m not in Mary Poppins land. When I look at the world, I see it is a huge, and getting worse, mess. We humans are showing sure signs of moving towards a global disaster and a major reset. I can see this as clearly as I see the letters on the screen in front of me.
So then, the question might be what can we do about it? And I think the probable answer is, ‘Not much”.
We are not the authors of it nor will we be the ones to repair it. We are simply the ones born here and now and who will see what unfolds. It is what it is.
So how can we still enjoy our lives in the midst of all this?
Cherish being alive and try to make someone else happy – just because. After all the complexity of our university educated lives, this must seem far too simple.
But we are just like fish leaping free for a moment from the surface of the sea of mortality. We take ourselves seriously and that is a lot of the problem we create for ourselves and our potential happiness.
It is what it is. Let it be as it is and say ‘yes’ to it. Just as we did when the acid began to get into us and disassembled our egos and made us feel everything directly and intensely.
We can resist or we can say ‘yes’. We can be unhappy that reality isn’t as we want it to be. Or we can embrace it ‘as it is’ and treasure the moments we still have left.
The voices that tell us that we cannot simply stop and accept things as they are are not ours. They are ‘shoulds’ still operating within us after all these years.
Archive for the ‘Philosophical’ Category
Changes
Friday, June 11th, 2021Awareness of Awareness
Tuesday, May 18th, 202118 May 2021
A friend of mine sent me an interesting article the other day. It was entitled, “Persuading the Body to Regenerate its Limbs“.
It concerned a researcher named Michael Levin who is intensely interested in how electrical currents help shape our bodies. He calls it the ‘Bioelectric Code‘. He has been able to convincingly demonstrate how the mechanisms, some lower creatures use to grow and repair themselves, can be significantly altered through the judicious use of electric currents. And further that these changes are due solely to the introduction of the electric currents themselves; as the genomes of the creatures are not touched.
We’ve known for a long time that electric fields are an integral part of biology. Cells have ion channels that allow their inner and outer charge environments to be balanced in ways that are optimal for the cell’s health and functioning. Cells signal back and forth with other cells via electrical impulses via axons and dendrites. It is becoming ever more apparent now that cells employ the bioelectric spaces between them as a kind of inter-cellular Internet; they use it to build intricate and extensive communication networks that control the transcription of genes, the contraction of muscles, and the release of hormones.
The concepts of how creatures develop are moving away from earlier and simpler paradigms in which biological science visualized that genes defined proteins and proteins combined to create cells and that was much of the story of biology.
But we’ve known for some time that large parts of the morphogenesis puzzle were missing. How and why do some stem cells become livers and others become arms or eyes?
It was tempting, early on, to imagine that hidden inside of our genomes were intricate instructions, which we hadn’t discovered yet, which guided a entity’s development from its initial zygotic stage to its full expression as a mature creature.
But matters have turned out to be far more complex than that.
The things that have been accomplished in Levin’s lab are pretty amazing. One of his postdocs noted that in frogs, certain electrical patterns developed in areas where later features like faces and eyes would develop.
As an experiment, the postdoc imposed the electrical pattern that predicted an eye onto the developing frog’s stomach and, amazingly, an eye appeared there. And, once the eye was present, the frog’s nervous system began building optic nerves to connect the new eye to the brain by way of the spinal cord. Clearly, Levin and his students are onto something.
But, exactly what they are on to is still under debate; as you will see if you read the paper itself.
Levin’s former advisor, Clifford Tabin, says he is “agnostic” about how Levin’s “bioelectricity” should be understood. Levin would have bioelectricity be the be-all-and-end-all which largely explains how morphogenesis unfolds.
But others, like Daniel Dennett think that there are also many other moving parts required to make up the full picture. He feels that genetics, biophysics, biochemistry, bioelectricity, biomechanics, anatomy, psychology, and probably still other still unrecognized factors, are all acting together; each playing an integral role, to control and shape the unfolding of biological morphogenesis.
If you’ve read this far, you are probably wondering, by now, what any of this has to do with this piece’s title, “Awareness of Awareness“?
Well, we’re going to get to that. But there are still more pieces to tie in.
Dennett thought that genetics, biophysics, biochemistry, bioelectricity, biomechanics, anatomy, psychology, and probably still other unrecognized factors, are all acting together; each playing an integral role, to control and shape the unfolding of biological morphogenesis.
