Beyond the Silencing

of Spring

When Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring in the 1960’s, she detailed how humanity had suddenly turned its great knowledge against nature, as with the invention and proliferation of deadly pesticides. The end result was that species of birds were dying, their heavenly songs silenced.

Actually living nature as such  or globally on Earth was threatened.

Deeper silence

Half a century later, we find a yet greater absence of the symphony of nature’s songs.

We hear less of the chirping of crickets, of frogs and less also of the buzzing of bees or the faint flapping of butterflies. The sterility of sound is increasingly deafening. Birds are dying in larger numbers and more quickly.

Can we reverse this engulfing stillness, this ever deepening Silence of Spring?

Here we’ll explore definitively how.

This helps greatly to move past a depressive and collective sense of helpless that gripped the environmental movement for decades.

Machines on the rise while increasingly life forms go extinct

Modern “progress”

Through Carson’s poetic writings, a new awareness blossomed, one that gave birth to the modern environmental movement.  Her observations challenged the thesis that our contemporary world is but moving along a path of rising progress. As a naturalist rather than mechanical engineer, her contrary observations served as a cultural shock.  In an age of countless new and exciting inventions and where a man had just been put on the moon, people didn’t know that our powerful modern technology could also create great harm.  This is reminiscent of when, in the 19^th century, Karl Marx began to look at dismal factory conditions – and where the Industrial Revolution had symbolized a “nothing possible going wrong” and the promise of but pure and endless progress  – as this was idolized.

What Carson brought to light, however, involved something much bigger going amiss.

She dealt with the fate of all of life on Earth intertwined.

Such a larger problem is also not as easy to fix. Carson herself was dying of cancer. She was a part of the same calamity involving all of life in an interwoven web.

Carson’s failing

Despite a love for Carson’s great poetic revelations, they exhibited one major failing.

There was her failure to point clearly to an underlying root cause.

If one fails to grab firmly onto the deep underlying cause, it is like not pulling a plant by its taproot. If the plant is a perennial invader, and not pulled by its root, it will come up each season and may take over a garden.

Annually we face ever more environmental problems.

Human beings are intimately involved when cancer rates rise.  What Carson railed most against, the use of pesticides, has actually exploded since.

Enhanced genetic engineering has implanted pesticides more deeply into the core of life (as with Monsanto’s Bt-technologies).

It has also allowed more intense spraying of millions of fields to accommodate Monsanto’s Roundup-ready seeds.

This might showcase how we have not pulled at the root cause – not enough to turn our conditions around.

Taproot causes can never be find on the surface…

When found they are hardest to uproot

Mechanical causes are superficial as symbolized by billiard balls colliding with each other by hitting each other’s surfaces.  There is a different kind of causality that is inner.  For example, if a runner on a track gets a cell phone call from a loved and decides from within to stop running, this appears to violate Newton’s mechanical law of inertia.  Newton told us such laws are cosmic or universal.  Thus in our modern world we tend to have trouble imagining inner causality as being a predominant force. This violates his vision.

So we are in the habit to look elsewhere or back to the surface levels of causality – and not within. Thus we never find the cause and are left feeling helpless.

Cause deepest within

With something as huge as our civilization’s whole posture towards all of living nature, imagine that indeed the cause is not just within but deepest possible within.  A metaphor for this is a flower radiating pedals in universal directions and from a unifying core. We then have to extend that physical metaphor as symbolizing something that happens deepest inside at the core of ourselves.

What then lies so deepest within? We can surmise it is our subconscious beliefs, formed early on by our elementary education, and such psychological roots are hard to dislodge.  Going further, there can exist collectively subconscious beliefs, showing up in our education, and established early on culturally – and far harder yet  to dislodge than personal beliefs.

This is because the view is re-instilled by almost everyone and almost universally.

 
Newton’s Principia

The Renaissance’s core beliefs

For our modern world, we have commonly shared root beliefs about nature have come out of what we call the “Renaissance.”

These involve some arrogantly presumed principles or “principia” supposedly forming the unifying order of nature. As expressed by Sir Isaac Newton, this was said to be mechanical and mathematical. His vision became culturally dominant or epitomized and represented the core beliefs of the Renaissance. This further catapulted the development of the Industrial Revolution and on must say, with explosive excitement. It was believed that this should and must lead all of humanity toward glorious progress.

A shock deepens

If things are now going wrong, and seriously (as with the invention of atomic weapons that could destroy all of life) as to where we have arrived,  it’s only logical that we need to go back to re-examine what has led us here from the get go. We have planted   a powerful seed vision long ago. Now we face several major and unexpected” black flowerings and fruitions.”

Could this mean that our glorious Renaissance vision, promoted passionately by Newton, is flawed in its guidance?

If so, what is that flaw? Given more insight, we might then be able to find a new seed to plant with. Otherwise we will keep using the old seed, not breaking the mechanical habit, not seeing anything wrong at all nor envisioning any other vision-directions.

We then destine ourselves to harvest not shinning progress, but a looming series of inventions and developments leading to our collective demise.

My own planting of a different seed vision within

In my youth I was a math prodigy. This was evidenced by one summer before high school picking up my first algebra book, and by the end of that summer passing a comprehensive calculus exam at Fairleigh Dickenson University. I afterwards won a regional math competition by a wide margin. However, at the age of 17 I had a high fever and probably a stroke. This caused my left-brain, housing mathematical abilities, to shut down. This experience shook my whole life to the core. I barely mustered the will to stay alive. My inner world essentially fell apart. But decades later I was hugely grateful for the experience. It woke me up where before I had been asleep. It helped me to retie my inner universe back together on a far more solid foundation. I no longer believed, however, in the math-based vision of nature that Newton had told us naively was “cosmically right” and divinely true. Armed with this inner revolutionary insight and shift, I reconstructed my whole consciousness of life. I gathered a new seed vision that also saved my life, rescued my spirit, and revived my soul. It was incredibly healing. It inspired me to become a naturopath wanting to heal others. Let me share only a few initial steps of what followed. It is a way of explaining to the rational mind, stuck in its ways, what a life-centered vision of nature looks like, and using a simpler language devoid of mythological or metaphorical images as expressed in ancient times.

Compared to the Essene vision

The Essenes and other ancient cultures came to very similar conclusions. Their seed visions, however, was often expressed in poetic and right-brain languages as written down on parchments known as the Dead Sea scrolls. This makes it difficult for the modern rational mind to grasp and agree with their view. It can dismiss such visions as nonsense or just lovely poetry or comforting imagination, rather than rational and solid truths. Here an intentional effort is made to explain a life-centered vision more in a more left-brain way, simply showing it to be the more logically and rationally solid view – one which when planted leads us to harvest what  is not rotting.

An outline

FIRST PRINCIPLE - At the core of nature is life. The American Indians, before the arrival of Europeans, lived in only natural terrains brimming with life and so it was much easier for them to take on this view. They had bows and arrows, not machine guns. They had rawhide teepees, not homes made of plaster. Today we are surrounded by endless synthetic creations. We retrofit nature to accommodate machines, as with asphalted streets.  When we walk into a supermarket, 90% or more of the food there is often no longer as nature provided it on her table. We not only live in homes made of unnatural construction materials that outgas but wear synthetic clothes and use toxic chemical cosmetics directly on our skin. Plastic plants replace living plants. Our foods especially are cooked to death and our medicines engineered.

SECOND PRINCIPLE– Imagine that the core of life, in turn, is consciousness (and not mystically or religiously understood but rationally) – as nature’s universal actual and matter-of-fact relationship of connection. Imagine that when so understood and with logical integrity, this is a pointing to connection in every direction and this allows for nature to be authentically and rationally One.

How to experience it -When we are conscious of something, we connect with it. When we are unconscious, we disconnect ourselves from experiences. A diabetic sufferer having neuropathy may step on a nail, and though physically connecting, will inwardly not. An Alzheimer’s sufferer can’t connect past memories well to present consciousness or often can’t tie together facial features enough to recognize the whole face of a life-long loved one.

THIRD PRINCIPLE – At the core of the mechanical seed vision is mathematics – and pointing oppositely to universal relationships of separation in all of nature.When we count three apples they are separate as 1,2, and 3. Blend them together to make applesauce and they can no longer be counted or mathematized.As a result, our “vision harvest” is a literal separation of all elements of consciousness. Our world’s core essence cannot be filled with consciousness and life and, at the same time, be essentially mechanical, separate-part-like or dead – which is what connects best with all of consciousness being separated. This is why we cry out in pain when cut, because life is connected through consciousness as a whole.   A roasted almond will not grow to become an almond tree.

Outline

of a life-centered

and healing

vision of nature

Nathan Batalion, Global Health Activist, Healingtalks Editor

Introduction: Shifting from left to right brain dominance or what triggered my  personal shift toward a different vision of nature

(Healingtalks) As a child I was a math prodigy. This meant that by age 12 or as a young teenager I was able to master forms of advanced mathematics. Before entering high school I passed a proctored, comprehensive integral and differential calculus final at Fairleigh Dickenson University (accomplished within about 2 months after picking up my first Algebra I book) and later won a regional high school competition in mathematics, and by a wide margin. At age 17, however, I had a high fever and that triggered the equivalent of a stroke. It shut down my left-brain functions almost completely – both verbal and mathematical. I became aphasic, unable speak well in whole sentences. This took me to uncharted territories within. In fact I felt lost and like my world had fallen apart. I dropped out of attending New York University, unable to relate, and for about five years what kept me alive was  lived  in an intentional community located in upstate New York. It was founded upon  a spiritual philosophy left to us by the Russian philosopher Gurdjieff. The teachings of that community essentially taught me how to put my inner observing consciousness very high above – above the left/right brain divide – and to  help me fathom this most disrupting life experience I had gone through.

What I learned

This taught me something critically important. It even forced me to become, though I fought it for years, a worldview renegade, one that a)  stopped believing in the conventional vision of nature  – the math-based and atomic and b) actually formulated an alternative vision that was right-brain rather than left-brain dominant in its vista.

 Are YOU right or left brain dominant?

There are simple tests on the web, series of questions, that help determine whether you may be right or left brain dominant.  One of the questions on that link asks: do you prefer algebra over geometry or are you more analytical than visual?  Looking at the above pictures of the left/right brain divide itself, do you understand it better visually or via the pictures on the left or the verbally – the words on the right?    Are you more a  business person who loves to wear a suit and tie and feels comfortable in working in an office cubicle plus revels in making a million… or are you more a hippie who loves to be out in the garden, to   wear lose tie dyes with a flower in the hair  – and has a goal of being a spiritual master  meditating on love, peace and harmony?

Which above way of dressing, living and thinking do you better relate to?

I once interviewed Viktoras Kulvinkas and asked him what scientific or lab protocol he used at the Hippocrates Health Institute in the early years when they tested different sprouting and living food approaches. I was more than stunned when this former physicist answered that he prayed every night and communed with the Source! One need only look at his book Life in the 21st century – a best-seller filled with the drawing of Peter Max, to sense that he is right-brain dominant person on a high level.

Determining our personally or culturally favorite worldview

Worldviews are supposed to be objective – past personal and cultural biases. Right?

They should nakedly describe the world as is really is – not as we internally might like it to or believe it to be – no doubt!

But what if a whole culture can be tested and found to be either left or right brain dominant?  Is it possible that its internal view of reality is eschewed toward that internal proclivity?  Might there then be a bias, a lack of worldview objectivity, and for the whole of its population and its educational system imbued that view to its young?

Modern lab science is just science. It is not something we challenge or question on a far deeper level.

Is our whole civilization – our collective consciousness – more right or left-brain dominant?

This is not very hard to determine.

It is obvious which side we veer towards dominantly in our culture as a whole. Wall Street rules politics

Thus do politicians, or those who control our culture, wear suits or tie dyes?

Furthermore you can just take a look at how the hippie movement of the 1960′s was co-opted, and  by commercial forces armed with the law and uniformed police. You no longer hear beatle-style folk music dominating the airwaves, and with spiritual overtones.  One of the major steps taken to make this happen, and later in the 1990′s, was a consolidated control of the media via the Telecommunications Act of 1996  – so that the cultural revolution of the 1960′s could never happened again. When I was at an anti-war rally recently, with over a hundred thousand people in Washington DC, it had hardly any corporate media coverage – CNN, ABC, CBS, etc.  Owning even marijuana to see reality in a different way, though this is a healing herb, soon became a felony.

The left-brain dominance of our culture has appeared virtually complete.

Historically larger and more subtle way of seeing this

The right-brain dominant approach always takes a larger overview to see things in a holistic way.

Keeping this in mind, the internal nature of our language is actually a more important indicator of brain dominance than how we dress on the surface.

Back in ancient Greek times, the Greeks began to add vowels to their written language.

Without vowels, words had multiple meanings and one had to look at the whole connected context to understand what was being conveyed by a writer – thus needing mostly right-brain or holistic skills. Reading the Greek language originally had eye movements from right- to- left, indicating a culture that was right-brain dominant.

But about a hundred years after the introduction of vowels, reading started to become boustrophedron – like an ox plows a field or back and forth (going from right-to-left and then left-to-right and again right-top-left, etc.) – because the mind was too confused as to the dominance to settle upon. About a 150 years after the introduction of vowels (to give each word a more separate and  distinct rather than whole context meaning, reading eye-movements transitioned to settle on being  left-t0-right or left-brain dominant.

This had a HUGE cultural impact.

This corresponded with the beginning of the “Golden Age of Greece” and which, through the worldviews of Aristotle, Plato, Phythagoras and the atomists set the foundations of western civilization.  It took almost two thousand more years, or until the seventeenth century, that we find the adoption of the mathematical vision of nature – and which can be shown to be the very highest of high left-brain dominant worldview views (because math symbols are the high abstract means to separate all elements of consciousness) – or the naturally arising central paradigm of that left-brain dominance and bias!

Lastly, it still another 400 years to develop this culture proclivity – and to see the stark and often dangerous consequences in our daily lives.

Transcending the divide

The real significance of  going beyond the bicarmel mind – the split brain – understanding the common foundation of these two essential forms of consciousness is that we thereby – and only thereby – can begin to understand what is consciousness itself

Knowing both sides intimately

My experience as a developed left-brain dominant person (a gifted math prodigy and linguist) was instructive in this light. Then my being radically transported to the opposite perspective was ultimately enlightening.  At first I was lost and confused.  Then I was forced to evolve a transcending view of  this divide.  Ultimately I chose to use the right brain’s  – the more raw, deeper and in touch with the nature of consciousness,  to guide the left.

This meant creating a brand new language to teach the left side how to re-see reality in the right brain way (which normally has no language of expression) – the more naked, raw, word-stripped way. It meant evolving a non- math dominated vision of nature.

None of the ancient traditions sufficed for me.

Why chose a right-brain dominance and to arrive at a whole brain objectifying view?

Looking at the picture above, could it be possible that knowing exactly how the colors of rainbow separate and reconnect back to white light represents a metaphor for how consciousness functions – and is more significant that understanding atom in the mathematical, left-brain dominant view?

Right brain dominance means the two brains are brought together with the right being the master, the left being the subservie servant.

The left brain has an essentially separative way of seeing reality, the right brain, connective.

What implications does that have for evolving a worldview? Would you rather connect what is most separative (right brain dominance) or the opposite, take apart what is most whole (left-brain dominance)?

What if what is most whole in nature is organic life, and which dies when taken apart – so that the most extremely evolved left-brain dominant view might threaten the existence and survival of life on earth – as manifesting with the invention of atomic weapons, the spread of chemical pollution, genetic manipulations, and the extinction of species?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor holding a sample brain

Contrasted to Jill Bolte Taylor’s experience

Harvard researcher Jill Bolte Taylor had a stroke that took her into the equivalent of another universe.  A short youtube on her experience has been seen by millions. She also wrote a best-seller book on the subject entitled A Stroke of Insight. T

aylor describes therein her entrance into another  inner world with blissful terms.

My experience and summation thereof was very different.  I decided to look at this experience from above, transcending the right/left brain divide.  From this, as mentioned and the reason why, I became convinced we need a right-brain holistic view to dominate the left. clinical experience tells us the same. When a person has a car accident where the right brain is damaged they become schizophrenic. Their inner world falls apart. When another person has a car accident were the left brain is damaged, they have trouble speaking because they disintegrate or tear their inner consciousness apart – and words, concepts and symbols guide us to do! They are handicapped in the opposite way.

My inner stance, as I regained my verbal and mathematical skills, was to no longer allow these to dominate as they had earlier in my life. I took a trans right-left-brain view and decided on a favorite whole brain view that made far more sense. One cannot connect a vision to wholeness, or bring the two types of inner consciousness together through disintegrative (left-brain dominant) perspectives.  I am certain of this from an ice- cold, freezing impartiality look from above the right/left brain divide.

This gave to me the priceless gift of being able to not only see this but to outline how to exactly and precisely bring these two vistas back together as one. With that we can finally see the objective (non-brain biased) view of our universe!

It is not at all the mathematical view we are familiar with.

Samuel Batalion, my dear dad, and at the opening ceremony of the Betar School (1947)

Why a brain-detached overview is personally important

There are two ways in which this is vitally important.

The first is on a personal level.

I can explain this best with the example of my own dad’s life. Samuel Batalion was a intelligent and quite vocal person. As pictured above he was an orator and leader. He also had many practical skills in life.  He founded the Betar school after World War II to help teach young Jewish men who had luckily survived the Holocaust. The school taught them  skills for a trade – or to become  a plumber, carpenter, electrician and so on. This gave them hope for a new life.

My dad, however, died of severe Alzheimer’s disease!

Why point this out? Because while he had so many great skills in life, he lacked the one skill I consider most important of all – how best to navigate our inner consciousness not to get lost, not to  not to literally slip into inner darkness. Lose consciousness and you lose all other skill sets. So wouldn’t such a premier skill be important? In fact, might it be the most invaluable of all skills we can have. We can learn the hard way, latter in life, that material possessions are nothing, have no real value, if the life within us slips away to enjoy them.

Why a brain-detached overview is culturally important

Back in the 17th century, several philosophers introduced the idea that nature cosmically functions like a Grand Clock or is but a mathematical machine.

No one expressed this more cogently than Sir Isaac Newton how ideologically led the way for the transition from the medieval to the modern world – and to the Industrial Revolution. His vision became dominant because he offered to chart the course of stars – a seemingly super-human feat. As one contemporary wrote, “Newton knew more about the cosmos than all of humanity combined.” His knowledge was so mythologized and revered. It didn’t matter than almost no one read or could understand his Principia Natural Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Nature) – except other mathematicians and physicists. It still, in my opinion, became the second most influential book of all of western civilization (second only to the Bible) because of its end-game insight – to chart how the earth rotated around the sun. This contradicted the view of the Bible. Genesis tells us that the stars were created to “shine upon the earth” as if the earth was the center of the universe.

With the Bible no longer being the highest or last word, but rather the word of Newton, all of western culture’s foundations were upset, and thus a revolution, a global mind change ensued. This is how Morris Kline describes this unique development in his book, Mathematics, A Cultural Approach:

“Infused with the conviction that reason, personified by mathematics, would not only conquer the physical world but could solve all of man’s problems and should therefore be employed in every intellectual and artistic enterprise, the great minds of the age undertook a sweeping reorganization of philosophy, religion, ethics, literature, and aesthetics. The beginning of new sciences such as psychology, economics, and politics were made during these rational investigations. Our principal intellectual doctrines and outlook were fashioned then, and we still live in the shadow of the Age of Reason….to win victories over nature.”

So powerful was this vast global mind change, that with the dethroning of the Bible came a challenge of Papal authority in Rome to delegate power to Kings and Queens. In one night, the entire royal family of Russia was murdered. The French and American revolution had a similar genesis. All of life changed with the transition from the medieval to the modern world.

This teaches us that nothing can change a culture more powerfully, deeply and widely than a new universal wordview. Absolutely nothing compares.

And there was an exuberant excitement in the air during the 17th century that what had been discovered would unleash a new era of progress – for man to control nature and all of life.  Little did they predict what is really happening 400 years later – a world marked by a) the invention of atomic weapon which can destroy all of life instantaneously, b) ever growing chemical pollution, c) with uncontrolled epidemics of chronic ills, and c) widespread dying of species.

There was one strange thing that happened in that era which should have clued us in that something might go wrong with the vision. Newton died a as a schizophrenic, something akin to developing Alzheimer’s disease or where the inner world falls apart.

Charles Kuen Kao (高錕 ), a Nobel Prize Winner in Physics who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.

Something should have clued us in, four hundred years later, when several Nobel Prize-winning physicists. chemists, and physicians have succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. Above is pictured Charles K. Kao because there is a Charles K. Kao Foundation for Alzheimer’s Disease Limited named after him.

Do we need  a new vision of nature – and for what purpose?

I know with 100% or absolute certainty that we do. For me this is the result of a distant,higher-objectifying and detached overviewing of how the two sides of our brain develop their two polar opposite forms of consciousness in a narrow bias – and what is the essential and best way to navigate both to bring their vistas together as one.

It happens that the left brain, developing separative consciousness, can guide us best toward a navigation of the surface view. The right brain, oppositely, can guide us to best navigate wider and more important depths. It is the former orientation by which we understand physics and chemistry – the mathematical way of seeing things. It is the latter by which we  avoid the inner dementia that my dear dad and some of the greatest scientists of our time have experienced.

In fact, we can truly raise, uplift and heal that inner consciousness rather than seeing it slip away as we age.

Wouldn’t that be a most invaluable skill to have, and more valuable even than an apparent external “control” of nature,” of material things, which can so easily slip away from within?

That’s not the only value of this knowledge.

What if it could veer us away from all the developments of modern life that have allowed chronic disease epidemics (cancer, diabetes, arthritis, and so on) that have exploded in our times – and once we understand that on a deep level these are actually inner consciousness or depth ills that manifest symptoms on the surface of our bodies.

The means by which to do all of this is what I call a right-brain dominant vision of nature, the life-and-consciousness centered .

It is a greater, deeper, and more integral fathoming of our cosmos than that of Newton who guided (or misguided) us to the modern world. It veers away from looking at that world as made up of just matter and energy defined mathematically. It also does not hinge on or anchor reality in the look at an atom – and derivatively not in the structure of the periodic table of elements.

William James – Father of  American Psychology

Instead, it is, in my experience, we gain a commanding knowledge of our entire inner world, the ultimate purpose of the science of psychology. Wouldn’t that be something? William James,  father of American Psychology, once stated, essentially, that whoever discovers the nature of “consciousness” will make the greatest of discoveries of all  millenniums.

About the life-and-consciousness-centered worldview or vision of nature?

For brevity and better imagery taking on, I call it the life-centered vision of nature. But more essentially it really
a) defines what is the nature of consciousness and in a guru-like, expert or commanding way. It explains its role within, and how it forms much more – namely the inner essence of all of nature along with the essence of ourselves  that keeps us whole or illness-free and alive.

The dying foot of a diabetic

Not having this knowledge, we will never be able to consistently avoid consciousness diseases like Alzheimer’s or diabetes,  or where with the latter neuropathy is common in the extremities. Thus one can potentially not feel or be conscious of stepping on a nail or having the life in our feet cells and tissues die and fall apart or disintegrate.

Brian Clement, head of Hippocrates Health Institute, and which applies conscious healing principles, noted that in his nearly half a century of experience treating hundreds of thousands of patients he has never seen a single diabetes type-II patient who has not reversed their condition using his therapies. That is what you call a commanding knowledge and more significant than knowing the clock-like mechanical motion of the earth around the sun – what is only a surperficial knowledge.

What I want to thus impress thus upon the reader is that such knowledge is real. It is not about things that happen accidentally or appear as illusionary (wishful thinking induced). It is not empty philosophy but a knowledge to assuredly guide the navigation of our inner terrains – not to get lost, not to slip into inner darkness.

In order to communicate this to others, my main challenge has always been one of simplicity in expression. This is necessary because it is a whole brain and unifying view.

Historical Perspectives

Many ancient cultures, on all global continents, had attained a life-centered view. This is perhaps because all of nature around them appeared alive. Also the living forces were sacred as they kept all alive in an interconnected and interdependent weave or family of life. Many of these ancient traditions were trampled upon or obliterated, especially by the Crusades. Coming into modern times, we have little knowledge that survives about them.  But most notably, we do have a record of the vision of the ancient Essenes, a Judea-Christian sect, a group of healers who counted among them Jesus Christ, and who had a distinctly and powerful life-and-consciousness centered view. This survives in the form of the dead sea scrolls and their writings are more often called The Essene Gospels.

The Outline

Here is my offering of a simple outline that helps to present this vision.

I – FIRST PRINCIPLES

Planet Earth – an awesome video showing countless and magnificent life forms which

universally share one miraculous gift – sentience, awareness or consciousness

Central concepts

• LIFE ITSELF
  Imagine life lies at the core of nature
• CONSCIOUSNESS WITHIN LIFE
  Imagine consciousness lies at the core of life making up its universal essence

(more pic’s to be added to the rest of the text later, please revisit)

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS

• Imagine consciousness is the universal relationship of connection in nature
• the principle of connection itself
•  what connects all things to each other.

2) HIGHEST PRINCIPLE
The absolute highest reigning principle in this worldview and never subordinate (similar to the posture of  the Biblical God in the medieval times or to mathematics as supposed  the “last word” or defining of reality schemata in our modern times. Sometimes we call this also the supreme reigning central paradigm of a given or chosen worldview. It defines how all the elements are connected to each other and to create a chosen one-ing perspective – what we call a resulting or thereby constructed inner “worldview.”

a) PLACED FULLY ABOVE
As a result, consciousness is here conceptually or ideologically and literally or consciously and intentionally placed above all other mental conceptions or to consciously observe in practice how  words or concepts and symbols are formed by our conceptualization faculty – which is usually the left brain (though it can switch sides in about 10-15% of the population). We observe how our inner consciousness forms separate concepts and symbols to supposedly best understand the world to thereby navigate awareness. Consciousness is placed then fully above this process, and for both all religion and secular ideas without exception. Nothing is left sacred, including math symbols whose highest placement and claimed supreme navigation role in the modern view then becomes naturally challenged and as we shall see, hugely demythologized.

b) TRANS-SECULAR & NON-MYSTICAL
Consciousness so fully placed above becomes a more pure means to arrive at a trans-secular and trans-religious/mystical stroke of deepest insight.

c) INTEGRAL
Consciousness can integrally function as above only due to it being a universal relationship of connection. If it universally (and with true and integral universality) connects us to all things and connects all things to each other or among themselves,  then we can impartially and fully move to a mountain-peak view of the Oneness of all things being connected everywhere or universally as One.

This is in contrast to any culturally or personally chosen view – a partial-view or biased view – one connecting. Only to  a favorite or favored view of reality – and that is often forced upon people to believe in because the view is unnatural.

d) SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Our consciousness-centered view can then form its own true and truer science of consciousness, and derivatively of nature. Later we can explore why the conventional study of consciousness, and derivatively nature – has been made subordinate to a mathematical view (as required by the mathematical worldview being dominant and supreme). This means that the study of consciousness is ever subject to lab measurement to supposedly fathom what is consciousness. But this cannot lead us toward this goal integrally if consciousness is the universal relationship of connection in nature. It then has no separate beginning and end points to measure. Again consciousness has to remain the one and only reigning principle, the literal the “master” to form its own proprietary worldview – and all other conceptualizations then become the “servant” to that view. No exceptions, no matter how supposedly “holy,” “sacred” or “unquestionable” those higher conceptualizations claim to be.

3) AN INTEGRAL “INDIVISIBILITY PRINCIPLE“

If consciousness is the indivisibility principle in nature  then the atom is not. And the latter fact, that the atom is not indivisible but has parts, has long been proven by countless discoveries seen under an electron microscope. Yet that was postured as an unshakeable belief by Newton who claimed the ” indivisible atom was a divine creation of God.  It was a belief not grounded in our sense nor good logic. Still the mathematical vision’s atomic view is  held onto for dear life – for otherwise the vision might collapse – as it rightly should. Conventionally the atom remains central to the understanding of nature, as nature’s so-called building block.   Here the true indivisibility principle is consciousness, and  for very deep reasons that are also very simple. Only what universally and thus integrally and everywhere connects cannot be ever separated. This then holds true and has to hold true not only at every level of magnification (which the atomic view does not) but for the blended blur in between magnification levels artificially isolated or separated by our minds – or at every attempt to slice apart whatever we see under a microscope, and its tunneling of our vision brought into sharply cut and thus separate focus – or past the smallness of any perceptions within our consciousness.

