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Archive for the ‘Consciousness’ Category

War on Consciousness by Graham Hancock

Posted in Consciousness, War on September 15, 2014| Leave a Comment »

LIFHeaderFreedom of Consciousness

What is Western civilization all about? What are its greatest achievements and highest aspirations?

It’s my guess that most people’s replies to these questions would touch—before all the other splendid achievements of science, literature, technology, and the economy—on the nurture and growth of freedom.

It’s about individual freedom.

Including, but not limited to freedom from the unruly power of monarchs, freedom from the unwarranted intrusions of the state and its agents into our personal lives, freedom from the tyranny of the Church and its Inquisition, freedom from hunger and want, freedom from slavery and servitude, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of thought and speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to elect our own leaders, freedom to be homosexual—and so on and so forth.

The list of freedoms we enjoy today that were not enjoyed by our ancestors is indeed a long and impressive one. It is therefore exceedingly strange that Western civilization in the twenty- first century enjoys no real freedom of consciousness.

There can be no more intimate and elemental part of the individual than his or her own consciousness. At the deepest level, our consciousness is what we are—to the extent that if we are not sovereign over our own consciousness then we cannot in any meaningful sense be sovereign over anything else either. So it has to be highly significant that, far from encouraging freedom of consciousness, our societies in fact violently deny our right to sovereignty in this intensely personal area, and have effectively outlawed all states of consciousness other than those on a very narrowly defined and officially approved list. The “War on Drugs” has thus unexpectedly succeeded in engineering a stark reversal of the true direction of Western history by empowering faceless bureaucratic authorities to send armed agents to break into our homes, arrest us, throw us into prison, and deprive us of our income and reputation simply because we wish to explore the sometimes radical, though always temporary, alterations in our own consciousness that drugs facilitate.

The reason the anti-marijuana campaigns have failed is that millions of users know from their own direct, long-term experience that marijuana does not do them any great harm and (with reference to the most recent anti-marijuana propaganda) most definitely does not drive them mad.

Other than being against arbitrary rules that the state has imposed on us, personal drug use by adults is not a “crime” in any true moral or ethical sense and usually takes place in the privacy of our own homes, where it cannot possibly do any harm to others. For some it is a simple lifestyle choice. For others, particularly where the hallucinogens such as LSD, psilocybin, and DMT are concerned, it is a means to make contact with alternate realms and parallel dimensions, and perhaps even with the divine. For some, drugs are an aid to creativity and focussed mental effort. For others they are a means to tune out for a while from everyday cares and worries. But in all cases it seems probable that the drive to alter consciousness, from which all drug use stems, has deep genetic roots.

Other adult lifestyle choices with deep genetic roots also used to be violently persecuted by our societies.

A notable example is homosexuality, once punishable by death or long periods of imprisonment, which is now entirely legal between consenting adults—and fully recognized as being none of the state’s business—in all Western cultures. (Although approximately thirteen US states have “anti-sodomy” laws outlawing homosexuality, these statutes have rarely been enforced in recent years, and in 2003 the US Supreme Court invalidated those laws.) The legalization of homosexuality lifted a huge burden of human misery, secretiveness, paranoia, and genuine fear from our societies, and at the same time not a single one of the homophobic lobby’s fire-and-brimstone predictions about the end of Western civilization came true.

Likewise, it was not so long ago that natural seers, mediums, and healers who felt the calling to become “witches” were burned at the stake for “crimes” that we now look back on as harmless eccentricities at worst.

At the deepest level, our consciousness is what we are—to the extent that if we are not sovereign over our own consciousness then we cannot in any meaningful sense be sovereign over anything else either.

Perhaps it will be the same with drugs? Perhaps in a century or two, if we have not destroyed human civilization by then, our descendants will look back with disgust on the barbaric laws of our time that punished a minority so harshly (with imprisonment, financial ruin, and worse) for responsibly, quietly, and in the privacy of their own homes seeking alterations in their own consciousness through the use of drugs. Perhaps we will even end up looking back on the persecution of drug users with the same sense of shame and horror that we now view the persecution of gays and lesbians, the burning of “witches,” and the imposition of slavery on others.

Meanwhile it’s no accident that the “War on Drugs” has been accompanied by an unprecedented expansion of governmental power into the previously inviolable inner sanctum of individual consciousness. On the contrary, it seems to me that the state’s urge to power has all along been the real reason for this “war”—not an honest desire on the part of the authorities to rescue society and the individual from the harms caused by drugs, but the thin of a wedge intended to legitimize increasing bureaucratic control and intervention in almost every other area of our lives as well.

This is the way freedom is hijacked—not all at once, out in the open, but stealthily, little by little, behind closed doors, and with our own agreement. How will we be able to resist when so many of us have already willingly handed over the keys to our own consciousness to the state and accepted without protest that it is OK to be told what we may and may not do, what we may and may not explore, even what we may and may not experience, with this most precious, sapient, unique, and individual part of ourselves?

If we are willing to accept that then we can be persuaded to accept anything.

