Merkabah

[ImaginaryBloke]

I think he was referring to the waffle taco.

Good theory. Is that somehow related to the obesification of society? How?

My theory is that it refers to the extroverted beach bum, whose noise level surpasses that of a jet plane.

 

[ImaginaryBloke]

Page 222 huh?

11:11 pops up as magic number. What about 22:22? What does it mean? That occurs in non-Anglosaxon countries.

 

[Tin Man]

Good theory. Is that somehow related to the obesification of society? How?

My theory is that it refers to the extroverted beach bum, whose noise level surpasses that of a jet plane.

I think it's supposed to fight against the obesification of society. You just take one long at that thing and your appetite is dead.

 

[Skarekrow]

11:11 pops up as magic number. What about 22:22? What does it mean? That occurs in non-Anglosaxon countries.

(of course now we are on page 223 hehe...except that this is also the 4444th post!)

ANGEL NUMBER 222

Number 222 is made up of the attributes of and energies of number 2 appearing tripled, making number 222 a very powerful vibration.
Number 222 carries the attributes of the numbers 2 and 22, the Master Builder Number that resonates with ancient wisdom, vision, idealism and transformation.

Number 2 lends its influences of faith and trust, encouragement, attainment and success, adaptability, diplomacy and co-operation, duality, service and duty, balance and harmony, selflessness, faith and trust and your Divine life purpose and soul mission.
Number 222 has to do with balance, manifesting miracles and new auspicious and timely opportunities.

Angel Number 222 encourages you to take a balanced, harmonious and peaceful stance in all areas of your life.
The message is to keep the faith and stand strong in your personal truths.

Angel Number 222 tells you that everything will turn out for the best in the long-term.
Do not put your energies into negativity – be aware that all is being working out by spirit for the highest good of all involved.

Angel Number 222 is also reminding you to keep up the good work you are doing, as the evidence of your manifestations are coming to fruition.

Angel Number 222 is a message of faith and trust from your angels.
Remember that nothing happens by chance and everything happens for a reason.

Maintain a positive attitude and you will find that everything will have positive results and you will receive abundant blessings in Divine right timing.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------​

Number Sequences - Repeating 4's

Number 4 resonates with the vibrations and energies of hard work, security, practicality, productivity, appreciation, tradition, solid foundations, security-consciousness, self-control, loyalty, conscientiousness, high morals and ethics, traditional values, honesty, strong-willed, conservative, application, determination, the serious builder, progress, the doer, management, realistic values, stability, wholeness, unity, ability, justice, goal-orientated, system, order, organization and exactitude, honesty and integrity, endurance, mastery, responsibility, inner-wisdom, maintenance, construction, seriousness, discipline, dependability, conviction, self-discipline through work and service, your passion and drive.

Number 4 represents the four elements of Air, Fire, Water and Earth, and the four sacred directions, North, South, East and West.

The number 4 symbolizes the principle of putting ideas into form and it signifies work and productivity.
The essence of the number 4 is security, diligent work and strong foundations.

It is constructive, realistic, traditional and cautious and is the number of system, order and management.
This vibration is to do with energy, harmony and co-operation and it is the door to illumination and/or initiation.

When Angel Number 4 consistently appears it indicates that your angels are all around you and with you.
The angels are offering you support and inner-strength to enable you to get the necessary work done.

They understand that you are toiling towards your goals and aspirations and the angels ask that you call upon them for help, support, guidance and the emotions of love and security.

The repeating Angel Number 44 sequence indicates that the angels are surrounding you at this time, loving and supporting you.
You have a very strong and clear connection with the angelic realm and are asked to use it to your advantage, and for the benefit of others.


The message of the 444 Angel Number sequence is that you have nothing to fear … all is as it should be, and all is well.
Things that you have been working on or with will be successful.

Repeating Angel Number 444 is an indication that you are being surrounded by angels who love and support you and their help is close at hand, always.

When the number sequence 4444 appears repeatedly, it is an indication that you are surrounded by your angels.
The angels are at your side to reassure you of their presence, love and help.

Your angels are watching out for you and supporting you in your work and day to day life.
They encourage you to continue working towards your goals and aspirations as success and achievement are ahead of you.

Angel Number 4444 is a message that help is nearby and all you need to do is ask for angelic assistance and guidance.

 

[Skarekrow]

I did some hard-core meditation last night and ended up wiping myself out...
I didn’t eat all day nor all night...and speaking of angels ^^^^ I called out to them many times last night.
Asked them to heal me...I get so tired of feeling sick all the time...feeling like I have to take a pill or get some treatment to feel better...I just want it to stop.
I purged and purged and purged, and cried and cried and cried....till I was an exhausted ball on the couch with a now stuffed up nose and a rapidly approaching migraine (not eating probably contributed to that...gotta have SOME sugar in the system).

When I closed my eyes I felt surrounded by loving presences, though I was alone.
I pleaded for their help, for my Dad’s help, to heal me, to comfort me, to help me through this life and allow me to be the best person physically and spiritually as I can.
I want to feel better because I want to contribute to the world, sometimes that is such an obstacle...this is how/why I was created IMHO...created to help others.
And I understand that one must first love and take care of themselves before they can help anyone else...I try....I really try...I just don’t know what else to do.

I know we all have our challenges in life, some are far worse than my own - far worse.
But I feel like I have such a difficult challenge to change my perspective about all this...maybe that will be my life’s hill to climb?
I don’t want to feel sorry for myself...don’t want to have to make excuses to people because of how I feel...emotionally or physically.

Now a list of some things in my life that I really appreciate:

• Everyone on this forum, all my friends especially.
• @Sensiko , I don’t know how I would get by without her love and support and depth of understanding of me.
• Mom, and family
• Music...I can’t go a day without it.
• Same goes for incense
• All the doctors, nurses, techs, cleaning staff, pharmacy staff, and all the people you never see behind the scenes.
• Nature, the beauty all around us that we don’t notice because we are too stuck in our heads all the time.
• Of course my Son...I was supposed to be his Dad, and I feel incredibly blessed and lucky to play that role in his life, to help him achieve/become whatever his version of a healthy, happy, successful person is to him.
• I feel lucky that I have done some of the really amazing things in my life that have helped countless people, as an EMT, Paramedic, Medic for the Coast Guard, ER Tech, Surgical Technologist, Open heart first-assist...most never even knew I was there or remember me at such a traumatic time, but I know what I’ve done, I think that counts for something...I would really like to get back to a functional level, though I may have to get more creative about how I can help others.
• My pets...my Dog and two cats...they always give you comfort no matter what the reason
• I feel lucky to be educated well.
• I feel lucky to have travelled to quite a few places around the world, and met some really amazing people.
• The memories of my Dad, the trips camping/etc. we used to take before he passed...he had more integrity than anyone I have ever met.
• I feel lucky to be alive, though sometimes I don’t realize and appreciate this...I feel I am slowly getting more and more out from being “stuck” in my own head.
• There are too many little things to count, and I will stop now...I get too emotional writing shit like this and used most of my emotional energy last night.