_______________________________________________________________________

II – SECONDARY PRINCIPLES

Forming an integral worldview and piercing what is non-integral

• INTEGRAL WORLDVIEW- Posturing a principle of universal connection to connect all things is an intellectually integral posture. It is not subject to internal contradiction – or the by-product of many contradictions….an essentially  illusionary view (one that due to its contradictions and illusion will disintegrate the integrity of consciousness)..
• OPPOSITE OR WHAT IS MOST NON-INTEGRAL
• A HUGE MISTAKE – Posturing a principle of universal separation to connect all things is obviously not intellectually integral and if believed in, a terrible and very foolish mistake.  I dare say it is stupid. This takes a long explanation because it is so vastly counter-cultural to what we have all been taught to be believe. And such deep beliefs struggle to survive within us, like toxic parasites holding on for deep life when we detoxify.
• ULTIMATE INTERNAL REVERSAL ILLUSION – So imagine it is a starkest of all reversal illusions (and the greatest of all inner reversal illusions revealed or pierced through only by placing consciousness above) to believe that principles of universal separation should guide our connecting of all things to form a worldview. It’s like trying to use a chainsaw to glue all things together.  Imagine it is the ultimate right/left brain illusion to tackle, to see through – but it is not seen through either by a person or culture that is left-brain dominant. This is because the left brain essentially separates all elements of consciousness – so that process seems to be the natural, and to reflect the natural order of things.
• AN ILLUSION THAT HAS CONSEQUENCES – Lastly imagine that there is such a view and that it has more powerful consequences than any vast external illusions – such as the cosmic reversing of helio-centricity with geo-centricity (the sun centered with the earth-centered view).  Unraveling this external illusion lead to the creation of our modern world, with vast consequences. Unraveling this yet greater illusion has predictably yet great consequences still.
• WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE MATH-CENTERED VISION – So what is this all about? Shockingly,  the principle of universal separation is symbolized conceptually by the number “1″ – as found in pure mathematics and as a foundational concept in and of mathematics. One (1) this or one (1)that, applied universally we fins is a concept that invariably helps to separate an element of consciousness. Take three apples and blend them together and you can no longer count each as “1″ in the applesauce. The same is symbolized by a point in spacial mathematics …or what we call simply “geometry” or the measuring of space. The “point” is a conceptual means to actually “disintegrate thoroughly” or separate all of space universally into separate points. The two views – of pure mathematics and of geometry – are merged or married together and very brilliantly in Cartesian geometry. Cartesian geometry formed the basis for Fehmi’s formulas that created the atomic bomb – to indeed separate space – and as could have been predicted many centuries prior as a consequence of that worldview.
• THE MATHEMATICAL WORLDVIEW AS A WORLDVIEW - But worldviews don’t see themselves as worldviews, as biases. Nevertheless, what we visualize we create. Just as the atom is supposedly…that is supposedly according to the mathematical view ….forms the building block of nature (“the atom, what God created on the first day of creation” according to Newton).. so the number “1,” the indivisible one or 1/1=1 – and all related symbols that are built up around the sacrosanct number “1″ (such as 2,3,4…and fractions) or concepts indirectly referring to the same set of symbols (like using the symbols “xyz” to replace missing numbers)… altogether forms the mathematical worldview intellectually. Then this worldview is applied to all of nature as not a worldview but the worldview. Newton’s “Principia Mathematica Naturalis” is not Natural Principles According to Mathematics but The Mathematical Principles of Nature. This forms the tenants of the mathematical worldview
• KEY QUESTION – The key question arises, is that viewpoint really and truly -past cultural mythologizing – an objective, impartial and integrally wise inner stance?
  When consciousness is the arbiter of that very critical question (or is supremely placed above the pointing paths of math symbols) ….and to sacrilegious observe and judge their paths…what we find is that we can and even must demythologize that culturally assumed worldview.
• UNEXPECTED ANSWERS CAN BE UPSETTING - Needless to say and believe this can be hugely upsetting to a physicist, chemist or geneticist (who holds the wisdom of a super-idolized icon like Einstein to be supreme – and will fight tooth and nail not to upset and pull the foundations out from under their worldview. They rather want to continue to follow faithfully from behind the pointing path again of these held-to-be sacrosanct symbols, and without further wise or challenging thoughts. On the other hand, their worldview is not just culturally chosen. It is the highest of left-brain integrating visions. But this is not enough to justify its overall dominance for we find, not  surprising, that several Nobel Prize winners have died of Altzheimer’s disease or essentially that the mathematical view did not safely or effectively navigate their depths our consciousness in a rescuing way. Imagine this is not accidental, or that patients in nursing homes fed chemical synthetics walk the halls like zombies, Imagiine the underlying math-based vision is essentially flawed  – very foundation of modernity – and very, very seriously flawed as a worldview vision.This means it needs to be overthrown or dethroned, exactly like the medieval view when contradictions and illusions were discovered. But why and more importantly how can we make this global mind change?  The worldview which we have inherited from the 17th century, and perhaps from ages prior as well, not only can be shown to be not integral – to harbor contradictions and illusions – but to be danger-filled due to its core contradictions being applied universally.
• PLACING CONSCIOUSNESS ABOVE TO SEE SUCH CONSEQUENCES - Because Newton, Galileo and Descartes never really, in my view, placed their consciousness far above the use of math symbols,  to search for impeccable impartiality, trusting instead the unquestioned choice to follow the lead of mathematical guidance – and coming out of an age of faith – and following that to wherever this ideological posture might lead our consciousness – they collectively were pitch-blind to how dark a choice they had made and what the centuries-later implications would be – such as the future invention of atomic or nuclear weapons. To them chemical pollution was something unthinkable that wasn’t brought to our consciousness until the 1960′s (via works like Silent Spring). And Rachel Carson in the ending of that book refers to a primordial philosophy creating assaults on nature p but without pointing fingers.  We just trust that worldview implicitly, much as a modern physician prescribing chemical drugs trusts what he or she does.  Ultimately math symbols, naked seen, are simply universal symbols for how best to separate all elements of consciousness universally. And one cannot best connect a vision hereby. Its impossible.
• TOWARD A CULTURE OF DEATH - For the past four hundred years what we have been guided or misguided to is
• A CLEAR REVERSAL OF TRUTHS – and with consequences that are hugely global as well as non-sustainable.
• DEATH AND UNCONSCIOUSNESS-CENTERED VISION - This is because we are everywhere materializing the very extreme opposite principles that brings out not life and consciousness ( nature’s essence to the surface) but rather and again the polar opposite -  death and unconsciousness in nature.  This creates a disintegrating culture of death and where inner life is disintegrating as well, or a zombie unconsciousness. It is not surprising in such a mislead world tat we increasingly see the wholesale death or extinction of species.

III – TERTIARY PRINCIPLES

• RECAP – After  a) consciousness is postured as the singular supreme central paradigm, a road-map-constructing principle to re-navigate consciousness toward its own essence and toward the perception of Oneness, what is itself a life-centered vision of nature ; and b) that vision is seen as having integrity – we then can proceed to trust that view to move much further along – to move down the mountain peak to define the first duality of that vision on the road to the bottom or the diversities of all of consciousness experience. Obviously that first duality is not going to be matter and energy defined mathematically. But what then?
• SEPARATION AND CONNECTION
• PRINCIPLE OF SEPARATION – think of it as any element of consciousness (a surface appearance because consciousness is  indivisible) as the essential movement away from consciousness’ essence and the experience of undivided Oneness. A physical metaphor for the nature of consciousness is any body of water which dissolves the separation of separate drops. The can appear separate on the surface, defined by separate surfaces, but lose the separativity inside the body of water.
• PRINCIPLE OF CONNECTION – think of it as any element of consciousness (a non-surface appearance or one having depth integrity) as the essential movement toward consciousness’ essence, its Oneness.
• FIRST DUALITY IS DEFINED IN RELATIONSHIP ONLY TO THE ONENESS - and nothing else (or arbitrarily chosen by a culture’s ideological bias and that a culture becomes attached to).
• CONNECTIVE MOVEMENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS IS SINGULAR and thus simple in nature (being a movement toward oneness and dissolving complexities).
• SEPARATIVE MOVEMENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS IS DUAL - creating the beginning of separate and clashing complexities.
• SEPARATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS HAS ITS OWN FIRST DUALITY – It is connective separation vs pure separation. This involves a connected spectrum, like rainbow colors, and of moving from partial unconsciousness and partial death at one end to full unconsciousness and full death at the other. Again the duality is solely defined by the essential nature of our world, and nothing else as a personal or culturally chosen view.  These become the true tertiary or third-level principles of this life-centered view.If we define “healing” in a living organism to be the process of inwardly connecting and reconnection that which has become torn or asunder, then an truly integral (and universally connecting, not separating, including with contradictions) view of our world is critically important for all healing processes. In fact, it becomes a means for re-guiding and revolutionizing the whole of our healing arts – and even healing consciousness itself.

IV – WHERE SUCH PRINCIPLES LEAD US

• AWAY FROM THE SOUL OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION – The exciting new natural science, the new proprietary vision of nature of the 17th century, was applied the most, and the most effectively, to the creation of machines.  The underlying vision was the  heart and soul of the Industrial Revolution – as well as our essentially commercial and materialistic (possessing separate things driven) society where human beings are guided to relate monetarily to each other and to nature in creating “progress.” That progress has some merit, as the mathematical view has some intrinsic merit in a servant, not master status and in reversal roles because it represents a reversal illusion.  Thus machines will objectively, if superficially, help us avoid what is not healing, mechanical chores, and this double negative that yields a superficial positive. But making our lives very deeply mechanical will destroy life itself. And we are in the process of doing just that, especially with genetic engineering. Also machines made of separate parts model the essential nature of the underlying vision that created them – rather than represent the deepest universal “Principia” or laws of nature.
• TOWARD THE SOUL OF A NEW AGE OF HEALING – Similarly the life-and-consciousness centered vision materializes its own best modelling but in an exactly opposite direction to that of just creating artificial machines that never exist in pristine nature. It models itself via the greater and greatest healing of living organisms – or in the healing arts made integral, curative and brought to perfection  (which is the opposite of what is presently the case). In an Age of Healing, the perfection of healing, of being connected as one – and which happens through a development of higher consciousness, becomes the primary collective goal of life – not the accumulation of money and material things as the key to a progress that illusioary – and eventually falls apart because the foundation is but quicksand.

V – HEALING ARTS BECOME PRIMARY – RE-GUIDED & CONSTRUCTED

When the guiding principles of a worldview tend to connect us to the essence of nature, we are reconnected to our own essence and thereby heal. Under the guidance of a life-and-consciousness-centered vision, what kind of practices will heal us and which will not?

• RE-UNDERSTANDING ILLNESS – If the foundation of nature is consciousness, separative and connective, and not matter and not matter and energy defined mathematically and charting its mechanical motions, what does this imply for the healing arts?
• EARLY STAGES OF ILLNESS – The early stages of illness tend to be inflammatory or acid because what is fiery, created by friction, represents the byproduct of “connective separation” – oppositional relationships that generate and fuel fire.  It is the beginning of the burning out of life and consciousness. This parallels how the fiery colors of the rainbow are the first to come about as color separations come out of white light, the colorless Oneness of light.
• LATER STAGES OF ILLNESS - The later stages of illness involve the movement toward pure separative consciousness or unconsciousness and death. We see this when a diabetic patient had neuropathy and no longer feels anything as a foot steps on a nail.

• REVERSING CHRONIC/SYSTEMIC ILLNESS – CURING THE INCURABLE  – Only a vision that integrally understands the healing process, the re-movement within to Oneness, can guide the curing of chronic systemic ills.  There are several major and effective paths up this mountain. All of them involve the regaining of what is life and consciousness in the body. Overall this involves the practice of natural healing – rather than using drugs, surgery, radiation and genetic modifications – and based on giving the natural healing arts their own supportive worldview with integrity – rather than trying to justify natural therapies with the very worldview that undermines and leads to a supplanting and destroying of the natural healing arts.
• FOUR MAJOR APPROACHES – Bring the best of living forces into the body (nutrition), take out the worst (detoxification), circulate both (exercise) and mind/body work to keep mind and consciousness on track.
• NUTRITION – This worldview advocates for a living foods diet, full of sprouts, green juices, green blends and superfoods – and that help alkalize what is acidic in the body and tend to be anti-inflammatory. This includes a low-glycemic diet. The simplest of green plants, the grasses, tend to naturally be the most healing or reconnective – and in the form of their juices. These are oxygen rich and we need to bring  more oxygen into our bloodstream.
• The concept of “oxygen,” while it belongs to the chemical/atom model of nature, is at the same time a bridge to the consciousness model. Having sufficient oxygen within, and in balance, is a means to reconnectively heal. When something oxygenates, it loses its life force unless there are anti-oxidants to ward that off. Thus freshly squeezed drinks should be drunk soon after making, and so the rest of the universe, which wants the same doesn’t get it and the force is released inside our bodies.
• DETOXIFICATION – Here we want to make our overall lifestyle organic, avoiding synthetic chemicals (the products of the 17th century worldview) and work to remove these same chemicals (not ingest more in the form of drugs or IVs) and other life-toxins from our interiors. We want to remove what undermines our consciousness, or takes out the light from within. This can be done through fasting, exercising to a sweat, taking a sauna, doing some special liquid cleanses, hydrating with pure water, taking enemas and colonics, as well as via skin brushing and lympth stimulations – among many other means.
• EXERCISE – This will improve circulation and, with aerobic exercises, will bring more oxygen into the body. Strength exercises will help build bone density, but the overall aim in healing is not to just develop separate muscles, as if the body was just a machine. It is to help heal and strongly carry the life force.
• MIND/BODY – Meditations, visualizations, realigning our worldview, healing our emotions, reducing stress or conflicts in life – all are valuable mind/body approaches to support healing.

VI – TESTING OUR WORLDVIEWS IN NATURE & THE HEALING ARTS

Because different worldviews each claim to best connect a vision of nature to Oneness, we can test each in nature – as well as in the healing arts meant to reconnect us.

• TESTING IN ISOLATED DOMAINS – In our modern world we measure (find beginning and end points of consciousness separation) and then test things in intentional isolation (as in a test tube) from the interaction of separate elements defined atomically/to fit the mathematical model of nature. We use fire (Bunsen burners) to effect this separation to greater heights in isolating chemicals.  This approach is especially applied to multi-million dollar drug testing – that is to the testing of patented drugs in isolation because patenting creates uniquely separate identity in the market place to focus monetary attention upon. We then look at the impact on isolate symptoms. But does that tell us what heals?
• TESTING NON-SEPARATIVELY – If we take a random and large mix of chemicals in order to test not one or another chemical in isolation but the whole chemical/math-based view of nature – and through that mix into a living environment like a compost heap, what happens? The compost heap is here chosen because all plants decay therein to form the building elements for all other plants in an unbroken circle of unity. So what happens with the large random mix of chemicals thrown in. We create a supertoxic waste site were all life there in dies and nature’s defining circle of unity is broken. In short the vision flunks out test in a more natural, rather than artificial environment.  In short, the isolative testing deceives. And part of the deceiving terminology is saying that what harms and even kills us is just a “side-effect.” It is not what is focused upon in isolative, non-holistic, non-objective testing.

VII  GREENING & HEALING OUR WORLD TO DEPTHS

We cannot green out world to depths without first greening and healing our ill worldview.

• ARCHITECTURAL METAPHORS – With a worldview that forms the dominant roadmap to our lives, you can see that dominance revealed in physically in soaring forms of architecture.Thus at the head of Wall Street is Trinity Church. Built in the 17th century to represent the ideology of the Church of England, the medieval view, with the steeple pointed to God, it was originally the highest reigning building in Manhattan. This has long been dwarfed by insurance, brokerage and the like office buildings – representing a different worldview.  George Washington knelt in Trinity Church, praying there to bring about a new world order.
• GREENING & HEALING OUR WORLD TO ITS DEPTHS – If we want to transform the world to its depths, this means not just recycling or saving energy (doing external things) but inwardly to our depths transforming our entire consciousness of the world – of what will make us more depth-connected to nature rather than more separate. We might need to question the universal presence of asphalt and cement, in City environs, covering the living earth. Cities were the places where monetary forces attracted people to live, from rural environment, to engage in the Industrial Revolution. But what if that revolution was based on a false foundation. Now we then need to thus reconnect the guiding worldview or whatever inwardly has been tearing us apart from nature. Choosing the highest symbols for separating all elements of consciousness is about the absolute worst choice for a vision’s supreme central paradigm – and not only worst and simultaneously most dangerous for potentially destroying all of life on earth.
• TWO OPPOSITE PATHS, TOWARD AND AWAY FROM HEALING – Such a worldview needs to be challenged, its dominance overturned and made subservient to a better view. If we connect what is most separative (right brain dominance) we heal what is most ill and threatened in our world. If we do the opposite, or separate what is most connected, we destroy conscious, organic life on earth. That has been our 400 year course, in essence, with superficial appearance of progress. One view creates a world of growing health pandemics and species extinctions and the other the opposite – toward an Age of Healing.
• SUPPORTING LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS - We thus need to support, not undermine, the greatest healing and promoting of our  lives, of our life’s consciousness, its essence and that of all of nature – and in order to not only heal ourselves but sustain the sacred living world that surrounds us -  interconnected and interdependent as One.

DEDICATION

This blog post was written on the eve of a Memorial to Melinda Lichter Elliott, my partner of four years and who recently passed. It is an expression of gratefulness, for Melinda, among other things, helped first set up raw-wisdom.com and which introduced to the world the life-centered vision of nature as here outlined.

RELATED BOOKS

• The Death of Nature – Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution by Carolyn Merchant
• Silent Spring – Rachel Carson
• Essene Gospel of Peace
• Life Force – Brian Clement
• Rainbow-Green Live-Food Cuisine – Gabriel Cousens
• Dr. Max Gerson – Healing the Hopeless
• The Healing Power Within – Ann Wigmore
  

RELATED ARTICLES

• Advocating a Life-Centered Vision of Nature
• Get Juiced  (Applies a Life-Centered View to Nutrition)
  
• Why Turn to a Life-Centered Vision of Nature
• Moving Away from a Death-Centered Vision of Nature
• Forget the Treadmill, Get a Dog
• For Many Species No Escape as Temperature Rises
• Imagining a Life-Centered Worldview
• Toward a Global Paradigm Shift, Part I
• What is Life Wisdom in the Raw – Part II
• Why Go Organic – Ten Top Reasons
• What is Consciousness
• 50 Harmful Effects of Genetically Modified Foods

VIDEOS

One man’s expression of the adoration of Life – part of his life-centered view, after having experienced war. The principal or highest adoration and reverence for life was common in the pre-modern cultures that were largely trampled upon, including that of the American Indians.

My early video that expresses the life-centered vision of nature

Jill Bolte Taylor’s

stroke of insight

Nathan Batalion, Global Health Activist, Healing Talks Editor

(Healingtalks) The experience of Jill Bolte Taylor is important because it takes us to another universe within, seeing the world in a right-brain dominant or connective-consciousness way rather than how we are usually trained to see the world in our modern culture.

Video

Related Articles

• Healing Consciousness
• Consciousness Revolution
• What Really Is Consciousness
  
• Simple Outline of a Life-Centered and Healing Vision of Nature
  

Keywords

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Yoga and Meditation

for Weight Loss

By Contributing Writer:  Jenn Pedde

(Healingtalks) Recently a report by The Trust for American Health confirmed that obesity in the United States is at epidemic levels.  38 states have obesity rates over 25 percent. In 15 years, seven states have actually doubled their rate of obesity, and related to this, ten states their rate of diabetes.  Americans are thus considering innovative ways to achieve weight loss (beyond dieting or simply watching calories and hitting the gym). Among those alternatives are ways of aligning your physical fitness and inner well being.

Yoga

Increasingly, yoga is being wholesale adopted by Americans. In gyms, at parks and at home, more and more people across the Untied States have begun to practice the ancient Indian exercise. Through a system of different postures and controlled breathing, yoga is meant to promote heath and relaxation. Through this achieved relaxation, practitioners are able to better “get in touch” or be conscious of and understand their bodies, allowing them to make more informed, on target decisions regarding their health, diet and lifestyle. Additionally, yoga practitioners looking to for weight loss may try “power yoga” with an emphasis on more vigorous postures and a quicker pace. This provides a greater workout than traditional yoga.

Although sometimes put down as “new age nonsense” by skeptics, ancient yoga has shown success in helping practitioners lose weight. This is confirmed by a 2005  survey of over 15,500 participants where those who practiced yoga lost 5 pounds on average, while those who did not gained as much as 14 pounds.

Meditation

Meditation is the art of creating self-inducing states of consciousness. This shift in our inner mentality is achieved through a variety of means, including deep contemplation, concentrated breathing, prolonged silence and chanting. In this way, individuals attain states of relaxation, heightened awareness or the means to reinforce any dedication to inner aims.

Meditation may also involve periods of silence, stillness or gentle moving. But this seems the opposite of very vigorous physical exercise meant to burn calories. Meditation is usually only thought of in connection with things like coping with stress, depression and anxiety. However, the clarity of mind that comes with meditations can also help us identify exactly which physical problems  need addressing – as well as to  gather the will, knowledge and means to overcome our challenges – including increasing overweight and obesity.

For our modern times

Stemming from ancient traditions, yoga and meditations may be reapplied to our modern times to help overcome the obesity epidemic. How?  By promoting deep relaxation and clearer inner consciousness, yoga and meditations can assist us in making both clearer and stronger inner commitments to weight loss and steadfast nutrition choices.

Resources:

• Clear Mind Meditation Techniques

• Study of Yoga and Weightloss Framson et al. Development and Validation of the Mindful Eating Questionnaire. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 2009; 109 (8): 1439 DOI: 10.1016/j.jada.2009.05.006

• Obesity Statistics in America

Jenn Pedde is the community manager of the University of Southern California’s online MSW programs, which helps prepare students to advance their career in social work.  She’s an avid traveler, and enjoys photography.

Keywords: yoga and weight, yoga for weight loss, meditation techniques, meditation methods, yoga meditation, weight treatment, mantra meditation, breath meditation, yoga and diabetes, health and meditation, health and yoga, yoga and meditation class, obesity and mindful eating

Advocating a

life-centered

vision of nature

Nathan Batalion, Global Health Activist, Healingtalks Editor

”
“We are in the process of awakening from a culture of death.”

Dr. Gabriel Cousens

(Healingtalks) The following article by Harvey Sindima, a Presbyterian minister, is a very exciting find.

Here he advocates something I have been so immensely passionately about and for educating countless others for decades. This refers to the urgent need to shift deep within to a  “life-centered vision of nature” and from the mechanical (death-centered) as a ruinous and bankrupt view.

Sindima, as a professor of philosophy and religion at Colgate University, really hits the nail on the head. There is hardly anything more determinative of our overall self-destructive global path than the essential worldview we currently have in western civilization – and how  our cultural imperialism undermined wiser indigenous approaches.

From the Mechanical to the Life-centered Vision

In other blog post I have outlined the intellectual flaws of the whole notion that nature is essentially mechanical (why that vision is both illusionary and contradictory, and why it can’t guide us effectively toward real progress. It rather deceptively leads us to our collective demise) and how the life-centered view is the more  integral (non-contradictory) alternative understanding of the world we live in.

Great Article Discovery

With this understanding in mind, I was hugely thrilled to find the article posted below and to further share this with our many regular readers.

Community of Life

Note that the title and ending summary of the article spell out the link between a different life-centered cosmic understanding (from an African perspective) with the promotion also of alternative communities in contrast to our competitive, materialistic, exploiting commercial society.

This really does follows the logic of a wider life-centered view

This is also why we live what we teach or have started the Raw-Wisdom Community as a model for alternative living. So here is this exciting article:

Community of Life:

Ecological Theology

in African Perspective

By Harvey Sindima, Professor of Philosophy and Religion, Colgate University
Originally posted at Religion-online.org

(Healingtalks) That Christian theology throughout its history has been transformed by sources outside of Christianity is a well-known fact. That it should be open to transformation through the insights of the various traditions, that it should be open to the possibilities of creative transformation by contact with the wisdom and vision of other sources, is highly controversial. Many of the authors in this book, however, are committed to such openness as an essential part of their own Christianity. Moreover, most would argue that we must repent of some aspects of the Christian experience that have been exploitative or destructive to peoples and to nature. In this essay African theologian Harvey Sindima proposes a traditional African view of life and community, which opposes the mechanistic world view that has so dominated Christianity in the West since the Enlightenment. It is the mechanistic world view, imported to Africa, which has been largely responsible for many eco-crises faced by Africa and which has led us in many ways to the global crises we face today.

How we think about the world affects the way we live in it. In particular, our understanding of nature — our cosmology — affects the way we understand ourselves, the way we relate to other people, and, of course, the way we relate to the earth and other forms of life. For some time the people of Africa have been influenced by a cosmology inherited from the West: the mechanistic perspective that views all things as lifeless commodities to be understood scientifically and to be used for human ends. Yet these people have an alternative way of looking at the world, an alternative cosmology, which can better serve their needs for cultural development and social justice in an ecologically responsible context. This alternative way might be called a life-centered way, since it stresses the bondedness, the interconnectedness, of all living beings. In what follows I will (1) examine the sort of cosmology imposed on African thinking by the West and (2) explore the traditional African view of creation and life as a healthy alternative to this vision. The chapter is divided into two sections corresponding to these aims.

The Problem The Mechanistic World View

The problems that are arising from a misuse of science and technology — our loss of ecological balance, for example — demand that we look seriously at different ways of thinking and living in the world. The present ways of understanding the world and the models of living informed by these views are leading humanity to self-destruction. The African concept of the bondedness of life, to which I will return in the second part of this chapter, is a viable alternative that could provide a foundation for a doctrine of creation and for the transformation of society. If a vision of the bondedness of all life informed and regulated the structures and actions of government and church, it would transform the way socio-political, economic, and ecological decisions were made. The ministries of the church — preaching, pastoral care, and the church’s general involvement in the life of the people and nature — would be transformed.

What prevents the traditional vision of the bondedness of all things from influencing government policies and church ministries in Africa? The answer to this all-important question obliges us to analyze the last two centuries or so of Africa’s socio-political biography. During that period the West intensified its contacts with Africa because of the growing demand for African resources and labor overseas. The early titles of the African novelist Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, capture what happened in the two centuries following this intensified contact. Achebe’s novels show the African attempt to fight against European domination of thought and values.

The West introduced a system of thought and a manner of living new to Africa. This system of thought manifested itself in various ways, particularly in a cultural imperialism, which was taught in schools and preached in the churches. Any system of domination uses three modes of control: coercion and reward; dependence; and thought control (Baker). The last mode is the most subtle of all forms and is a technique that seeks to uproot a people and impose on that people a value system different from their own, doing so until the people become obsessed with the values so imposed. The higher one’s education, the greater his or her disorientation. This disorientation process begins with corrupting thought and language, for people interpret and understand their experience or reality, that is, their cosmology, through these media. Consequently, people’s emotions and relationships become conditioned by a new “reality.” If a people’s thought system is corrupted, their value system is destroyed; the “world” or cosmology that informs their way of life has been ruined. This corruption continues as long as the people do not come to a realization of who they are. Without such self-consciousness a people cannot reject the disorienting language, that is, the process of alienation becomes total. This is what Western cultural imperialism sought to do to Africans.

With the imposition of Western cultural views, the African hermeneutical process — the process by which African people appropriated their own heritage — became so impaired that the Africans ceased to understand their world through their own cultural system or through the symbolic interpretation given by their cosmology. Today this impairment prevents the traditional concept of the bondedness of life from being an organized logic informing African life and practice.

In this chapter I use the word mechanistic to refer to that view of the world and its attendant manner of living that informed the thinking and behavior of the Westerners who brought this impairment. The mechanistic view takes the world to be like a machine with many parts, each working according to the laws of nature. To understand the world, one has only to know these laws. Society, as well, is conceived as a megamachine¹ in which nature and people are objectified. The model of living in this megamachine is accordingly mechanical. People are seen as atomistic individuals whose interactions and interrelationships are valued according to function and utility alone. Feelings and emotional needs are not important. Hence, concern and care do not enter everyday living. Moral conduct in a mechanistic society is often guided by self-interest, and often there is no agreement on what is “moral.” Mechanistic society undermines the ties that bind persons and their communities to one another and to the cosmos.

The mechanistic perspective which has now shaped Africa itself has a history, originating in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with work in philosophy and science by thinkers such as Descartes, Bacon, Newton, and others. In this era, nature was reduced to mathematics or transformed into quantitative physical phenomena which could be grasped by rationality. Nature was purely other and merely material to be subjugated and manipulated. It had only instrumental value, determined by the extent to which people could use it. With this vision of nature in place, the stage was set for the rise of materialistic philosophy and its attendant manner of life. This way of life has captivated much of Western civilization ever since, and has been exported to all places this civilization has gone in its quest of material resources and to fulfill its expansionist philosophy.

Part of the mechanistic perspective involves adherence to the myth of progress. For Descartes, Bacon, and Newton, science implied unlimited growth. Technology became the application of the rules of nature established by science to specific needs for human ends. Through science and technology, human mastery over nature seemed complete and progress assured.

The notion of progress has been very compelling in Western civilization. Many believed progress was the way in which misery would be eliminated in the world. However, as the centuries have shown, the alliance of progress, science, and technology has not eliminated misery. On the contrary, destitution has emerged and the future of all creation hangs in the balance. Progress through (industrial) technology creates exploitation of resources and people and has often damaged the ecological balance and threatened the livelihood of those who depend upon that balance. This alliance of progress, science, and technology has led to social, ecological, and spiritual bankruptcy.