His list would indicate that the interactions between cells involve a lot more than just the magic of bioelectricity as Levin envisions it. But I don’t think we’re done yet drawing in relevant factors.
As many simpler units come together, Emergent Properties can come forth.
Ants, which are quite simple in and of themselves, combine into colonies which have quite complex behaviors. And it is these new behaviors which seemingly manifest from nowhere. No amount of study of individual ants would ever give a researcher the ability to predict the behaviors and properties of ant colonies. You can read more about all of this in Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldrop.
So, we have all the factors Dennett mentioned as ways that cells intercommunicate. And we also have a vertical functional assemblage that progresses from a few local cells into larger groups of cells organized as specific organs like livers, eyes, brains and hearts.
And through all of these organs and their inner organizations and their external communications and co ordinations are all the interactive communication technologies Dennett listed and probably more.
It gets harder and harder to hang on to to all these points at once. One strategy open to us is to realize, through logic, decomposition and analysis, some sort of a simplified picture of what our biological beings are.
But another and deeper insight is to see all of this coordinated movement of many parts as an all-at-once flow that is happening in the immediate now. A non-dualistic immediacy that has no notion of, nor need for, our decompositional analysis in order to simply do what it does.
Now, we are getting close to the point of this article, “Awareness of Awareness“.
If small groups of cells, as Levin asserts and I’m sure Dennett would agree, tend to coordinate their activities through bioelectric fields (and all of the other listed mechanisms) for their own greater good, then wouldn’t such a beneficial organizational mechanism repeat at all levels of organization?
Does not the heart regulate it own activities for the benefit of the heart, directly, and for the benefit of the overall organism, indirectly? And would not every sub-component do the same for itself and for the overall organism?
And what of the sense of self that pervades your overall organism? Is this not the highest level of communication among your disparate parts? Does it not act for the highest good of the organism it represents?
Does it matter if we can say if it is bioelectric or any particular mix of the other contributory items that Dennett mentioned?
From here, a hundred roads and a hundred questions beckon us. Questions about awareness vs. self-awareness. About duality and non-duality. About Free Will and Determinism. But all of them are arising from the dualistic side of us. The mind of cognition and abstraction. The side that decomposes in order to attempt understanding.
But none of that, as endlessly fascinating as it is to the mind, is what I’m interested in here.
I want to talk about the sense of self we feel when our awareness is aware of itself and aware of this material being which hosts the awareness.
Just as a few cells communicate and coordinate among themselves, think of the communication and coordination that occurs when you sit for a moment and empty your mind and let a feeling of peace and well being permeate through you – all of you.
Think of the signal sent for the benefit of the sender when you stop and consciously give thanks for all of the good things in your life.
Think of the message you are sending when you gaze at your body in the mirror and give sincere thanks and gratitude for this material being that hosts your awareness.
Truly, our awareness helps to maintain the boundaries of our existence. Not just because of its flight or fight capabilities but also because it coordinates and directs the sense of well being that serves to optimize our continued existence in the body.
To get to this place where these effects can be beneficently directed, much of the collateral confusion that arises, as a side effect of the mind’s conceptual, linguistic and abstraction capabilities, has to be discriminated and intentionally isolated.
It isn’t that these mental abilities are not valuable. They are immensely valuable and we would not have them if it were not so. But they are tools – they are not what we are.
The self aware, but untrained, mind is like an echo chamber or a mirror. And it is almost inevitable that our burgeoning awareness should mistake the contents of the mind (the concepts, the language and the abstractions) for itself. Many of these contents are instilled into us before we are mature enough to defend ourselves and to question and possibly reject what is being imprinted upon us.
At some point, if we are lucky, we become mature and independent enough to control the further inward flow of ideas. And then, if we experience unease at all the inner dichotomies and inconsistencies, we may begin to sort through the mess.
And, as the mess is cleared and we begin to increasingly identify with our awareness of awareness and to dis-identify with the contents of our minds and our egos, we can being to focus on the message we are sending when we consider ourselves and our bodies and give sincere thanks and gratitude for this material being that hosts us.
It is awareness intentionally giving loving concern and integration to the physical entity that hosts it for the mutual benefit of both.
Let us make a small aside here, to acknowledge all the religions, masters, schools and traditions which have tried unrelentingly for thousands of years to awaken us from the illusion that we are the contents of our minds. And who promised us, that if we could but realize the primacy of our awareness as being what we are, that we should then experience a deeper and more pervasive sense of subjective peace.