 

[Skarekrow]

Don’t post much about nutrition and such on this thread, but I liked this one.
Enjoy!

Serotonin Deficiency and Food Cravings​

Written by: Kevin Cann


​

The more I meet with people and get to know them the more I have realized that we may have another epidemic here in America that is not often addressed, serotonin deficiency. Antidepressants are the most common medication prescribed in the United States (Olfson, 2009).

Understanding the mechanisms on how antidepressants work can help us understand what is going on in our heads.
The most commonly prescribed antidepressants are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI).

They are prescribed not only for depression, but also for obsessive compulsive disorders, panic disorders, and even eating disorders.
The way that these medications work is they increase the amount of serotonin at the serotonin receptor sites (Stahl, 1998). This in the short term may make us feel better by balancing out our biochemistry.

The issue lies when our body fights back and begins to desensitize to serotonin and the medication dosage needs to be increased or medications need to be changed.
Certain foods can have a similar affect.

When we eat a food high in sugar insulin gets released to quickly take it out of the bloodstream.
Insulin removes all of the amino acids along with the sugar, except for one, tryptophan.

Tryptophan is our precursor for serotonin and it now can enter the brain without having to compete with other amino acids.
This can lead to increased amounts of serotonin in the brain (Ross, 2002).

Addiction can be linked to these neurotransmitter deficiencies.
According to Kenneth Blum’s Reward Deficiency Syndrome, we will seek out substances that balance us out biochemically.

For example, if we have low serotonin we will seek out substances that raise serotonin levels.
High sugar foods are a way for us to do this.

Blum also concluded in a study that glucose cravings are caused by a lack of dopamine receptors in the brain (Blum, 2006).

Serotonin and dopamine have a very complex relationship in the brain.
A clinical review of SSRIs showed that these drugs inhibit dopamine (Damsa, 2004).

According to this study, increased serotonin in the brain can lead to an inhibition of dopamine.
If we are eating high sugar foods or have high insulin levels, and have enough leftover tryptophan in the blood, we will have high amounts of serotonin in the brain.

If we are constantly eating high sugar foods throughout the day, perhaps our diet will mimic the SSRIs by leaving increased amounts of serotonin around the neuron for extended amounts of time, leading to less dopamine.

According to Blum’s study this will lead to more sugar cravings.
Over time of increased serotonin exposure, just like with SSRIs, we become desensitized to the neurotransmitter and mood disorders can follow.

So what can cause serotonin to become depleted?
First, let us look at diet.

High amounts of caffeine will eventually lead to serotonin issues.
Caffeine combats adenosine.

This causes a domino effect in our central nervous system.
To respond to this we release serotonin and noradrenaline.

Caffeine also increases serotonin concentration in the brainstem (Walton, 2002).
This can lead to our neurons becoming desensitized to serotonin as well as decreasing dopamine.

High sugar foods are also problematic due to the mechanisms described above.
Protein contains the amino acids that are our precursors for our neurotransmitters.

Therefore, if we aren’t eating enough protein there is not enough of these precursors to make the neurotransmitters.
Breast milk contains high amounts of tryptophan, infant formula does not.

This could leave us predisposed to becoming serotonin deficient (Ross, 2002).
B vitamins, calcium, magnesium, and vitamin D are also required to make serotonin.

Serotonin is dependent upon light.
This is where problems such as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) come into play during the winter months.

On top of serotonin being stimulated by light, vitamin D is required to make it, which we also get from the light.
Chronic stress can deplete serotonin.

We release serotonin to counter the stress response.
Again, too much exposure to serotonin leads to us becoming desensitized.

So what do we do?
For one, eat a diet with ample amount of nutrients and protein.

Also, get some exercise!
Exercise works similar to insulin in that it takes all the amino acids out of the bloodstream and shovels them into muscles except for one, tryptophan.

Ever wonder why you feel better after working out?
It can be even better by exercising outside in the natural light can help stimulate serotonin.

Signs and symptoms of serotonin deficiency are low-self esteem, insomnia, phobias, panic attacks, eating disorders, depression, anger, anxiety, shy, and obsessive behaviors as well as cravings for sweets and chocolates, cravings for sweets at night, and binge eating.

If you experience a few of these symptoms chances are you are serotonin deficient and if switching up the diet to a paleo framework does not work seek the help of a qualified practitioner.

References​

Walton, Christine (2002). Effect of caffeine on self-sustained firing in human motor units. The Journal of Physiology.
Damsa, C (2004).
“Dopamine-dependent” side effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors: a clinical review.” UK Pubmed Central.
Olfson, Mark (2009).
National patterns in antidepressant medication treatment. Archives of General Psychiatry.
Stahl, Stephen (1998). Mechanism of action of serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors: Serotonin receptors and pathways mediate therapeutic effects and side effects. Journal of Affective Disorders. Blum, Kenneth (2006).
Reward deficiency syndrome in obesity: a preliminary cross-sectional trial with a genotrim variant. Advances in Therapy.
Ross, Julia (2002). The Mood Cure. Penguin Publishing. London, England.​

 

[PintoBean]

This guy tells some truths and tells information about turning on the pineal gland naturally with knowledge.
Sounds interesting.

[video=youtube;m_tZbSWf79Q]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_tZbSWf79Q&index=19&list=WL[/video]

That's interesting. Descartes was also big into the Pineal gland. He called it I think the "seat of the human soul."

 

[Skarekrow]

Yea...so awesome....(sarcasm)...I could do without my empathy being validated ALL the fucking time thanks.

Depressed about the world?
Awesome!
Stages of being awake, catalyzing transformation​

Depression can be ontologically (way of being) embraced as a natural expression of empathy; a rational response to the present conditions of psychopathic Earth “leadership.”

Choosing to embrace rather than resist so-called “depressed” thoughts and feelings opens a pathway to possible proactive thoughts, speech, and actions to transform present conditions to unpredictable and even unimaginable virtues.

That is, if a human being is going to participate in the transformation of present Earth conditions, then it seems normal for most people to have reactions that may include shock, horror, denial, sadness, fear, rage, depression, and anxiety in becoming responsible (response-able) to Earth conditions when factually embraced.

This is a temporary stage that those of us with experience observe often, and almost all of us have gone through ourselves.
Initially painful reactions is a transitory phase to discovering openings for action in this condition.

It also opens real-world exercise of religious/spiritual/philosophical self-expression for ontological peace within this condition.
In simpler terms: Duh. Who wouldn’t be upset when you wake-up to how badly we’re being fu*ked?
And who wouldn’t step-up to help when you see the OMFG crimes centered in war, money, and media (and ~100 other areas)?