Exploitation

Let us consider some examples of this exploitation. First, the ivory trade. The demand for ivory abroad is the reason for the large decrease of elephants in Africa. But elephants play a very important role in the ecological balance. They contribute significantly to the welfare of other animals. Elephants are the only animals with an extra sense to locate water in the ground. With their tusks elephants make a hole in the ground to get at water as deep as three feet below the surface. Elephants drink about sixty-five gallons of water at a given time. They also like mud because they play and bathe in it. Furthermore, mud serves as moisturizer for their unusually dry skin. Because of this great need for water, elephants make a hole in the ground large enough for their massive bodies. In the process they make a pool from which other animals find water they need. This explains why many animals are found in areas where elephants are in large numbers. Kill elephants for their tusks to satisfy aesthetic beauty abroad, and many animals will die of thirst at home. The ecological balance to which elephants have contributed is destroyed.

Ecological balance is also destroyed when people want to take more from nature at one time than nature’s internal mechanism allows for the balance of the system. Science has the ability to promote life when rightly applied, but its potential to destroy ecological systems is great. Informed by marine biologists, an effort was made in the 1960s to increase tonnage of fish caught in Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake. To increase tonnage, marine biologists recommended introduction of Nile perch, some of which grow to be six feet long. The perch took to the lake with a vengeance and have destroyed scores of all fish. Once again, the ecological balance was changed. It does not take much thinking to know that the introduction of the perch into Victoria had a negative result for the people who depend on the lake for their livelihood and protein. The desired increased tonnage is still in the future!

Attempts for high productivity may be appropriate, but the price and who will pay the price must always be taken into account. Usually it is those already struggling to make ends meet who pay the price for national gambles. Science, or at least its technological application, has much to answer for in Africa in this respect. In the name of high productivity Africans were encouraged to use fertilizers. Most of these fertilizers were not tested for the particular soils in which they were being used. This resulted in the use of the wrong types of fertilizers. Consequently, soils were burnt with the wrong salts applied to them and made unable to produce as much as had been hoped.

Malawi

Malawi, my own country, provides a more specific example of some of the problems identified above. In Malawi the staple diet for a large population of the country is made from corn flour. In an attempt to increase production of corn, agriculture experts recommended introduction of a hybrid corn, Malawi Hybrid, commonly known as MH 12, 15, or 32. The numbers stand for specific hybrid categories. This corn grows two to three long cobs with big ears on one stock, and it grows faster than the traditional corn. Its big ears, however, are softer and therefore absorb water much more quickly than the traditional corn. Because of its softness and quick absorption of water, MH 15 and the others get rotten very fast. Insects quickly infest the ear. To preserve it for some time, even for a few months, insecticides have to be used. For reasons best known to agricultural “experts” in the country or because of economic considerations, the insecticide commonly used by farmers or stocked by local farmers’ clubs is dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT). How safe is DDT for human consumption? Furthermore, this breed of corn is unsuitable for the tropics because of the high rainfall these areas get. The corn begins to rot even before it is harvested. For Malawi, the problem is compounded by the fact that rain water permeating through the walls of traditional granaries gets to the corn. The walls of traditional granaries are made of bamboo or twigs and their roofs are thatched grass. A roof on top of the granary prevents the corn from direct exposure to rain but does very little to keep it from getting rotten. Thus a family that worked very hard for months may find it has less food to carry it through to the next harvest because all its corn is rotten. Worse still, the family will have no money, yet it has to pay back a loan from the local farmers’ club from which it got the MH 15 seed. All this, for high productivity!

The result of these and other examples has been suffering on the part of people and other creatures. Until people learn to be responsible in their relations with nature, until people realize that they are a part of nature and that nature is part of them, unnecessary suffering will abound. People need to learn to take care of nature.²

Responsibility of Experts and of Western Christianity

The examples I have given above indicate what happens when moral responsibility is replaced by greed, and when the mechanistic perspective prevails. Over the past two centuries the mechanistic concept of the world and its attendant manner of living, a manner of living inundated with greed, has destroyed the African system of thought and values; it has ruined our vision of and interaction with nature. Our ability to interpret the world as we understood it and live accordingly has been weakened; not only has our sense of basic values been affected but our very vision of life has been undermined. Our very identity has experienced a crisis.

Illustrative of this identity crisis has been an overreliance on mechanistically inclined “experts” at the expense of trusting in the intelligence of traditionally minded African people. For example, in the last few decades the crisis has been compounded by the recommendations that Africa has received from the “development experts.” Indeed, the very concept of development has its roots in the notion of progress and is essentially a materialist philosophy bent on unlimited growth of exploitation and accumulation. The African bureaucrats and political elite who operate within the Western vision of the world continue the philosophy of accumulation under the heading of development. This explains why politicians and the bureaucratic elite are unable to draw on our concept of the bondedness of life as they decide on national policies.

Even Christianity cannot be excused. Christianity, though a Middle-Eastern phenomenon, came to Africa in the last century as part and parcel of Western culture and civilization. That being the case, Christianity only compounded the problem of the crisis of values for Africans. Through preaching and education churches changed traditional value systems. As traditional values crumbled, the hermeneutic ability of our people became deeply affected. This is to say, Christianity weakened or impaired our ability to interpret and reconstruct systems of values and norms that give meaning to our lives. All the more important that Africans, particularly African Christians, rediscover traditional African values and rethink Christianity in a non-Western, African way. As we will see, this envisioning process may have relevance to people in other parts of the world as well.

African Concept of Creation

The African understanding of the world is life-centered. For the African, life is the primary category for self-understanding and provides the basic framework for any interpretation of the world, persons, nature, or divinity. For Malawians, life originates in the divine Moyo. Part of the very process of life involves a tendency toward self-transcendence, which itself aims toward umunthu, or the fullness of life. In the human sphere the process of life achieves fullness when humans are richly connected to other people, to other creatures, and to the earth itself. Humans realize their own fullness by realizing the bondedness of life.

To reclaim this notion of life, of life as characterized by a deep and thorough bondedness, is to find a correction to the mechanistic view which has been imposed upon African thinking, and which has led to the exploitation and suffering of humans and other creatures alike. In what follows, I briefly explore (1) Moyo as the foundation of life, (2) umunthu as the aim of life, and (3) notions of justice and community which are entailed by life itself.

Moyo as the Foundation of Life

In a Public Broadcasting Service documentary series titled The African (1986), Ali Mazrui, one of the leading African political scientists, finds an example of the African vision of interrelatedness and bondedness with nature in the way Africans think of the forest. Mazrui pointed out that the forest provides the African with all basic needs — food, materials for building a home, medicine, and rain; it also provides a sanctuary for religious practices as well and a home for the fugitive; in addition, it serves as a cemetery and the abode of ancestral spirits. In short, the forest is everything for the African.

In so many ways nature in general plays an important role in human life and in the process of human growth. It provides all that is necessary for a person to live and develop. This means that nature and persons are one, woven by creation into one texture or fabric of life, a fabric or web characterized by an interdependence between all creatures. This living fabric of nature — including people and other creatures — is sacred. Its sanctity does not mean that nature should be worshiped, but does mean that it ought to be treated with respect. John Mbiti comments on this vision of nature as follows:

It emerges clearly that for African peoples, this is a religious universe. Nature in the broadest sense of the word is not an empty impersonal object or phenomenon; it is filled with religious significance. . . . This is one of the most fundamental heritages of the African peoples. It is unfortunate that foreign writers, through great ignorance, have failed to understand this deep religious insight of our peoples; and have often ridiculed it or naively presented it as “nature worship” or animalism. . . . The physical and spiritual are but two dimensions of one and the same universe. These dimensions dove-tail into each other to the extent that at times and in places one is apparently more real than, but not exclusive of, the other. To African peoples this religious universe is not an academic proposition: it is an empirical experience, which reaches its height in acts of worship (Mbiti, 73-74).

For the Malawians the universe is full of sacred life, full of life that transcends itself through fecundity, that in its abundant creativity continues to cross frontiers and break forth into new dimensions, always recreating itself and presenting people with ever new possibilities.

Moyo is the Malawian word for such life. Moyo, written with a lower case m, is both physical and spiritual. In part, moyo is life as it is manifested in biological existence. As such it is shared by, and bonds together, all living things. But moyo is also spiritual and sacred: even moyo as it is manifested in biological existence is rooted in the Mystery. Divine life, signified by the capitalized Moyo, is the source and foundation of all moyo. All life — that of people, plants and animals, and the earth — originates from and therefore shares an intimate relationship of bondedness with divine life; all life is divine life. Mulago speaks of this vision of life as follows:

It is a whole of life, individual inasmuch as it is received by each being which exists, communal or collective in as much as each being draws from a common source of life. . . It is life as it has been derived from the source of “power,” as it turns towards power, is seized by it and seizes it (Mulago, 138).

Holding that human life is inseparably bound to nature, and that both human life and that of other creatures are one with the divine, the Malawians find it alien to objectify nature as the other or to see nature as having only instrumental value. The African notion of the bondedness of all beings in sacred moyo, in one texture of life, fosters a sense of care for all of creation. It entails a manner of living guided and enriched by respect, by a stance that allows the rhythms of life to flow.

Nature has rhythms and patterns through which moyo flows. It is our responsibility to keep ourselves from interrupting the flow of moyo; it is imperative that we avoid changing or reversing these rhythms and patterns. The future of a people depends upon how that people relates to nature and exercises its human responsibility.

Umunthu: The Aim of Life

For the African, human life is a fiber in the fabric of the totality of life The phrase “being-in-plenitude” best describes the African notion of persons because it emphasizes the unity or connectedness of persons to one another and to nature. We cannot understand persons, indeed we cannot have personal identity, without reference to other persons. Nor can we understand ourselves without reference to nature. People understand themselves and gain identity only in a total framework of life. They are defined as they engage in work, ritual practice, and symbolic activities. But they must also understand themselves as belonging to nature, as living the life of nature. It is through their relationships with nature that people discover their identities and approach the possibility of living life fully. As nature opens itself up to people, it presents possibilities for experiencing the fullness of life, possibilities for discovering how inseparably bonded people are to each other and to all of creation.

Furthermore, when traditional Africans think of creation they think of the relation between human life and nature; a world without people is unthinkable to them, for it is an incomplete world. Moyo continually breaks frontiers and reaches superabundance. It continuously transcends itself as it aims at greater and greater fullness of life. Human life completes the picture of this process of creation. Through their rich relationships with life, with nature, and with one another, individuals give themselves new meaning and achieve umunthu, fullness of life. Similarly, creation achieves new meaning through these persons. In many ways, moyo transcends itself as the possibilities for the realization of umunthu are created.

Community and Justice

In the African view of the world, the word community refers to more than a mere association of atomic individuals.³ The term itself suggests bondedness; it refers to the act of sharing and living in communion and communication with each other and with nature. Living in communication allows the stories or life experiences of others to become one’s own. The sharing of life’s experiences affirms people and prepares them for understanding each other. To understand is to be open to the life experience of others and to be influenced by the world of others. In community, we share and commune with selves who are other than ourselves and yet united to us by both moyo and Moyo. In being open to the other, we are given possibilities for transformation and for reaching umunthu.

Persons are not individual entities or strangers to one another. They are nature itself seeking fullness in the actuality of present life. Since people belong to the fabric of life, their life — like nature — must be respected. This call for respect is also a charge to the community to create possibilities for persons to realize full personhood. In a community of life where all are bonded together, everyone is responsible for everyone else:

What falls on one, falls on all. In such a relationship, the issue is the re-establishment of community, the re-establishment of the circulation of life, so that life can go on transcending itself, go on bursting the barriers, or the intervals, the nothingness, go on being superabundant (Boulaga, 81).

A community of life emphasizes being-together for the purpose of allowing life to flow and for the purpose of creating possibilities for achieving umunthu. The notion of being-together is intended to emphasize that life is the actuality of living in the present together with people, other creatures, and the earth. Justice in such a community must be based on a sense of the bondedness and oneness of life:

We must repair every breach of harmony, every wound and lesion. We must demand reparation for ourselves because we are not merely ourselves, and for others because they are also ourselves, the what-and-who of our pre-existence and survival, the what or who of some manner of our “presupposing” ourselves (Boulaga, 81).

Justice is how we live in the web of life in reciprocity with people, other creatures, and the earth, recognizing that they are part of us and we are part of them.

Conclusion

As we see, moyo, umunthu, community, justice, nature, and the power of life are inseparable. Together they represent the bondedness of life. This notion of the bondedness of life has informed some African Christian thinking where that thinking has attempted to transcend the mechanistic views imposed on Africa by the West, where that thinking has drawn upon the rich heritage of Africa itself. But such life-centeredness could also serve as a vital basis for all Christian thinking and action, as a guide and an empowering vision for the Christian movement to alleviate the suffering and exploitation of living creatures worldwide.

And there is urgent need to consider a model for the transformation of society, a model which will take bondedness and the relationship between people and other creatures seriously.⁴ Social structures and policies must find a basis in life itself, and in the notion of justice as it is entailed by the life we creatures share with each other and the divine. Community must be based in a consciousness that all creatures are part of all others, that humans share a common destiny with nature. Community, and the vision that puts forth that community, must be dedicated to the fullness of life for people, for other animals, for plants, for the Earth, indeed for all expressions of the divine Moyo.

Notes

1. This is a term Lewis Mumford has designated in describing the differences in visions and ways of life of Western and other societies.

2. There are a few examples where projects exhibiting care for nature have been embarked upon in Malawi. The restoration of the country, which begins every year In December with the tree planting day, December 21, is a good sign of care for nature. The project is done by all Malawians. The Ministry of Forestry through its nurseries throughout the country sells the seedlings at a cheap price, about three cents a seedling, cheap enough for most people to afford. Game parks are another sign of hope, especially when attention is given to animals that may soon be endangered species, such as the twenty-four hundred elephants now under special protection in the Game Parks. In an attempt to preserve nature, Malawi in 1982 became the first country in the world to create an underwater national park designed to protect fish. According to ichthyologists, Lake Malawi has nearly a thousand species of fish, many of which exist nowhere else in the world. But what will happen to this park if Malawi follows the UN. proposal to introduce fresh water sardines into Lake Malawi? According to UN. marine biologists, these sardines could produce as much as ten thousand tons of protein. At what price will that be in terms of the ecological balance of the lake? What will be the future of the sixteen thousand Malawians whose livelihood depends on the lake?

3. The differences between African and Western concepts of community are well-argued by Menkiti (Menkiti, 179).

4. I have described the question of transformation in another work, Community of Life: Foundations for Religious and Political Transformation.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1962.

_____.No Longer at Ease. London: Heinemann, 1963.

Baker, Donald. Politics of Race: Comparative Studies. Westmead and Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1975.

Boulaga, F. Eboussi. Christianity Without Fetishes: An African Critique and Recapture of Christianity. Trans. Robert R. Barr. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984.

Mazrui, Ali. The Africans. A Public Broadcasting Service television series, 1986.

Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

Menkiti, Ifeanyi A. “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought.” African Philosophy. Ed. Richard A. Wright. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984.

Mulago, Vincent. “Vital Participation: The Cohesive Principle of the Bantu Community.” Biblical Revelation and African Beliefs. Ed. Kwesi Dickson and Paul Elingworth. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1971.

Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine, Part Two: The Pentagon of Power. A Harvest Book. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.

Sindima, Harvey. Community of Life: Foundations for Religious and Political Transformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming.

About the Author

Harvey Sindima, a Presbyterian minister, was born and raised in Malawi. He graduated from the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Blantyre, Malawi, and did postgraduate work at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. His Ph.D. in religion and society is from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is author of Community of Life: Foundations for Religious and Political Transformation (forthcoming) and Drums of Freedom: African Theology (forthcoming). This essay originally appeared as chapter 10,pp. 137-147 in Charles Birch, William Eaken and Jay B. McDaniel (eds.) Liberating Life: Contemporary Approaches in Ecological Theology, published 1990 by Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York 10545. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

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14 signs that the collapse

of our modern world

has already begun

By Nathan Batalion, Global Health Activist, Editor Healingtalks

(Healingtalks) This is post is one of the most important we have put up.

So much of what is happening in our tumultuous world…..from earthquakes, river floodings and tzunamis, to the overturning governments in the Middle East and our own Occupy Wall Street movement…..is unsettling.

Why are these things happening now?

Here is an explanation you won’t find elsewhere

So PLEASE pass this on to friends and family. It is important.

My dad left Germany in the 1940′s just before its collapse, and after reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf he saw the writing on the wall.

When any person decides to become say…. an astronaut, football player, musician, actor or actress or whatever…. common sense tells us that their key decisions in life were made from deep inside, after some soul-searching along with the influences of  family, friends, teachers and their environment to then shape their lives. However, we don’t often think that way about what shapes the course of civilizations.

Perhaps this is because we don’t take serious the motto that ‘changes happen from the inside out.”

The dominant “religion” or highest set of truths for all the why and how things happen in our world is apparently physics and chemistry. They offers a mechanical explanation of the why and how of things or how  “changes happen from the outside in” …like a billiard balls might mechanically touch the outside surface of another after colliding to then move a ball in a certain direction.

Let’s assume the prior motto is true… the inside out one…and even for the collective or group consciousness. Then let us ask what is it on the inside view of modern civilization that is leading or misleading us to our demise.

What Most Sets of the Course of Civilizations From the Inside Out

Like the personal choice of a career, where to live, and whether to raise a family or not, the answer for the collective society might lie in something else – the core of the core of our vision of nature.

Why?

Because these visions tend to have certain beliefs that function as “central paradigms“  – some core view that connects the whole of understanding – the whole course of life – much like the center of a flower connects all the pedals in all directions.

Do we have such a central paradigm… a core of cores…. a ‘soul” to our modern worldview?

The answer is a resounding yes. Central paradigms give integrity to a vision and usually present.

The dominant culture-wide adoption of this particular central paradigm – taking root in the collective inner subconsciousness – occurred dramatically in the 17th century – and it is this process that has set us on our present course toward a precipice, to our own self-created demise and the destruction of nature around us.

A Global Mind Change in the 17th Century

Western civilization actually changed course from having a prior central paradigm or cultural soul.  It experienced what is called a global mind change.

It shifted radically to a new overall path during the 17^th century.

This was from the medieval, biblical or religious-led culture whose highest truth and/or central paradigm was revelations through the Bible to one a new reliance on the truths of astronomy, physics, chemistry, and related sciences. Did these sciences have a single common central paradigm that unified their separate discipline understandings as one?

They did.

It was the mathematical understanding of the universe or as Sir Isaac Newton expressed it in Latin the “principia naturalis mathematica.”

The vision also later developed its first duality, matter and energy, which E=mc2 attempted to reunite as one, mathematically of course. Its understanding focused around the atom, which in ancient Greek meant the indivisible 1, because mathematics is built up on integers with 1/1=1, or with 1 being indivisible. Thus nature’s building blocks had to be the same as those of symbolic mathematics. This was the new faith adopting by some in ancient Greece and which again came to cultural prominence and dominance in the 17th century.  That vision evolved, flowered and began to bear fruit in the 19-21st centuries.

This new highest, supposedly truest vision also led us onto the path of the Industrial Revolution and found a wecoming home in our modern commercial and technologically-driven world, departing again from the medieval, biblical God-centered view.

Mapping Out a New Course of Civilization From the Inside Out

How did the new understanding determine an overall course?

Well, the 17^th century was so extremely excited, self-assured and enamored by what they discovered  (and fueled by the Enlightenment belief that man,  under the direction of God, was destined to rule over all of nature and on a road of ever rising human progress) that objectivity went out the window.  Consciousness was not put above the mathematical view, rather the contents of consciousness were judged mathematically. Anything that couldn’t find precise math-correspondence wasn’t really real!

But sorry to inform my scientific friends, in my opinion physicists, chemists, allopathic doctors, and economists – all applying the symbols of mathematics in a dominant, central paradigm way – failed to truly see what they were doing in and to their consciousness. Even less did they have any sense of what they were about to do to the outer world “from the inside out.”

Stripping Naked the Illusions of a Mathematical Cosmos

There are four important things we need to know about the mathematical vision of nature, leading or misleading us on our present paths toward multi-dimentional self-destruction.

• Demythologzied – Stripped naked – and with consciousness placed above the mathematizing process,  first math symbols are simply mental symbols not something given to us by God to man in order to understand to the world.  It’s hard to imagine these days now this happened but the 17th century philosophers who promoted this view (resurrecting beliefs from the Golden Age of Greece) were devout Christians. It was according to Newton, that not only was the atom the indivisible one, like 1/1=1 and where numbers were the building blocks of nature but, to quote Newton, where “the atom was what God had made One on the first day of Creation.” This was a belief-directed vision that then took on the mantle of supposedly being objective or ‘scientific.”
• Universal Separation Symbols – What really is going on is that math symbols, being symbols or pointing tools for our minds, point abstractly or universally to how to separate all elements of consciousness. To separate universally is to most deeply and fully disintegrate. It is to map the course of things falling apart! Universal symbols of separation offer a misguidance.  If  everyone understood this, no one would adopt a math-based vision of nature – whose impact now is engulfing us because it is indeed being universally and deeply applied -  again from the inside out.
• Illogical and Irrational – It is impossible to best connect a vision, any vision let alone that of all of nature, by systematically and universally separating all of our consciousness of nature. This is why the vision is fails and cannot but fail us.  We glorify the Einstein’s of our times, while several Nobel-Prize-winning physicists have come down with Alzheimer’s disease. This is because the mathematical vision needs to be demythologized. It cannot integrally point to a deep and real understanding of the nature of our consciousness, nor of the depth essence of our world.  It is rather an illogical and irrational vision, one whose misguidance is powerfully dangerous.  As a final note, one can no better connect a vision of nature using the very highest (meaning the most universal) abstractions of separation than one can glue things together with one’s most high powered chainsaw.
• Machines Never Once  Occur  in Pristine Nature – Go to any forest, desert, ocean or mountain peak and you will never ever – not once – find a single machine in pristine terrains (human-untouched), not even a simple bicycle, unless planted there by man and as a biproduct of his internal math-led vision. It is man’s hubris that creates these unnatural creations to have power over nature, supposedly.  How can what never once occurs be the model for what everywhere and always occurs throughout our cosmos. It takes a certain insanity to believe that. Well, welcome to the modern world‘s insanity taken to be ultimate sanity. Its the same modern world where chemicals that cause cancer and yet are postured and used to supposedly cure cancer. Never mind that they fail 98+ percent of the time, as could be predicted. This pays homage to a diehard holding on to a bankrupt vision.Again the vision defies our senses, and logic, though we hypnotically continue to believe. When someday we will wake up from this bad cultural dream, we will see how it has shaped a world falling apart from the inside out. Then we can take responsibility for what we have created to chart a new course.

How to Get Beyond the “Core Religion” of Our Times

Conventional schooling brainwashes us not to question our teacher’s teachings. We compete to get A’s on tests by agreeing with rather than challenging our teacher’s beliefs.

The precepts of our basic sciences are given the aura of highest of high or unchallengeable truths.

We look to the invention of machines  (the ideological correspondence to that vision) for validation.  Don’t you love that Mustang, jet plane or cell phone? We mix up that fact that certain inventions can represent an aspect of nature, but not necessarily its soul.

Have you ever seen a periodic table of elements hung high in a science classroom? And like a religious icon to revere? This is even though it has long been proven by electron microscopes that a) atoms are not at all indivisible and b) the periodic table does not truly represent exact whole numbers of atomic masses!

What we really need is a different core view, something far less ideological and more rational, intelligent, and most of all integral. Then we can look to vision fruits that are not black and rotting.

How can we accomplish this?

I have outlined this in my many discussions and post as a math prodigy turned renegade – and about an alternative life-and -consciousness-centered understanding of our cosmos, and of all of nature.

This is a road map to the reconstruction of all the major paths of modern consciousness.

This re-understanding is the basis for a step higher global mind change.

It is a real turnaround that hopefully others will catch onto, our civilization from the inside out – and for me as the only real way it can effectively have an antidote to what makes modern living turn ill.

Unfortunately it is looming mass sufferings that trigger mass changes. I have seen this especially after I started an alternative cancer treatment center. Making a shift from a  diet of junk foods to quality foods tends to happen after a bout with serious illness or even being at the doorstep of death. We sometimes are not ready to make massive changes until we have suffered greatly or our life is nearly snuffed out.

Fast Forward to the 21^st Century

The signs major change on a societal or cultural level are nevertheless happening. It is both frightening from the suffering end and exciting at the same time from the liberating end.

We are waking up from a bad dream. It is the naive and blinded dream of unending progress fueled by a bankrupt 17th century understanding – and what has led us on this overall course.

Species Dying

We suddenly face an unprecedented, nature-destructive and non-sustainable world where already about 1/4 to 1/2 of all life forms are threatened with extinction.

But our world is falling apart at multiple seams – ecological, health, social, psychological (with an epidemic of mental and consciousness diseases) and political fronts.

And there is the pollution and disruption of our planet to the extent that now the whole eco-sphere of the globe is disturbed,  as with see with global weather crises rising each year in number and intensity.

Where the Clash of Vision and Reality is the Greatest

The arena where the signs of things in shambles are the greatest is the healing arts.

Why? This is because the healing arts involve our deepest connections to wholeness, and to use the most separative symbols to structure all of consciousness, including the healing arts, results in the most grossly anti-healing practices (exposing chronically ill patients to drugs, surgery and radiation) like using the most toxic chemicals that cause cancer to try to reverse cancer!

Like a religion whose faith is waning and falling apart, the faithful priests of that view (allopathic doctors, physicists, chemists, Wall Street traders and economic statisticians) may tend to refuse to face the reality of what is really happening.

It is heretics who may differentiate the shit from the toilet!

Shift in the Making

The exciting part is that we are privileged to see the closing of an era and the birth of a new one.

Now according to Mike Adams, there are now 14 signs that our modern world indeed is coming apart at the all major seams – and as we are living through a special time – the end of one era and the birth of a new one.

In the future, this will likely be called a momentous time. Here then are Mike’s 14 signs, largely unedited – along with subsequent comments.  We might have add a collapse of our educational system, geared to prepare our young for the commercial job market rather than living a higher consciousness, higher-aliveness, healthier and sustainable existence.

Also there is a looming collapse of our food delivery system, centered around supermarkets, Walmarts and the like.

All of this can be disturbing when one is not prepared for more sustainable solutions and alternatives.

So PLEASE  pass this blog post onto to friends and family.

It may be the most important post they will every read. We are living in changing times and don’t expect the support systems of the past to last.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mike Adams the Health Ranger’s

14 Signs that the collapse of our modern world has already begun;

#1 – Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis – At first it seemed like a fluke; but now it’s a pattern. The weather is becoming increasingly extreme. Over 120 tornadoes recently struck the U.S. Midwest. Texas is on fire and suffering through an extreme drought. And where there aren’t fires and droughts, there are floods. This is only the beginning… watch for more freak weather over the next 18 months.

#2 – The silence of the bees – Colony Collapse Disorder continues to accelerate across North America. We already know it’s being caused in part by chemical pesticides (and possibly worsened by GMOs), but the chemical industry is engaged in a full-on cover-up to deny this truth while the pollinators of our world suffer a devastating population collapse. (http://www.naturalnews.com/028218_p…)

#3 – The failure of nuclear science – The Fukushima catastrophe proves one thing: Scientists are dangerously arrogant in their planning of large-scale projects, and they fail to account for the awesome power of Mother Nature. Nuclear science promised us clean, green energy — but now it has delivered a silent, invisible poison that’s infecting our planet.

#4 – The vicious pursuit of Wikileaks – In an age of such rampant deceit, there is no room for the truth. So those who tell the truth (Wikileaks) are viciously pursued as if they were criminals.

#5 – The rise of the medical police state – The armed SWAT raids on Maryanne Godboldo in Detroit are only the beginning (http://www.naturalnews.com/032091_M…). The truth is that the medical system uses guns to force its vaccines and chemotherapy onto children and teens across America. The medical system has become so utterly useless, corrupt and dangerous that it must actually invoke guns in peoples’ faces just to “convince” people to take its medicine. This is a gunpoint-enforced medical monopoly that exists as a threat to our health and our freedoms.

#6 – The increasing frequency of food shortages and crop failures – Notice the spike in food prices? That’s just the beginning: Food prices will continue to skyrocket in the years ahead due to extreme weather, the loss of pollinators and the global contamination of crops by GMOs. Real food is becoming increasingly scarce in our world. You might want to think about starting a home garden…

#7 – The runaway destruction of the world by energy companies – The radioactive fallout from Fukushima isn’t the only way in which energy companies are destroying our world: Don’t forget about the Deepwater Horizon and the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — a spill that isn’t over, by the way. They’re still spraying Corexit in the Gulf one year later!

#8 – The continued GMO contamination of our planet – This may be the worst chapter in the coming collapse: The widespread genetic pollution of our planet through GMOs. This is a crime against nature and against humanity. It is a “gene spill” that may never be contained as it spreads its deadly DNA across the world’s food crops, leading to crop failures and starvation (http://www.naturalnews.com/032167_g…). The use of GMOs is the closest thing to “Satanic” that you’ll find in modern agriculture. The agenda behind this is pure evil.

