FAITH AND SCIENCE

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kmaherali
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The Science of Creating Heaven on Earth

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The Honeymoon Effect: The Science of Creating Heaven on Earth

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The Honeymoon Effect: A state of bliss, passion, energy, and health resulting from a huge love. Your life is so beautiful that you can’t wait to get up to start a new day and you thank the Universe that you are alive. Think back on the most spectacular love affair of your life—the Big One that toppled you head over heels. For most, it was a time of heartfelt bliss, robust health, and abundant energy. Life was so beautiful that you couldn’t wait to bound out of bed in the morning to experience more Heaven on Earth. It was the Honeymoon Effect that was to last forever. Unfortunately for most, the Honeymoon Effect is frequently short-lived. Imagine what your planetary experience would be like if you could maintain the Honeymoon Effect throughout your whole life.

Bruce H. Lipton, Ph.D., bestselling author of The Biology of Belief, describes how the Honeymoon Effect was not a chance event or a coincidence, but a personal creation. This book reveals how we manifest the Honeymoon Effect and the reasons why we lose it. This knowledge empowers readers to create the honeymoon experience again, this time in a way that ensures a happily-ever-after relationship that even a Hollywood producer would love. With authority, eloquence, and an easy-to-read style, Lipton covers the influence of quantum physics (good vibrations), biochemistry (love potions), and psychology (the conscious and subconscious minds) in creating and sustaining juicy loving relationships. He also asserts that if we use the 50 trillion cells that live harmoniously in every healthy human body as a model, we can create not just honeymoon relationships for couples but also a “super organism” called humanity that can heal our planet.

https://www.brucelipton.com/books/honeymoon-effect/
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Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future and a Way to Get There From Here

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We’ve all heard stories of people who’ve experienced seemingly miraculous recoveries from illness, but can the same thing happen for our world? According to pioneering biologist Bruce H. Lipton, it’s not only possible, it’s already occurring. In Spontaneous Evolution, this world-renowned expert in the emerging science of epigenetics reveals how our changing understanding of biology will help us navigate this turbulent period in our planet’s history and how each of us can participate in this global shift. In collaboration with political philosopher Steve Bhaerman, Dr. Lipton invites readers to reconsider:

•the "unquestionable" pillars of biology, including random evolution, survival of the fittest, and the role of DNA;
•the relationship between mind and matter;
•how our beliefs about nature and human nature shape our politics, culture, and individual lives; and
•how each of us can become planetary "stem cells" supporting the health and growth of our world.By questioning the old beliefs that got us to where we are today and keep us stuck in the status quo, we can trigger the spontaneous evolution of our species that will usher in a brighter future. .
kmaherali
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How to Make a Decision When There’s No ‘Right’ One

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By Russ Roberts

Mr. Roberts is the president of Shalem College in Jerusalem and a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us,” from which this essay is adapted.

In 1838, Charles Darwin faced a problem. Nearing his 30th birthday, he was trying to decide whether to marry — with the likelihood that children would be part of the package.

To help make his decision, Darwin made a list of the expected pluses and minuses of marrying. On the left-hand side he tried to imagine what it would be like to be married (“constant companion,” “object to be beloved & played with — better than a dog anyhow”). On the right-hand side he tried to imagine what it would be like not to marry (“not forced to visit relatives & to bend in every trifle”).

Darwin was struggling with what I call a wild problem — a fork in the road of life where knowing which path is the right one isn’t obvious, where the day-to-day pleasure and pain from choosing one path over another are ultimately hidden from us and where those day-to-day pleasures and pains don’t fully capture what’s at stake.

There might be a mere handful of such decisions like this that we face — whether to marry, whom to marry, whether to have children, whether to switch careers and take on new responsibilities. Often there is little evidence to guide us, and what little evidence is available can mislead us.

How should we proceed, then, especially if we want to make a rational decision?

I was trained as an economist at the University of Chicago. We were taught that economics is the guide to making rational choices in life. We were taught that everything has a price; everything involves giving up something to have something else. Nothing is of infinite value. But as I’ve studied the lives of some of history’s great thinkers, I have come to believe that when it comes to the big decisions of life, those principles can lead us astray.

Take Darwin’s list. At first glance, making a list of pluses and minuses seems like a rational approach for dealing with any problem, wild or tame. The technique is probably as old as Eve in the garden facing the wild problem of whether to eat that fruit. (Minuses: It will annoy the Head Gardener, ignorance is bliss, gaining knowledge may come with unexpected downsides. Pluses: Snake seems like a pleasant fellow, forbidden fruit is sweetest, and so on.) But as we’ll see, the cost-benefit list that Darwin constructed is less helpful than it might appear. Let’s take a look at part of it:

Marry

Children — (if it please God) — constant companion (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one — object to be beloved & played with — better than a dog anyhow — home & someone to take care of house — charms of music & female chitchat — these things good for one’s health — forced to visit & receive relations but terrible loss of time.

Not marry

No children (no second life), no one to care for one in old age. — What is the use of working without sympathy from near & dear friends — who are near & dear friends to the old, except relatives

Freedom to go where one liked — choice of society & little of it — conversation of clever men at clubs — not forced to visit relatives & to bend in every trifle — to have the expense & anxiety of children — perhaps quarelling — loss of time — cannot read in the evenings — fatness & idleness — anxiety & responsibility — less money for books &c — if many children forced to gain one’s bread — (but then it is very bad for ones health to work too much)

Perhaps my wife wont like London, then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool

Darwin managed to come up with more minuses than pluses if he married. Though he didn’t write it down explicitly, it’s pretty clear what he considered the biggest minus: If he married, he’d have less time for his scientific research and be less productive. He might not become a great scientist. Staying single seemed to be the rational option.

Darwin desperately wanted to know if he would like marriage more than staying single. But his list tells us more about Darwin than it does about marriage. His list of pluses and minuses — especially the pluses — is the list that someone would make who has never been married and has no access to the upside of the inner life of a married man. Darwin’s ignorance is part of the reason his negatives about marriage (Banishment! Degradation! Idle fool!) are so emphatic and his positives are so mild (female chitchat). His cluelessness helps us see just how hard it is to make what looks like a rational decision.

And notice that there’s little in Darwin’s list about devotion to another human being or love or the pleasures and pains of cleaving to another person, ideally for life. Nothing about the pleasure of making someone else happy, nothing about the opportunity to soothe his spouse’s sorrows. It’s all about him, which makes sense; he’d never had a partner. How would he know about the power of a shared life?

To Darwin, looking in from the outside, marriage was overwhelmingly about what he would give up. And marriage does involve restrictions. Being married does mean you can’t necessarily live where you want. You can’t do what you want with your time. Your sexual freedom is almost certainly curtailed. It’s all about “can’t.”

Similarly, what does it mean to have children? A lot more “can’t.” Parenthood is when you can’t go on real vacations anymore. You can’t buy that new car because it doesn’t have a back seat. Plus, you have to save for college, pay the babysitter. You can’t afford that car you would have wanted anyway. With many wild problems, the downside is easily imagined, while the upside is veiled from us. That’s one reason wild problems are so hard to tame with the standard tools of rationality.

If Darwin had known me and asked me what it’s like to be a parent, I would have told him that having children connects you to your parents and brings you closer to them in ways you never could have imagined. That it’s part of the human enterprise that’s unlike any other part of the ride. That it’s a taste of immortality. That the decision isn’t just about the expected day-to-day costs and benefits but more about who you are and how you see yourself. Marriage and parenting suffuse our days in ways we cannot imagine until we’ve experienced them.

Does that take some of the pressure off as you think about making a life choice? Maybe. Maybe it’s comforting to know that there isn’t a rational route to the right decision.

Most of Darwin’s list seems to point him toward a life of staying single. Yet he decided to marry, seemingly putting his sober list of pluses and minuses aside, writing in a much more emotional vein:

My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working & nothing after all. — No, no won’t do. — Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London house. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire & books & music perhaps. — Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St.

Marry — Mary — Marry Q.E.D.

Less than a year later, Darwin married his cousin Emma Wedgwood. Together they had 10 children; seven survived to adulthood. And somehow, despite or perhaps because of his decision to go through life with a wife and children at his side, Darwin managed to become one of the greatest scientists of all time and forever changed our understanding of who we human beings are.

But why did Darwin ignore the calm, cerebral calculus he laid out in his journal? What’s the lesson to be learned from his decision-making process?

I have to speculate a little here, but I think he realized, as most of us do, that life is about more than just the sum of the day-to-day pleasures and pains that follow from our choices. Adding up costs and benefits — what I call narrow utilitarianism — may seem like the height of rationality. But it can easily undervalue the most important but less obvious aspects of a life well lived. A broader view doesn’t always point to marriage. It can also point to staying single or getting divorced. But the important lesson is to think about life as more than accumulating pleasure or avoiding pain.

Human beings want purpose. We want meaning. We want to belong to something larger than ourselves. The decisions we make in the face of wild problems don’t just lead to good days and bad days. They define us. They determine who we are, who we might aspire to become, who we might come to be.

And this, I think, is the key to how we approach our own wild problems. Darwin’s decision looks irrational only until we remember that the future is veiled from us and that life is about more than simple pluses and minuses. Darwin accepted, I think, that daily happiness was less important than how he thought he should live his life and who and what he wanted to become.

My advice? Learn from Darwin. Spend less time trying to figure out the best path to get to where we want to go and spend more time thinking about where we want to go in the first place.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/21/opin ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
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Truth in Science, Art and the Spiritual

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Truth in Science, Art and the Spiritual

Bohm spoke of the scientific spirit, the artistic spirit and the religious spirit, all of which have certain things in common…One of the key elements of the scientific spirit is to acknowledge the fact, whether you like it or not, not to reject the fact or the interpretation of the fact, simply because you don’t like it. And this should equally apply of the religious or spiritual; not to engage in wishful thinking, otherwise, the truth would get lost in self-deception.

The other ‘spirit’ Bohm spoke of is the artistic spirit which searches for expressions of truth, that opens a portal into the unseen, bridging the gap between manifest reality and the underlying reality where the formless and unmanifest becomes manifest in form.

The Artist Sir Antony Gormley caught this idea beautifully in his sculpture Quantum Cloud in which he expresses graphically the truth that, everything is in a state of “becoming”, that each individual “is a place of transformation”. Quantum cloud shows us the possibly of a body in a state of emergence, from the implicate to the Explicate, shining a light on the truth that we are the determiner of what we see, the subject and object become one, underpinning the profound truth of nonduality and that The Observer is the Observed…

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WATCH NOW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHJNUKooutE&t=2s
kmaherali
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Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine

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Why do we feel the way we feel? How do our thoughts and emotions affect our health? Are our bodies and minds distinct from each other or do they function together as parts of an interconnected system?
In her groundbreaking book Molecules of Emotion, Candace Pert provides startling and decisive answers to these and other challenging questions that scientists and philosophers have pondered for centuries.
Her pioneering research on how the chemicals inside our bodies form a dynamic information network, linking mind and body, is not only provocative, it is revolutionary. By establishing the biomolecular basis for our emotions and explaining these new scientific developments in a clear and accessible way, Pert empowers us to understand ourselves, our feelings, and the connection between our minds and our bodies -- body-minds -- in ways we could never possibly have imagined before.
Molecules of Emotion is a landmark work, full of insight and wisdom and possessing that rare power to change the way we see the world and ourselves.

Free download of the book at:

https://oiipdf.com/molecules-of-emotion ... e_vignette

Boook review:

https://www.wildearthacupuncture.com/bl ... of-emotion

Book report:

https://www.icemethod.com/posts/molecul ... ok-report/
kmaherali
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Two Distinguished Scientists on How to Rescue Humanity

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The Anthropocene demands a massive realignment of priorities.