Let’s look at depression as one example of the victim/initial phase, with opportunity as a validating response of empathy.
What most people call “depression” includes two interpretations before a potential breakthrough third:

1. External conditions are somehow “wrong” or “bad.”
2. Internal power or resources are insufficient to substantially improve those conditions.
3. Even though external conditions are not preferable, and resources might be insufficient to alter those conditions, human beings are free to dance in full creative self-expression regarding our condition and resources.

Let’s look at each of these three interpretations of the world.

External conditions are “bad”: As humans awaken to the facts, these are certainly “bad” compared to what ~99% of us would prefer:

• peace over lie-begat unlawful Wars of Aggression,
• money rather than debt and mathematically guaranteed debt-slavery,
• Facts about our most important stories rather than Orwellian corporate media lies (with much distraction).
• And then many of us awaken to other 100 or so game-changing areas, such as Dr. King being assassinated by the US government as proven in the family civil trial, it’s cheaper to provide housing than endure homelessness, GMO non-foods, cancer cures, chemtrails, vaccines being toxic, fluoride in water also toxic, and, well, about 100 more!

So!
Appreciating objective, measurable, and independently verifiable factual world conditions, ~99% of us would truthfully assess such conditions as “bad” relative to a range of alternatives!

A big part of such an assessment of “bad” is natural empathy for those suffering under such conditions.
Resources are insufficient to improve “bad” conditions: Connected to the assessment of “bad,” we naturally prefer to upgrade those conditions approaching “good.”

That said, awakening humans notice their previous “entranced” state still existing for almost all humanity when we try to naturally share our factual findings with others.

The result for almost all of us is we find that other humans, even those we believed who most care for us, are not ready to engage in factual consideration of the human condition.

In combination with corporate media’s propaganda of oligarchs’ continuous manipulations to continue neo-slavery over the 99%, we can naturally conclude that our personal and perceivable resources are too small to overcome the history and existing propaganda that maintains these Orwellian conditions.

Even when we realistically assess how many humans are awake enough to recognize the Orwellian conditions, my colleagues who I ask estimate a range of 1 to 10 million Americans (3% at maximum), with likely higher percentages outside the US.

The effects upon US policies to date seem to suggest that we have enough of us awake so we’re difficult to ignore, but too few to alter much in what happens.

So!
It just seems accurate data from our experience that many or most people are not ready to factually embrace world conditions, and our total resources are not sufficient yet to significantly alter such conditions.

That is, the “bad” conditions are likely to continue into the immediate future.
Again, considering this frame to observe “depression,” anyone with empathy for those suffering would feel both the “bad” conditions and the rationally-assessed likelihood those conditions will continue.

The “silver-lining” is this validates our empathy.

Human beings are free in self-expression: After the shock, fear, depression, and whatever else is embraced, we see those as normal initial knee-jerk reactions for humans who see “good” as very different from what we have on Earth.

And after the lack of responses of our sharing (or “bad” responses) are embraced, we begin to see an Earthian tragic-comedy in play.
This is not necessarily bad as a genre, and certainly requiring critical mass force of unawakened humans to exist!

So!
Given human power to self-express as we see best that all of us experience in areas of expertise/power, we can sense/feel power to dance with world conditions as we choose.

What we can see:

• Empathy drives us to transform “bad” conditions to “good.”
• Our Earthian tragic-comedy challenges self-expression to produce such “bad” to “good” outcomes, given direct communication often produces denial/resistance.
• We humans are free to self-express in this area of Life, and all other areas (this is where your sense of Faith/religion/spirituality can inform what you best feel of virtue to express and experience on the journey).

Conclusion:
Humans are free to self-express, and as guests on this planet we’re not part of management to determine anyone else’s choices.
Experiment and do what feels best, feeling that your empathy is a virtue to fuel your self-expression.

If we are to win, and I bet we are, the victory will be swift in an Emperor’s New Clothes moment, with my preference being Truth & Reconciliation for the evil and minions to fully disclose the facts.

Personally, from political activism since 1977, here’s what seems to drive my self-expression (more here):

• Know your purpose has 95%+ agreement when people have the facts.

• Do what is natural and virtuous for your self-expression: Given a position of power that you have an outcome people really want, AND given a condition that people may not recognize easily the attractiveness of what we offer, experiment with your most virtuous self-expression to play this game. Your unique, powerful, and beautiful sense of virtue is attractive when expressed, and the best you have to offer.Connected with my next point, my own sense of virtue is to be of simple service and fun with others. I only offer information when a genuine opening occurs consistent with someone’s expressed interests. My friend, Bucky Fuller, called this particular indirect outcome precession (and here), similar to the contribution honey bees make with pollination as a side-product of their interest in honey. The outcome is ever-increasing experience and expression of virtue.

• Relax and have fun ‘cuz we’re guests on Earth, not management: For the first part of my activist career, I operated to save human lives from poverty as quickly as possible. The hard truth is that I am insufficiently powerful to produce that outcome on my own; I am only able to offer this outcome (or any other) in networks for various groups’ consideration. Given my gradual acceptance of an apparent status as a human guest on Earth outside of direct managerial decisions, I’ve looked at different perspectives to be effective and enjoy this experience. From having “played” as hard and fast as I could for years, I’ve surrendered to Bucky’s conclusion/observation of precession.

If a pathway hasn’t opened to your powerful self-expression so far, and you’re interested, look from the power of purpose, what’s natural to your sense of virtue, and what seems fun. Having a chat with like-minded friends should also open valuable ideas, or perhaps a poet’s advice.

 

[dang]

I did some hard-core meditation last night and ended up wiping myself out...
I didn’t eat all day nor all night...and speaking of angels ^^^^ I called out to them many times last night.
Asked them to heal me...I get so tired of feeling sick all the time...feeling like I have to take a pill or get some treatment to feel better...I just want it to stop.
I purged and purged and purged, and cried and cried and cried....till I was an exhausted ball on the couch with a now stuffed up nose and a rapidly approaching migraine (not eating probably contributed to that...gotta have SOME sugar in the system).

When I closed my eyes I felt surrounded by loving presences, though I was alone.
I pleaded for their help, for my Dad’s help, to heal me, to comfort me, to help me through this life and allow me to be the best person physically and spiritually as I can.
I want to feel better because I want to contribute to the world, sometimes that is such an obstacle...this is how/why I was created IMHO...created to help others.
And I understand that one must first love and take care of themselves before they can help anyone else...I try....I really try...I just don’t know what else to do.

I know we all have our challenges in life, some are far worse than my own - far worse.
But I feel like I have such a difficult challenge to change my perspective about all this...maybe that will be my life’s hill to climb?
I don’t want to feel sorry for myself...don’t want to have to make excuses to people because of how I feel...emotionally or physically.

