(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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Three times as many white adults as black or Mexican adults took antidepressants
Boys were prescribed drugs to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) twice as often as girls, but antidepressants were prescribed to boys and girls at the same rates;
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.
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 toa 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.
RAW-WISDOMis a revolutionary view the essence of nature. It shifts from the mechanical, machine-like or dead view of nature to an oppositely life-centered understanding. This is in order to turnaround our major planetary ecological crises.
We offer words of wisdom about the growing chemical and genetic pollution and overall destruction of planet Earth.
In modern times we’ve invented at least 4 million chemicals (as reported in scientific literature), most all in the last 100 years, including 150,000 drugs, 100,000 chemicals in commercial production, 10,000 in food processing and at least 1000 toxic ones lodging deeply in our cells (even in mothers’ placenta for the unborn). Cancers logically follow, but doctors rarely advocate organics and prefer prescribing drugs. Now 2/3rds of Americans annually take drugs and 2/3rds remain victims of long-term illnesses. Supposedly the drugs “scientifically” control conditions but statistics belie this. They show major illnesses persist and just get labeled as “chronic.” Also genetic engineering is rapidly dominating staples in just a few decades. These two huge trends are happening primarily because a very, very powerful seed idea was planted in the 17th century. Now 400 years later this is bearing crops (like global pollution).
This one seed idea should have faced huge skepticism yet it was universally accepted. Even naturopaths tend to take in what is so cogently taught in modern education and by mass media. This refers to the root belief that nature is surely but a math-based, mechanical/atomic enterprise. This central belief, having universal applications, underlies many planetary ills.
Our surrounding world reflects the immense loss of wisdom. This is reversible by a simple change of mind, and from again a death to a life-centered vision of nature or where we elicit out of nature what is life rather than death delivering and create what Gabriel Cousens calls a “culture of life.”
Nathan Batalion, the originator of “raw-wisdom” was born in Germany to a Jewish Holocaust-surviving family which made him sensitive to the more cruel aspects of our modern world. In his early years Nathan was a math-prodigy. But at 17 he had a high fever that caused his left-brain to shut down, giving him a strong glimpse into a right-brain way of seeing (which contradicted his math-grounded view). Over several decades he refined his unique philosophy of nature which he refers to this as “naturolism” to support naturopathy or natural healing. He considers “raw-wisdom” a right-brain-anchored view, stripped of left-brain illusions. The term ”raw” refers to seeing passively or naked of conceptual projections. Our left-brain creates mental concepts which are outline images that guide (and therefore shape) the direction of consciousness. Shaping consciousness is like diving into a body of water to create temporary walls of water all around you. When you leave the waters, the walls reconnect. The right brain view seems the ocean more passively and the left-brain not.
Nathan also is a certified traditional naturopath and a passionate eco-activist as a result of his experience with raw-wisdom. He helped found Food & Water, Inc fighting food-irradiation and is the author of 50 Harmful Effects of Genetically Modified Foods and follows a living-food vegan lifestyle. He is currently working on a PhD in environmental philosophy at Binghamton University. He co-founded the Gerson Wellness Center at Sedona in Arizona (treating cancer patients naturally) and is creating a Raw-Wisdom Community in Oneonta NY as a branch of Gabriel Cousens’ Tree of Life.
Everyone knows we’re created a non-sustainable condition for our environment.
Our planet is a global mess and something has to give or turn things around.
Key species, like honey bees, are dying.
The riches of natural ecologies like rain forests and coral reefs are being devastated or are dying.
Pollution is everywhere on the planet and within us. Human beings are certainly not immune from what is happening, and thus we are increasingly suffering from systemic and chronic health challenges.
But to do something, and effectively, requires knowing the root cause. Is that possible?
IS THE CAUSE WITHIN?
Here is my take on this very critical issue.
First I believe we must assume personal responsibility for this ecological mess on the premise that the cause is not “out there.”
Secondly, that means we need to look within at what is directing us to cause such damage to our environment and ourselves. Somehow if the outside world is a huge mess, our inner world must be comparably out of sorts or very poorly organized. If that is so, how exactly did this first come about?
BEGINNNG WIH THE GREEKS
I believe this has to do with certain deep cultural roots, beginning in ancient Greek times – and screwing up a best integration of our whole inner consciousness.
Remember we have main sides to our brain, one is skilled at conceptual languages and the other at seeing things in a raw and naked without the use of words. One tends to experience any consciousness of our world “connectively” and holistically, and the other oppositely. It is better at taking things apart or seeing things with separate and detailed precision.
Now let me propose it is not ata ll wise to make the latter side (takes-things-apart-with-precision side) dominant. That that indeed screws the whole of our consciousness up. Why? Because then we tend to take apart what most whole, ending up again with a huge mess. On the other hand if the other side is dominant, we can oppositely and with greatest skill reconnect to wholeness or heal what is most apart, asunder, ill, a mess or in shambles.
Which side then is dominant in our times and for the overall integration of consciousness?
I will argue it is the former thus making a mess or creating a non-sustainable environment. This is happening as we have gone actually to the greatest extreme of such left-brain dominance.
HOW WE BECOME EXTREMELY LEFT-BRAIN DOMINANT Words form ideologies and philosophies and so they can structure the whole of our consciousness and thereby direct our lives. The role of language here is critically important. If we now go back to Greek times we see that the Greeks did something very, very important to their language – influencing how we integrate our inner world in the west. It doesn’t seem like they did something dramatic at first sight, but indeed it was monumental from an inner point of view.
The Greeks simply added vowels to their language!
Why did that matter at all? What does this have to do with anything? How does it relate to our modern ecological crises?
My explanation is as follows.
Before they added vowels, the Greek language was read from right to left like the Hebrew was. Eye movements for reading from right-to-left is thought to be right-brain dominant – the connective over the separative.
Within about a hundred years of making this language shift, or after the adding of vowels which allowed each word to have a specific, isolated, and therefore disconnected/separative meaning,eye movements for reading changed! The inner consciousness was rewired. The Greeks suddenly read in a “boustrophedron” style or like an ox plows a field. Once vowels were added, the average reader didn’t have to necessarily look at the whole context of a dialogue or written work to decipher what any given word meant!
Looking at the whole triggers the right brain’s functioning, not needing to do so triggers the left brain’s functioning coming to the foreground. Reading thus went back and forth (or right-to-left and from left-to-right alternatively) as if balancing out the too or consciousness appeared confused. It couldn’t make up its mind which way to dominantly go.
Then after about a hundred fifty years it finally settled on reading from left-to-right.
The use of language, as evidenced by the way it was read, became more left-brain dominant. The latter gained the controlling “upper hand.”
Lab testing has shown that individuals who are disabled by car accidents and the like to become right-brain damaged, and thereby severely left-brain dominant, will largely go insane or suffer from dementia. Patients with the opposite malady, or being more left-brain damaged but right-brain ok, will remain completely sane or oriented, but will have great trouble verbalizing things or explaining what they experience in precise detail. They also will have trouble drawing straight linear lines because their consciousness can’t sharply separate elements spatially! They are not likely to wear suits and work on Wall Street because their consciousness, as we used to say in the 1960′s, is “not straight.”
The significant Greek cultural/language shift came to a pinnacle expression during the Golden Age of Greece. This brought us the taproot foundations of western civilization’s whole worldview.
If the essence or core of life resides in the concentrated presence of consciousness, then knowing what the latter really is become decisive. William James once wrote that the discovery of what is consciousness will be the most powerful discover of all or to which all other discoveries of science will pale by comparison. Again I have studied these issues for nearly half a century and coming to certain conclusions I consider breakthrough and revolution. The answer to the question what is consciousness, on the face of it, may seem simple, even simple minded. But ultimately the implications are so powerful, the overturn the very root foundations of our western worldview – upon which also allopathic medicine is built. If the foundation is false, it will explain why the system of medicine built on that foundation is now failing and crumbling. Answering that question will thus lead the way to knowing why one is being mislead, and how to retrace one’s steps to truly resurrect, heal, recapture, nourish and support one’s consciousness – and thus rescue one’s life in the midst of a life-threatening health challenge.
It is what we know that will save our life.
CONSCIOUSNESS AS THE PRINCIPLE OF CONNECTION ITSELF IN NATURE
Here is the most critical and invaluable insight I want to share. Consciousness forms the principle of connection itself in nature. It is what, at the core, holds nature together and when drawn out of that core manifests as connected-to-wholeness or organic, living, conscious organisms. Why is this view earthshaking and revolutionary? Revolutionary means reverse revolving, just as Copernicus began a revolution in worldviews by observing a literally reverse revolution of the earth and sun (heliocentric rather than earth-centric) as implied in the Bible. In what context then is my view of consciousness revolutionary?
THE CONTEXT
The most important element in any culture is its central paradigmatic worldview. If a worldview is ill, the healing of that worldview has the most powerful effect of any kind of healing because it affects the whole of one’s consciousness and thus life. In the medieval era there was a biblical concept of God that filled this role and directly or indirectly exerted a most powerful influence. Since the 17th century, the quantitative/mechanical view of physics, chemistry, and later genetics eclipsed that of the biblical in at least supposedly understanding the external world. But what is the essence of that new math-bound view? Math symbols actually abstract how to separate all elements of consciousness and this view elicits, draws out, nurtures the creation of machines made of separate parts. This is why in modern medicine surgery is so important. We cut the body apart and replace parts as we would with a machine.
WHY THAT VIEW CAN’T HEAL LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS
If life is the concentrated presence of consciousness and consciousness is the principle of connection itself in nature, no view of the core of nature is more opposite, more opposing to that essence than the mathematical. This is why machines designed by that worldview are not alive and not conscious. This is why a system of medicine that is grounded in a core view which systematically elicits/draws out of nature the exact, precise and reverse opposite of what is the core essence of life and consciousness cannot but fail abysmally. In fact it will support the development of human health and consciousness pandemics. This is precisely what is happening in our modern world. It is insanity to treat cancer, for example, with the same chemicals and radiation that cause cancer, unless one lives inside the mechanical worldview.
A related implication is that the integrity of consciousness is undermined, why the allopathic/mechanical view is so ripe with deceptions.
The most global implication is a similarly profound impact on all of surrounding life on our planet. This is why we are in the midst of a wholesale species holocaust.
We essentially follow the dictates of technologically advanced but inwardly death-delivering culture which has gained accelerating speed and breadth of global impact over a 400 year span. It takes huge amounts of vision, clarity of mind, courage and knowledge to step outside this culturally-created illusionary and deadly framework. Then we begin to move in a different life-supportive direction along an entirely different path. We understand deeply why the opposite path can’t work – past all the deceptive media information – and towards our own integral healing.
When I look at pharmaceutical and conventional medical ads (websites, facilities, and so on) one key impression is that of narrow mechanization and a vast stifling of consciousness! The ads often have fake models with bleached teeth, the doctor’s suits are all perfectly pressed, white and with stereotyped stethoscopes and the similar smiles – all of which is to me quite offensive or jarring. It is part of being in the commerical business of treating rather than actually and really healing. The problems behind such stilted presentations are enormously deep. This is why I am asking the reader to also think very deeply in reading this article. Just yesterday I met someone with advanced diabetes who takes a dozen or so drugs and is subject to repeated surgeries. He is a mess and his life is a shambles because he is being guided by a medicinal system that is largely bankrupt to its root foundations. The whole house-of-cards approach is for me a unprecedented sham. It treats for profit and does not truly heal systemic ailments. Yes it helps in emergency situation but this deeps the illusion that the overall approach works for chronic systemic ailments. Modern medicine actually has no true conception of first “what is consciousness” (as diabetes is distinctly a consciousness-retreating disease marked by neuropathy or lack of feeling/sensitivity/consciousness). The drug and surgical approaches used all claims to be based on science but they are not. Why do I write about all this. It is because I very deeply care for the fate of other human beings as well as life on earth in general. Thus I try to write to explain a very different view in order to make a difference.
FALSE ROOT BASIS
Modern medicine is, at its taproots or depth foundations, based on three foolish beliefs that I know to be ultimately and utterly false. Note that, at first, they may seem like healthy or salient beliefs but I’ll explain why they really are not.
A) THE ROOT WORLDVIEW – THE MATHEMATICAL – IS THE TRUEST UNIVERSALLY- This is the deepest of all beliefs in our modern culture, learned at least since primary school, and namely that chemistry and physics, and their mathematical foundations, all represent the only true, most objective and scientifically valid laws of nature. Modern allopathic doctors are really what I call Newtonian “meta-physicians.” The word “meta” comes from a Greek word meaning “after.” But the study of these disciplines actually precedes or comes before any other for modern doctors. This is why, before going to medical school, future doctors must study and excel in chemistry, physics, and perhaps biotech, to prepare them in pre-med school or for their future allopathic career based on this foundation understanding.
B) TESTING WITHIN THAT WORLDVIEW YIELDS OBJECTIVITY- Following closely behind this root metaphysical premise is the companion belief that double-blind testing, under the strictest lab conditions (using all manner of precise measurement tools – micrometers, scales, spectrometry, etc) gives us the most reliable, trustworthy, objective, illusion-free or “scientific” results in constructing the overall mathematical/mechanical orientation applied to our bodies – and to then best treat and guide patients who are ill or seeking to avoid illness.
C) LARGE SCALE TESTING YIELDS THE MOST “GOLD STANDARD” OBJECTIVE RESULTS – If we then do very expensive large-scale testing of the same kind, as drug companies are mandated to do by the FDA and with peer-reviews, then we can most rely on those results. We can also rely upon them to literally risk our lives and the lives of patients with that trust! That is a lot to ask, wouldn’t you say? Thus we had better be triply sure that these three premises are absolutely true!
But I will explain why, in biological rather mechanical realms (rather than in designing, building and perfecting the performance of machines), nothing could be further from the truth. What we rely upon is a sham.
DEBUNKING EACH TAPROOT BELIEF
Let me address each of the above three beliefs and why they are pervasively and deeply full of holes.
A) WHAT’S TRUE FOR MACHINES IS NOT REALLY TRUE FOR LIVING NATURE. First, the math-bound view of nature excels in bringing out what is most mechanical out of nature. Already this should be a very powerful hint that the view is non-universally true and thus not integrally objective. Objectivity is something that gained via a view true from all points of view, rather than a biased or subjective or partial perspective. Machines actually don’t pre-exist in pristine nature. You will never find a bicycle in an untouched rainforest. They are uniquely man-created inventions. How then can mechanical laws represent all of nature. Something here does not click!
—- HOW THE MATHEMATICAL VIEW BREAKS DOWN
Seen nakedly and past a long-running cultural mythology, math symbols actually, really and nakedly represent inner tools (or symbols) that guide us in how to separate all elements of consciousness. I use the word “naked” because they truly represent nothing more than that stripped of any more imagined culturally-created importance. They are not, as Sir Isaac Newton supposed, “what God gave us on the first day of creation to better understand nature with.” This goes counter to what every school boy and girl is indoctrinated with since primary school – the Newtonian worldview – with icon idols like Newton and Einstein supporting the genius of that vision.
—DOWN TO EARTH
And this may sound a little heady but let us bring this way, way down to earth so we can understand how hugely mistaken the “great” Newton was in developing this kernel vision about nature’s universal laws. It sinks just a bit in when we observe how those symbols are used to separate elements of consciousness not only quite deeply but in very life-threatening ways. They are used in the creation of atom bombs (tearing things literally apart or separating). All the major formulas behind the atomic bomb relied on the schemata of Cartesian coordinates – Rene Descartes visualization of space broken down into separate points – or space exploded. Math symbols help us also to design machines (things made most distinctly of separate parts – unlike living organisms). Machine are not alive and not conscious – because consciousness forms a universal relationship of connection in nature, or the opposite of what math symbols bias-point to. To heal is also to connect, so the symbols in their pointing bias also most deeply point us away from what is the healing process in nature.
—HOW MATHEMATICS “WORKS”
What if we take three apples (each seen as separate fruits in our consciousness) and undo their separation? We can accomplish that by simply making applesauce! Then we can no longer count the separate apples as 1,2,3. This is simply because they are no longer distinctly separate objects in our awareness. Stripped of millions of details, mathematics ultimately guides us towards is not much more complicated than that forms of separation.
—THE PROBLEM WITH MEASUREMENTS
Measurement thus delineates beginning and end points or measurement deepens the sense of universal consciousness-separation. Its a great schemata for designing separate chemical pills, known as drugs, used to treat separate symptoms, and tagged with a dollar sign.
—IRRATIONAL AND UNWISE
In my opinion, past deep mythologizing about the supposed transcendent truth and significance of using mathematics, we very greatly suffer under a cultural delusion, a collective consciousness ill (and since the age of Galileo, Descartes and Newton) of a purely math-bound vision of our universe. It is actually (and this may be hugely shocking to hear) quite profoundly irrational and unwise to so culturally connect a vision of nature by employing only the very highest, most universal, and most powerful abstractions or symbols for the separation of all elements of consciousness. It’s actually more than a bit culturally crazy – no matter how widely accepted, rooted, everywhere taught and revered that dominating view may be in our times. As mentioned a test-tube isolation used to create separate pills which further gravitates to dollar-sign tagging offers orientations that come together to support a left-brain dominant or separative consciousness bias. These are, in my experience, categorically non-objective from a whole-brain point of view. This overall results, and predictably, in non-sustainable and catastrophic postures toward the healing of our bodies, toward polluting our cells with chemicals and ultimately harming the whole of our surrounding ecology of life. All of this is not the result of an “objectively advanced” vision of nature – as presumed over the last 400 or more years. This is why I never take in any – zero – pharmaceuticals or drugs into my body.
—TESTING THE OVERALL VISION
Take any large random mix of chemicals and throw them into a compost heap – where all breakdowns of plant life create the materials for building up all plant life in a circle of unity – and you then test the overall math-hinged, superficial vision of nature. You then do not test isolated chemicals in element-isolating test tubes. Nor do you observe just their immediate impact (the surface of time) on isolated symptoms – all of which creates a biased milieu and illusionary perspective. All of this is consciousness dis-integrative as well as non-objective in the viewing of a living terrain. Now what happens to the compost when instead we measure the impact of synthetic chemicals as a connected whole? All life in the compost heap dies. This is due again to the overall effect of a large, random mix that tests the worldview itself! The deadly results are not accidental. This will happen consistently and repeatedly, reliably because consciousness is rooted in the principle of connection itself in nature. Mathematics abstracts consciousness separation, the opposite disassembling orientation. This counters healing. Thus the latter, when too deeply and pervasively forced upon nature, has absolutely deadly consequences. This is why species all around the planet are dying. The compost heap’s profound and universal circle of unity here is also categorically broken.
