"It is important to teach schoolchildren that violence is a fruitless approach to solving problems.
The use of violence and force inevitably entails unanticipated consequences and rarely any solution.
It would be much better if children grew up accustomed to the idea that the proper way to resolve problems is through dialogue, through reaching a mutually agreeable solution."
~ The Language of Nature ~
~ The Trees Will Teach You Telepathy ~
Have you ever wondered what “telepathy” really means?
Have you ever experienced it?
Have you ever wanted to experience it?
Well you can, and you should.
Telepathy is commonly known as ”mind to mind” communication, without the sounds of linguistics or speaking, it is an instant form of transference of thoughts and senses.
Some think it is merely ”language-less” – it is not.
Telepathy alone may be, but Empathic Telepathy is a language full of silent communion and it is this form that is natural to us.
Some of us know that thought-forms can be transferred from person to person, and even some technologies have been developed which can do this.
And there are spiritual beings and entities who can be telepathic with us.
They can transfer either thoughts or feelings, or both.
This is a mixed cornucopia of input.
But what I am talking about is Empathic Telepathy which is natural and organic to living beings, a way of being that is fulfilling, and we can Be this way with all Living Beings.
Nature has a language that communicates itself through its sounds, scents and colors, textures and more.
It has both history and panoramic complexities of sentience we are at a loss to detect, much less describe, and its composition is communicated often so profoundly, beautifully.
Countless poems throughout history have been written in humble attempts to write in words all that has been received. Many readers of such poems sense the beauty of them, but it is mostly the writers response to their communion with Nature which is being conveyed through the poems, and often apologetically for an egregiously inept ability to capture in writing all that was received.
The reader cannot experience what has been telepathically conveyed to the writer, only what the writer has sensed and is trying to convey.
This is second hand but it is still rich.Empathic Telepathy is more than transference of thought, this is a left brained (sans-sentience) explanation.
It is communion, communion of the highest order.
It is a ”language” of a multi complexity of feelings within and around the communicator, which includes the entire spectrum of experience of what is being communicated.
A higher consciousness being, especially those of the Natural Kingdoms, have many senses, and many of these can be expressed.
You not only get the thoughts around the communication, you get all the sentience that occurred at the moment of the experience being expressed, as well as the current feelings of the one communicating.
Often what has been conveyed includes history.
It is a sentient rich communion between those who are expressing, of feelings, thoughts, ideas, scents, and sounds all simultaneously, ambient with the communicators unique sensations, surpassing space and time, in an instant.
You may have noticed I am using the term communicator and not just ”person” as it is certainly not limited to people.
Telepathy is achieved most successfully with not only people, but with animals, and the Green Kingdoms, and Mineral and Etheric Kingdoms.
This involves listening rather than merely hearing.Listening and hearing are two different things.
Hearing is the detection of audible sound being spoken whose words are open to infinite interpretation.
Such communications when received with a tempered mind, is hearing only.
You have often heard people say “I hear you” and yet you find yourself feeling a void, waiting for appropriate response and left unfulfilled.
Listening involves sentient rich receptivity and is deliciously complex and filling. Empathic Telepathy is not just ”mind to mind” communication but consciousness to consciousness.
This involves a greater use of the brain, a multi sensory complexity within the body with which we are naturally endowed.
The loss of telepathy and empathy comes from all institutionalized forms of ”education” and ”training”.
These are processes that temper ones mind much like a steel blade is made.
It is hammered and pounded, and heated, and hammered and pounded, over and over, on and on… until it becomes a blade.
It has been tempered and molded by the black-smith.
And so the steely mind has been indoctrinated and inculcated into being left brain dominant, being likened more to a computing processor.
This is a form of mind control conducted by well funded and organized institutions whose goal is to make you learn what they want you to learn, most if not all of it lies, for at the very least it is incomplete.
It is not education, is it fractionalized and desensitization. Even those who consider themselves smart will hear a stream of words from a speaker and often formulate a response before one has even finished speaking.
This is computing.
It has a projectile nature of being a one way transaction.
It is box like and of the intellect alone. It is the way of the black-word smithy to form minds into computized instruments.
Information bits are chosen and pieced together and spun into deliberate creations with artistic license.
It is the way of the Empathic Telepath to commune openly and fully with the truth. Empathic Telepathy listens with full brain and body capacity, and is able to receive infinitely much more information, wisdom and knowledge, sentient rich, in a nano second.
Unlike the tempered steely mind which needs to acquire information and experience in a linear time/space continuum. For Empathic Telepaths, communicating with such steely mind word smithys is entirely frustrating and fruitless.
One is left with a bitter aftertaste, mixed with a complexity of discordance, a feeling of some kind of void, or being given ”spin” or manipulation. With Empathic Telepathy there is a sweet taste left, one is left satisfied, respected and well received, filled with much more than itself, no matter the truth.
How can we become Empathic Telepaths?
Where is the teacher?
Thought-forms can be conveyed by people and technologies now, it is a one way transaction projected unto another, often without our knowing, and these kinds of projectile transferences are usually of the regressive kind.