Source: Graham Hancock

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Climate Change and Consciousness | OM Times Magazine

Posted in Climate Change, Consciousness, Earth, Evolution, Quantum Physics, Reality, Realizations, Revelation, Transformation on August 30, 2014| Leave a Comment »

???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????By Angela Levesque

We need a broader view of climate change. Part of our problem is we have reduced everything down to a string of data, giving measurable, quantitative numbers and present it along with the message of urgency and sacrifice. The problem is, that numbers don’t move people to change. Narratives of futility don’t either. We need to shift the conversation from, “Nothing can be done” to “What can I do and what can we do together as a community and as a country?” It is time to move beyond our instinctual and reactionary behaviors that are products of an Old World, mechanistic system, and shift our thinking and the conversation we are currently having around climate change. This requires an individual shift in consciousness through the development of our personal self-awareness and understanding of our enculturation. As well as a global shift through awareness of the unified field.

Defining Consciousness

From a psychological perspective consciousness is the awareness of our internal responses i.e. our thoughts, feelings and sensations to an external experience. This experience is then furthered through the field of neuroscience; where a materialist view explains how brain activity and the interactions of neurons, give rise to that psychological experience. In this paradigm, communication and information are a linear expression of space/time. Defining consciousness in this way helps us understand how the mind and body interact to create our material, sensory experience. This helps us address some of the patterns of consumption and habits and gives us real world tools on how to change them. Read more…

Source: OM Times Magazine

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Scientists Closing in on Theory of Consciousness | LiveScience

Posted in Body/Mind/Spirit, Consciousness, Evolution, Holograms, Quantum Physics, Reality on July 30, 2014| Leave a Comment »

ConsciousnessMatrixBy Tanya Lewis, Staff Writer

Probably for as long as humans have been able to grasp the concept of consciousness, they have sought to understand the phenomenon.

Studying the mind was once the province of philosophers, some of whom still believe the subject is inherently unknowable. But neuroscientists are making strides in developing a true science of the self.

Here are some of the best contenders for a theory of consciousness.

Cogito ergo sum

Not an easy concept to define, consciousness has been described as the state of being awake and aware of what is happening around you, and of having a sense of self. [Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind]

The 17th century French philosopher René Descartes proposed the notion of “cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”), the idea that the mere act of thinking about one’s existence proves there is someone there to do the thinking.

Descartes also believed the mind was separate from the material body — a concept known as mind-body duality — and that these realms interact in the brain’s pineal gland. Scientists now reject the latter idea, but some thinkers still support the notion that the mind is somehow removed from the physical world.

But while philosophical approaches can be useful, they do not constitute testable theories of consciousness, scientists say.

“The only thing you know is, ‘I am conscious.’ Any theory has to start with that,” said Christof Koch, a neuroscientist and the chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Neuroscience in Seattle.

Correlates of consciousness

In the last few decades, neuroscientists have begun to attack the problem of understanding consciousness from an evidence-based perspective. Many researchers have sought to discover specific neurons or behaviors that are linked to conscious experiences.

Recently, researchers discovered a brain area that acts as a kind of on-off switch for the brain. When they electrically stimulated this region, called the claustrum, the patient became unconscious instantly. In fact, Koch and Francis Crick, the molecular biologist who famously helped discover the double-helix structure of DNA, had previously hypothesized that this region might integrate information across different parts of the brain, like the conductor of a symphony.

But looking for neural or behavioral connections to consciousness isn’t enough, Koch said. For example, such connections don’t explain why the cerebellum, the part of the brain at the back of the skull that coordinates muscle activity, doesn’t give rise to consciousness, while the cerebral cortex (the brain’s outermost layer) does. This is the case even though the cerebellum contains more neurons than the cerebral cortex.

Nor do these studies explain how to tell whether consciousness is present, such as in brain-damaged patients, other animals or even computers. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

Neuroscience needs a theory of consciousness that explains what the phenomenon is and what kinds of entities possess it, Koch said. And currently, only two theories exist that the neuroscience community takes seriously, he said.

Integrated information

Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison developed one of the most promising theories for consciousness, known as integrated information theory.

Understanding how the material brain produces subjective experiences, such as the color green or the sound of ocean waves, is what Australian philosopher David Chalmers calls the “hard problem” of consciousness. Traditionally, scientists have tried to solve this problem with a bottom-up approach. As Koch put it, “You take a piece of the brain and try to press the juice of consciousness out of [it].” But this is almost impossible, he said.

In contrast, integrated information theory starts with consciousness itself, and tries to work backward to understand the physical processes that give rise to the phenomenon, said Koch, who has worked with Tononi on the theory.

The basic idea is that conscious experience represents the integration of a wide variety of information, and that this experience is irreducible. This means that when you open your eyes (assuming you have normal vision), you can’t simply choose to see everything in black and white, or to see only the left side of your field of view.

Instead, your brain seamlessly weaves together a complex web of information from sensory systems and cognitive processes. Several studies have shown that you can measure the extent of integration using brain stimulation and recording techniques.

The integrated information theory assigns a numerical value, “phi,” to the degree of irreducibility. If phi is zero, the system is reducible to its individual parts, but if phi is large, the system is more than just the sum of its parts.

