Skarekrow
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This one would be really cool to do!!What about?.... The TREE of LIFE!!!!
I’m saving it!
(I’ll trade you the finished project for something magical?)
Merkabah
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I’m saving it!
(I’ll trade you the finished project for something magical?)
Tin Man
"a respectable amount of screaming"
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Skarekrow
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“Enlightenment is a destructive process.
It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier.
Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth.
It’s seeing through the facade of pretense.
It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."
~ Adyashanti
It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier.
Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth.
It’s seeing through the facade of pretense.
It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."
~ Adyashanti
PintoBean
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But it could be. I know you can't get away from yourself, but a change of scene for the better really can do wonders. Apartment overlooking the community dump (for real situation)= le suck. Cottage overlooking the Atlantic= amazing, and yes life changing. Just imagine, I want to open my curtains and step outside! A job that is awesome vs. a sucky job = life changing. Current (permanent husband) vs. ex-husband= hugely positive, extreme life improvement.
Skarekrow
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I believe it is warning of taking it to the extreme…i.e. our suffering is subjective…it’s how we react to the bullshit that is 95% of life that defines our character.
So of course you can change every aspect of your life…and even eliminate physical manifestations of suffering…but none of those external things could every give me the kind of peace and contentment that I desire.
I hate the fact that I even feel the need to discuss the pain that is part of my life, because I’m trying to rise above that mentality that I can do nothing about it…that I give up…and I feel so stupidly self-centered when I think of my situation in relation to what terrible things are happening around the world.
Which is kind of a mind-fuck to your self-esteem.
To be internally “happy” is something people struggle with their entire lives…but if you constantly come up with new reasons why you haven’t reached that state (and people seem to like to do that) then you will never be happy, or it will be very fleeting at best.
I get what you mean.
Skarekrow
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Chris Mackey: The startling science of synchronicity
HAVE you ever been so gobsmacked by an amazing coincidence that it stopped you in your tracks?
HAVE you ever been so gobsmacked by an amazing coincidence that it stopped you in your tracks?
You might have been thinking about someone you hadn’t seen for a long time who suddenly contacted you from out of the blue.
Or you might have been astonished by an unexpected encounter with someone who could help you solve a problem with which you felt stuck.
Perhaps you experienced a series of such remarkable coincidences that it led you to wonder what hidden order or organising force might exist, linking our inner and outer worlds.
Such experiences are examples of synchronicity, the uncanny timing of events that compellingly seems to go beyond pure chance.
I used to be very sceptical about such a mystical-sounding concept, believing that even the most striking coincidences could ultimately be explained by random occurrence, perhaps combined with people looking out for particular types of coincidences.
As a psychologist with extensive training in scientific method and rational thinking approaches, I believed that the notion of synchronicity – that coincidental events could be non-random and meaningful – was a merely superstitious idea.
Then, after a few years of working as a therapist, something changed.
When I first read about synchronicity, based on the theory of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, I experienced a seeming explosion of synchronistic experiences that most definitely stopped me in my tracks.
Even more surprisingly, many of my clients started to report their own synchronistic experiences without me prompting them to do so.
I now believe that such coincidences, if recognised and interpreted in the context of our values and goals, can help point us in the right direction, or affirm us on the path we are on, enhancing our sense of life direction and purpose.
I believe that synchronistic experiences often serve as “ticks from the universe”, affirming that we are on the right track in whatever course we are pursuing.
Though interpreting synchronicity is based strongly on intuition, I believe this is not a lesser form of thought than rational thinking.
It can be especially useful at times in guiding us in finding solutions, representing what I call “the power of supra-rational thinking”.
Believing in synchronicity is not as unscientific as it may seem.
Many people are surprised to learn that Jung developed ideas about synchronicity in part through his discussions with Albert Einstein.
Perhaps even more surprisingly, he only wrote about synchronicity in response to the active encouragement of Wolfgang Pauli, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics.
Several features of synchronicity, of seeming non-local connection between people or events, overlap with findings from quantum physics, such as that objects can be instantaneously connected at vast distances.
In later columns I hope to elaborate on and illustrate these ideas based on what I have learned from clients’ stories, personal experience and study of synchronicity.
This will include material from my forthcoming book, Synchronicity: Empower your life with the gift of coincidence.
At this advanced stage of my career I am especially interested in the things I’ve noticed and learned as a therapist that are under-recognised or under-appreciated with regard to our mental health.
The potential meaningfulness of striking coincidences in people’s lives is one of those things.