BY CHARLES F. KENNEL & MARTIN REES
August 19, 2022

“Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie…”
—Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well

Our Earth has existed for 45 million centuries; and humans for a few thousand. But this century is the first when our species is so numerous—and so demanding of energy and natural resources—that we risk collectively despoiling our planet. It’s surely an ethical imperative that we should not deny future generations the wonders and beauty of the natural world. Policy must, in the words of the Brundtland Commission, “meet the needs of the present—especially the world’s poor—without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This requires a massive transformation in our lives—how we derive our energy, and how we feed ourselves. It’s an inspiring challenge for the younger generation, and an investment crucial for the future of humanity—and indeed all life on Earth. But it requires a massive realignment of priorities in all nations—a change in individual attitudes, as well as in public policy.

The Anthropocene

All the living organisms on Earth are passengers on a voyage to a new world. Humans have transformed the surface of the Earth so completely that future geologists will view our time as a new era in Earth history. Paul Crutzen invented a new word, Anthropocene, to describe it. Like the other transitions between eras in the geological record, this one could be accompanied by massive species extinctions.1 It is not as though we have been taken by surprise. For more than half a century, science has warned that climate change will disrupt our civilization beyond easy repair.

Descendants in a happier future would equip their planet with awareness systems.

Decades of worldwide publicity have not saved planet Earth from approaching the threshold of irreversible climate catastrophe.2 Denying the urgency of climate change action could prove to be the ultimate global “tragedy of the commons”—a term introduced in Hardin’s classic book analysing how, for instance, “free” common land can be eroded by irresponsible overgrazing.3 Economists now argue the global economy must be restructured over the next 30 years to create a zero-carbon emission society,4 the necessary (but not sufficient) condition for climate stability.

Anthropocene challenges go beyond economics and technology. Zero-carbon does not free society of mortal threats to ecology, food security, or public health. The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals are the most inclusive attempt yet to balance the requirements for a hospitable environment and a just society. Religious authorities, notably Pope Francis, maintain that only a transformation of human values will produce both the ecological conditions for sustainability and the social justice essential to the stability of society.5

The Crisis of the Anthropocene

Planet Earth is on a perilous course. Society’s delayed adjustment to Anthropocene dynamics has amplified risks to global, regional, and local human security6 and threatens a comprehensive crisis, especially if risks materialize in reinforcing ways. This, the Crisis of the Anthropocene, is likely to be most acute when world population peaks—according to U.N. demographers this should happen before the end of the century. The number of humans at risk will therefore be largest when resource consumption and stress on eco-environmental systems are maximal and extreme climatic events disrupt ecologies at their most vulnerable. Since threats we presently think distinct are the most likely to interact and cascade then, we will not have the luxury of dealing with them one at a time, as we are trying to do today.

Planetary Agency

The nations of Earth need to transform their economies in little more than one human generation to meet the challenges posed by Anthropocene dynamics.

The word, Anthropocene, implies a material causal relationship (hazily articulated at present) between what global society chooses to do and how planetary eco-environmental systems evolve. Human communities have modified their local environments since before the Agricultural Revolution,7 but ours is the first century in the 20,000 that the human lineage is recognizable in the fossil record that humans can determine the fate of the entire biosphere.8

Denying the urgency of climate change is the ultimate tragedy of the commons.

Now our task is to exercise a familiar form of local agency planetwide; could planetary agency be exercised in time, a tragic outcome would not be inevitable. Even the possibility that human agency has planetary scale means that Anthropocene thought has an ethical dimension—what global society chooses to do shapes the eco-environmental systems that sustain later generations.

From now on, what we think as a planet is what our children get as a planet. However crucial policy and diplomacy may be, global agency ultimately requires that billions of micro-choices made every day by billions of human beings be (at least slightly) biased in favor of altruistic action. Whether human wills can be aligned (and planetary agency exerted) depends on the clarity of our collective thinking and how well the intent to apply that thinking is organized. As individuals we are acutely attuned to differences in each other’s psychologies. We know there are many situational reasons for action or inaction—but when we ask what moves populations to action or leaves them in inaction, we need to know what is common to large numbers of people.

The Duality of Human Nature

Our response to imminent threats is rooted in how human minds think. Human beings have hearts and minds, ids and egos, an unconscious and a conscious. This is not a new idea. Ancient Greek philosophers, Shakespeare, and Freud understood that emotion and rationality compete for human attention. The dual nature of human thought has found institutional expression in Western societies in bi-cameral legislatures9 and the separate authorities of church and state. What is new is that modern research in psychology and neuroscience has established a species-wide basis for this ancient insight. Every human on Earth has two systems of neural circuitry; psychologist Daniel Kahneman10 calls them systems 1 and 2. System 1 processes the wants, fears, and perceptions of the present, while system 2 organizes them into concepts that guide future actions. It takes psychological energy to raise percepts in system 1 into concepts in system 2, and consonance of systems 1 and 2 to overcome the inertia to act.

Harmony of heart and mind is the precursor to action. People generally focus on the short-term, and their immediate experience11; this makes it particularly difficult to overcome sustainability’s inherent time displacement disincentive: We resist risking present well-being to protect people we don’t know living in a future shrouded in uncertainty.12 We educate children, provide for grandchildren, give to charity, and preserve artifacts that we value in the here and now. Personal altruism goes that far, but not far enough to provide for some foreign family’s descendants two centuries from now. Why risk present prosperity to offset risks that materialize in the future? We only live once; our hearts are not in the game.

Intergenerational Altruism

Intergenerational altruism intelligently exercised protects humanity’s future on the planet. Political, industrial, and financial leaders then make decisions with as much regard for future consequence as for past precedent. With responsibility for the future embedded in technologies and institutions, the present leverages the future. The future is infused with positive expectations and our guilt about the world we are sending our children into is relieved. We believe society can advance. The abolition of slavery in the 19th century and colonialism in the 20th tell us that adoption of new social norms is possible despite seemingly refractory conflicting interests, but it takes several generations to resolve the conflicting interests, and the resolution is never perfect.

Our task is to exercise a familiar form of local agency planetwide.

Intergenerational altruism came more easily to the cathedral builders of the European Middle Ages, where people believed their descendants will live much as they did. The pace of change quickened after the Scientific Revolution, and now it is hard to imagine how the next generation thinks. Yet some institutions have survived generational change. Most cultures have some form of religion. Religion’s example makes clear that resilient ethical norms, enduring institutions, and shared values are not built primarily by rational communication. Methods provoking Kahneman’s system 1—charisma, renunciation, art, iconography, ritual, regalia, holidays, cosmology, story, myth—are employed to motivate altruistic behavior. In the secular canonization of Greta Thunberg, a 21st-century Joan of Arc, we see a system-1 technique deployed on behalf of the planet. In a similar vein, Earth Day is the first new holiday of the Anthropocene Era.

It is unlikely we will know in advance whether society can aggregate the social and psychological resources to overcome the time displacement disincentive inherent in the planet’s sustainability challenge; Kahneman sees “no path to success on climate change.”13 The countervailing view is exemplified by economist Thomas Piketty14 and psycholinguist Stephen Pinker,15 who document major increases in life expectancy, world economic prosperity, and societal well-being in the past two generations. Diplomacy also kept the lid on the Cold War. If we did those things, this view holds, we can create a society and planet in harmony if we put our minds to it. Social well-being may have come first in the beginning of the Anthropocene era, but now it is time to rebalance.

Planetary Cyber-Civilization

A World Wide Web of knowledge and feeling is engulfing almost every human being on Earth. A technology that seems well-suited to help humans think collectively mirrors the way we think individually: The Web has evolved the capacity to communicate in Kahneman’s systems 1 and 2. Social media employs a communication platform devised by rational engineers to elicit feelings and attitudes. With the capacity to disseminate ideas with feelings attached comes power to promote action, good or bad. Social media enables interaction with friends and colleagues, anywhere in the world, but there is a downside: It turns out to have unforeseen power to move the lonely misfits of society to depraved acts, and it allows extremists to readily spread their views and generate “fake news.” The technologies enabling the Web to communicate emotional states are at an early stage of development. Imagine that smartphones could sense indicators of mood like perspiration, electrical activity, or neurotransmitters; biophysical indicators of feeling state would accompany words and images more reliably than emojis. Your smartphone’s voice could be trained to use language, tone, and accent that elicit your deepest responses. We have to hope that the Web, the first creation of the Anthropocene era, is evolving, along with Anthropocene civilization, the capacity to organize global agency.

If we do these things, we can create a society and planet in harmony.

Beyond the Anthropocene Crisis

There is no book of recipes on how to rescue a planet, no magic checklist to go down.16 Even if the Web did its part by establishing receptivity to intergenerational decision making, it would avail little if decisions were wrongly conceived. Humanity’s system 1 and system 2 capacities will both be strained. Fortunately, crisis conditions need not last forever. Global population, the ultimate Anthropocene stressor, is expected to peak during this century.17 If a sustainable society emerges from the demographic transition in progress,18 humans can look toward the longer future. Unfortunately, science cannot guarantee that we will retain the present planetary environment. Transitions in natural systems seemingly beyond human capacity to reverse are in progress,19 such as species extinctions, ocean acidification, sea level rise, polar ice loss, permafrost melt. The technologies used to manage the planet could have adverse side effects, or their very success render the infrequent breakdown catastrophic.20 Progress is hard to discern through the noise of highly visible disasters, but by looking beyond setbacks, we can reinforce trends that converge to a satisfactory solution. Satisfactory does not mean satisfying; it will be a different planet that survives, but one that provides a sustainable future for the organisms that build it.

Planetary Consciousness

We cannot expect that threats to life on Earth would magically disappear, but we can hope they can be stabilized. Our descendants in that happier future would equip their planet with situational awareness systems that sense small deviations from stability and prevent them from going out of control. Their awareness networks could evolve into a watchful intelligence given a long future. One can imagine a network of networks that synthesizes continuous awareness of the changing states of the planet and society and instinctively propagates adaptive responses. This is a property of consciousness. Contemporary science is silent on whether consciousness is a natural stage in the evolution of intelligence-bearing planets, for we know no other such planet. If we did know of one, we could ask it whether planetary consciousnesses that survive have consciences.

Martin Rees is an astrophysicist and cosmologist, and the United Kingdom’s Astronomer Royal. He is based at Cambridge University where he has been Director of the Institute of Astronomy and Master of Trinity College. He is a member of the U.K.’s House of Lords, and was President of the Royal Society for the period 2005 to 2010. In addition to his research publications, he has written extensively for a general readership. He has been increasingly concerned about long-term global issues. His most recent book is If Science Is To Save Us (Polity Press; publication September 2022).

Charles F. Kennel’s early career was as a space scientist. He was a professor at UCLA and then associate administrator at NASA, leading Mission to Planet Earth, the world’s largest Earth science satellite program. NASA influenced him to go into Earth and climate science, and he became Director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. He is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Christ’s College, Cambridge.

Acknowledgment: We are indebted to Partha Dasgupta, Veerhabradan Ramanathan, and David Victor for illuminating discussions. CFK was introduced to the idea of thinking planets by the MIT physicist Philip Morrison.

https://nautil.us/two-distinguished-sci ... dium=email
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Through Time Into Healing: Discovering the Power of Regression Therapy to Erase Trauma and Transform Mind, Body and Rela

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The book that sheds new light on reincarnation and the extraordinary healing potential of past life and hypnotic regression therapy, from the New York Times bestselling author of Many Lives, Many Masters.