This system explains how consciousness can exist to varying degrees among humans and other animals. The theory incorporates some elements of panpsychism, the philosophy that the mind is not only present in humans, but in all things.

An interesting corollary of integrated information theory is that no computer simulation, no matter how faithfully it replicates a human mind, could ever become conscious. Koch put it this way: “You can simulate weather in a computer, but it will never be ‘wet.'”

Global Workspace

Another promising theory suggests that consciousness works a bit like computer memory, which can call up and retain an experience even after it has passed.

Bernard Baars, a neuroscientist at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, developed the theory, which is known as the global workspace theory. This idea is based on an old concept from artificial intelligence called the blackboard, a memory bank that different computer programs could access.

Anything from the appearance of a person’s face to a memory of childhood can be loaded into the brain’s blackboard, where it can be sent to other brain areas that will process it. According to Baars’ theory, the act of broadcasting information around the brain from this memory bank is what represents consciousness.

The global workspace theory and integrated information theories are not mutually exclusive, Koch said. The first tries to explain in practical terms whether something is conscious or not, while the latter seeks to explain how consciousness works more broadly.

“At this point, both could be true,” Koch said.

Source: LiveScience

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Declaration of Human Sovereignty | The Sophia Code

Posted in Awakening, Body/Mind/Spirit, Consciousness, Evolution, Freedom, Insights, Poetry, Reality, Realizations, Responsibility, Revelation, Source, Sovereignty, Transformation on July 18, 2014| Leave a Comment »

geometry

 We acknowledge and affirm with the following declarations:
The Architecture of Your SOVEREIGN OVERSOUL

Your divine SELF has emerged into the physical world as a human being.

Your divine SELF is known as an OVERSOUL, commonly referred to as a “soul”.

Your OVERSOUL exists outside the parameters of the space-time continuum.

Your OVERSOUL is an exact, individual fractal of SOVEREIGN god consciousness.
We interchangeably refer to god consciousness as omniscient SOURCE ENERGY.

We define SOVEREIGNTY as that essential quality of SOURCE ENERGY that is invincible, immutable, omniscient, eternal, and entirely whole unto itself.

As an exact fractal of SOVEREIGN god consciousness, your divine SELF is endowed with all the same essential qualities of god consciousness, also known as the ONE omniscient SOURCE ENERGY.

Your OVERSOUL has been “made in the image and exact likeness of its original creator, the ONE SOURCE THAT CREATED YOUR SOUL AND ALL THAT IS.

Therefore, your OVERSOUL is also a SOVEREIGN CREATOR OF SOURCE ENERGY, endowed with the same power and FREE WILL of the original creator. As such, your OVERSOUL is capable of creating anything you desire.

starburst

Your FREE WILL and SOVEREIGN DIVINE NATURE are immutable and can never be taken from you. Your OVERSOUL is an unconditional and eternal divine inheritance given from the ONE SOURCE.

The divine nature of your OVERSOUL is SOVEREIGN unto itself. There is no force of nature or god consciousness above or beneath your OVERSOUL’S autonomous FREE WILL. There is no force of nature or god consciousness that may overpower the invincible divine will of your OVERSOUL.

As such, it is your own omniscient OVERSOUL that is the sole operating consciousness directing the details of your current incarnation and destiny.

Your OVERSOUL was designed for the ONE SOURCE to KNOW ITSELF through the expression and expansion of ITSELF as many. For the ONE SOURCE to KNOW ITSELF, it could only replicate ITSELF, for a perfect reflection of SELF-KNOWING.

Your many incarnations in the world of form serve as a parallel reflection of this original design of an “OTHER” to know and expand upon the ONE.

The omniscience of your OVERSOUL is orchestrating all of your incarnations simultaneously across the fabric of quantum reality. As such, your human awareness is capable of effecting change upon all your incarnations through the intentional SELF-MASTERY of this lifetime.

With every incarnation, your OVERSOUL is reflected back the truth of its absolute divinity within a quantum ocean of relativity, chaos, and infinite potential for seeming risk, failure, and success. Your OVERSOUL considers every physical experience, regardless of a desired outcome, as a spiritual success that expands its field of consciousness.

Your OVERSOUL is the omniscient, unconditionally loving and accepting GODSELF at the still center of your human awareness. Its active state is the HIGHER SELF, sometimes referred to as your “Holy Spirit”, which emerges from the space of NO-THING, into the light of creation to birth your human body into form. Read more…

Source: The Sophia Code

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Elusive On/Off Switch Found for Human Consciousness | Discovery

Posted in Awakening, Body/Mind/Spirit, Consciousness, Dreams, Evolution, Holograms, Meditation, Quantum Physics, Reality, Realizations, Revelation, Source on July 7, 2014| Leave a Comment »

ConsciousnessMatrix2By Tracy Staedter

When I was a child about nine years old or so, I embarked on a mission to discover the barrier between waking and sleeping. I believed that if I concentrated each night before falling asleep, I would recognize the moment I slipped out of consciousness and into dream. I never found the precise line — although I did, unintentionally, teach myself to lucid dream.