I would find a more benevolent source. To regain our natural abilities we need to first and foremost desire to be receptive, as this desire is itself receptivity, and one begins to open and soften the tempered mind, make it malleable again.
It is a deliberate act of will and discipline.
Then we need to find a source of true telepaths, and the most benign and gregarious ones will be found in Nature.
Trees especially are willing to be our sources of communion again and our friends.
To find out the truth of that statement you will need to experience it for yourself.
No tree will lead you astray nor lie to you, nor commune to you anything that has any ”spin” or ”distortion” within it.
They are as incapable of this as an infant is capable of lying.
Nature in all its forms are our relatives in truth and in essence, in physicality and in origin. All of Nature is us, people, trees, grasses, mountains, water, plants etc, we are all of the same essence….and so they are our relatives in another form, yet deeply informed of us.
Go to Nature to commune.
Don’t just go to speak, but go to listen.
This may take some practice for those who are not used to being receivers, but it can be done when you become soft of mind and receptive.
They will find you.
You will need to spend more time with Nature especially trees, which are everywhere, and many are willing to communicate with you, though not all. You will find only Truth.
You can nurture an opening of your mind which acts like a portal of connection with them and they will use this portal to commune with you.
Sometimes this connection can happen quickly, surprisingly so, and some will need some time.
A type of trust is needed to develop, not with the tree or whatever your source, but with your own mind….you must trust in your mind to become soft and vibrant with receptivity.
For everyone it will be different.
But I can see a world of Empathic Telepaths coming into being, coming ”online” so to speak, and this is only the beginning of regaining our connection to Source, to our Divinity, our true Nature, and to feel at home both in our own skins and on this planet we were born on.
We must commune with our relatives and love them, live with them.
This is harmony.
When all forms of communication and communion are open – flowing in all directions – and natural feelings and senses permeate our beingness, this is where we sense our Family and Love.
Did you see where there is a new social media product backed by Anonymous with the idea they will take over facebook?
I have been looking for an alternative to fb for months now. I intend to check em out.
A new social network, backed by Anonymous, hopes to take on Facebook and the other social media giants with a commitment to privacy, security and transparency about how posts are promoted.
The site, Minds.com, has the same basic options as any other social network: users send updates to their followers, who can comment or promote posts that they read. But unlike its competitors it doesn’t aim to make money from gathering data — instead, it encrypts all messages, so that they can’t be read by advertisers or by governments.
The app’s other big differentiating feature from other networks is that it rewards people for interacting with posts, by voting, commenting or uploading. Users are given points that can then be exchanged for views, meaning that the posts of active members will be more promoted by the network.
Did you see where there is a new social media product backed by Anonymous with the idea they will take over facebook?
I have been looking for an alternative to fb for months now. I intend to check em out.
A new social network, backed by Anonymous, hopes to take on Facebook and the other social media giants with a commitment to privacy, security and transparency about how posts are promoted.
The site, Minds.com, has the same basic options as any other social network: users send updates to their followers, who can comment or promote posts that they read. But unlike its competitors it doesn’t aim to make money from gathering data — instead, it encrypts all messages, so that they can’t be read by advertisers or by governments.
The app’s other big differentiating feature from other networks is that it rewards people for interacting with posts, by voting, commenting or uploading. Users are given points that can then be exchanged for views, meaning that the posts of active members will be more promoted by the network.
It's quite interesting (hence the QI) and has taught me numerous obscure, but fascinating facts. Also very funny. The youtube video title screen does make it look incredibly dumb though.
You'll have a lot of catching up to do as it's currently on season 12.
It's quite interesting (hence the QI) and has taught me numerous obscure, but fascinating facts. Also very funny. The youtube video title screen does make it look incredibly dumb though.
You'll have a lot of catching up to do as it's currently on season 12.
The holographic universe proves that the physical world we believe is real is in fact illusion.
Energy fields are decoded by our brains into a 3D picture, to give the illusion of a physical world.
When you do things from your soul, you feel a river
moving in you, a joy.
When actions come from another section, the feeling
disappears.
Don't let others lead you.
They may be blind or, worse, vultures.
Reach for the rope of God.
And what is that?
Putting aside self-will.
Because of willfulness people sit in jail, the trapped bird's wings are tied,
fish sizzle in the skillet.
The anger of police is willfulness.
You've seen a magistrate
inflict visible punishment.
Now see the invisible.
If you could leave your selfishness, you
would see how you've been torturing your soul.
We are born and live inside black water in a well.
How could we know what an open field of sunlight is?
Don't insist on going where you think you want to go.
Ask the way to the spring.
Your living pieces will form a harmony.
There is a moving palace that floats in the air with balconies and clear water flowing through, infinity everywhere, yet contained under a single tent.
While pre-quantum/Newtonian physics is typically a good approximation for objects much larger than molecules, we know that this worldview is fatally flawed. To illustrate the point, where initially it was supposed that nonlocal entanglement could not be evinced by anything other than quanta in specially controlled circumstances, we now know it is a fundamental aspect of reality.
