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 22 Apr 2004 @ 03:11, by b. Philosophy
OT3 was called the Wall of Fire. It was a broad level. I learned to focus on what I needed to do to get through it and do it. Doing the auditing as I found more of me I found that I had more self control. Focus and determination. More >
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 20 Apr 2004 @ 05:49, by ming. Philosophy
Paul Hughes makes a compelling case for free will as an unavoidable constant, tying into and going beyond neuroscience, quantum mechanics, and many other subjects. Article "Super Free Will: Metaprogramming & Quantum Uncertainty" at FutureHi.
Neuroscientists and behavioral scientists and cognitive researchers can show how most of our behaviors and thoughts can be shaped or controlled by chemistry and by the inputs we are provided. By finding the right place to put electrodes on someone's brain, or by setting up an environment that influences them in a particular way, one can shape people's reality, and the throughts and feelings they have, to a remarkable extent.
The funny thing is that eastern mystics and yogis and meditators might say similar things, from another angle. Most of what you do is just robotic, arbitrary behavior patterns that you do completely automatically, based on what has been imprinted and conditioned into you. You walk around, half-asleep, in an arbitrary world that is projected for you, having thoughts and feelings that mostly aren't your own.Ok, so where does free-will come in? So far it seems like I’ve decimated every last shred of free-will and human dignity. Yes, and for good reason! Unless we understand the full extent of just how brainwashed and programmed we are, we will never have anything close to a free-will. To be free it first helps to intimately understand just how imprisoned we are by our own nervous system. Freedom comes from knowledge, not ignorance. To know thyself is the pathway to liberation and freedom, as I will now explain. No matter what we do, we're mostly dealing with a world that comes in through our perceptions and our nervous systems, and before we even get around to having a thought about something, we're already many levels of abstraction removed from the real event. And when we form ideas and concepts and try to share them with each other, they're all subject to the same limitations. Even scientists are thoroughly conditioned into logical fallacies developing from layers upon layers of fuzzy abstractions and semantic and neurological limitations.
The answer is that the only thing that leads out of the trap is consciousness that includes knowledge of all these limitations and that strives to transcend them.
Quantum mechanics entails that any measurement includes uncertainty. Even if you check it with another measurement, it just involves more uncertainty. Ad infinitum. The only thing that breaks the chain is when a conscious observer decides what it means.
Likewise, no matter how mired we are in uncertainty and subsconscious conditioning from our environment, we can always move a step up. We can encompass all the uncertainty, including our own imperfect perceptions and memories, and aim at getting what the meta-program is. We can increase our freedom and free will and awareness by understanding better how things work, and by transcending the previous limits we experienced. If we don't add in our own consciousness, we'd keep going in circles. But by becoming conscious of a new understanding, which provides more choices and more freedom, we can actually move up in the spiral. And we can repeat that any number of times. Finding how our previous beliefs and behavior patterns limited us, and moving on to a meta-understanding of them, which gives us more flexibility. But which, of course, again becomes a limitation sooner or later, which we need to transcend. All of this includes, of course, not just how we think, but how capable we are at working with our environment.So here we are altering our own molecular DNA, and soon the entire physical world down to the atomic level. Another way of looking at this, is DNA having evolved out of the slime, is now becoming recursive enough to begin altering itself with internationality and purpose towards something stronger, smarter and more versatile. Going further, the atomic world is now becoming aware of itself, and as it becomes aware of these limits, just like we becoming aware of our own programming, will begin to re-program this matter to become more expressive to this internationality, to the logos, the memeplex that is our noosphere. Will this self-recursion ever end? Probably not. Do we have free will? As I have shown, free-will is a matter of degree. It is easily demonstrated that we can increase the levels and degrees of freedom as we become aware of our own limits. I would say, not only is there free-will, but eventually everything in the universe, including the very essence of ourselves will become re-defined by it. In the end, everything will change, but one thing will remain and increase, the level of our free will, our consciousness, the fundamental that is and comprises everything. As Paul says, free will not only exists, but ultimately it is all that remains in an ever changing uncertain universe. And I agree. For that matter, it seems abundantly logical to me that the universe and our existence in it makes no sense without the perpetual existence of consciousness. I.e. being aware of something and being able to make a choice about it. That can happen at very low levels, automatically and imperfectly, or it we can strive towards doing it better, gaining more all-encompassing wholistic knowledge, understanding ourselves and the universe better, and doing more interesting things with that new awareness. More >
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 14 Apr 2004 @ 10:13, by ming. Philosophy
Via Quotes of the Day:
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
- Philip K. Dick
Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.
That would exclude, oh, how about governments and countries? If we don't believe in boundaries and in the power of certain groups of people to govern us, then there really isn't anything there. There are continents and land and people. But no borders and no power over us. No laws either. They aren't really real. People are real. What they do is real. Their thoughts and feelings and actions are real.