—TO HAUNT US
Overall the root vision of the 17th century has been in the 20th and 21st centuries coming to roost. It is now here to haunt us and to the core. Some of its fruits are pure black as this terrible “picking season” arrives. They are many death-laden and poisonous “fruits” which have been pesticide and herbicide sprayed. They are cancerous and polluting relative to a healing re-connection of our body and of nature’s ecologies. The ultimate reason is that Newton, Galileo and Descartes made naive, fundamental and very deep vision mistakes.
B) TESTING WITHIN THAT WORLDVIEW IS LARGELY NON-OBJECTIVE – If the root worldview is non-objective, you can expect, closely following behind, that the very same is true for its companion and supportive methodology.
—BIAS DIVING INTO AN OCEAN OF CONSCIOUSNESSTO EXPERIENCE SEPARATE SYMPTOMS
To explain this, imagine that in the experience of life there is an unrecognized (or right-brain perceived) “ocean of consciousness.” This is a connected vista, just like an ocean or any body of water is, and relative to each separate drop of water. Now let us correlate this to the following. With our left-brain we make mental images in our mind to which we assign words. This helps us focus upon or tunnel awareness towards something. We use the word “tree,” for example, to isolate and again separate that element of consciousness. Words of all kind will guide the dissecting or cutting apart of this underlying ocean. The mathematical view does this to the most polar extreme. It is a penultimate “left-brain dominant symbolism.” It can thus be used to build a completely separative-eschewed view of reality – rather than an objective or whole view. The math-based vision is thus not valid view from whole-brain dominant (real objectifying) perspective. I know this personally because as a teenager I was a math prodigy until a high fever caused my left brain to shutdown – and then I was able to see through the illusion of that vision.
—HOW THIS APPLIES TO THE HEALING ARTS
Let us thus say that as we dive into the experience of our bodies and isolate a separate symptom we focus on a headache, toothache or stomach cramp. We could name a thousand other such personal symptoms. Who initiates this chosen symptomatic focus or “separation of element of consciousness”? The subject/experiencer of the experience. But a directional focus of a subject creates a “subjective bias.”
–WHO CREATES AND DIRECTS THE SUBJECTIVE BIAS
Who creates and directs this subjective bias for a given experiment? Who determines the specific effect of a drug on, for example, blood pressure measured by blood pressure testing equipment rather than the amplitude of alpha waves measured via a biofeedback instruments? The conductor or funder of the experiment determines this and sets the controlling consciousness bias. After all the given pharmaceutical company wants to make a profit in treating such symptoms as blood pressure or a headache, toothache or stomach cramp. If this experiential bias is then shared by subject and the conductor, does the sharing make the experience objective? Of course not!
—SHARING THE BIAS OR FAKING OBJECTIVITY
Do exact measurements undo this overall subjectivity? No. On the contrary, any measurement in a non-mechanical environment deepens the sense of a biased “separation of elements of consciousness!” What happens then is that whatever is focused upon, and as a given surfacing symptom to place attention upon, is the chosen “main-focus” or “effect” of the experiment. Everything else is labeled a so-called irrelevant “side-effect.” Presumably the “side-effect” is less important and therefore listed with the tiniest of print on a pill bottle at times, or in an ad. Are the choices of what is a “main effect” and what is a “side-effect” made objective via their isolation in the structure of the experiment (reinforced by peer review)? Hardly. When there is the shared economic gain in the background, the opposite of this reinforcing objectivity is generally veritas. Or the personal subjectivity of experimenter and subject is now transferred to a wider commercial venue. Real objectivity is utterly lost. This is why modern allopathic medicine gravitates towards isolated symptom-alleviation or treatment-based approaches and, of course, for profit. This generally fails to heal most whole-body, deep, and systemic ailments – which takes an entirely different orientation that has to be truly not fake objective.
The root problem – to be blunt – is that both what philosophers call the “metaphysics” of our modern root worldview (the root understanding of the nature of nature’s elements) and its “epistemology” (or way of gaining knowledge about those elements) are corrupt. They or not objective, trustworthy, or reliable. They are both as deeply flawed and stilted. Thus one cannot build a reliable system of medical treatment on that foundation. It is impossible.
The results are misguided by false objectivity – and for the healing arts this has overall quite deadly and disastrous consequences.
C) GOVERNMENT-BACKED LARGE SCALE TESTING OF THIS KIND DECEIVES THE PUBLIC
—IMPACT OF POLITICAL FORCES
The very deeply false sense for getting objective knowledge gains further force when backed by the authority of political forces. These might try to outlaw anything which does not conform to this overall deception. Lobbying with campaign contributions biases the consciousness of the politicians. Paid media also tend to come on the bandwagon. Pharmaceutical sales were greatly spurred on by TV and print ads since the 1950′s. Combine all of the foregoing and you see why our modern medical system has to so systemically and completely in a shambles – why it fail to truly heal cancer, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, asthma, mental illness, and Alzheimer’s and so on.
The marriage of commercial and lab deceptions are so pervasive and systemic it allows for little else.
—WHAT IS ILLUSION AND DECEPTION
Illusion is the “breakdown of the integrity of consciousness.” Deception is the “intentional breakdown of the integrity of consciousness.” An integrity of consciousness means consciousness is true to itself. But consciousness, at the core of life (as I have tried to propose) forms “the principle of connection itself in nature.” Thus one absolutely cannot have an integral vision of nature rooted in the highest abstractions of what tears our consciousness apart. The mathematical worldview will expertly build machines. But it also makes an intimate marriage with dollar sign to almost irretrievably corrupt consciousness – and to the absolute hilt.
—REGAINING OBJECTIVITY The healing of our consciousness and the healing of our body are intertwined. Making a deep and healing global mind change, we move from this a left-brain to a right-brain-dominant or from a separative to a connective view of nature. What is connective is again healing. We ultimately are redirected to look at whole impacts ( not the partial or biased or culturally subjective orientations). This gives us a chance to rescue ourselves or to regain objectivity. Only to look at the whole is to become objectiveand to offer true, reliable healing solutions.
What is the most polluted region of our planet? There are a number of possible answers. It could be the underground oceanic terrain now being vastly polluted with BP oil. Or it might be the thousand-mile long stretch of the Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch. We could also list a number of major supertoxic waste sites. On a different front, Antarctica’s atmosphere has hugely concentrated chemicals that migrate globally to colder regions (as brought out by the groundbreaking book, Silent Snow). Then there is the area just north of the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. This has uniquely experienced three nuclear disasters. The list of other major candidates goes on.
DIRTY THIRTY Actually Blacksmith Institute publishes an annual Dirty Thirty list of the most polluted spots on the Earth. They state on their website the following:
“Pollution likely affects over a billion people around the world, with millions poisoned and killed each year. The World Heath Organization estimates that 25 percent of all deaths in the developing world are directly attributable to environmental factorsSome researchers estimate that exposure to pollution causes 40 percent of deaths annually.”
WHAT’S MISSING One “region” of our planet, however, is glaringly missing from Blacksmith’s list. I deeply believe it is the single most polluted arena of them all……Ready for this?….. It is the inner state of our minds or what our minds do to structure of our collective consciousness and way of relating to nature! In that inner world of ours, imagine that pollution first manifests subtly before it takes physical form – and as a set of “illusions.” Illusion can be defined as a breakdown in the integrity of consciousness. For example, if a surface illusion (a mask or makeup or a dressing up of reality makes us think that something similar is deeply true… but it isn’t… there is a breakdown in the integrity of consciousness. Outer pollution breaks down the integrity of whole organisms. Are inner breakdowns related to outer breakdowns of the physical integrity of life, to pollutions? Are we creating the pollution that is now engulfing us externally because our minds have so far out of tune, or have been engulfed themselves by vast, deep and global illusions? What are these illusions? This is absolutely critical to know.
ILLUSIONARY CENTRAL PARADIGMS Nothing is more powerful and influential in influencing our world than our culturally-chosen core worldview. Each worldview is a way of integrating, bringing together or “making one” a perception of the world – and this is done using a chosen central paradigm. The oriental worldview is sometimes organized using the concepts of yin and yang. The western worldview is usually organized using the concepts of matter and energy defined mathematically. Is there something wrong with the latter perspective? Does it harbor any illusions? Are those illusions possibly the root cause for the rapidly growing pollution of our planet? My answer to these three questions is a resounding yes.
In our times, and since the 17th century, we have seen the dominance of a math-based vision of nature – as catapulted to prominence by Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Naturalis Mathematica - The Laws of Nature as Mathematical. This is the foundation for all of chemistry, physics, and biotechnology. This spins the quintessence of the modern vision of nature.
THE POWER OF WORLDVIEWS I can throw a rock at a sheetrocked wall, and it will simply smash a hole, the size of the rock, in the wall. However, if I alter an ingredient which makes up the entire wall, all of the wall is naturally impacted to its depths. Worldviews have such a universal impact, and obviously, because they are created out of the most universal ideas that then can seep into, and deeper and farther than anything else into the fabric of nature. This is a fact we forget, partly because we believe our worldview is not a worldview, but the worldview. It is supposedly not our culturally subjective creation but something that objectively and scientifically belongs to all of nature – and which we discover and uncover. Newton, after all, discovered not “laws of nature viewed or seen as mathematical” but the mathematical laws of nature. Newton was thereby heralded as a near-god. One contemporary wrote of Newton that he knew more about the cosmos than all of humanity combined. Was this really true?
AT THE ROOT OF THE CURRENT POLLUTION OF OUR PLANET When Galileo began teaching that the earth was not at the center of the universe, many of others thought he was raving mad. He had challenged a conventional and very deeply-held paradigms, such as that only the Bible was the final authority on the cosmic structure of the universe. In Genesis it was written that the “stars were made to shine upon the Earth,” implying an earth-centered view. How dare Galileo, the upstart and fool, think otherwise – and because of some squiggles on a drawing board we call math symbols correlated to his new toy, a telescope! What an arrogant sacrilege. Besides, doesn’t the earth seem to stand dead still? Obviously no one felt the earth moving at vast speeds, getting us dizzy. Who would be so foolish and idiotic to think so. Nor was anyone falling off the edges of our planet – not a one!
What I am proposing is something similarly unimaginable and revolutionary and on a vast cultural level impacting ourselves and our planet. It is even more deeply illusion-breaking, in my opinion. I am proposing that the foundations of chemistry, physics and bioengineering, grounded in the mathematical worldview, do not collectively give us a depth-integral or objective vision of nature’s nature and that the illusion of that powerful view is what is most deeply and vastly polluting our world – and with ever increasing intensity and scope since the middle of the 20th century.
WHEN I WAS YOUNGER AND FOOLISH When I was a teenager attending high school, I managed to get the highest college-entrance-exam score in physics in my school. I think it was 772 out of a possible 800. I also thought the reason why I got less than a perfect 800 (as I had done twice in math college entrance exams), was because I failed to understand the clearer nuances of basics physics concepts. Later I learned those basic concepts were actually corrupt. They created a highly quicksand-like understanding. It would take many pages to explain why. Here let me share the core gist of this revolutionary view.
DISORGANIZING, CORRUPTING, POLLUTING CONSCIOUSNESS All symbols in our minds have a unique identity, and thus limitations in guiding our vision. This is because symbols are simply pointing tools – and nothing more when stripped naked. They are not inner gods magically revealing laws. To “point” consciousness is to isolate or separate something in our awareness. This creates awareness bias. Thus worldviews generally are not objective. What do math symbols point to and bias us towards – past all the foolish and arrogant cultural mythologizing of the 17th century? Math symbols uniquely point us to how we can or may best separate elements of consciousness. The number “one” in the field of counting plus the ”point” in geometry are building block concepts. They represent universally separate wholes, the latter spatially and the former more universally. Is this the most appropriate symbolism for forming a coherent, sensible, rational, and non-illusionary worldview? In my mind, it is categorically not. One actually cannot connect a vision of nature with much integrity using the highest abstractions for how to separate all elements of consciousness. The end result will be vastly illusionary (and as intimated, physically polluting). And it not the use of these symbols as such which is being questioned. We need saws to cut pieces of wood. We need symbols of separation to cut apart our perceptions. The more important question is, are they appropriate symbols, used as central paradigm builders. The answer, in my mind, is most definitively not – and the impacts on our environment and the healing arts are where this is felt the most. Why?
IMAGINE Imagine that at the core nature is the principle of life, not the mathematical laws of machines. Imagine that at the core of life, is consciousness. Lastly imagine that consciousness forms a universal relationship of connection in nature. What then would the adoption of the mathematical view accomplish or symbols that point systematically to the separation of all elements of consciousness? They would foster an undermining or corruption of the essence of consciousness. Again this manifests in what touches life.
SIGNS OF INNER FAILINGS Thus I am not surprised that modern medical science is baffled by the lack of any cure for consciousness illnesses (like Alzheimer’s or diabetes evidencing neuropathy) using chemical drugs; or that the great Sir Isaac Newton ended his life schizophrenic; or that Nobel Prize-winning physicists have likewise ended their lives with Alzheimer’s disease. Math symbols do not, by their very nature, direct us to the connective depths of nature. They do help us build atomic weapons. They also help us to make things mechanical ( in separate parts) and unconscious. How they foster pollution is a little more complicated but it is part of the same mix. Ultimately one cannot integrally connect consciousness using separative symbols. It is like trying to glue things together with a chainsaw or atomic bomb. The loss of integrity of vision leads us to vast illusions and these illusions externally and potently manifest as life-threatening pollution.
ANTITHESIS Here we are pointing with math symbols to what can be seen as an anti-thesis to what more truly binds nature connectively together. An antithesis relative to a thesis forms a reversal illusion. Reversal illusions are the most powerful of all illusions (as with the reversal illusion of helio and geocentricity). Thus there arises the ability to powerfully dissolve and undermine the integrity of ecologies all over our planet – and in a very close marriage with commercialism that fosters a similar consciousness. Making a massive shift away from the whole math-bound view is culturally revolutionary. It constitutes a Copernican-like revolution. This time it involves a re-revolving around a different inner rather than outer understanding. Ultimately we will never stop polluting nature and own bodies if we keep holding onto the very vision that is most responsible and causative. We will treat cancer that is caused by chemicals with yet more chemicals as in chemotherapy.h We will create green college campuses (with lawns not pesticide/herbicide sprayed or with more energy saving devises) but will continue to teach courses in physics, chemistry and biotechnology as the dominant, core, and most objective understandings of nature. This illustrates how the changes we currently make, while valuable, can still be relatively superficial and thus not nearly enough to change our fundamental course from deep within. Therefore despite the existence of a growing alternative medical community as well as a potent environmental movement since the 1960′s, the destruction of species and the pollution of our bodies and planet have still sped forward – and in a way largely unimpeded but gaining steam. We have far more pesticides sprayed today on acres than at the time Rachel Carson first wrote Silent Spring.
As we heal our innermost vision we deeply heal ourselves and our surroundings. The greatest of healing begins thus from very deeply within and ultimately from the very core of our vision.
AT THE CORE OF NATURE IS LIFE This differs from that currently dominant view that the atomic model, or other mechanical, death-laden, math-defined principles give us access to the core of nature – or what allowed us to create the Industrial Revolution. If life is at the core of nature, what evidences that life? It is not just plain motion or jumping around. Machine can do that easily. Rather life exhibits consciousness, and whether in motion or not.
AT THE CORE OF LIFE IS CONSCIOUSNESS Thus living things partake or bring out this consciousness from the depths or bosom of nature and in a spectrum of life forms that include dinosaurs and microbes, trees and single-cell plants.
AT THE CORE OF CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE RELATIONSHIP OF CONNECTION ITSELF IN NATURE
The resulting life-centered vision of nature then becomes an exact reverse mirror image of the presently dominant mathematical/mechanical view. This is because math symbols expertly abstract universal separation of elements of consciousness – going in the opposite direction from the essence of life. They point to the surface/separate appearance. This is why we can “best” use those symbols to build atomic bombs. Also pointing to mechanicality or to machines made of separate parts, we terribly eschew or biased rather than objectify our view of nature. We give too much weight to the relationships between nuts and bolts rather than a deeper order of unity. Focusing on this underlying and integral connectedness, we also arrive at completely different set of laws for nature, and the nature of ourselves, than those of math-bound, mechanical physics and chemistry.
RE-VOLUTIONARY
This perspective, if adopted, literally “re-volutionizes” or reverses our root metaphysical understanding of the cosmos, of nature and planet earth, and of ourselves – for the overall course, evolution and healing of our lives.
LEFT BRAIN DOMINANCE We live in a culture that is most extremely left-brain dominant, the most in humanity’s history. It is something spectacular that has evolved since ancient Greek times. In my opinion, it is a greatest of all cultural diseases, one that is ultimately fatal. I see it as occurring deep within, why we keep failing to heal our modern conditions using superficial and quick-fix solutions. We may blame material conditions or certain key persons (like George Bush, Stalin, Hitler, Mao), various politicians or corporate heads, when actually, I believe, our whole planetary culture is suffering from an inner consciousness disease.
CONSCIOUSNESS DEMENTIA When an individual person damages the right hemisphere of their brain (losing what tunes into depth connective/holistic/healing consciousness) - they can see the world through the eyes of that left-brain awareness only (which tunes into an oppositely surface/illusionary/breaking apart awareness). Then and as a result,they suffer from dementia and schizophrenia. In short such an individual can’t put their world back together. They are lost and “a gonner,” like an Alzheimer’s patient who cannot connect to memories or connect vision to recognize a whole face – just its separate details. This is because again their connective consciousness is burnt out, harmed or superceded by the separative. The process becomes life destructive. This is because life is the concentrated presence of consciousness and consciousness forms the principle of connection itself in nature, which the right brain wisely tunes into in the raw. See our philosophy of raw-wisdom. Below are the most powerful drivers of that left-brain dominance. MATH-BASED VISION OF NATURE TOPS THE LIST Mathsymbols abstract how best and most powerfully to separate all elements of consciousness. We make each distinct, with beginning and end points. We favor physical separation and disintegrative energies – why fuel creates energy but love does not in physics. The core contradiction of that with this metaphysics one cannot integrally connect a vision of nature using the highest abstractions of separation. We cannot connect by tearing consciousness apart. It is a reversal illusion of the highest of high orders. Math symbols rather the highest paradigm symbols or what universally and best organize a left-brain dominant view of reality. We cannot glue two things together using the most powerful dynamite available within. The opposite proceeds naturally and predictably. It bears black sterile fruit over time. Thus the math-base vision, when increasingly globalized (especially since the middle of the 20th century) thus leads inevitably to what deeply threatens the sustainability of life on earth. It eventually manifests atomic energy/atomic weapons and a widespread pollution of our bodies and planet. The adaptation of that vision as the most dominant view of nature is really the culmination of nearly 2,000 years of left-brain dominant trends since ancient Greek times and heightened in the Golden Age of Greece. Even the atomic view and the mathematical that it reflects was present then in metaphysical forms.