Now a list of some things in my life that I really appreciate:

• Everyone on this forum, all my friends especially.
• @Sensiko , I don’t know how I would get by without her love and support and depth of understanding of me.
• Mom, and family
• Music...I can’t go a day without it.
• Same goes for incense
• All the doctors, nurses, techs, cleaning staff, pharmacy staff, and all the people you never see behind the scenes.
• Nature, the beauty all around us that we don’t notice because we are too stuck in our heads all the time.
• Of course my Son...I was supposed to be his Dad, and I feel incredibly blessed and lucky to play that role in his life, to help him achieve/become whatever his version of a healthy, happy, successful person is to him.
• I feel lucky that I have done some of the really amazing things in my life that have helped countless people, as an EMT, Paramedic, Medic for the Coast Guard, ER Tech, Surgical Technologist, Open heart first-assist...most never even knew I was there or remember me at such a traumatic time, but I know what I’ve done, I think that counts for something...I would really like to get back to a functional level, though I may have to get more creative about how I can help others.
• My pets...my Dog and two cats...they always give you comfort no matter what the reason
• I feel lucky to be educated well.
• I feel lucky to have travelled to quite a few places around the world, and met some really amazing people.
• The memories of my Dad, the trips camping/etc. we used to take before he passed...he had more integrity than anyone I have ever met.
• I feel lucky to be alive, though sometimes I don’t realize and appreciate this...I feel I am slowly getting more and more out from being “stuck” in my own head.
• There are too many little things to count, and I will stop now...I get too emotional writing shit like this and used most of my emotional energy last night.

Great post. I can relate. All I can say is the wounded healer archetype is a bitch. Be patient and stay strong. You seem to be on the right track. Not everyone can be like David Bowie. Unfortunately.

 

[Skarekrow]

Great post. I can relate. All I can say is the wounded healer archetype is a bitch. Be patient and stay strong. You seem to be on the right track. Not everyone can be like David Bowie. Unfortunately.

RIP Bowie...
Thanks for the support...I was just saying to [MENTION=251]Wyote[/MENTION] though that I need to stay focused on the big picture and try not to sound like a whiny little bitch when there are people as I type this being bombed to death or starving.
Get out of my head me!!

 

[dang]

RIP Bowie...
Thanks for the support...I was just saying to [MENTION=251]Wyote[/MENTION] though that I need to stay focused on the big picture and try not to sound like a whiny little bitch when there are people as I type this being bombed to death or starving.
Get out of my head me!!

Pain is pain. It is not a contest. Just because we haven't been tortured doesn't diminish our experience. Yes we shouldn't wallow in our pain. But we should acknowledge it and try to learn from it. Pain does serve a purpose. It wakes us up. It pushes us in certain directions. It helps us out in a bizarre way. But it still sucks. I know I have been through hell. I don't need to convince anyone. I understand what you are saying but you need a balanced perspective. Things could always be better or worse. I personally feel it is very difficult and pretty futile to compare people's pain. Or to say your pain isn't that significant or valid because others are suffering more. Don't be so hard on yourself. I have learned not to exaggerate or to downplay how I am doing. I just try to accept it for what it is. Yes whining is annoying. But ranting is therapeutic. I guess what I am trying to say is everyone has an equal right to share their experience of personal pain. I don't think it is fair to say that only the most cursed people get to complain. I am rambling. But I guess you sound a little like me and perhaps we both need to learn not to be so hard on ourselves. Give ourselves permission to experience pain without qualification or guilt or worry. Just to accept it like looking at a painting. Anyway, hope this makes some sense. I guess everything is relative to an extent. Now stop whining and be a man. Just kidding. Have a good one.

 

[Skarekrow]

Pain is pain. It is not a contest. Just because we haven't been tortured doesn't diminish our experience. Yes we shouldn't wallow in our pain. But we should acknowledge it and try to learn from it. Pain does serve a purpose. It wakes us up. It pushes us in certain directions. It helps us out in a bizarre way. But it still sucks. I know I have been through hell. I don't need to convince anyone. I understand what you are saying but you need a balanced perspective. Things could always be better or worse. I personally feel it is very difficult and pretty futile to compare people's pain. Or to say your pain isn't that significant or valid because others are suffering more. Don't be so hard on yourself. I have learned not to exaggerate or to downplay how I am doing. I just try to accept it for what it is. Yes whining is annoying. But ranting is therapeutic. I guess what I am trying to say is everyone has an equal right to share their experience of personal pain. I don't think it is fair to say that only the most cursed people get to complain. I am rambling. But I guess you sound a little like me and perhaps we both need to learn not to be so hard on ourselves. Give ourselves permission to experience pain without qualification or guilt or worry. Just to accept it like looking at a painting. Anyway, hope this makes some sense. I guess everything is relative to an extent. Now stop whining and be a man. Just kidding. Have a good one.

You know you look just like this guy in Boy Scouts when I was a kid named Jason Dummel...he was the guy you had to watch out for or he would take a piss in your canteen...which was all good fun so long as it wasn’t you..hehe.
There was no point to that story just fyi.

You are right...and you know most of the time I have a fairly optimistic outlook on how I am doing, and I do genuinely care and try to do my best to take care of/acknowledge/love/appreciate all the people I know who are in my life.
I think we all have our moments...and honestly I would rather have my moments than not feel at all, or feel less than I do now...including the pain.
I had a profound dream right after my Dad died....I was in the foggy woods and came upon a house with warm light coming through the window, and as I looked in, I saw my Dad, and me, my mom, brothers and sister....but others as well, people I didn’t recognize but I knew somehow I would come to know them at some point in this life.
And I realized this was beyond death, or is simultaneously happening depending on how time actually works...we had all died, but we were still gathered together, eating, talking and laughing.
It was my own sobbing in my sleep that woke me up, but just before I woke, just for a moment - I glimpsed how incredibly short this life (the present one we are in) actually is....it is the blink of an eye, and I know there will be some time when I will look at it and see that again, and know.
People are free to believe what they wish...and it all may have just been some vivid elaborate dream designed by my brain to help me feel better after my Dad passed...but it felt like far more than that...I got to glimpse eternity just for a split second of a second.
And then life comes along with his beer cozy and his shit-smelling cigar and pours his beer over your head and you forget all about dreams and profound moments.
It’s hanging on to that moment...those few fleeting moments we get to have in our lives...that kiss that made you fall in love with someone...the smile only a child can give you.
I used to be lead burn tech after training at the Grossman Burn Center in West Hills LA - http://www.grossmanburncenter.com
That’s something I’m really proud to have done...I worked in Bakersfield at the time (where I grew up and will never return cause it’s a shithole).
Anyhow, a lot of the time we dealt with children...many purposefully burned, like forced to sit in scalding water until their poor legs and groin were thoroughly burned and the child appeared to be wearing red tights torn to shreds and hanging off them.
If I ever need to reflect on pain, those memories from that job will show it to me.

Anyhow...just had a bad night...feeling better today.
I really appreciate all of you here on the forum for your support, advice, profundity.
May it return 1000X to you all.
-M

 

[Skarekrow]

 

[dang]

The fact that he was president for 8 years and that I am a college drop out makes me feel worse, not better. Sorry. At least you tried. You are exponentially wiser than him and you share your wisdom modestly via this forum. For years he was the most powerful person in the world. Depressing. Obviously, life is neither fair nor sensible. President Trump anyone?