The entanglement of holmium atoms in a tiny chip of magnetic salt has been unexpectedly observed in the laboratory, showing that “big” things like atoms, and not just photons and electrons (individual quanta), can be entangled.
More recently (2011), it was announced by a group of physicists that two diamonds approximately 3 mm in size and separated by about 6 inches were successfully entangled at room temperature.[ii]
Previously, it was believed that once things got to the level of atoms and molecules, the universe started acting strictly deterministically again, according to predictable Newtonian laws.
This is no longer a scientifically viable view.
A review of developments on entanglement research in March 2004 by New Scientist writer Michael Brooks concluded that “Physicists now believe that entanglement between particles exists everywhere, all the time.”[iii]
Widescale or “nonspecific entanglement” has been experimentally validated in many ways.
For example, around 1956 Pavel Naumov conducted animal biocommunication studies between a submerged Soviet Navy submarine and a shore research station.
These tests involved a mother rabbit and her newborn litter.
According to Naumov, scientists put the baby rabbits on board the submarine, but kept the mother rabbit in a laboratory on shore where they implanted electrodes in her brain.
When the submarine was submerged, assistants killed the babies one by one.
At each precise moment of death, the mother’s brain produced detectable and recordable reactions.[iv]
Many examples can be found in Soviet literature dealing with dogs, bears, birds, insects, and fish in conjunction with basic psychotronic (psi) research.
The Pavlov Institute in Moscow may have been involved in animal telepathy until 1970.[v]
Researchers such as David Wilcock and Richard Hoagland posit that these nonlocal interactions are facilitated by the hyperdimensional torsion/spin waves of the unified field/aether (or gravity, as Wilcock emphasizes in The Source Field Investigations) we are all immersed in.
We will look further at torsion and nonlocality between sentient beings soon. Once, the esteemed physicist Eugene Wigner remarked to Karl Pribram, a board-certified neurosurgeon and professor of psychiatry and psychology, that in quantum physics we no longer have observables (invariants) but only observations.
Tongue in cheek, Pribram asked whether that meant that quantum physics is really psychology, at which Wigner beamed and replied, “yes, yes, that’s exactly correct.”
“If indeed one wants to take the reductive path, one ends up with psychology, not particles,” says Pribram. “In fact, it is a psychological process, mathematics, that describes the relationships that organize matter.
In a non-trivial sense current physics is rooted in both matter and mind.”[vi]
Indeed, one of the main points R.A. Wilson made in Quantum Psychology was that “the laws of the subatomic world and the laws of the human ‘mind’ parallel each other precisely, exquisitely, and elegantly, down to minute details.”[vii]
Wigner, as a physicist, had said that “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness…t will remain remarkable in whatever way our future concepts develop, that the very study of the external world led to the conclusion that the content of the consciousness is an ultimate reality.”[viii]
Sir Arthur Eddington said that the lesson from physics and especially from quantum mechanics is that insofar as we can describe the world at all we are necessarily describing the structure of our own minds.
By collating various forms of scientific thought generated over time, “we obtain the structure known as the physical universe.”[ix] Wilson further said: “We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the foot-print. And Lo! It is our own.”[x]
Similarly, Goswami has puzzled that according to the new physics, the particle tracks left in cloud chambers are simply extensions of ourselves.
The objectified, absolute, Newtonian linear-mechanistic view of the universe is dead.
Quantum physics – as per ancient mystical perspectives – simply does not allow the luxury of the concept of the separate observer, because it is meaningless to conceive of the scientist as being separate from his equipment, or anything else.
Wheeler has wondered: “May the universe in some sense be brought into being by the participation of those who participate?”[xi] We are no longer dealing with interactions between two dissimilar entities – “mind” and “matter” – but with a single unified, conscious, holographic entity.
Mind is “physical” too if you can rotate into phase with its contents/energies.
“From science then, if it must be so,” wrote Paramahansa Yogananda, “let man learn the philosophic truth that there is no material universe; its warp and woof is maya, illusion.”[xii]
Consider what it tells us that a hard science like physics, which set out to investigate the so-called physical world, ended up running headlong into the nonphysical – consciousness.
The mystics already knew why this would be so: consciousness is the ultimate reality and the foundation of all existence.
It is the sine qua non of the cosmos.
It is curious that some “scientifically-minded” types become irate at the mere suggestion that a mystic or occultist could have known something before the venerable institution of science found it out.
They seem to forget that scientific research is an implicit acknowledgment of ignorance.
If scientists already knew all the answers, scientific research would not exist, because science is, fundamentally, an inquiry; it is not an a priori presumption of omniscience.
Science builds models of reality based on what little knowledge of reality it possesses – it does not build reality itself.
We need to remember again not to confuse the map with the territory.
A scientific theory of something is not the same as the tangible or experiential reality it attempts to describe.In an interview about his theory of monistic idealism, the interviewer commented to Amit Goswami that “science’s current findings seem to be parallel to the essence of the perennial spiritual teaching.”
Goswami responded succinctly: “It is the spiritual teaching. It is not just parallel.”[xiii]
Renee Weber, a philosopher at Rutgers University, actually raised the possibility that mysticism may, in a sense, be more committed to the spirit of scientific exploration than science itself.[xiv]
In fact, mystics have been described as “the most thoroughgoing empiricists in the history of philosophy.”[xv] What identifies a mystic then?