A COMMERCIAL, CORPORATION-DOMINATED SOCIETY A commercial society links people together via monetary relationships as employer/employee, buyer/seller, landlord/tenant, lendor/lendee, and so on. It gauges growth and “progress” thereby. It applies but the math-based, left-brain dominant ideologies to all social relationships – to mirror the root nature of our cosmos. The first economist William Petty was a friend of Isaac Newton who first published Principia Naturalis Mathematica – the laws of nature as mathematical. This left-brain dominant model puts people into positions of separative conflicts called competition in lieu of cooperation. It creates ultimately progressive instability. The day a 100 year-old company can’t make its payroll or pay its debtors, the doors close and the individuals disband. The entity disintegrates because it was built on quicksand foundations. Separative relationships are by their nature superficial, non-deep and disintegrative. I have always predicted that what happened in 1929 did but suppressed the symptoms of a poor way of relating, furthering rebuilding the same with an eye on a future greater crash. Also money corrupts consciousness the foundations of our collective progress are as illusionary as our vision of nature. Illusion is the breakdown (the separation of elements) in the integrity of consciousness. This makes the math-bound view the most surface-viewing, the most illusionary, and a commercial society as well.
ALLOPATHIC MEDICINE Allopathic or contemporary modern medicine makes a marriage with mechanical, math-based understanding of nature (chemistry/drugs, physics/radiation, and genetics) and a commercial society to attempt to heal. This is an impossibility. As a result major chronic diseases are pandemic (dozens of physical and psychiatric diseases) and the percentage of sufferers are ever rising, especially among children. Chronic illness in children has at least quadrupled. Consciousness-illnesses like Alzheimer’s are especially on the rise. Healing is the process of connection to wholeness. Yet surgery cuts the body apart, as if it was a machine made of replaceable parts and thus it cannot truly heal. Chemistry is based entirely on math-bound principles that are not in harmony with life. Thus when you put a large random number of chemicals into a compost heap – to test not one or another chemical separatively in a controlled experiments using billions of dollars (something completely left-brain dominant) but the entire or whole understanding – what happens? Remember that a compost heap is where all plants disintegrate or breakdown to form the building up ingredients for all new plants in a circle of universal unity of life . Everything then in the compost heap dies in the presence of a large random mix of chemicals. We form a miniature super-toxic waste site. We do the same in our oceans on a more grand scale and in our atmosphere as well – and to the point of threatening now, via climate change, the future the survival of our entire planet. We pollute our bodies in parallel, and to form cancer and birth defects and so on. We also treat ourselves with the same or more chemicals that cause cancer, and with more radiation that causes cancer, and with surgery that cuts the body’s wholeness apart. The negative effects are supposedly minimal or “side-effects” and our failures to cure are supposedly the fault of the diseases being incurable. Our medical care system, centered around the most sterile hospital environments (that also serve junk and bioengineered food) is in such a shambles that it is financially ruining our society and many individuals under medical care end up filing for bankruptcy. At the same time, governments, lobbied by corporations, try to impinge the promotion of any natural remedies to self-heal or what might not create financial dependence upon doctors and drugs (ig. Codex, et. al.).
SIDE-NOTES A right-brain damaged person literally suffers from the inability to connect reality but can expertly describe countless minute details and in a tick-tock, separate stepped, and even logical way. Because life is the concentrated presence of consciousness, and consciousness forms the principle of connection itself in nature, a consciousness-centered worldview is the opposite of a math-bound. It can manifest most strongly in the healing/life-connective arts and life supportive realms – such as organic agriculture. It elicits the opposite of a machine-designing, industrial and commercial society. The math-based view, by separating elements of consciousness has subordinate, rescuing value. It can be applied well in emergency medicine. It has some double negative roles, as in cutting out/killing (a negative) directed toward a toxic tumor (a second negative) which creates a double-negative-positive that is only superficially positive or symptom relieving. This creates the illusion of real healing – mistaking surface appearance for something depth or integrally true. Or it does not really nurture healing forces. However and on the flip side, when that vision is systematically applied and too deeply/globally, it vastly displaces the life and living, healing principles with the mechanical/death-ridden ones. Then it promotes the wholesale destruction of human life, of surrounding ecologies, of the planet as a whole or what is most whole and interconnected in nature, again organic life itself via innate consciousness. It undermines that innate consciousness. It lures people from open organic fields working under the sun in mechanical factories and city living. Marx and Engels only critiqued the economic exploitation, while supporting the same underling vision. Liberal and conservative, socialist and capitalist thus sometimes produce the same end results if something deeper is not changed. For all the while, species around the planet are dying en mass. We too are so impacted if we do not counteract all these trends at a more taproot or deepest level
NON-ORGANIC, NON-SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE This extends left-brain consciousness view to further disconnect us immensely from organic nature and whatever nurtures and heals our bodies. Pesticide-laden fields are life stripped. To a lesser extent, so are mono-cropped fields. They are left-brain dominant and linear. Bioengineering especially creates “terminator” seeds, plants and trees that are sterile and exhude death-laden chemicals throughout. Withthe destruction by bioengineering firms of heirloom seeds in massive quantities, and the crowding out of organic farming, it has resulted in the what Time magazine once called The Death of Birth.
OUR EDUCATION We learn first the three Rs – reading, writing, and arithmetic- causing the left brain to dominate at a most earliest of age. We prepare individuals for our commercial society. Our language, with ancient Greek roots, contains vowels. This causes each word to have a specific rather than whole-context meaning. The latter triggers left-brain dominance. When the Greeks introduced vowels into their language, it caused a brain polarity shift. Reading changed from right to left (right-brain dominant) to left to right (which is left-brain dominant). An alternative to this kind of education is provided in the Rudolf Steiner Schools – first developing right brain skills to be dominant and latter the left.
OUR MEDIA Our media and primary means of getting information are commercial enterprises. As a result, a “health” magazine that is significantly funded by pharmaceutical ads, will not give you the whole or true picture of what is happening on the health scene. Our major media are corrupted and it is often difficult to sift through distorted news. Our minds are programmed to remain on the same cultural grid. The main impact of monetary exchanges, because they apply a math-bound view in social contexts, tends to be to focus, direct and thus control the direction of consciousness – to control life – in a dominantly disintegrative way.
OUR SOCIAL STRUCTURE In a commercial society like ours, the single person living separately alone is the single largest growing social statistic. Large, living together extended families, found in the 19th century on sustainable organic farms, have all but become extinct. Other signs of social disintegration are rampant, as brought out in detail by Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone.
TRANSPORTATION Corporate interests lobbied hard to destroy the early rise in public transportation using railroads. This was replaced by the use of each person separately using metallic cars to ride on concrete highways. These are either asphalted and cement laden, traveling on paths that still more disconnect us from the living earth, and in order to accommodate the movement of mechanical wonders, cars and trucks, in accordance with Newton’s mechanical, dead forms of motion.
ENERGY Governments and corporations have tried for nearly a century to kill alternative energy production that make sense and that do not pollute the planet. But it is precisely such energy sources that keep us financially bound. So the addictive game goes on. Nothing is more economically wasteful and dangerous to life than nuclear plants, but they are still promoted to as safe. Coal production, which profoundly pollutes our planet, is promoted as clean. This is the same as promoting synthetic drugs as healing.
CONCLUSION Lock-stock-and-barrel we are but a deranged left-brain dominant society and culture, why much of what goes on really borders on a form of deep insanity and is so obviously taking us down a road that is harmful to life and ultimately non-sustainable.
When one lives a life dedicated to raising one’s consciousness, that of others and our planetary culture, it is also a path veered toward the healing arts. Why? This is because consciousness is the principle of connection itself in nature.
WHAT IS INSEPARABLE
Since healing is a re-connection, healing and consciousness are inseparable. This is why when a rock falls on our foot, consciousness immediately rushes there. It is the consciousness of pain.
CONSCIOUSNESS AS A MODERN STEP-CHILD OR ORPHAN
In this light, however, imagine ”raising” consciousness is akin to raising a step-child or orphan in our modern world. This is because consciousness is not well recognized in modern physics, chemistry or biotechnology. There is rather the emphasis on outer than inner manifestations. The outer world appears on the surface to be made of separate objects – the material world. Our inner experience in deep meditation is of a connected ocean of consciousness. If the main focus is on that outer material appearance, with everything “real” reduced also to what can only be mathematized (and where mathematics abstracts how to separate all elements of consciousness) - then the opposite reality – the principle of pure connection itself in nature is essentially excommunicated from such a “science.”
It becomes like a “ghost” or mirage in the machine made of, of course, separate, consciousness-less mechanical parts.
HOW TO RAISE CONSCIOUSNESS
We can raise our consciousness like we might raise a newborn child. Love is the most connective of all emotions and thus love raises consciousness. Integrity of mind, or not harboring contradictions, enhanced the connectivity and unity of our mental terrains. We may raise a child to have integrity of mind and character so too we raise our consciousness. Learning to heal our body, to make it whole likewise raises consciousness. Ultimately we uplift our consciousness by being peacemakers and healers, as well as by being true to ourselves and each other and planet Earth- with compassion and caring.
RAISING CONSCIOUSNESS TO HIGHEST LEVELS
We can raise our consciousness to highest levels by developing an overall worldview that transcends illusions.
It transcends even the final hurdle of inner consciousness – its first separating split. This is the first duality of the whole of consciousness and manifests in our right/left hemisphere split. How do we transcend that highest of inner rifts? We do so by putting the wisdom of the right hemisphere, its connective consciousness, above the left-brain’s lower separative consciousness. The later evolves a purely math/mechanical dominating worldview. We really need to make it subservient. Then we can connect what is most separative and harness the mechanical for the benefit of life. If we do the reverse in a worldview, we yield atomic weapons and chemical pollution. We disconnect most powerfully what is whole. We end up with essentially a non-sustainable planetary culture.
WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING ACCOMPLISH?
Our present inner understanding, visions, and postures are thus challenged to grow As Dr. Gabriel Cousens recently shared in an email:
” The world is at war on many levels. Chronic disease is on the rise. Violence pervades the Middle East. Animal agriculture is taking a devastating toll on ecosystems everywhere. Economic exploitation has become business as usual. Earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, and other symptoms of climate change are becoming common occurrences. Every twenty minutes another specie of plant or animal becomes extinct. Every year, 15 million children die of hunger. Proponents of genetically modified foods claim that they can solve this crisis, while hiding data about the destructive effects of these elements on human health and environments…..These are all symptoms of the ‘Culture of Death‘….. What can one do to effectively counterbalance these destructive forces…. infuse Light into these dark places….celebrate the Culture of Life …..and protect all beings and Mother Earth?”
A NECESSITY IN OUR TIMES
A) If consciousness is the permeating essence of life and B) our culture upholds a mechanical worldview to yield highest truths, and C) we can logically then conclude that guided by the latter we’ll create, in time, a culture of Death. The past four hundred years bear this out. We thus mustraise our inner consciousness - you and I, friends and family - to the very highest levels and not just as a mere luxury but a real survival necessity.
ENGLISH PREFIX….. CO-CON-COM
No matter how you spell it, the word contains the prefix “con.” In the English language, the prefixes “co” “con” and “com” both seem to refer to “what is with or together.” Something with or together is also “connective” or “connected” in our consciousness. Here are some examples in the English language. We can highlight this by conjoining the world “together” next to each term.
EXAMPLES
Connect to each other
Co-operate with all
Commune to something higher
Communicate with a neighbor
Command a group
Co-found an organization
Combine ingredients together
Be community-minded
Conjoin two things
Contain a multitude
Concern oneself with the world
Consider two thoughts together
Walk on common ground
Note that also “com” has the universally sound “om” (pre-verbally or right-brain understood as the sound that is most consciousness-connective. Note that in forming the “o” sound, our lips become circularly rounded to, with the “m” sound then reverberate the tone of oneness). We see this in the Indian word “om,” the ancient Hebrew and Aramaic “shalom” as well as the modern English “home.”
ENGLISH SUFFIX…… OUS-IOUS
At the end of these terms is the suffix “ious” which means “having or full of.”
EXAMPLES
joyous – full of joy
copious – full and abundant
suspicious – full of suspicions
audacious – full of audacity
pugnacious – full of a fighting spirit
ENGLISH SUFFIX – NESS This simply refers to a state or condition, and there are numerous example of its use
CONSCIOUSNESS-CONSIOUSNESS-CONCIOUSNESS
It is so wonderful and beautiful that English has combined this prefix and suffix or conjoined them to mean a fullness of connections, as employed in the most extraordinary of words – however it may be spelled – as consciousness, consiousness or consiousness. It is as if there is a subliminal deep wisdom in the English language. This connects now to our core and pivotal definition of
what is consciousness
what is consiousness
what is conciousness…….
The universal principle of connection in the whole or fullness of nature.
Enlightened Consciousness When we study spiritual arts, or begin studying meditation, we may tend to look up to our teaching yogis who’ve spent a lifetime engaged in such meditation and other spiritual arts. We naturally assume they have reached a “higher state of consciousness or awakened consciousness or whatever transcendental level – along with maybe bliss or perhaps a state of nirvana. We want to emulate them to awaken our own consciousness. Christ had to have had Christ consciousness, right? But let’s face it, do we really know what “higher consciousness” refers to or what truly entails a rising path to enlightenment? Perhaps with enlightened consciousness there is a glow or sense of inner peace . There may be some confidence because assured higher conscious steps have been taken. But is any of this a sure sign of enlightenment consciousness? Maybe the yogi or saint appears as a “together person,” not out-of-control, not agitated or stressed. We also may note their surrounding environment is orderly, and as a reflection of the “togetherness” within. But beyond that or demythologized, is there actually such an animal as purely higher consciousness or higher states of conscious awareness?
In answering that question, let us assume our answer depends, in part, on how we see and define what consciousness is. What are we really pointing to with such words?
A Guiding Definition of “Consciousness”
In this blog, we tend to define principle of consciousness as the principle of connection itself in nature. If we apply that unique definition consistently, there may not be such a thing as a purely “higher” state of consciousness. This is because that principle of connection refers to something far too universal – such as connecting to whatever is higher and lower. So a guide to consciousness has to involve a practically guiding definition of consciousness and to transcend consciousness in the ordinary modes.
Another Meaning of “Higher”
There is still another keen way of looking at the term “higher” in relation to consciousness. It can mean the experience of what is higher consciousness or what are higher conscious states in a way akin to being on top of a mountain and seeing from a “zenith” panoramic perspective. To see an entire landscape as one is a way of making vision connectively whole. Or this means one has a more connective/conscious posture to literally everything in daily life experience – namely towards consciousness itself, one’s mind, emotions, body movements, social environment and nature as a whole.
Monastic View of Higher Consciousness
If we then separate ourselves from the world in a monastic lifestyle and go deeper and deeper into a mucho-relaxed, mega-alpha wave state, we arrive then at a different view of presumably higher consciousness or some high consciousness states. To awaken that kind of consciousness, we need not be involved in the world at large. Creating a deeply relaxed and at peace state allows us to become more connected and whole within – whether or not one can use that state or its insights outwardly to help others heal with compassion. Thus a heightened inner connectedness that is monastic, via life in a cloistered monastery, steps away from worldly concerns or involves emptying the mind as a whole. This is not the same as a lifestyle that dares otherwise. I’ve traveled to Israel and have seen where the Essenes lived in desert caves removed from the rest. Other such traditions support living in seclusion via different means.
Divergent Terms for Awake and Conscious
As a result, we have divergent terms for what it is to achieve a higher level of consciousness or awake states such as spiritual consciousness, awakened state, sudden enlightenment, cosmic consciousness, transcendental consciousness, alpha wave mind state, buddha consciousness, christ consciousness, brahman consciousness, shiva consciousness, yogic trance consciousness or samadhi, and the state of bliss and nirvana , spiritual consciousness and so on. Maybe the laughing Buddha, God bless him, has reach a state of comic consciousness. Higher consciousness, treated lightly or seriously, may often be something quite different in various cultures.
The positive is that there is no one guide to higher consciousness. One can choose to pursue different spiritual consciousness paths, or living in the world while not being of it. You choose the level of consciousness to be on, and perhaps some run in parallel loops rather than ever higher spirals of transcendent conscious awareness.
Imagine consciousness is simply the principle of connection itself in nature
NATURE’S UNITY
The ability of our consciousness to thus connect to all things ends up being something profound – the global basis for nature being One.
NATURE’S ESSENCE
A chocolate bar’s essence is simply its all-permeating chocolate. If one ingredient most permeates all of experiences, then similarly that consciousness forms the essence of nature!
ORGANIC CONSCIOUSNESS A flowers with a beautiful solar radiance of petals indicates the potential existence within of depth consciousness.
PAST A MATH-”CONNECTED” UNIVERSE
The math-based understanding also wants us to discover what really connect all of nature. But math symbols, demystified, are poor universal tools for that purpose because they guide the separation of all elements of consciousness. We, for example, count things if they are separate. We will never integrally connect our vision by separating elements of our vision. This cosmic-in-scope contradiction has vast consequences.
HEALING VIEW
A consciousness-center view is highly connective. It serves as a counterpoint to the most separative vision, again the math/mechanical. We then evolve our most connective healing arts to new heights rather than our separative or mechanical arts, unless the latter serves the former.
CAUSE AND EFFECTS
If consciousness again is the principle of connection itself in nature, it thus forms what connects events together over time and space. This lead us to develop a different science of nature as a whole. It transforms especially our healing arts.
In our ongoing series of posts on consciousness here we focus on the movement towards a new science of consciousness. To envision that, we really need to carefully define our two key terms: science and consciousness.