But now there is research showing that the brain does have an on/off switch that triggers unconsciousness. Mohamad Koubeissi at the George Washington University in Washington DC and his colleagues describe for the first time a way to switch off consciousness by electrically stimulating a part of the brain called the claustrum.

Simulating The Human Brain

Their accidental discovery could lead to a deeper understanding of a fundamental mystery of the human brain; that is, how conscious awareness arises.

The discovery came while the researchers were studying a woman who has epilepsy. During a procedure, they used deep brain electrodes to record signals from different parts of her brain in order to determine where here seizures were originating. One electrode was place next to the claustrum, a thin, sheet-like structure underneath the neocortex. Although this area has never been electrically stimulated before, it had been implicated in the past as a possible control center for consciousness by neuroscientist Francis Crick, who identified the structure of DNA, and his colleague Christof Koch of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.

Koubeissi and his team found that Crick and Koch might have been on to something. When they stimulated the area with electrical impulses from the brain electrodes, the woman stopped reading, stared blankly into space and didn’t respond to auditory or visual commands. Her breathing slowed as well. She had lost consciousness. When the scientists turned off the electrical stimuli, she immediately regained consciousness with no memory of blanking out. Additional attempts were tried over two days and each time, the same thing happened.

New Scientist reported on the results and in the article Koubeissi says he thinks the claustrum indeed plays a vital role in triggering conscious. “I would liken it to a car,” he told New Scientist reporter Helen Thompson.

“A car on the road has many parts that facilitate its movement – the gas, the transmission, the engine – but there’s only one spot where you turn the key and it all switches on and works together. So while consciousness is a complicated process created via many structures and networks – we may have found the key.”

Project To Map The Human Brain

One researcher, Anil Seth, who studies consciousness at the University of Sussex, UK, pointed out that the woman in the study had had part of her hippocampus removed earlier as a way to treat her epilepsy, so she doesn’t represent a “normal” brain.

Additional research is needed. But the results could open wide a door on one of the most mysterious aspects of existence. We could determine once and for all what living creatures are aware of themselves and the world around them.

Source: Discovery

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The Synchronicity Holistic Model of Reality

Posted in Consciousness, Quantum Physics, Reality, Source on June 30, 2014| Leave a Comment »

LuminousBrainThe Synchronicity Holistic Model of Reality provides the foundation for the experience of Modern Spirituality. It is derived from thousands of years of wisdom expressed by traditional peoples and cultures from around the world and, more recently, studied and refined by science and academia.

The model is called “holistic” because it is based on the wholeness of One Source Consciousness. The model states that there is only one energy or consciousness which is the source of everything in the cosmos — whether good or bad, light or dark, seen or unseen. In addition, Source Consciousness is multi-dimensional, ranging from “dense” physical bodies and objects to “subtle” non-physical dimensions.

Source Consciousness has a primary intention which is to fully experience itself. To actualize this, it creates a relative field of experience since the only way it can experience what it is, is in relation to what it is not. All experience is relative.

The relative field has two polarities: “Being” at the positive end of the spectrum; and “Becoming” at the negative end. There are also vertical levels or dimensions of experience within this relative field that start at the very dense physical level and include everything we can see, touch or feel. Since consciousness is everything, it also includes more subtle levels such as emotions and thoughts. Beyond these three basic levels (often called the Primary Trinity), there are increasingly more subtle dimensions accessible only through intuition or trans-mental mystical experience.

Having a physical form would not be possible in pure formless Being. As Becoming dominates Being and as Source Consciousness becomes denser, physical forms appear. The negative (Becoming) must dominate the positive (Being).

Source Consciousness remains aware of itself and of its wholeness at the subtlest levels of experience where the relative field exists with balanced polarities. This enables source Consciousness to be aware of both polarities such as being and becoming, love and fear, without either dominating the other.

As Source Consciousness densifies within the Relative Field, it forfeits holistic awareness when the polarities become increasingly unbalanced by an increasing dominance of Becoming (the negative polarity) over Being (the positive polarity). At the densest levels of relative reality, holistic experience is minimal, and fragmented, negative-polarity dominant experience is maximum.

This is where the vast majority of humanity is anchored, with Source Consciousness at maximum densification expressing as a vast diversity of separate and limited forms including human beings, most of whom believe they are totally separate from everyone and everything else.

This cycle of creation – Source Consciousness moving from subtle to dense — is termed involution or diversification. When consciousness is complete in the experience of imbalance, fragmentation and illusion, something remarkable happens — the experience of Awakening. This experience almost always occurs under the auspices of an authentic spiritual master and heralds the completion of the involutionary cycle of individuated human experience (separation). It also marks the beginning of the evolutionary cycle termed unification or wholeness. Awakening is thus an experience to be celebrated.

From this point, the primary intention in Source Consciousness moves in the direction of evolution. During evolution, Source Consciousness begins the return to wholeness which is the journey from dense to subtle. Many individuals who are drawn to meditation and other balancing techniques find themselves on this “involutionary / evolutionary bridge,” and changing their fundamental direction.

This stage of the journey benefits from the guidance of a spiritual teacher or holistic master (who has already experienced and understands the journey), which then proceeds to increase balance and expand holistic awareness until Source Consciousness once again fully recognizes itself. This is called wholeness and constitutes human mastery or fulfillment.