– Chris Mackey is a Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society and is the principal psychologist at Chris Mackey and Associates, with 35 years’ experience in public and private mental health services in Geelong.
Skarekrow
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Lockheed Exec Admits Key To Space Travel Is ESP
Ben Rich is a UCLA engineering alumnus who was also the director of Lockheed Martin’s super high tech aircraft division called Skunk Works from 1975 to 1991.
Rich admits that the key to space travel among the stars is not necessarily advanced mechanics, or the ultimate rocket fuel, but something more esoteric — ESP.
One of the main hurdles to mankind in reaching other worlds off-planet has been the sheer distance and time it would take to get there.
Our current space shuttles (at least with the horse-and-buggie-like technology that has been released to the public) only travel 17,500 miles per hour.
This means that visiting the second nearest star to our planet, Proxima Centauri, a meager 4.22 light years away, would take several life times.
Of course, then there are fuel costs, which would be more than prohibitive using conventionally imagined space travel.
Worm holes could be used like short cuts through Sunday traffic, and ‘warp drive’ or anti-gravity, which Boeing has admitted to working on could also shorten the ride, but we’d still be looking at more rocket fuel than Exxon, Saudi Aramco, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, and BP combined have ever even sneezed at.
Overcoming Space Time
Rich gave a tip to a fellow alumnus of UCLA, Jan C. Harzan, a nuclear engineer that is currently on the board of directors for MUFON — the world’s oldest and largest UFO phenomenon investigative body — and has recently been promoted to executive director.
Harzan says that when he was eight years old, he saw a craft hovering 30 feet from him with the only discernible means of propulsion being a ‘humming noise’ it was making. Harzan knows from speaking with Rich that it is possible to travel faster than the speed of light — but how?
Rich, a man running one of the most secretive and advanced aircraft development organizations in the world, and responsible for the creation of several highly advanced stealth planes, including the SR71, and the F117, spoke at a fundraiser in 1993 that Harzan hasn’t forgotten.
He met with Rich for Q&A after his presentation and he told him that ‘it won’t take a lifetime’ to travel to the stars, but that with ‘ESP’ we can do it easily.
He inferred to Harzan that ‘all things in space and time are connected.’Other scientists that have worked for Lockheed admit similar phenomenon concerning UFOs and space travel.
[video=youtube;kAqpVweK3tk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kAqpVweK3tk[/video]
Harzan says that the technology works exactly like ESP, and that the stealth technology which Rich used to develop his many aircraft was based on a Russian scientist’s mathematics, which reiterates this basic principle.
How Does ESP Work?
ESP, or extrasensory perception is the ability to transmit thoughts or events at a distance without actually being there in physical form.
Schrödinger’s Cat (the wave-particle collapse), parallel universes, the many-worlds hypothesis which explains how we might live in multiple webs of alternate timelines, and their relationship to perceived reality are all relevant to this observable fact.
Interplanetary space travel is all about consciousness, not the archaic assumption that we’d have to paddle our own rocket-fueled boat to get to the planet next door.
To View More Sources For Ben Rich’s Comments Click HERE
Skarekrow
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RESPECTED SCIENCE WRITER BURNED OUT
WITH “UNSCIENTIFIC” STRING THEORY
[video=youtube;MR1SZBKPv9Q]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=MR1SZBKPv9Q[/video]
John Horgan is a top-notch science journalist, but he’s looking toward consciousness research to find where science is heading.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with science writer and author John Horgan:
For more visit: http://www.skeptiko.com/john-horgan-u...
WITH “UNSCIENTIFIC” STRING THEORY
[video=youtube;MR1SZBKPv9Q]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=MR1SZBKPv9Q[/video]
John Horgan is a top-notch science journalist, but he’s looking toward consciousness research to find where science is heading.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with science writer and author John Horgan:
For more visit: http://www.skeptiko.com/john-horgan-u...
Skarekrow
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Me, myself, and the I-thought
By Michael Prescott
By Michael Prescott
Quite often on this blog we've talked about the transmission hypothesis, which can be expressed in various forms, but which always boils down to the idea that the brain is a medium by which consciousness interacts with the physical world.
When the brain dies, consciousness continues, though it is no longer physically embodied.
This is one basic answer to the question of how personality can survive the death of the body.
One of the most common objections to this idea is that the mind can suffer severe impairment as a result of neurological damage or other physical problems, so that, even if the mind does survive death, it will survive only in a grossly impaired form.
On the other hand, it is argued, if the postmortem mind is free of all physical impairments, then it bears little or no resemblance to the embodied mind and therefore amounts to a whole new mind.