Science
It is word derived from the Latin “scientia” meaning knowledge. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary refers more specifically to a “knowledge attained through study or practice… knowledge covering general truths of the operation of general laws, esp. as obtained and tested through scientific method [and] concerned with the physical world.”
Forms Of Science
Here we refer to both a) the strict discipline that uses “the scientific method” for observing and experimenting rather than just vaguely believing in something about our world, and b) the body of knowledge that results from applying this method. There is also pure science looking for facts and applied science seeking applications of those facts tied together to form theories.
Consciousness
All words are pointing tools used to separate elements of our consciousness, and consciousness itself might point to the whole unseparated whole. Webster, not surprisingly, gives several definitions for consciousness. These include a reference to any quality or state of being aware, whether of what’s within or outside; and whether of sensation, thought, emotion or again the whole of all conscious states – and whether we are awake, aware, present, oriented or in dream and altered states. Lastly, and alternatively, it refers to “the upper level of mental life of which the person is aware as contrasted with unconscious processes.” The etymology of the term conscious comes from an ancient Latin word conscius which means “to know.”
Thus the terms scientia (knowledge) and conscius (to know) thus beg for a marriage.
Contrast To Create Identity Because “consciousness” partly refers to just about everything we ever have or could experience, or the medium thereof. It thus seems to be something very non-distinct. We, nevertheless, can give it a distinct identity via the quite stark contrast to “unconsciousness.” This is similar to defining a level of darkness by the level of the absence of light.
Close Association With Human Consciousness
Also we cannot experience consciousness in other life form. Thus we can only infer something like that exists (as by observing how animals act the way we do) . Otherwise the term “consciousness” is tied to just human awareness – and especially within our brain, including the higher order self-aware ways the brain might function.
Toward A Trans-Personal Definition Of Consciousness Let us consider, in this context, the following alternative definition. It sees consciousness in an broader context than even the whole of what we humanly experience. Namely it postures consciousness to have some trans-personal and trans-human qualities as belonging or proprietary to all of nature. This is awfully hard, if impossible to prove with finality since we cannot really ever go outside of our own consciousness. We cannot do that trick anymore than we can jump over our own knees. Thus perhaps this is merely a pure inference. It is derived, however, of a kind of detached observation and therefore can form a quite sane theory. It is a theory of consciousness which can further be put to practice and even tested. This is why there is such a true need for a science of consciousness, namely and again to test such theories or to tell us which might be valid or not.
OUR DEFINITION
The definition here states that: consciousness forms the potentially universal relationship of connection in nature It thereby can form nature’s core essence or what holds all of nature together as one to derivatively define its essential essence. This is like chocolate making up the essence of a chocolate bar.
Implications Of This Definition/Theory For A Science of Consciousness The above definition and theory has some profound implications. If valid, if begs for a really new science of consciousness – and for that matter, a new science of nature as such. It focuses away from the presence of the western way of envisioning all of the essence of nature – as with the periodic table of elements or with the view of matter or energy defined mathematically predominating. The latter points primarily to a physical, machine-like world and wherein consciousness seems dispensable. It might either be of secondary, derivative, emerging, irrelevant, or shadowy value. In more extreme views, consciousness is appears unreal, a phantom or the ghost in the machine.
Why Propose A Non-Mechanical Science of Nature?
How do we focus away from this western vision with our new definition in hand? There are two main ways. First, we don’t start with the intellectual bias of assuming that math symbols will exclusively lay open the bosom of nature. For the distinct identity of those symbols – those pointing and consciousness biasing tools - is that they abstract how best to separate all elements of consciousness, and b) the physical world is exactly what those symbols best point to or bias our attention towards. They cause us to prefer giving attention to what is most clearly separate in our awareness and also thus having separating surfaces in our vision. This is definitely the physical or material world or what is composed of “matter.” The assumption is that this scientific view is not a metaphysics or ideology of nature. But let us counter-culturally consider that it is!
A Different Root Vision
Rather than starting then with this math-bound apriori metaphysics – an ideology that preferentially points towards certain directions – let us instead look more at the experience of both what is distinctly connective and separative consciousness – and in a pre-physical pure and raw experience of consciousness. Why chose this first duality? One side, the connective, points to the underlying oneness of nature, and the other as systematically away. Thus the origin of this duality is directly from nature’s oneness – as a true duality should and must be. This is why we don’t use words or pointing tools like yin yang, or matter, energy – each derived from a different cultural perspective.
Right/Left Brain Split
This alternative duality is easily correlated to the differences between our two main brain hemispheres, something well documented in empirical psychology. The thesis here is that neurons do not produce this split in brain consciousness, or consciousness as such, but rather just tune in like a radio to the more primordial, connected, ocean of consciousness that precedes the separative-seen or surface-perceived physical world of our senses.
Conclusion
If taken seriously, the above view creates a deep and profound revolution in our whole knowing and understanding of nature as such or essentially. This is why a scientific study of consciousness can be so pivotal and important for different fields. This especially applies to the healing arts that treat consciousness ailments. Integral healing is usually a connection to wholeness, and if we do not understand the very root foundations of connection in nature, we will also not know how to truly, integrally and deeply heal ourselves and our loved ones. We can only treat them symptomatically because the understanding is surface-bound. Secondly, if science is exclusively associated with the quantitative study of what is but physical and material, and if at the very same time our new alternative definition of consciousness holds true, then any mechanical or traditional science of consciousness will predictably fail. It will fall flat on its face because it takes a very different, non-mechanical, non-mathematical, and non-consciousness-separative approach. This whole notion aims to overturn, to revolutionize, to form a global mind change in relation to the vision promoted by Galileo, Descartes, and Newton and which really established the inner foundation for our modern industrial/commercial civilization
The question of what is consciousness is not at all trivial nor ordinary.
NON-PHYSICAL & EVER-PRESENT
To approach consciousness, you have to know it isn’t something you can simply wrap your hands around. It is not physically contained. To make matters worse, consciousness is always present. You can’t escape it. You can go to China to study China but you have to be open to go everywhere to study consciousness. We can argue all is nothing but an experience of inner and outer, normal or altered consciousness. Do we limit ourselves to just human consciousness studies? To whole streams or separate bits of consciousness? But how do we approach this vast global subject – in order to know and explain what is consciousness itself beyond its different higher or lower levels, contents, maps, charts, diagrams, states or stages and laws? And what is the difference between real and artificial consciousness?
CRITICAL QUESTION TO ANSWER This question is especially important when we are faced with a variety of “consciousness diseases.” A diabetic may step on a nail and not feel a thing. How is it that an Alzheimer’s patient can’t recognize a closest relative, child or spouse? Thus knowing exactly and precisely “what is consciousness” may be the single most vital for our extremely health and environmentally challenged times.Consciousness disease pandemics are such a powerful sign that whatever we know falls short of deepest insight.
SOLVING THIS RIDDLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS In my own life, and after an experience where my left-brain shut down to help me see things in the raw, I came to the conclusion that – or began to put into words for the left brain, what is the right brain experience. From that came the following definition to understand collective and cosmic consciousness: Consciousness forms a potentially universal relationship of connection in all of nature. This means that matter, which we experience as separate things, is not really what nature’s root foundation is all about. It only appears so in an illusionary, phenomenal or surface consciousness, but not in the deeper layers, levels and states of consciousness. Imagine the latter really connect everything. Also mathematics is not a well-designed tool to then understand that consciousness because math symbols point to consciousness separations or actually directly away from the essence of consciousness, which here is seen as forming the essence of nature. Can this create problems? You betcha. Take a look at global pollution or fact that life dies in the presence of large mixes of synthetic chemicals,. As you can see, if we try to seriously overturn the taproot premise of physics and chemistry, the math-bound view, this leads to a vast and deepest of revolutions in thought.
AS A NATUROPATH As a naturopath, I have applied this consciousness revolution to the natural healing arts, to help reverse cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and less serious consciousness diseases. Consciousness is real. We can directly induce, raise, awaken or bring it out of nature as simply as we pour water over a seed. The reason we generally don’t or fail to fathom it is because we are knee-deep stuck in the 17th century’s stale, math-bound vision – the mechanical, unconscious, dead-bound view. Thus knowing “what is consciousness” becomes a the pivotal catapult for a most powerful revolutionary global mind change or shift in the whole of our lives.
Copernican Revolution - With the Sun at the Center
Are we in the midst of a consciousness revolution? The answer depends on our understanding these two terms.
WHAT IS A REVOLUTION? The word revolution means a reverse movement a complete change in perspective – originally as applied to celestial bodies. It come from the old French and was latter and aptly to the impact of the Copernican “revolution.”
“Nicolas Copernicas had introduced the idea that the earth might revolve around the sun – the reverse of what had previously been believed. This created a complete turnaround or “revolution” in our vision of the cosmos. The same word was latter applied politically, as in the French revolution, the American Revolution and also the Russian, Mexican and Chinese Revolutions – among the most popular applications of this term. There was also an Industrial Revolution and a Scientific Revolution. It was therefore applied to the vast changes in our ideas in many other fields, especially a revolution in our paradigms of physics. We also have the terms cultural revolution, market revolution, information revolution and sexual revolution. Interestingly enough, political revolutions tended to follow the ideological – including even the Copernican. Thus when Copernicus introduced his novel ideas, they later led to a loss of a degree of faith, culturally, in the Bible as the final say or arbiter in our understanding of the universe. During the Middle Ages, the power of the Pope in Rome was to delegate authority to rule of countries in Europe. This was dependent on the deepest faith in the Pope as receiving that vast authority directly from God and through divine inspiration. When the dominance of the biblical worldview was challenged by Copernicus and later by the new scientific vision of Newton, Galileo and Descartes, there followed a derivative revolution in political authority. The entire royal lineage of Russia was murdered one night in the Russian Revolution. This overturned that countries political rule, among others and in the French and American revolutions.
ARE WE IN THE MIDST OF A CONSCIOUSNESS REVOLUTION? Are we really undergoing a consciousness revolution or is this just a comforting phrase? That depends on how we understand consciousness and its dynamics. I’ve repeatedly emphasized and elucidated that, in essence, consciousness forms a potentially universal relationship of connection in all of nature. Now why is that, in and of itself, a revolutionary perspective? Well we all know consciousness interacts with our mind. Our mind forms outline images (which are translated into written and spoken words). These help us to focus consciousness in endless directions. They help separate elements of our consciousness. This can happen again in universal directions.
Now what if the more silent, quiet, meditative, integrative, pre-conceptual, word-empty mind (our right-brain) were to suddenly dominate our whole consciousness? Our worldview would then become more holistic and spiritual – as in the Buddhist traditions. On the other hand, if the conceptual mind predominates (the left brain), I would predict that an opposite material worldview would become dominant as more “rational.” I would also argue it ultimately becomes quantitative. Rational comes from the word “ratio,” a mathematical term. This is because math symbols represent the very highest, most universal of all inner pointing tools of the mind to separate elements of consciousness and thus to point to separate matter. I think of this as the surface appearance of things, reverse postured as the most objective or depth view.
ON THE CUSP It is finally my orientation that we are on the cusp of moving away from that current dominance of the present math-bound vision of nature, of physics, chemistry and biotechnology (the dominantly left-brain view of the cosmos) – and derivatively of a primarily commercial society. If this indeed occurs, it will be a genuine turnaround of the inner foundations of our modern world, of our modern consciousness. It will represent a true reversal in core brain polarities, and thus a true and real “consciousness revolution.”
We can diligently and carefully search the web to find many of what l call “standard definitions of consciousness.” Here are a few examples of such definitions of consciousness, with critiques.
SOME STANDARD DEFINITIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
An cognitive state
This makes the assumption that consciousness is tied to cognitive functions and thus much of what plants and animals experience would be considered unconscious.
A feature or force of life
Some Vedanta traditions see consciousness this way. Certainly some form of consciousness is a universal feature of life, but what does that really tells us? If bubble gum sticks to a wall, does that define the stuck-to wall?
The state of being aware
This is a very redundant definition. Awareness can be called consciousness and consciousness can be called awareness. It doesn’t really tell us very much. It offers no deep insight into what is the nature of consciousness.
Alert perceptions
To be alert is to be in a state of feisty awareness, which again doesn’t tell us very much.
Awake and self-aware A living organism can be sentient, or present to its surrounding, and grounded in a time and space framework/reference without necessarily being self-aware. Does self-awareness really define the full spectrum of what is consciousness or in its absence, unconsciousness?
Higher order awareness
This is tied to a mix of cognition, self-awareness, and being awake or in advanced levels of consciousness – including having greater inner peace and heightened, clear and brilliant perceptions. But what give us the hubris or vain authority to be so selective in this elite view of consciousness?
By-product of neuron firing
This reduces consciousness to various physical mechanisms. This implies certain organisms which do not have such neurons then do not have consciousness. Nevertheless they are sentient and aware, unlike rocks.
HOW TO GO BEYOND THIS STANDARD LIST
We could go on with this standard list and related critiques. Keep in mind that with a valid definition we must ask:
a) Does it give us an objective, trans-personal, outside-ourselves point of view of consciousness itself?
b) Does the definition of consciousness have practical, proving and valuable applications?
None of the above seem to meet these tests for me.
MOVING TO AN ALTERNATIVE
Thus I’ve evolved an alternative definition of consciousness. This came to me after an inner experience as a teenager when, subsequent to a high fever, my left-brain shut down and I was thrown, outside of my mind, into a wordless and oceanic, connected and whole experience of consciousness. What I learned from that experience is the following definition of consciousness. It is one that yields revolutionary implications and also vast practical applications – mainly for the healing ourselves (as when we fall prey to consciousness illnesses such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, and diabetes) and the healing our planet. Such applications are really the acid test of definition, understanding or theory of consciousness.
Alternative Definition
The alternative as well as extended definition is as follows:
Consciousness forms a potentially universal relationship of connection in nature.
This includes our own human nature and the nature of the world around us. Imagine consciousness underlies the thin surface appearance, the illusion of a world fundamentally composed of hard, separate, mechanically-acting, math-defined physical forms or “matter.”
Imagine thus that the underlying oceanic consciousness is at the real depth core of nature, of everything existing in the cosmos. We really never experience anything outside our consciousness so anyone who tells you this is far-fetched are themselves out of touch with their own inner consciousness. They are locked into the surface appearance. In my experience, consciousness really forms nature’s ultimate and primordial essence and quintessence. Because “laws” are what “connect” events (as in the laws of cause and effect or the laws of action and reaction – including billiard balls bouncing off each other) then consciousness so defined as above suddenly underlies the taproot foundation of all connections in nature an thus of nature’s laws. This means that consciousness forms the authentic and abiding “principia” of nature, contrary to Newtons core thesis in his Principia Naturalis Mathematica or his “laws of nature as mathematical.” Math symbols do expertly abstract separation and therefore cannot truly point to what connects nature in its essence – namely consciousness. Newton very abysmally and foolishly lost sight of this simple common sense. He was self-engrossed, bedazzled by his own newly invented calculus. This critique of Newton’s vision may seem harsh, but I must beg to differ. We do need to revisit his old, stale, moldy premises, the ideology of his that took root to form our modern world. It is a vision that is now failing to work and falling apart. We do need, quite urgently, to make some vast and revolutionary inner shifts in our visions. Then we can uncover or bring out more fully out (as when we water seeds), nurture and discover the underlying laws of consciousness, life, and connection – rather than of the mechanical, death-delivering, math-defined, separative patterns that now almost totally predominate our prevailing industrial/commercial/material worldview. We need to re-structure our collective consciousness from the ground up or from its 17th century crumbling foundations. Why? Because those foundation stones has mislead a building process of the Industrial Revolution. That metaphysics has yielded a failing medical system, helpless in the face of pandemics, and focused on surface symptoms plus misdirecting us towards a disintegrating, dying parade of living ecologies. These are not minor problems or crises. We need to thus face the root inner cause of global pollution, global warming and a more massive destruction of life and consciousness on our earth than ever before, and which is proceeding at ever faster and faster paces.
Going Past Current Definitions
Lame definitions of consciousness will not help us on this score or to extricate us from the larger, self-created problems of our modern world. They fall short in giving us the simple needed insight to turn around our major looming planetary trends, derivative of an extraordinarily and extended loss of wisdom.
For more information on such a philosophy and definition of consciousness – and its implications – visit http://www.raw-wisdom.com
What is the relationship between consciousness and healing? This hinges on understanding the essence of both these phenomena in nature.
We define healing as a process of connection to wholeness – whether of consciousness itself, mind, emotions, body, or our surrounding living environment. Healing occurs integrally where there is life.
Next comes the understanding of what is consciousness. We define it as the universal and primordial relationship of connection in and underlying all of nature. We also look at life as the concentrated presence of consciousness. Thus healing only proceeds in the presence of life and consciousness. It makes logical and real sense. This is also the foundation understanding for a different system of healing than what we are used to in the west – allopathic medicine that uses drugs, radiation and surgery to “heal.” Surgery cuts the body apart and thus can only mechanically fix things, not deeply heal or restore consciousness and life. Drugs are designed mathematically, where math symbols are universal abstractions of separation. Thus such creations also cannot integrally heal or restore life and consciousness. Radiation is derivative of the math-bound understanding of physics and thus also only kills mechanically but does not restore systematically what is life and consciousness.
This is why true healing, and not just treatment, involves a deep and profound understanding of the role and nature of consciousness.
MORE THAN JUST A THEORY A theory of “what is consciousness” generally consists of an outline image in our minds that supposedly points to something real in the world on this subject matter. All our words and symbols are just inner pointing tools to something. Theories are organized ways of orienting or pointing our awareness to things in our world and in relationship to each other. Thus to demonstrate that a particular theory or set of ideas actually points to something systematic, real, valuable and predictable becomes an event.
THE HARDER PROBLEM Consciousness, however, represents potentially such a vast-touching -upon-all-the-world phenomena that its exploration can take a trillion different confusing directions. Everything we know is something we know in our consciousness. And sophisticated and intricate theories may only point to some relatively narrow or ivory tower vistas of a part of that whole. These can result in a variety of entanglements of mind which miss the whole point of seeing “what is consciousness” in its full essence. Or one can easily fail to fathom a truly inner-mountain-peak vantage point of this unified and vastest of arenas for knowing. Adeptly using high abstractions (universal concepts) in a philosophy of consciousness and states of consciousness may thus give but the deceptive appearance of having latched onto this transcendent highest view with some mastery. This is the harder problem in dealing with “consciousness.” However this is easier to be said than attained. An acid test is whether that proposed theory or definition of consciousness can actually help anyone enhance their consciousness or resist the slippages into consciousness diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Otherwise the theory is just so much disingenuous jibber-jabber.