Brian Weiss made headlines with his groundbreaking research on past life therapy in Many Lives, Many Masters. Now, based on his extensive clinical experience, he builds on time-tested techniques of psychotherapy, revealing how regression to past lifetimes provides the necessary breakthrough to healing mind, body, and soul. Using vivid past life case studies, Dr. Weiss shows how regression therapy can heal grief, create more loving relationships, uncover hidden talents, and ultimately shows how near death and out of body experiences help confirm the existence of past lives. Dr. Weiss includes his own professional hypnosis, dream recall, meditation, and journaling techniques for safe past life recall at home.

Compelling and provocative, Through Time Into Healing shows us how to help ourselves lead healthy, productive lives, secure in the knowledge that death is not the final word and that the doorways to healing and wholeness are inside us.

https://www.amazon.com/Through-Time-Int ... 0671867865
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Same Soul, Many Bodies: Discover the Healing Power of Future Lives through Progression Therapy

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The New York Times bestselling author of Many Lives, Many Masters breaks new ground to reveal how progression therapy into future lives can help transform us in the present.

How often have you wished you could peer into the future? In Same Soul, Many Bodies, Brian L. Weiss, M.D., shows us how. Through envisioning our lives to come, we can influence their outcome and use this process to bring more joy and healing to our present lives. Dr. Weiss pioneered regression therapy -- guiding people through their past lives. Here, he goes beyond that to demonstrate the therapeutic benefits of progression therapy -- guiding people through the future in a scientific, responsible, healing way.

Through dozens of case histories detailing both past-life and future-life experiences, Dr. Weiss shows how the choices that we make now will determine our future quality of life. From Samantha, who overcame academic failure once she learned of her future as a great physician, to Evelyn, whose fears and prejudices ended after she envisioned prior and forthcoming lives as a hate victim, Dr. Weiss gives concrete examples of lives transformed by regression and progression therapy.

A groundbreaking work, Same Soul, Many Bodies is sure to deeply affect peoples' lives as they strive toward their future.

https://www.amazon.ca/Same-Soul-Many-Bo ... 0743264347
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The big idea: why relationships are the key to existence

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From subatomic particles to human beings, interaction is what shapes reality

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Quantum theory is perhaps the most successful scientific idea ever. So far, it has never been proved wrong. It is stupendously predictive, it has clarified the structure of the periodic table, the functioning of the sun, the colour of the sky, the nature of chemical bonds, the formation of galaxies and much more. The technologies we have been able to build as a result range from computers to lasers to medical instruments.

Yet, a century after its birth, something remains deeply puzzling about quantum theory. Unlike its illustrious predecessor, Newton’s classical mechanics, it does not tell us how physical systems behave. Instead, it confines itself to predicting the probability that a physical system will affect us in one way or another. When an electron is fired from one side of a wall with two holes, for instance, quantum theory tells us where it will end up on the other side, stubbornly saying nothing plausible about which hole it has gone through. It treats any physical system as a black box: if you do this to it now, it will react like that later. What happens in between? The theory simply doesn’t tell us.

Many scientists are content with this, but others are puzzled. Among the latter, some make hypotheses: they propose complicated stories about parts of nature that are hidden from us for ever, or multiple universes that underpin the part of reality we do see. Others resign themselves to the notion that science is not about what things “really are”: it is only about what we are able to directly observe.

Another idea has recently begun to catch on. Perhaps there is no need to make anything up about what lies behind quantum theory. Perhaps it really does reveal to us the deep structure of reality, where a property is no more than something that affects something else. Perhaps this is precisely what “properties” are: the effects of interactions. A good scientific theory, then, should not be about how things “are”, or what they “do”: it should be about how they affect one another.

The winners in the long run are those who collaborate

The idea seems radical. It pushes us to rethink reality in terms of relations instead of objects, entities or substances. The possibility that this could be what quantum physics is telling us about nature was first suggested a quarter of a century ago. For a while it remained largely unnoticed, then several major philosophers picked it up and began to discuss it. Nowadays interest in the idea, called the Relational Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, is steadily growing. It is a possible solution to the puzzle of quantum theory: what quantum phenomena are is evidence that all properties are relational.

There is a strikingly similar definition of existence at the root of the western philosophical tradition. Plato’s The Sophist contains the following phrase: “Anything which possesses any sort of power to affect another, or to be affected by another, if only for a single moment, however trifling the cause and however slight the effect, has real existence; and I hold that the definition of being is simply action. [δύναμιςδύναμις]” And in the eastern tradition, the Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna’s central notion of “emptiness” (śūnyatā) tells us that nothing has independent existence: anything that exists, exists thanks to, as a function of, or according to the perspective of, something else.

So maybe this is not such a radical idea after all. We all know that a chemical substance is defined by how it reacts, a biological species is defined according to the niche it occupies in the biosphere, and what defines us as human beings is our relationships. Think of a simple object such as a blue teacup. Its being blue is not a property of the cup alone: colours happen in our brain as a result of the structure of the receptors in the retina of our eyes and as a consequence of the interactions between daylight and the cup’s surface. Its being “a teacup” refers to its potential function as a drinking vessel: for an alien who doesn’t know about drinking tea, the very notion of a teacup is meaningless. What is more, its stability as an object depends on the timescale in which we consider it: take a longer view and it is just a fleeting aggregation of atoms. And are these atoms themselves independent elements of reality? No they are not, as quantum theory shows: they are defined by their physical interactions with the rest of the world.

So quantum physics may just be the realisation that this ubiquitous relational structure of reality continues all the way down to the elementary physical level. Reality is not a collection of things, it’s a network of processes.

If this is correct, I think it comes with a lesson. We understand reality better if we think of it in terms of interactions, not individuals. We, as individuals, exist thanks to the interactions we are involved in. This is why, in classic game theory, the winners in the long run are those who collaborate. Too often we foolishly measure success in terms of a single actor’s fortunes. This is both short-sighted and irrational. It misunderstands the true nature of reality, and is ultimately self-defeating. I believe, for example, that we make this mistake all the time in international politics. Prioritising individual countries, or groups of countries, over the common good, is a catastrophic error. It leads to the devastation of war and prevents us from addressing the true challenges that all of humankind – a node in nature’s network – faces as a whole.

Carlo Rovelli is a professor of physics. To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Further reading
Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution by Carlo Rovelli (Allen Lane, £9.34)

The World According to Physics by Jim Al-Khalili (Princeton, £12.99)

Theaetetus & Sophist by Plato (Cambridge, £17.99)

Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning by Karen Barad (Duke, £23.99)

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kmaherali
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The Real Magic of Rituals

Post by kmaherali »

We might call them superstitions or spells, but they genuinely drum anxiety away.

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BY DIMITRIS XYGALATAS
September 14, 2022

Tennis star Rafael Nadal performs an elaborate repertoire of rituals before and during every match. When he arrives at the stadium, he enters the court holding a racket in his hand, taking great care never to step on the lines and always crossing each line right-foot first. He places his bag on the bench and turns his tournament ID face up. His chair must be perfectly perpendicular to the sideline. He checks his socks to make sure they are perfectly even on his calves. During the coin toss he faces the net and starts jumping until the coin falls, then runs to the baseline, where he drags his foot across the entire line in a single sweeping motion before hitting each shoe with his racket.

When the game begins, Nadal starts performing repetitive hand gestures that resemble those of Catholics crossing themselves. With his right hand he touches the back and front of his shorts, then his left shoulder, then the right, then his nose, left ear, nose again, right ear and finally his right thigh. At each changeover he picks up two towels. He waits for the other player to cross the line, and then he crosses right-foot first to take his seat. He carefully folds one towel and puts it behind him without using it. Then he folds the second towel and places it on his lap. He takes one sip from a bottle of water, then another sip from a second bottle. Very carefully, he returns the two bottles to the exact same position, the labels facing the same way.

Nadal insists he is not superstitious. In his autobiography, he writes, “Some call it superstition, but it’s not. If it were superstition, why would I keep doing the same thing over and over whether I win or lose? It’s a way of placing myself in a match, ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head.” Who could deny that Nadal’s rituals don’t help him manage his anxiety and find order on the court? He is one of the greatest tennis players of all time.

Over the decades, anthropological studies, including my own, have shown that ritual practices come naturally to us, regardless of our cultures, and further, we expect them to have an effect. But is ritual really an effective stress-management strategy? Or is it simply an illusion, a waste of time or, worse, a dangerous distraction from our real problems?

Field observations suggest that ritual may indeed help people cope with anxiety. In a study conducted in Israel, researchers interviewed local women during the Lebanon War of 2006. They found that among those women who lived in war zones and experienced the stress of war, reciting psalms was associated with lower overall stress levels.1 No similar association was found for women living outside the war zones. While participants in this study were the judges of their own anxiety, similar effects were found at the physiological level.

“It’s a way of ordering my surroundings to the order I seek in my head.”

In my lab at the University of Connecticut, my colleagues and I observed a group of students during the midterm exams, one of the most stressful periods of the year. In addition to surveys, we collected hair and saliva samples, which we used to measure levels of cortisol, a hormone associated with stress. Salivary cortisol changes over the course of a few minutes, so it can be used to measure stress around a specific activity. But traces of the hormone also accumulate in our hair, and they can be used to track long-term anxiety. We found that students who participated in more rituals had lower anxiety across all these measures.

But these are correlational findings. They help us point to an association but cannot establish a causal relationship. For that, we need to turn to experimental studies. Fortunately, several experiments have been conducted on this topic in recent years.

In one of these studies, Matthew Anastasi and Andrew Newberg randomly assigned Catholic college students to either reciting the Rosary (a set of repetitive prayers) or watching a religious film, and measured anxiety levels before and after those tasks. They found that those who recited the Rosary experienced a greater decrease in anxiety.2

Alison Brooks and her colleagues found similar results when they asked participants to enact an artificial ritual that resembled a magical spell. As it turned out, performing this ritual helped people engaged in various stressful tasks such as taking a math test or participating in public karaoke to cope with anxiety.3 In another study, Michael Norton and Francesca Gino asked participants to think about a loss they had experienced—someone who had passed away, a broken relationship or even a monetary loss. They found that, when they asked some of them to perform a ritual, they were better able to cope with the anxiety caused by the loss.4

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FORTUNE TELLER: Our brains are prediction machines. They look for patterns and statistical regularities everywhere. But when they can’t make sense of something, we experience anxiety. That’s where ritual comes in. Its repetitive actions help us cope. Illustration by Ekosuwandono / Shutterstock.

Moving from the lab into the real world, my colleagues and I designed a field experiment on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius.5 To see whether some of the traditional local rituals helped people reduce anxiety, we measured a property of the autonomic nervous system known as heart-rate variability. A healthy heart does not beat evenly like a metronome. When we have a heart rate of 60 beats per minute, this does not mean that our heart ticks exactly once every second. Rather, it means that all the slightly different periods between each two successive beats average out as one second. This variance in the timing between beats is known as heart-rate variability. When it is high, the nervous system is more balanced, and the body is better able to respond to changing circumstances. But when we are stressed, this balance is disrupted and the heart beats in a more rigid way—it has low variability. As a result, the body maintains a state of high alert, which is experienced as anxiety.