Involution and evolution are the two cyclical processes in Source Consciousness that fulfill its primary intention to fully be itself. Termed the “Creation Game”, it is analogous to a game of hide and seek, in which Source Consciousness obscures itself from itself, only to delight in finding itself again. The challenge in being human is to play the game masterfully and enjoy the fulfillment of being fully human — in balance, wholeness, and fulfillment.

Source: Synchronicity

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How the Brain Awakens from Unconsciousness Becomes Clearer | Discovery

Posted in Awakening, Consciousness, Dreams, Holograms, Insights, Quantum Physics, Reality, Realizations on June 10, 2014| Leave a Comment »

ConsciousnessasLightBy Bahar Gholipour, LiveScience

Exactly what happens when people wake up from anesthesia or a coma has long baffled scientists, but now new research on rats suggests the path the brain takes to regain consciousness may be even more sophisticated than thought.

“It is commonly assumed that waking from anesthesia is a simple thing: The drugs leave the brain, and the effects they produced in the brain get washed out, and the brain somehow recovers,” said Dr. Alex Proekt, an assistant professor of anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. “But that ‘somehow’ part is poorly understood.”

The researchers looked at the brain’s activity patterns, hypothesizing that the activity follows a structured path, changing in a specific way as the brain moves toward consciousness. The researchers wanted to know whether the brain moves from one activity state to the next, in a stepwise fashion, or whether the brain can go from any given state to a number of other states, and therefore, that there are multiple routes to consciousness.

Brain Activity Shows Basis of Near-Death ‘Light’

What Is Dead?
As technology has changed, so has our definition of “dead.” Laci gives a brief history and ponders the delicate boundary between dead and alive.

To examine the brain’s trajectory while recovering consciousness, Proekt and colleagues recorded the electrical activity of certain brain regions in anesthetized rats. They slowly lowered the concentration of anesthetic vapor that the animals were breathing, until they eventually woke up.

The analysis of the rats’ brain activity suggested that the brain passes through several distinct activity states to become conscious. The researchers found that only certain transitions between activity states are possible, and some states do form hubs that connect groups of otherwise disconnected states. [10 Things You Didn’t Know About the Brain]

“Although many paths through the network are possible, to ultimately enter the activity state compatible with consciousness, the brain must first pass through these hubs in an orderly fashion,” the researchers wrote in their study published today (June 9) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Trapped in a coma

The researchers said the new findings could one day be used to help people in a coma. The brains of people under anesthesia as well as comatose patients show an electrical pattern known as burst suppression, which is characterized by periods of spikes in activity, alternating with periods of silence.

Both general anesthesia and coma are major perturbations to brain’s normal activity, and in some cases, the brain cannot find its way back to consciousness.

“Some people, after injury, will remain in some minimally conscious state forever, but some people can recover years after the injury,” Proekt said.

“One interesting possibility is that perhaps the injury can act to remove some of these loops, so in a sense you are trapped in one of these states,” Proekt told Live Science.

In order to help comatose patients, scientists will first have to examine whether the same phenomenon they observed in rats also exists in the human brain, and then explore how it may be possible to push the brain out of one state so it can proceed further toward recovery, Proekt said.

‘Clinically Dead’ Woman Alive and Well

Awake during surgery

Although anesthesiologists have long been able to successfully put people to sleep, they still can’t be 100 percent sure that a patient is truly unconscious, rather than just unable to respond.

Understanding the transitions between activity states that happen during the brain’s recovering from anesthesia may be the first step to finding a way to detect when someone is on the verge of waking up, Proekt said.

“It’s not a common problem, but it is a petrifying scenario to imagine — being paralyzed and awake for surgery,” he said.

Studies have suggested that a very small number of patients experience awaking during surgery, but it is also possible that a larger number of people have some awareness during surgery but don’t recall afterwards, Proekt said.

Source: Discovery

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10 Scientific Studies That Prove Consciousness Can Alter Our Physical Material World | SocialConsciousness.com

Posted in Body/Mind/Spirit, Consciousness, Death & Dying, DNA, Evolution, Freedom, Insights, Meditation, Quantum Physics, Reality, Realizations, Revelation, Source, Transformation on April 20, 2014| Leave a Comment »

AlterOurWorldNikola Tesla said it best, “the day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence. To understand the true nature of the universe, one must think it terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”

Swami Vivekananda was Tesla’s mentor, an Indian Hindu monk and chief disciple of the 19th century saint Ramakrishna. Science works best when in harmony with nature. If we put these two together, we can discover great technologies that can only come about when the consciousness of the planet is ready to embrace them, like free energy.

I want to make it clear that my intention of presenting this information is to demonstrate that thoughts, intentions, prayer and other units of consciousness can directly influence our physical material world. Consciousness can be a big factor in creating change on the planet. Sending thoughts of love, healing intent, prayer, good intention, and more can have a powerful influence on what you are directing those feelings towards. Fukushima for example, if a mass amount of people send their thoughts and good intention to our waters, we can help mitigate the situation. These concepts can be used on a mass scale as one human race with one intent in their hearts, for multiple problems, as well as individual situations in our own lives. When our consciousness starts to merge into one as a collective, and we all start to see through the same eyes, we will begin to transform the world around us. I believe we are currently in this process. For quite some time now, physicists have been exploring the relationship between human consciousness and its relationship to the structure of matter.