The true mystic is not a believer or a disbeliever – he or she knows the existential fundamentals, and in getting to the point of knowing, has discarded belief altogether.
The mystic has direct insight into the nature of things, as opposed to having to rely on laboratory equipment, equations, theories, speculation, or educated guesses.
For the mystic, as far as the fundamental nature of consciousness goes, thereis no mystery.
For millennia, mystics have known via direct cognition what Bell’s theorem has only fairly recently revealed to the world of science.
The mystic experiences the nonlocal, interconnected/entangled nature of consciousness and reality directly, and in doing so, understands it (in a holistic, existential sense).
The mystic knows that human consciousness and our infinitely complex and elegant self-organizing universe did not come into existence through the random interactions of inert matter.
This idea has been likened by Stanislav Grof to a tornado blowing through a junkyard and accidentally assembling a 747 jet.[xvi]
Noted occultist J.J. van der Leeuw pre-empted Grof almost a century ago, commenting that we might as well believe a heap of bricks could randomly form themselves into a building, if we are going to believe that the blind chance of “natural selection” is responsible for biological life and consciousness.[xvii]
It is a ludicrous proposition, in other words.
Writing in the 1980s, Francis Crick, the co-(re)discoverer of the DNA molecule, showed the total mathematical implausibility of even a single protein emerging by chance.[xviii]
Van der Leeuw added that the data of science are not in any way incompatible with the belief in a creative Intelligence, directing and guiding evolution from within (as opposed to the external “man behind the curtain” scenario advocated by creationists).
More than 90 years later this is overwhelmingly the case, as, for example, Yurth’s Self-Organizing Criticality model shows. A growing point of view among physicists is that there must be a cosmic consciousness pervading the universe.
Objects seem to spring into being when measurements are made, and measurements are made by conscious beings.
Hence, there must be cosmic consciousness that pervades the universe determining which state we are in.
Some, like Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, have argued that this proves the existence of “God” or some cosmic consciousness.
Wigner not surprisingly expressed an interest in the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism, in which the universe is pervaded by an all-embracing consciousness.[xix]
This type of sentiment is becoming increasingly widely held by physicists who are realizing the implications of what quantum mechanics and other fields of research such as parapsychology are telling us.
In order to truly understand what mysticism is and the spirit of it, one has to have encountered a drastically expanded sense of perception or awareness that completely transcends the ordinary waking state of mind and its associated perceptual limitations.
If one steps beyond the bounds of permitted thoughts allowed by the materialistic paradigm, one learns an awful lot about just how limited and myopic this reductionist view of life actually is, and how much fact it must ignore and deny in order to maintain its own survival.
Please note: I used to be something of a materialist myself (philosophically).
The problem is that this belief structure can only survive within very narrow experiential and investigative parameters that not every human life can (or will) facilitate.
If it could, everyone in the so-called developed world would be a materialist, or would have been, were it not for the advent of quantum mechanics.
So, is any talk of or related to mysticism “pseudo-science” by definition?
Categorically, no.
Grof (for one) agrees, stating that the “pedestrian consciousness and world-view” have simply not caught up with mysticism or modern physics.[xx] Another common misconception is that mysticism is analogous or related to Western conceptions of religion or religious zeal and/or faith.
But the mystical experience is not a moment of intense faith; it is a moment of intensely deep experience beyond this ordinary world and/or its normal sense impressions.
Do you have faith in the existence of the chair you are sitting on?
No, you simply observe and sense that the chair exists, otherwise you would have landed rather sharply on the floor!
By your experience you know it exists and can leave it at that.
In contrast, simply believing in the chair would probably not be enough to hold you up off the floor, no matter how lovely and detailed a 2D schematic of it you might have drawn up!
Thus, mysticism is based first and foremost on direct and lucid experience of expanded and altered states of awareness/consciousness and thus asks no blind faith. (A mystic also knows not to confuse the map with the territory.)
In this sense, we can see that mysticism does not consist in believing in some abstract faith-based dogma.
Donald DeGracia is a biochemical researcher in the field of cerebral ischemia and reperfusion.
In his excellent book Beyond the Physical, he wrote:
Mysticism is the true spiritual approach, it is the true way to religion, [which] in the West [today] is but a watered-down, overly rigid, dogmatic and institutionalized vestige of ancient expressions of the mystical experience. The true mystical experience defies the mind at all of its levels…and brings into direct comprehension the…living unity of all existence.[xxi]
Mysticism expands consciousness, deepens awareness, and develops wisdom, whereas organized religion – having been “de-mysticized” – has a tendency towards often (though not always) achieving the complete opposite effect, especially in its literalistic fundamentalist and extremist forms.
This applies much less to its more progressive streams, which appear to be moving in a more experiential and enlightened direction, such as is the way in mysticism and true occultism. In other words, even that most intellectually rigid and stagnant of institutions, mainstream religion, is very gradually creating new models of “God” and reality.