 

[Skarekrow]

The fact that he was president for 8 years and that I am a college drop out makes me feel worse, not better. Sorry. At least you tried. You are exponentially wiser than him and you share your wisdom modestly via this forum. For years he was the most powerful person in the world. Depressing. Obviously, life is neither fair nor sensible. President Trump anyone?

Dude...some of the most brilliant minds have been college drop-outs...and who’s to say you aren’t going to finish it one day?
This asshat went to college on his family legacy and “charitable donations” made by his Daddy...did some fake pseudo-military service (and lots of coke ((if he actually went to boot camp, I’ll give you $10)), he was groomed to be what he was - a puppet.
Education does not make one intelligent, you either are or you aren’t.
You Sir. IMHO are.
So shut up.

 

[Skarekrow]

Great article!

Wyrd, Post-Selection, and the Quantum Trickster



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English is blessed with a large and fascinating family of w-r words connoting twisting, turning, and turning-into (in the sense of becoming)–think writhing wriggling worms and the wrath of wraiths. (See my ancient post about “werewords” if you are curious.)

My favorite of this family is Wyrd, which comes from the Old English weorthan, “to become,” but with a sense of turning or spinning–as in, the “spinning” of the thread of our life.

Wyrd (or in Norse, Urthr) was one of the three sister-goddesses, the Norns or Fates, who together wove a man’s destiny and could thus foretell it.

Wyrd, as becoming and as turning, represents “what has turned out” or “what will have turned out” or “what you will have turned into.”
It is a kind of future-perfect tense, a retrospective view from a future vantage point that can look back and survey the ironic (or even warped) paths a life has taken.

Other than through a common appearance in fantasy novels, including the Discworld series of Terry Pratchett, Wyrd survives now in English solely via the wonderful word weird, and this is thanks entirely to Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

The “weird sisters” were three prophetic witches living alone in the wilderness, inspired undoubtedly by the Norns, but their role in Shakespeare’s tragedy is far more interesting.

Weird didn’t simply mean “strange” as it does nowadays; it meant more a force of compulsion related to prophecy–forcing things to happen because a prophetic person said it.

Frank Herbert keyed in on this ancient usage in Dune, where “weirding words” had a compelling force over the hearer.
The concept of Wyrd can thus help us understand post-selection, the quantum physics concept that allows time travel–including time-traveling information (prescience and prophecy)–to exist without producing causality-offending paradoxes.

The term comes from quantum computing, where it is simply a filter on the outcomes of a computation: Set a computer to perform calculations and exclude all the various solutions that do not arrive at a desired, “selected” answer.

This leaves a range of allowable paths to get to that answer–a certain limited range or degrees of freedom within which information accessed in the past, at time point A, accurately pertains to the future event at time point B.

In a way it is analogous to quantum “tunneling”–a particle’s ability to simultaneously take multiple paths to a destination in space–but applied to the time dimension instead.

​

Applied to the larger universe of causality, which is information by another name, post-selection just means we live in a possible universe, and outcomes are those that have “survived” (think Darwin).

Specifically, they have survived any possible precognitive detection by an agent capable or desirous of preventing them, or else have been actually facilitated by prophecy (those feedback loops I’m fond of).

Under post-selection, a degree of foresight is purchased at the expense of some degrees of freedom of action and interpretation.
This produces ironic effects that go a long way toward explaining various characteristics of psi and the paranormal more generally.

Post-selection is the Trickster, who might also be called the Timeline Guardian.
The witches’ prophecies about Macbeth actually shape his destiny, his Wyrd, embodying the ambiguities and peculiarities of prescience in a possible universe, a universe that must sometimes take strange steps to protect itself from paradox.

This may even offer a new way of thinking about psychokinetic (PK, or mind-over-matter) effects that seem to occur in the vicinity of precognition.

Misdiagnosed Informational Reflux

Folklore and tragedies from Oedipus to Macbeth to Dune Messiah show us that prophecy seldom directly and obviously helps further a person’s conscious intentions or plans; often it has the opposite effect.

For instance, Macbeth neurotically finds himself striving to achieve his succession to the throne even though it has been prophesied; yet the witches’ more oblique prophecies about his downfall are fulfilled precisely because he misunderstands them until too late; had they been clearer, he would have taken action to prevent them.

Debates over prescience and its paradoxes often misleadingly turn on ideal-typical examples like receiving a premonition of a terrorist attack, which raises the obvious question of possibly using the foreknowledge to warn somebody (and thus foreclose the event).

It doesn’t quite work that way in the real world, where prescience has a much more ambiguous character.
Because we possess consciousness and free-will, the rule of post-selection guarantees that the vast majority of our precognitive experiences are consciously unregistered as such until after the fact, either because we totally overlook them or, if we detect something premonitory going on, it is subject to too many rival interpretations that it does not occur to us to act (deliberately or inadvertently) in a way that would prevent the foreseen outcome from occurring.

Or, we can try to act on it, but the circumstances guarantee that nobody will listen or heed what we say.
Nobody pays much attention to credulous paranoids and New Agers who believe in bullshit like ESP; societal disbelief in psi and prophecy must be included in our account of the universe’s immune system against paradox.

None of the nation of dreamers who dreamed of 9/11, for instance, knew exactly what was going to happen or when; even if some did, there was no possibility of preventing the attacks based on such dreams and visions (especially taken in isolation).

Precognition is always slippery, always evades our attempt to interpret.
It often has an ominous or uncanny flavor, for instance, yet turns out to have a totally mundane meaning once confirmed by events–or else, it seems mundane and innocuous at first glance and then turns out later to have had monumental importance.

This is all, I believe, directly symptomatic of how prescience has to work in a post-selected universe.

​

Post-selection is sometimes described as a rule that prevents the grandfather paradox, but the way it works in practical terms is as a context that preserves a tolerable degree of uncertainty about information back-flowing from the future.

One of the vexations of psi is that it has always been seen to be a weak signal on a noisy channel; protocols to enhance the signal, such as the redundancy method described in Damien Broderick’s recent book Knowing the Unknowable, cannot get rid of the noise altogether.

What this means is that you can never prove that a single psi behavior (guess, dream, insight, drawing, etc.) is authentically an example of psi.

You are stuck in a land of statistics and uncertain probabilities and inability to ever make definitive claims.
People always raise the paradoxical idea of having a premonitory dream of dying in a plane crash and then avoiding the flight.

What, in that case, “sent” the premonition?
But there’s no mystery: The premonition may really be “of” surviving a plane crash that was depicted in the dream as including you.

Or if I am right, it would be more accurately characterized as being an oblique representation of your complex emotions sparked (in the future) by surviving a real or possible plane crash.

We should not look for literalness in premonitory phenomena, or a direct connection to actual events; they refer to our (future) inner life. And more to the point, you can never be 100 percent sure it was “a premonition” or “a precognitive dream” in the first place and not chance coincidence, just a random dream, and your interpretation of it a hindsight-biased construct.