Previously it was believed that a Newtonian material universe was the foundation of our physical material reality. This all changed when scientists began to recognize that everything in the universe is made out of energy. Quantum physicists discovered that physical atoms are made up of vorticies of energy that are constantly spinning and vibrating. Matter, at it’s tiniest observable level, is energy, and human consciousness is connected to it, human consciousness can influence it’s behavior and even re-structure it.

“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real” – Niels Bohr

“The hypothesis of modern science starts from matter as the basic reality, considering space to be an extension of the void. The phenomenon of creation of stable cosmic matter, therefore, goes beyond the scope of present science. The theory also neither pinpoints the source of cosmic energy that resides in the structure of matter, nor can it explain the cause of material properties that are experienced with the behavior of matter. These are, in brief, the limitations of modern scientific theories at the most basic level of the physical phenomena of nature. When a scientific theory cannot cope with the question of the very origin of the universal matter and energy, how could it ever grasp and explain the phenomenon of consciousness which is evident in living beings?” – Paramahamsa Tewari

The revelation that the universe is not an assembly of physical parts, but instead comes from an entanglement of immaterial energy waves stems from the work of Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg, amongst others. Read more…

Source: Social Consciousness

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The Primacy of Consciousness by Erwin Laszlo | Peter Russell Spirit of Now

Posted in Body/Mind/Spirit, Consciousness, Quantum Physics, Reality on March 30, 2014| Leave a Comment »

ConsciousnessMatrix4Summary: An argument as to why the ultimate nature of reality is mental not material.

Ervin Laszlo has proposed that the virtual energy field known as the quantum vacuum, or zero-point field, corresponds to what Indian teachings have called Akasha. the source of everything that exists, and in which the memory of the cosmos is encoded. I would like to take his reasoning a step further and suggest that the nature of this ultimate source is consciousness itself, nothing more and nothing less.

Again we find this idea is not new. In the Upanishads, Brahman, the source of the cosmos (literally, “that from which everything grows”), is held to be to Atman (“that which shines”), the essence of consciousness. And in the opening lines of The Dhammapada, the Buddha declares that “All phenomena are preceded by mind, made by mind, and ruled by mind”.

Such a view, though widespread in many metaphysical systems, is completely foreign to the current scientific worldview. The world we see is so obviously material in nature; any suggestion that it might have more in common with mind is quickly rejected as having “no basis in reality”. However, when we consider this alternative worldview more closely, it turns out that it is not in conflict with any of the findings of modern science—only with its presuppositions. Furthermore, it leads to a picture of the cosmos that is even more enchanted.

All in the Mind

The key to this alternative view is the fact that all our experiences—all our perceptions, sensations, dreams, thoughts and feelings—are forms appearing in consciousness. It doesn’t always seem that way. When I see a tree it seems as if I am seeing the tree directly. But science tells us something completely different is happening. Light entering the eye triggers chemical reactions in the retina, these produce electro-chemical impulses which travel along nerve fibers to the brain. The brain analyses the data it receives, and then creates its own picture of what is out there. I then have the experience of seeing a tree. But what I am actually experiencing is not the tree itself, only the image that appears in the mind. This is true of everything I experience. Everything we know, perceive, and imagine, every color, sound, sensation, every thought and every feeling, is a form appearing in the mind. It is all an in-forming of consciousness.

The idea that we never experience the physical world directly has intrigued many philosophers. Most notable was the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanual Kant, who drew a clear distinction between the form appearing in the mind—what he called the phenomenon (a Greek word meaning “that which appears to be”)—and the world that gives rise to this perception, which he called the noumenon (meaning “that which is apprehended”). All we know, Kant insisted, is the phenomenon. The noumenon, the “thing-in-itself,” remains forever beyond our knowing.

Unlike some of his predecessors, Kant was not suggesting that this reality is the only reality. Irish theologian Bishop Berkeley had likewise argued that we know only our perceptions. He then concluded that nothing exists apart from our perceptions, which forced him into the difficult position of having to explain what happened to the world when no one was perceiving it. Kant held that there is an underlying reality, but we never know it directly. All we can ever know of it is the form that appears in the mind—our mental model of what is “out there”.

It is sometimes said that our model of reality is an illusion, but that is misleading. It may all be an appearance in the mind, but it is nonetheless real—the only reality we ever know. The illusion comes when we confuse the reality we experience with the physical reality, the thing-in-itself. The Vedantic philosophers of ancient India spoke of this confusion as maya. Often translated as “illusion” (a false perception of the world), maya is better interpreted as “delusion” (a false belief about the world). We suffer a delusion when we believe the images in our minds are the external world. We deceive ourselves when we think that the tree we see is the tree itself.