It still has not really realized its mystical roots though, still suffering institutionalized amnesia. Science’s childish attitude towards what it conceives to be mysticism has in many ways been as bad as religion’s attitude towards it.
To both institutions, mysticism has traditionally been “the devil… Yet the mocking presumptuousness of modern science and philosophy towards occultism and mysticism is only an admission of their ignorance and insecurity in the light of knowledge and wisdom that neither possesses.”[xxii]
In the late 1970s, Fritjof Capra said this, in simplifying and reconciling the different approaches taken by mystics and scientists: “Mystics understand the roots but not the branches, scientists understand the branches but not the roots.”[xxiii]
Evelyn Underhill put it this way: “even the report of the greatest contemplative saint is much like that of the wise shepherd, who can tell us much about the weather, but nothing about meteorology.”[xxiv]
What mystics understand the roots of is this: the fundamental nature of reality itself and the fundamental nature of consciousness (same thing).
Mystics are actually much more inclined towards understanding areas of inquiry such as quantum physics than many otherwise intelligent people are.
They have an experiential advantage with nonlocality, for a start.
There is nothing airy-fairy or flaky about a mystic.
It is an awareness characterized by deep insight and clarity of thought, not a lack of it.
In fact, Capra wrote an entire book on the similarities between mysticism and physics.
In The Tao of Physics he explained that, while the mystic begins his exploration from the inner realm and the physicist begins from the outer, they both ultimately reach the same destination: awareness of the fundamental unity between all things and events.[xxv]
Modern science tells us that the world of supposedly solid matter, as presented to us by the standard five senses, is an illusion.
This is, of course, the view taken by mystics ever since there was such a thing as a mystic.
How else is it that the deeper we attempt to peer into supposedly solid matter, the more empty space we find?
Seemingly inert matter proves, upon closer inspection, to be very much alive and in constant motion; Larson’s proposition – and he was not alone – was that the only thing that really exists in our space-time is motion.
Apparent solidity is merely a function of a particular mode of perception, not an absolute truth. The mystic’s outlook encompasses the materialist’s perspective and extends beyond, much as metaphysics both includes and transcends physics.
As Taimni said in TheScience of Yoga, the higher viewpoint includes and enhances the lower, while placing the lower in its proper perspective.
“Expansion of consciousness means inclusion of more and more and exclusion of nothing.”[xxvi]
Thus, the mystic’s sense of reality places the world of appearances in its proper context, giving one the awareness of the difference between illusion and reality/truth.
References:
See Brooks. McTaggart details these and related experiments extensively in The Intention Experiment.
[*][ii] Schoch, Time, Entanglement & Consciousness, New Dawn Special Issue 6(4).
[*][iii] Brooks.
[*][iv] Ostrander & Schroeder, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, 33—4.
[*][v] Defence Intelligence Agency, Soviet and Czchechoslovakian Parapsychology Research, September 1975.
[*][vi] Pribram, Consciousness Reassessed.
[*][vii] Wilson, Quantum Psychology, 43.
[*][viii] www.projects.science.uu.nl/igg/jos/foundQM/wigner.pdf
[*][ix] Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, vol. 1.
[*][x] Ibid.
[*][xi] Pinchbeck, 49.
[*][xii] Yogananda, 228.
[*][xiii] Hamilton, Scientific Proof of the Existence of God.
[*][xiv] Radin, The Conscious Universe, 305.
[*][xv] LeShan, 62.
[*][xvi] Grof, The Holotropic Mind, 5.
[*][xvii] See van der Leeuw, Ch. 5.
[*][xviii] Narby, 75—6.
[*][xix] Kaku, Physics of the Impossible, 243.
[*][xx] Grof, LSD Psychotherapy, 128.
[*][xxi] DeGracia, Beyond the Physical, 16.
[*][xxii] Ibid., 17.
[*][xxiii] See Capra, The Tao of Physics, 339.
[*][xxiv] Underhill, 31.
[*][xxv] Capra, 338.
[*][xxvi] Taimni, 167—8.
Researchers Are Developing A Vaccine For Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Tweaking the immune system could be key to treating, or even preventing, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Research in rodents suggests that immunizing animals can lessen fear if they are later exposed to stress.
Researchers have known for some time that depression and immune-system health are linked and can affect each other.
Early clinical trials have shown that anti-inflammatory drugs can reduce symptoms of depression[SUP]1[/SUP], raising hopes that such treatments might be useful in other types of mental illness, such as PTSD.
“I think there’s kind of a frenzy about inflammation in psychiatry right now,” says Christopher Lowry, a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.
He presented results of experiments probing the link between fearful behaviour and immune response at a meeting in Victoria, Canada, last week of the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society.
Studies of military personnel suggest that immune function can influence the development of PTSD.
Soldiers whose blood contains high levels of the inflammatory protein CRP before they are deployed[SUP]2[/SUP], or who have a genetic mutation that makes CRP more active[SUP]3[/SUP], are more likely to develop the disorder.
To directly test whether altering the immune system affects fear and anxiety, Lowry and colleagues injected mice with a common bacterium, Mycobacterium vaccae, three times over three weeks to modulate their immune systems.