I am deeply grounded in science. And I am also deeply grounded in non-duality. I appreciate the power of the mind as a tool. And I also appreciate the immediacy and essential truth that manifests when I stop my mind and see this existence as an immediate and inseparable flow; that I am an inseparable part of.
Following the threads implied in the “Persuading the Body to Regenerate its Limbs” paper has enabled me to cobble a tentative connection between how the physical systems of our biological bodies function to communicate, coordinate and preserve themselves and the ideas of higher consciousness that arise from the meditative, spiritual and non-duality worlds in which this same preservation of what we are is deeply honored.
An Enlightenment
Monday, September 3rd, 2018On the morning of what he calls his “real awakening,” Adyashanti wrote the following to his teacher, Kwong Roshi –
–
“Roshi, today was a very special day. I woke up at 5:30 a.m. as usual to sit for a few hours before going to Los Gatos. I lit a candle, o?ered incense and bows and sat on my cushion.
Suddenly I heard a bird chirping away outside. The sound entered me in a way it had never before and a voice within spontaneously asked ‘Who hears the sound?’ Instantly the whole world, my perception of it, ?ipped 180 degrees. Everything dropped away. Everything.
I was the hearing. I was the bird. I was everything and I was nothing at all. It’s just like waking up from sleep. Nothing special at all. No excitement. No thrills. Nothing like I thought it would be like. Its like going home. Finding home. Being home. So very ordinary and yet so new. Like being born for the very ?rst time.
Every breath, every step, every thought, every perception is new. The Self returns to the Self, actually the Self realized the Self, but its so ordinary, so natural. Who would have thought there was a common belief that there is going to be a lot of ?reworks, lots of emotion, lots of dazzle, but this waking up is so silent, so quiet, so profound, so present in everything, has everything.
I felt something coming on for months. During the day I would be constantly laughing to myself because everything seemed to be transparent, so impermanent. Everything seemed to be falling away in front of my eyes. A huge void was looming in the background, swallowing everything up, every moment, every perception, almost as soon as it appeared, but I was not afraid at all. In fact, I was excited at watching it all happen.
Energy and conviction grew more day by day. Inside it felt as though all my old ways of perceiving the world and myself were just dissolving into nothing, into nothing. I kept investigating this nothing and this dissolving more and more deeply. Eventually even my questioning was dissolving as soon as it arose.
In some ways I felt dead, but joyously so. On and on it went for weeks, months and then last night the last thought I had was ‘I’m ready.’ The words just spontaneously came to mind, not as anything special, more like a simple fact. I thought nothing of it and went to sleep. The next morning when I heard the bird, everything dropped away and the next thing I knew I was the bird. I was the listening. I was everything. Everything and Nothing. So ordinary.
[A poem he wrote the same morning:]
Today I awoke, ?nally I see the Self has returned to the Self.
The Self is none other than the Self.
I am deathless. I am endless. I am free.
The birds outside sing …
The birds outside sing and there am I.
The seeing of leaves on the trees, that seeing am I.
The body breathes, breathing am I.
I am awake and I know that I am awake.
Seen from the old eyes, everything is asleep, a game, a delusion.
But now I am awake. I am the play. I am the game. I am the delusion.
I am the enlightenment I sought, looking everywhere.
Nothing is separate, nothing is alone.
I am all that I see. All that I smell, taste, touch, feel, think and know.
I am awake and this awakeness is the same as Shyakyamuni Buddha’s.
Today the leaf has returned to the root.
I am all name and form and beyond all name and form.
I am Spirit, no longer trapped in a body.
I am free. I am free because I am awake.
So ordinary. Who would have thought? Who could have guessed?
I am home. I am really home. Ten thousand lifetimes.
Ten thousand lifetimes but today I am home.
his is not an experience. This is me.
I am awake. Finally, I am awake.
Nothing has changed, but I am awake.
Before I tasted the root many times and felt how delicious.
Today I became the root. How ordinary.”
~ Adyashanti (20th-21st century American mystic)
Letter to a Grandson
Thursday, August 30th, 2018My dear Grandson,
I want to wish you a very happy birthday. To say that you are showing every sign of being the brightest light of our extended family would not be an exaggeration.