The tree itself is a physical object, constructed from physical matter—molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles. But from what is the image in the mind constructed? Clearly it is not constructed from physical matter. A perceptual image is composed of the same “stuff” as our dreams, thoughts, and feelings, and we would not say that these are created from physical atoms or molecules. (There might or might not be a corresponding physical activity in the brain, but what I am concerned with here is the substance of the image itself.) So what is the mental substance from which all our experiences are formed?

The English language does not have a good word for this mental essence. In Sanskrit, the word chitta, often translated as consciousness, carries the meaning of mental substance, and is sometimes translated as “mindstuff”. It is that which takes on the mental forms of images, sounds, sensations, thoughts, and feelings. They are made of “mindstuff” rather than “matterstuff”.

Mindstuff, or chitta, has the potential to take on the form of every possible experience—everything that I, or anyone else, could possibly experience in life; every experience of every being, on this planet, or any other sentient being, anywhere in the cosmos. In this respect consciousness has infinite potential. In the words of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, “Consciousness is the field of all possibilities”.

This aspect of consciousness can be likened to the light from a film projector. The projector shines light onto a screen, modifying the light so as to produce one of an infinity of possible images. These images are like the perceptions, sensations, dreams, memories, thoughts, and feelings that we experience—the forms arising in consciousness. The light itself, without which no images would be possible, corresponds to this ability of consciousness to take on form.

We know all the images on a movie screen are composed of light, but we are not usually aware of the light itself; our attention is caught up in the images that appear and the stories they tell. In much the same way, we know we are conscious, but we are usually aware only of the many different perceptions, thoughts, and feelings that appear in the mind. We are seldom aware of consciousness itself.

All phenomena are projections in the mind. Read more…

Source: Peter Russell Spirit of Now

—The Third Karmapa

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What Is the Wilber-Combs Lattice? | Integral Spirituality

Posted in Consciousness on April 18, 2013| Leave a Comment »

By Ken Wilbur

At this point I am going to drag y’all through the convoluted mess that we had to go through in order to arrive at some sort of clarity on this issue [i.e. how to properly integrate states of consciousness and stages of psychological development]. I’m going to do this because I had to slug through this rotten mess and I don’t see any reason you shouldn’t.

What was so confusing to us early researchers in this area is that we knew the stage conceptions of people like Loevinger and Graves were really important; moreover, some of these stages (e.g., Kohlberg) had been tested in a dozen or more cross-cultural studies; either you included these models or you had a painfully incomplete psychospiritual system.

But we also knew that equally important were the phenomenological traditions East and West (e.g., St. Teresa’s Interior Castle, Anu and Ati Yoga), as well as the recent studies like Daniel P. Brown’s on the commonality of certain deep features in meditative stages. And so typically what we did was simply take the highest stage in Western psychological models—which was usually somewhere around Spiral Dynamic’s GlobalView, or Loevinger’s integrated, or the centaur—and then take the 3 or 4 major stages of meditation (gross, subtle, causal, nondual—or initiation, purification, illumination, unification), and stack those stages on top of the other stages. Thus you would go from Loevinger’s integrated level (centaur) to psychic level to subtle level to causal level to nondual level. Bam bam bam bam. . . . East and West integrated!

It was a start—at least some people were taking both Western and Eastern approaches seriously—but problems immediately arose. Do you really have to progress through all of Loevinger’s stages to have a spiritual experience? If you have an illumination experience as described by St. John of the Cross, does that mean you have passed through all 8 Graves value levels? Doesn’t sound quite right.

A second problem quickly compounded that one. If “enlightenment” (or any sort of unio mystica) really meant going through all of those 8 stages, then how could somebody 2000 years ago be enlightened, since some of the stages, like systemic GlobalView, are recent emergents?

All of our early attempts at integration were stalling around this issue of how to relate the meditative stages and the Western developmental stages, and there it sat stalled for about two decades.

Part of the problem centered around: what is “enlightenment,” anyway? In an evolving world, what did “enlightenment” mean? What could “enlightenment” mean?—and how could it be defined in a way that would satisfy all the evidence, both from those claiming it and those studying it? Any definition of “enlightenment” would have to explain what it meant to be enlightened today but also explain how the same definition could meaningfully be operative in earlier eras, when some of today’s stages were not present. If we can’t do that, then it would mean that only a person alive today could be fully enlightened or spiritually awakened, and that makes no sense at all.

The test case became: in whatever way that we define enlightenment today, can somebody 2000 years ago—say, Buddha or Christ Jesus or Padmasambhava—still be said to be “enlightened” or “fully realized” or “spiritually awakened” by any meaningful definition.

This complex of problems formed something of a Gordian knot for, as I said, the better part of two decades. The first real break came in understanding the difference between states and structures, and then how they might be related (once you figured out that you had to stop equating them). A few years after I introduced a suggested solution, my friend Allan Combs, working independently, hit upon an essentially similar idea, and so, in a painfully transparent bid for history, we named this the “Wilber-Combs Lattice” (after months of me having to explain to Allan how silly the “Combs-Wilber Lattice” sounded).

Here is the general idea. The essential key is to begin by realizing that, as we earlier noted (and emphasized), because most meditative states are variations on the natural states of gross-waking, subtle-dreaming, and causal- formlessness, then they are present, or can be present, at virtually all stages of growth, because even the earliest stages wake, dream, and sleep.