#9 – The tyranny and criminal crackdowns targeting real food (raw milk) – When you can’t even sell honest farm food to your neighbors without being targeted and arrested by the cops, something is terribly wrong with the world. But this is happening today, all across America. Now the feds are even targeting the Amish! (http://www.naturalnews.com/029322_r…)

#10 – The escalation of the counterfeiting of the money supply – In a failed economic system approaching collapse, the moronic leaders can only think of “solutions” that actually accelerate their own downfall. The runaway counterfeiting of money by the Federal Reserve (with its “quantitative easing” and other counterfeit methods) is a classic sign that the end of our current system is fast approaching. The economic insanities are obvious to anyone who can still do math.

#11 – The plummeting intelligence of the masses – One of the most disturbing signs that we’re already in the collapse is the great dumbing-down of the masses. The drooling, CNN-watching television zombies who dominate our landscape offer absolutely nothing of value to the world. They are the “mindless consumers” who get vaccinated, watch television and eat processed, pasteurized junk food. They’re on psychiatric meds and believe everything the government tells them. Most of these people, of course, won’t make it through the collapse.

#12 – The complete and utter fabrication of the mainstream news – Much of the mainstream news is now utterly and completely fabricated these days: The reporting on Obama’s long-form birth certificate; the news about the war in Libya; the coverage of the economy and the U.S. debt… it’s all so utterly false and unbelievable that an intelligent person watching the news can’t help but explode with laughter. It is a sign of this collapse that the information sources relied upon by the masses are unable to report the truth anymore and must resort to weaving politically expedient fictions on everything from health care and medicine to the fate of the U.S. dollar itself.

#13 – The ongoing pharmaceutical pollution of our world – Beyond the GMO contamination and the radiation contamination of our world, we are also experiencing the mass pharmaceutical contamination of our planet. It’s not just the pharma factories that dump their products into the rivers (http://www.naturalnews.com/025415_w…); it’s also the fact that well over half the population is now taking drugs almost daily, and those drugs pass right through their bodies and end up in the water supply where they contaminate the fish (http://www.naturalnews.com/025933.html). Even beyond that, the drugs end up in the human sewage sludge that’s packaged and sold as “organic soil!” (http://www.naturalnews.com/029504_o…)

#14 – The radioactive contamination of the global food supply – Here’s one that’s really insidious: The global food supply is now contaminated with the radioactive fallout from Fukushima. We’re told the levels are “low,” but we’re not told the truth of how radioactive cesium isotopes persist in the food supply for centuries. How is the human race going to survive its exposure to CT scans, radioactive food, chest X-rays, TSA body scanners and even the secret DHS mobile X-ray vans that can penetrate your body with X-rays as you’re walking into a football stadium? The total radiation burden on the human race is now reaching a point of mass infertility. That may be the whole idea, actually.

It’s accelerating, too

December, 2012 may be a useful date as some sort of mid-point in the crisis, or perhaps as a trigger date for some further acceleration of society’s rapid unraveling. But make no mistake: We are already living in the collapse of our modern world. And you have a front-row seat! (Exciting, huh?)

Think about what’s happening around you these days. These are the signs of the last, desperate clutches of a civilization built on utterly unsustainable practices that don’t value life on our world. These are the End Times of the corporate oligarchy; the monopolistic for-profit corporation machine that destroyed everything in our world in exchange for a slightly higher quarterly earnings report.

In the quest for more money, humanity has sacrificed its food supply, its pollinators, it’s oceans, forests and soils. Greed-driven humans have used other humans as medical experiments and cannon fodder. We have created wars to sell more bombs, and we’ve invented disease to sell psychiatric chemicals.

These are the practices of a failed civilization… and one whose days are numbered. Watching it all crumble is far more interesting than watching it continue its destructive ways, of course, because those of us paying attention realize a future civilization must rise up in the place of this one after the collapse.

Say goodbye to the false power of institutions

It would be nice if our future leaders remembered the importance of liberty and personal responsibility, of course. The answer to all the world’s problems, it turns out, is freedom — freedom in medicine, freedom in economics and freedom from government tyranny.

Because, let’s face it: The root cause of most these problems that are bringing down our world right now is bad government. It is bad government (Big Government) that approved the GMOs. Bad government enforced the medical monopoly and allowed the pesticides to kill the honeybees. Bad government drove us into inescapable debt and costly foreign wars. Bad government outlawed health freedom and protected the monopolistic practices of the food companies, drug companies and chemical companies.

The downfall of modern human civilization is, as you probably guessed, also the downfall of the very idea that Big Government creates a better society. Because if there’s one idea that needs to stay dead after the collapse, it’s the idea that We the People somehow need another group of people (government workers) to live off our hard work while hounding us with their false authority, directing every little detail of our lives.

What we need in our world isn’t more government, but more freedom. If we had freedom, integrity and personal responsibility, we wouldn’t even be facing the global collapse that has already begun. But alas, the human race is an infant species and it must learn some lessons the hard way, it seems.

This lesson should be long remembered: If you let the corporations, the banks and the governments run your economies, your farms and your lives, they will enslave you and steal your future while you sleep; they will inject silent poisons into the very world around you until you awaken one day to find that all you created has been destroyed. They will promise you paradise but deliver only death. Beware of any entity that is not a living person — no government, no institution, no corporation has a soul, nor a heart, nor a conscience. They are forces of organized destruction that decimate those things we hold dear while delivering to us things that will only enslave us or harm us.

Beware the corporation; the government; the non-profit institution working as a front group for private industry. Never allow yourself to be ruled over by any institution which exists only as a fictional construct organized from the projection of human greed.

And be ready for the acceleration of the collapse. Because if you are reading this, you are the future of the human race. You have a duty to stay alive, keep your genes intact, and be around to help create the Next Society after this one crumbles into history.

Keywords: collapse of the modern world, modern apocalypse

Based partly on an article by Mike Adams, Natural News

Healingtalks Journal Oct 2, 2011

On the Deepest Essence of Ill States, Seen From Within

By Nathan Batalion, Global Health Activist, Healingtalks Editor

(Healingtalks) October 2, 2011 Today was a really memorable day.

RACE AND VIDEO

First I ran the Pit Run, a 1oK race here locally in Oneonta NY. Four of our community members cheered me on and I cut about 4 minutes off my 6.2 mile time at 58.33. Not bad for being nearly 62. And a few hours later a recovery. We are going to post a video soon on the site of the race, and how I felt afterwards. Watch for it…I guarantee the bit  at the end of the clip…I won’t spill the beans and tell you what it is… will surprise you.

All this is only made possible by the kind of high-vitality, life-centered lifestyle I try to lead, be an example of and promote on Healingtalks.

EMAILS

Got an email from a friend who read my articles, especially the one on inflammation and this has inspired this person to continue on their health journey.  It give me a warm feeling to know I am inspiring others. This also triggered some thoughts which I thought I must journalize.

So posting this journal, rather than just an article, is a new adventure.

FROM A THOUSAND AND ONE ILLNESSES TO HEALTH

There are a thousand and one names and signs and symptoms for illnesses. Doctors specialize in groups of them. But health is a state of oneness. And from an inner, not outer surface view, there are only two manifestations of illness – though they have countless names also.

TWO INNER ESSENCES OF ALL ILL STATES

I am going to share with you something I consider a secret of secrets, and if I may dare say, something very profound and wise.  It applies to countless situations. There are really just two essential ill states, the first duality of the movement away from inner oneness. Why these two states. Because our oneness is built around our consciousness(where consciousness is the universal relationship of connection within making us one). Consciousness is also the universal relationship of connection in nature. It is an illusion of the left brain (because of how the left-brain functions)  that consciousness supposedly originates in the brain. Don’t believe it.

If we lose that consciousness, we lose EVERYTHING. We lose not just our health but our life. However, it doesn’t happen all at once, but rather in dying and downhill crawling stages.

INFLAMMATION

The first essence of all ill states is thus the initial slipping of that inner consciousness when we feel charged up or simply inflamed.

To explain this, try to remember when someone really got you upset and you lost it. You got fired up into an inflamed state of anger. When so charged up, you were not  good with the fine details, not fully there or with it but rather taken up by the anger.

Imagine this symbolizes the early movement away from the direct connection or presence of consciousness.

The fire takes out the inner and not just outer light. It breaks things down that way.

Also think of the rainbow, as colors breakdown white light. The early or initial colors that come out of the unity of white light are the three fire colors, red and orange and yellow.

The feel of this essence may be called a fever, especially in children who bring it to a higher temperature. Or it may be called an “itis” like arthritis, an itch, an irritation, a stimulation or even an awful stirring pain. See our article on natural and powerful anti- inflammatory remedies, which includes this understanding about inflammations.

In one way or another with what I call “inflammations” there a stinging irk. There is a noticeable discomfort.  With our inner state, something is apparently wrong to make you feel ill from within, and that keeps you from also feeling at peace,  tranquil, in harmony or whole. The good part of this is that you still feel something. You have a consciousness of some sort – even if it is disturbing. So the worst thing you can do, in this light, is take a suppressant, a pain killer, etc (except in emergencies) because that takes you further into an ill state!

UNCONSCIOUSNESS

This becomes clearer by understanding the second essential inner experience of illness. It is precisely the experience of not feeling at all.

Or we can simply called it unconsciousness.

It may take the name of neuropathy, or the death of nerves, as in diabetes; or the death of insulin receptors, as cell membranes throughout the body die, again in diabetes, or the loss of memory, making mental connections as with Alzheimer’s impossible; or the silent spreading of what is destroying life, as with cancer.

The list goes on but it is all the same from a deeper inner point of view.

CONTINUUM BETWEEN

In between these two polar and defining consciousness opposites… at first the inflaming and burning out of consciousness but with the presence of consciousness still there… and the final or complete burn out or the death,  disconnection and loss of consciousness, there is a full continuum.

SO SO SIMPLY, AND FOR REAL

Because understanding again these  two defining end pins is so simple (any real understanding of the movement to and from oneness must to be so simple, a telling sign of integrity of wisdom) you don’t need any doctor or guru to ultimately fool you ( and themselves) into thinking this is a very complicated  process…to heal oneself…or that it involving mysterious knowledge of  hundreds of thousands of possible chemicals/drugs and countless interactions that only the doctor can claim to best advise you about or be an experts about. This is why you must empty your pockets for them. We are  taught something like that by endless TV and newspaper ads, and on TV with paid actors who are essentially paid to lie.

This allows us to fall into a world of illusions, the breakdown of the integrity of consciousness which itself is an ill state!

Oh yes I know, in emergencies  fast acting drugs have their place, even to save a life.

But for inner and depth healing, all we need is simple things, like gentle fasting for detoxification, or  eating whole foods, or meditating on love – peace – oneness …exercising regularly…and health, wholeness follows. Thre are also anti-inflammatory herbs, like curcumin.

So go to it. Have a life worth living and in a state of optimum health.

Keywords: Kinds of illness, definition of mental health, illness of the mind, consciousness illness, illness from within,inflamation and curcumin.

Short video on curcumin

Scientists Hint at

Why Laughter

Feels So Good

Based on an article by JAMES GORMAN in the NYT

Keywords: Why we laugh, healthy laughing, laughing heals, effects of laughing

Video on Patch Adams, the Laughing Doctor

The Gullible Mind

Explained

(Healingtalks) Humanity has exhibited many great achievements due to our high intelligence relative to all other species on the planet. The very strange thing is that we, at the same time, exhibit a high degree of gullibility.

The dictum that if you tell a Big Lie often enough, the general public begins to believe it…is really true.

So what is the very biggest of all lies, not only of this decade, this century but actually this millennium?

None really compares with how deeply and universally this deceit has penetrated the modern mind. This begins with the greatest cultural myth of all, mandated to be taught to every primary and high school student, the so-called foundation of “objective” truth – the math-based/mechanical/dead vision of nature and its psycho-locked, consciousness focal point, the  lofty and mythologized atomic model. This supposedly – and as proven by the power to build machines and technology under such guidance – represents an objective and impartial view. It is one that claim the know the essence of nature providing it is reduced to what math symbols point to.

Never mind that money, an applied form of the mathematization of consciousness, can corrupt consciousness just about more than anything else.

The fact is that this all-of-nature-reduced-to-math-symbols human-conjured ideological belief has , after only 400 years of universal applications, left us with unprecedented devastation of nature, pollutions, super-toxic waste cites, health pandemics and bioengineerings that now not only have become global in scope but globally threatening.

In the 1960′s Rachel Carson noticed the growing death of birds, only a decade after the unleashing of countless synthetic chemicals. She wondered at the end of Silent Spring, what primitive philosophy of nature was causing us to develop the most powerful of weapons pitted against nature.

The initial environmental problems she noted pale in comparison to what we face today, and including global warming and the prospect of 25-50% 0f all species nearing extinction in the next 100 years.

Could a vision so universally taught be mistaken?

You bet. For how can math symbols, the universal and precise symbols of consciousness separations, best guide the optimal and most integral connections of a vision of nature. This vision does not have that capability, and in fact takes us in the opposite direction, as with the development of atomic weapons.  Descartes, Galileo and Newton did not understand this. This why they also never foresaw any of the major downsides to their vision, virtually zero. Yet we teach their blind beliefs to everyone, and even by legislative force, so that everyone is mandated to accepts this. Then the collective mind really becomes highly gullible thereafter – too gullible to challenge what is so, so prevalently accepted and early on in most everyone’s life penetrates the collective subconscious.

It is really an amazing phenomenon.

It also teaches us how seemingly far we still have to go to evolve toward real depth intelligence to make us worthy stewards of nature – not just the surface appearance of intelligence.

Or can we take a leap and over the chasm we have self-created before it is too late?

Nathan Batalion CTN

Originally published May 5 20 11

The gullible mind explained

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

In light of the string of the blatant falsehoods being announced by the U.S. government these days (FDA, DHS, White House, etc.) it’s interesting that so many people still believe whatever they are told by “official” sources. It brings up the question of the functioning of their brains: How could a person swallow official information so gullibly and so completely without even asking commonsense questions about the reliability or factual basis of that information?

These people, it turns out, are operating from what I called The Gullible Mind. It is a psychological processing malfunction that filters out information based on its source rather than its integrity. People who operate from The Gullible Mind tend to have misplaced trust in governments, institutions, mainstream news networks, doctors, scientists or anyone who wears the garb of apparent authority.

Whereas a normal, intelligent person would raise commonsense questions about information they receive from all sources, the Gullible Mind wholly accepts virtually any information from sources that occupy the role of apparent authority in society.

Governments never lie

But how does this work inside their heads? It’s an interesting process. Gullible Mind people do believe it is possible for a government (or institution) to lie; but they believe that governments, institutions and doctors choose NOT to lie even when it would serve their own self interests to do so.

Follow this carefully, because this is the fascinating part. These Gullible Mind people effectively believe that even though a government official could lie about something, they would never actually do so. And why wouldn’t they? Because, ultimately, the Gullible Mind crowd believes that governments, institutions and mainstream media outlets operate from a sort of honor code. So even if it were in the interests of our own government to lie to us, it would never happen because that would violate this imaginary honor code.

Where does this honor code exist? Where is it written down? Nowhere, of course. It is imaginary. But to The Gullible Mind, it seems real. Interestingly, even though this “honor code” only exists in the imagination of The Gullible Mind person, they project this honor code onto sources of authority, imagining that they abide by it.

Extreme human gullibility

This is how The Gullible Mind person believes that network news always reports the truth. The news networks have a sense of “honor,” they believe, and this sense of honor requires them to always report the truth and never manipulate the news for any nefarious purposes. So news networks never “shape” the news and they only report what is factually true without any consideration whatsoever of politics or advertiser profits.

This view of the world is, of course, laughably naive. And yet it is the core belief system of at least half the population — the Gullible Mind half that believes everything it is told by its own government, media or authority figures.

Interestingly, the Gullible Mind is also inwardly gullible because it does not recognize its own gullibility. Instead, it believes it is operating as a Rational Mind. This false Rational Mind believes it functions as a critical filter of incoming information, but even this is self deception. In truth, this false Rational Mind is on “auto filter” so that it filters out any information that conflicts with the information it is receiving from official sources.

This is the key to understanding the Gullible Mind — it isn’t the quality of the information itself that matters; it is the confirmation of the story from official sources that “makes it real” in the Gullible Mind.

The Easter Bunny killed Bin Laden!

For example, let’s say a Gullible Mind person comes across an announcement that says the Easter Bunny has killed Osama Bin Laden. The report claims that colored eggs were found near Bin Laden’s body, and there was evidence of feathers being left at the scene, which proves the Easter Bunny was there.

Now, an intelligent, rational mind would have a lot of questions about this. For starters, rabbits don’t have feathers. And the Easter Bunny is a piece of fiction, too. On top of that, how could the Easter Bunny kill Osama Bin Laden? An intelligent person would, upon reviewing the holes in the story, be forced to conclude the story is fiction. The only logical conclusion from that is that the government is lying to them.

A Gullible Mind person, however, would not ask whether rabbits have feathers, or whether the Easter Bunny is capable of conducting a military raid. Instead, the Gullible Mind person would first look to other confirming news sources in order to determine the reliability of the story. They would turn on the TV or surf the internet, looking for the news to be repeated through “official” sources.

Once they found CNN, or Fox News, or some other “official” source reporting that the Easter Bunny killed Osama Bin Laden, then that news report would instantly become “real” in their minds. Suddenly it has shifted from their mental processing queue to the “absolutely truth” part of their brain, and from that point forward, no one can question that reality in their heads.

Don’t bother arguing with a Gullible Mind – they are immune to facts

At this point, their rational mind is completely shut off on the topic. No accumulation of facts can, at that point, rattle their “reality.” For example, a person who believes the government’s story of 9/11 has already embraced the Easter Bunny version of terrorists flying airplanes into the World Trade Center towers. So how did this act cause the WTC 7 building to collapse in a demolition-style free-fall a few hours later, when WTC 7 was never struck by airplanes? How can a steel and concrete building suddenly and magically collapse in perfect structural synchronicity merely from being on fire?

The answers don’t matter to The Gullible Mind, you see. There is no room for facts inside their heads, because all the space has been taken up with what is essentially a cult-like belief in institutions of authority.

We saw this in the Heaven’s Gate cult in California a few years back. The leader of that cult, a man named Applegate, positioned himself as the one and only source of authoritative information among the cult followers. So HE became the authoritative source whose information was wholly accepted without questioning or skepticism of any kind. At that point, he was able to quite easily convince his followers that an alien race was going to land a UFO on the far side of a comet, and that if they killed themselves, they would be transported onto the alien ship (or something like that).

The belief in such a story may seem silly… until you realize that the governments of the world use the exact same cult-like tactics to get their own “followers” to believe everything they say, without question. So if President Obama announced that an alien race was going to land a mother ship on the White House lawn, and that people who voted for him would have their consciousness transferred to an immortal alien body, the remarkable truth is that millions of people would believe that. Perhaps tens of millions. They would even worship him as an interstellar saint.

Remember Orson Welles’ radio program that announced aliens had invaded the Earth and were destroying our cities? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wa…) Huge numbers of people believed it was really happening… and not because it made any sense, but because the information came from the source they trusted. To those people, the alien invasion was just as real back then as Bin Laden’s official death is to government followers today.

Throughout history, many conspiracy theories have turned out to be true

Government lying, of course, has been going on for as long as governments have existed. Not all conspiracies theories are true, of course, but so many of them turn out to be true that the idea of “not believing” in conspiracies makes no rational sense.

To not believe in conspiracies means you don’t believe two people have ever sat down and plotted to take advantage of others in some unethical and deceptive way. Well gee, that describes virtually every board meeting of every large corporation in the world! Conspiracies are not just commonplace; they’re practically synonymous with modern-day capitalism! Even right now, Apple is being accused of a conspiracy to keep employee wages artificially low: http://www.appleinsider.com/article…

I wonder: Do the Gullible Mind people also not believe in that conspiracy theory? Are all conspiracy theories automatically tossed out merely because of the word “conspiracy?”

For those who don’t know their history, here’s a list of 33 conspiracy theories that turned out to be true: http://www.newworldorderreport.com/…

The Manhattan Project, of course, was a secret government conspiracy. The Tuskegee Syphilis experiments on African Americans was a secret medical conspiracy. Operation Northwoods was a conspiracy plot to create support for a war on Castro by staging terrorism events in U.S. cities.

These are all historical facts. They are indisputable. But to The Gullible Mind, none of this history exists. What’s real is only what they are being told right now by the White House. When George Bush occupied the White House, the daily fibs were things like, “The Iraqis want us to occupy their land with military personnel because we are setting them free!” Oh yeah, that’s a bit of twisted logic, for sure. But it’s no different from Obama’s version of the war fairytales, which includes such gems as, “We’re only dropping humanitarian bombs on Libya.” Or, “It’s not actually war. It’s only kinetic military action.”

But you see, it makes no difference whether anything they say is actually true… at least not to The Gullible Mind, which believes there is no such thing as a conspiracy theory. There is no such thing as a nefarious government, either. Heck, when Columbus landed in the New World, his entire crew shared food and wine with the Native American Indians, we’re told. There was no raping, no murder, no genocide. That’s why we continue to celebrate Columbus Day every year! Because the Gullible Mind wants a reason to get off work for a day, even if it requires a complete revision of actual historical facts.

The most popular issues of Gullible Mind people

Vaccines are good for you – Vaccines are “safe and effective” merely because doctors and the CDC say they are, not because of any reliable scientific evidence.

The economy is in great shape – Gullible Mind people are easily influenced to stop thinking about the $14 trillion national debt that’s growing by the day and simply go along with whatever economic fictions are being woven in Washington.

Governments and corporations are looking out for your best interests – The drug companies only want to find cures and make everybody healthy. The government is here to help. We should all stop asking questions and just do what we’re told.

Nothing will ever run out – There’s no such thing as Peak Oil. Our world can continue its throwaway economy without end, they believe. We’ll never run out of gas, water, soil or natural resources. Keep using stuff up and throwing it all away!

Food additives are good for you – Otherwise, the FDA wouldn’t have approved them, would they?

There’s no such thing as a cure for cancer – The ultimate pessimists, the Gullible Mind crowd believes cancer has never been cured! And if a cancer cure did exist, we would know about it by now, right? (Because our scientists already know everything that’s worth knowing, you see…)

There are no other non-terrestrial civilizations or beings in our universe – Amazingly, we are the only intelligent forms of life that have ever existed, they believe. Any talk of non-Earth intelligence is just a bunch of “fringe” nonsense. There was never any life on Mars, either.

Herbs and plants have no medicinal value – That’s right, only conventional medicine can “treat” you, because that’s what the doctors say. Herbs and plants have zero biological value beyond their calories alone, they insist.

… and on it goes, one delusion after another. A Gullible Mind, it seems, will believe almost anything if it comes from a “trusted” source. But that same Gullible Mind will discount straight-up facts if they don’t come from those same trusted sources.

How to stop being a Gullible Mind

Interestingly, most of the people who are intelligent, skeptical thinkers today used to be Gullible Mind people at one time or another. There was a point where they simply “awakened” and began to consciously question the world around them.

Intelligent, informed skeptics are the people asking questions like:

• Homogenizing News – Why do twenty different mainstream news sources all report the exact same news, using the exact same words, on the exact same day? (http://www.naturalnews.com/032022_m…) If they were all investigating and writing their own news, wouldn’t their news be different?

• Bailouts - Why did Wall Street get a multi-trillion-dollar bailout from Washington while the American people are still required to pay taxes that involve sending money to Washington? If Washington can just magically create a trillion dollars overnight, why do we pay taxes, then?

• GMOS - Why does the USDA now actively conspire with GMO seed companies to keep approving genetically modified seeds even without any scientific evidence of their long-term safety?

• Mercury and modern dentistry - If mercury is one of the most toxic substances known to modern science, why is it still being deliberately placed into the mouths of children in the form of “silver” fillings? And why are they called “silver” when they actually contain more mercury than silver?

• Fluoride in our water – Where does the fluoride used to fluoridate the public water supplies really come from? (http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=42652…) And if fluoride is so good for people, then why is it so hazardous to handle, and why is it considered a hazardous chemical by the EPA?

• Truth about 9/11 - What really happened on 9/11? How did WTC 7 collapse if it was never hit by any airplanes? Why did they sweep away the rubble before a proper forensic analysis could be performed?

• Vaccines - Are vaccines really safe? Where’s the study comparing vaccinated children with non-vaccinated children? Why won’t the vaccine industry allow such studies to be conducted?

• Cancer Industry - Why does the cancer industry seem a lot more interested in treating cancer and recruiting cancer patients than actually curing cancer and ending the epidemic? Why does the industry refuse to talk about cancer-causing chemicals or the anti-cancer effects of vitamin D?

• Chemical Additives – Why are toxic food additives still allowed in the food supply? What’s the real story on aspartame and the FDA? Why did the FDA oppress stevia for so many decades?

• Police State - Why is the medical police state now using guns to force parents to medicate their children? In what kind of medical system is it necessary to use the threat of violence to force compliance?

• Imperialism Press - Why did Clinton bomb the Sudan in the middle of the Monica Lewinsky crisis? Why did Obama suddenly announce the death of Bin Laden in the middle of his “birther” crisis?

• War on Drugs - Why do we still have the DEA’s “War on Drugs,” especially since there is ample evidence that the war is a total failure that only increases the prison population while actually enriching the drug gangs with higher street prices?

• TSA and Homeland Security – Why is the TSA still reaching down our pants at the airports if Bin Laden is now dead? Wasn’t he the whole reason we created the TSA and hired on those 60,000 security agents in the first place? (http://www.naturalnews.com/032267_B…)

An intelligent, skeptical thinker would ask these questions (and many more) as a natural course of basic human curiosity. But a Gullible Mind, attacks the questioner for even daring to ask such questions.

Who are some of the awakened people?

That’s why the Gullible Mind is more than merely gullible: It is a cowardly mind. It is afraid to ask questions on its own, and it simultaneously attacks those who have the courage to stand up and actually ask those questions (like Jesse Ventura).

Most members of the conventional press are, of course, cowardly minds. They almost universally buy the corporate spin (or the White House spin) and never ask any tough questions anymore. Some of the REAL heroes — the people who are asking intelligent questions about our world — include:

Alex Jones
Jeff Rense
Charlotte Gerson
Jonathan Landsman
David Icke
Jesse Ventura
Gerald Celente
Ron Paul
Robert Scott Bell
Dr. Andrew Wakefield
Suzanne Somers
Dr. James Forsythe
George Noorey

Do you see a pattern here? Each one of these individuals has been marginalized or viciously attacked and slandered simply because they chose to ask intelligent questions about the world around them. Now, I don’t agree with every single thing said by each one of these people, but I admire each of them for having the courage to ask the questions that need to be asked if we are to move forward as a society (and civilization).

These kind of people represent the complete opposite of The Gullible Mind. They are, instead, the “true skeptics” of the world. The reason they are viciously attacked is because our world is so steeped in deceit and conspiracy that only Gullible Minds are tolerated. Those who question the status quo are not merely annoying to the powers that be, but actually dangerous because the most dangerous activity in which you can engage today is helping others awaken to what’s really happening around them.

It is that “awakening” that is so utterly despised by the web of corporations, governments and media lackeys that they will do everything in their power to prevent any sort of awakening from taking place at all. The functioning of the Matrix, after all, depends on people believing in the illusion.

And it is so much easier to govern, of course, if people just believe whatever you tell them. Gullible Minds make great voters and willing slaves. But lousy company.

Keywords tags: gullible mind explained, no cure for cancer, what is a gullible mind, why are we so gullible, who is gullible

A NEW

CONSCIOUSNESS-CENTERED

VISION OF NATURE

Can our rational mind understand the nature of consciousness. In my experience it can but it is quiet a trek to get there.

Having personally experienced a left-brain (rational mind) shutdown due to a stroke-like occurrence is not something that everyone has. It is not something the average person can or would want to recreate.  Thus if I write and say the following propositions, it may seem hard to impossible for someone else to get an anchor onto what I try to explain as whole different vision of nature and the world we live in.

So rather than asking for blind trust  or faith (which is not at all my penchant) or a recreation of that experience (which is generally impossible) I have to point to other experiences that can justify the following. We know in the study of psychology, studying from the outside in, that we have a right brain that tends to see “holistically.” The question arises then “to what extent can we use our left brain to explain that other side’s experience of our world as unified and whole.”

INTRODUCTION

First let me give an intro to this subject via the following.