Someday, if not already, you will realize how immensely blessed your life is. The time and place where you were born, your parents, your grandparents; Bernie and Sally, your faith, your intelligence, your curiousity, your excellent body and mind and so many other factors have made you lucky among the billions of we human beings. But, above and beyond that, you have not rested on your luck but, rather, you have taken your good opportunities and used them well. Brilliantly even, I think.
I am deeply curious to see what you will make of your life.
If I might presume to offer you some hard-won advice from my own experiences?
Always question things. Do not simply believe what others tell you. And even if you’ve questioned a thing and think it is good, Go back, in a few years, and give it another good look and see if it still makes sense.
It is natural that the people who teach you give you their best in terms of facts and interpretations of those facts. They are good and sincere people. But there is little that is absolute in this world. History is largely written by the victors and the laws of science are constantly being refined and, at times, reworked as better understandings are gleaned. And, of psychology and philosophy, one can only say that it is as if we have a small candle in our hand as we move into a darkness that is far bigger than we can imagine.
Humans seem intelligent and rational but that is largely an illusion. Compared to the complexity of the existence we find ourselves in, our intelligence is small. And the more we understand, the more we understand how little we understand. The very ideas of who we are and what our place is in this universe are to be questioned and questioned again. And, with sincere inquiry, the scales will fall from your eyes again and again.
Truly, we live in a place of infinite mystery. And what we think we understand today will be shown again and again to be an illusion tomorrow. But, this is not bad because every illusion we drop or see through takes us another step closer to the truth – whatever that might be.
But know that the more you trust yourself and your own vision and the less you trust the vision of the crowd, the more you will move into a form of isolation from your fellows. It is inevitable. Measure yourself by your own yardstick.
I like the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. God said they should not eat the Apples from the tree of knowledge. But, tempted, Eve did and they were thrown from the Garden of Eden.
My interpretation of this story is that once you have chosen the path of knowledge, you cannot un-see the things you will come to understand. You will become responsible for what you know. So, what is the saying? “Stay out of the kitchen, if you can’t stand the heat.”
There are thousands of signals hitting us daily. Suggestions about what to believe, how to look, how to act, how to speak, how to dress for success and an and on. Nearly all of them are manipulative. It is rare, indeed, that anyone would sent out such signals without their own motivations and self-interests as the cause of their doing so.
I am not saying this with distain towards them. This is a natural thing. Almost everyone is acting in their own self-interest. When you realize this, it will free you from so much that most people are confused and mesmerized by.
Instead, watch for people you admire. Study them and try to understand what they think and why they act as they do. And when you see things you like in others, make them your own. Intentional self-creation is a powerful art that is little practiced in this world.
Be kind, always, to those who understand less than you do. People may or may not be doing the best that they can. But, really, it is not your business because the only one you are responsible for is you.
And when you want to inspire others, act by example. It is usually far more powerful than words.
And be rigorous in avoiding the “quid pro quo’ traps. Never give a gift, if you are thinking about what you will get back. Give to others what you would like to receive. But do it with no expectation or thought that it will change their behavior.
Do the things you do because they are inherently right in-and-of-themselves and need no further justification.
Think about the differences between your ‘shoulds’ and your ‘wants’ and strive, over time, to weld them into one thing so that you can be of one mind.
Intelligent and inquiring men and woman have been seeking to understand this existence for many thousands of years. Much of their wisdom, from back in our deep past, has been swept aside in this modern age; as we humans have been quite impressed with the new worlds or science and technology that we’ve created.
And make no mistake, much of what was believed in the past was made of superstition and myth.
But, there was genuine wisdom as well.
It is no coincidence that many brilliant, famous men of letters and great achievements in our modern world turn towards the ancients as they come to the latter part of their lives.
In spite of the fact that the ancients lived without science and were surrounded by superstition and myth, some of them spent much of their lives seeking into questions like: what is consciousness, what is existence and what is the meaning of all this that we see around us?
The stories of what they thought and their conclusions still exist; though they are mostly ignored by our world of technology obsessed humans. These are, collectively, called the Mystics, the Enlightened, the Saints and many other names. The holy books of the world’s major religions are filled with their insights; woven in among the superstition and myth.
Someday, when you have cut an arc through all that this modern life offers you, and success, wealth and freedom are yours, then perhaps you will still be motivated by deep curiosity and the urge to know, “What else is there?”