TACKLING CONSCIOUSNESS One highly effective way to get past this “harder problem” is having again an authentically high overview and not a personal or cultural, conceptually-biased orientation. this means looking from above the pointing paths of all concepts because touches everything. This is as if one must look at consciousness from above the entire left/right brain divide which is a superhuman feat. The left-brain conceptualizes. It forms outline images as pointing tools or the world of ideas as Plato referred to this. It uses these ideas to separate elements of consciousness and thereby to focus one’s attention. The right brain does the opposite. It helps us unpoint and unfocus. It looks at things as a whole or connectively and non-conceptually or intuitively. Sometimes what is called “right-brain” ends up dominantly functioning in the left-hemisphere of the brain and visa versa because these are two forms of consciousness that are tuning into dominantly by one side or the other, rather than physically bound. One verbalizes and philosophizes with concepts and the other cannot and has no inclination or need. Here I consider myself to have an advantage in overviewing this study of a trans-split-brain view. This is simply because first I was trained in dominant left-brain skills as a philosopher and math prodigy and experienced the exact opposite, a radical left-brain meltdown causing a brain polarity shift to right-brain or connective consciousness dominance. This was similar to what happened to Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard brain scientists who had a stroke that also shut her left-brain down. It allowed her, and myself similarly, to visit the internal highways in unusual ways – and from what I consider again a seeing from a higher vantage point. This didn’t mean that when I later returned to using familiar words and comfortable sentences – speaking English or German or Chinese or Hebrew – that then I discounted the importance of words. I did not abandon the dominantly verbal/mathematical approaches of the west in favor of a solely non-verbal, intuitive, vague or right-brain dominant mysticism – as with indigenous shamans . On the contrary, I sensed the huge and profound need to bridge these two worlds. It seemed now that I had a gift, and could do so with an impersonal, conscious and intentional approach.
BREAKING GROUND FOR A DEFINITION Ultimately I came to some unique conclusions about truly what consciousness is, and resulting in the following definition and theory which I consider of priceless value for the development of a higher consciousness and a conscious mind. When one enters the raw world of consciousness there is no such thing as a “theory.” Theories only exist when right and left brain consciousness is severed. When I try thus to state this in so many words – but not really needing those words - it may make little or no ripples with others at first if my language of expression is not translated. It is like writing a physics formula on a blackboard and about how to create an atom bomb – and without first explaining how to apply the formula. The formulas appear meaningless and insignificant – just white marks on a dark blackboard – except to a person who knows the vast implications and pointing paths of those symbols. The responsibility then remains to demonstrate the value of what is created by those symbols (and here for the making of not bombs but integral healing of life and consciousness within ourselves and throughout nature).
WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS? With this said, let me now offer a definition of consciousness that shakes the foundations of the western worldview – the matter/energy math-defined vision. Imagine that consciousness forms a potentially universal relationship of connection in all of nature.
Just as chocolate makes up the permeating “essence” of a chocolate bar, it is another discussion to show that this consciousness also and thereby forms the penetrating, defining and universal essence of nature (and not mathematical relationships or the postulated microscopic atomic/subatomic model as what should be centrally focused upon). This means that at the core of nature there is a dance of consciousness and unconsciousness, of connection and separation, rather than a dance of matter and energy defined mathematically. This one idea, theory or definition thus has the potential to change the whole of our vision of nature. Or when adopted, it can change the heart and soul of the collective view of what is nature and the functioning of our cosmos.
A third discussion is how this same consciousness can permeate nature to higher and lower degrees. The greater permeation or concentration manifests in life. This means that living organisms, rather than machines brought into being by math-designs, thereby represent nature’s core essence to be elicited or brought out to dominate natural terrains – rather than machines and what is mechanical.
Some philosophers may not at all be open to this kind of thinking about consciousness.
In their minds, they may think it is far more rational and flattering to view the essence of consciousness as tied to higher-order skills in human beings – include self-cognizance triggered by human brain neurons. Everyone can define consciousness as they choose, with resulting limited foci. The defining words I use point to a larger and highly revolutionary vision. Here consciousness is not seen as something small, special and proprietary to human brain cells but as arising out of a universal cosmic terrain from the core of all of nature. This may shatter the view of the Renaissance, namely of humans being so special.
This view also came to me via a dissolving of the functions of my left-brain conceptual faculty – leaving behind attachments to such flattering conceptualizations.
The foregoing definition still can for a long time remain meaningless until examples are given of how it applies. The applications are powerful.
Note that we really want to know 1) what best brings out consciousness or maintains, nurtures, supports and raises that consciousness and 2) what does the opposite or takes away, destroys, corrupts or lowers consciousness, and how and with what procedures we follow this divide.
AT THE FOUNDATION OF LIFE
Above we referred to a close link between consciousness and life. Here we refer to, among other things, the sentience and awareness of all living creatures, not just higher order brain skills. It is this awareness that manifests with life and among millions of species as a common denominator. Let us therefore think for a moment of life as theconcentrated expression and presence of consciousness. This means living organisms are expressive containers for what brings out the connective essence of nature (consciousness) and rather than machines (per the math-based vision of nature) reflecting nature’s essential laws. So what is the first sign of this special presence of consciousness coming out of the core of nature? Life per se.
Organic life brings forth also certain distinct common features. In fact when an organism remains alive will it retain its connected wholeness. It will display on the surface or as seen in a silvered mirror what I would call the “badges of organicity.” These are thin outer signs of the more important full depth-inner presence of depth-connectedness.
These outer signs include the solar radiance of a flower’s pedals, the rings of a tree, the organic-in-form branching veins of a leaf, the swirls of sea shell, and so on. Again organic forms show off these beautifully attractive badges when they are reflective of a more deeply present connected whole via living consciousness.
Consider the possibility that consciousness again lies at the foundation of that depth-connectedness which keeps all living forms alive. Therefore when an organic life dies, it then predictably loses both the outer organic badge, the whole appearance on the surface, and its more important inner-depth consciousness or fuller connectedness with. Trigger this undoing of life with a bullet or surgical knife or sword - cut a living organism progressively into parts – and again it dies. There are exceptions, as the hard form of shells displays the organic badge longer until time it’s elements dissolves into its surroundings. Ultimately the body’s flesh separates into parts or “falls apart.” It turns to dust in earthen graves. The inner consciousness once connected it more deeply within, and to the world around it as well. Now it is no longer present. This is but a first step in demonstrating how this theory, definition and understanding functions in nature. Next we need to visit what are tell-tale signs of any rising, eliciting and support of the presence of consciousness – and derivatively life?
MORE EXAMPLES OF HOW AND WHY Here are a few more genres of examples. We can discuss the details in future blog post.
A) Water elicits life and consciousness
Water’s essence in the mechanical/math-based/atomic worldview is H2O. In a life-centered worldview it establishes the connective relationship to elicits life and consciousness from every seed – and detoxifies, purifies, and helps re-establish life and raise consciousness in ourselves. There are several ways of demonstrating how water so function, and in this context why it brings out the rainbow, forms bubbles, rounds the sharp/oppositional corners of rocks, puts out fire, and so on.
B) Fire destroys life and consciousness
This is works on the same principle in reverse. This is why various states of inflammation are acute harbinger of later chronic illnesses, when inflammation is not healed. The effect is a lowered state of inner health, wholeness, connectedness and overall awareness. When a person is angry, or their emotions are inflamed, the This is why largely uncooked,
C) Love elicits life and consciousness; hate and fear the opposite
Love establishes an emotional connective relationship. Hate and fear do the opposite. This is why an angry person is not well aware of their surroundings, another persons feelings, etc. Anger and fear inflame emotions and bring on fiery adrenalin . Love guides us to connective oneness with what is loved. Hate and fear brake us away from that connective oneness in our consciousness.
D) Money corrupts consciousness. Money mathematizes awareness. The lusting for money makes a marriage with the mechanical worldview. This lowers consciousness, brings us into deeper states of illusion and corruptions of consciousness – where illusion is the falling apart of the integrity of the essence consciousness, its awareness of connective oneness. A money-centered society thus traps others in countless deceptions. It puts everyone in competitive opposition to each other. It elicits fiery friction and feeds on fears and addictions to move an economy “forward.” It does not integrally evolve our human consciousness, the essence of our being, and the key to our evolution.
E) Chemicals harm Life; pollute the environment; upset the ecology of the whole planet, cause species to die Take a random and large mix of chemicals, to test not individual separate chemicals but the underlying math-based order, and the mix will kill and destroy all of life and consciousness in the compost heap. The compost heap is symbolic. It is were a large and random mix, in fact all plant life forms can decay to form the building materials of all other plant life forms in an endless and integral circle of unity. The philosophy of chemistry, the math-based worldview, clashes and thus when widely and deeply applied will destroy life and consciousness in nature. This is why we have an epidemic of species dying.
F) Surgery, radiation and chemical drugs – chief tools of allopathic medicine – fail to truly heal consciousness ailments . We see this with the health epidemics of cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s. To reverse these ills both in ourselves, and on a culture-wide basis, involves a true and revolutionary global mind change – a moving to a different essential vision of what is the core of nature, and our innermost being. It sets us on a different course to healing rather than ills. A true global mind change thus first heals our consciousness and its relationship to our mind’s understanding of the world, then emotions, body, and being in this world or to all that surrounds us each day of our lives.
LOSING ONE’S CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE LOSS OF A GREATEST TREASURE There is hardly anything more sad and tragic in life than a progressive withering of one’s consciousness, especially after a life of richly gathering knowledge, experience and wisdom. We see this especially in Alzheimer’s patients who can’t recognize their loved ones. This happen rather often and after long periods of illness or insipid advancing old age. About half of Americans over 85 suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. With this receding of consciousness we lose the natural enjoyment, joy and zest for life. Life becomes a true drag. We may become chronically depressed with one foot in the grave. Colors then can become less vivacious, sounds less sonorous, thoughts less clear as the mind dulls, and motions slower and shaky. The ability to accomplish dreams is seriously impinged. We can’t pull really things off and pull them together.
WHY? Whydoes all this tragically happen? Why isn’t life a more constant joyous upward journey? What causes this awful slippage into unconsciousness and how can it mostly be avoided or at least slowed?
COMPARED TO OTHER RICHES Among one’s greatest life accomplishments a person can point to their livelihood – as a doctor, lawyer, accountant, nuclear physicist, artist or entrepreneur. Or they may be a homemaker or parent. Without the knowledge however of what is consciousness, and thus the essence of life contained in different forms, all other riches and enjoyments of life can be taken away. One can say thus that the knowledge of what is consciousness (and as the essence of one’s life) is really the important study of all.
IF WE ONLY KNEW! If we therefore and intimately knew what is consciousness and how it functions – whether how it rises or recedes – we could very greatly alter and improve the course of our lives.
BREAKTHROUGH KNOWLEDGE FOR HEALING In my experience that kind of knowledge is entirely possible. It is dear and precious to have. It can be accessible but only with an open, receptive mind that can think out of the box. One of my life aims, as I keep envisioning it, is to write a popular book of 50 simple ways of healing the whole of ourselves, beginning thus first and foremost with a healing of our consciousness. This is because the healing of our consciousness is really at the foundation of all other major forms of healing. This then supports and spreads out to improve the whole of our lives.
HOW I CAME TO THIS PERSPECTIVE I came to this perspective through some trying experiences of my own, as outlined in my bio. This influenced me to become a natural healer or naturopath – ever showing the path of healing journeys to others.
The question of what is consciousness is not at all trivial nor ordinary. For example, you can walk into a department store, go to the sports section and find a pair of skies. Or you can go to a library and find a book specifically about glass lamps. But where do you go to find what is consciousness or even just a book that truly describes what consciousness is?
NON-PHYSICAL & EVER-PRESENT
Consciousness isn’t something you can simply wrap your hand or mind around. It is not physically contained. No matter what we are engaged in, somehow consciousness is to a degree present. It is part of everything we experience. Does that mean it has no specific identity whose knowledge we can master?
CRITICAL QUESTION TO ANSWER It has been my experience that this riddle can and must be solved. It becomes critically importance to know the answer when suffering from a variety of “consciousness diseases” - such as those evidence by neuropathy, lack of circulation where the bloodstream fails to carry consciousness to our cells. We see this also with diabetes and atherosclerosis. A diabetic will thus step on a nail and not necessarily feel anything. Someone who has had a stroke similarly has part of their brain or related body part no longer feeling. A sense of consciousness is lost. Alzheimer’s patients have this especially with certain brain functions. With metastatic cancer a given illness spreads unnoticed to destroy life. Actually most all chronic and systemic diseases have some inner component that involves a recession of consciousness. Thus knowing and understanding exactly and precisely “what is consciousness” may be the single most important and vital of all question to answer in our times. This is why even Nobel Laureates in physics, chemistry, and biotechnology have fallen prey to Alzheimer’s disease. Somehow physics, chemistry, and biotech disciplines have not yielded optimal answers to our key and central question.
PANDEMIC Note also that consciousness diseases are very much pandemic in our times. This is powerful evidence that we are far afield in our inner knowing of what is consciousness really and thus how to help support, nurture and retain rather than lose and hinder its presence.
SOLVING THIS RIDDLE In my own life, I have come to certain powerful and clear conclusions on this critical question and not based on borrowing secondhand from the ideas of others I know or have read about from the distant past. This is not gathered from any ancient tradition such as Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, shamanistic or other alternative views. Rather my breakthrough view came about via a rare left-brain meltdown. This allowed me to peep through a small hole to see our world “in a raw” or in a conceptually-stripped way – a view chronicled in my bio at www.raw-wisdom.com/bio. What I most deeply learned is that consciousness forms a potentially universal relationship of connection in all of nature. It is thus distinctively not an exclusively human attribute or possession, especially not of just our brain and brain neurons.This phenomenon of consciousness then internally unifies or forms the binding-together connective essence of our entire world! What a statement this is to make. This profound view also differs from the vast cultural assumption that has been promoted since the 17th century that supposedly matter and energy postured in time and space and described or defined mathematically forms the essence of nature. I find this not to be true but a surface illusion. This view spearheaded the Industrial Revolution and the distinctiveness of our modern world.
AS A NATUROPATH As a naturopath, I have applied a very different root understanding of nature and ourselves to help reverse consciousness diseases. The effectiveness of this reversal becomes a true litmus test for a real definition and also real (and not imagined or academic or philosophical or faith-based, or spiritual-tradition concocted) understanding of “what is consciousness.” Otherwise our theories are but self-gratifying nonsense that fail to liberate the conditions of impeded consciousness. Understanding “what is consciousness” when grounded in substantive objective reality forms thus a vast revolution in impersonal and true understanding – a revolution in our whole vision of what is nature’s essence or the essence of the entirety of the cosmos we live in.
Knowing thus “what is consciousness” can have some of the most profound and powerfully revolutionary effects on the whole of our lives.
Can there be a science of consciousness that is real and substantive – with practical applications – rather than a mystical, feel-nice discipline that really leads us nowhere?
Obviously there can be such a thing when consciousness is an incredibly vital component of our daily lives. How can we master this consciousness and as more than a whimsical art?
DIABETES
For example, at the foundation of diabetes is a stark consciousness disease. We call it neuropathy. It manifests when a diabetic steps on a nail and can’t feel a thing. Understanding consciousness as a science could help us dramatically heal diabetes (which is presently considered incurable). We see this potential reflected in Gabriel Cousens’ new program that actually helps reverse diabetes within just 30 days. He applies consciousness principles.
METASTATIC CANCER
Spreading and unnoticed cancer can reflect a consciousness disease. A person who understands consciousness could then help another and oneself overcome this scourge. I discovered this when I worked with Charlotte Gerson to help many patients reverse metastatic cancer conditions.
ALZHEIMER’S
Alzheimer’s disease is still another consciousness ailment. Just dispensing wonder drugs generally doesn’t work. Quite seriously we then need a different kind of understanding and science.
A REAL SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Thus if the presence and absence of consciousness is strikingly real for healthy and ill persons, then the knowledge thereof can help reverse our ill states of consciousness. First we need to know exactly “what is consciousness” to begin with.
MASTER KEY
I have tried to outline a certain powerful definition. Prior to grappling with this, it may be helpful to forgo any personal arrogance that assumes “consciousness” is merely a human attribute. Imagine instead that consciousness forms a a potentially universal relationship of connection in and throughout all of nature. Imagine also that this allows various microorganisms to have sentience. Imagine lastly that this consciousness co-habits with its opposite or unconsciousness. Exact knowledge of this “co-habitation” or how the two interact, can help us heal ourselves and revolutionize our personal lives and overall culture.
For more in depth discussions the reader is invited to visit other blog posts under the categories of consciousness and raw wisdom and to visit www.raw-wisdom.com
In order to know how to “heal consciousness,” we first need reliable means to know what it is to “heal” and to have “consciousness” or to become “conscious.”
What Does “Healing” Mean?
Healing, in one form or another, tends to be a way of connecting something living to wholeness. This is why when a cut mends we say it is “healed.” Also when a heart is broken and then mends we say it is healed. The former connects something physically asunder. The latter connects something in our spirit. There also can be mental healing, environmental healing and so on.
Nature of Consciousness
Imagine that what is consciousness forms “a potentially universal relationship of connection in all of nature.” This is a powerful definition when practically applied. Thus to be “aware” or “conscious” imagine that we simply connect to something we are so aware or conscious of. If this is a reliable and depth insightful definition, then the very presence of onsciousness will tend to mend or heal what is asunder.
Evidence of Healing Consciousness
There is evidence of this. Thus when a stone falls on our foot, for example, and we have a cut or bruise, there also immediately occurs a heightened awareness we call “pain.” I might cry out, for example, “Oh my God it hurts.” God here is a connective inner cosmic image – trying to pull down the power of healing within = and the experience of pain is also subliminally connected to the connective healing process. This is why I strongly oppose most pain killers or chemical drugs that engender just unconsciousness and therefore interfere with integral healing.
Healing Consciousness
This phase has two major meanings:
Healing Consciousness can use the word “healing” as an adjective. This means consciousness with the characteristic of being healing. But this is actually a redundant phrase, something that is critical to know. Western medicine is grounded in the mechanical, math-based vision of nature. Mathematics abstracts how best to separate elements of consciousness – moving our awareness away from the very essence of consciousness itself! This is why machines, made of separate, math-delineated or designed parts, tend to be relatively unconsciousness. Also in modern medicine, based on the allopathic/mechanical model, we can expect trouble with any attempt to depth heal systemic ailments since there is no science therein for the foundational healing of consciousness.