• NATURE’S ESSENCE – Imagine there is  such a thing as an “essence” to nature (like chocolate makes up the essence of a chocolate bar) or something universally permeating…and through that universality making nature One.
• TRYING TO EXPLAIN THE RIGHT BRAIN VIEW – Imagine that any view of the existence of such an essence to nature is really right brain derived, and more so when the left shuts down or does not interfere. However, the right brain’s vision has a severe disability. It has trouble putting into words what it experiences intuitively. It thus needs serious help. It alone cannot well-navigate us to-and-from that Oneness in our daily lives.  We need this especially in the healing arts or when we are not at one.  The right brain merely melts into that Oneness. But is not good at the ship’s helm  to getting us to there if we are lost. It is rather the left-brain that practically navigates our everyday lives, but without right-brain intuitions can also get us  lost. Each side has a disability. So it stands to reason they should work together to negate their deficits. But how? All philosophies or put-into-words ways of trying to explain what the right brain sees are ultimately left-brain! But they come in different “flavors” some of which are more compatible with right or left brain dominance.  We can look at this in detail.
• RELIGIOUS  IDEAS  – Most cultures lean on religious view of the essence of our world. In religious views there is a God, Great Spirit, and/or Atman or something like that which forms the ultimate Truth underlying all our world within and without. Religious and mystical ideas may really express powerful truths of holistic consciousness. But these often are not verifiable. Images formed in  our collective subconscious or dream world may remaim prominent, like that of Angels and Devils which speak to more the intuition of our spirits – even if there is nothing tangible, physical, or concrete to back up the view. No one,  to my knowledge, has ever seen any God sitting on a gilded throne in the sky. But it doesn’t matter to the spiritual/metaphorical view. At the same time, to the rational and more literal mind it does. This keeps our inner consciousness disjointed.
• SECULAR IDEAS – The alternative is to explain the Oneness of nature in a way the rational mind prefers. We bring in primarily the concrete, physical,  or tangible world. This then allows that same rational mind to predominate. At the same time, it affronts inner intuitions. So what to do?  Should we attempt a better secular or religious view? Fully secular views are rare. Among them are the mathematical vision of nature (using physics, chemistry and biotechnology) and the yin yang philosophy (with its origins in China). Each attempts to formulate a “universal central paradigm” or means to see all things as One. Are any of these views authentic? Remember that the right brain quintessentially is the more connective, healing view. Thus an acid test for a left-brain formulated worldview is how well it performs in the healing arts. This applies to modern allopathic medicine rooted in the mathematical view and Chinese medicine rooted in the yinyang philosophy. If a derivative healing art does not heal, it brings into question the underlying philosophy. Today our world is filled with major and growing health pandemics, which thus is very telling.
• PARTLY SECULAR, PARTLY RELIGIOUS – In ancient India it was proposed that consciousness forms the universal essence of nature. But the literature often remain mystical and is thus hard for our modern minds to best relate thereto. Still the ancient Hindu and Buddhist traditions have evolved their own derivative healing practice – such as Ayurvedic and Tibetan medicine. Again, if their remedies are effective it may evidence some signs of truths in the root vision. With this view in mind, the fact that several cancers have become epidemic in both China and India hints that all of the combined secular visions of nature we’ve developed may not be well-navigating enough.

MODIFYING AND REVIVING

THE CONSCIOUSNESS & LIFE-CENTERED

VIEW OF NATURE

• Supplanting the Atomic Model - The core essence of nature is not objectively defined by the atomic model, supposedly objectified by what math symbols point us to. Rather that role is filled by what we experience as “consciousness.”  The atom was supposedly the indivisible One, like that of 1/1=1 and thus the building block of all of nature. Electronic microscopes have disproved that ideological illusion. In truth, consciousness is nature’s indivisible One, so we need to retrace our steps.
• Consciousness Supplanting the Atom – Consciousness as nature’s essence can be defined as the “universal relationship of connection in nature.
• Consciousness is at the core of life. Chronic illnesses of our bodies are thus not essentially mechanical but consciousness ailments – especially Alzheimer’s, diabetes and systemic cancers.  Knowing that is the master key to healing and preventing these ailments.
• Rational Explanation of Consciousness – The above is a very powerful rational explanation of the nature of consciousness which usually defies rational explanation. The rational mind isolates elements in our consciousness with perfection. It uses symbols like those of mathematics, the highest abstractions for how to separate all elements of consciousness. But that essential approach actually moves away from the essence of consciousness. So we have to retrain the rational mind to point and focus  (like a camera) upon the unpointing and unfocusing process – or to re-see the undivided ocean of consciousness that exists to the depths of nature, past the surface appearance of the separate physical forms.This  is no minor knowledge and of what forms the essence of life, of nature, and ourselves – with powerful healing and environmental applications.
• Organics Supplanting Math-Defined Lab-Creations – Among the first, to give an example, there is a very deep reason why we need to avoid lab-created synthetic chemicals, things deeply and purely math-designed, and to go organic in order to preserve our health and that of our environment whose inner essence is living consciousness. We also might incorporate more living foods that bring out nature’s essence, and more importantly than a combination of things math-described and defined (e.g. fats, proteins, carbs, sugars). This is unique knowledge that many ancient cultures did not have, even if they bordered on a life-centered view. So we modify and revive the life and consciousness centered vision of nature to apply it powerfully to the healing of our times. We need to do this because we are in the eleventh hour or destroying our planet by unrelentingly, ideologically (left-brain dominant)and arrogantly following 17th century illusions about the mechanical/math-based vision of nature instead.

My intense study of consciousness, the essence of life, led me to the conclusion that it forms the universal essence of nature as well. This means that life, and not the principles of the machine, lie at the core of nature. The modern world has a different view. It uses mathematics to describe the essence of all things in nature. But math symbols abstract how to separate all elements of consciousness – creating mechanical things made of separate parts and going directly against the depth essence of consciousness and life. Force that vision deeply onto nature and you inevitably harm and ultimately destroy  living nature, and the nature of ourselves.

If you wonder why our world today is an incredible mess…why we are on the verge of economic and ecological collapse…why there are vast health pandemics out of control…go to the taproot reason…take a look at the core guiding (or misguiding) philosophy of nature …its sister profit/quantification of consciousness motive..or what has dominated us pervasively the last four hundred years. Wherever there is a deepest  corruption of consciousness, socially, money motives are involved and an essential left-brain dominance to disintegrate vision.

This is not accidental and is a trend that has been on the rise since ancient Greek times, culminating in the 17th century European culture and coming to a dark fruition in our times – global pollution, atomic weapons, and GMOs, among those fruits.

Lorna powerfully keys into this. Here is a synopsis of her ideas.

Summary of Lorna Green’s Theory of Consciousness

Here is a brief summary of Lorna Green’s points in her What Is Consciousness In the Scheme of Things. Her thesis is something I wholeheartedly agree with:

Consciousness As An Anomaly
Thomas Kuhn, in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions pointed out that the discovery of anomalies (evidence that contradicts a theory and cannot be explained within it) is the foundation of all scientific revolutions. In this context

• Understanding “what is consciousness” appears at a leading-edge frontier of modern science. It is the last of the major unconquered territory for the real depth understanding of our world.
• At the same time consciousness fails to be explained by existing scientific principles that are mechanical. It precisely an anomaly.
• Thus if consciousness were to be explained, it tends while it fit uneasily in our classical assumptions, this can become the trigger for revolutionizing our whole modern worldview.

Let me add my own example to Lorna’s thesis. Living organisms actually and really violate all of Newton’s mechanical laws of motion – one of the foundation assumptions of physics that that is how nature works – mechanically. A runner, for example, can run around a track and with a certain inertia or momentum. But being conscious and alive, he can then decide to abruptly turnaround. Where is that explained in Newton’s laws? How and why does that happen? Why, in fact, is mechanical motion anathema to life, as in working on an assembly line all day long.  Suppose the reasons are profound, and why cannot be reduced to mechanical explanations (which was how 18th century philosophers tried to solve this unresolved problem).

Moving Away From Old Renaissance Assumptions
In order to thus revolutionize our worldview, we must move away from century-old notions about consciousness such as:

• A) Consciousness emerges at only the high end of a path of physical evolution
• Consciousness is tied to the development or evolution of  our physical brain’s activities. It is produced and derived from neuron activities,  a by-product of a computational organ with impressions.  It is not something existing in its own right.
• Consciousness is a helpless ghost or shadow in the machine, in the material/physical world
• Matter and energy defined mathematically is exclusively what is really or objectively real in our world.

Near Death Experiences – The Means to Overthrow Old Consciousness Assumptions
Lorna points out that a study of near death experiences may offer the pivotal means to overthrow our old assumptions about the world we live in. There are several on-going studies worldwide to determine if consciousness is really separable from the body or can exist independently on its own – with real powers of its own.

We Are In The Position of Forming A Second/New Copernican Revolution
If the results of on-going Dutch and English experiments show that consciousness is incontrovertibly separable from the body, then our modern worldview must change in ways that are almost unimaginable. It could involve of reversal of root terms – or where consciousness becomes the primary and fundamental stuff of the world, and not matter. She calls this The Consciousness Paradigm. Matter become derivative and secondary  rather than the other way around. This, by the way I would add, can go beyond conventional panpsychism – or the philosophy that consciousness is in all of nature. The latter can still presuppose that consciousness emerges from matter. Here we make a radically backwards inference. The universe suddenly becomes no longer just a machine, Newton’s Grand Clock, or acting blind and unconscious. Just about everything we believe about nature, and ourselves, then is revolutionized. Or the whole of nature and its causal laws might be seen as primarily or first an express of consciousness in things (rather than an expression of what is the machine-like functioning of matter). Also consciousness might ever exist within consciousness… ad infinitum, like a Russian doll is made with a smaller doll inside which in turn has ever smaller dolls.

I would add a stirring example to Lorna’s point. A person, in deep hypnosis, can often image a hot iron touching the skin with the result that a blister forms. Matter here then emerges out of mind and consciousness rather than the other way around – the common modern assumption.

Impact Of A New Theory Of Consciousness
With the above revolution in thought, or reverse understanding of the foundations of nature, all departments of knowledge and all human activities are impacted. This is what happened in the 17th century with the transition from the biblical worldview to the modern mechanical underlying the Industrial Revolution. This kind of a global mind change can happen again.

What really

is consciousness

When I tell people I really know the transpersonal nature of consciousness, one reaction I can anticipate, especially from philosophers and scientists, is skepticism. And there is nothing wrong with having such healthy skepticism. One should generally never believe what we can’t see or verify.

Still I make this claim about something that has escaped some of the greatest minds of all times. So what makes me so self-assured that I truly and really know the solution to this most ultimate and difficult of all puzzles?

There are a couple major reasons.

One of these is that my model actually works in practice and helps explain some inscrutibl phenomenon. For example, why does money so powerfully corrupt consciousness. We cannot know the answer to that important question without first knowing what consciousness is. Similarly, we can’t help reverse consciousness diseases without intimately knowing the nature of consciousness. A second reason is how I came to this understanding, as explained below.

Now having a hypothesis about the nature consciousness that really works in practice and also helps explain things that otherwise can’t be explained….all of this is not minor event.

It ladens me personally with a responsibility to explain or to share this message no matter how difficult that task may be.

For this understanding has radical, revolutionary and powerful implications and thus applications.

How I came  to an intimate first sense of what consciousness is

But the simple fact is that I was the beneficiary of some unique circumstances and experiences.

In my youth I was a math prodigy who, like Jill Bolte Taylor, had a left-brain shut.

This changed my life as it had changed her life indelibly. But my take on that traumatic experience was very different. Just as I had once mastered certain math skills to a high degree and quickly, I now was drawn to an accelerated mastering or gaining the commanding knowledge of something very special – the transcendent, transpersonal nature of our right/left brain divide and derivatively of the interconnecting nature of consciousness itself.

What I discovered is invaluable knowledge.

It also and absolutely cannot be understood immediately.

It took me decades to pinpoint and find just the right words to express that nature, working on an accelerated schedule.

The reach of this knowledge of consciousness

When the mathematical philosophy of Sir Isaac Newton was first introduced in the 17th century, his Principia naturalis mathematica,  no one really knew where this whole Newtonian/Cartesian/Galilean cosmic vision would ultimately lead us to know or master. There was just an exciting sense that nature’s truest truths had been tapped into and that would push forward the evolution of all of human life.

Yes and of course they knew it could give us a commanding knowledge of mechanical motion, but otherwise little else concrete.

It took at least 400 years for all of us nowadays to experience more of the fullness and depth and breadth of their vision’s implications and applications. This includes the rise of the modern Industrial Revolution and its supporting commercial society. It includes all the inventions that have come about thereby – manufacturing equipment, cars, trains, jet planes, TVs, radios, computers, cell phones, a host of chemicals, genetic engineering, atomic weapons and so on.

Similarly knowing what consciousness is, and the vast implications and applications of that knowledge, cannot quickly be fathomed. It takes time to apply a universal vision universally, but this makes the task all of the more exciting.

Secondly this knowledge materializes in an essentially different domain (different than that of building ever better machines or mechanical moving things) – which also opens the door to surprise us.

If I tell you, the reader, now immediately “what is consciousness,” and in a single sentence, the knowledge then may appear cheapened.

“Oh that is what you think it is.  Sure..hmm”

Then it goes potentially, so to speak, in one ear and out the other. It takes an open mind – consciously and subconsciously open, to grasp a vast idea with revolutionary implications and expectations.

What I can answer to this smirking reaction is…. “No, it is not really and truly what I  think it is at all, but rather….”

So let me explain this further.

Consciousness “in the raw”

When I had a left-brain shutdown, I didn’t just think verbally or in words about “what is consciousness.” In fact, I couldn’t.

For a while I was distinctly aphasic, unable to even speak in any whole sentences.

But I continued to experience consciousness without words or “in the raw”  (why I later called this the pathway of raw-wisdom).

Consciousness translation

The right brain “silently speaks” actually very different language than that of the left.

In fact the connective syntax or grammar of each  language has an opposite nature. It thus became a huge task, as a translator, to find a language that would best tell the verbal brain what the non-verbal one “thinks” or experiences.

I had to create a Rosetta Stone to bridge the gap, and rather than the reverse. What I mean by “rather than the reverse” is as follows. The right brain can explain its language to the left, providing a right-over-left dominant view. This is rather than the left-brain, which tends to be normally dominant, to aggressive, telling the quiet shy right brain how to bridge the gap and see reality.

To compound the problem, we really have these two fundamental kinds of consciousness. There are these two opposite forms of consciousness (with a common ground) which, when separately tuned into, really create a right/left brain split.

Is then consciousness brain-centered or derived?

One of those two fundamental forms of consciousness requires our left-brain to function and to project consciousness outward from itself. This can give the powerful appearance that consciousness originates from the brain.

Seen from a left-brain point of view, there is some truth to that appearance.

But ultimately consciousness has a more transcendent and trans-personal and trans-human foundation. This is innately difficult to see because we are bound in our human consciousness, and proud of and in love with our rare human brain skills. We can, with our brains, make a million and one language distinctions while cats can only meow or hiss and dogs growl and wine. So with our brains we have an edge. And what gives us that edge makes it appear that our consciousness comes from our brain. Yet it really isn’t so.

With that said, I have to ultimately conclude this introduction and then “spill the beans” or tell the reader finally what is my understanding of consciousness. This is at the risk of saying this prematurely, whereby it is minimally understood or misunderstood.  But ultimately I have to unveil my definition of “what is consciousness” and open myself to challenges.

This view embraces, by the way, no mysticism or religious view to explain consciousness based on a belief system.

What I discovered rather by observation, as if from outside, is that….

Consciousness is simply the universal relationship of connection in nature.

Said in a simpler way, consciousness is nature’s principle of connection itself.

The average person can read this explanation and thereby know what this string of words is saying conceptually. We can understand it with our left-brain.

Or we can alternatively look at some Asiatic paintings/mandala of meditative postures and which show a yogic radiation of consciousness in every direction. We can intuitively have a visual, pre-verbal or right brain sense.

But for a still more whole-brain and depth understanding, what do we need to know? That really comes about with a more depth application to one’s life, and thus knowing the links from the one-to-the-many,  or the far-reaching, cosmic, cultural and personal  implications of a revolutionary re-understanding of our whole world.

If accepted, processed and applied universally, these implications are more than powerful than anything we can imagine.

This refers to vision reconstruction of all of consciousness in every direction.

All civilizations somehow intuitively strive to have an integrally integrated or healthy and whole core view of nature. It is what binds everything together without flaws or contradictions- and such views tend to be dominantly monopolistic. You really cannot have two competing views that tie everything together as One.

We are rather left with an unreconciled duality.

Visually you cannot have two centers of a flower unifying all of its pedals together as one.

This is why the early 17th century attempted at a marriage or coalition government between science and the Church that soon fell apart as it had to.

Initially the former studied the outer world. The latter ruled the inner.

But within a hundred years the science of psychology developed to really evolve one central paradigm view of the whole to dominate. As a result, the spiritual power of the Church further declined. Architecturally and symbolically, modern municipal and later commercial structures soon dwarfed medieval church steeples – which previously were the highest architectural structures built at the center of cities and pointing to God.

Thus a new core vision, if it really universally reintegrates all of consciousness, must also supplant and surpass the dominance of any prior or existing view of a similar sort! It cannot be otherwise

In this case, if our vision of consciousness is true to itself, it must then supplant the taproot inner foundation for western civilization as introduced in the 17th century – the vision that supplanted the medieval.

This would trigger a second major global mind change.

The original global mind change of the 17th century catapulted us straight out of the medieval world (with its aim for humanity to come ever closer to the will of God)  and into the new modern world (with the aim of  ever more commercial, industrial and technological progress).

Again another replacement core vision changes the latter.

It offers not just a re-understanding of our cosmos and its quintessence, but derivatively of the essential aim of life, our own and that of all others coming together to form a civilization.

It changes the vision of what life really is all about.

Nathan Batalion CTN

Can Psychedelics

Offer a Path

to Transformation?

Adapted from an article by Phil Wolfson and published in the magazine Tikkun

For more articles like these, subscribe to get the latest from Tikkun Magazine in its newsletter.

The California ballot initiative for partial marijuana legalization (Proposition 19) may have been defeated for the moment, but nevertheless more than four million voters said “yes” to it. Between the recent reduction in California’s penalties for use — now reduced to a fine for possession of under an ounce of marijuana — and the burgeoning medical marijuana industry, clearly the times are a-changin’. There are many hundreds of thousands of certified medical marijuana users in California, and twelve other states now have some reduction in marijuana criminalization as well. With scientific research into the clinical effects of psychedelics also burgeoning and a growing number of papers indicating benefit for various psychiatric conditions (post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, terminal illnesses, and drug addiction), thereby bolstering historic claims for clinical utility, and with the horrific costs of failed prohibition more and more obvious to the public, decriminalization — if not legalization of marijuana – has become more of a possibility. With this as background, it is imperative to undertake a public reevaluation of where we are with respect to psychedelic use, its risks, and its potential to support personal, spiritual, and cultural transformation.

History of Psychedelics: Ancient and Modern

Psychoactive substance-induced alteration of consciousness is ages old, the specific history dependent on humans’ particular geographic location and corresponding native plant habitats. The remarkable discovery, perpetuation, refinement of use, and sacralization of psychoactive substances in early and stone age cultures testifies to the timeless human interest in transcending “ordinary” historical and cultural realities.

Marijuana use dates at least to 4000 years BCE — the earliest cultivated plant remains known having been dated to that time. Humans and marijuana have co-evolved, influencing each other reciprocally in terms of cultivation and culture.

The use of mushrooms and other psychoactive plants in Mesoamerica is undoubtedly thousands of years old and was ineradicable despite the deliberate murder of practitioners by the Inquisition and genocidal suppression of indigenous cultures by the European colonizers.

In fact, Europe was desperately poor in psychedelics, these being limited to the toxic tropane alkaloids contained in mandrake, henbane, and poisonous nightshades such as datura (popularly known as thorn-apple, jimson weed, or devil’s trumpet). European consciousness developed its particular distortions in concert with the addictive and easily manufactured toxin known as ethanol, which is of limited value for mental and spiritual transformation.

Most remarkable is the Amazonian creation of ayahuasca (yage), the admixture of two separate plants that had to be bundled to create the remarkable oral dimethyltryptamine-based experience that was practiced as divination and personal transformation by native shamans. Ayahuasca use has recently spread to North America, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court’s recognition of the União do Vegetal with hoasca as an acceptable sacrament and indispensible part of the União do Vegetal Church’s ceremonial life, much as peyote is legal for the Native American Church.

Prohibition has often arisen in tandem with use, and has tended to serve elites who, hiding behind moral authoritarianism, attempt to regulate the “mind” in order to control dissidence. On the other side, use of substances for social control has its own history. For example, the Opium Wars were aimed at securing British capitalist interests in China and sedating the Chinese and, as many have argued, the pestilence of heroin use in the ghettos of the United States was fomented by the CIA in the 1960s and ’70s. Prohibition and criminalization — and, in our times, the “war on drugs” internationalized by the United States — distort the discussion of psychoactive substance use and criminalize the exploration of mind-altering drugs, as if this were an activity to be controlled by the state. That demonization makes for both propagandistic deception and overstated advocacy.

The best course has always been to provide information and education. Suppression can result in destruction of entire countries — Afghanistan, Honduras, Colombia, etc. — because “money” is the most powerful hard drugs of our times and attracts so many passionate adherents globally who are fixated on the accumulation of capital and, much like hardcore drug addicts, care little for the havoc their addiction wreaks.

Essential Safety of Psychedelics

Our epoch is unique for the mass use of psychedelic substances despite oppressive prohibition. This makes it crucial to understand why so many people defy drug laws and police to experience psychedelic effects. If the “war on drugs” is a lost cause despite the billions spent and the hordes of bureaucrats and enforcement agents who make their living off of it, why does the individual consumer still persist in driving the demand in the face of draconian penalties?

The addictive potential of substances such as cocaine, meth, the various opiates, and others are likely the driving force behind their consumption, but this is not the case for all drugs. The demand for psychedelic substances such as LSD, psilocybin, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and mescaline — and their relatives the empathogens (MDMA, 2-CB, etc.) — is not dependent on users getting hooked.

Psychedelics are relatively safe substances, especially as compared to alcohol, cocaine, meth, and other drugs. Rates of acute psychosis and incidents of physical harm are scant. Casualties do occur though, so a concern for safety and an understanding of risks (and the types of use that increase risks) is a must. For example, at the height of the Rave period of mass use of ecstasy in the U.K. between 1988 and 1997, when tens of millions of doses were consumed, often in tandem with other substances and under difficult conditions in which masses of people danced together in crowded hot spaces resulting in dehydration, the total number of deaths upon which the media became fastened amounted to 50-100. These deaths were certainly needless and stopped occurring for the most part when the causes were defined and appropriate preventive measures taken. For the United States the figure has been about one death per million users, and these figures generally reflect mixed substance abuse, with ecstasy being one component. Contrast this with alcohol-related deaths in the same period in the U.K., which amounted to 625 deaths per million users annually — yet there is an acceptance of that carnage. Such contradictions seem irreconcilably irrational, yet they occur because corporate interests have wielded their power to ensure that alcohol promotion and the alcohol-related catastrophe remain completely acceptable.

To be absolutely clear, deaths due to drugs are tragic, regrettable, and potentially preventable. Substances carry their own particular toxicities, but humans invent the circumstances that harm, like jam-packed clubs. Alcohol is the most significant gateway drug to other intoxicants, yet the official focus has been on marijuana, which seems more likely to serve as a gateway to safer and less addictive drugs like psychedelics, in those cases when it serves as a gateway at all.

Possibility of Transformation Via Psychedelics

To return to the question of the allure of psychedelics, the most potent explanation is that they offer the possibility of a transformation of consciousness. That may occur as an intimate acute experience or a form-shaking permanent alteration — it is a spectrum of effect that has incalculable personal and social consequences. The introduction of psychedelic substance use to masses of people in the sixties was part and parcel of the immense cultural change that occurred. Liberation from the suppressive, repressive yoke of McCarthyism that had penetrated darkly into the family culture of the late ’40s and ’50s was in part due to the mind expansion made possible by psychedelic use, which blew up restrictive mental fetters and fear of the personal imagination. This was transmuted reciprocally to and from new cultural and political formations. If the entire New Left didn’t succumb to rigid and dogmatic Leninism, it was to a great extent protected from that by personal mind-expanding experiences that escaped control by all ideologies and false consciousness. But it is not a perfect record, and psychedelics were also used to corrupt and control humans. Consider, from opposite perspectives, the final catastrophic period of the Weather Underground (and its mind-numbing use of psychedelics, which facilitated a cultish, delusional, and destructive view of what made for revolution) and, at the other destructive extreme, the sinister dealings of the CIA, which has had a compulsive interest in using psychedelics adversely to extract information or to create group and personal confusion, and even madness.

Some aficionados of the pure psychedelic experience argue that the unmitigated experience itself is sufficient to deliver transformation. And there are others, such as me, who find that the transformative influence of the psychedelic experience makes a quantum leap when integrated with spiritual practice such as Buddhist contemplation or when integrated with liberating psychotherapy. Unsupported psychedelic experience is unpredictably transformative. Integrations from the spirit side with ordinary lived reality are easier if we recognize that psychedelic transformation is but one element in our efforts to free ourselves from the corporate materialist culture. That is not a simple or straightforward task.

Varieties of Pyschedelic Experience

To convey the varieties of psychedelic experience is to experience the only partially descriptive capacity of words. Without intending to reify, or circumscribe, I will present a taxonomy of experience that reflects my personal history and observations over forty-seven years, since I and a small group of new friends just commencing medical school in New York City dropped acid (LSD). With this I am attempting to convey the psychedelic allure and am using “states” rather than some hierarchical notion based on “levels” — all such states have value for transformation.

Mundane State

 Conventional allure flows from curiosity, a desire to change oneself, the temptation of forbidden fruit, and emulation of others.

Personal/Psychotherapeutic State

 In 1964, I was a young, awkward, and self-conscious male, repressed and having just finished a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapeutic experience that had helped me to alleviate some of the pain of my hypercritical feuding parents that I had introjected. I was beginning to find my own voice and guidance. In the flash dance of a few hours, my inner structure rocked and shifted. LSD and I met, and I passed through great fear to feel my self-hate alleviated and my imagination freed to inform a creative new consciousness. Art came alive, as did everyday experience. After I came down from the LSD trip, I was deliberately determined to hold onto that freedom — a determination informed by a structural psychological awareness that had been obtained in the intensity of my earlier psychotherapy experience. My subsequent introduction to marijuana freed me of physical and sexual awkwardness, turned me onto intimate discourse, facilitated a heightened closeness in my friendships, and furthered my sense of being a creative person. This was not completely linear. There were ups and downs, and the process took place with absorption in the growing Movement, which came with a sense of being in a community of progressive people worldwide. Psychedelic use in that formative period increased my self-confidence and sensuality. It did not prevent me from making all manner of errors in personal and political life, but I was much better at discernment, moving on, kindness, and forgiveness.

Psychedelic use invariably affects the personal/psychological matrix. Starting a journey forces an encounter with fear — of the unknown, of the lurking dangers believed hidden in one’s own mind, of coming back altered. In the encounter the first period is generally absorbed with the personal: relationships, guilt, love, longing, grief, attachments, and self-concepts. This encounter opens the way to examination, release, and change, to reframing and heightened awareness of self and the others. A bad trip — usually in an uncomfortable setting under stressful circumstances — can result in fear, paranoia, and a recoil from the opened space that is perceived as threatening. Some folks never use psychedelics again. Occasionally too young people and some others — I know personally of several twelve- and thirteen-year-olds — experience damaging mental effects that may last far too long. Set (the mind’s orientation) and setting (the circumstances of use) always affect the quality of significant psychedelic experiences. Conscious preparation, good location, and the presence of supportive friends make for better experiences and outcomes.

Empathic State

 Generally any psychedelic experience may heighten empathy and empathic awareness. This awareness can manifest as love and affection; as the ability to see another’s point of view and put oneself in the other person’s shoes; as deep respect and regard; as elimination of barriers that separate; as communion with nature; or as a transcendent feeling of warmth for all things. In the eighties, the potency of ecstasy (MDMA) was recognized as a means — a tool — for heightening the quality of communication between people and for fairly reliably producing a state of warmth, affection, and nonsexual sensuality. Many therapists, including myself, introduced MDMA psychotherapy within couple, family, and group contexts. Because the experience was fairly replicable, generally positive, and without much in the way of distortion and hallucination, a new name was coined for a cluster of substances for which MDMA was the exemplar: “empathogens.” Those of us who saw MDMA’s potential for positive impact were able to demonstrate its medical utility before the Drug Enforcement Administration’s own administrative law judge. The agency went against its own judge’s finding, which would have placed MDMA in an accessible Schedule II classification, and placed it in the highly criminalized and inaccessible Schedule I group of substances that included other banned psychedelics and heroin. In the years that followed the 1986 ruling, MDMA use soared and the “rave” phenomenon began to attract huge numbers of people — again a testimony to the power of the substance to facilitate loving, intimate, sensual experience. MDMA’s appeal continues to be based on the facilitation of a state of communion and community larger than the personal self’s usual strictures allow. MDMA consciousness can be learned and generated without the drug as part of an expansive, loving, daily life. Much of the concern about brain damage due to serotonin depletion was based on phony research that was retracted from the literature when it was exposed. Hundreds of millions of doses have been consumed in the past few decades, notwithstanding the recent twenty-four years of prohibition, and yet my informal census of other therapists and friends who were there from the start fails to reveal names and numbers of any individuals with brains damaged by MDMA.