Our study took place in a small fishing village called La Gaulette. As is often the case with such villages, most public life took place near the coast. All restaurants, shops, and other commercial activities were arranged alongside the coastal road, and so were all public services, including a police station and two places of worship: a Catholic church near the south entrance, and a Marathi Hindu temple on the north side. Sitting at the cafe each morning, we could see many of the local Hindu women, dressed in colorful saris, walk to the temple to perform religious prayers. Those prayers involved making offerings to the statues of various Hindu deities and executing circular movements with an incense burner or incense stick. These were just the kind of repetitive action patterns that we were interested in and, importantly, ones that were culturally scripted rather than dictated by the experiment.

Whether the sense of control is illusory is of little importance.

We recruited 75 of these women and split them into two groups. We asked those in the first group to meet our team at the temple. The second group arrived at a makeshift lab we had set up in a non-religious building of similar size and arrangement to the temple. This would be our control group. Participants wore a small monitor that recorded their heart beats before being invited to engage in a task that was designed to be stressful: We asked them to write an essay describing the kinds of precautions they would take when faced with an impending flood or cyclone. Such natural disasters regularly plague the island, often with catastrophic consequences, and are a constant source of anxiety for the locals. To create additional stress, we also told them that their essay would be evaluated by a group of public safety experts. After the stressor task, those who were in the temple were asked to go to the prayer room and perform their rituals in the same way as they always did. They entered the room in privacy, lit the incense, and made their offerings to the deities. Those in the control group went through the exact same procedure but performed no rituals. Instead, they were told to sit and relax.

As we predicted, the ritual had beneficial results. Reflecting on natural disasters caused a rise in anxiety for both groups. But those who performed the ritual were faster to recover from that anxiety. Their heart-rate variability increased by 30 percent, suggesting that they were better able to cope with the stress. This was also consistent with how they felt: Subjective ratings of anxiety were twice as high for those who had not performed the ritual. These are no trivial differences: Clinical studies have documented effects of similar magnitude between healthy individuals and people suffering from major depression.6 Ritual, it turns out, can be as effective in reducing stress as some of our best anxiety medications.

How can we explain these findings? Rituals are highly structured. They require rigidity (they must always be performed the “correct” way), repetition (the same actions performed again and again) and redundancy (they can go on for a long time). In other words, they are predictable. This predictability imposes order on the chaos of everyday life, which provides us with a sense of control over uncontrollable situations.

Studies show that, when people experience uncertainty and lack of control, they are more likely to see patterns or regularities where there are none. These patterns can range from visual illusions (such as seeing faces in the clouds) to seeing causality in random events and forming conspiracy theories.7 Under these circumstances people are also more likely to turn to ritualized behaviors. This is known as the compensatory control model: We compensate for lack of control in one domain by seeking it in another.8 Whether this sense of control is illusory is of little importance. What matters is that ritual can be an efficient coping mechanism, and this is why those domains of life that involve high stakes and uncertain outcomes are rife with rituals.

In the experiments conducted by Brooks and her colleagues, engaging in rituals helped participants to perform better in mathematics contests and sing more accurately in karaoke competitions. And in Israel the women who recited more psalms felt less need to take other precautions, which might have impeded them from going about their normal life. In contrast, those who did not perform as many rituals seemed overcome by anxiety. This led them to avoid public places, buses, restaurants, and large crowds after rocket attacks. This sounds very sensible until you learn that, even at the height of the conflict, the chances of getting killed in a terrorist attack in Israel were lower than those of dying in a car accident. Living in fear could do more harm than good, and rituals helped those women deal with their fears and live a normal life in the face of the conflict.

Our predictive brain does not like unpredictability.

Similar effects extend to a variety of other domains. A group of German psychologists found that people who used lucky charms and rituals such as keeping their fingers crossed performed better in an assortment of skill games and puzzles.9 Other studies have found that ritualization may help athletes perform better. Basketball and golf players are more successful after performing pre-shot rituals.10 Stopping them from performing these rituals can be detrimental to their performance, leading them to miss more shots.11 The reason for these remarkable effects appears to be that these rituals allow the athletes to ease their own anxiety, regaining a sense of control.

In recent years, philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists have revised their models of the human mind. The classical view was that our cognitive apparatus functions as a data-processing device: It receives input from the environment and reacts by producing the appropriate responses. But evidence has been mounting that our brain is much more sophisticated than that. It is a predictive device. Rather than passively absorbing information about the state of the world, it actively works to make inferences (predictions) about what types of stimuli it is most likely to encounter at any given situation. Those predictions are based on information derived from our prior experience and socialization, our surroundings, as well as hard-wired knowledge.

Take the blind spot in our vision. The optic nerve, a bundle of nerve fibers that carry information from the eye to the brain, passes through the retina itself. Consequently, the spot where the optic nerve enters the eyeball has no photoreceptor cells to detect light. This is why it is called a blind spot: Whatever part of our visual field falls on to that spot becomes invisible to us. If you had never noticed that you have a blind spot, that is because your brain makes up the missing part of the image by using information from the surrounding environment to fill in the gap.

Our brain makes similar types of inferences in all sorts of other domains. Imagine that you live on the outskirts of San Francisco, and as you wake up you feel your bed shake. Fearing it might be an earthquake, your immediate response might be to try to get out of the building as quickly as possible. But now imagine that you live in New York, which does not experience many earthquakes, and that an elevated train line runs alongside your building. Perhaps the first time that you wake up to the vibration you rush to the door, only to embarrass yourself as you run down the hallway in your underwear. But once you know what to expect when you feel the shake, it will no longer cause you to panic. As your brain has now updated its prior knowledge, it can predict with greater confidence that the shaking will not cause the roof to fall on your head. The situation is no longer stressful. In fact, over the years, the familiar sensation of the train going by at regular intervals may even start to feel comforting.

Because our brain never stops making these kinds of predictions, we tend to look for patterns and statistical regularities everywhere around us. This is extremely important, because any computational device (and the human brain is no exception) becomes dramatically more efficient when it can build on prior knowledge. This way, we do not have to learn everything from scratch. But one consequence of this cognitive architecture is that when our predictive potential is limited—that is, when there is high uncertainty—we experience anxiety. Our predictive brain does not like unpredictability.

This is where ritual comes in. The repetitive action patterns found in ritual function as cognitive gadgets that help us cope with stress. By embedding these gadgets into our cultures, all human societies—and its individuals—can capitalize on their potential.

Just ask Rafael Nadal.

Dimitris Xygalatas is an anthropologist and cognitive scientist who studies some of the things that make us human. Most of his research has focused on rituals and their ability to soothe, excite, unite, and divide us. To study these effects, he combines ethnographic field work with scientific experiments. He is based at the University of Connecticut, where he directs the Experimental Anthropology Lab.

Excerpted from Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, by Dimitris Xygalatas. Copyright © 2022 by Dimitris Xygalatas. Used with permission of Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. New York, NY. All rights reserved.

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kmaherali
Posts: 25105
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Is Matter Conscious?

Post by kmaherali »

Why the central problem in neuroscience is mirrored in physics.
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The nature of consciousness seems to be unique among scientific puzzles. Not only do neuroscientists have no fundamental explanation for how it arises from physical states of the brain, we are not even sure whether we ever will. Astronomers wonder what dark matter is, geologists seek the origins of life, and biologists try to understand cancer—all difficult problems, of course, yet at least we have some idea of how to go about investigating them and rough conceptions of what their solutions could look like. Our first-person experience, on the other hand, lies beyond the traditional methods of science. Following the philosopher David Chalmers, we call it the hard problem of consciousness.

But perhaps consciousness is not uniquely troublesome. Going back to Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, philosophers of science have struggled with a lesser known, but equally hard, problem of matter. What is physical matter in and of itself, behind the mathematical structure described by physics? This problem, too, seems to lie beyond the traditional methods of science, because all we can observe is what matter does, not what it is in itself—the “software” of the universe but not its ultimate “hardware.” On the surface, these problems seem entirely separate. But a closer look reveals that they might be deeply connected.

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Consciousness is a multifaceted phenomenon, but subjective experience is its most puzzling aspect. Our brains do not merely seem to gather and process information. They do not merely undergo biochemical processes. Rather, they create a vivid series of feelings and experiences, such as seeing red, feeling hungry, or being baffled about philosophy. There is something that it’s like to be you, and no one else can ever know that as directly as you do.

Our own consciousness involves a complex array of sensations, emotions, desires, and thoughts. But, in principle, conscious experiences may be very simple. An animal that feels an immediate pain or an instinctive urge or desire, even without reflecting on it, would also be conscious. Our own consciousness is also usually consciousness of something—it involves awareness or contemplation of things in the world, abstract ideas, or the self. But someone who is dreaming an incoherent dream or hallucinating wildly would still be conscious in the sense of having some kind of subjective experience, even though they are not conscious of anything in particular.

Philosophers and neuroscientists often assume that consciousness is like software, whereas the brain is like hardware.

Where does consciousness—in this most general sense—come from? Modern science has given us good reason to believe that our consciousness is rooted in the physics and chemistry of the brain, as opposed to anything immaterial or transcendental. In order to get a conscious system, all we need is physical matter. Put it together in the right way, as in the brain, and consciousness will appear. But how and why can consciousness result merely from putting together non-conscious matter in certain complex ways?

This problem is distinctively hard because its solution cannot be determined by means of experiment and observation alone. Through increasingly sophisticated experiments and advanced neuroimaging technology, neuroscience is giving us better and better maps of what kinds of conscious experiences depend on what kinds of physical brain states. Neuroscience might also eventually be able to tell us what all of our conscious brain states have in common: for example, that they have high levels of integrated information (per Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory), that they broadcast a message in the brain (per Bernard Baars’ Global Workspace Theory), or that they generate 40-hertz oscillations (per an early proposal by Francis Crick and Christof Koch). But in all these theories, the hard problem remains. How and why does a system that integrates information, broadcasts a message, or oscillates at 40 hertz feel pain or delight? The appearance of consciousness from mere physical complexity seems equally mysterious no matter what precise form the complexity takes.

Nor would it seem to help to discover the concrete biochemical, and ultimately physical, details that underlie this complexity. No matter how precisely we could specify the mechanisms underlying, for example, the perception and recognition of tomatoes, we could still ask: Why is this process accompanied by the subjective experience of red, or any experience at all? Why couldn’t we have just the physical process, but no consciousness?

Other natural phenomena, from dark matter to life, as puzzling as they may be, don’t seem nearly as intractable. In principle, we can see that understanding them is fundamentally a matter of gathering more physical detail: building better telescopes and other instruments, designing better experiments, or noticing new laws and patterns in the data we already have. If we were somehow granted knowledge of every physical detail and pattern in the universe, we would not expect these problems to persist. They would dissolve in the same way the problem of heritability dissolved upon the discovery of the physical details of DNA. But the hard problem of consciousness would seem to persist even given knowledge of every imaginable kind of physical detail.

In this way, the deep nature of consciousness appears to lie beyond scientific reach. We take it for granted, however, that physics can in principle tell us everything there is to know about the nature of physical matter. Physics tells us that matter is made of particles and fields, which have properties such as mass, charge, and spin. Physics may not yet have discovered all the fundamental properties of matter, but it is getting closer.

Yet there is reason to believe that there must be more to matter than what physics tells us. Broadly speaking, physics tells us what fundamental particles do or how they relate to other things, but nothing about how they are in themselves, independently of other things.

Charge, for example, is the property of repelling other particles with the same charge and attracting particles with the opposite charge. In other words, charge is a way of relating to other particles. Similarly, mass is the property of responding to applied forces and of gravitationally attracting other particles with mass, which might in turn be described as curving spacetime or interacting with the Higgs field. These are also things that particles do or ways of relating to other particles and to spacetime.

Conscious experiences are just the kind of things that physical structure could be the structure of.