I leave you then with this small gem that I find myself thinking about most days:
If you understand,
Things are just as they are.
If you don’t understand,
things are just as they are.
~ a Zen saying ~
With much love to you,
Grandfather Dennis
On Enlightenment
Wednesday, January 10th, 2018Non-Duality, Enlightenment, Awakening, Nirvana, … or whatever we want to call it, is a promised-land Shangri-la that’s out there. It has all sorts of powerful and mystical associations that swirl around it. It is one of the preeminent mythologies that has circulated among humankind for thousands of years. Gurus, books, meditation groups, charlatans, respected masters, and the practices and scriptures of several faiths, have, and are, all calling us to ‘the’ path; ‘a’ path, ‘their’ path, the ‘true’ path. And all of them are advising us what to do to ‘get there’. And all of them have different stories and different advice and a lot of it seems pretty cryptic and faith-based.
And, in the end, until you actually ‘get there’ no one can really tell you precisely what ‘it’ is.
The reasons for all the confusion are basically two.
The first reason is that experiencing ‘it’ is quite different from how most of us experience our lives. And it is not easy to transition from our normal/default experiences to the type of experience ‘it’ offers. It is difficult because to make the transition, much of what you think is real, who you think you are, and what you currently believe in – all has to be abandoned.
The second reason is that the state one obtains seems so different, at least initially, is that folks all down through history have idealized it. They have put it on pedestal and elevated it to something magical, mysterious, special. All of this reverence implies that it is somehow discontinuous with our normal life and experiences. They’ve made it into a thing to be spoken about in hushed voices.
But, this idealization of ‘it’ is unnecessary and it ends up obscuring things. Yes, it is difficult to ‘get there’ and, yes, it is a profoundly different experience once one does ‘get there’. But these difficulties and differences are still all just part of the full range of experiences available to us here in this existence that we find ourselves in. There’s nothing magical, supernatural nor discontinuous about ‘it’.
The reverence about ‘it’ seems to arise because many seekers experience a long struggle as they try to drop their beliefs about themselves, the reality around them and to abandon their ego-centric point-of-view. Such struggles can literally take years of meditation and effort. And, after such a long effort, when they finally do ‘get it’, they often feel as if they’ve made a massive breakthrough into a new awareness that is new and discontinuous with everything they’ve ever known before; and quite special. But this is not true.
And to compound the problem, when they have made their breakthrough, the things they begin to say can seem exceeding mysterious and hard to understand for the rest of us. And this leads us to think that they have, indeed, gone ‘somewhere else’ discontinuous with the world we see around us.
They will say things like, “I meditated and studied for years and, in the end, when I finally awoke, I found that I really hadn’t gone anywhere and that there never had been anywhere to go nor anything to do to achieve true realization except to see that I was already there and to stop trying to get there.”
After hearing such a mysterious pronouncement, the mystique and the mystery just grows for the rest of us.
I think there’s a lot of unnecessary confusion about all of this. Non-Duality, Enlightenment, Awakening, Nirvana, … or whatever we want to call it, is just another way that the awareness in each of us can be experienced. It is not mysterious, mystical, discontinuous or magical.
As the transition of an awareness filled with egoic beliefs migrates towards being an awareness that is empty of such beliefs, its regard for the existence it finds itself in is more and more infused with the truth that “It is what it is”.
But, awareness hasn’t gone any place. It has just exercised its option to become “…an awareness that is empty of such beliefs….”
2017-12-26 – In the land of Duality
Tuesday, December 26th, 2017We are all here in the land of duality, in the land of partial understandings, in the land of limited intelligence.
We can progress and we can learn and, to some extent, we can transcend.
But why do we want to insist that we can come to the end, now? To think that we can come to the unity, to the final understanding that there is no more to understand, to the place where the choices cease and being is all there is?
Clearly, to me, we’re not there and we’re unlikely to get there or be there except in a way that is severely limited by our intelligence and awareness. We are just on one step on the stairway to heaven that has more steps upward than we can begin to imagine from here.
Yes, I can cease here with thought and feel existence being in, through and around me (though they all are one).
But this experience is partial, it is temporally limited, it is and has to be only part of what-is. I cannot shed my skin here born and bred of duality and the world of cause and effect.
Yes, I can stop and say I am giving up choice because I think that’s what lies at the end of the road. But that seems to me to be a hugely premature stopping.