Egolytic State

 For the most part, the psychedelic experience exerts a damper on egotism and egocentrality. A sense of smallness and particulate being in the universe may be a fundamental part of the experience: I am truly an insignificance. A reduced sense of attachment to material goods, a sense of being awestruck with life and the psychic ground, a spaciousness of mind, a situating of the self as but a speck in the cosmos, and a sense of ease at being free of self-inflated importance may compose much of the trip. For some, this can be difficult and disorienting as a loss of the centrality of self and a confusion as to how to manifest and reintegrate. For most this state provides a welcome relief from the tension of being a particular totalization in the personal world and the competitive, demanding outer life.

Transcendent Transpersonal State

Stripped of ego, personal psychology, and investments, the psychedelic traveler enters the ground state from which thought, feeling, form, and formlessness emanate. It is as if the source of mind becomes the mind experience itself. This is certainly not restricted to psychedelic states. In the unadorned meditative experience, this too is highlighted for periods of time. An apocryphal story from those who travel in both the spiritual and psychedelic realms is that the great guru drops a bazillion micrograms of LSD and stays beaming and untouched the entire trip; he is already so spiritually elevated in his nature that the drug is not altering or transformative — he is the ground state itself. Ram Dass, among others, is fond of this tale. I have my doubts. In the psychedelic state the flux, the movement, of stimulated consciousness is what is experienced at a heightened level of manifestation. Some psychedelic experiences are difficult to recall and are difficult ones in which to maintain an observational awareness. However, most experiences include intense observational awareness. Dose is a factor — generally, the more you take, the greater awareness tends to diminish. It is my view that psychedelics tend to make more available for experience and scrutiny — by amplifying the phenomena coming into being — what Tibetans refer to as Dzogchen or primordial awareness as it is commonly translated, the sunyata state in Sanskrit, and in the less developed Western explication, the state of awe. By learning to reside in a nondualistic state of mind, by choosing to enter that state, and by having experiences that create faith in the goodness of that state, spaciousness, creativity, and compassion arise from nonattachment, from living in the flow, from not grasping at every object that comes to mind and attracts our attention.

Within the Transcendent Transpersonal State, a multiplicity of experiences and views will arise. They are generally not pre-programmable, but they have some degree of specificity depending on the substance ingested (different substances tend to produce a quality of experience specific to those substances) and to the user’s state of mind. I will mention a few by description that I class as “Vistas.” This is certainly not meant to be exhaustive.

• Sensual Universe Vista: Traveling through space as on a rocket ship, or being that rocket ship, I encounter extraordinary forms and shapes. Neon-colored blazing fractal worlds open. Forms emerge: animals, beings from other galaxies, lovers, and forgotten friends. I morph to meet them, and my morphing morphs. I am eaten and eat, am absorbed and absorb. Sexual encounters may occur. Love spills everywhere. Or fear brings on its own forms and monsters. Psychological themes come from my everyday life and are given forms, often allowing for a working through of trapped emotional energies. There is a sense of great exploration and great bliss, and at other times of the terror of being alive and vulnerable.
• Entheogenic Vista: A personal experience of god(s), or a relationship to the personally held notion of god that deepens, may occur. A sense of traveling in the starry cosmos freed from all constraint may occur, of being part of a perceived universe. Buddhists are told that they have, as do all sentient beings, “Buddha Nature.” In the psychedelic realm, I became the Buddha and felt that meaning and that responsibility. I moved about as the Buddha. I have tried to maintain that sense of awesome responsibility in my usual unenhanced state, to varying depth and effect — it is difficult. At other times, there can be the sense of the devil within, of the play of evil and the hunter/murderer, which we also contain and constrain. In mind traveling, there is no risk in exploring this aspect of us, knowing and accepting what we are capable of and explicitly reject.
• Connection Vista: The experience of connection and interdependency gives rise to feelings of gratitude, love, humility, and desire to benefit others. Our personal lifeline extends backward through a near infinite unbroken number of progenitors to the unformed stuff of the great earthly soup from which the first life forms emerge and forward to the future, as well. I have felt myself to be, much as a mushroom sprouts from the great mycelial mass, its myriad threads stretching underground in all directions, sprouting beings who as their time ends return to the rich mulch while new sprouts — humans — emerge. There is a sense of vibrant biological immortality. Or in contrast, a sense of the human mass as itself a cancer, having all of those characteristics — unrestrained expansionism, proliferation in all directions, and lack of concern for others’ needs and requirements — and eating everything in its path, out of control. There is also the sense of group mind, the experience of sensation outside the confines of the personal body/mind, in resonance with the others with whom one is traveling as a new assemblage in which the mind is intrapersonal.
• Cartesian Vista: I am the source of all that I experience. I create it. The outside realm — all of it — is a manifestation of my mind. This passes before me as I scan all of my creations, from scientific texts to great vistas to my friends and my partner. I am the author of life and death. Moving about within this perspective, I am able to revise what exists and what will be, for a time, until I am drawn back to the usual perspective of subject and object. This Cartesian experience, while one of false consciousness, increases the sensitivity to the difficulty of being by nature an interpreter removed from direct experience with only a mediated awareness of the external, and a personal awareness of the interior. While in this inflated state, I am god and master of the universe, prophet, seer, and enlightened being. And then there is the crash, and hopefully great humility.

Integration of Psychedelic Experience

In the post psychedelic condition, integration is the key to maintaining transformation. Integration is a function of intentionality — conscious and unconscious. Integration occurs both without effort — as a redesign of the central processor of our minds — and voluntarily as a deliberate effort to understand, find meaning, and as rectification — of our behavior towards others and towards ourselves. The psychedelic experience in and of itself may be transformative of our consciousness, but support for change by deliberate and disciplined absorption in the myriad spiritual/emotional/psychological/activist opportunities for increasing clarity and breadth most probably results in a more long-term and positive transformation of self. The human mind while extraordinarily plastic, adaptable, and mutable is also built with a great rubber band that returns us to our dominant character. This serves both as preserver of the integrity of the self and as a block to transformation — holding onto deluded Self.

Grounding in the world of the interior and the external world — finding balance — is a prerequisite for successful psychonautical voyaging and for a mind expansion that is in essence kind, creative, and that loosens the spell of the propaganda-filled social world we inhabit that tells us what to think and feel and especially what to desire and purchase.

Suggested Reading on Psychedelics

• A lovely, illustrated history of mind-altering drug use: High Society by Mike Jay Park (Street Press, 2010).
• More on the sixties, the CIA, LSD, etc.: Acid Dreams by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain (Grove Press, 1985) and Storming Heaven — LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stevens (Grove Press, 1987).
• A glorious mytho-poetic encyclopedia of psychoactive substances: the Pharmako trilogy by Dale Pendell (North Atlantic Books, updated editions 2010).
• For the current state of psychedelic science, policy, and controversy, subscribe to the journal from MAPS — the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Substances (www.maps.org).

Phil Wolfson, MD, is a practicing psychiatrist/psychotherapist in the Bay Area. He is the author of the forthcoming Noe — A Father/Son Song of Love, Life, Sickness and Death.

© 2011 Tikkun All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/150262/

COMMENT

While some psychedelics can expand one’s consciousness, others may have ultimately the opposite impact, to potential cause harm. A special concern is  for brains not yet fully formed, namely of young adults under the age 25. While maijuana has a relatively mild mind-altering impact, caution must otherwise be exercised and guidance sought from experienced and reliable facilitators when using more potent substances.

Nathan Batalion CTN

Daily

Meditation

Habit

This is dedicated to those who want to daily meditate but don’t actually sit down and do it! Here’s how to overcome the obstacles.

“I know I should be meditating but I just can’t find the time” or “I wish I could take time to reflect but I keep getting distracted” are common refrains. If this is you, there’s a very good reason that you don’t actually sit down, do your practice, and get the benefits you desire. Before I share it with you, allow me to quickly clarify two things:

Don’t Judge the Meditation Practice

First, any meditation or reflection practice (short or long, sitting or lying down, oriental or whatever)  is a good one.

I am intentionally not promoting any one style of meditation or reflection over the other. Personally, I’ve been certified in about a dozen styles of meditation and reflection practices and I teach several. I can say with some conviction that the right practice is any practice as long as you use it. There’s no need to get caught up in searching for new ancient wisdom or the next breakthrough tool that will finally help you sit down and do it. The tools you already have, or could pick up quite easily from training, are likely perfect for you – if you actually use them.

Know That a Regular Meditation Practice Is Vital

Second, consistent meditation or reflection is essential to a life well lived.

It seems that – without exception – whole, happy, successful people do some consistent practice to connect with their creative source and clear out mental and emotional junk. Whether the goal of a daily practice is improved creativity, better decision-making, greater health and well-being, a deeper connection with your source, or just feeling good while you do it, the benefits of regular meditation and reflection are so well documented that most of us know we should be doing it, even though we don’t… right?

Here’s the simple truth. If you want to have a regular practice of meditation or reflection but don’t do it, there’s only one reason (and I say this with love): something scary lurks within. As Henry David Thoreau aptly phrased it, “It is easier to sail many thousands of miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with 500 men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.”

Two Main Fear Obstacles Preventing Regular Meditations

In my experience, when we make a commitment to quiet down and go within, two kinds of fear arise. The first is that our suppressed negative emotions will rise to the surface and cause us pain. The second fear emerges once we’ve become adept at meditation and reflection. It’s that if we continue plumbing our own depths, we’ll lose our identity and everything that supports it.

Here’s one method to conceptualize these two types of fears. Imagine you’re in the desert and you’re drilling a well for cold, fresh artesian water. As you begin to drill, you strike the top permeable layers of sandstone. There’s a lot of dust here. It’s messy. But once you get going, the drill powers through these strata quite easily until it reaches the impermeable surface of shale far below. Here your drill gets stuck. In order to bust through the hard shale, you’ve got to pull the drill back, recommit, and strike the drill through the rock. Once you do, the spring waters naturally pour forth from the well and you’ve got yourself a lifetime supply of cool, fresh drinking water.

• The first fear, that of releasing negative suppressed emotions, is like the dusty sandstone.  It may seem scary at first but once you allow yourself even a bit of traction, you’ll find that you can quickly power through to the deeper layers of your soul. Be open and curious here. It’s OK to be afraid, but just for a little while, act as through you weren’t. Gradually your fear will disappear and you’ll fully experience the benefits you’re seeking.
• The second fear – that of a loss of your identity – will arise once you’ve become adept at meditating and you want to go further in your practice.

Facing this fear is the key to making a monumental breakthrough in your life. Here’s the secret: in order to bust through the layers of your psyche to the clear waters of your source, you’ve got to be willing to let go of your current sense of self and all that you’ve invested in it. Intuitively, we know this wonderful source is already there within us. Yet accessing this source is what Marianne Williamson rightly called our greatest fear: “it is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”

What do you have invested in your current sense of identity? Just about everything.

Your thoughts, beliefs, social status, career, family, history, dreams, friends…you name it. In order to bust through the bedrock, you’ve got to be willing to release your grip on who you think you are and trust that you’re something else entirely.

Muster the Courage For a Meditation Breakthrough

Making this choice takes tremendous courage. I have great admiration for anyone who’s done it and I will support anyone who’s game for it. Once you break through, you’ll realize that the fear was only as big as you made it out to be and the cool refreshing water at your source is so delicious….. you’ll just want to share it with all others.

definition of consciousness

Definition of Consciousness

Humanesque Definitions of Consciousness

If one scans the Internet, the majority of definitions of consciousness are what I call “humanesque.” They relate to mostly our own human or anthropomorphic experience and as something largely internal.

Examples are an alert cognitive state of mind or a subjective experience of the world or the totality of experience of everything we humans have of our world.

Occasionally one runs across a trans-human or trans-personal definition of consciousness, (suchg as yogic or Buddhist). This  views consciousness as a divine energy or some subtle force in the universe that pervades everything.

It is a universal consciousness that is One. Often this is still linked back to something humanesque, as when this yogic or universal consciousness manifests within a human being or the “enlightened person” having  a higher state beyond sleep or being awake

Consciousness  as a Mystery

Wikepdia starts its consideration of this issue by quoting Max Velmans and Susan Schneider who wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness:

“Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.

Consciousness Conceptions

Among the common humanesque definitions it notes are subjective experience; human awareness; our ability to experience feelings; our state of wakefulness; having a sense of personal selfhood; or as the executive human control system of the mind.

Consciousness Extensions

Philosophical issues arise about larger extensions or whether consciousness can exist in computers, in the fetus and at what developmental point, or whether it resides in other living and again non-living forms of nature (or can be reduced to what is mechanistic).

Consciousness Research

While this field of study was once relegated to just intellectual, philosophical and theological considerations, it now has become a popular and intense topic for practical research – trying to understand, for example, how meditation and drug altered states of consciousness arise, or subliminal experiences, blindsight, and denial of impairment. There is also an attempt to find biological/brain/neural and psychological or non-physical correlates.

Medical Consciousness Considerations

In medicine there is the further practical concern as to when exactly a patient is fully conscious, communicating and responsive or has officially come out of a comatose state. A further important medical issue, not mentioned, underlies the sudden or gradual loss of consciousness, as with Alzheimer’s dementia or neural impairment or when a diabetic loses awareness of what is happening in their extremities.

Earlier & Modern Concepts of Consciousness

• EARLIEST ROOTS - The earliest Latin meaning of the term dates back to the 1500 and referred to conscius (con- “together” + scire “to know”),as something that involved shared knowledge.
• MODERN CONCEPT - The modern concept of consciousness is often first attributed to John Locke‘s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690.Locke saw consciousness as “the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind.” His essay influenced on the 18th century view of consciousness, and that definition  of consciousness appeared in Samuel Johnson‘s celebrated Dictionary (1755).  He saw it as a kind of human looking at the mind, from outside the mind.

Philosophical, Religious, and Scientific Approaches

• DISTINCTIONS FOR TYPES OF CONSCIOUSNESS - There are various debates going on that usually involve certain distinctions or subdivision of consciousness – such as raw sensory “qualia” or phenomenal or P-Consciousness vs A-awareness or “access” consciousness (the latter being used by our cognitive mind and what can then be integrated into memory connections, verbal accounts, rational thought and/or language expressions. This attempts to grapple with the difference between pure sensory and mental, or right and left brain thus split consciousness. Individuals and primates however who cannot speak, are autistic or aphasic or have had a left-brain shutdown can still seem to have consciousness so this creates an unexplained mystery. More on this later.
• CONSCIOUSNESS AS PHYSICAL OR NON-PHYSICAL - The second major philosophical issue is how consciousness relates to our physical world, and whether it can be reduced to matter and/or the laws of physics. The Descartes introduced this famous line of thought by offering a dualistic understanding of res cogitans vs res extensa (something extended in space, definable by his Cartesian coordinates or something truly material). Some would argue that if we cannot find a material or mathematical/mechanical basis for consciousness, then perhaps it is not a real phenomena. 
• STATES AND ASPECTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS – In the Vedanta tradition, there is more of a focus on states of consciousness such as sleeping, dream, awake consciousness. trans-personal/self-conscious, and ultimately God-consciousness. In the Vijnana tradition, more of sensory distinctions are focused on in distinguishing eye-consciousness, ear-consciousness, nose-consciousness, tongue-consciousness, body-consciousness, intellect-consciousness.
• SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH - These often focus on neural or psychological correlates to states of consciousness, their presence or absence reduced to measurement or statistical analysis. Some reduce consciousness to what happens in the brain. Others explain consciousness,  correlated to experiments, in terms of classical physics or modern quantum mechanics. Various tests are devised to supposedly establish the presence of consciousness, and they are the subject of intense philosophical and medical disputes.

Our Unique Definition of Consciousness

This unique definition is derivative of my experience some decades ago where my left-brain shut down after having a high fever. Thereafter I underwent what it was like to experience consciousness in an aphasic or non-verbal state. It then took decades to assign words that would bridge the gap between the verbal and the non-verbal, the left- and the right-brain perception of our world.

What I arrived at is the following very powerful trans-humanesque or human or brain-centric definition. It bridges the gap between not only a right- and left-brain view of consciousness, but also a personal and transpersonal, a secular and religious understanding

Consciousness forms the universal relationship of connection in all of nature.

Powerful and Revolutionary Implications

This has powerful and vastly revolutionary implications. first and foremost this displaces the mathematical/mechanical view of Sir Isaac Newton, what gained sweeping dominance in 17th century. That view arrogantly claimed math symbols, abstractions of consciousness separation, best and ultimately pointed to the unifying essence of nature. Abstractions of separation cannot actually point to any pure connection in nature, making the Newtonian view basically contradictory or lacking in minimal integrity and thus ultimately untenable.

The Newtonian-Cartesian vision is a great inner point of view to uphold for deeply polluting our bodies and our planet, as well as building atomic weapons that threaten all of life.

Implications For Our Personal Lives

Other significant observations are that the concentration presence of consciousness forms what we can experience within us as organic “life” – and both what is life of our own and that of surrounding nature. It is not accidental that the signature badge of organic life is some pulling-to-oneness form, like the solar radiance of a flower or beautiful fibres of the retina of a smiling child’s eye.

Healing, healed or whole states of organic life, as well as the very survival of life, depend on maintaining one’s base-line consciousness (rather than taking in artificial or synthetic chemical drugs that are unwisely math-designed, based on a ”worldview- mistaken” approach.

Without that baseline consciousness, one also dies and the body disintegrates.

Chemical drugs very often hasten the process though they claim to do the very otherwise.

The Acid Test

What is magnificent about this definition of consciousness is that it can be acid tested in practice, especially as applied to what are the most distinctly or obviously “consciousness ills.” This includes various forms of dementia and diabetes.  It is fairly easy to show how this theoretical view becomes practically powerful, putting all other theories in the shadows.

If an MD, physicist, or prominent philosopher of consciousness cannot avoid his or her own later-life dementia,  then it reveals a lack of right-brain or raw-consciousness knowledge to ground their proposed ideological beliefs.

To reaffirm….Consciousness is the universal relationship of connection in nature.

Consciousness is, in my deep experience, the only one true, pure, real, and integral principle of connection….  the principle of connection itself …. in  all of nature.

Such a definition takes time and much dedication to absorb. Believing is seeing and seeing is believing, in this case.

For this approach has immense and revolutionary implications.PAST THE ATOMIC AND MATH-BOUND VIEW

Here we can claim that consciousness is the  principle of indivisibility in nature, and not the atom .

The latter is a by-product of the ideological conceptualization of a left-brain dominant,  math-bound view – and which has long been disproven. The atom was shown, early in the 20th century with the help of more powerful electron microscopes, to have subatomic parts or to be divisible.

Yet this atomic view is still clinged to out of fear of facing nature a deeper reality – a more non-ideologically, free of the math-bound view understanding of the universal raw presence of consciousness.

A Serious Global Mind Change Challenge

Consciousness, and consciousness alone, is really and ultimately what makes nature and ourselves integrally One (and  again not by any stretch what math symbols falsely point to or greatly misdirect us towards as a dominant cultural perspective -  the deeply mechanical, death-laden, and consciousness-stripped view.

When superficially applied the view has value. When deeply applied it has devastating and non-sustainable implications globally for nature.

The above is a very serious and deep-to-the-foundations challenge to the taproot justifications for the anchor ideologies of  modern chemistry, physics, and biotechnology – the quintessential vision that took us out of the medieval world and into the modern.

Medical Applications As the Proving Ground

This replacement view begins to explain why the simpler, organic, natural modalities of healing truly work (and on much deeper,  more universal and integral levels). They work to reliably cure our most chronic and horrible of ills –  while allopathic methods do not cure, do not really work and actually cannot essentially work.

With great arrogance the approaches are nevertheless maintained and politically ingrained.

Allopathic medicine does have effective and vital emergency applications – to  “time and space surface consciousness“.

Past  surface or superficial, fooling, symptomatic, isolative, covering-over applications, they often have very lethal or unconsciousness deepening impacts. Nursing home patients, those taking multiple pharmaceutical drugs, tend to walk the halls like zombies as they die more quickly thereby.  This entire approach actually cannot work to reverse or prevent any of our major “consciousness ills”  – and no matter how many billions or trillions of dollars are devoted to pharmacetical and high-tech research, fueled by corporate greed.

This is because  the essential understanding is false.

What is first needed  is a very, very deep-to-the-foundations revolution in thought – a breakthrough of unprecedented proportions -and  one that begins with an integrally insightful and then provenly practically or workable definition of consciousness.

It must actually guide us more truly to maintain our daily consciousness or to actually reverse our consciousness ills.

Otherwise it is just so much philosophical nonesense for our mental waste baskets.

Proof Is In the Pudding

Currently a number of Nobel-prize-winning physicists have come down or slipped into Alzheimer’s disease states. This is something that really doesn’t surprise me at all because their guiding vision is essentially and absolutely false. It is grounded in  the most profoundly unconsciousness foundations promoted to dominance in the 17th century, and earlier in Greek times.

Newton himself, it is revealing, died in a state of sever dementia and schizophrenia.

What is conscious?

I have a strong and clear answer to this critically important question of what is conscious or not.

My convictions about the nature of consciousness are so strong that I feel someday I will impact millions around the planet.

When I was a teenager I had a very high fever that caused my left brain to shut down. This was after having been both a young linguist and math prodigy (expressive of the two most primary skills of the left-brain ).  Through that immensely challenging experience I learned new things.

One of these things was  that“consciousness” is a “universal relationship of connection to which we tap into  – and dependent on how conscious and alive we are.”   This is not human brain centered. Left-brain functions are brain centered but not consciousness as a whole. The left brain create images and words that are projected outward – giving the illusory appearance of brain-centeredness.

As a result, any living or sentient thing  – animal and plant – can be called “conscious.“

Five Deepest Insights

Nathan Batalion, Global Health Activist, Healingtalks Editor

(Healingtalks) The following is a an introduction to my life-and-consciousness centered worldview, a core philosophy that can be used to help transform all the healing arts, in fact all of modern life that has been using the mechanical vision of nature, and that has been leading us to our own global self-destruction.

It is a positive message that life need not to be lived that ill way.

1 -  How does consciousness
emerge out of nature?

A related question is how does consciousness emerge out of ourselves and to a higher level. In our culture it really doesn’t.

In fact statistically it tends to recede over a lifetime as is evidenced by the wildfire growing epidemic of Alzheimer’s – the fastest of all the major growing health epidemics of our time.

That disease now affects more than half of those over age 85 or older. Not far behind are two other major consciousness epidemics – diabetes where one suffers from neuropathy or conscious loss of feeling in the hands and feet….and the epidemic of cancer spreading silently, that is unconsciously. Modern medicine, through lack of wisdom, helps creates the multi-drugged, walking the halls like zombies residents of old-age nursing homes. It is a travesty, a practice of medicine rooted in criminal ignorance. But all of this is really the result of a faulty worldview, the mechanical.

While it is obviously true that our bodies house life – and this includes consciousness – is it also true that our brains appear to be the main storage house of that consciousness. Or is that really true?

It is one of the deepest insights of my life that life and consciousness do not come out of the physical world at all, and thus with the latter not arising out of our brains (an illusion derived from our left brain male-like function, projecting-images-outward-from itself like a penis)  but rather the reverse.

This means the physical world comes out of what makes up consciousness.

How is this possible? This begs the question, first and foremost, what is this consciousness?

2 -  What is consciousness ?

There is a growing movement in modern science  “towards a science consciousness.” But the movement is grounded again in the 17th century mechanical worldview that created classical physics, chemistry and modern medicine.

These three disciplines point to a math-defined physical world as the foundation of nature.

Mathematics designs machines. It is thus the mechanical, life-less view.

This overall physical world also includes our physical bodies with distinct brain hemispheres and brain cells that undergo chemical reactions. This all supposedly creates what we experience as consciousness in us. If those brain cells are damaged, the consciousness is no longer the same way – which seems to support this thesis.

My alternative view is that our experience of consciousness actually represents something deeper to the taproot foundation of nature.  This would require consciousness not to arise just out of our brain cells.

So let us first define consciousness in a novel way, namely imagine that consciousness is the principle of connection itself in nature.

What does that mean and imply?

A symbolic analogy and image is a body of water or an ocean that connects countless separate drops as one, and out of which those separate drops manifest.

In the ocean we also find fish.

Now it would be a stretch to believe that the ocean arises out of the fish! We instead are more convinced that fish are birthed, grow, and develop  out of the ocean, out of their source environment.

Imagine the same could apply to the relationship between a physical world made up of separate objects and an inner world composed of the connected “ocean” of consciousness. Forget what you learned in high school about physics and chemistry making up our world.

3 -  What is Life?

Imagine that life concentrates and models the presence of consciousness – just like machines model mechanicality and/or a mathematical order of nature.

In short, imagine that consciousness is at the core of life and creates life.

Secondly imagine it connects us to the world around us and within. It makes whole and healthy. So to be healthy you don’t need chemical balance through drugs, you need simply more consciousness.

An Alzheimer’s patient who has vastly receded consciousness cannot connect events or memories to each other. He or she cannot connect parts of a face to recognize the whole, even of a life-long loved one. He or she has so little or no sense of the whole that they may have trouble even knowing where they are in crossing a street. Their inner vision is totally disconnected.

This is why, if the essence of life is consciousness, it would make sense that life requires an organically whole or connected physical form to thrive in – like the radiant form of a flower or the iris of our eyes.

Life therefore would leave whenever that physical form is cut apart severed or dissected to death.

It would leave if transformed into a schemata of just machine parts, as in the mechanical hand shown above. Knowing this it suddenly makes sense that if our food is progressively cut apart, processed or made no longer whole, like milled flour products for example (cookies, breads, pasta) and that are subject to life-killing high-heat, it would make complete sense that eating such dead foods as a staple will eventually cause us to develop consciousness diseases.

And this is precisely what is happening in our modern industrialized and commercial world where dead foods have greater shelf life, greater commercial value, better mathematical-dollar-tagging qualities, better death values.

Life, when fully alive, also feels conscious pain when its organic form is disconnected.

Life also becomes polluted and has its consciousness recede when it is drugged into a stupor by synthetic chemicals.

Why?

Chemicals are organized mathematically. It is as simple as that. This is why the vision fails in a living terrains. Mathematics uniquely abstracts how to separate all elements of consciousness. Three separate apples can be counted as three until you make applesauce. When connected the apples cannot be counted.

This is why there is no chemical drug to cure Alzheimer’s and there never will be!

So if we compare something living (organically connected) with something dead or mechanical, unconscious or robotic (math-designed mechanical) and disassemble the latter back into its separate machine parts… we can always put those separate machine parts, such as of a car, back together as a whole… and the machine or car will not only continue to run it may even run better.

We cannot do the same with life or with a whole organism that is conscious.

Cut it apart systematically and it dies. Life leaves. Consciousness goes away.

Imagine this is because consciousness, at the core of life, is the root principle of connection itself in nature. 

The equal sign of a mathematical formula does not connect nature or replace that principle.

4 -  Are there laws of this consciousness, akin to the mechanical, math-defined?

Absolutely and they can be powerfully applied, especially in the healing arts.

They function, however, in an entirely different way than again the laws of physics and chemistry.

Let us first look at the mathematical view of nature.

Numbers beginning with the simple number “1″ represents the universal separate and indivisible whole  (1/1=1) or one divided by one equals one. Its the final building block.

We can call numbers the building blocks of mathematics as a resutl, like individual dots are the building blocks of lines and the rest of geometric space.

With this understanding, if nature is truly mathematical, then nature must also  be organized in this way. This arrogant presumption, and it is a left-brain-originating assumption, can be easily shown to be both illogical and non-empirical or unreal.

But this means putting our consciousness above the mathematizing process, which the 17th century, in its arrogance, never bothered to do. Galileo, Descartes, Newton and others  just applied the vision universally with blind self-assurance to lead us to our modern Industrialized age.

When through the invention of high-powered electric microscopes, atoms were found not to be indivisible,  how inconvenient was. Still this blind ideology was kept in tact because otherwise the whole system of this bankrupt understanding would collapse.

Returning to our core question, are there laws of consciousness?  Looking at the picture above, we can contrast how fight and flight, or fear and anger represent separative emotions while love represents a connective posture. If consciousness is the principle of connection itself in nature, having a loving posture becomes more conscious. It is as simple as that.

A universal principle of connection is what can integrally make our world one.

Something that moves toward oneness ends up being simple. Complex things are not at one.

The simple understand is, at the same time, a deep and profound understanding.

5-  Revolutionary understanding to re-guide daily life

In the modern western worldview, the most powerful applications of the math-bound view became Industrial Revolution – large-scale machine applications from simple sewing machines to computers that have helped build the modern world.

But the same vision fails to halt the more important modern receding of consciousness.

Newton especially helped guide the transition from the medieval (bible-centered) to the modern math-centered vision of nature.  This was his revolutionary thesis of his main text Principia Naturalis Mathematica (The Laws of Nature as Mathematics). The later was more often translated as The Mathematical Principles of Nature because it was an ideology assumed to be absolutely true.

The fact is that machines never once occur naturally in pristine nature didn’t bother them. How can what never occurs anywhere in  nature represent the universal order of nature?