Don’t Think of a Polar Bear

And really, precognitive dreams and visions are not really “of” the future in any sense: They arrange material already in memory as a best-guess interpretation of unprovenanced “perturbing” information supplied by the precognitive circuit.

My work with precognitive dreamwork and hypnagogia over the past two years has made this logic quite clear to me: We’re precognitively dreaming all night and metabolizing our immediate future in hypnagogia all day; but even scrutinizing these phenomena, armed with a notebook and melatonin and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, their meaning only ever becomes apparent in hindsight or, often, precisely as the precognized event is already unfolding (thereby adding to the excitement and thus emotional salience of the realization).

They largely concern very trivial events, forcing me to conclude that the traditional association of premonitions with disasters and traumas is purely an effect of hindsight bias; prescience is a constant background function (i.e., James Carpenter’s “first sight”), not a rare thing provoked by “disturbances in the force.”*

Other than dreams, prescience informs our intuitions, parapraxes like misreadings and slips of the tongue or pen, “earworms,” and other manifestations of what Freud called the psychopathology of everyday life.

The associative murkiness surrounding psi not only demands that we study these phenomena within a Freudian psychoanalytic framework, as Jule Eisenbud did in the 1970s, but also links them to phenomena described in more recent cognitive psychology, such as the “ironic process theory” of Daniel Wegner.

Wegner realized that, if asked, you can’t not think of a polar bear, because a vigilant part of the brain is on the lookout precisely for the undesired thought in order to prevent it.

It’s essentially a Trickster function, and such a function would have arisen to orient us toward real threats (not just imaginary polar bears); it causes us to find perverse reward precisely in signs of things we don’t want to happen; the function especially keys in on signals of chaos, entropy, and death or decay.

​

Edwin May thinks entropy gradients actually carry the psi signal, but I think it is simply that our psi eyes are drawn to the signs of disorder and decay that hint at something our survival-minded limbic system ought to be aware of.

Psi is semiotic, focused on signs, because information is; as psi-dreaming pioneer J.W. Dunne brilliantly discerned, it’s an orientation to information coming down the pike from the brain’s future, not an orientation to objective events out in the world.

Wegner’s ironic process, or the Trickster function, explains the perverse linkage of reward to threat (a binding I have elsewhere called jouissance)–explaining why it is really reward and not trauma that “powers” psi phenomena, and why (again, per Carpenter) it most often operates awry of our conscious intentions.

This may seem to make precognition “useless” but it does not; it only makes it non-straightforward with respect to our conscious aims.
It was a big “duh” moment for me about a year ago when I realized that this is just another way of phrasing what ritual and chaos magicians have been saying for many years, albeit in another idiom. Hence the importance (as Gordon White reminds us in his excellent recent book The Chaos Protocols) of “obliquity,” as well as the necessity of a ritualized social context in which to productively exercise psi abilities.

Blinding

The associative remote viewing setups devised by Russell Targ and others are perfect examples of psi-facilitative social ritual–where effectively the psychic him-/herself is “blinded” to the useful meaning of the information they produce until after the fact.

Just as the first cells may have capitalized on quantum pre-sense by engulfing tubulin endosymbiotes (more on this in the next post), the only useful psi in the human world is “symbiotic” in the form of teamwork, a relation between, minimally, a “blind” psychic subject and an agent who is alone privy to the specific problem or question being posed–and better yet, even more intermediate layers of knowing/non-knowing.

We should not miss here the resonance to classical archetypes of prophecy.
Prophets often are blind, or are blinded.

Think blind Tiresias, who is really a mirror held up to Oedipus, who blinds himself upon learning the truth of how his actions fulfilled the prophecies.

It is precisely the fact that prescience is always about the psychic subject’s own future enjoyment that makes the subject precisely useless or unreliable as an interpreter of his/her visions; there must be controls in place to take this unconscious foresight and forefeeling, de-bias it, and make it something actionable and useful for the welfare of the community.

This is precisely why I think science is a necessary partner in psi: Actually utilizing psi effects requires the same sort of rigorousness and fussiness (blinding and controls) that enables us to capitalize on other elusive, small effects in nature and turn them into something powerful.

We also should not miss the historically well-known role of collaboration in divination and magic: The diviner often requires a more naive assistant as a conduit or reader, which performs the same function as blinding in an experimental context–creating filters to control for bias and to extract prophetic knowledge from the noise that surrounds it.

Think the oddball practices like Cagliostro’s use of a child-clairvoyant, or John Dee’s use of Edward Kelly (although you could ask, who was using who, in that case).

Experimenter effects are the death of divination.
Blinding is really a kind of distillation or extraction operation … And wouldn’t it shock most scientists to know that the ancestor of basic experimental controls is nothing other than mediumship.

In no case can the “psychic subject” gain conscious knowledge, with any certainty, of an event such that the knowledge could be actually used by him-/herself in such a way as to prevent that outcome–kind of like the witches’ prophecy that no one “of woman born” will kill Macbeth, or that he’ll only be overthrown when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane.

I’ve noticed that precognitive dreams have a cunning range of interpretations: Until the future referent becomes clear, you can often write them off as having vague links to past events or preoccupations.

They have a way of discouraging scrutiny.
Precognition could only have arisen in this “cloaked” fashion; it can only be an unconscious phenomenon.

Psi and meaning do not mix, as remote-viewers have always known: There is some contradiction between psi-gained information and understanding its meaning or being able to put its meaning (accurately) into words.

It also comes hand in hand with a shaping of our possible degrees of freedom, and cannot be disassociated from our neuroses and deepest motivations.

​

This is similarly clear on the other end of the spectrum from blinding us about fates we might rather avoid: There is also the situation of precognizing an outcome or event in such a way as to impel us to fulfill that outcome.

Post-selection also explains why there can be a kind of bootstrapping in which the future seems to cause the past that causes the future, in a senseless loop–kind of like Macbeth’s desperate efforts to fulfill the witches’ prophecy of becoming king.

As Macbeth shows, Wyrd entails a kind of neurotic, mechanistic or automatistic responsiveness, or pre-sponsiveness, in the face of prophecy.

Generally, we would misinterpret our unconscious foresight as simply inspiration: having a thought to do or seek a thing and then being rewarded by going and achieving it.

In these cases–indeed in many cases of artistic and other kinds of creativity–I suspect that “inspiration” is our classical-causal camouflage for prescience in action (what I have elsewhere called “prophetic jouissance”).

Such situations (which I described as “atemporal feedback loops” in my series on rethinking synchronicities) sound paradoxical, kind of like the grandfather effect, but actually an effect that ensures (rather than prevents) its cause is the opposite of a paradox, even if it challenges our “one thing after another” model of how things happen in a billiard-ball universe.

This kind of tautological relationship between the effect and its cause would actually be an expected sort of formation in a universe containing precognitive agents.