The scientists then placed these mice, and a control group of unimmunized mice, in cages with larger, more aggressive animals. Mice that had received the injections were more ‘proactive’ in dealing with the aggressor, Lowry says, rather than simply surrendering, as most mice do.
And the guts of the immunized mice remained healthy, whereas the animals in the control group developed inflamed colons and their gut bacteria shifted to favour species associated with stress.
Stress relief
In a second experiment, Lowry and colleagues injected rats with M. vaccae and conditioned them to fear a sound that was associated with an electric shock to the foot.
This fear was then ‘extinguished’ by exposing the animals to the sound without the foot shock.
Immunized rats lost their fear much more quickly than unimmunized animals, suggesting that immunomodulation could be a treatment for PTSD as well as a preventive measure.
Lowry says that his group is considering clinical trials of the therapy.
Because M. vaccae has been extensively used in humans as a treatment for other diseases, he hopes that regulators will approve the trial plans fairly quickly.
Jessica Gill, who studies neurogenomics at the US National Institute of Nursing Research in Bethesda, Maryland, says that the idea of preventive treatment for PTSD is interesting. “It definitely is conceivable something like this could be translated to use in populations where we know they’re going to be under stress,” she says.
In a separate study also presented at the neuroscience meeting, researchers taught mice to fear a sound by delivering an electric shock each time it played.
The team, led by neuroscientist Matthew Young of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, then injected the animals with molecules from the surface of bacteria to trigger an immune response.
Twelve hours later, the scientists tested the animals’ reaction to the sound, and found that mice that had been injected acted in a more fearful way than did mice in a control group.
“It’s massively intriguing,” says Bill Deakin, a neuroscientist at the University of Manchester, UK.
He is beginning a clinical trial to give 200 people with schizophrenia the antibiotic minocycline, which blocks inflammation in the brain, to determine whether this treatment lessens the shrinkage in the brain's grey matter that is seen early in the disease.
A smaller study found that this treatment lessened symptoms of the disease [SUP]4[/SUP]. Deakin hopes that treating people at genetic risk of schizophrenia or who are showing early signs of psychosis could lessen the disease’s symptoms once it develops.
Observing Psychokinesis in a Lab–Researchers Taking Psi Mainstream?
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.–Exuding mysterious and strange forces from one’s mind to bend a spoon or otherwise affect a physical object has long seemed to many a rather unscientific pastime.
But in a state-of-the-art lab at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), psychokinesis isn’t a sensationalized magic-show talent.
Its subtle forms are studied and scientifically measured in various ways.
Dr. Ross Dunseath, an electrical engineer, has made advances in fine-tuning novel sensors that can pick up on psychokinetic forces.
His instruments are also able to measure physiological changes in people performing psychokinesis tasks.
His research partner, Dr. Ed Kelly, a Yale- and Harvard-educated psychologist and neuroscientist, has studied psi phenomena since the 1970s (Psi refers to any psychic phenomenon, such as psychokinesis, telepathy, or clairvoyance).
Identifying the physiological changes associated with psi could really help bring psi research into the mainstream, Dr. Kelly explained.
“Showing that a psi event is connected to some other thing is good, because that anchors it. It’s not just a free-floating anomaly, it’s something related to something else. And if the ‘something else’ is physiological, in the contemporary frame of mind, that’s particularly good.”
This could resolve a lot of the issues most often brought up by critics of psi research.
For example, the physiological research could give greater control in the lab.
If certain biological characteristics or states are identified as correlating with psychokinetic powers, those states or characteristics could perhaps be induced in subjects.
This way, psychokinesis could take place on demand in a controlled manner.
More than half the battle for Dr. Dunseath and Dr. Kelly is finding subjects who have psychokinetic abilities.
And their nearly impossible task is finding such subjects who can use these abilities on demand.
Furthermore, the person must be able to do so under conditions that work with the given measurement tools.
A subject must remain relatively still while his brain activity is being measured using an electroencephalogram (EEG) or a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine.
One subject Dunseath and Kelly studied was able to enter a sort of ecstatic state on demand.
But testing him in an MRI machine or with an EEG was difficult, as he moved around quite a bit in this state.
Nonetheless, the researchers were able to pinpoint with some certainty parts of the brain activated in this altered state of consciousness and found that they correspond to some physiological effects found in advanced meditators.
While Kelly and Dunseath have witnessed impressive psi events in the past, they have yet to hit on a really outstanding test subject on whom to use their new equipment.
Some minor successes provide hope that in the future, when someone with outstanding psi abilities enters their lab, they will be able to measure what’s happening during psi events in a way no one has before.
Dr. Ed Kelly in his office at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies on Feb. 6, 2015.
An example of such success concerns the little blasts of charge detected by Dunseath’s new sensors.
Crystals attached to an amplifier act as a charge detector.
Sometimes little blips are recorded by the device when no one is around, but blasts of charge appear more often when someone is there trying to make it happen.
These are recorded in correspondence with EEG readings.
It’s a start, and the researchers are confident these little starts could pan out into big results. “Come back in a year,” Kelly said.