Newton’s vision is essentially contradictory. Abstractions of separation cannot possible best connect the essence of our world. This is why the vision fails to support what is most connective in nature – life and consciousness.  This is why it destroys life globally on earth, and its consciousness. This is why the earth is becoming ever more polluted and species are become extinct – something Newton or Galileo never foresaw, being blinded by their own ideology!

Newton, the left brain genius (the left brain separates elements of consciousness)  went insane toward to the end of his life – symbolic of the fact that one cannot connect a vision of nature using the absolutely most separative  symbols in the whole of our human consciousness! Newton went crazy and schizophrenic.

What those symbols can best help us do is to create atomic weapons that can destroy all of life on earth.

This is because that vision is the by-product of a root contradiction.

Yet it still dominates our times as our modern world is falling apart at multiple seams. It is not leading us toward higher consciousness.

The most powerful applications of an alternative vision is not for building atomic weapons but rather for a deeper and greater support of  healing – reconnection of the life-and-consciousness.

We thus need a new…..bio principia naturalis.…..a virtual opposite vision to that of Newton’s.

The primary focus is no longer again toward creating machines made of separate parts but rather toward the discovery and creation of what connects us within (and all of organic life) to a higher level of consciousness and health and wholeness.  We gain the knowledge of a mending of the life together – of mind, emotions, sensations, body and consciousness as one.

It also is a model for mending of our social bonds with each other, and not through a dominantly commercial society.

Will the Newtonian view take us to the same place?

I am afraid not. The proof abounds as in the pictures below.

Again no pharmaceutical (math-designed) drug will cure Alzheimer’s patients. This is because we hold on unconsciously to the Newtonian vision, and patients are fed not one but multiple chemical drugs to mislead them down the path of unconsciousness and death.

Multiple drugged patients then occupy nursing room halls like zombies.

Crudely said, they become cash-machines for Big Pharma rather than functional, living, conscious human beings.

Notable Physicists Who Became Alzheimer’s Sufferers

Charles Kuen Kao                              Raymond Davis, Jr.                       Gerson Goldhaber
(2009 NOBEL/Physics)                  (2002 NOBEL/Physics)                 (1976 NOBEL/Physics)

Nowadays half of those 85+ again suffer from Alzheimer’s.

These terrible victims include Nobel-prize-winning laureates in physics (the above pictured Charles Kuen Kao, Raymond Davis, Jr., Gerson Goldhaber, etc.).

This is because, as I contend, their Newtonian vision fails to well guide them.

This is a hugely revolutionary statement.

It knocks on the door of overturing the core modern worldview that has ruined indigenous wisdom.

Newton’s vision overturned also the medieval God-centered view, forming the core spirit of our modern world. This means we need a second and vast global mind change to overturn the Newtonian view – otherwise we are headed down an ever darker path.

As noted by an organization of senior citizens(AARP). “you have brilliant physicists, physicians, and mathematicians getting Alzheimer’s as well as average people in familiar occupations.”

What this means is that the worldview they learned does not really enlighten us.

John Douglas French MD
Founder of the first Alzheimer’s treatment center in the US  who
himself became a sufferer! & Newton, portrayed at age 81

The great Sir Isaac Newton himself died with the  fate of severe schizophrenia.

That illness manifests when the right brain’s connective consciousness shuts down and the left-brain’s separative  (disintegrative, falling-apart consciousness) prevails.

Mathematics once again is the zenith left-brain dominant symbolism for the separation of all elements of consciousness.

Math squiggles on a blackboard are the very highest and most universal symbols for that separation.

They are the mental tools for therefore designing machines made of separate parts.

But these are immensely misguiding symbols in trying to optimally connect both a vision of nature’s essence and the healing arts that bring our life and consciousness back together as one.

Thus the failure of even Nobel-laureates, or greatest mathematicians or a preeminent  MD who formed the first exclusively Alzheimer’s treating center in the US, himself falling prey.

This is telling.

Briefly My Life Story as a Renegade and Global Health Activist

As a former child math prodigy, I had a high fever and apparent stroke at the age of 17 that caused my left-brain to shut down.I was escaped thereby the ideological confines of our modern vision. I broke through its deep illusions, to become a mathematical renegade, I left the fold and abandoned the Newtonian vision.

I made the leap rather to a life-and-consciousness centered view of nature

The Biocentric View

A life-centered vision has been called “biocentric.” This is ecoed by Robert Lanza, MD in a book called biocentrism – and where this knowledge builds not dazzling machines but helps us heal and reach our real and true highest potential of life.

Closing Statement

Our civilization appears rich in material things, but is not integrally rich. Out health statistics contradict the surface appearances of all things being well. This is why we need the deepest of new insights to liberate us from the declining environmental and health condition we have created.

This can only happen through a new and deep revolution of thought and toward a more authentic, healing vision.

In the following article, consciousness is seen as coming out of  or being “caused” by our human brain processes.  The deeper-held and larger assumption is the overall worldview represented by chemistry and physics – that consciousness and all else comes out of something physical that’s best explained mathematically.

Consciousness “somehow” fits in but we don’t know how as an attribute of this supposedly “objective physical-based worldview.” Thus there is a movement ”towards a science of consciousness” within that mechano-physical or brain-tied framework. In this core understanding of nature (brought to prominence in the 17th century and still dominant today) “true” reality is made up of only separate physical things, again like brain cells and in turn made of individually separate chemicals (and where math symbols abstract the separation of all elements of consciousness – their uniquely identifying  bias). These separate physical things, more precisely seen at cut magnification levels of light, are purported operating as separate things. They function therefore like billiard-balls bumping into each other or moving mechanically.

So where would consciousness fit into this endlessly disjointed picture of chemical/atomic puzzle pieces moving in mathematical cadence?

Consciousness we are told could be a kind of  “arising out of ” -  a secondary, surface or superficial attribute of matter – like the color or texture of a billiard ball. But the mechanical components are  the holy primary reality to study.

With our philosophy of raw-wisdom, we follow a paradigm-busting orientation. We propose the polar opposite. This can be called a right-brain dominant view (where the mathematical view is the pinnacle left-brain dominant orientation) and where the two sides of the brain actually see in opposite ways. Imagine that nature’s primary reality is not really nor truly encompassed by matter and energy defined mathematically but rather, and with depth integrity, by what is consciousness – the experience of an integrally connected ocean of consciousness arising out of nature’s depths, its oneness, and where the physical world is the veil, the surface view, the non-objective illusion – the thin appearance that lacks depth integrity and of separate things functioning in separate-stepped or mechanical ways….. and where consciousness is just a minor or secondary an attribute.

The math-based physical view is again seen as non-objective – meaning lacking depth-perspective truth. During the Middle Ages, the earth looked like it was moving around the sun from one viewpoint – from the earth or from a self-centered vista. But from multiple and depth perspectives this was seen through as a powerful illusion. The same applies here or toward the math/mechanical based perspective. From this late 17th century orientation, the nature of consciousness doesn’t really fit – not into that ideological worldview – and never will - because that view is itself in need of huge fixing. Over the past 350 years, that vision has already produced waves of toxic chemical pollution, atomic weapons’ proliferation, and a dozen more major threatening consequences taking us towards the destruction of the earth and ourselves.

Furthermore, the two opposite orientations support two opposite approaches to the essential medical arts – the natural and allopathic – as means to make us whole. The latter is not very adept at preventing, healing or reversing consciousness illnesses like Alzheimer’s. For it is grounded and stuck in the 17th century’s  consciousness-stripping definition of a “scientific” worldview – again the math-based mechanical vision of nature.

Thus the following elucidates a little more of a derivative conventional view of consciousness and its study. It comes from a paper written by Professor John R. Searle and entitled The Problem of Consciousness

- Nathan Batalion

Abstract: This paper attempts to begin to answer four questions. 1. What is consciousness? 2. What is the relation of consciousness to the brain? 3. What are some of the features that an empirical theory of consciousness should try to explain? 4. What are some common mistakes to avoid?

Importance of Consciousness

The most important scientific discovery of the present era will come when someone — or some group — discovers the answer to the following question: How exactly do neurobiological processes in the brain cause consciousness? This is the most important question facing us in the biological sciences, yet it is frequently evaded, and frequently misunderstood when not evaded. In order to clear the way for an understanding of this problem. I am going to begin to answer four questions: 1. What is consciousness? 2. What is the relation of consciousness to the brain? 3. What are some of the features that an empirical theory of consciousness should try to explain? 4. What are some common mistakes to avoid?

I. What is consciousness?

Like most words, `consciousness’ does not admit of a definition in terms of genus and differentia or necessary and sufficient conditions. Nonetheless, it is important to say exactly what we are talking about because the phenomenon of consciousness that we are interested in needs to be distinguished from certain other phenomena such as attention, knowledge, and self-consciousness. By `consciousness’ I simply mean those subjective states of sentience or awareness that begin when one awakes in the morning from a dreamless sleep and continue throughout the day until one goes to sleep at night or falls into a coma, or dies, or otherwise becomes, as one would say, `unconscious’.

Above all, consciousness is a biological phenomenon. We should think of consciousness as part of our ordinary biological history, along with digestion, growth, mitosis and meiosis. However, though consciousness is a biological phenomenon, it has some important features that other biological phenomena do not have. The most important of these is what I have called its `subjectivity’. There is a sense in which each person’s consciousness is private to that person, a sense in which he is related to his pains, tickles, itches, thoughts and feelings in a way that is quite unlike the way that others are related to those pains, tickles, itches, thoughts and feelings. This phenomenon can be described in various ways. It is sometimes described as that feature of consciousness by way of which there is something that it’s like or something that it feels like to be in a certain conscious state. If somebody asks me what it feels like to give a lecture in front of a large audience I can answer that question. But if somebody asks what it feels like to be a shingle or a stone, there is no answer to that question because shingles and stones are not conscious. The point is also put by saying that conscious states have a certain qualitative character; the states in question are sometimes described as `qualia’.

In spite of its etymology, consciousness should not be confused with knowledge, it should not be confused with attention, and it should not be confused with self-consciousness. I will consider each of these confusions in turn.

Many states of consciousness have little or nothing to do with knowledge. Conscious states of undirected anxiety or nervousness, for example, have no essential connection with knowledge.

Consciousness should not be confused with attention. Within one’s field of consciousness there are certain elements that are at the focus of one’s attention and certain others that are at the periphery of consciousness. It is important to emphasize this distinction because `to be conscious of’ is sometimes used to mean `to pay attention to’. But the sense of consciousness that we are discussing here allows for the possibility that there are many things on the periphery of one’s consciousness — for example, a slight headache I now feel or the feeling of the shirt collar against my neck — which are not at the centre of one’s attention. I will have more to say about the distinction between the center and the periphery of consciousness in Section III.

Finally, consciousness should not be confused with self-consciousness. There are indeed certain types of animals, such as humans, that are capable of extremely complicated forms of self-referential consciousness which would normally be described as self-consciousness. For example, I think conscious feelings of shame require that the agent be conscious of himself or herself. But seeing an object or hearing a sound, for example, does not require self-consciousness. And it is not generally the case that all conscious states are also self-conscious.

II. What are the relations between consciousness and the brain?

This question is the famous `mind-body problem’. Though it has a long and sordid history in both philosophy and science, I think, in broad outline at least, it has a rather simple solution. Here it is: Conscious states are caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the brain and are themselves higher level features of the brain. The key notions here are those of cause and feature. As far as we know anything about how the world works, variable rates of neuron firings in different neuronal architectures cause all the enormous variety of our conscious life. All the stimuli we receive from the external world are converted by the nervous system into one medium, namely, variable rates of neuron firings at synapses. And equally remarkably, these variable rates of neuron firings cause all of the colour and variety of our conscious life. The smell of the flower, the sound of the symphony, the thoughts of theorems in Euclidian geometry — all are caused by lower level biological processes in the brain; and as far as we know, the crucial functional elements are neurons and synapses.

Of course, like any causal hypothesis this one is tentative. It might turn out that we have overestimated the importance of the neuron and the synapse. Perhaps the functional unit is a column or a whole array of neurons, but the crucial point I am trying to make now is that we are looking for causal relationships. The first step in the solution of the mind-body problem is: brain processes cause conscious processes.

This leaves us with the question, what is the ontology, what is the form of existence, of these conscious processes? More pointedly, does the claim that there is a causal relation between brain and consciousness commit us to a dualism of `physical’ things and `mental’ things? The answer is a definite no. Brain processes cause consciousness but the consciousness they cause is not some extra substance or entity. It is just a higher level feature of the whole system. The two crucial relationships between consciousness and the brain, then, can be summarized as follows: lower level neuronal processes in the brain cause consciousness and consciousness is simply a higher level feature of the system that is made up of the lower level neuronal elements.

There are many examples in nature where a higher level feature of a system is caused by lower level elements of that system, even though the feature is a feature of the system made up of those elements. Think of the liquidity of water or the transparency of glass or the solidity of a table, for example. Of course, like all analogies these analogies are imperfect and inadequate in various ways. But the important thing that I am trying to get across is this: there is no metaphysical obstacle, no logical obstacle, to claiming that the relationship between brain and consciousness is one of causation and at the same time claiming that consciousness is just a feature of the brain. Lower level elements of a system can cause higher level features of that system, even though those features are features of a system made up of the lower level elements. Notice, for example, that just as one cannot reach into a glass of water and pick out a molecule and say `This one is wet’, so, one cannot point to a single synapse or neuron in the brain and say `This one is thinking about my grandmother’. As far as we know anything about it, thoughts about grandmothers occur at a much higher level than that of the single neuron or synapse, just as liquidity occurs at a much higher level than that of single molecules.

Of all the theses that I am advancing in this article, this one arouses the most opposition. I am puzzled as to why there should be so much opposition, so I want to clarify a bit further what the issues are: First, I want to argue that we simply know as a matter of fact that brain processes cause conscious states. We don’t know the details about how it works and it may well be a long time before we understand the details involved. Furthermore, it seems to me an understanding of how exactly brain processes cause conscious states may require a revolution in neurobiology. Given our present explanatory apparatus, it is not at all obvious how, within that apparatus, we can account for the causal character of the relation between neuron firings and conscious states. But, at present, from the fact that we do not know how it occurs, it does not follow that we do not know that it occurs. Many people who object to my solution (or dissolution) of the mind-body problem, object on the grounds that we have no idea how neurobiological processes could cause conscious phenomena. But that does not seem to me a conceptual or logical problem. That is an empirical/theoretical issue for the biological sciences. The problem is to figure out exactly how the system works to produce consciousness, and since we know that in fact it does produce consciousness, we have good reason to suppose that are specific neurobiological mechanisms by way of which it works.

There are certain philosophical moods we sometimes get into when it seems absolutely astounding that consciousness could be produced by electro-biochemical processes, and it seems almost impossible that we would ever be able to explain it in neurobiological terms. Whenever we get in such moods, however, it is important to remind ourselves that similar mysteries have occurred before in science. A century ago it seemed extremely mysterious, puzzling, and to some people metaphysically impossible that life should be accounted for in terms of mechanical, biological, chemical processes. But now we know that we can give such an account, and the problem of how life arises from biochemistry has been solved to the point that we find it difficult to recover, difficult to understand why it seemed such an impossibility at one time. Earlier still, electromagnetism seemed mysterious. On a Newtonian conception of the universe there seemed to be no place for the phenomenon of electromagnetism. But with the development of the theory of electromagnetism, the metaphysical worry dissolved. I believe that we are having a similar problem about consciousness now. But once we recognize the fact that conscious states are caused by neurobiological processes, we automatically convert the issue into one for theoretical scientific investigation. We have removed it from the realm of philosophical or metaphysical impossibility.

III. Some Features of Consciousness

The next step in our discussion is to list some (not all) of the essential features of consciousness which an empirical theory of the brain should be able to explain.

Subjectivity.

As I mentioned earlier, this is the most important feature. A theory of consciousness needs to explain how a set of neurobiological processes can cause a system to be in a subjective state of sentience or awareness. This phenomenon is unlike anything else in biology, and in a sense it is one of the most amazing features of nature. We resist accepting subjectivity as a ground floor, irreducible phenomenon of nature because, since the seventeenth century, we have come to believe that science must be objective. But this involves a pun on the notion of objectivity. We are confusing the epistemic objectivity of scientific investigation with the ontological objectivity of the typical subject matter in science in disciplines such as physics and chemistry. Since science aims at objectivity in the epistemic sense that we seek truths that are not dependent on the particular point of view of this or that investigator, it has been tempting to conclude that the reality investigated by science must be objective in the sense of existing independently of the experiences in the human individual. But this last feature, ontological objectivity, is not an essential trait of science. If science is supposed to give an account of how the world works and if subjective states of consciousness are part of the world, then we should seek an (epistemically) objective account of an (ontologically) subjective reality, the reality of subjective states of consciousness. What I am arguing here is that we can have an epistemically objective science of a domain that is ontologically subjective.

Unity.

It is important to recognize that in non-pathological forms of consciousness we never just have, for example, a pain in the elbow, a feeling of warmth, or an experience of seeing something red, but we have them all occurring simultaneously as part of one unified conscious experience. Kant called this feature `the transcendental unity of apperception’. Recently, in neurobiology it has been called `the binding problem’. There are at least two aspects to this unity that require special mention. First, at any given instant all of our experiences are unified into a single conscious field. Second, the organization of our consciousness extends over more than simple instants. So, for example, if I begin speaking a sentence, I have to maintain in some sense at least an iconic memory of the beginning of the sentence so that I know what I am saying by the time I get to the end of the sentence.

Intentionality

`Intentionality’ is the name that philosophers and psychologists give to that feature of many of our mental states by which they are directed at, or about states of affairs in the world. If I have a belief or a desire or a fear, there must always be some content to my belief, desire or fear. It must be about something even if the something it is about does not exist or is a hallucination. Even in cases when I am radically mistaken, there must be some mental content which purports to make reference to the world. Not all conscious states have intentionality in this sense. For example, there are states of anxiety or depression where one is not anxious or depressed about anything in particular but just is in a bad mood. That is not an intentional state. But if one is depressed about a forthcoming event, that is an intentional state because it is directed at something beyond itself.

There is a conceptual connection between consciousness and intentionality in the following respect. Though many, indeed most, of our intentional states at any given point are unconscious, nonetheless, in order for an unconscious intentional state to be genuinely an intentional state it must be accessible in principle to consciousness. It must be the sort of thing that could be conscious even if it, in fact, is blocked by repression, brain lesion, or sheer forgetfulness.

The distinction between the center and the periphery of consciousness

At any given moment of non-pathological consciousness I have what might be called a field of consciousness. Within that field I normally pay attention to some things and not to others. So, for example, right now I am paying attention to the problem of describing consciousness but very little attention to the feeling of the shirt on my back or the tightness of my shoes. It is sometimes said that I am unconscious of these. But that is a mistake. The proof that they are a part of my conscious field is that I can at any moment shift my attention to them. But in order for me to shift my attention to them, there must be something there which I was previously not paying attention to which I am now paying attention to.

The gestalt structure of conscious experience.

Within the field of consciousness our experiences are characteristically structured in a way that goes beyond the structure of the actual stimulus. This was one of the most profound discoveries of the Gestalt psychologists. It is most obvious in the case of vision, but the phenomenon is quite general and extends beyond vision. For example, the sketchy lines drawn in Fig. 1 do not physically resemble a human face. If we actually saw someone on the street that looked like that, we would be inclined to call an ambulance. The disposition of the brain to structure degenerate stimuli into certain structured forms is so powerful that we will naturally tend to see this as a human face. Furthermore, not only do we have our conscious experiences in certain structures, but we tend also to have them as figures against backgrounds. Again, this is most obvious in the case of vision. Thus, when I look at the figure I see it against the background of the page. I see the page against the background of the table. I see the table against the background of the floor, and I see the floor against the background of the room, until we eventually reach the horizon of my visual consciousness.

The aspect of familiarity

It is a characteristic feature of non-pathological states of consciousness that they come to us with what I will call the `aspect of familiarity’. In order for me to see the objects in front of me as, for example, houses, chairs, people, tables, I have to have a prior possession of the categories of houses, chairs, people, tables. But that means that I will assimilate my experiences into a set of categories which are more or less familiar to me. When I am in an extremely strange environment, in a jungle village, for example, and the houses, people and foliage look very exotic to me, I still perceive that as a house, that as a person, that as clothing, that as a tree or a bush. The aspect of familiarity is thus a scalar phenomenon. There can be greater or lesser degrees of familiarity. But it is important to see that non-pathological forms of consciousness come to us under the aspect of familiarity. Again, one way to consider this is to look at the pathological cases. In Capgras’s syndrome, the patients are unable to acknowledge familiar people in their environment as the people they actually are. They think the spouse is not really their spouse but is an imposter, etc. This is a case of a breakdown in one aspect of familiarity. In non-pathological cases it is extremely difficult to break with the aspect of familiarity. Surrealist painters try to do it. But even in the surrealist painting, the three-headed woman is still a woman, and the drooping watch is still a watch.

Mood

Part of every normal conscious experience is the mood that pervades the experience. It need not be a mood that has a particular name to it, like depression or elation; but there is always what one might call a flavour or tone to any normal set of conscious states. So, for example, at present I am not especially depressed and I am not especially ecstatic, nor indeed, am I what one would call simply `blah’. Nonetheless, there is a certain mood to my present experiences. Mood is probably more easily explainable in biochemical terms than several of the features I have mentioned. We may be able to control, for example, pathological forms of depression by mood-altering drugs.

Boundary conditions

All of my non-pathological states of consciousness come to me with a certain sense of what one might call their `situatedness’. Though I am not thinking about it, and though it is not part of the field of my consciousness, I nonetheless know what year it is, what place I am in, what time of day it is, the season of the year it is, and usually even what month it is. All of these are the boundary conditions or the situatedness of nonpathological conscious states. Again, one can become aware of the pervasiveness of this phenomenon when it is absent. So, for example, as one gets older there is a certain feeling of vertigo that comes over one when one loses a sense of what time of year it is or what month it is. The point I am making now is that conscious states are situated and they are experienced as situated even though the details of the situation need not be part of the content of the conscious states.

IV. Some Common Mistakes about Consciousness

I would like to think that everything I have said so far is just a form of common sense. However, I have to report, from the battlefronts as it were, that the approach I am advocating to the study of consciousness is by no means universally accepted in cognitive science nor even neurobiology. Indeed, until quite recently many workers in cognitive science and neurobiology regarded the study of consciousness as somehow out of bounds for their disciplines. They thought that it was beyond the reach of science to explain why warm things feel warm to us or why red things look red to us. I think, on the contrary, that it is precisely the task of neurobiology to explain these and other questions about consciousness. Why would anyone think otherwise? Well, there are complex historical reasons, going back at least to the seventeenth century, why people thought that consciousness was not part of the material world. A kind of residual dualism prevented people from treating consciousness as a biological phenomenon like any other. However, I am not now going to attempt to trace this history. Instead I am going to point out some common mistakes that occur when people refuse to address consciousness on its own terms.

The characteristic mistake in the study of consciousness is to ignore its essential subjectivity and to try to treat it as if it were an objective third person phenomenon. Instead of recognizing that consciousness is essentially a subjective, qualitative phenomenon, many people mistakenly suppose that its essence is that of a control mechanism or a certain kind of set of dispositions to behavior or a computer program. The two most common mistakes about consciousness are to suppose that it can be analysed behavioristically or computationally. The Turing test disposes us to make precisely these two mistakes, the mistake of behaviorism and the mistake of computationalism. It leads us to suppose that for a system to be conscious, it is both necessary and sufficient that it has the right computer program or set of programs with the right inputs and outputs. I think you have only to state this position clearly to enable you to see that it must be mistaken. A traditional objection to behaviorism was that behaviorism could not be right because a system could behave as if it were conscious without actually being conscious. There is no logical connection, no necessary connection between inner, subjective, qualitative mental states and external, publicly observable behavior. Of course, in actual fact, conscious states characteristically cause behavior. But the behavior that they cause has to be distinguished from the states themselves. The same mistake is repeated by computational accounts of consciousness. Just as behavior by itself is not sufficient for consciousness, so computational models of consciousness are not sufficient by themselves for consciousness. The computational model of consciousness stands to consciousness in the same way the computational model of anything stands to the domain being modelled. Nobody supposes that the computational model of rainstorms in London will leave us all wet. But they make the mistake of supposing that the computational model of consciousness is somehow conscious. It is the same mistake in both cases.

There is a simple demonstration that the computational model of consciousness is not sufficient for consciousness. I have given it many times before so I will not dwell on it here. Its point is simply this: Computation is defined syntactically. It is defined in terms of the manipulation of symbols. But the syntax by itself can never be sufficient for the sort of contents that characteristically go with conscious thoughts. Just having zeros and ones by themselves is insufficient to guarantee mental content, conscious or unconscious. This argument is sometimes called `the Chinese room argument’ because I originally illustrated the point with the example of the person who goes through the computational steps for answering questions in Chinese but does not thereby acquire any understanding of Chinese.[1] The point of the parable is clear but it is usually neglected. Syntax by itself is not sufficient for semantic content. In all of the attacks on the Chinese room argument, I have never seen anyone come out baldly and say they think that syntax is sufficient for semantic content.

However, I now have to say that I was conceding too much in my earlier statements of this argument. I was conceding that the computational theory of the mind was at least false. But it now seems to me that it does not reach the level of falsity because it does not have a clear sense. Here is why.

The natural sciences describe features of reality that are intrinsic to the world as it exists independently of any observers. Thus, gravitational attraction, photosynthesis, and electromagnetism are all subjects of the natural sciences because they describe intrinsic features of reality. But such features such as being a bathtub, being a nice day for a picnic, being a five dollar bill or being a chair, are not subjects of the natural sciences because they are not intrinsic features of reality. All the phenomena I named — bathtubs, etc. — are physical objects and as physical objects have features that are intrinsic to reality. But the feature of being a bathtub or a five dollar bill exists only relative to observers and users.

Absolutely essential, then, to understanding the nature of the natural sciences is the distinction between those features of reality that are intrinsic and those that are observer-relative. Gravitational attraction is intrinsic. Being a five dollar bill is observer-relative. Now, the really deep objection to computational theories of the mind can be stated quite clearly. Computation does not name an intrinsic feature of reality but is observer-relative and this is because computation is defined in terms of symbol manipulation, but the notion of a `symbol’ is not a notion of physics or chemistry. Something is a symbol only if it is used, treated or regarded as a symbol. The Chinese room argument showed that semantics is not intrinsic to syntax. But what this argument shows is that syntax is not intrinsic to physics. There are no purely physical properties that zeros and ones or symbols in general have that determine that they are symbols. Something is a symbol only relative to some observer, user or agent who assigns a symbolic interpretation to it. So the question, `Is consciousness a computer program?’, lacks a clear sense. If it asks, `Can you assign a computational interpretation to those brain processes which are characteristic of consciousness?’ the answer is: you can assign a computational interpretation to anything. But if the question asks, `Is consciousness intrinsically computational?’ the answer is: nothing is intrinsically computational. Computation exists only relative to some agent or observer who imposes a computational interpretation on some phenomenon. This is an obvious point. I should have seen it ten years ago but I did not.

Footnotes

* An earlier version of this article has appeared in the publications of the CIBA Foundation. The theses advanced in this paper are presented in more detail and with more supporting argument in Searle, J.R. The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press, 1992.

1. Searle, J.R., ‘Minds, Brains, and Programs,’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences, (1980) 3, 417-457.

The conscious experience was one of the first topics studied by early psychologists. Structuralists used a process known as introspection to analyze and report conscious sensations, thoughts, and experiences. American psychologist William James¹ compared consciousness to a stream; unbroken and continuous despite constant shifts and changes. While the focus of much of the research in psychology shifted to purely observable behaviors during the first half of the twentieth century, research on human consciousness has grown tremendously since the 1950s.

What aspects of consciousness do researchers study? Topics such as sleep, dreams, hypnosis, and the affects of psychoactive drugs are just a few of the major topics studied by psychologists.
Links in this article:

Are many Americans being medicated to death? Taken on Big Pharma and its sales pitch to the ill is quite a task. If we don’t the epidemic of  pharmaceutical drug taking will continue to grow to astronomical heights. Taken from  an article written by Robert Longley and posted at About.com

Is America the most medicated nation on Earth? Could be, according data just released by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) showing that at least half of all Americans take at least one prescription drug, with one in six taking three or more medications .The report, Health, United States 2004 presents the latest health data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics and dozens of other Federal health agencies, academic and professional health associations, and international health organizations….Prescription drug use is rising among people of all ages, and use increases with age.

Five out of six persons 65 and older are taking at least one medication and almost half the elderly take three or more.

Adult use of antidepressants almost tripled between 1988-1994 and 1999-2000. Ten percent of women 18 and older and 4 percent of men now take antidepressants. Prescriptions for non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, antidepressants, blood glucose/sugar regulators and cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, in particular, increased notably between 1996 and 2002.

The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found a 13 percent increase between 1988-1994 and 1999-2000 in the proportion of Americans taking at least one drug and a 40 percent jump in the proportion taking three or more medicines. Forty-four percent reported taking at least one drug in the past month and 17 percent were taking three or more in the 2000 survey.