It may be precisely how complex systems like life arose, as I’ll argue in the next post.

The Hysterical Universe

Here’s where it gets really exciting: Post-selection might also help us understand PK and other tricksterish mind-over-matter phenomena that closely attend prophecy.

In my earlier post on sleep paralysis and OOBEs, I raised the question of precognition’s possible relationship to apports and other PK phenomena, such as my “astral foot” possibly knocking over a rock in my study during an OOBE … or not.

My limited experience has inclined me to think that what seems like astral journeying is really very vivid precognition of a future real-life experience in the target locale … thus my astral foot was safely in my bed at the time the rock fell, and my electrified bodymind was precognizing a scene in my study precisely a year in my future–nowhere near the rock in either time or space.

The intuitive notion that the mind in an emotional state can “reach out” and muck with matter via some energy or disturbance in the “consciousness field” is, I think, an appealing, easily visualized idea but hard to square with physics as we understand it.

However. according to some interpretations of post-selection, time travel–including time-traveling information–would sometimes produce anomalies, highly improbable events, precisely to protect the timeline from paradox.

If you went back in time to shoot your grandfather, you would be thwarted somehow, even if it took a UFO to appear from nowhere, or bigfoot to leap out of the bushes and kill you, or (more plausibly) a manufacturer error at the bullet factory.

The way precognitive information is held in our associative ‘premory’ protects the timeline, as I’ve shown, but inexplicable phenomena in our physical environment might also.

In other words, what if a powerful precognitive experience like one of those “Howitzer” long-range OOBE precognitions of an event a year in the future–an event that, because of its distance, would be particularly vulnerable to perturbation in a butterfly-effect universe–could actually “force reality’s hand” to produce an improbable or even outrageous physical effect that raises doubt about the precognitive nature of the experience and thus protects the timeline from interference?

PK, like other psi phenomena, tends to disobey our conscious intentions or yield very micro-sized effects.
Its most dazzling manifestations seem to be oblique, like the bent spoons and stopped clocks (and weirder events like teleportation) that surround Uri Geller but which he cannot quite control.

The tendency for weird physical manifestations like apports and poltergeists and “exteriorizations” to surround powerfully precognitive individuals–Whitley Strieber would be another example–suggests that the possible (post-selected) universe may be straining, hysterically (i.e., “acting out”), to protect the timeline. (Coincidentally or not, hysteria characterizes the personality of many of those highly psychic individuals too.)

​

The displacement of my specularite from its perch, for example, precisely supported the standard OOBE interpretation of the experience, distracting me from any suspicion that it had a precognitive dimension.

Had I suspected precognition, I might have done more to try and confirm its target and thus potentially altered my destiny.
PK may be the probabilistic recoil of psi’s big guns, in other words.

No “subtle bodies” are needed, just a “queering” of ostensible randomness toward the nonrandom.
I find such a hysterical-causal pathology around prescience more believable than invisible pseudopods reaching out from our bodies to bang on stuff and knock things off the shelves … but that’s just me.

This is why I tend not to think of the “supernormal” as some realm of latent powers that humans are destined to develop more fully as the “next phase in our evolution” (a la Frederic Myers).

For precognition to exist, it has to be mostly hidden, protected by dense layers of psychological and social resistance that would compel us to see its effects as anything but seeing or knowing the future.

Future psi wizards are not going to be X-Men or Jedi Knights waving their hands to levitate stuff; they’re going to be, basically, furtive psychomagicians and chaos magicians engaged in weird rituals to program their own unconscious in private and idiosyncratic, highly weird, ways. (Oh man, he called it)

A Causal Immune System

The social unacceptability of psi and the paranormal to button-down minds is not only that it involves liminal (category-defying) subjects, as George Hansen argues in his monumental study The Trickster and the Paranormal.

I think it goes even deeper: It is that the real process and mechanism that (I argue) must underly some or maybe even all of these phenomena–precognition–trespasses on our most basic understanding of causality and seems to invite paradox, which is the most loathsome thing to a rational person.

It is why prescience, of all psychic phenomena, is especially taboo: It is essentially a temporal analogue of incest.
Oedipus, as I’ve argued elsewhere, was an ancient gedanken experiment about prophecy and causality, linking foresight both to the (grand)father paradox and to forbidden enjoyment.

Paranormal phenomena survive in a post-selected universe precisely by introducing doubt, and mucking with our ability to settle on the right explanation.

It’s possibly even their function: Some PK effects could be “high improbabilities” generated by the activity of our precognitive faculty.
This may be part of precognition’s camouflage, an essential aspect of the way precognition survives as an adaptive trait in sentient, willful organisms like ourselves.

When we know too much, we’re f***ed.
Which also explains the link between the paranormal and paranoia: We instinctively know that this zone of taboo-defying phenomena is dangerous, and the universe’s immune system might not like us peering too closely. (It would be not too unlike the Strugatsky brothers’ wonderful novel Definitely Maybe, about a cosmic immune system against advanced science, and perhaps also not too unlike Jacques Vallee’s control system hypothesis.)

​

Every culture, at all times, has misunderstood the power of prescience.
Even when they acknowledge that it sometimes occurs (as nearly all besides ours do), it is this repulsive paradoxicality that deters people from pondering the mechanisms, the “how.”

It is precisely the line of inquiry blocked by that Timeline Guardian, the Trickster, who sends us off in every other possible direction than the future.

Since the beginning, humans have talked about gods and spirits and spirit worlds and telepathy, without understanding that we are really talking about the tunneling into our own future timelines enabled by the quantum brain.

The Greeks of Sophocles’ time, for instance, thought that prophecy had to be supplied by the gods, not directly perceived by the seer.
A few ancient philosophies do however veer excitingly close to a god-free vision of Wyrd, our ironic and mysterious relation to the future.

The Yogacara science of mind, with its “substrate consciousness” where the seeds of Karma are planted comes very close.
My friend Alex van Oss (who did the illustration at the top of this post) alerts me that in the Caucasus the concept of Kebzeh (“the law of cause-effect and effect-cause”) is very similar; one of its principles, “produce the effect and the cause will follow” could really be another way of phrasing post-selection.

In Europe, Hegel articulated a similar idea, with his retrospective understanding of history; and Freud came daringly close when he mapped the unconscious and philosophers like Sartre rightly asked “where is this unthought thought occurring?”

As I argued, the question should really be “when?”

NOTE:
* Here’s a particularly good example of the mismatch between triviality and significance that contributes to our nonrecognition of the precognitive nature of dreaming.

One morning a couple years ago I wrote down all I could remember of a dream that felt like some Central European (Czech or Polish) New Wave film from the 1960s, black and white, about a couple on vacation, a car at an intersection, and something about a sailboat on a lake–almost more of a vague impression than anything narrative I could pin down.