He’s hoping to bring one of his most promising subjects back to the lab for tests.
In the early 1970s, Kelly had the opportunity to work with Bill Delmore, a Yale law student at the time. In his book “Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration,” David Ray Griffin described Delmore’s success in tests of psychic ability involving playing cards: “In a total of 46 runs (of 52 guesses each), Delmore had exact hits (correctly naming both the suit and the denomination) 6 percent of the time (compared with the less than 2 percent that would be expected by chance).
The odds against this occurring by chance are a million trillion trillion to one.
Especially remarkable was Delmore’s success on ‘confidence calls,’ which are those in which he was most confident that he was correct.
On these, he was indeed correct 14 out of 20 times.” Delmore is now a retired lawyer and Kelly is still in touch with him.
Reading the brain activity of such a reliable subject could yield great insights. The ability to pin-point physiological changes related to psi could also give researchers statistical control.
Kelly said, “Suppose it’s an ESP [extra-sensory perception] test, for example, and we can figure out what EEGs go with hits.
Well, then you have a kind of statistical control.
You could go into a body of data without ever looking at the ESP part and pick out trials that have the right physiological signature with the expectation that there’s going to be a higher hit-rate in those trials than in the experiment as a whole.”
From Conflict to Compromise
The scientific community has often showed a division in its approach to psi.
On one side are the dualists, who say the mind and brain are totally separate.
On the other side are the physicalists who say the mind does not exist beyond the brain.
Dunseath and Kelly provide a middle ground.
Their work doesn’t require a commitment to either perspective. “I think everybody would agree that at some stage mind and brain are very intimately connected. So there ought to be some reflection in physiology of things that are going on mentally,” Kelly said.
He and Dunseath study this intimate connection.
Kelly also described his approach to the massive anthropological literature on psi in a paper titled “A Psychobiological Framework for Psi Research,” written in 1983:
“What we wanted to focus on particularly was not so much the evidence that psi had occurred (which we assumed would in many or most of these cases be defective from a modern point of view), but rather on the circumstances under which it was believed to have occurred. When one does this it quickly becomes overwhelmingly clear that the strong outbursts of psi are heavily concentrated in a relatively small variety of individuals and circumstances.”
The Facilities
Dr. Dunseath opened the bulky door of the electromagnetically and acoustically shielded chamber in his lab. Because of the shielding, if a subject sitting in that room is able to pick up on what another subject in another room is thinking, the researchers can be sure he did not receive that information via normal means (such as a text message, since no communication signals could penetrate).
Tara MacIsaac poses with an EEG cap on in a shielded chamber in the lab at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, where the physiobiological effects of psychokinesis are studied, on Feb. 6, 2015.
The old armchair in the middle of the chamber gives it the feel of grandpa’s den.
The chamber is carpeted and the wooden cupboards containing some of the sensor devices were built in a homey style.
The idea is to make the subject as comfortable as possible.
The subject is given some time to relax before focusing on some of the sensors and trying to influence them psychokinetically.
It’s hard enough to perform a psychokinetic task under any circumstances.
But in the lab, additional difficulties are introduced if the environment is cold and sterile.
A relaxed inner state is often said to be conducive to psychokinesis.
Wearing an EEG cap, the subject is already distracted by the thought of having to keep still so it can work properly, even paying attention to not tensing the forehead.
Tweaking the measurement tools to increase the subject’s comfort and better suit the delicacies of psi research has led to advancements that can be applied beyond this field.
How Psi Research Could Help Other Fields of Study
Dunseath’s improvements on EEG design have broad applications, including for use in epilepsy studies, for example. Kelly wrote:
“One of the ways in which psi researchers can begin to break down this terrible kind of professional isolation that we’ve suffered under for many years is to begin aggressively making contributions to some of these neighboring research areas. There’s no reason why we can’t do that. In fact, in our group we’ve already made some significant contributions to EEG methodology, and we expect to make more in the future.”
For Kelly, there is no division between the usual functions of the brain and the supernormal functions of the brain.
Whether it’s performing psychokinesis or remembering what you ate for breakfast, it’s all part of this wonderfully complex and important part of ourselves–our consciousness.
“I don’t distinguish between the hard problems and the easy problems [in neuroscience],” Kelly said. “I don’t think there are any easy problems. Ultimately, to understand any of this, we’re going to have to understand all of it, including the supernormal stuff. We’ll find that it all has a common theoretical underpinning.”
Understanding how the brain works during psi events could give insights into “personality growth and integration, unusual creativity, and striking expansions of various kinds of cognitive abilities, including even such things as reading speed,” according to Kelly.
For him, it isn’t a question of whether psi exists or not, it’s already clear to him that it does.
It’s about how psi research can help us further understand our consciousness in a broad sense.
Kelly wrote: “In my opinion, the existence of psi phenomena has been established beyond any reasonable doubt. Some of my colleagues would perhaps find that too strong a statement, but I think that’s because we’ve grown too accustomed to bending over backwards to accommodate critics who, by and large, are behaving extremely irresponsibly. The existing literature of the field is very large, and no one is qualified to express a global opinion about the subject who has not taken the trouble to study that literature in some depth. Nevertheless, at thepresent time we are confronted with the sad and frustrating spectacle of a number of rather distinguished scientists who are freely offering sweepingly negative opinions about the field without having taken that time and trouble.”