In general, it seems all fundamental physical properties can be described mathematically. Galileo, the father of modern science, famously professed that the great book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Yet mathematics is a language with distinct limitations. It can only describe abstract structures and relations. For example, all we know about numbers is how they relate to the other numbers and other mathematical objects—that is, what they “do,” the rules they follow when added, multiplied, and so on. Similarly, all we know about a geometrical object such as a node in a graph is its relations to other nodes. In the same way, a purely mathematical physics can tell us only about the relations between physical entities or the rules that govern their behavior.

One might wonder how physical particles are, independently of what they do or how they relate to other things. What are physical things like in themselves, or intrinsically? Some have argued that there is nothing more to particles than their relations, but intuition rebels at this claim. For there to be a relation, there must be two things being related. Otherwise, the relation is empty—a show that goes on without performers, or a castle constructed out of thin air. In other words, physical structure must be realized or implemented by some stuff or substance that is itself not purely structural. Otherwise, there would be no clear difference between physical and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere abstraction. But what could this stuff that realizes or implements physical structure be, and what are the intrinsic, non-structural properties that characterize it? This problem is a close descendant of Kant’s classic problem of knowledge of things-in-themselves. The philosopher Galen Strawson has called it the hard problem of matter.

It is ironic, because we usually think of physics as describing the hardware of the universe—the real, concrete stuff. But in fact physical matter (at least the aspect that physics tells us about) is more like software: a logical and mathematical structure. According to the hard problem of matter, this software needs some hardware to implement it. Physicists have brilliantly reverse-engineered the algorithms—or the source code—of the universe, but left out their concrete implementation.

The hard problem of matter is distinct from other problems of interpretation in physics. Current physics presents puzzles, such as: How can matter be both particle-like and wave-like? What is quantum wavefunction collapse? Are continuous fields or discrete individuals more fundamental? But these are all questions of how to properly conceive of the structure of reality. The hard problem of matter would arise even if we had answers to all such questions about structure. No matter what structure we are talking about, from the most bizarre and unusual to the perfectly intuitive, there will be a question of how it is non-structurally implemented.

Indeed, the problem arises even for Newtonian physics, which describes the structure of reality in a way that makes perfect intuitive sense. Roughly speaking, Newtonian physics says that matter consists of solid particles that interact either by bumping into each other or by gravitationally attracting each other. But what is the intrinsic nature of the stuff that behaves in this simple and intuitive way? What is the hardware that implements the software of Newton’s equations? One might think the answer is simple: It is implemented by solid particles. But solidity is just the behavior of resisting intrusion and spatial overlap by other particles—that is, another mere relation to other particles and space. The hard problem of matter arises for any structural description of reality no matter how clear and intuitive at the structural level.

Like the hard problem of consciousness, the hard problem of matter cannot be solved by experiment and observation or by gathering more physical detail. This will only reveal more structure, at least as long as physics remains a discipline dedicated to capturing reality in mathematical terms.

Might the hard problem of consciousness and the hard problem of matter be connected? There is already a tradition for connecting problems in physics with the problem of consciousness, namely in the area of quantum theories of consciousness. Such theories are sometimes disparaged as fallaciously inferring that because quantum physics and consciousness are both mysterious, together they will somehow be less so. The idea of a connection between the hard problem of consciousness and the hard problem of matter could be criticized on the same grounds. Yet a closer look reveals that these two problems are complementary in a much deeper and more determinate way. One of the first philosophers to notice the connection was Leibniz all the way back in the late 17th century, but the precise modern version of the idea is due to Bertrand Russell. Recently, contemporary philosophers including Chalmers and Strawson have rediscovered it. It goes like this.

The hard problem of matter calls for non-structural properties, and consciousness is the one phenomenon we know that might meet this need. Consciousness is full of qualitative properties, from the redness of red and the discomfort of hunger to the phenomenology of thought. Such experiences, or “qualia,” may have internal structure, but there is more to them than structure. We know something about what conscious experiences are like in and of themselves, not just how they function and relate to other properties.

For example, think of someone who has never seen any red objects and has never been told that the color red exists. That person knows nothing about how redness relates to brain states, to physical objects such as tomatoes, or to wavelengths of light, nor how it relates to other colors (for example, that it’s similar to orange but very different from green). One day, the person spontaneously hallucinates a big red patch. It seems this person will thereby learn what redness is like, even though he or she doesn’t know any of its relations to other things. The knowledge he or she acquires will be non-relational knowledge of what redness is like in and of itself.

This suggests that consciousness—of some primitive and rudimentary form—is the hardware that the software described by physics runs on. The physical world can be conceived of as a structure of conscious experiences. Our own richly textured experiences implement the physical relations that make up our brains. Some simple, elementary forms of experiences implement the relations that make up fundamental particles. Take an electron, for example. What an electron does is to attract, repel, and otherwise relate to other entities in accordance with fundamental physical equations. What performs this behavior, we might think, is simply a stream of tiny electron experiences. Electrons and other particles can be thought of as mental beings with physical powers; as streams of experience in physical relations to other streams of experience.

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Manuel Litran / Paris Match via Getty Images

This idea sounds strange, even mystical, but it comes out of a careful line of thought about the limitations of science. Leibniz and Russell were determined scientific rationalists—as evidenced by their own immortal contributions to physics, logic, and mathematics—but equally deeply committed to the reality and uniqueness of consciousness. They concluded that in order to give both phenomena their proper due, a radical change of thinking is required.

And a radical change it truly is. Philosophers and neuroscientists often assume that consciousness is like software, whereas the brain is like hardware. This suggestion turns this completely around. When we look at what physics tells us about the brain, we actually just find software—purely a set of relations—all the way down. And consciousness is in fact more like hardware, because of its distinctly qualitative, non-structural properties. For this reason, conscious experiences are just the kind of things that physical structure could be the structure of.

Given this solution to the hard problem of matter, the hard problem of consciousness all but dissolves. There is no longer any question of how consciousness arises from non-conscious matter, because all matter is intrinsically conscious. There is no longer a question of how consciousness depends on matter, because it is matter that depends on consciousness—as relations depend on relata, structure depends on realizer, or software on hardware.

One might object that this is plain anthropomorphism, an illegitimate projection of human qualities on nature. After all, why do we think that physical structure needs some intrinsic realizer? Is it not because our own brains have intrinsic, conscious properties, and we like to think of nature in familiar terms? But this objection does not hold. The idea that intrinsic properties are needed to distinguish real and concrete from mere abstract structure is entirely independent of consciousness. Moreover, the charge of anthropomorphism can be met by a countercharge of human exceptionalism. If the brain is indeed entirely material, why should it be so different from the rest of matter when it comes to intrinsic properties?

This view, that consciousness constitutes the intrinsic aspect of physical reality, goes by many different names, but one of the most descriptive is “dual-aspect monism.” Monism contrasts with dualism, the view that consciousness and matter are fundamentally different substances or kinds of stuff. Dualism is widely regarded as scientifically implausible, because science shows no evidence of any non-physical forces that influence the brain.

Monism holds that all of reality is made of the same kind of stuff. It comes in several varieties. The most common monistic view is physicalism (also known as materialism), the view that everything is made of physical stuff, which only has one aspect, the one revealed by physics. This is the predominant view among philosophers and scientists today. According to physicalism, a complete, purely physical description of reality leaves nothing out. But according to the hard problem of consciousness, any purely physical description of a conscious system such as the brain at least appears to leave something out: It could never fully capture what it is like to be that system. That is to say, it captures the objective but not the subjective aspects of consciousness: the brain function, but not our inner mental life.

In order to give both phenomena their proper due, a radical change of thinking is required.

Russell’s dual-aspect monism tries to fill in this deficiency. It accepts that the brain is a material system that behaves in accordance with the laws of physics. But it adds another, intrinsic aspect to matter which is hidden from the extrinsic, third-person perspective of physics and which therefore cannot be captured by any purely physical description. But although this intrinsic aspect eludes our physical theories, it does not elude our inner observations. Our own consciousness constitutes the intrinsic aspect of the brain, and this is our clue to the intrinsic aspect of other physical things. To paraphrase Arthur Schopenhauer’s succinct response to Kant: We can know the thing-in-itself because we are it.

Dual-aspect monism comes in moderate and radical forms. Moderate versions take the intrinsic aspect of matter to consist of so-called protoconscious or “neutral” properties: properties that are unknown to science, but also different from consciousness. The nature of such neither-mental-nor-physical properties seems quite mysterious. Like the aforementioned quantum theories of consciousness, moderate dual-aspect monism can therefore be accused of merely adding one mystery to another and expecting them to cancel out.

The most radical version of dual-aspect monism takes the intrinsic aspect of reality to consist of consciousness itself. This is decidedly not the same as subjective idealism, the view that the physical world is merely a structure within human consciousness, and that the external world is in some sense an illusion. According to dual-aspect monism, the external world exists entirely independently of human consciousness. But it would not exist independently of any kind of consciousness, because all physical things are associated with some form of consciousness of their own, as their own intrinsic realizer, or hardware.

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Manuel Litran / Paris Match via Getty Images

As a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, dual-aspect monism faces objections of its own. The most common objection is that it results in panpsychism, the view that all things are associated with some form of consciousness. To critics, it’s just too implausible that fundamental particles are conscious. And indeed this idea takes some getting used to. But consider the alternatives. Dualism looks implausible on scientific grounds. Physicalism takes the objective, scientifically accessible aspect of reality to be the only reality, which arguably implies that the subjective aspect of consciousness is an illusion. Maybe so—but shouldn’t we be more confident that we are conscious, in the full subjective sense, than that particles are not?

A second important objection is the so-called combination problem. How and why does the complex, unified consciousness of our brains result from putting together particles with simple consciousness? This question looks suspiciously similar to the original hard problem. I and other defenders of panpsychism have argued that the combination problem is nevertheless not as hard as the original hard problem. In some ways, it is easier to see how to get one form of conscious matter (such as a conscious brain) from another form of conscious matter (such as a set of conscious particles) than how to get conscious matter from non-conscious matter. But many find this unconvincing. Perhaps it is just a matter of time, though. The original hard problem, in one form or another, has been pondered by philosophers for centuries. The combination problem has received much less attention, which gives more hope for a yet undiscovered solution.

The possibility that consciousness is the real concrete stuff of reality, the fundamental hardware that implements the software of our physical theories, is a radical idea. It completely inverts our ordinary picture of reality in a way that can be difficult to fully grasp. But it may solve two of the hardest problems in science and philosophy at once.

Hedda Hassel Mørch is a Norwegian philosopher and postdoctoral researcher hosted by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at NYU. She works on the combination problem and other topics related to dual-aspect monism and panpsychism.

This article was originally published in our “Consciousness” issue in April 2017.
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The Dalai Lama and Science - FULL INTERVIEW

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The Dalai Lama and Science

A reminder that our SPECIAL release of the EXTENDED INTERVIEW SERIES featuring those who participated as interviewees in the film Infinite Potential – The Life and Ideas of David Bohm – [The Director’s Cut.] continues with a new interview appearing fortnightly.

Last week we released the full interview with His Holiness the Dalai Lama; So if you have not seen it yet you can watch it now.

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WATCH NOW

https://www.infinitepotential.com/full- ... alai-lama/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AGXPzv2MI4&t=11s
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How philosophy turned into physics – and reality turned into information

Post by kmaherali »

The Nobel Prize in physics this year has been awarded “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”.