Healing Consciousness can use the word “healing” as a verb. This can mean the mending of our state of consciousness. Consciousness itself actually can never be healed as it is foundation of healing itself. It is rather that our state of incomplete consciousness is what can be mended, reconnected or made whole.
To do so requires a deeper understanding and an advanced inner technology.
Healing Our Entire Being
This can be accomplished by physical, mental and emotional means. Actually we have potentially seven waves of depth and complete healing, beginning with the healing of our state of consciousness and then expanding progressively to transform mind, emotions, body, immediate family and social relationships and finally our overall posture to our environment and cosmos as a whole.
NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS – WHAT IS IT?
In a kind of comprehensive overview of approaches, Ken Wilber has a post on the Web taken from his Journal of Consciousness Studies article (February 1997, pp. 71-92) and which outlines his Integral Theory of Consciousness. It integrates twelve different approaches to apparently understanding the nature of consciousness. These include the approaches of cognitive, introspective, neuro-psychological, clinical psychological & psychiatric, social and developmental psychological, psychosomatic, eastern and contemplative traditions, quantum theories, subtle energy studies and adventures into non-ordinary and drug-induced states. The list is long enough to certainly make the subject matter confusing to some. To make matters worse, we could expand that list profoundly. Where then do we truly understand the core essence of consciousness? Is there a core binding-together essence or a disintegration into so many forms?
SIMPLIFYING THE UNDERSTANDING
In most all other studies of life one can garnish a specialized expertise. But the study consciousness potentially can involve all of life and all of knowledge that we consciously take in ad infinitum. How then again do we arrive at its core essence? An essence is something that universally penetrates and thus is singular and simple – like the essence of a chocolate bar being made of chocolate. We might add an almond to the bar, but what primarily permeates remains simply chocolate. Is there a comparable essence to consciousness, or something that unifies the whole – in and throughout all of the potential categorizations or approaches. In my experience the answer is yes. However, to arrive at the seeing of what that is takes a vastly transcending mental, beyond the right/brain split perspective. You almost have to step outside and above the human mind/brain and its perpetual constructs to reach such a high perspective.
LITMUS TEST Supposing you get that far, how do you know that your conclusions are trans-personally or objectively true – true from all sides and past side-views, subjectivity and limited biases? There is really a Litmus Test. Our modern world is presently plagued with a variety of what I call growing consciousness diseases. It can be argued that all diseases are really carriers of a consciousness-depleting element. Some are so more dramatically than others. Thus we can have cancer that silently or without our consciousness spreads to kill us. We can become severely diabetic, and where when we step on a nail we feel nothing as we suffer from neuropathy – a loss of feeling, a loss of consciousness in the extremities primarily. We can fall also into the throws of Alzheimer’s disease where our mental consciousness breaks down. Now if a theory of consciousness can be tested in its applications to help reverse all three of these and similar condition, then we really and powerfully are onto something. With out such proof, we remain groping in the dark just as the patients with those ailments may be too.
IS THERE SUCH AN ANIMAL? After nearly half a century of searching for such a viable theory, I can honestly share my conclusion that there is such an animal. Most philosophers and scientists won’t make this kind of assured statement. I do because my experiences transcended my own personal identity or concern with such an identity. The implications of that “theory” I am referring to are revolutionary. The application are more than immensely powerful. For when one has a far better understanding of consciousness,. it can truly help those who have let it slip away, unconsciously – which seems a terribly helpless state. When physicians try to help such patients, but they can’t, they too are at a loss to understand what consciousness is, why we need a transcending understanding.
IMPLICATIONS
This “theory” is such an understanding. Its implications are profound. When understood, it has the vast potential to not only help those who are consciousness-ill, but to more so overturn the very taproot foundations of our whole modern worldview or vision of the essence of nature. This may seem a very bloated statement indeed. But, nevertheless, in my experience it happens to be true. The fact is that what we take to be our very highest truths in physics and chemistry – buttressed by mathematical formulations as the anchoring crutch, actually fail to factor in the existence, identity, or nature of consciousness in nature.
CORE PURPOSE OF BLOG
Once on does factor in that phenomena, everything else changes. As to this “theory” (written in quotation marks because it has ceased to be a theory for me) it is the core mission of this blog and of our original and related site, namely raw-wisdom.com to bring out to the public this understanding.
NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
With that said, now let me present the gist of this theory states of consciousness’ defining identity. Through that special identity we can fathom it in a conquering way. I’ve not learned this via any lab studies because a laboratory setting and all the tools of measurement it coalesces are actually the wrong tools with which to understand consciousness’ essence. Rather my “theory” is the result of other experiences. In my youth I was a math prodigy whose left-brain shut down temporarily forcing me to befriend an opposite brain vista. Later I tried to make peace between the split-brain views. Through that reconciliation, I came up with what I consider a piercing of the veils of consciousness. This requires super normal skills. I don’t state that to bloat my ego but simply because the need for transcendent is a given.
A DEFINITION
With this introduction now let me outline a set of words that for me best point to the quintessence of consciousness. Consciousness can be seen as the primary potentially universal relationship of connection in and throughout all of nature. It thereby forms nature’s core essenceand the basis for nature’s oneness.
VAST IMPLICATIONS Our math-based vision of nature no loner holds true if our definition of consciousness is valid. The nature of consciousness supplants what math symbols point to in defining the essence of our world. Just imagine how profound the implications of this simple statement are. Math symbols generally abstract how to separate all elements of consciousness. Given the prior definition of consciousness, however, math symbols then cannot possibly point us to the essence of nature. This violates of central and thought to be bedrock thesis of chemistry and physics – the deep assumption that mathematics offers a universal paradigm for integrating the objective understanding of the oneness of nature. Again the preceding definition denies that.
IS THIS VIEW OBJECTIVELY VALID? OR A PERSONAL SUBJECTIVE VISTA?
Many think that consciousness is solely the byproduct of human evolution as animals and plants presumably are not really, truly conscious or at least as cognitive and self-conscious. To move to a more nature-permeating definition of consciousness, as in pansychism, requires proof or a Litmus test. Again suppose we can use our “theory” to actually reverse the most persistent consciousness illnesses. The details are outlined in this blogs. Without such proof, the theory would only be a set of empty words promoted by our egos. With such backup evidence, we can advance our understanding of the world we live in – and of ourselves.
DEFINING CONSCIOUSNESS An effective study of Consciousness In Nature is dependent on how we first define the term “consciousness.” A word is an invention of the mind that serves as a pointing tool of our consciousness. How do we uniquely point that consciousness, using words, to nothing but itself? If we associate this word with an advanced human cognitive function then “consciousness” becomes something narrow or severely constrictive to point to. It becomes just a human attribute. In my experience, this may only help us feel superior when in reality this is a deep illusion born of what I call a left-brain dominant ”hubris.” Hubris is a wonderful ancient Greek term that means overbearing pride, presumption and arrogance. Yielding a sense of superiority, it feeds the drive to dominate and control. When we are so driven to conquer “it” – or something outside of us including nature – then that outside “it” becomes separate from us. When we are at one with something, there is no inside/outside group to contend with. There is no need to conquer and no need for a sense of superiority or inferiority. When we fall out of this loop, we are estranged.
CONSCIOUSNESS AS BELONGING TO ALL OF NATURE My life-long study of consciousness has yielded a very different if not opposite conclusion, namely that what we experience as every day “consciousness” is not a special attribute that belongs to us humans. It is rather proprietary to all of nature that formed us. In fact my view goes further. It states that consciousness also makes up the essential essence of nature or the cosmos we live in. Nothing in conventional mechanical science teaches us this proposition. In fact, we need to actually learn a different language than “matter and energy, defined mathematically” to understand this viewpoint deeply. Again words are but pointing tools and changing the language to point with changes the focus of consciousness and life. When the focus is unconventional it will of course be challenged. Yet I stand firm in my conviction that, really and truly, atoms and sub-atomic particles do not represent the essence of nature (rather they represent the cultural-ideology of a math-based view of nature) and that instead consciousness lies at the very core of our world and of ourselves.
DIFFERENT THAN THE DOMINANT WESTERN VISION Naturally this stance puts me at odds with chemistry and physics, the mathematical and the systematically mechanical viewpoint. We have been culturally convinced that the latter holds the key to the ” really true” unifying laws or objective principles of nature.
My experience tells me otherwise, and definitively.
THE SHELL OF THE TORTOISE What I know of nature is symbolized by a tortoise and its shell.
This is a metaphor for the difference between the surface appearance of nature (like that of a hard shell) and its depths. The shell exhibits not hardness and relative lifelessness. Separate from the turtle, it cannot function other than mechanically. Imagine that the depth of nature work exactly on the opposite principles. The flesh of the turtle is soft. It is consciousness, not mechanical. It is self-moving. It does not stay fixed, unmoving or dead. If you try to transplant the principles of the shell, of the surface, to the depths, what happens? If we inject into the turtle’s blood vessels only the hard shell’s minerals, the turtle will die.
In my opinion, western civilization is on a like path. It has mistaken the illusion of nature’s surface mechanical appearances for the essence of all of nature and thus has begun to supplant and displace surrounding nature’s inner conscious and living depths.
If we assume all is mechanical and then try to remake everything in that image, the result will naturally be to destroy the bounty of living Eden.
HOW THIS COMES ABOUT Imagine that “consciousness” is not something amorphous, that is without a unique identity. If we can identify that identity, we can familiarize ourselves more deeply with that consciousness, evolve a science, and then help support and nourish rather than destroy consciousness/life in nature. Let me describe this identity as best I understand it. Not to be treated lightly, this definition is the result of about a half a century of inner explorations:
Consciousness-in-nature forms a potentially universal relationship of connection.
Now when two things are glued together they connect. When we think of how this works conventionally, we think of a chemical formula for the glue. However, the glue may be generating a strong relationship of connection on the surface bond but not necessarily in regard to deeper kind of connective consciousness. The glue is dead. It does not respond or connect to its surroundings. The glue shows no signs of alive awareness.
BADGE OF ORGANICITY
Imagine a flower with pedals that radiate outward in 360 degree directions. The radiations then also point inward to a single center to unify the whole. Now imagine that not just a flower but most all organic life wear or display one or another surface badge of its connective essence and organicity- at least while alive and consciousness. Afterwords they may turn to dust. This includes the swirls of a snail, the veins of a leaf, the radiance of our own human eye. Suppose we now work on bringing out this consciousness to sustain life, and rather than what is mechanical. We can begin by constructing a very different global view of the nature and nature’s Oneness and derivative laws. What this implies is a vision that is very different from the mathematical ideology of machine principles that currently dominates modernity – and that is taught virtually everywhere to be believed in.
WHY ARE WE HARMING NATURE’S CONSCIOUSNESS? Obviously the mechanical view of nature, math-defined, is a not an especially consciousness-centered vision of nature. I would argue that its core principles actually stand in opposition to what is consciousness at the core of nature. Would it then be surprising that we are ubiquitously destroying life all over the planet? To understand this innate opposition, let me explain the following. Western civilization has, since the 17th century, been on a course of progressively adopting a math-based vision of nature, the mechanical whose ambassadors are physics, chemistry and biotechnology. Brought into the fold are geology, oceanography, and atmospheric sciences – all ultimately helping to reduce all of nature to mathematics or the principles of a machine.
MACHINES
Machines are distinctly “Alzheimerish” or unconscious. We sense this best when speaking to a telephone machine that can’t distinguish between someone saying a thing or two lovingly or in an angry voice. “May I have your credit card please?” We curse at it, and the machine can’t make it out. We also sense can get a sense of this when a bulldozer tramples over a life-form with no real consciousness, feeling or remorse. In this context, mathematics abstracts how to, with potential universality, separate all elements of consciousness. To count objects is to consider each as separate units. The three apples that make up a cup of applesauce cannot be counted as three anymore. There are endless examples of how mathematics dominantly abstracts relationships of separation, and geometry of spatial separation. Now imagine that consciousness in its essence , and with the same potential universality, represents the opposite or what connects most deeply. Symbols are not mystical tools to discover nature with. They are just inner pointing utencils. Thus mathematics, because of the limitations of what those symbols represent, will not be able to point to consciousness in nature.
Trusting the pointing path of those symbols to blindly – which is what ideologies do - we end up then adopting a worldview that solemnly claims “objectivity” but actually points in a bias away from the very quintessence of our world. What math symbols do point to well and design even better is machines - things made most distinctively of separate parts – thus easily math-defined. Bottom line following this ideology of nature, we then either begin to supplant or impinge what is life and consciousness, and with the opposite principles that really deliver and represent death in nature. We see this with chemical pollution concentrated in supertoxic waste sites that kill all of life and the proliferation of atomic weapons that can do the same.
Our sense of already knowing the core secrets of nature offers a good feeling or sense of a hubris-endowed superior knowledge that ultimately blinds us.
ENVIRONMENTAL RESCUE
Thus to urgently rescue us from both our inner global foolishness and our outer global environment crises we urgently need a what may be called a global mind change or paradigm shift. This means a universal shift in inner perspectives. It is the same as a central or core paradigm shift, one which redirects us from a new core to something universal. Historically there have been very few such shifts One occurred in the transition from the medieval Bible-centered to the present mechanical/ math-centered orientation of our modern times. Imagine we will make the subsequent shift, this time from th math-based view as pinnacle (Principia Naturalis Mathematica) to a consciousness/life based vision.
SPLIT-BRAIN VIEW
In a study of our split brain, this same shift can also be considered a transition from a left-to-right brain dominant view. We can shift from a dominant separative consciousness to a dominant connective consciousness. In the process we can literally reconstruct, transform and revolutionize the whole of our essential vision of the cosmos.
BEING AND BECOMING SUPER-HEALTHY Today was a fun day. I ran a 5K as part of a local American Heart Association fundraiser in about 10 degree weather – it was exhilarating – and we met lots of inspiring people. After the race, I got my blood and circulation checked and the results were exceptional. At age 60, my blood pressure was 98/68, my blood cholesterol was 150 and the body fat was 19%. I neverworry or am in fear of getting cancer, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis. Alzheimer’s or asthma. Why? Because I know the root and deeper principles that both cause and help us avoid those diseases. It is not really guess work. I also don’t feel I am getting older at 60. I am actually getting younger. This past year I have seen some old conditions reversed. This is the result of what I’ve learned of the healing arts as a naturopath and of how to see and understand nature as a whole, as an environmental philosopher. The healing arts are always part of, and reflect a larger posture.
WHERE TO TURN If you don’t know whom to trust, it’s generally best to follow personal examples. I remember meeting Dr. Atkins a few years ago at a health convention. He looked terrible and aged. A few years later he died of a heart attack. If the doctor you are most closely following looks a mess, would you trust his or her advise?
HOW TO REALLY BECOME INCREASINGLY HEALTHY It is important to keep things simple. I advocate no more than four simple approaches to healing. They involve 1) what we take in (nutrition, hydration, air and sunshine), 2) detoxification or getting out all we should, 3) supporting circulation without which both nutrition or detoxification fail to work and finally 4) uplifting our minds, hearts, and consciousness. Of the four, the far most important is to start with a healing of our minds’ understanding (especially larger or broader concepts via a philosophy of healing) and then a healing of our hearts’ feeling. Without any inner transformation, the rest cannot be attained.
MISSION OF THIS BLOG This is why I started working on this blog, to share the best of powerful healing talks, both of my own and in the future of others. I have plans to take this blog to a higher level - and it will happen as surely as the winter passes.
A CHALLENGING TIME This winter has been indeed a challenging time for me. I love to spend lengthy hours posting new materials here on healing talks. My primary income, however, is derived otherwise – from oddly giving tax advise during the short tax season. I do like the fact that this second career choice gives me ample income to pursue other interests throughout the rest of the year. So I may post less during the winter, but I am dedicated to making those few pithy and full of what really stirs and excites me.
ANOTHER CHALLENGE Please note that last month, the server of this blog crashed and the backup didn’t work. We rescued the posts nevertheless. We lost just minor formatting and categorizing and we plan to fix this as soon as we can.
Here is a gist or abstract for a paper entitled Toward a Non-Mechanical Science of Consciousness to be presented at the next 2010 global conference of ASSC – Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. This is pending approval by ASSC. For more information and details on a non-mechanical and non-math-based view of nature, plus a unique and revolutionary philosophy of consciousness and our cosmos, visit our www.raw-wisdom.com website.
PROVOCATIVE TITLE The above title of Toward A Non-Mechanical Science of Consciousness or even a Non-Science of Consciousness seemingly goes against the core thrust of ASSC and allied organizations. It definitely offers a revolutionary thesis that counters some central beliefs of our modern world. No doubt we need a more advanced and non-mystical (not just vaguely and comfortably believed in) view about what consciousness is. It needs to have practical and effective applications that really work to enhance our consciousness. This study, however, has resisted those kinds of results and even with the best of conventional scientific thrusts to fathom exactly and precisely what the essence of consciousness is.
This paper examines the reason why this innate resistance not only exists but has non-accidentally persisted.
AUTHOR’S EXPERIENCE
In his earlier years, the author Nathan Batalion was a math prodigy who at the age of 17 had an high fever that caused his left-brain to shut down. Subsequent decades of deep inner explorations, led him to develop a radically different view of not only the nature of consciousness but of our cosmos as such. He went past his mathematical training and astute knowledge of physics to see through the essential left-brain dominant perspective that supposedly math-bound formulations pointed us to nature’s true essence . He went past the 17th century catapulted ideology of Galileo and Newton or the vision of a solely math-defined/machine-principle-eliciting view of nature and our cosmos.
THUS GOING PAST CONVENTIONAL LABORATORY APPROACHES The distinctive features of a modern laboratory include a converging of measuring tools in order to buttress, reinforce and ever expand this same 17th century ideology of nature. A common assumption of the phrase “toward a science of consciousness” is thus that we need to break down consciousness to conform and fit into this mold. Or we need some breakthrough conventional lab protocol to fathom exactly what consciousness is in a measured way. We may thus study consciousness in the same way we study a geological rock – using precise lab assays or a test tub chemical analysis. We might then reduce the rock to a few chemical components, each delineated by an exact atomic structure. But can we really discover the nature of consciousness by these means – breaking it up into such atomistic parts or something akin? We may employ the very sharpest tools of measurement and/or microscopy to explore this approach and still somehow it has resisted that exploration – and for extremely good reasons.