In this case, there is no continuity of consciousness between the premortem and postmortem mind, and so there is no individual survival.
There are two ways to counter this argument.
The first is to forego philosophizing and simply look at the empirical evidence that convinced us (or some of us) of life after death in the first place.
To me, the best evidence is found in the trance mediumship of women like Leonora Piper, Gladys Osborne Leonard, and Eileen Garrett, all of whom were studied intensively for decades by serious investigators, who left behind reams of stenographic records of hundreds of sittings.
Some of the material that came through these mediums was incorrect, and a great deal of it was nonsense ("bosh," William James called it), but all serious researchers were eventually led to conclude that a significant minority of the communications contained information that the mediums could not have obtained by any normal means.
These researchers were divided between the hypothesis of postmortem survival and the hypothesis of super-ESP.
Personally, I think the super-ESP idea has little merit; for a detailed discussion, see Chris Carter's Science and the Afterlife Experience.
This leaves us with postmortem survival.
And the hypothesis of personal survival is further supported by near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, apparitions, deathbed visions, terminal lucidity, past-life recall, and other cases.
What all of these instances have in common is an insistence on continuity of consciousness.
The deceased, speaking through mediums, tell us quite plainly that they are still the same individuals that they were when physically alive.
This point is repeated over and over, almost ad nauseam.
We are told that the transition between life and the afterlife can be so seamless that the person is unaware of having died.
In other cases, the transition is more difficult, but even then the discarnate communicator invariably tells us that he has the same sense of self that he had when living on earth.
People who have had near-death experiences also report no disruption in the continuity of their consciousness.
However much their consciousness may have been expanded or otherwise affected, they retain the sense that the entire episode happened to the old familiar I of personal experience.
Since this is what all the evidence tells us, there is really no reason to doubt it merely on philosophical grounds.
It would make more sense to rethink our philosophical arguments than to discard empirical evidence.
But there's another way of tackling the problem — namely, to sketch out a philosophical position consistent with the empirical evidence.
For what follows, I'm indebted to the contributions of several commenters on this blog, particularly Matt Rouge, who first brought up the concept of the I-thought and its entanglement with an informational matrix.
To get into this, we first need to think a little about what consciousness is.
Consciousness implies both a subject and an object.
This much is obvious, but most people have a mistaken idea of what the subject is.
I think it is this mistake that makes it hard to appreciate the force of the transmission hypothesis.
To describe what the subject is, let's first detail what it is not.
The objects of consciousness include sensory input, mental imagery, logical reasoning processes, memories, imagination, feelings, and thoughts.
Yes, even thoughts are objects, not subjects, of consciousness.
What, then, is the subject?
It is pure awareness – nothing more and nothing less.
Pure awareness, when linked to a specific set of objects, is known in some traditions as the I-thought.
It is described this way in The Advaita Worldview: God, World, and Humanity, by Anantanand Rambachan:
The I-thought is centered on an awareness that is permanently present, being timeless and self-revealing.
Its content and nature are nothing but awareness, without which it has no existence or reality.
...
When the I-thought, whose nature is limitless awareness [ ] is subject to ignorance, it identifies itself with the characteristics of the body, senses, and mind in notions such as, "I am short," "I am blind," or "I am unhappy."
Liberation from ignorance occurs when the I-thought [ ] comes to understand its nature as limitless awareness.
…
A requisite of such knowledge is a calm and translucent mind in which the I-thought is able to understand itself as nonobjectifiable, illuminating awareness, distinguishable from the body, senses, and mind, relating to all of these as subject to object, and as identical with brahman, the non-dual ground of all reality.
...
All thoughts originate from and can be reduced or resolved back to the I-thought.
The I-thought, on the other hand, can be traced back to its source in awareness, without which it ceases to be.
Awareness, however, cannot be resolved or reduced it to anything else.
It simply is.
It thus accounts for the continuity of consciousness and for the often-reported insistence that the deceased "I" is the same as the physically embodied "I."
When we talk about an embodied consciousness – that is, the consciousness of a person living on earth – we're talking about an evolving dynamic process that involves all the objects of consciousness I listed above, and the I-thought, and the neurological and biological structures of the living organism.
When we talk about a disembodied consciousness – the consciousness of a discarnate person – we're talking about an evolving dynamic process that involves all the objects of consciousness and the I-thought, but not the physical structures of the living organism.
The absence of those physical structures is the key difference.
No one disputes that neurological damage and other physical problems can impair consciousness while it is embodied.