Goodbye to religions too. If you don't believe in them, there's really not much there. A lot of church buildings and some books. Good deeds are real.
Scientific laws and theories go away as well when we stop believing in them. Nature and life doesn't go away. The flowers keep blooming and the planets keep rotating around their stars. And there's a system to that, which keeps working. But it is the theoretical models of how we think that works that drop away.
There's a lot of things our theories say don't exist or can't exist. If we stop believing in those theories, those things will still be there. Extraterrestrials, other dimensions, paranormal perceptions, miraculous events. Except that they won't be miraculous or paranormal unless you have some kind of belief about how unlikely they're supposed to be.
Dreams exist whether you believe in them or not. You'll be zipping around in fantastic realities every day, at least when you sleep.
Failure and success, loyalty and betrayal, mistakes, lies, obligations, promises, shoulds - none of it means much if one stops believing. What matters is what is there, and what you actually do. Good constructive actions last longer than destructive actions. They're more real. Good and bad feelings exist. The reasons for them do not.
Life exists. Consciousness exists. I exist. I'm probably more real the more I get over my beliefs about why and how. More >
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 11 Jan 2004 @ 07:42, by ming. Philosophy
There are quite divided opinions about what consciousness is and where it comes from. Arguments mostly arrive from quite divided assumptions about what the Universe is and where it comes from. One way I would simplify the views would be as follows.
You could assume that there's an external entity, which you can call God or something else, which intervenes in order to make things happen inside the universe. So that if something new happens, it is because God decided it was a good idea and introduced it.
You could also assume that the universe is a closed system. I.e. what is there is what is there, and when it evolves into new things it is because it is in its nature to do so. If hydrogen and oxygen turn into water, even the first time it happens, it is only because they have the emergent property to do so.
In my own somewhat controversial view of all this, I think there are many people who are confused about which camp they're in, or who really assume something different than what they think they do.
Let's look at consciousness. It is observable that there are entities here who have awareness, consciousness, the ability to think about things, including self-reflexively and abstractly. According to the first view, it would be because God suddenly one day said "Hey, I now decree that this mud henceforth will be conscious". According to the second view it would be because it would be perfectly logical, that the component parts merely evolved such a capability, based on the way they're put together, based on their pre-existing properties, and based on a natural sequence of events.
But many people who believe the latter will also try to deny that the consciousness is in fact an emergent property. If I say it a little differently: consciousness can only emerge if it has been there all along. Just like hydrogen and oxygen only can turn into water because they've been able to do that all along. If we use a controversial word for it, their design includes the capability to transform in such a manner.
Water can only happen because the universe possesses a water-ness. If you believe that such a capability suddenly happened and wasn't there before, you're a subscriber to the first worldview above, that there's an external agent who shows up and makes it happen.
Likewise, the universe can only manifest consciousness if it already possesses the capability for consciousness. Consciousness can only emerge if it all along has been an integral quality of the universe. We can discuss whether it was a latent quality or a continuously expressed quality, but it has to have been there, unless it suddenly came from the outside.
If the universe is a closed system, it of course gives some major problems of trying to explain where that came from. Even if we accept that there's no outside interference, but everything in the universe is just doing what is its nature to do, over billions of years, and that happens to have lead to human consciousness and MTV and the Internet and other interesting things, you can not avoid coming up with an answer to where such a brilliant evolutionary engine came from in the first place. If we assumed that the Universe actually evolved from a Big Bang 12 billion years ago, and everything that happened emerged naturally from the qualities inherent in whatever it was that exploded, it still does absolutely nothing in explaining how that something happened to be so exquisitely designed that extremely complex lifeforms would develop which would be self-aware and capable of developing advanced technology. Despite that it supposedly is a natural law that physical matter does the opposite, moving towards increased entropy.
The explanation that most often is used to avoid admitting that the universe possesses inherent intelligence is to invoke Randomity. I.e. to show how random events will carry along evolution. There are some big problems with that, however. What is called "random" usually just means that it is too hard to calculate which exact interactions between what produced what, and it is never just simple cause-effect relationships when one gets down to it. Some people think that Quantum Mechanics show that the universe is basically random. But it really just talks about uncertainty. Because you basically have to include all sub-atomic particles existing in 12 or so dimensions, in a possibly infinite number of parallel universes, in order to calculate what exactly will happen. Which is rather impractical at this point, so the actual outcomes of events, particularly very small ones, are for our purposes uncertain. To our limited view they seem "random" because we're incapable of understanding the whole system at one time at this point.
"Randomness" as such is essentially a variation of the external "God" in the first worldview at the top. I.e. believing in "randomness" influencing the universe in arbitrary ways has much of the same structure as believing in "God" influencing the universe in arbitrary ways. The difference is only in the labels people attach to it and to themselves. E.g. whether one thinks one's view is based on science or religion. Either way, we're in the field of religion if your model requires miraculous outside influences in order to hold together.