Read more: Nobel prize: physicists share prize for insights into the spooky world of quantum mechanics https://theconversation.com/nobel-prize ... ics-191884

To understand what this means, and why this work is important, we need to understand how these experiments settled a long-running debate among physicists. And a key player in that debate was an Irish physicist named John Bell.

In the 1960s, Bell figured out how to translate a philosophical question about the nature of reality into a physical question that could be answered by science – and along the way broke down the distinction between what we know about the world and how the world really is.

We can help you make informed decisions with our independent journalism.

Quantum entanglement

We know that quantum objects have properties we don’t usually ascribe to the objects of our ordinary lives. Sometimes light is a wave, sometimes it’s a particle. Our fridge never does this.

When attempting to explain this sort of unusual behaviour, there are two broad types of explanation we can imagine. One possibility is that we perceive the quantum world clearly, just as it is, and it just so happens to be unusual. Another possibility is that the quantum world is just like the ordinary world we know and love, but our view of it is distorted, so we can’t see quantum reality clearly, as it is.

In the early decades of the 20th century, physicists were divided about which explanation was right. Among those who thought the quantum world just is unusual were figures such as Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. Among those who thought the quantum world must be just like the ordinary world, and our view of it is simply foggy, were Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger.

Read more: What is quantum entanglement? A physicist explains the science of Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’ https://theconversation.com/what-is-qua ... nce-191927

At the heart of this division is an unusual prediction of quantum theory. According to the theory, the properties of certain quantum systems that interact remain dependent on each other – even when the systems have been moved a great distance apart.

In 1935, the same year he devised his famous thought experiment involving a cat trapped in a box, Schrödinger coined the term “entanglement” for this phenomenon. He argued it is absurd to believe the world works this way.

The problem with entanglement

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Niels Bohr (left) and Albert Einstein (right) argued for many years over whether the world was really as fuzzy and strange as quantum mechanics suggested. Paul Ehrenfest

If entangled quantum systems really remain connected even when they are separated by large distances, it would seem they are somehow communicating with each other instantaneously. But this sort of connection is not allowed, according to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Einstein called this idea “spooky action at a distance”.

Again in 1935, Einstein, along with two colleagues, devised a thought experiment that showed quantum mechanics can’t be giving us the whole story on entanglement. They thought there must be something more to the world that we can’t yet see.

But as time passed, the question of how to interpret quantum theory became an academic footnote. The question seemed too philosophical, and in the 1940s many of the brightest minds in quantum physics were busy using the theory for a very practical project: building the atomic bomb.

It wasn’t until the 1960s, when Irish physicist John Bell turned his mind to the problem of entanglement, that the scientific community realised this seemingly philosophical question could have a tangible answer.

Bell’s theorem

Using a simple entangled system, Bell extended Einstein’s 1935 thought experiment. He showed there was no way the quantum description could be incomplete while prohibiting “spooky action at a distance” and still matching the predictions of quantum theory.

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John Bell in his office at CERN in Switzerland. CERN

Not great news for Einstein, it seems. But this was not an instant win for his opponents.

This is because it was not evident in the 1960s whether the predictions of quantum theory were indeed correct. To really prove Bell’s point, someone had to put this philosophical argument about reality, transformed into a real physical system, to an experimental test.

And this, of course, is where two of this year’s Nobel laureates enter the story. First John Clauser, and then Alain Aspect, performed the experiments on Bell’s proposed system that ultimately showed the predictions of quantum mechanics to be accurate. As a result, unless we accept “spooky action at a distance”, there is no further account of entangled quantum systems that can describe the observed quantum world.

So, Einstein was wrong?

It is perhaps a surprise, but these advances in quantum theory appear to have shown Einstein to be wrong on this point. That is, it seems we do not have a foggy view of a quantum world that is just like our ordinary world.

But the idea that we perceive clearly an inherently unusual quantum world is likewise too simplistic. And this provides one of the key philosophical lessons of this episode in quantum physics.

It is no longer clear we can reasonably talk about the quantum world beyond our scientific description of it – that is, beyond the information we have about it.

As this year’s third Nobel laureate, Anton Zeilinger, put it:

the distinction between reality and our knowledge of reality, between reality and information, cannot be made. There is no way to refer to reality without using the information we have about it.

This distinction, which we commonly assume to underpin our ordinary picture of the world, is now irretrievably blurry. And we have John Bell to thank.

https://theconversation.com/how-philoso ... l&he=email
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One of the great science Partnerships

Post by kmaherali »

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Basil Hiley and David Bohm

One of the great science Partnerships

A Partnership in search for meaning and a quest to understand the underlying nature of Reality. Extended interview with Basil Hiley is now available and should not be missed….Dear Friends, today you have an opportunity to watch our extended interview with Basil Hiley, Quantum Physicist and Professor at University College London, who featured in our film Infinite Potential – The Life and Ideas of David Bohm – [The Director’s Cut]

After Bohm’s period in exile, he (Bohm) eventually moved to the UK where he accepted a position as chair of theoretical physics at Birkbeck College, University College London. It was here that he fortuitously met with and formed one of the most enduring science partnerships of his life with Physicist Basil Hiley.

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WATCH NOW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO8hR2z8yW4

Hiley recalls that when he first heard Bohm speaking, he was “blown away”, saying that he never heard such “an inspirational talk”. Bohm was talking about physics in an entirely new and original way, raising questions about the need for new concepts that Hiley says he could not get any of his lecturers at Kings college to discuss.

Hiley recalls that Bohm was never afraid to break with orthodox and established beliefs quoting Bohm as saying “if we are to develop new concepts we need to be like children, forming concepts from scratch and not rely on concepts we were taught"...

and Hiley continues "The mathematics then enabled us to dress the ideas in adult clothes......and once the foundations of his (Bohm’s) ideas became clear, we were able to expand the principles to wider and wider domains, not restricted to physics and mathematics, but to a whole new way of thinking about mind and ultimately consciousness”.

Remember it was at Birkbeck College, UCL, that Bohm’s ‘Hidden Variables’ theory was revived giving us the most complete and coherent picture of the nature of reality.

Watch the full un-cut interview now with Quantum Physicist Basil Hiley. And remember over the following weeks you will have more from the extended interview series which will include full interviews with lifelong friends of Bohm Maureen Doolan and Biographer David Peat, Quantum Theorist David Schrum, Physicist Jan Walleczek, Artist Sir Antony Gormley and more…

As our previous mails indicated, we are posting one new extended Interview, fortnightly.


WATCH NOW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO8hR2z8yW4

https://mailchi.mp/infinitepotential.co ... 5dd2856923
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Harness Your Heart Intelligence for a Happier Life

Post by kmaherali »

Dear Karim,

In a world where stress and anxiety seem to be on the rise, it's crucial that we discover effective ways to manage our emotions and nurture a sense of inner peace and balance. Scientific research has unveiled a fascinating aspect of our existence: the heart possesses its own intricate nervous system and electromagnetic field, capable of influencing our emotions, thoughts, and overall well-being.

Today, I want to share with you some powerful insights on how we can harness the remarkable power of our heart intelligence to reduce stress and cultivate happier lives.

Let's dive in and explore:

1. Understanding Our Place in the Universe: We are an integral part of a Universal Consciousness that animates all life. This means we live in a spiritual universe, and each of us is an emanation of this profound source. Love is at the core of this universe, and when we fully embrace and receive this love, practicing heart coherence and heart lock-in becomes a natural expression of our being. This understanding fills our hearts with boundless joy and makes it easier to embody LIFE – Love In Full Expression.

2. Practicing Heart Coherence: Heart coherence is a physiological state in which the heart's rhythms become smooth and harmonious, aligning the body and mind. It leads to increased emotional balance, mental clarity, and overall well-being. You can cultivate heart coherence through practices like meditation, deep breathing exercises, and mindfulness. Simply taking a few moments each day to quiet your mind, focus on your heart, and breathe deeply can establish a profound connection with your heart's intelligence.

3. Heart-Centered Visualization Exercises: Engaging in visualizations that evoke positive emotions and focus on the heart's energy can strengthen your connection to your heart's intelligence. Picture a loving light or warmth radiating from your heart, enveloping your entire being and extending to those around you.

4. Heart Lock-In Technique: This technique allows us to deepen our connection with the heart's intelligence by concentrating our attention on the heart area and recalling a positive feeling or memory. Immersing ourselves in this heartfelt experience amplifies the heart's electromagnetic field, promoting emotional wellness and expanding our capacity for love and compassion.

5. The Role of Gratitude in Heart Intelligence: Holding a state of gratitude significantly enhances heart coherence and emotional well-being. Taking a moment each day to reflect on and express gratitude for the people, experiences, and blessings in your life opens your heart to greater possibilities.

Managing to maintain balance and inner harmony is no easy feat for any of us. But, when we have potent tools, like the assortment above that cater to unlocking your heart’s intelligence, the rough waters we navigate on the daily become easier.

And, not only does this cultivation of personal peace benefit us, but when we raise our vibration toward the powerful resonance of love and compassion, we create a ripple effect that touches everyone we cross paths with each day.

In these practices we live a delicious life individually and collectively so here is to living in heart coherence!

In Service,
Steve


Steve Farrell

Executive Director
Humanity's Team

https://humanitysteam.org
kmaherali
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14th ANNUAL GLOBAL ONENESS SUMMIT & CELEBRATION

Post by kmaherali »

Transforming our Lives Through
Conscious Creativity

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21ST THROUGH TUESDAY, OCTOBER 24TH, 2023

Over 45 FREE Panels with Spiritual Visionaries, Scientists, Transformational Leaders, and Musicians, plus the International Shout-Out Love Event!

A FREE 4-Day Global Gathering and Celebration with performances, music, panels, mini-masterclasses, and immersive experiences guided by world-renowned Visionaries, Transformational Leaders, Scientists, and award-winning Musicians.

SIGN UP FOR FREE https://www.humanitysteam.org/g1summit-register-page-1

There is something for everyone in the lineup of over 60 world-renowned conscious leaders including:


Gregg Braden, Suzanne Giesemann, Rainn Wilson, Riane Eisler, Dr. Shamini Jain, Neale Donald Walsch, Bruce H. Lipton Ph.D., Dr. Sue Morter, don Oscar Miro-Quesada, Marci Shimoff, Dr. Eben Alexander, Ken Honda, Debra Poneman, Steve McIntosh, Patricia Cota Robles, Andrew Harvey, Dr. Anita Sanchez, Dr. Robert Atkinson, Kristin Engvig, and many others.
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A U.K. University Will Confer a New Title: A Master’s Degree in the Occult

Post by kmaherali »

The postgraduate degree, to be offered at the University of Exeter starting next year, will focus on the history of magic, folklore and rituals.

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The new postgraduate degree program at the University of Exeter in Britain taps into growing interest in the history of witchcraft and other related subjects.Credit...Jonathan Player for The New York Times

In the ancient city of Exeter, three women were hanged for practicing witchcraft in the late 17th century, the last of such executions in England. Now, merely a short walk from where the hangings occurred, the University of Exeter will offer a postgraduate degree in magic and occult science, which the school says is the first of its kind at a British university.

Prof. Emily Selove, the head of the new program and an associate professor in medieval Arabic literature, said the idea for the degree, which will be offered starting in September 2024, came out of the recent surge in interest in the history of witchcraft and a desire to create a space where research on magic could be studied across academic fields.

Coursework will include the study of Western dragons in lore, literature and art; archaeology theory; the depiction of women in the Middle Ages; the practice of deception and illusion; and the philosophy of psychedelics. Through the lenses of Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, lecturers will explore how magic has influenced society and science.