I simply haven’t the the grasp or reach to attain any ‘I’ve got it all’ state.
For me, part of the deep acceptance of my place in existence is to realize that we’re on the road and the road is long and we will not complete the road in these clothes.
And yet, still, the road draws us onward. Blessed be the road for it is all we have.
And when I need refreshment, I stop doing and let the silence and being-ness fill me. Then refreshed, I come to the road again and the endless questions that arise to ask and the illusions to be seen through.
I sense progress and I currently do not think there is anything else.
Declaration for Integrative, Evidence-Based, End-of-Life Care that Incorporates Nonlocal Consciousness
Tuesday, May 31st, 2016There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
-from Hamlet
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
By: Stephan A. Schwartz, Gary E. Schwartz, PhD, Larry Dossey, MD
In February 2014, a group of internationally known scientists from the fields of biology, neuroscience, psychology, medicine, and psychiatry participated in a conference on post-materialist science. The purpose was to discuss the impact of the prevailing mechanistic-materialist ideology within science and the emergence of a post-materialist paradigm for science, spirituality, and society. The nature of consciousness has been largely explored only from the assumption that it is a neuro-physiological process entirely resident in the human organism. Its inherent physicality has become an ironbound axiom. But a growing body of experimental and clinical research now challenges this assumption.
The 2014 Conference resulted in the Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science.
Then, in September 2015, a second Conference was held. Its faculty was composed of therapists, clinicians, scholars, and researchers from the United States, Europe, and Asia, all of whom are involved in some way in the processes of human death. Many who attended felt that an exclusively materialist model of consciousness—the view that consciousness is produced entirely by the brain and that physical death annihilates it—cannot account for the experiences they see in those who are dying.
The purpose was to explore the question: What happens when we die? The conference faculty was composed of therapists, clinicians, scholars, and researchers from the United States, Europe, and Asia, all of whom are involved in some way in the processes of human death. Many felt that a materialist model of consciousness—the view that consciousness is produced entirely by the brain and that physical death annihilates it—cannot account for the rich experiences they see in the dying.
All agreed on the existence of a nonlocal aspect of consciousness, and there emerged a Declaration for Integrative, Evidence-Based, End-of-Life Care that Incorporates Nonlocal Consciousness. This Declaration represents a consensus view of the undersigned faculty concerning the greatest issues anyone faces: the origin, destiny, and nature of human consciousness.
1) Today, there are seven stabilized experimental protocols used in laboratories around the world, each of which requires the existence of nonlocal consciousness to be successful. All seven protocols have independently produced six-sigma results, meaning that the odds against a chance explanation of the experimental finding are roughly a billion to one, or above a 99.999999 percentile of certainty.
2) In addition, there are now five areas of consciousness science directly linked to the processes of death that also support the existence of a nonlocal, non-physiologically dependent consciousness: near-death experiences; after-death communications; deathbed vision and physical phenomena at the time of death; laboratory studies with research mediums; and reincarnation research, particularly involving young children.
3) We believe that the question, Can consciousness exist that is not physiologically based? has been answered in the affirmative, and that it is time to move on.
4) We believe that everyone involved in end-of-life care should be educated in an evidence-based manner concerning these findings.
5) Programs should be developed that prepare patients and their loved ones for the journey following death, based on the evidence provided in this Declaration. This can have major effects in reducing the fear of death in both patients and their loved ones.
6) The new consciousness research points to the existence of an individual’s immortal, nonlocal consciousness, a perspective affirmed by many philosophical and religious traditions for millennia.
We see nonlocal consciousness as existing within the broader context of the emergence of a new paradigm in science which incorporates consciousness. We recognize, however, that acknowledging non-physiologically based consciousness can evoke emotional responses that challenge deeply held beliefs in both mainstream science and religion. It will take courage, compassion, and integrity to address the wealth of implications and opportunities afforded by integrating these research findings. Now is the time to advance this integration.
- this from: HERE
- research thanks to Merv D.
Paul Chefurka and the Fermi Paradox
Tuesday, May 24th, 2016I’ve had a link from this Samadhisoft Blog to Paul Chefurka’s Blog for a long time. I’ve always found what’s he’s written to be interesting and insightful.
Recently, he and I engaged in an on-line chat in which The Fermi paradox was mentioned.
Read this Wiki article to come up to speed on the Fermi Paradox if you are unsure about the idea.