The annual report to Congress showed that health expenditures climbed 9.3 percent in 2002 to $1.6 trillion. Although prescription drugs comprise only one-tenth of the total medical bill, they remain the fastest growing expenditure. The price of drugs rose 5 percent, but wider use of medicines pushed total expenditures up 15.3 percent in 2002. Drug expenditures have risen at least 15 percent every year since 1998.

Medicare, the Federal health insurance program for the Nation’s seniors and disabled residents, will begin routinely paying for prescription drugs in January 2006. After a $250 deductible, Medicare will cover three-quarters of drug costs up to $2,250 a year.

Among the report’s findings:

I just heard from my friend Lorna Green, PhD (who is a vital contributor for us at Healing Talks on the topic of what is consciousness in the scheme of things). Lorna informed me that her article on near-death experiences (with impeccable arguments supporting her view of consciousness) was rejected by an academic peer-reviewed publication. This refers to The Journal of Consciousness Studies edited by Anthony Freeman.

Mr. Freeman, the editor, wrote back with the comment that all her paper was doing was offering a heart-felt plea for personal points of view, something not acceptable to a most high-standing, peer-reviewed academic journal. I would comment that what they are really looking for something in the more sterile, 17th-century tradition of science as applied to the study of consciousness – or a much more meaningless, left-brain, math-measurement-based/mechanical approach, which by its very nature (in my opinion) cannot at all truly fathom what is consciousness!

I told her the same, and to thus keep the spirit; that the “peer reviewed game” was not authentically objective. It is a suppressive veil of illusions.

WHY MECHANICAL OBJECTIVITY IS NOT REALLY OBJECTIVE IN THE BIOLOGICAL ARTS
For in the biological-living arts (where objectivity is grounded in looking at alive-connected wholes, not the dead, unconscious, mechanically separate-parts) peer review is based on a long tradition of enforcing this so-called “scientific” perspective.

Science here is really meant to refer to mechanical science. We see this in most vividly in the medical/psychiatric professions.

As a prelude, pre-med students are  taught principles of chemistry and physics to prepare them to become agents for dispensing chemical/pharmaceutical products and radiation/surgical procedures. They are prepared to strip their minds of deeper wisdom. This maintains, with on-going peer pressure and peer review – the marriage to commercial interests that represent the very anti-thesis of what generates objectivity

What this really guarantees is a sure-fire failure of conventional medicine when dealing with depth-chronic ailments. As a result, illnesses like diabetes and cancer – and other consciousness-depleting illnesses – are now increasingly pandemic.

HISTORICAL ROOTS OF PEER REVIEW – WITH ROYAL SOCIETY OF ENGLAND

How did all mess start? How did a peer-enforced or collective loss of objectivity begin?

“Peer review” as we know has its roots in European culture beginning about four centuries ago. It was meant to support the new Continental vision of nature that claimed stake to higher truth, knowledge and objectivity about the natural world. We find the more exact historical details on the website of the Royal Society, founded 350 years ago and as the oldest or modern scientific society. The site states the following:

“The origins of the Royal Society lie in an ‘invisible college’ of natural philosophers who began meeting in the mid-1640s to discuss the ideas of Francis Bacon. Engraving by George Vertue of Gresham College, from John Ward’s Lives of the Professors of Gresham College (1740) Its official foundation date is 28 November 1660, when a group of 12 met at Gresham College after a lecture by Christopher Wren, then the Gresham Professor of Astronomy, and decided to found ‘a College for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’. This group included Wren himself, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, Sir Robert Moray, and William, Viscount Brouncker. The Society was to meet weekly to witness experiments and discuss what we would now call scientific topics. The first Curator of Experiments was Robert Hooke. It was Moray who first told the King, Charles II, of this venture and secured his approval and encouragement. At first apparently nameless, the name The Royal Society first appears in print in 1661, and in the second Royal Charter of 1663 the Society is referred to as ‘The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge’. It was also in 1663 that the Society acquired its motto “Nullius in Verba” This means “trust no one person’s word.”

The assumption then was  simple, that Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Newton had discovered the true view of nature, the math-bound vision and via their joint mathematical/mechanical approaches – effected in laboratory where tools of measurement were coalesced  (the temple/mosque/church of that math-bound worldview), we arrive at  “the” objective and liberating view of nature.

Other approaches effected in other places could not be trusted. This was the only view allowed.

Thus a society of “advanced” (mechanical-vision exploring, experimenting, observing, and thinking) men could exclusively be trusted to be objective.  Their work had to be submitted to peer review of like-minded men. This was in contradistinction to trusting the prior, lower-consciousness, emotive views  based on blind faith (trusting the prophesy or revelation of a revered person such as a pope, cardinal, biblical prophet, fortuneteller, etc).

This is how the concept of peer review originated, as an adjunct to the emergence of the 17th century’s new and exciting mechanical, math-based vision of nature – the trigger, the inner catapult for the Industrial Revolution.

THE FALLACY OF PEER-REVIEW EQUALS OBJECTIVITY
The fallacy of this approach lies the common partiality toward a superficially-true/depth-false or illusionary worldview. The objectivity thus becomes illusionary itself. Math symbols abstract how to separate all elements of consciousness. This is the penultimate left-brain orientation to nature, which by its very nature is what most (not least) biases awareness.  This is why for example money, which is math-based, so incomparably corrupts the integrity of consciousness to all depths. More seriously the 17th century vision, which required peer review to buttress it, is  actually and intrinsically anti-consciousness. This is why it has failed for centuries to integrate any meaningful understanding of consciousness  – and why it has extremely non-sustainable and polluting impacts for conscious life. It very powerfully undermines the core of life (in a marriage with commerce) in the healing arts.  That is why we  can’t help but have growing chronic and depth-illness epidemics – including autism, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cancer, and so on – which are each different forms of consciousness-diseases supported in their growth by the ideologies of modern, peer-reviewed and peer-pressure created forms of allopathic medicine.

AWESOME
Its awesome to look at this bigger historical picture of how we got lost and remain lost. Nothing happens by accident.

MY SIMILAR EXPERIENCE
In this same light, a peer-reviewing committee also rejected my presentation proposal for the last ASSC conference in Canada. This is because I was promoting a non-mechanical understanding of consciousness that directly threatens their game….again the 350-year-old, Royal Society born-type Grand-Clock Universe vision… the intellectual foundations of the modern polluted, non-sustainable and ill Industrial Age ..or which has been devastating-toward-near-extinction a large part of life and consciousness on our planet.

Those who perpetuate this tradition are promoting to conquer consciousness in the same way we make a better mechanical race car in the lab or a better bulldozer to raise a rain forest for cattle ranches. Their form of “peer review” is a critical part of maintaining the overall loss of objectivity.

LORNA TO YOUR HONOR
So my dear and wise friend Lorna, don’t lose spirit.

Take it has an honor that your deeper-to-core thinking was rejected.

Cleansing Reactions and Healing Crises
What Are They?

by Jameth Sheridan, N.D.
©1998, 1999, 2000

A “cleansing reaction” or “healing crisis” is a natural, significant body initiated process that can occur when accumulated toxins are being eliminated from the body. These toxins come from unhealthful foods (primarily), impure air, tap water, electromagnetic radiation, negative thoughts, etc. This internal body cleansing is absolutely essential to maintain or regain health.

Cleansing reactions can occur for two somewhat opposite reasons:

1.) Ingestion of toxins. The body has accumulated/is still accumulating toxins at a faster rate than it can eliminate them by normal means. It reaches a point of “enough is enough” (toxic overload). In this scenario, the body will create a cleansing reaction when you are eating or living unhealthily.

2.) Increased vitality. When cleansing foods/practices are undertaken, such as eating more raw, whole, vegan, health-promoting foods and many superfood supplements, the body’s vitality increases, as does its ability to throw off toxins. In this situation, the body will create a temporary cleansing reaction because you are eating healthfully. The elimination of old toxins is commonly mistaken as “this health food made me sick.”

Symptoms of a cleansing reaction can include lethargy; temporary all-over muscle aching; mucous or other discharge; a coated, pasty tongue; light-headedness upon standing and in general; headaches; and flu-like symptoms in general. A cleansing reaction/healing crisis may take the form of old symptoms that have been previously suppressed. You may think you are sick. However, this cleansing process is absolutely essential to achieve health and should not be suppressed with drugs. The mainstream medical establishment has completely closed its collective mind to cleansing and assumes that any symptoms displayed by the body are caused by a microbe, so antibiotics are usually prescribed even if they think the causative agent is a virus. Medical antibiotics have no effect on viruses, other than weakening the immune system so viruses can replicate more. Antibiotics and other drugs suppress cleansing and the immune system as well.

Suppressing cleansing reactions/healing crises leads to lethargy, sickness, and eventually, to life threatening degenerative diseases.

Since healthy, raw, vegan (no animal flesh, dairy or eggs) foods are relatively non-toxic and contain nutrients which help to detoxify your cells (as do superfoods), they can initiate, and allow the body to initiate, beneficial cleansing reactions. This is a very good thing.

If a cleansing reaction does occur, I recommend consuming lots of healthy fluids such as raw vegetable juices, raw fruit juices (diluted 50/50 with purified water), fresh watery fruits, and purified water; along with superfoods such as wheat grass, barley grass, spirulina, certain herbs such as Ginkgo Biloba, plant source enzymes such as Digestion Enhancement Enzymes™, HealthForce Vitamineral™ Green (a superfood complex), etc., to assist in the cleansing and apprehending of toxins. In addition, certain homeopathic remedies can assist the cleansing process and make it more comfortable without suppressing it. Consult with a Homeopathic practitioner, or the many books on homeopathy, and/or a local health food store for more information on homeopathic remedies. If possible, avoid homeopathics that are in a base of lactose. I do not recommend water fasting, meaning that nothing is consumed but water. I feel strongly that a mostly liquid diet of fresh juices combined with bio-compatible nutritional supplements™ (including those listed above), and either enemas or a mild herbal laxative, is superior to pure water fasting. I feel this type of cleanse allows for deeper, more effective cleansing and greater ease on the eliminative organs (more cleansing with less severe, more comfortable and effective cleansing reactions.)

Having a clean colon can also greatly assist the cleansing process and is essential for true health. I have had great success with proper colon cleanses. Contact HealthForce Nutritionals for more information on highly effective colon cleanses. There are less intense (and somewhat less effective) alternative programs that I highly recommend doing if not doing a colon cleanse that HealthForce offers. These other programs can usually be found at health food stores.

The cleansing process may be slowed down or stopped by eating heavy food (cooked or raw) such as tofu, tempeh, nuts and seeds (especially unsoaked or roasted); or worse, bread, white flour and sugar, processed foods in general, animal flesh, or dairy products (which I don’t recommend). Prescription or over-the-counter drugs are often taken to stop the symptoms of a cleansing process. However, in addition to halting this beneficial cleansing process, the body now has to deal with the added toxicity of the drugs. Suppressing cleansing reactions/healing crises leads to lethargy, sickness, and eventually, to life threatening degenerative diseases, even if suppressing the cleansing makes you feel better in the short term. Obviously, assisting the cleansing process is preferred and the only way to achieve actual health. Without knowing the preceding information, many people have mistakenly concluded that healthy raw foods and/or superfoods made them sick, and unhealthful foods or drugs made them well. If you do experience outwardly noticeable cleansing symptoms, remember that they don’t last forever, and once through them, people often feel better than they have in years.

Some individuals (that are aware of the validity of cleansing reactions) hold the firm position that microbes have nothing to do with being sick, and that all sicknesses are actually cleansing reactions. Based on my extensive research (including actual lab work with microbes), I have concluded that both beneficial cleansing reactions and microbial illnesses do exist. To ignore either one these, is, in my view, a very bad and dangerous idea.

** Cleansing and microbial infections (bacterial, viral, fungal, and parasitic) have similar symptoms. However, having symptoms of cleansing does not, by itself, mean that you are having a beneficial cleansing reaction. You might be in cleansing because you ate something or were subjected to something that was toxic, and caused you to go into cleansing (see point #1 above). Do not dismiss the role of microbes in disease. There are natural alternatives to antibiotics and other toxic drugs, (such as olive leaf extract, stabilized oxygen – Oxygen Supreme™, grapefruit seed extract, echinacea, garlic, oregano oil, other essential oils, elderberry extract, etc.) and the previous suggestions on what to do to support a cleansing reaction will also nutritionally assist the body in overcoming microbial invasions (and boost the immune system in general).*

I am not generally in favor of pharmaceutical antibiotics and they are widely over-prescribed, misused and abused. They are often prescribed for viral conditions, for which they essentially have no positive effect. However, I have seen irrefutable cases where pharmaceutical antiobiotics have clearly and dramatically improved health in both companion animals and humans, and quite literally saved lives. I would not have been caught dead saying this many years ago, when I was fully entrenched in traditional raw food theories. Pharmaceutical antibiotics are considered the “anti-christ” by many, the embodiment of pure evil. Many would die before taking them and many have. I am aware of people who have died due to their refusal to take antiobiotics, even herbal ones, or simply waiting much too long. If pharmaceutical antiobiotics become necessary, I strongly urge you to consume protiobics (friendly bacteria) such as acidophilus and bifidus, and to take liver protective and regenerative herbs or foods such as dandelion greens, beets, and Milk Thistle extract (as found in Liver Rescue™ III+). Also, please investigate the effective herbal alternatives to antibiotics before resorting to antiobiotics (IF you have access to them). Also consider looking at your life practices (food, exercise, etc.) to see where you may improve so as to have a stronger imune system in the future.

I suggest you seek out a health conscious, open-minded, nutritionally aware health care professional (who understands the difference between genuine sickness and genuine cleansing, and is aware of non-toxic alternatives to antibiotic, antiviral, antifungal, and anti-parasitic drugs), and/or educating yourself.

* These statements are not intended to diagnose, treat cure, or mitigate any disease. They have not been evaluated by the F.D.A. Discuss any change in your diet or supplement program with your physician.

There is hardly a question more important to ask.

QUESTIONS OF IF…..
If you don’t know exactly “what’s life” and especially your very own intimate life force, how can you know the ways to best nurture, heal or restore life?

If  you want to become more and more alive, or in the negative, stop being devitalized or subject to an aging process, how is that possible without knowing (transpersonally and objectively), again “what is life?”

If that life force is seriously ill, how will you choose between different ways that claim to reverse illness – without knowing deeply and thoroughly …. what is life?

If  you feel  somehow that your life is our of sorts, how can you move to fulfill your life, again and again with knowing what
…….God help us all to know …. what is life?

If you want to live a long and full life, and maybe for a century or more, how will that be made possible without first knowing, and precisely for sure the secrets of …. what is life?

If you are seeking a diet that is more enlivening, and choosing between a regular, raw, and raw-living diet, what exactly demarcates the difference and why?

If life on earth is seriously threatened with extinction (with nearly 25% or more of all of life slated to become extinct in this century)  plus if the causes are humanly triggered, how can we best deal with this crisis and know what causes and can stop this, without knowing first what is life?

CONCENTRATED PRESENCE
My answer to these questions is as follows. Life manifests, and especially in living organisms, through the concentrated presence, expression or drawing out of nature of what is consciousness. The mathematical principles that design machines draw out of nature the mechanical, which is relatively not conscious.

Life draws out of nature its consciousness.

Consciousness thus forms, in my view, the quintessence or irreducible distilled essence of what underlies all of life – and the development of that consciousness then becomes life’s distinguishing characteristic and sets its deepest core purpose in existing.

Thus billions or more of plants, animals and microbial life species have , in my opinion, just one commonly-held characteristic. They are sentient. They react to their environment in ways that does not fit the mechanical, unconscious billiard-ball colliding model.

We see this awareness in all of life, from the largest of dinosaurs to the tiniest of nano-viruses.

Life and its forms come, however, in a variety of not just sizes, but shapes, colors, textures, and many other features. Some live in the air and others in the soil or underwater. A horse may, for example, move very quickly. But a tree stands relatively still, rooted in its whole life to the ground. A squash plant may grow horizontally, hugging closely the earth. A tree will grow otherwise, reaching up to the sky.

Each life species has its distinguishing characteristics but they all share what is life.

Looking at plants, and their reactions to their environment, the presence of consciousness is not as evident. Books like the  Secret Life of Plants bring out that this is not the case. Plants are sentient.

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?
Now if the bringing out of consciousness is the essence of life, this begs the question, what is consciousness.

For me, consciousness is the principle of connection itself in nature.

Continued in Part II

Simple truths are often the most profound. There is hardly a more profound truth to consider than what really is “life” itself.

We can observe that any living organism is connected within as a whole. Therefore, metaphorically, it wears a “badge of organicity” – some exterior design that reflects a living unity within. For example, a flower radiates from its center displaying such a paradigm of unity. A floral beauty is other than something helter-skelter.  A leaf similarly branches in a pattern of unity from its root vein. The eye of animal radiates like a flower or the solarity of the sun.  All of these are “organic badges” -  exterior signs of organic/organized life and consciousness within. For I propose that consciousness is the foundation relationship of connection itself in nature. When concentrated most purely it then manifests as organic life in its beauty and glory.

A reverse evidence is obtained by cutting a living organism apart, destroying that organic connectedness. There and then consciousness leaves and the organism dies.

CONNECTED WITHOUT
Living organisms do connect to their environment from within, from their consciousness. We can see this more in contrast or the reverse evidence – as when mechanical billiard balls do not do the same. Thus a billiard ball will move and react mechanically or only based on a reaction to a surface interaction. There is no inner connecting consciousness. The balls are “alive” in the sense of moving but dead in terms of having any inner motivating force, moving rather in a mechanical way. A seed that grows to become a tree has true life within. It will gather the force within needed to attract nutrient to grow tall with. Imagine it does so, at all cellular levels, from its consciousness flowing later within a tree’s sap. What is flowing is life within, withing the hard protective bark housing the softer life’s consciousness.

NURTURES OR DESTROYS LIFE
Following my train of thought, imagine first that life is the concentrated presence of consciousness, then that consciousness again forms the cosmic and pure principle of connection itself in nature, and finally that anything which connects life to its wholeness nurtures that life. The flip side implies anything which separates, severs, scalpels or cuts apart (or surgically disconnects that wholeness)  and thereby harms more than on a superficial level – harms life. That’s why life feels pain when deeply cut. Fire also harms life by being a separative or de-composing agent. It draws the light and consciousness out. The exception is to cut out something toxic  or life-harming – or where a double-negative that yields a positive. Water also nurtures life – which implies it must establish the same deeply integral connective/consciousness relationship. We can see this when water rounds the sharp corners of rocks. A sharp corner is something in geometrical opposition. To be so in opposition means something is not at one. When water rounds sharp corners it brings what is not at one back to connective oneness. Water re-establishes the connective relationship of nature that forms life. It thus also creates circular bubbles which have no points in opposition. This equates over and over again with our core and revolutionary view that consciousness form the root, foundation or pure relationship of connection in nature!

This is why water not only forms spherical bubbles, but also brings out the rainbow (another paradigm of nature’s oneness) and thus the miracle of life from every seed. Water, in this view, is not essentially H2O as chemically, dead, surface-effecting, or math defined in the mechanical view – which ideological orientation of the 17th century still dominates our modern culture.

HOUSED BUT NOT ROOTED
Imagine life is thus grounded irreducibly in consciousness, and consciousness in turn  forms this irreducible relationship of connection in nature. Then this powerfully differs from the Newtonian world-picture which adds that supposedly the atom, “the indivisible one” or “what God created as One on the First Day of Creation,” forms the building blocks of nature. Newton believed this premise because he thought that a) nature always mirrored mathematical order, b) numbers formed the building blocks of mathematics, therefore c) atoms, representing numbers, were the building blocks of nature. This was Sir Isaac Newton’s mystical logic for believing we need also something akin in the laboratory to search and find the atom under the microscope. We have nowadays culturally adopted his beliefs as objectively true.  The reorganization of nature based on that contorted view has opened up a vast Pandora’s box.

Shifting away from that Newtonian vision, imagine that nature is not essentially made up of separate building blocks to conform to Newton’s vision. Imagine instead that it has a connected inner weave – a weave of consciousness – which binds all of nature together.  Guided by the Newtonian view, we are destroying that weave. Imagine further that consciousness is rooted not in what’s solid or physical as much as what’s physical is rooted in is conscious. Life then flows “in between” what appears on the surface as separate.  And our life’s consciousness travels instantaneously from brain to toe, if the latter is consciousness-accessible.  Life also travels via a tree’s sap and via our bodies using various connecting fluids.

CUT A LIVING THING OPEN
Cut an apple open and it soon turns brown or “oxidizes.” Oxygen is a concept also created within the atomic view.  Imagine that when life is impaired, severed, made toxic, inflamed, or its vessels are cut apart,  life begins to leave. With the apple, it browns and then further decays. Its connective life force, so to speak, is absorbed by what surrounds it (when no longer protected within a whole and enclosed or shelled form).  We can think of a tortoise’s soft body being protected within its hard exterior. That aliveness then does not belong to the organism’s shell or its outermost form but rather to the inner softer, pre-physcial world centered within – and to the universal principle of connection itself  or to consciousness – which unifies living nature and to which life returns.

TWO MAIN DIRECTIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
In my deep personal experience there really are two essential and main directions of consciousness. I wish I could invent that proposition but nature displays this with our split left and right brains as tuning forks – each tuning into two opposite and primary consciousness directions. They work like a wave flowing towards a seashore and then returning to the ocean. These two directions also involve going away from and back to consciousness’ own underlying inner connected oneness. These two potential directions are why we and other animals have bifurcated brains and opposite “tuning forks” towards these directions.  One side tunes better into what I call the separation of all elements of consciousness (moving away from the  essence of life and living awareness). The other moves consciousness back towards what I call its connective essence. The latter movement is more healing, the former is not. However because things are ultimately and organically one, there is a kind of yin yang co-dependent between the two opposite directions. They need each other to co-exist. Their reversal expresses the other’s reality. For example, we cannot separate something that is not first connected. We cannot connect something that is not first separated. The two must be present for each other.  We therefore need both sides of our brain to think in a whole way. But if the right brain dominates, we can best connect what is most separate or broken apart.  If the left brain dominates, we tend best do the opposite, to break apart what is whole. The latter turns out to be destructive of life. There are vast consequences of adopting the later, and manifesting as a  mechanical, left-brain dominant vision of nature.

Continued in Part III

ROOT REASON WE’RE MASS DESTROYING LIVING SPECIES ON EARTH

Imagine that a deep understanding of ourselves – what is our life – will help us to stop destroying so many species on earth.

Something in our consciousness doesn’t either recognize, value, honor or nurture life around us. Curiously I believe this has to do with  our advanced bi-brain structure. This is because our right brain (tuned into our holistic consciousness) helps us in “connecting” deeply with the essence of life in nature while our left brain moves us in the opposite or” separating” direction – and with the latter being dominant.

My experience is that what the word “consciousness” points to the essence of life – and consciousness in turn allows us to connect to the world around us and within.  It has also been my insight that when we are in a  more right-brain dominant frame of mind, we again connect with that deeper holistic essence of consciousness; and in a left-brain dominant frame of mind we do not – disconnecting us from the depths of life and connecting us powerfully to the surface appearances. The very highest left brain skill is mathematical – using math symbols to separate all elements of consciousness. At least since the 17th century, we have used a mechanical  (math-0rganized and woven together ) vision of nature to best supposedly understand and relate to the core of nature – and which in my opinion a fundamental and profound mistake.

I am convinced this is the root reason why we are wholesale destroying organic life clear around the planet.

These are the precious creatures that wear the proud and rare “badges of organicity,” of the concentrated presence of consciousness and life within.

Life itself in nature cannot be destroyed – not if it is based on the irreducible and indestructible relationship of connection itself of all of nature which also creates nature’s oneness. That is ultimately untouchable. However specific life forms,  expressing organic life – or sentient beings that have taken literally millions of years to evolve – are being crudely extinguished, exterminated, killed, maimed  or annihilated. They are becoming extinct.

We are like bulls in this china closet of nature.

Humans may themselves soon become threatened species. We are threatened already with the existence and proliferation of atomic weapons. It is thus superficial to “green our lawns” by removing pesticides and herbicides, without greening first our minds or addressing our root inner visions that have made us into killing agents on killing fields.

WHY MODERN MEDICINE FAILS TO HEAL MOST ILLNESSES

Another major signs of things going wrong is a failing medical care system. Currently it is based on using surgery, drugs and radiation to make our bodies “whole.”  You can rarely cut something surgically apart and make it whole. With health epidemics like cancer quite rampant, that health care delivery system is in disarray,  being based on the same root mechanical (not life and consciousness-based)vision of nature. We thus fail to reverse several major chronic systemic illness. We rather poison ourselves with chemical drugs to make profits for Big Pharma. We especially see growing consciousness diseases – such as Alzheimer’s mental disarray, cancers’  silent spreading and diabetes’ diabolical neuropathy. If our modern world simply understood what is life and consciousness, we would , I believe, not have such pestilences.

TOWARD A GLOBAL MIND CHANGE

We urgently need a root worldview change or global mind change. For me this refers to a shift to a life-centered vision of nature and away from the  mechanical-centered, math-based that spearheaded  the Industrial Revolution. This doesn’t mean we stop using machines, rather they must serve the more central needs of life.

As we change our very deepest core visions, everything else can and will change in tandem.

Otherwise the changes will  remain superficial and ineffective.

The power of deep-entrenched central beliefs allows them to become pivots for profound change.

Some 400 years ago we shifted our highest central beliefs about the nature. In the Middle Ages the Bible revealing a God-created and manifested universe. The modern world now sees a math-bound universe whose order is  revealed by numbers and equations. Looked at from an outside point of view, there are problems with the latter vision. Math symbols abstract how to separate all elements of consciousness. One cannot integrally connect a vision by systematically separating its elements. This contradiction permeates the whole math-tied view of nature.

The good news is that we can make another huge vision leap. The last such shift within was accompanied with a great deal of external political, cultural and economic violence. This time it may be accompanied by more environmental violence.

HIGHER LEVEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS

My vision  is that if we can and must shift to a higher level of consciousness, moving from a mechanical (Newtonian) to a life-centered vision of nature. This is also a consciousness-centered shift. How much of this is possible will depend on others taking on this banner. We certainly can shift to better ways to nurture, sustain and discover life in nature rather than best bringing out the machine-like, mechanical (Industrial Revolution).

I feel there is no more important inner task facing our modern world.

With mechanical things, motions have no inner life component to inspire them. With living organisms, motions are inner consciousness driven. In this light, and with nearly 1/4 of all earthly species headed soon towards extinction, we need a deep shift within to a higher level of consciousness – to redirect our lives and save our planet from its present path of potential self-destruction.

INTRODUCTION

Some environment scientists project that up to 50% of all species may be threatened with extinction in the next 100 years. Why is this happening? It is my thesis that we are following a death-centered vision of nature that is manifesting all around us.

QUESTIONING OUR MECHANICAL VIEW OF THE COSMOS

Our view of the cosmos, at least since the 17th century, has revolved around the all-cosmos-organizing use of math symbols. The most representative book of this vision is Sir Isaac Newton‘s Principia Naturalis Mathematica, which I translate The Laws of Nature as Mathematical.  That view has yielded the vision of the disciplines of chemistry, physics and biotechnology, which together, we are told, most objectively fathom our world’s essence. Having this scientific perspective at our fingertips, we presumably can progress or have a commanding knowledge of all of nature.

But ecological devastation and growing health pandemics belie this claim. In truth, we are not masters even of our own bodies or spirits when in later life our health and mental integrity is often in disarray. The latter refers to such things as the growing Alzheimer’s epidemic and to the phenomenon that ever more diabetes sufferers end their lives often in near total blindness.

Thus within this essay we will revisit, with deep-seated irreverence, what I call the “soul” of modernity or the dominating modern perspective of an essentially quantitative universe. We reevaluate this quantitative view’s major applications and implications, showing that it not only involves technical or erudite science, but also has relevant influences on our daily lives, according to the principle of “as above, so below.”

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

What this means is that our overall worldview tends to filter down from the top-rung, ivory- tower, unifying view (the dominant scheme for claiming to know something about nature’s oneness as with formulas such as E=mc2) all the way down to the lowliest of applications and finest details of everyday life. In the 17th century, the quantitative view rose to its dominant posture by more convincingly describing our solar system’s motions than the Bible. The Bible seemed to have implied that the sun rotated around the earth. At least in Genesis we were told that “the stars were made to shine upon the earth.” Did that mean we were the central focus, the apple of God’s eye, or even the center of the universe?

This sense that mechanical/mathematical insights might outpace those of the Bible was a deep shock to the soul of the medieval world. As the new worldview reversed the rotation of the outer universe (thus a “re-volutionary” view), it also turned their inner world upside down. The change in cosmic perspective then impacted other scientific explorers who wanted to emulate the genius of Sir Isaac Newton in their respective domains. One dramatic result was eventually the Industrial Revolution which brought us inventions of mechanical things like waterwheels, flying shutt