Christina Oakley Harrington, a retired academic of medieval history and the founder of Treadwell’s, a London bookstore specializing in literature on magic and spiritualism, said that many witches she knew were talking about the degree program, announced last week, and were thinking about enrolling.

“Not because they’re idiots and think it’s going to teach them how to wave a magic wand and do a spell,” Dr. Oakley Harrington said. “They’re people who have just a huge curiosity about the world and the way we perceive the seen and the unseen worlds.”

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Prof. Emily Selove is seated in a field with stones arranged in a circle behind her.
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Prof. Emily Selove, of the University of Exeter, during a visit to the Dartmoor stone circles in Sheepstor, England. She said she had received a few hundred inquiries about the new degree program on magic and the occult.Credit...Michael Kingsley

And in the United States, where fewer people are affiliated with religious institutions than in the past, interest in all things magic has surged. Six in 10 U.S. adults believe in one or more of the following: reincarnation, astrology, psychics and the presence of spiritual energy in physical objects like mountains or trees, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center study.

There has also been renewed interest in witches, with feminism and pop culture embracing them as symbols of female independence. The trend is reflected in posts on TikTok, where videos under the #WitchTok tag have amassed nearly 50 billion views on topics such as cleansing homes of unwanted energy and identifying the qualities that make a person a witch.

Dr. Oakley Harrington said that she had seen an increase in sales in books on feminist witchcraft and on the history of magic, including to customers in their teens and early 20s. “They will pick up a book on witch hunts, which they wouldn’t have 10 years ago,” she said.

Pam Grossman, an author and the host of the popular “The Witch Wave” podcast who Vulture described as “the Terry Gross of witches,” said that people did not need to be “woo woo” to be interested in magic. “Whether or not one believes in magic, it is still worthy of academic rigor because human beings have practiced magic for thousands upon thousands of years, and therefore it is worthy of study and attention,” she said. This weekend, Ms. Grossman is leading the Occult Humanities Conference, hosted by New York University.

While some schools, like the University of Exeter, are adding to their humanities programs, others have eliminated courses because of funding shortfalls. West Virginia University said in August that it was shutting down 32 of its 338 majors and cutting programs including creative writing and languages. At the same time, some colleges are emphasizing career-focused programs, such as supply chain management.

The University of Exeter said it was the first British university to offer a degree in magic, but other universities have offered courses and certificates on the subject. The University of Amsterdam offers a specialization in Western esotericism. The religion department at Rice University in Texas offers a certificate in gnosticism, esotericism and mysticism. Career paths could include work in museums or art organizations, leading spiritual retreats, or pursuing further academic research in the field, Dr. Selove said.

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The logo for The University of Exeter’s Center for Magic and Esotericism. It has 16 squares containing Arabic letters.
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The University of Exeter’s Center for Magic and Esotericism explores the history of magic, occult and esoteric literature.
Credit...University of Exeter

Magic is sometimes thrown around as a synonym for false thinking, said Prof. Jeffrey J. Kripal, who helped to create the Rice University certificate program. “People have been practicing magical rituals and thinking about the world in magical terms much longer and deeper than the world religions,” Dr. Kripal said. He added that the defunding of studies in the humanities could lead to a more polarized world that is less prepared to cope with the biggest issues facing society.

Southwest England has a long history of witches and witchcraft, and a concentration of people who are interested in the subject. The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, about 60 miles west of Exeter, has a collection of more than 2,000 artifacts representing British magical traditions, from medieval magic to modern Wicca, which is part of the contemporary pagan movement.

Dr. Selove said she had received a few hundred inquiries in recent days from students interested in the degree at the University of Exeter. “If we are looking for truly new and creative solutions to the problems that we as a society face, then we need to be honest and courageous about the fact that some of our tried and true methodologies do have a limit,” she said. “Let’s cautiously and responsibly try some new or some old ideas that we’ve thrown out.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/worl ... n=Trending
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How a Few Days Sailing in the Aegean Changed My Mind About the Fundamental Nature of Things

Post by kmaherali »

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A few years ago, my wife, Sarah, and I went on a sailing trip on the eastern Aegean. It was heaven: The two of us out at sea, charting a course between Greek islands and the coast of Turkey, taking turns helming the boat and dozing below, surrounded by all the glittering blue of the sea.

As we hopped from port to port, I couldn’t help but notice that the names of many of the places we passed were familiar to me, as I had come across them in my work as a historian. Thirty or forty miles to the south of our boat was Miletus, the birthplace of some of the first recorded theorists of the physical world. Twenty miles to the east in Ephesus was the home of Heraclitus, the earliest person whose reflections on the interrelatedness of things have come down to us. Across a nearby peninsula, just 70 miles away, was Lesbos, the island of Sappho and Alcaeus, the greatest early lyric poets. To the south in Samos was the birthplace of Pythagoras, an early theorist of an everlasting soul.

It struck me that not so far out of view from the cockpit of our small boat was the whole province in which Greek philosophy had begun. Those gray-blue masses of island and mainland hid within them the thinkers’ cities.

There, afloat on the water, I began wondering about the relationship of places and ideas — how places can open up the way we think and feel, and give access to minds, however distant and strange. I realized then that philosophy has a geography. To be in the places these thinkers knew, visit their cities, sail their seas and find their landscapes is to know something about them that cannot be found otherwise; and despite that locatedness, and despite their age, the frame of mind of these first thinkers remains astonishingly and surprisingly illuminating today.

But why here and why then? Several centuries earlier, the great near-eastern civilizations of the Bronze Age, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, eastern Turkey and Crete, had all collapsed or nearly so. A wild and anarchic period of petty kings and sea pirates — the world, essentially, portrayed by Homer in “The Iliad” — had followed. But then, from about 650 B.C. onward, there was an emergence and a renaissance, as a constellation of independent harbor cities started to emerge in the eastern Aegean. They were mainly merchant oligarchies, often deeply skeptical of the virtues of monarchy, dependent more on trade than agriculture, absorbing the ancient wisdom from the earlier civilizations to the east but crucially not dominated by them. The trading Greeks could take what they wanted (math, astronomy, sculpture, temples, alphabetic writing, the making of gold and silver jewelry) but remain independent.

Above all, the Greeks were not subject to vast instituted kingly and priestly bureaucracies. A mental freedom coursed through their cities. They were adventurous, expert sailors and shipbuilders, sending expeditions out to the far north of the Black Sea and to the western end of the Mediterranean, taking olives and vines to southern France, bringing back shiploads of silver from the great mines of southern Spain, lacing the Mediterranean with the bright wakes their poetry celebrated.

Entrepreneurial qualities governed them: inventiveness, a sprightliness of mind, a new athleticism, a certain fluidity of thought, a desire to rule themselves, to generate their own systems of law and regulate their turbulent lives and to find justice by accommodating difference.

These harbor cities were the homes of the people generally considered to be the first philosophers, with lives dependent on the sea and on the connections the sea could provide. This version of Greece in the centuries between 700 and 500 was not land-based. It essentially existed at sea and, where it touched the land, it appeared and manifested itself as the cities from which these philosophers came.

What we think of now as the mainland of Greece, then filled with communities of farmer-warriors, played essentially no part. Recorded philosophy was almost entirely a harbor phenomenon, a byproduct of trading hubs on the margins of Asia, on the islands, and eventually in the rich lands of Sicily and southern Italy. Its creators were from the mobile edges, merchants in ideas, people from communities in which exchange was the medium of significance and for whom inherited belief was not enough.

Those mercantile qualities of fluidity and connectedness were precisely the governing aspects of the new thought. The philosophers’ emphasis was on interchange and, in Heraclitus in particular, the virtues of tension. Just as in a bow, he wrote, the string pulls against the frame, and would collapse if either string or frame failed; a just society needs to be founded on a tension between its constituent parts. Everything flowed through everything else, multiplicity was goodness and singularity the grounds of either sterility or tyranny.

There is nothing stiff about this way of thinking. These early Greek forms of thought cross all the boundaries between poet and thinker, mystic and scientist, in a rolling, cyclical, wave-based vision of the nature of reality. The thinkers did not provide a set of rationalist solutions nor of religious doctrines, but again and again explored the borderland between those ways of seeing. Possibility and inquiry, the effects of suggestion and implication, rather than unconsidered belief or blank assertion, were the seedbed for the new ideas.

This harbor mind holds lessons for us now. We may want fixed answers and rigid definitions. but vitality — and perhaps even health — lies in the ability to stay afloat, stay loose, stay connected, stay with the questions and entertain doubt as the unlikely bedrock of understanding. The only understanding is in the fluidity of mind.

Who would have guessed that a few days setting sail in the cool of a Greek morning, dropping anchor in sandy, eye-blue bays, and swimming in the shade of olive trees on shore with sheep bells ticktocking beside us, could have started to change my mind about the fundamental nature of things? But it did.

And if anyone asks me why I now think as I do, I can answer: Because I once went sailing in the sea where philosophy began.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/23/opin ... raphy.html
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From Quantum Physics to Divine Purpose: A Journey of Understanding

Post by kmaherali »

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The realms of quantum physics and spirituality, while seemingly divergent, have been on a converging path, seeking to answer the very essence of our existence. Figures like Nassim Haramein, Gregg Braden, and the insights gleaned from "Conversations with God" have been instrumental in bridging this gap, offering a lens through which we can perceive the interconnectedness of science and spirit.

Quantum Mysteries and the Fabric of Reality

Quantum physics, at its core, ventures deep into the enigmatic realms of the universe's smallest constituents. It presents a world that defies logic – particles can not only occupy one position but can exist in a superposition – essentially being in multiple places simultaneously. The renowned double-slit experiment exemplifies the bizarre nature of this realm, showing how light can exhibit both particle and wave characteristics, contingent on observation alone.

The phenomenon of entanglement, described by Einstein as "spooky action at a distance," illustrates the profound interconnection that can exist between particles, regardless of the vastness of space separating them. This interconnectedness challenges our conventional understanding of space and time, hinting at a more profound, unified underpinning of reality.

Nassim Haramein's pioneering work in quantum gravity and cosmology underscores this inherent interconnectedness. He delves into the holographic principle, suggesting that every minute part of the universe embodies the information of the entirety, a notion echoing the hermetic principle of "As above, so below; as below, so above." This perspective not only aligns with spiritual understandings of unity but accentuates them. The infinitesimal and the immense become reflections of one another, intertwining our very existence with the expansive cosmos.

The Resonance of Spirituality and Science

Gregg Braden, renowned for his synthesis of ancient spiritual wisdom and modern scientific insight, introduces the concept of a divine energy matrix pervading the cosmos. This matrix isn't just a passive tapestry; it's interactive and dynamic. Braden's research underscores the potent electromagnetic field of the human heart, which significantly eclipses that of the brain. This field can act as an interface between our inner states and the surrounding environment, implying that our emotional and spiritual states can tangibly shape our external world.

Such a perspective finds resonance in the "Conversations with God" series, where the profound idea of thoughts manifesting reality is iterated and emphasized. This spiritual understanding finds surprising parallels in quantum mechanics, especially in the observer effect. Here, observation isn't a passive act; it's a participatory one, with the observer's presence determining the observed outcome. The texts of "Conversations with God" intimate that, in life, our deepest intentions, desires, and beliefs play a similar role, sculpting our experiences and realities in everyday life.

The Melding Point of Purpose

Central to "Conversations with God" is the revelation of our inherent divinity. We aren't just bystanders in the cosmic play but active participants, channeling the Divine to experience, explore, and express the myriad facets of existence. This divine play, when examined through the lens of quantum understanding, becomes a harmonious resonance, with our individual and collective energy fields vibrating in sync with the cosmos's vast orchestration.