The resistance, of course, is not what we would expect being “scientists.” We would anticipate our efforts bearing fruit soon – as we use our most exacting and reliable tool for “objective perspectives” and to satisfy peer reviews. However, peer review and peer pressure can be closely related what then engenders still more deeply ingrained cultural bias.
RADICAL THESIS
Here a radical thesis is proposed that we need to escape most of the conventional paths for arriving at a trans-left/right brain dominant, truly impartial, culturally non-tainted, impersonal and/or objective view of what consciousness is.
THE MAIN MISSTEP Back in the 17th century western civilization experienced a hugely revolutionary and dramatic inner transformation. There was a shift from the dominance of the Bible-centered view of the world. This was symbolized by the steeples of churches that rose the highest or assumed cultural dominance. The biblical truths were the organizing core beliefs of the medieval vision. The biblical view was as deeply entrenched then as the math-centered vision that replaced that perspective is now. Civilization, guided by the likes of Galileo, Descartes, Newton aggressively sought to uncover nature-conquering truths that supposedly were more free of beliefs and blind metaphysics than the prior biblical. All elements of consciousness could now be subdued, fully known and reunited into a new order – the purely math-ledand defined. All else was less real or less reliable to lean upon. This lead to a reconstruction of most major fields of knowledge and the transition from medieval religious culture to our modern industrial/commercial world.
AUDACIOUS THESIS GLOBALLY APPLIED
No longer the word of the biblical God, now where math symbols pointed presumably gave us bedrock truths of the “principia” or laws of nature. This very audacious thesis, if right, could help us evolve to heights or if wrong (because it is so universally and aggressively applied) could destroy us. This presumption, nevertheless, was promoted with an unbridled lack of doubt. It manifest in the global proliferation of the fruits of chemistry, physics, biotechnology, pharmaceutical medicine and the centuries-long experiences of our Industrial Revolution.
HEALTH “SIDE-EFFECTS” Galileo, Descartes and Newton naively envisioned a kind of glorious future Utopia evolving out of their ideas, and which was to manifest later with the Industrial Revolution. However, they never vaguely imagined the same future to filled with chemical pollution, atomic weapons proliferation or health pandemics like cancer. It was far from their consciousness to suspect that their ideas might be implicated in such threatening developments. They rather and again, with little self-scrutiny, foresaw blinding progress to be led by the discovery of nature’s “truly objective” laws. Nevertheless we now experience certain “side-effects.” They can be named “side-effects” to make them appear less significant. On the issue of health “side-effects,” we must face the fact that the collective health of our planet’s human population is not improving at present. A generation ago in the US, for example, 2% of children were known to suffered from chronic diseases. Now it is closer to 8%, the figure having quadrupled in just one generation. Cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease are especially pandemic and they are what I call “consciousness diseases.” For example, cancer spreads unnoticed within. Diabetes manifests with neuropathy or lack of feeling, especially of the extremities. A diabetes patient may step on a nail and not feel the penetration. Alzheimer’s disease obviously involves another kind of extreme loss of consciousness. If consciousness diseases are actually growing in our modern world, it becomes obvious that culturally we do not fathom deeply, we have not conquered the knowing of this phenomenon – not via our most conventional, trusted understandings.
ENVIRONMENTAL “SIDE-EFFECTS” From an ecological point of view, we also find ourselves approaching a kind of precipice. Our global collective path is not just energy-wise non-sustainable, it also threatens the extinction of life and therefore the extinguishing of consciousness. Some estimate that in the next 10o years 1/2 of all life forms on earth, plant and animal, will be threatened with extincting. This implies that present trends will continue. The recent wholesale death of bee colonies portends this. Avatar was a film with a script that captured a little of this gist. The integrity of the whole web of life and consciousness on Earth is being threatened on multiple fronts. Something is obviously very wrong which implies our modern knowledge of nature is faulty.
CONCLUSION
This paper assembles potent and piercing ways to challenged, transcend, and replace our conventional, taproot and mechanical understanding of nature. This means we also deeply reorient our understanding of waht is the nature and organization of consciousness within us and in our great universe. Here we thus challenge the depth-validity, integrity and true wisdom of the core of core philosophies of our times, the mathematical, and that just 400 years ago began guiding the formation of our uniquely modern world. So to move toward a genuinely objective science of consciousness we need a different approach.
STATISTICS
The Center for Disease Control in the US has reported that 1 in 100 children have been diagnosed with autism spectrum Disorder (ASD). This is up from 1 out of 150 in 2007. The statistics were 1 out of 5,000 20 years ago. A study conducted by the journal Pediatrics showed similar numbers 1 out of 90 children – and for boys the rate was 1 out of 58. This makes autism the fastest growing disability in the US. It affects more infants than cancer, diabetes, and AIDS combined.
A CONSCIOUSNESS DISEASE It is one of several of what I call “consciousness” diseases. Children who are affected are so-called “self-absorbed” which refers back to the Greek root “autos.” What are autism signs and symptoms? Actually they may not respond in their behavior to various stimuli, make eye contact or hear even their own name. Consciousness is an ability to connect an thus here are the signs of disconnection, loss of consciousness. What is the cause?
OUR MODERN WORLD’S VISION Our modern world has evolved out of the mechanical vision of nature of the 17th century. Its root paradigm is mathematics – the universal abstractions of how to separate all elements of consciousness. As we reorganize nature to fit this paradigm, we end up with synthetic chemicals throughout and an essentially commercial society. The chief problem with that paradigm, as I learned in my younger years, is simply that the essence of consciousness is the polar opposite.
WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS? What is consciousness? It forms a universal relationship of connection. We can thus use the mechanical model to support life’s consciousness only in what I call a double negative way - by helping us avoid the mechanical as in using machines that do mechanical chores. If we instead transform nature to become mechanical, we harm the essence of nature. We pollute and the earth and then our bodies,. Thus a distinctive feature of the modern world is a meteoric rise in consciousness illnesses. This is complete predictable.
A VICIOUS CYCLE
It takes no lab tests to demonstrate this. It is vital to understand that the mechanical worldview points us always back to the modern lab environment for ultimate objective truths. Autism research is thus lab research looking at isolated, separate elements that are mathematized – not the holistic impact of our worldview as a whole. In the lab, everything must be measured to be considered “real.” This always keeps us bound tightly within and promotes the validity of that core and root vision. So there is a vicious cycle we tend to fail to break out of – a very deep spiritual and cultural rut.
WHY THERE IS AN EPIDEMIC
This is why in an age of some of the very highest and most dazzling developments of mechanical things/technology, we still have brutal epidemics of diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and autism – rampant consciousness ailments – and why no chemical drugs ever provide any real cure. Autism therapy and treatments with drugs tend to be disastrously ineffective. They do not deal with the cause of autism. Adding more chemicals to our bodies via drugs makes the pollution intentional, especially when the “medicines” contain heavy metals, like mercury, as in modern vaccines.
SHAMBLES
Our medical care system is a shambles because our understanding is. We are thus not preventing or reversing such disorders via conventional means. We are rather deepy and profoundly misled by core paradigms of nature that are flawed. Our children, and all of us, suffer as a result.
RAW WISDOM We thus need to turn to alternative paradigms, why I found it necessary to evolve a philosophy of raw-wisdom – and means of detoxing ourselves from the effects of our modern world – mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually.
TRANSFORM OUR MINDS AND CONSCIOUSNESS FIRST In my life experience – spanning over half a century - I have noticed how the most ardent and committed environmentalists have been educated in the very same modern worldview as their opponents. Thus a person may have a deep spiritual path, like Buddhism, and which teaches a meditative emptying of minds to past illusions. However, at another level, they still subconsciously buy-in to the dominance of the modern vision, again the math-based, “advanced scientific,” atomic modern worldview. We have been taught this is objective scientific truth about the outer world. This is taught to us in earliest impressionable childhood. Things in nature are thus just so many chemicals put together mechanically
AN APPLE With this in mind, and for example, a simple apple is supposedly, objectively and scientifically made up of about 90% carbohydrates, proteins, fats, sugars and calories (CPFSC). There are also trace mineral elements, vitamins and phytonutrients therein. Please not these are all chemically-defined concepts. They all hinge on the same underlying atomic view of nature. We are told we must see things this way. It is a gospel to calculate our measured ingesting of these CPFSCs or chemically-defined ingredients. Then we can follow this or that diet at will, tweaking the relative percentages and interactions of these chemical elements. This is what virtually every and all nutritionists, dietitians, naturopaths and allopaths – together and as one – tell us, and in a well-meaning way.
THE ILUSION OF TRUTH When there is such total and complete unanimity, the appearance is one of having rock-solid, reliable, peer-reviewed, objective knowledge rather than a culturally-subjective and ingrained view.
ANOTHER WAY TO UNDERSTAND
It is, however, possible to re-understand our foods using what I consider a much better-guiding, more healing and quite different, almost opposite model. Our foods can be said to be whole or processed (heated, chemicallized and cut apart) living or dead, organic or genetically modified. They have certain other key features which are significant in a totally different worldview. A chemical assay tends not to focus on these other aspects. Everything hinges on the worldview’s bias or ideology. Not that we can’t retool our chemical model to become useful. It is just that, in my view, this doesn’t get to the deeper more important core issues. This is why our culture is suffering from what David Wolfe calls a “nutritional holocaust” and which, in turn, relates to growing epidemics of chronic diseases. The conventional model, in my understanding, stands in the way. It’s conventional use makes it harder to see through our deepest illusions to heal ourselves. It reinforces, first and foremost, the root mechanical vision of nature. This is what, at the deepest core level, is misguiding us to destroy our planet. Do we really want to feed this fire? Or should we look for some water to put the fire out?
THE ROOT PROBLEM Imagine that ultimately the mechanical model of nature is the most culpable spiritual problem of our times.we need far more an inner transformation of our own core consciousness. How can we turnaround our environmental crises by looking for causes “out there” or pointing fingers at others, when
Outer environmental pollution will not magically stop until our inner world detoxes first.
BRAIN POLARITY SHIFT The above involves the same as a “brain polarity shift.” It is a moving from a left-brain dominant to a right-brain dominant view. It is a shifting from a separative, math-bound and atomic or material view. The shift is towards seeing of an underlying connected ocean-of-consciousness. The resulting vision is also consciousness and life-centered. This blog offers guidance toward such a shift. We also provide links to many articles and videos on the subject of raw-wisdom.
When we truly empty ourselves of surface illusions (ills of consciousness) we begin to detox the outer world around us. Again as we heal the depths within, we become shining stars and magnetic attractors for the change we want to see everywhere in our world.
If we are serious about reversing some of the main ills of our world, such as environmental pollution and the vast growth in chronic health pandemics, we need to go within for root causes or what needs to be healed
CORECONSCIOUSNESS To detox and heal our core inner consciousness, however, we obviously need to know more about what that “consciousness” is. Trans-personally, I’ve defined “consciousness” several times in this blog as the potentially universal relationship of connection in all of nature. More profoundly it produces what we experience as “life “and it also it holds that life together. We are through the presence of inner consciousness kept whole, alive, and healed. When there is a wound, consciousness travels there in order to heal, to mend it. However, when we violate this connecting consciousness, as in surgically cutting apart our bodies, life is impinged. If we cut a living organism apart systematically it dies.
GOING PAST THE MODERN WORLD VIEW Our modern vision of nature is centrally math-dominated and defined. Chemistry represents one major branch of this dominance. The philosophy of chemistry also began to be globally applied to nature via the introduction of endless modern industrial, health, cosmetic, cleaning and agricultural products. This trend first accelerated in the middle of the 20th and this was thus the time when our environmental problems began to surface. What, pray tell, does one thing have to do with the other – a math-dominated vision of nature with our environmental problems?Mathematics represents the very highest or most universal set of symbols ever used to help separate all elements of consciousness, and with precision to infinite smallness. Since consciousness, however, is defined here as the “potentially universal relationship of connection in nature” – and which also brings out, maintains and returns us to life, a universally separative view is then, by definition, anathema and in opposition to life. In other words, it really involve the polar opposite or the penultimate representative of a death-centered vision of nature. Since visions are working models and not just ideas, they are used to organize our way of living in this world. It then becomes predictable that we increasingly surround ourselves with enveloping toxicity or pollution, denatured environments and wholesale extinctions of life. A universally separative view is hugely wise. It will eventually undermine consciousness with or without being fatal, as when someone takes multiple chemical drugs to make that person almost dead – or walk the halls of a nursing home like a zombie COMPOST HEAP POLLUTION Also when a very large and entirely random mix of chemicals is thrown into a compost heap that supports plant life, this can test the essence of math-designed products in our soils, and by implication, perhaps the underlying worldview. Intentionally we do not test the effects of one or another chemical in laboratory isolation but rather in a medium where life interconnects. There we look at the whole impact. What happens? Plant life that seeks nourishment from the heap now dies. It happens every time in super toxic waste sites. This kind of pollution applies also to water, air, and virtually all other surroundings. The significance is denied. The focus instead is on isolates for profit or separative, lower consciousness. It is not easy to go past some of our very deepest cultural paradigm illusions. When we do, we transform our inner mind and consciousness.
Can we define what is Enlightenment? Is there is clear path to such enlightenment or does it just happen instantaneously? Can there be a whole Age of Enlightenment and are we living in one?
AGE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT We supposedly had such an Age of Enlightenment. What historians call the “Enlightenment Period” traces back to 17th and 18th century Europe. This also overlaps with the Renaissance or again the so-called “rebirth of civilization.” It is in this era that philosophers and thinkers began to introduce certain key ideas underlying our modern world.
SHOULD WE QUESTION THE HISTORICAL ACCOUNT? Was their thinking really all that wise, spiritual and enlightened? Did their cultural influence and impact leave behind a truly enlightened way of thinking, higher reasoning and wisdom? Did their literature offer a lasting guide to becoming more deeply enlightened and wise?
We can review the writings of the luminaries of that era, of Leibniz, Voltaire, Kant, Berkeley, Hobbes and Hume, or Galileo, Descartes, and Newton among others, and one common thread was a sense of excitement. A new worldview had just been born that would supposedly free humanity from the shackles of the medieval era. What really transpired as a result? The Industrial Revolution was born.
A COUNTER-CULTURAL VIEW
I have a counter-cultural view of their guidance being not all that enlightening. The 17th century introduced most importantly a universal math-based vision of nature, the mechanical. This formed the inner ideological foundation for the Industrial Revolution. This best guides us to bringing out the mechanical nature of nature, including via the invention of machines. But does this really connect us with the true depth essence of either nature or our core human consciousness? Enlightenment somehow involves a raising of our consciousness to a higher light.
WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?
This brings up the underlying question: what is consciousness? My view is that it forms the potentially universal relationship of connection in nature. If this is true, then the divine gift of consciousness that living things have is what really connect us to each other and also to all things around us. When an Alzheimer’s patient cannot connect one memory to another, or connect the visual image of a face – even of a familiar loved one - there is an extreme breakdown of consciousness. Thus most importantly, imagine that consciousness is what connects us not only physically and externally but also within. Therefore without that inner consciousness, we would not only not be alive but would start to disconnect at all levels – mentally, emotionally, and spiritually – including with our bodies falling asunder and eventually turning to dust. Again if this view is true, it brings up a very curious dilemma.
THE REVERED SYMBOLS OF MATHEMATICS Symbols are but pointing tools and the symbols of mathematics point us most powerfully to relationships of separation. To count, adding and subtracting, is to see things separately that are so counted.To divide is very obviously to separate something mentally into parts. To multiply is just a reversal of the same.
A CONFLICT AND BIAS So if consciousness is again the potentially universal relationship of connection (potential because there is unconsciousness in the world as well) then guess what? The symbols of mathematics and the resulting worldview point us diametrically and directly away from the same – what is consciousness and life in nature! This forms a worldview bias rather than an objective orientation.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE LOSE CONSCIOUSNESS? When we lose consciousness, it is as if the light within is turned off. We become de-enlightened. Darkness looms within as if a shadow-creating cloud travelled over our heads. The world of a dementia patient is not enlightened. What all of the above ultimately means is that armed with this modern worldview, the mathematical, which the 17th century heralded as the new light for our world,, we can very easily elicit what is really not enlightening, principles of death in nature.
EVER WONDER Ever wonder why we live in an age filled to the brim with unprecedented species deaths? Why is the atomic bomb the invention of high-order mathematics? Or why do we live in an “enlightened” age filled also with unprecedented health pandemics, like diabetes. Diabetes is evidenced by a growing cellular and body unconsciousness or neuropathy. Ever wonder why we have a growing epidemic of Alzheimer’s diseases where again the connectedness of the mind falls apart? As explained in the philosophy of raw-wisdom, there is a deep reason which we critically need to know if we are to become truly enlightened.
CONTINUATION
This is a continuation of an earlier post about seeing a life-centered vision of nature through a right-brain dominant way of seeing. We have a literally split right and a left hemisphere and they tend to see reality differently (unless brought together in a whole brain view). This corresponds to two forms of consciousness that may be united or posed at odds.
TWO ROOT FORMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Bertram Russell once offered two metaphors for understanding out universe – a pail of molasses and a pail of sand. This is reminiscent of the choice between a particle and a wave theory in quantum physics. Which view, the separative or connective, the pail of sand or that of molasses, is the best or the more objective?
CONNECTIVELY DOMINANT
There is no really black and white answer. What I’ve discovered is that the surface/separative appearance of nature is best left-brain described and dealt with. The depth-essence of nature is fathomed with the opposite approach. Raw-wisdom moves only to our awareness becoming more connectively dominant, with the separative view remaining essential but subservient. What all this means becomes clear in the application to the healing arts that bring out life and consciousness from what appears to have little.
RAW VIEW
The right-brain dominant view may also be called the “raw” view or what is concept-naked. This is similar to Buddhism’s emptying our minds to raise consciousness of the oneness in meditations. There is also a second usage of the term “raw” as discussed below.
ROLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Let me first say that the single greatest discovery in my whole and entire life, without exaggeration, has been the central understanding that what is “consciousness” taps into a universal relationship of connection in nature, and thus forms nature’s core essence and depth laws. Universal connection equates with Oneness and thus consciousness also is the foundation of nature’s interconnected view as a whole.