Charles Darwin was a firm believer in the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
In his book The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Darwin gave many examples of the hereditary transmission of adaptations.
He also published an account in Nature about dogs with an inborn fear of butchers.
Their father had a violent antipathy to butchers, probably as a result of being mistreated by one, and this fear was transmitted not only to his children but also to his grandchildren.
Darwin knew nothing of genes or random mutations, which only became part of biology in the twentieth century.
He put forward his own theory of heredity in the The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, entitled ‘The Provisional Hypothesis of Pangenesis.’
In order to understand, for example, how a dog could inherit something a parent had learned, or how a plant’s descendants could inherit its adaptations to a new environment, Darwin proposed that cells all over the body threw off microscopic ‘gemmules’ which somehow entered the egg and sperm or pollen cells, transforming them to make these characteristics hereditary.
The great French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Larmarck proposed decades before Darwin that habits could be inherited, and in this sense Darwin was a Lamarckian.
Darwin’s theory of pangenesis was largely ignored, and was airbrushed out of twentieth-century hagiographies of Darwin.
In twentieth-century biology, Lamarckian inheritance was treated as a grave heresy in the West, where Neo-Darwinism predominated.
In the Soviet Union, by contrast, the inheritance of acquired characteristics was orthodox, which only intensified the prejudice against it in the capitalist world.
Neo-Darwinism differs from Darwinism in attributing heredity to chemical genes, which can only change by random, purposeless mutations, and in denying the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Many neo-Darwinians are unaware that Darwin himself had very different views.
Darwin was not a neo-Darwinian.
The selfish gene theory, advocated most strikingly by Richard Dawkins, took the neo-Darwinian world-view to an extreme.
The genes were personified: Dawkins argued that they were selfish, and as ruthless as Chicago gangsters.
They had the power to ‘mould matter’ and ‘create form.’
The genetic material, DNA, was no longer a mere molecule: it was animated and purposive.
Ironically, Dawkins persuaded many of his readers that life was purposeless and mechanistic by using vitalist rhetoric, attributing minds and purposes to DNA molecules.
But behind the haze of misleading metaphors about selfish molecules, he was popularizing the standard neo-Darwinian theory that evolutionary creativity occurred only by random mutations, with no purpose or direction.
Evolutionary change was driven by the changes in gene frequencies in the population as a result of natural selection.
Acquired characteristics could not be inherited.
Unfortunately for Neo-Darwinism, the facts do not fit the theory.
The taboo on the inheritance of acquired characteristics was lifted at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the recognition of epigenetic inheritance, meaning inheritance over and above the genes.
Some kinds of epigenetic inheritance depend on small RNA molecules (sRNA), others on the methylation of DNA, others on modifications to the proteins that bind to DNA.
The genes are not changed through mutation, but are switched on or off through the way they are packaged.
The discovery that some of these changes are inherited through eggs, sperm and pollen marks a revolutionary change in modern biology.
Some remarkable recent studies have shown that mice can inherit their fathers’ fears, reminding us of Darwin’s report of dogs with an inherited fear of butchers.
In these experiments, carried out by Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler, males were exposed to the smell of a chemical called acetophenone that they would never normally encounter in nature.
They were given mild electric shocks when smelling this chemical, and soon became frightened when they smelled it again.
This was a classical Pavlovian conditioned reflex.
However, their children and grandchildren were also terrified of the smell of acetophenone.
They were affected even when the fearful fathers’ sperm was transmitted by artificial insemination, preventing any form of cultural contact.
How could fearful responses to a smell be transmitted from noses and brains to sperm cells?
Dias and Ressler suggest that molecular influences travelled through the blood stream.
This sounds very like a modern version of Darwin’s gemmule hypothesis.
In plants, too, there is now good evidence that sRNA molecules can move from various organs of the plant through the sap to the eggs and pollen, bringing about heritable changes that continue over generations.
To what extent can the fears of human fathers be transmitted to their offspring, even in the absence of any contact between the fathers and their children?
No one knows.
Much remains to be discovered about epigenetic inheritance.
But it is already clear that evolutionary theory needs to be extended or revised.
As evolutionary theory moves beyond the narrow confines of Neo-Darwinism, the question of evolutionary creativity is once again thrown open.
The inheritance of learning and adaptations does not depend on random genetic mutations, but on direct transmissions from parents to offspring.
Hence the creative responses of organisms to challenges are a major source of evolutionary creativity, just as Darwin thought, and as Lamarck thought before him.
Darwin attributed these adaptive abilities to the ‘co-ordinating power’ inherent in living organisms.
But he did not explain how this power worked, and we still do not know.
But we do know that organisms themselves can be creative, and that some of their learning and adaptation can be passed on to their descendants.
Evolution can happen faster and more purposefully than twentieth-century biologists allowed them to think.
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