Paul directed me to an article he’d written on The Fermi Paradox which I quite enjoyed and it inspired me to write one of my own in response.
You will find Paul’s article is here.
My article is below. My article will make a lot more sense to you, if you read Paul’s first.
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Paul,
The Laws of thermodynamics are, indeed, an excellent base upon which to begin any chain of reasoning.
It wasn’t until I read, “Into the Cold – Energy Flow, Thermodynamics and Life” by Eric D. Scheider and Dorion Sagan, that I really ‘got’ thermodynamics.
Before that, I wondered how, in an existence where the Second Law held sway, life could manage to evolve and get more complex. I’d worked out for myself that in excess energy environments, such as on a planet near a sun, the excess energy could be stored as organization and complexity. but this book really put it all together for me.
For me, the conservation of energy idea is a deep principle. Nature rarely, if ever, does anything wasteful. I see this idea as extendable into evolution, biology and psychology. I often talk about the ‘conservation of cognitive energy’.
So, back to your treatise on Fermi’s Paradox.
I quite agree that the laws of thermodynamics will, in energy abundant situations, tend to support self-replication mechanisms and these will eventually lead to simple life.
I also agree with your Carbon-Oxygen logic. Carbon’s four bonds are a wonder among the denizens of the periodic table.
But then I think there’s a jump in your story that could be better paved with connecting logic. That is the jump from simple life (prokaryotic bacterial) to complex (eukaryotic multicellular).
Here I can highly recommend a seminal book; “Rare Earth – Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe” by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee.
They show, pretty convincingly, that the jump from simple to complex life is a very tough jump and may be quite rare.
If we assume that the jump to complex life has occuured someplace (and obviously it has here) and that the environment there has remained stable enough for the complex life forms to advance to generalized intelligence, then I quite agree that the local environment needs to provide certain things to support their ascension to civilization. I.e., energy in the form of hydrocarbons and also easily available metallic ores.
After this point in your discussion, you move into a projection of how the newly intelligent species will learn to use carbon to power its civilization’s rise. And you surmize that this use of carbon and the associated rise of a civilization will prove to be a fatal feedback loop for them.
I agree, my friend, but I think there’s another link in all of this that would more causally connect it all.
What I find needed here is the ‘why’.
Why would an intelligent species engage in a self-destructive pattern and continue on with it even when, apparently, it has the intelligence to see the error of its ways and the consequences thereof.
This is a subject I have been thinking about for years. And I think the answer lies in our evolutionary psychology.
Our perceptions and thoughts have not been bred for fidelity; much as we might imagine they have been. They have been bred, rather, for survival through unrelenting evolutionary selection pressures.
Thus we do not see all colors equally, for example. We see many more shades of green than we do shades of red or orange. Seeing what was in the green foliage around us was quite important for our survival. We do not have equal fidelity across the range our hearing range. We hear best in those sub-ranges most critical for our survival.
It is the same with our ability to think logically.
There is, for example, no real difference between something happening now verses something happening at another time. Nor is there a real difference between something happening here or something some miles from here. And, finally, something can be equally significant regardless of whether it is a concrete thing or an abstract idea.
And yet, unless we are cognizant of these biases and consciously train ourselves to oppose them, we will in general, as a species, react more to now vs then, more to here vs. there and more to concrete vs. abstract.
It is why we generally favor the short-term gains over the long-term consequences so many times and so irrationally.
It is why we don’t mind killing people and animals at some time in the future in a remote part of the planet due to some abstraction like our need for Palm Oil.
If you set yourself to watch for the now vs. then, here vs. there and concrete vs. abstract dichotomies, you will begin to see them in the irrationally all around you.
Consider where expressions like, “Once burned, twice shy” come from. They are born of folk observations of these same truths.
One of the most important legacies of our environmental heritage that lives on in us is what I call our biological imperatives:
The idea is that all biological forms here on earth, from very near the beginning of biological evolution until the present, share a deep inborn imperative to propagate their genes forward in time and to create and protect spaces within which their progeny can grow to maturity so that they can, in their turn, propagate their genes forward as well.
It is a strategy which has served all of biology very well up until now.
But now, one species, us, has become so powerful that we’ve broken free of all the checks and balances of the natural world. And we’ve grown until we’ve covered the planet.