Ultimately the better model is probably some kind of synthesis. It isn't ultimately satisfying to just delegate the hard problems to some magical entity you can never understand, or to just deny that they even exist. Assuming that the Universal Intelligence is either entirely outside the universe, or that it doesn't exist at all - both fail to explain a lot of what we can experience here, and either one produces pretty depressing prospects for the future.
The more simple answer, to me at least, is that there's an infinite Omniverse there, and you're an integral part of it. It has the inherent capability to do everything that ever happened and ever will happen, and the scope of what can happen is infinite. Some of the inherent qualities are self-reflexive consciousness and the ability to evolve. It is vast, complex and mysterious, but ultimately completely logical and coherent. You can learn about it and understand it as deeply as you want, and it will readily divulge its secrets, but everything in it is connected with everything else, and all of it is continously evolving, so you'll probably never be done. And that's what makes it an infinitely continuing and expanding game. More >
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 10 Jan 2004 @ 05:11, by scotty. Philosophy
Jeff said "watch your mind at all times"
hmmm ...he of course has never had a peek inside my head - thank goodness - for him!
He got me thinking though - and I thought - and I thought and ...I found myself in a maze !
hmm Now I know where amazed comes from - heh heh heh!
I got to thinking about mazes - and then I thought about a labyrinth.............
In contrast to a maze (a puzzle of choices and dead ends), a labyrinth is a circular, spiraling walkway with a singular path — you reach the center and return on the same path.
Modern labyrinth walkers often speak enthusiastically of heightened senses, renewed spirit, and awakened self-awareness.
The labyrinth is a "right brain" activity and to walk it, you shut off reasoning and welcome contemplation.
There are three basic phases to a labyrinth walk.
The first is moving toward the center - this is a journey inward.
The second is standing in the middle - this is for reflection.
And finally - emerging from the labyrinth - this is about letting go.
Easier said than done methinks ! More >
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27 May 2003 @ 13:30, by sharie. Philosophy
God has given you everything
in order for you to create
anything
you choose,
any experience,
any life,
any world,
anything
Consider the billions of civilizations that have risen and fallen over the aeons of time, each one with their own beliefs, values, and goals, and each one just as seemingly valid and yet just as fragile as this great modern society we have now.
We can create any economic system we want. I recommend we ditch this one that's destroying our life-support system - our Earth, poisoning our water, and polluting our air... it's made the billionaires insane with greed and exploits the suffering of the masses. There are alternatives to this mental sickness. We can stop deluding one another into believing that the value of our possessions signifies the value of our personal life. To own and possess more, doesn't make your life more worthy than those who have less. Quite the contrary, there seems to be some response-ability on the part of those who own more.
We stop believing that by owning *more* we *are* more, we begin to value inner happiness, healthy lifestyles, helpful encouraging friendships, which is far more valuable. We can experience the satisfying feeling of growing spiritually and intellectually... we can value brilliance and radiance in one another, in our Mother Earth, and in our universe.
The universe is an intelligent life form.
Do you think the balancing act of the planets and stars is all done just by coincidence, just by the *forces* that happen to exist, just by the weight of the planets? Or does it occur to you that perhaps there is an intelligence that places *balance* at a priority?
Do you assume the universe is not a life form?
Do you assume the universe is not alive, while assuming you are?
How can you assume rocks are dead when you would be dead if it weren't for the iron, magnesium, and other minerals in the rock?
The universe is an intelligent life form.
And I'll tell you something else that is an intelligent life form... Earth... yes, of course, Earth, but there's something else...
Love
You think love is a feeling?
Love is an intelligent being. Love is a kingdom and a realm. Love is a miracle that transcends all things...
(love deserves an article all its own... coming soon)
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 5 May 2003 @ 17:51, by ming. Philosophy
What if I'm not a bag of skin? What if I'm not a spirit stuck in the head of such a bag of skin? Nor its brain. Nor its collection of thoughts?
The explanation I'm most used to is that I'm a spirit who temporarily resides in a body, and who moves on to other lives. I didn't believe in being a brain since I was a teenager, before I started looking around and questioning things.
But I'm not sure any of those answers are good enough for me any longer. Even the explanation of being an immortal spirit who jumps around from life to life, that's a little too simplistic and limiting in some ways. Oh, I have plenty of experiences to back it up, but it is not enough.
Logically, as well as intuitively, the ultimate answer can only be that I'm everything, the metaverse, all-that-is, God, whatever you call it. Any explanation that is built on a model of your identity being inherently separate from everything else eventually falls apart. There's just no proof of it. Fundamentalist religions, including the religion of scientific materialism, would like to tell you otherwise. You're a separate and powerless little thing, subject to the whims of a vengeful god, or to the cruel randomness of a meaningless and empty universe. The simplest answer to many puzzles is the connectedness of everything. Fundamental separation requires complicated and fanciful explanations, along the lines of "turtles all the way down". No, whatever I am is some kind of wave, or particle, in the quantum sea. And ultimately, any idea of my identity being anything less than that whole sea would be just a temporary convenience.