Accordingly, if you take any structure-stage sequence (we will use Gebser’s—archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, integral) and put those sequentially developing structure-stages (which we will again simply call stages unless otherwise noted) running up the left side of the grid or lattice, and then put the major states across the top (gross, subtle, causal, nondual), you get a simple version of the W-C Lattice (see fig. 4.1). There are many variations on this general idea, and I do not want to imply that Allan agrees with all of mine; but the general idea that structures and states overlap in complex ways is indeed the point. Most of these diagrams and the following discussion are my particular take on that general notion, and I think Allan agrees with these, but, again, I don’t want to speak for him in these details, since we have each developed the germinal idea in various directions.


Figure 4.1 The Wilber-Combs Lattice

What you can see in figure 4.1 is that a person at any stage can have a peak experience of a gross, subtle, causal, or nondual state. But a person will interpret that state according to the stage they are at. If we are using a Gebser-like model of 7 stages, then we have 7 stages × 4 states = 28 stage-interpreted / state experiences, if that makes sense. (And, as we’ll see, we have evidence for all of these “structure-state” experiences).That bold sentence was for us early researchers the breakthrough and real turning point. It allowed us to see how individuals at even some of the lower stages of development—such as magic or mythic—could still have profound religious, spiritual, and meditative state experiences. Thus, gross/psychic, subtle, causal, and nondual were no longer stages stacked on top of the Western conventional stages, but were states (including altered states and peak experiences) that can and did occur alongside any of those stages.(What was doubly confusing to us is the fact that there are also 3 or 4 higher structures beyond the centaur and its vision-logic, and because these structures have characteristics that appear similar to those of the 3 or 4 higher states, it was almost impossible to spot the differences. So we kept stacking higher states on top of structures—and calling them higher structures—and we could not for the life of us figure out why that didn’t work. This really drove us nuts. The W-C Lattice was so hard to see, even though the data were right in front of our eyes, because of this overlap.)

The point is that a person can have a profound peak, religious, spiritual, or meditative experience of, say, a subtle light or causal emptiness, but they will interpret that experience with the only equipment they have, namely, the tools of the stage of development they are at. A person at magic will interpret them magically, a person at mythic will interpret them mythically, a person at pluralistic will interpret them pluralistically, and so on. But a person at mythic will not interpret them pluralistically, because that structure-stage of consciousness has not yet emerged or developed.

But the 5 major states of consciousness are available more or less from the start, because everybody wakes, dreams, and sleeps, no matter what stage they are at. Putting those together immediately gives us something like a W-C Lattice.

Let me give one simple series to show what is involved. Take a subtle-state experience of intense interior luminosity accompanied by a sense of universal love. Let’s say this person is Western and Christian, so that the Lower-Left quadrant (which is also intimately involved in providing the contexts for interpretation) has primed this experience of interior luminosity to be interpreted as an encounter with Jesus Christ (or the Holy Spirit). That subtle- realm religious experience can occur at virtually any stage—the magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, or integral—but in each case, it will be interpreted according to the basic limiting principles of that stage.

Thus (to give some quick and stylized examples), at the magic stage, Jesus is experienced as a personal savior who can miraculously alter the world in order to satisfy my every desire and whim: Jesus as Magician, turning water into wine, multiplying loaves and fishes, walking on water, and so on (we are not talking about the ontological content, if any, of the interpretation; Jesus may or may not have walked on water, but at this stage, this is the thing that would mean the most to me). This stage is preconventional and egocentric, so this Jesus cares only about me.

At the next stage, the mythic, the same kind of subtle-state experience might be interpreted as communion with Jesus the Eternal Truth bringer. This stage is absolutistic in its beliefs, so you will either believe the Word exactly as written, or you will burn in hell forever. This stage is also ethnocentric, so only those who believe in Jesus Christ as their personal savior can be saved.

At the next stage, the mental-rational, Jesus Christ becomes a humanized figure, still fully Divine and fully human, but now fully human in a more believable way, as a teacher of the universal love of a deistic God (who has read Principia Mathematica and knows where to draw the line). Because this stage is the beginning of the postconventional and worldcentric stages, this is also the first of the stages of development that can find salvation through Christ Jesus but also allow that others might find equal salvation through a different path. You will be moving in a Vatican II fashion.

Have a series of profound spiritual experiences at the pluralistic stage and you will likely find yourself one of the authors of The Postmodern Bible, a wonderful example—out of thousands that have sprung up—of interpreting Jesus Christ and the Christ-experience through the lens of the green stage of development.

The integral stage for Gebser was one stage, but for us is simply the opening to at least 4 higher structure-stages of development, any of which will insist on integrating its experience of Christ-consciousness with other expressions of the Holy Spirit around the world, and if so in your case, you might likely find yourself reading a book like this. (Frankly, any earlier/lower stages would simply not find this topic interesting. But if we do pat ourselves on the back, let it still be with humility: whatever stage we might be at, there are always higher stages; and somewhere, someplace, in some universe or dimension, somebody is writing a text that is over our heads….)

Excerpted from Integral Spirituality by Ken Wilber

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