And now, with no more frontiers to conquer and no more spaces to fill, our biological imperatives driven strategies have finally, after billions of years, come to the place where its applicability has run out and a new strategy that acknowledges limits has to be implemented or we are going to self destruct and take much of the biosphere with us.
All around us, the collect ‘we’ is still trying to maximize power, sexual partners, calories, military power and etc. And virtually all of ‘us’ are still driven by our biological imperatives.
It’s not surprising. 3.5 billion years of evolution have conserved, enshrined and focused these urges in us. Realize that all those who were less driven by these urges, fell before those who were more driven. And those who survived these contests became our ancestors and, finally, they became us.
The old brain still speaks these urges to us. Hunger urges, sexual urges, urges to manage our space for our progeny and so on.
Our irrationality as a species arises largely, I think, from these biological imperative urges. And we, the supposedly rational creatures that we fancy ourselves to be, think that we’ve conquered and controlled these urges. The evidence that this is ludicrous lies littered all around us.
So, I think that if a species could somehow, through conscious intentionality, control or transcend these biological urges in itself, that species would have little trouble seeing the logic of forming a civilization with the goal of living within a sustainable footprint on its’ birth planet.
And such a species could survive indefinitely on that planet nurturing the biosphere around it and sharpening its technological prowess so that its quality of life could continue to improve even while it held its population and its the footprint constant.
And, in time, as its technology matured, it might manage to venture into the stars.
But, we haven’t heard from anyone. And one wonders is complex life is a very rare phenomenon as per Ward and Brownlee?
And if, when life does manage this rare jump to complexity, if it then almost invariably fails to manage the next jump; the need to transcend its own biological urges?
And if, very very rarely, some planet’s biology has managed to do both jumps, then what are the chances that they are, right now, in a technological window now where we could even recognize them?
With events so rare, they could easily be, and probably are, a million years behind us or ten million ahead of us. Time is a vast and deep thing.
And with events so rare, might not they be on the other side of our galaxy or even in another?
And then there’s the speed of light.
All our science fiction authors like to posit that we’ll learn to break it. But it may be simply an absolute limit. And anyone wanting to go voyaging to the stars will have a very slow time of it.
And then there’s the question of motivation.
I’m sure we would be motivated, as we are now, to engage in such explorations.
But would the species we would be, if we learned to transcend our biological imperatives, still feel those same expansive urges?
Perhaps after seeing 100 other planets or 1000 other planets after such long and grinding sub-light speed journeys, a star faring civilization would just get ‘get over it’ and turn to some more local form of navel-gazing that we cannot even imagine now.
The Singularity Concept says that things in the not too distant future will become so very different from how we understand things now that after that point we simply won’t be able to do any meaningful extrapolations. So, in truth, we are really quite blind to try to look forward very far.
Thanks for sharing your piece on the Fermi Paradox, Paul. It got my own juices flowing. (smile)
Cheers,
Dennis Gallagher
…from a letter to a friend….
Friday, December 25th, 2015Advice to the Guardian
Sunday, July 19th, 2015– Recently, the Guardian Newspaper, which I read, asked its readership what it should be doing. The occasion of asking was the posting of a new editor-in-chief there. I wrote them the following:
– dennis
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What’s missing in today’s news is a sense that it is unbiased. The very fact that the Guardian seems to report a number of stories that fly in the face of how the powers that be would like to see the world explained to the average man, speaks well of the paper’s independence.
But left open are still the questions of (1) whether or not you are simply recognizing an under-served part of the market and serving it. (2) whether you are focusing on a type of sensationalism that works because it goes against the grain or (3) you are actually trying to report the news in an unbiased manner because that is what best serves all of us.
Many of us perceive your reporting as arising from motive (3). If that is so, you need to recognize that this is what makes you special and you need to accentuate it, defend it and promote it. But most of all, you need to really do it by walking your talk in everything you do. Build your brand on it.
In a world where the reader can trust nothing they read in the media because it all seems to be shrouded in spin serving various factions, the reader will simply give up and society’s self-awareness will fragment and dim.
Humanity does have a right to clear, unambiguous information about the state of the world. And we have this right whether or not is it codified anywhere. People who speak the truth, in spite of the peril it costs them, know this instinctively. And those of us who align ourselves with the good of all, rather than the personal good of the few, recognize such truth-speaking as heroism and as being the best of us.
Be that paper and be it with a vengeance.