But that doesn't help me either. Or maybe it does in a way I don't understand. But I'm looking for the stuff in-between. I'm looking for a better way of understanding what and who I am. A practical way that will be more helpful as our world is accelerating and becoming increasingly multi-dimensional.
I can talk very down-to-earth about that. Technology and societal changes force all of us to move faster and be more multi-tasking. Information overload, instant satisfaction, the global village. But I think all of that is only the surface manifestations of something much bigger. We're evolving. Not just as a cute metaphor, but for real.
Despite far out discoveries in science, quantum mechanics, string theory, 12 dimensional universes, etc, we still go around pretending that the world is the same. Even if you're a scientist, your personal instincts haven't gotten any further than the science of Newton. You instinctively understand gravity and acceleration and movement in 3 dimensions. You have absolutely no instincts about 12 dimensional multi-verses where everything is in a quantum state that depends on everything else, and time is just another fungible dimension, which can run backwards, forwards or sideways. So the easiest is just to close your eyes and pretend it is just some cute, weird theory which doesn't have any bearing on real life. No, its the other way around. The Real World probably IS that weird. And we're largely living in a fantasy world. Or, more kindly, just one particular instantiation of centillions of possibilities. Trying to believe it is the only one is the crazy part. You know, that our game here is the only interesting thing in the multi-verse, and it all rotates around our little 3rd rate planet here.
I suspect our evolution will involve an increased intuitive awareness of some of those weird quantum physics principles. Exactly what, I don't know. I'm still a confused 3 1/2 dimensional human.
Biologically each of us is obviously a "we". A sophisticated cooperative of millions of smaller beings. Each of our cells is already a cooperative of thousands of smaller life forms. So a human body is a pretty huge socialist commune. Does that mean I need to operate as if I'm the elected head of state of this whole organization? Maybe. Maybe I should let the biology run itself, as it runs pretty well without me worrying too much about it. But maybe I'm really another kind of "we". A collection of all the different roles I'm playing. Or, more drastic, maybe all versions of me in many parallel dimensions need to coordinate their actions in some fashion.
Maybe it is more simple, and the real me is just a certain .. feeling, a vibe, a certain quality of how things are done. Maybe I don't have to worry about how I get around, or how I'm packaged, how I'm identified, or whether I understand the cosmology of it all. Maybe I'm just a very unique way of doing things. Maybe I'm just a way of perceiving things. Maybe I'm just the awareness of a certain pattern of information. Maybe I will wake up 5 universes away, if the sun just strikes the trees in the exact right way on a misty spring morning. Maybe I'm already there. More >
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9 Apr 2003 @ 15:20, by sharie. Philosophy
I copied the following from my comment on Ming's newslog post about "thinking", I commented:
After working with kids for years, I wrote a book called, "Teaching your Pre-teen to Think" where I addressed this very topic because people just don't seem to know how to think. A few do, but most don't. When I was four years old, I decided my parents didn't know what they were doing... This has been a concern of mine for most of my life. Not that I claim to be an expert on the subject because... I consider myself a novice, but when I can't find the answers I'm looking for in life, I often make up my mind to write a book about it, and ask the universe to answer my questions... and then I write it down, and claim that I wrote the book. I have to admit I am the universe (everyone is) so it is an honest claim. I've studied neuro-psychology, neuro-linguistics, NLP, the brain and it's many functions... and still... this topic of *thinking* has yet to be mastered. I experience myself first and foremost as a spiritual being, but I'm also intellectual, emotional, physical, and social, along with some other aspects.
To *think* I must embrace all I am and use the full power of all of my being... not just my brain, not just my neurology, not just my nervous system, not just the intelligent cells of my body, not just the life-force in the oxygen I breathe, not just the intelligence in the water I drink, not just the world I see, not just the sounds I hear, not just the sensations I feel, not just the emotions that propel me, not just the spirit that guides me, not just the light that shines upon me... and not just the fairy-tale dreams of romantic living or the beckoning of the mountain forests with its uplifting waterfalls... I am all of this... I am the earth and the stars, the oceans and the skies... to *think* I embrace all I am... and just love all of me... that's the best thinking I can do at this point.
Suggestions anyone?
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16 Mar 2003 @ 09:15, by jeffreyiam. Philosophy
My journey to understand the presence of the Soular light has been through my path of destiny. More >
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12 Mar 2003 @ 07:49, by jeffreyiam. Philosophy
Years ago during a time of insight it was revealed that the new light which is coming to the planet is called the Soular light. More >
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