Both Nassim Haramein, with his unified field theory, and Gregg Braden, with his insights on heart coherence, accentuate this cosmic dance of interrelation and interdependence. Their work and insights, along with the wisdom from "Conversations with God", spotlight a universe that is alive, conscious, and ever-responsive. Every emotion, intent, and action we undertake sends ripples across this universal fabric – influencing, shaping, and co-creating the reality we experience.

Towards an Enlightened Future

The future beckons with a promise of deeper understanding as we continue to explore the crossroads of science and spirituality. The insights from quantum physics, combined with the profound wisdom from spiritual teachers and texts, provide a roadmap for humanity's evolution.

As we stand at this nexus, figures like Nassim Haramein, Gregg Braden, and inspirations from works like "Conversations with God" serve as torchbearers. They light our path, reminding us that every quest for scientific understanding is also a journey of the soul. Embracing both these avenues with an open heart and mind will undoubtedly lead us to a holistic comprehension of our divine purpose in this intricate cosmic dance.

Practical Implications: Living at the Crossroads of Science and Spirituality

The converging ideas of quantum physics and spiritual wisdom aren't just ethereal concepts reserved for theoretical discussions; they have tangible implications on our day-to-day existence.

Understanding the interconnectedness of all things can shape our perception of self and the environment. If, at the quantum level, particles are interconnected, it's a potent reminder that our actions, no matter how small, ripple outward, affecting the larger whole. This knowledge can foster a heightened sense of responsibility towards our environment and fellow beings, pushing for sustainable living and more compassionate choices.

Furthermore, the concept of our consciousness actively shaping our reality, as emphasized both in quantum theory and in "Conversations with God," can revolutionize mental health approaches. Recognizing our thoughts and intentions as powerful agents can lead to proactive mental wellness strategies. Meditation, mindfulness, and positive affirmations, rooted in both spiritual traditions and now validated by neuroscientific research, become invaluable tools for well-being.

Case Studies in Quantum Spirituality: When Theory Meets Experience

Throughout history, numerous accounts hint at the overlap of the spiritual and the quantum. Mystics, sages, and even everyday individuals have shared experiences that echo the theories of quantum physicists.

Take, for example, the phenomenon of spontaneous healing. Gregg Braden often delves into instances where individuals, harnessing profound belief or through specific meditative practices, have induced remission in otherwise untreatable ailments. This mirrors the quantum idea of the observer effect, where consciousness can influence outcomes.

Near-death experiences, or NDE’s, also offer intriguing insights. Many recount a profound sense of interconnectedness during these moments, that is, a profound understanding that all things are one and the same. Such accounts mirror theories posited by thinkers like Nassim Haramein, suggesting that our consciousness is part of a unified, all-encompassing field.

Another compelling case is that of synchronicity. Carl Jung's concept of meaningful coincidences has been described by many as moments where intention, thought, or desire aligns uncannily with an external event. This idea parallels quantum entanglement, suggesting that on some unseen level, our internal states are intricately linked with the external world.

These real-life cases serve as compelling testaments to the profound interplay between the spiritual and the scientific, showcasing that theory and experience often walk hand in hand.

Dive Deeper: A Spectrum of Learning with Humanity’s Team

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kmaherali
Posts: 25105
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

The Return of the Magicians

Post by kmaherali »

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In the last few weeks, I’ve found myself writing columns that touch on the rapid advance of artificial intelligence, the mystery of unidentified flying objects haunting American skies and the enthusiasm in certain circles for taking mind-altering substances that yield a feeling, illusory or not, of contact with supernatural-seeming entities.

These are very different stories, in a way. The A.I. revolution belongs to the realm of serious and lavishly funded science. The U.F.O. phenomenon hovers on the paranormal and pseudoscientific fringe. The spiritual dimensions explored by users of drugs like DMT belong primarily to the terrain of psychology and religion — either as manifestations of some sort of Jungian unconscious or else, well, as actual spiritual dimensions.

But there is a shared spirit in these stories, a common impulse to the quests: the desire to encounter or invent some sort of nonhuman consciousness that might help us toward leaps that we can’t make on our own.

This impulse is an ancient one: The idea that one might bind a djinn, create a golem or manipulate a god or fairy to do your bidding is inscribed deep in the human imagination. Once upon a time this magician’s art seemed like a plausible rival to scientific technique, or a complementary means of mastery over nature; indeed, the scientist and the magician were often overlapping figures in the early modern imagination, blurring together in vocations like alchemy and characters like Dr. Faustus.

They separated primarily because the scientific method simply worked in a way that magical conjuring did not. Or as C.S. Lewis put it 80 years ago, in “The Abolition of Man,” “The serious magical endeavor and the serious scientific endeavor are twins: One was sickly and died, the other strong and throve.”

But now we are in an era when people talk increasingly about the limits of the scientific endeavor — the increasing impediments to discovering new ideas, the absence of low-hanging scientific fruit, the near impossibility, given the laws of physics as we understand them, of ever spreading human civilization beyond our lonely planet or beyond our isolated solar system. Meanwhile, the speculations of scientific theorists and philosophers are reaching beyond the very confines of our universe — to an ever-multiplying multiverse whose branches never touch, or an infinite-seeming hall of simulations run by some civilization with godlike capacities relative to ours.

So it’s not surprising, in this age of frustration and re-mystification, that our thoughts and efforts might turn back to the magician’s art, in search of powers that might help us escape the limits of our island planet, our paltry life span, the crooked timber of our nature. But not simply back to the old magic of spells and incantations (though there is a lot of that these days as well). Instead in the U.F.O. fascination and the A.I. enthusiasm and the drug-enabled “psychonaut” explorations, we see attempts to link magic to science, or to deploy science to do magic, using telescopes or chemicals or vast computing powers to discover or create what the old magicians tried to conjure — namely, beings that can enlighten us, elevate us, serve us and usher in the Age of Aquarius, the Singularity or both.

The hardheaded reader will object that one of these examples isn’t like the others. Simple common sense tells us that the U.F.O. speculators are probably not about to get in touch with extraplanetary aliens. The materialist premises of modern science reassure us that our hallucinogen-ingesting psychonauts are not actually in touch ‌‌with the originals of Titania and Oberon, Jupiter or Odin. Whereas the A.I. project seems to be advancing rapidly, with no speculative leaps required to see its promise. So why lump it in with the dubious and paranormal? Why invoke sorcery to explain a straightforward scientific triumph?

Stipulate for the sake of argument that the A.I. project is more likely to have immediate practical effects than the search for extraterrestrial life or any drug-aided communion with the spirit realm. There are still good reasons to analyze its efforts in terms of djinns, golems and the like.

First, because this is how its own enthusiasts talk. Here’s Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas, Austin, and one of the most accessible online writers on issues related to computer intelligence, on his own reaction to the new chatbots:

An alien has awoken — admittedly, an alien of our own fashioning, a golem, more the embodied spirit of all the words on the internet than a coherent self with independent goals. How could our eyes not pop with eagerness to learn everything this alien has to teach? If the alien sometimes struggles with arithmetic or logic puzzles, if its eerie flashes of brilliance are intermixed with stupidity, hallucinations, and misplaced confidence … well then, all the more interesting! Could the alien ever cross the line into sentience, to feeling anger and jealousy and infatuation and the rest rather than just convincingly playacting them? Who knows? And suppose not: is a p-zombie, shambling out of the philosophy seminar room into actual existence, any less fascinating?

Or consider a recent Wall Street Journal essay by Henry Kissinger, the former Google C.E.O. Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher of MIT, which effectively repurposes Arthur C. Clarke’s admonition that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” as a kind of boast. With the emergent forms of A.I., they argue, we have created an intelligence that can yield answers the way an oracle might or a Magic 8 Ball: through processes that are invisible to us, permanently beyond our understanding, so complex as to be indistinguishable from action in a supernatural mind.

As such, they argue, the A.I. revolution represents a fundamental break with Enlightenment science, which “was trusted because each step of replicable experimental processes was also tested, hence trusted.” The knowledge granted us by “generative AI” will be far more mysterious; its truth will need to be “justified by entirely different methods, and it may never become similarly absolute.” Their vision of the human-to-AI relationship evokes Delphic priestesses channeling Apollo or mediums reaching through the veil: “We will have to ask continuously: What about the machine has not yet been revealed to us? What obscure knowledge is it hiding?”

And this kind of magical language mostly describes A.I. as an answer machine, Aaronson’s “embodied spirit of all the words on the internet.” It doesn’t even get into the question of whether an A.I. can actually attain consciousness, where the sorcerous aspect of this project is even more explicit.

After all, we don’t really understand our own consciousness, we haven’t even begun to solve the so-called hard problem of the mind and its relationship to matter. Yet here we are telling ourselves, in hope and also fear, that these machines whose workings we don’t fully understand might make the leap to self-awareness if only we keep making their processes more sophisticated, more beyond our ken.

In this sense what we’re doing resembles a complex incantation, a calling of spirits from Shakespeare’s “vasty deep.” Build a system that imitates human intelligence, make it talk like a person and answer questions like an encyclopedia and solve problems through leaps we can’t quite follow, and wait expectantly to see if something infuses itself into the mysterious space where the leaps are happening, summoned by the inviting home that we have made.

Such a summoning is most feared by A.I. alarmists, at present, because the spirit might be disobedient, destructive, a rampaging Skynet bent on our extermination.

But the old stories of the magicians and their bargains, of Faust and his Mephistopheles, suggest that we would be wise to fear apparent obedience as well.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/02/opin ... pe=Article
kmaherali
Posts: 25105
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Sacred Medicine

Post by kmaherali »

Hi Karim,

We talk a lot around here about medicinal foods, plants, mushrooms and herbs because we believe they offer profound physical benefits to your body and your overall health. But there is another ancient alternative to modern medicine that is taking the world by storm...

Exciting new studies are showing that certain vision-inducing plants from indigenous traditions around the world may hold incredible potential for healing our mind and body.

Scientists began to call these compounds psychedelics back in the 1950s, and that name became somehwat stigmatized as a "hippy" term in the 60s and 70s.

But major medical institutions like Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Northwestern are now showing that psychedelics are unparalleled in their ability to heal a number of mental health challenges.

If you’re on this natural healing path, you probably check in with yourself regularly to see if you’re taking the right supplements and herbs, drinking enough water, or getting enough rest.

But are you making the time to enter the realms of the deep unseen? Because it is here that secrets about your health and who you are may be discovered.

The modern world is beginning to re-embrace what many have always known... when it comes to wholeness and wellness, it is impossible to separate the mind, body and soul.

Which is why I’m so excited to tell you about The 2024 Expanded States of Consciousness World Summit https://trk.klclick3.com/ls/click?upn=u ... 8tXQ-3D-3D. This extraordinary FREE event invites you to dive into the deep expanses of your mind and spirit, in the name of healing and transformation.

Drawing on the latest research, practices and tools - from meditation, breathwork, and plant medicines, to shamanism, music, chanting and more - this summit features over 60 world-class experts, practitioners, scientists, researchers, teachers, and wisdom holders, including…

Yours truly :) I hung out with Dr. Fleet Maull (host of the event and an all-around fascinating guy) to discuss one of my favorite topics: sacred medicine and the science-backed physical and metaphysical healing properties of ancient entheogenic plants.

See you inside!

Expand Your Consciousness Now https://trk.klclick3.com/ls/click?upn=u ... eeuA-3D-3D

Stay curious,

Nick Polizzi
Host of Healing Kitchen: Let Food Be Thy Medicine
& Founder of The Sacred Science
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