The impairment occurs not because of any change in the pure awareness at the root of the I-thought but because the range of objects of consciousness is reduced.
It may not be possible to recall memories, focus on logical reasoning, or formulate coherent thoughts.
Again, all of these are objects, not the subject, of consciousness.
Pure awareness remains uncorrupted and unimpaired, but the set of objects it can illuminate is narrowed, and the I-thought mistakenly accepts this narrowing as permanent.
Upon passing over to the next life, the physical impairments are removed, and the full variety of objects is again available.
Now, for this to make sense, two things must be true.
First, the objects of consciousness, even if temporarily lost while consciousness is embodied, cannot be permanently lost.
If memories, thoughts, logical reasoning, and so forth are irretrievably lost, then even the transition to a discarnate state would not allow the I-thought to recover them.
So there must be some way in which the objects of consciousness are preserved – whether we call it the Akashic records or whether we simply maintain that information, once brought into existence, cannot be destroyed.
Second, we must assume that there is a close relationship between one's awareness and the particular set of objects on which it has focused.
Otherwise awareness, once liberated from its physical trappings, might focus on any and all objects of any consciousness that has ever been.
In this case there would be no survival of the individual personality, but only a kind of universal mind that is aware of everything at once.
While this idea might be philosophically appealing and it is found in some spiritual traditions, it's contradicted by the apparently reliable testimony of deceased persons speaking through mediums, as well as the testimony of people who've had near-death experiences, etc.
And in any case, the very concept of the I-thought expressly serves to cover this relationship.
The I-thought is pure awareness connected to a particular set of thoughts and memories — individuated and egoic, not universal and identityless.
It is an I-thought, not a We-thought.
Given an "entanglement" between the I-thought and the constellation of objects on which it has focused, the I-thought, once free of physical limits, will naturally focus on the one particular set of objects – memories, thoughts, feelings, etc. – that, added together, constitute a "personality."
After all, what we call personality is only the intersection of the I-thought with a characteristic set of objects – distinctive memories, personal thoughts and feelings, recognizable habits of mind.
This is how we can say that the personality survives death, even if the personality has been grossly attenuated or deformed by dementia, mental illness, and other impairments.
It is also how we can say that in cases of terminal lucidity, the dying person abruptly recovers his or her personality ("she was herself again").
An analogy might make this whole thing a little clearer.
Imagine a person who is able to see only through a narrow horizontal slit in a blindfold.
His vision is restricted to a hazy line, and he thinks of himself as nearly sightless.
At a certain point, the blindfold is removed, and after a short period of disorientation and adjustment, he is able to see a much wider range of objects.
In this case the person's eyesight corresponds to pure awareness, his self-identification as "nearly sightless" corresponds to the I-thought, and the slitted blindfold corresponds to physical limitations and impairments.
The person's capacity for vision actually remains unchanged throughout, but the objects of his vision are restricted at first and relatively unrestricted later, and the I-thought (in its ignorance) mistakes this temporary limitation for a permanent condition.
The bottom line is that the skeptical objection to the transmission hypothesis is flawed in two respects.
First, it's inconsistent with the empirical evidence. (Naturally, skeptics will dispute or dismiss this very evidence, but that's a separate issue.)
Second, it depends on an understanding of consciousness that confuses subject and object.
It assumes that thoughts and memories and reasoning processes are the same thing as awareness, when in fact all of these are objects of awareness in the particular form of the I-thought.
If we look at consciousness as an I-thought entangled with an information matrix in an evolving system that is subject to temporary limitations and impairments, but in which no data are ever permanently lost, the skeptical objection simply becomes irrelevant.
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Skarekrow
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[MENTION=5667]Jacobi[/MENTION] [MENTION=6917]sprinkles[/MENTION] [MENTION=2578]Kgal[/MENTION]
I don’t know if you saw this article and read it or not - http://www.infjs.com/forums/showthread.php?t=27025&page=162&p=839228&viewfull=1#post839228
There is a link at the bottom to the full PDF version of the paper that was peer reviewed.
If you get a chance to glance it over, I would be curious as to your opinions and thoughts.
Thanks!
I don’t know if you saw this article and read it or not - http://www.infjs.com/forums/showthread.php?t=27025&page=162&p=839228&viewfull=1#post839228
There is a link at the bottom to the full PDF version of the paper that was peer reviewed.
If you get a chance to glance it over, I would be curious as to your opinions and thoughts.
Thanks!
sprinkles
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I don't really know. The part of me that knew about that stuff kind of split off somewhere a while back.