A moment’s reflection on waking told me it was actually a specific movie I had dreamed of: Knife in the Water by Roman Polanski.
It had been many years since I’d seen it, and I really just had a fuzzy recollection limited to the images and ambience of my dream. (I’d always vaguely confused Polanski’s film with Plein Soleil, the 1960s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley.)

Okay, I went to work and sometime mid-morning, probably about 10:30, I went into the small kitchen to get the serrated knife (it’s a sparsely appointed office kitchen, and there’s just one such knife) to cut and peel my apple.

What should I encounter but the sink backed up, and a single object gleaming at me at under about four inches of gray dirty water: the serrated knife I wanted.

Often the referent of dreams isn’t obvious at first, but this one struck me immediately on seeing the “knife in the water” like that: Information about this minor annoyance/upheaval in my morning had entered my unconscious “premory” and triggered an association to that Polanski movie; thus my brain concocted a little image to pre-present this event (or more accurately, the gestalt of my event and my very slightly depressed reaction to it) about 3 or 4 hours in advance.

A dream feels like a big immersive experience.
Naively, it seems odd that the brain would “go to all the trouble” of representing something as trivial as a knife in a clogged sink using something as “big” as, in this case, a movie scenario about a couple’s eventful holiday on the water–as if such an image is, itself, kind of a “production” requiring actors, a set, and props, etc.

But a moment’s thought shows how silly that is: For the brain there was no effort whatsoever in triggering a few neurons associated with that old Polanski film.

This same apparent mismatch of scale and significance has been the mental block for many people, including Frances Yates, in imagining the usefulness of the art of memory too.

A mnemonic image seems somehow effortful, like a big elaborate stage play, so how could it be an efficient method of learning?
In fact it’s just the activation (via free association) of a tiny handful of items already in your head.

Once you start doing it, you realize how effortless it is.
Given the immersiveness of dream experiences, we also naively assume that they unfold in something like real time.

In fact, the few images in my dream could have been a brief flicker of cortical activity lasting a few seconds or even just a few milliseconds. When we realize we spend a couple hours each night dreaming, and any given dream we actually remember may represent just a tiny, tiny fraction of that cortical activation, then it becomes easy to imagine how we could be metabolizing all of our daily experience–both of prior days and subsequent days–in the course of a night.

Dreams are easy for the brain, not a “production” in any sense of the word.

​

 

[Skarekrow]

Does the Brain Filter out a Wider Awareness?


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The human brain has amazing capacities.
It contains billions of neurons, allowing it to process vast quantities of information so that we can function effectively.

But can we have too much information?
Yes, and, in fact, filtering information is one of the brain’s most important functions.

Brain filtering is an adaptive strategy and ensures that only the information relevant to our goals is allowed into our consciousness.
This keeps us from being flooded with irrelevancies that might distract us.

To introduce brain filtering to my neuroscience students, I show them a video of two teams throwing a ball back and forth, and instruct them to track how many times each team gets the ball.

After the students give their answers, I ask if they noticed anything unusual during the video.
Typically, they say no. I then tell them a man in a gorilla costume walked across the court during the play.

When they watch the video again, they see the gorilla.
This is a classical case of the brain filtering out information (the gorilla) irrelevant to the task (counting).

Filtering of information through the attentional pathways of our brain was brought to wide acceptance in the 1950s through the work of psychologist Donald Broadbent.

There is still debate regarding where in the brain this filtering takes place, but it is known that the two sides of the brain filter information differently.

The left controls information important for language abilities and goal-directed actions.
The right controls a broader visual-spatial attention that allows us to take in new experiences on the boundaries of our awareness.

In her book, My Stroke of Insight, neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor describes changes in her attention following a stroke to the left side of her brain.

Immediately after the stroke, she found it exhausting to focus on what someone was saying.
Once she allowed herself to rest in the experience of her right brain, however, she was only aware of the present moment. She says:

In this altered state of being, my mind was no longer preoccupied with the billions of details that my brain routinely used to define and conduct my life.... As my consciousness slipped into a state of peaceful grace, I felt ethereal.

​

Taylor says that the greatest benefit she received from the experience was an understanding that a “deep internal peace is accessible to anyone at any time.”

Taylor’s experience is similar to that reported by many meditators and suggests that reducing the activity of attentional areas in the left side of the brain diminishes one filter on our awareness–and, thus, allows us to experience an expanded consciousness.

Many people’s experiences of this wider awareness have been published over the years.
During near-death experiences, for instance, subjects have described perceiving their awareness leave their body and observe details of the attempts being made to resuscitate them.

People also report moments when they are aware of something happening to someone many miles away.
When they come back to their normal consciousness, these people sometimes ask, “Was it real? Or was it a hallucination?”

Is it possible that in these moments the normal filtering mechanisms of the brain are reduced and this reduction allows the experience of expanded consciousness?

Perhaps the brain’s filtering mechanisms screen out more than just sensory information.

Current research offers additional information on attentional processing and supports Taylor’s experience that the left side of the brain may selectively filter and, thus, limit access to this broader awareness.

Research also shows that training can expand the way we perceive the world.
Long-term meditation training, for instance, increases right hemisphere activity, and opens our awareness to a vaster field.

Another brain area that is highly activated in meditators and that actually grows larger with meditative practice, is the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).

The ACC is also active during such practices as hypnosis and energy healing, allowing a more expanded consciousness to modulate the activity of the brain and body.

Is it possible that reducing the dominance of the left hemisphere and modulating the activity in the ACC might minimize the brain’s filter?
Could minimizing the filter explain the mystical experiences of meditators and the “paranormal” phenomena reported during near-death experiences?

This might indicate that there actually is an expanded level of consciousness that is accessible to our awareness.
Is it also possible that, in addition to filtering out certain sensory information, the brain also blocks our awareness of this expanded level of consciousness?

William James, considered the father of psychology, made a bold proposal about this function of the brain at the turn of the 19th century, saying that the brain filters our access to a vast consciousness, which extends beyond the limits of neural activity.

James proposed that the brain acts as a partial barrier and gives us only the surface of what is possible for us to perceive.
The process James described so many years ago is, of course, the filter theory, and he said that what the brain filters out is consciousness itself–a supremely expanded consciousness.

Not surprisingly, scientists during James’ time were polarized in their views about the proposal that a vast consciousness is filtered from our awareness by our own brain.

This skepticism persists, despite growing evidence that there are certain circumstances that allow us to experience this expanded consciousness. Research studies indicate that these experiences occur when the brain is inactive or minimally active, as occurs in near-death experiences, energy healing, or deep meditative states.

At such times, the filter becomes thinner, and we can experience the expanded consciousness that is usually blocked. If these studies are valid, and I believe they are, we are faced with the paradoxical effects of the filtering process of the brain.

The brain’s amazing capacity to filter sensory information is critical to forming coherent perceptions of the world.
However, one consequence of this amazing capacity is to limit our direct access to the vast consciousness of which we are a part.

 

[Skarekrow]

 

[Skarekrow]

 

[Skarekrow]

[MENTION=5667]Jacobi[/MENTION]