PAIL OF MOLASSES
This is the” molasses view” in contrast to the “pail of sand view” that offers mechanical, atomistic laws for the surface/separative/illusionary appearance view. This overall and right/left brain understanding has a thousand and one implications and powerful applications. The “pail of molasses view” differs fundamentally from the atomic or mathematical view of physics and chemistry again representing the pail of sand perspective. The latter is usually the sole “true” vision we have all been brought up to believe in – except for some traces of religious mysticism.
WHAT WE ARE TAUGHT
In our impressionable years attending primary and high schools, we take in this left-brain-eschewed and authoritative way of seeing reality. We are taught to buy-into an only superficially true and depth false view. Because mathematics represents a “universal symbolism for the separation of all forms of consciousness,” it actually makes no logical sense to apply this view to the depth connections of nature (which are consciousness-based) We want to mostly connect not separate ourselves from an understanding of the whole fabric. Applying the Newtonian vision, we’ve instead put ourselves in a either passively separated or actively clashing stance.
RAWLIFEWISDOM
Because the concentrated presence of consciousness forms life, this bringing out of life and consciousness (especially in the healing arts) is not the same as the bringing out of the mechanical using physics and chemistry. Here we can note that the term “raw” is thus further associated with bringing out what is life and consciousness in ourselves, including by engaging the foods we eat. We thus recommend to others to follow a living foods diet. There is a profound reason to water our seeds (water elicits life and consciousness) or to not cook our foods (fire elicits the destruction of life).
RAISING CONNECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS
Ultimately the healing of our disintegrated visions, the greening of our mind, is what leads us consistently to a healing change in lifestyles. This offers to raise our connective consciousness and is whatrawlifewisdom is all about.
Because healing is a connective or consciousness-building process (see our blog posts on consciousness as a connective relationship in nature) and love is a connective emotion (while hate and fear are separative) – simply by feeling love we help to heal ourselves and each other.
DO WHAT YOU LOVE
We can also do things that we greatly love to do – whether in making money or in our hobbies and art expressions – and all of this can help us heal. This is why partner Melinda has written a book called “Healing Breast Cancer Through the Arts.” The book is not officially published but is just given to friends. We don’t sell it. We offer it in our travels for donations. If you would like a copy click here and let Melinda know you would like a copy.
VOLUNTEER
We can volunteer selflessly to help another, and this too can help each of us heal.
NOT A MIRACLE
It is said that “love works miracles.” But actually whatever love does, it is not really a miracle.
In my prior post, Stopping Environmental Pollution – The FirstWave, I began to explain that this reversal begins with ourselves and deep inside. It is the core of ourselves that expresses and manifests the essence of life on earth.
SEVEN WAVES We thus can begin to heal from deep within and in outwardly growing waves. W can start with the deepest core of ourselves (our mind and consciousness) and then stretch out towards our emotions, then our bodies, then our home surroundings, then our livelihood and other distant social networks and finally our whole relationship to all of nature on our planet and in and throughout the cosmos.
BRAIN POLARITY SHIFT The firstwave is the most critical and because it triggers and determines the shape and force of all the rest. I also tried to express this in that prior post plus that this inner core change involved a “brain polarity shift.” This refers to a shift from left- to right-brain dominance, or from the reign of separative to connective consciousness. Is such a shift possible?
JILLBOLLTETAYLOR, Ph.D. is a brain scientist from Harvard who had a stroke that suddenly shut down her left brain functions This also allowed her to see the world in a more right-brain dominant way. It was like stepping into nirvana for her It got her to a place where she can see the core essence of all of nature as One. We shift from again separative to connective consciousness – and where there is an appreciation of the greater importance of all that is connective, healing, loving and at peace in our lives. It is a life-centered consciousness orientation because the essence of consciousness , at the heart of life, is to connect.
SECOND WAVE – DETOX EMOTIONS
Here our core mind and consciousness shift, from what is “separative” (moving away from an ill/destructive view of nature) to what is “connective” and healing is applied to our emotions. We veer thus to what is loving rather than filled with hate and fear. We develop a sense of inner emotional peace – the feeling of being at one. We harbor compassion, connecting to the life force and emotions of all others and other living creatures. We become giving rather than hoarding. We see ourselves at-One with all of life in the cosmos.
THIRD WAVE – DETOXING OUR BODIES
Once we embrace the inner work of detoxing of our mind, consciousness and emotions, then the next step is to become committed to clear to detoxing, purifying or cleansing our bodies to contain the higher state of consciousness within. The most powerful means to accomplish this are all water-related.
WATER DETOX/HEALING THERAPIES
Water most purely brings life out of a seed. Life is the concentrated presence of consciousness, and consciousness is the potentially universal relationship of connection in nature. Water brings this out, and in the processes detoxes toxins, especially using alkaline water. Water therapies may includes periodic fasting (water and juice), colonics, enemas, and the use of infrared saunas.
All of my writings are essentially attempts to share what I have learned about “seeing beneath the veils” or the surface illusions of life and to better heal ourselves – and more deeply at all levels. Seeing a deeper cause for disease is a part of this.
LOWERED CONSCIOUSNESS
John Tilden, in his Toxemia Explained, apparently made the very famous claim that “alldiseases have onerootcause, toxemia.” Many naturopaths follow this philosophy. My view is this is partly true and party not. A rootcause means, strictly speaking, something so encompassing that it explains the origins of all forms of diseases and at their foundation. Now I can be ill by having my finger cut and then infected. This has nothing to do with toxemia!
HEALING PHILOSOPHY OF RAW-WISDOM
My own healing philosophy of raw-wisdomoffers a different view. Toxins are physical substances that are poisonous. Emotions and thoughts can also be toxic. They all take life, inner light and consciousness out of our bodies. Ultimately it is this taking away of connective consciousness that engenders disconnection, not-being-whole or experiencing disease. This is why Alzheimer’s is obviously a consciousness disease. So is diabetes or where a person can step on a nail and not feel anything due to necrosis in the extremities. Cancer is another dramatically consciousness-depleted disease as it can grow unnoticed to destroy life.
There are further reasons why I uphold this view.
CONSCIOUSNESS DEFINED
At the foundation of the raw-wisdom view is the simple but revolutionary proposition that “consciousness forms a potentially universal relationship of connection in nature.”
IMPLICATIONS
Among the powerful implications of the above unique statement is a direct challenge to the math-based vision of nature that has fully dominated us for four centuries and which supposedly best helps connect our vision and understanding of the cosmos – the philosophy of Newton, Galileo and Descartes. This formed the essentially modern way of seeing nature.
WHY THE MODERN VISION IS CONTRADICTORY
That view is actually and very deeply contradictory. It lacks lacks integrity because of what I will explain in a moment and it points only to surface appearances. The reason is that math symbols uniquely direct us to principles of separation in nature. To count two apples they have to be separate. Make applesauce and you can’t count them anymore. Math symbols are not the mystical tools for God’s plan for nature that Newton assumed and then popularized. This is why those quantitative symbols do direct us to build machines made of separate parts and that are distinctly unconscious. This is also why the modern world is so globally destroying much of living and sentient nature. Ultimately this is why allopathic medicine, grounded in this misguiding worldview, fails to integrally heal with chemical drugs, surgery and radiation – and also points to mostly surface or symptom ameliorations which are not depth-real.
AT THE ROOT OF HEALING
What consciousness does is it c-o-n-n-e-c-t-s our inner being together as one. The presence of consciousness keeps us whole and alive. The absence or loss fosters diseases. Lose more consciousness, and we lose life in the body. The body falls apart then and turns to dust. Thus raising consciousness either by physical or inner means is very integral toall healing. Healing is symbolized by a cut that mends or re-c0nnects – that regains integral consciousness within. But healing can also be engendered simply by educating, by raising the level of insight past illusions and deceptions about things that do not heal but harm our bodies.
ULTIMATELY Ultimately it is a lowering of consciousness that forms the disease process. Each just has a different surface mask. This is also why non-physical approaches like meditation, emotional healing and adequate sleep can further help pull us together or to heal.
HEALING CONSCIOUSNESS
I am considering the task of putting together a book on healing, cleansing and detoxing in seven waves. This was essentially my topic in the talk recently in Waltham, MA. The presentation was well received. The seven waves involve a process of healing and detoxing from the core within and expanding this to encompass the whole of our consciousness – and to remake that consciousness whole.
START WITH OUR CORE
This again begins with the core of ourselves, the state of our mind’s most universal postures to organize consciousness. Here we make a shift from left- to right-brain dominance because of the following. The left brain is skilled at using words, concepts and symbols and when it dominates, it dresses up a sense of reality. It settles in on illusionary ideologies. The right brain oppositely sees consciousness directly, undressed and in the raw.
DIFFERENT WORLDVIEW
If we make this shift, we arrive at, in my experience, a different and more healing worldview than the modern. There comes about a fundamental change in the integration of mind and consciousness at the very core. We move away from the left-brain dominant, math-based and mechanical (unconscious and consciousness-destructive) vision of nature. With the talk at Waltham, I spent nearly half the time speaking about this change, this first wave or the development of raw-wisdom. This is because it is the most critical of all steps and from which all else can proceed. This is similar to the choice of seeds to plant in one’s garden, which then determines, more than anything else, what will grow.
HEAL EMOTIONS, BODY, HOME ENVIRONMENT & CLOSE TIES
The other six waves are simply as follows. We have a healing and detoxing of our emotions, our body, our home environment, close social ties (including immediate family and close friends).
LARGER SOCIAL NETWORKS AND THE EARTH Then we detox or work to heal also our larger social networks (including via right livelihood and a growing sense of community) and finally we work to heal our overall relationship to all of nature.
The result is that we manage to include in the healing process a transformation of the whole of our consciousness or life experience.
WHERE SHALL WE BEGIN TO DETOX OUR WORLD? Ever since Rachel Carson published her classic Silent Spring, the amount of environmental pollution in our air, water, soil and ultimately the cells of living organisms has continued to skyrocket. If trends continue, life on earth may not be sustainable. All of this has continued to occur despite the growth of a vibrant environmental movement which Carson initially triggered in the 1960’s. Some logical questions then arise, such as why past approaches have fallen short and why we have not come up with new strategies that do work to stem the tide of vast environmental pollution?
POINT TO OTHERS: PROBLEMS ARE OUT THERE I have often seen environmentalist point fingers at certain corporate or political “villains” who are supposedly responsible for the larger part of our environmental crises. In other words, they see the problem as out there and certainly outside of themselves. If only we could get the corrupt politicians and executives to change their ways we would all be much better off. If only we could alter the messages of the major corporate media, our world would soon transform. If only we could change the ownership of the means of production, our society would more gloriously progress for the benefit of the disadvantaged. POINT TO SELF: PROBLEMS DEEP INSIDE Here we stop pointing fingers and look instead within. We take personal responsibility and in waves. This means we start detoxing from our innermost core within and then go outward to radiate in all directions towards ever larger circles of influence. This blog and our website raw-wisdom.comoutlines the first such wave – changing our core vision and orientation to nature as a whole, to our cosmos. As long as we all ourselves have not made this innermost shift, the outer world will continue its present non-sustainable course.
WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?
This, first and foremost, happens to be a really vital question, especially when we are trying to help a diabetic person suffering from neuropathy (loss of feeling and awareness in some part of their body), dementia (as with Alzheimer’s patients) and metastatic cancer (where cancers spread silently, unconsciously to kill).
There is a whole movement to try to answer what is consciousness or to develop a real science of levels of consciousness that considers this the “hard question” or the hardest of unanswered riddles of science. Some call this the last major frontier of science. A discovery of what is consciousness will likely be the most significant finding of not only this century but the whole millennium.
WHY PHARMACEUTICALS FAIL TO HEAL The fact that we don’t really understand consciousness or a conscious mind is quite obvious in a typical modern nursing home where over half of the residents over the age of 85 suffer fromAlzheimer’s.
Nobel Prize winning physicists have succumbed to Alzheimer’s, indicating the laws of physics don’t necessarily reveal what is consciousness. Also if you give an Alzheimer’s patient a cocktail of the very “best” pharmaceutical or synthetic chemical drugs, they tend not to work, indicating furthermore that the discoveries of chemistry also appear to fail us. Despite extraordinary efforts of modern science, we continue to have dementia patients walking the halls of nursing homes in zombie-like unconscious states. There is too often a dullness rather than brilliance to their eyes. “No one is at home inside” and to the extent that they may be unable to recognize their children or spouses. But the next miracle discovery in physics, chemistry or genetics may be around the corner about a higher consciousness mind! Without going into details, the current science of what is consciousness is, for me, quite unsatisfying. That emerging science as yet doesn’t help those in greatest need. Therefore if we can regularly effect a turnaround of Alzheimer’s,diabetes and cancer patients’ altered state of consciousness, this becomes an acid test. Personal opinion and ideologies matter less.
TOWARDS A REAL SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS There are several international organizations working “toward a science of consciousness” and I have presented my ideas about what is consciousness at two of these organization’s conferences - one in Tuscon, AZ and the other in Taipei Taiwan. The usual academic approach is to define consciousness scientifically or within a conventional lab-generated understanding, e.g. some reflex reactions numerically expressed or electric and chemical reaction (neurons firing mostly in the brain) or via neuroscience. This tries to define what is consciousness within our most familiar or comforting mechanical models of nature. In my experience, we are going up the wrong alley so that such efforts are doomed to fail.
SINGLE GREATEST DISCOVERY The single greatest discovery of my own life offers a solution to this most stumping problem. It is an answer which, when applied, breaks through what I consider the deepest illusions (breakdowns in the integrity) of consciousness and can thus truly reverse chronic consciousness-illnesses in ourselves, in others, in our society at large and for the benefit of life on our planet. This huge discovery led me to make it a major aim of my life to bring out this understanding. The subsequent applications are again the acid test. Can we take someone from a lower to a higher state of consciousness via a real science? The shocking commentary here is: not within the model of science we currently have. Actually that model stands in the way.
WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?
In my youth I was a math prodigy. Then one day something traumatic happened. No, an apple did not fall on my head! Rather I had a high fever that caused my left-brain to shut down. This was similar to what occurred to Jill Bollte Taylor, a Harvard brain researcher who had a stroke and subsequent left-brain shut-down. For a while I was aphasic or could not talk in whole sentences as the left-brain is both the verbal and the mathematical. For myself from then on, however, I began to study the nature of consciousness as if it was the single greatest urgency of my life. This was because, for a while, I had lost not only typical left-brain skills but all of my inner bearings. I was lost in a new ocean of consciousness without an anchor. Looking fo an anchor I was greatly helped by living in a community called ”The Barn” and which taught me consciousness-observation techniques developed by the Russian philosopher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. After a decade of pursuing such studies or trying to discover “what is consciousness,” I came to unique and independent conclusions. Among these was my deep conviction that consciousness is not just a human-possessed or elite attribute. I saw human consciousness as an off-shoot of the greater consciousness that belongs to all of life on earth an in our cosmos.
Secondly, and still more profoundly, consciousness expressed for me the “essence of nature” – and whether an element of nature appeared to be living or not. When something permeates through and through it forms an “essence,” like brown chocolate forms the essence of a brown chocolate bar. Thirdly for me, consciousness also forms nature’s universal relationship of connection. This is why it can assume the status of being an “eco-essence” as it permeates then throughout. Consider this, if two events are connected, might consciousness be the basis of that connection? Usually we think math-formula-defined or mechanical causality explains phenomena, but math symbols abstract how to separate elements of consciousness. This makes math-defined causality actually illogical, implausible, foolish and even impossible. On a far deeper level, for me it is the phenomenon of consciousness that connects all of nature’s surface appearances, and “together as one” (being a universal relationship of connection). Lastly that same consciousness, when concentrated, brings out the most profound of all natural phenomenon: living organisms or life!
Living organisms then express, display, and bring out nature’s essence, rather than machines displaying, expressing and bringing out mathematical order!
This is a revolutionary and profound shift in visions.
IMPLICATIONS OF THIS REVOLUTIONARY VIEW
There are vastly potent implications to answering the core question, what is consciousness. Here we express a derivative consciousness-centered view of nature or where consciousness thus again is the essence of nature, not what is pictured with math-formulas integrated as one. This is a step beyond the philosophy of panpsychism.
Panpsychism sees consciousness as present within all of nature’s matter, but often as a subordinate attribute of matter or with matter and the mechanical orientation of chemistry, physics, and biotechnology remaining primary. The consciousness-centered view, however, creates an entirely different core understanding of nature. It departs from rather than creates another subsidiary branch of the 17th century-outlined view which was formed via the inspirations of Galileo, Descartes and Newton. It offers again a countering vision to that of chemistry, physics and biotechnology. It does not, for example, focus on atoms and subatomic particles and their interrelationships expressed mathematically nor on genes at the core of each cell. It sees all chronic illnesses as surface manifestations of inner lowered consciousness – especially diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer’s. Thus to reverse such illnesses we re-elicit entirely different natural approaches rather than surgery, radiation and chemotherapy/drugs in order to return us to connectedness, wholeness, and healing.
LIFE-CENTERED
Since living organisms, not machines, are seen as representing nature’s depth-essence, this again forms a evolutionary consciousness andlife-centered vision of nature.
MECHANICAL
Machines then and again no longer bring out or express a “discovering” of nature’s quintessence, nor the related mechanical principles via mathematical formulation as supposedly representing the laws of nature (Newton’s Principia Natualis Mathematica that guided the Industrial Revolution). They rather represent a math-constructed, and actually non-objective, culturally-created ideology for the depths of nature. Because math symbols point us to an exactly opposite essence in a reversal illusionnature simply by being symbols for how to separate all elements of consciousness, it follows then that we can predict unavoidable problems arising, especially with aggressive, self-certain global applications. These problems can be extremely serious. As I see it, they may actually threaten life’s long-term sustainability on Earth. The dilemmas include the development of atomic weapons plus a level of global chemical pollution that yields ubiquitous toxic residues. These can cause, among other things, the present pandemics of cancer.
UNDERMINING CONSCIOUSNESS
Chemical cocktails bring out and represent this mathematical ideology and generally do not support consciousness or life in nature and ourselves. Thus drug-based medical care merely can mask surface symptoms (in lieu of depth-healing) while there is a simultaneous undermining of consciousness.
COMPOST HEAP A compost heap or where all possible plants may be thrown in to disintegrate and later reintegrate to form new living plants, symbolizes an unbroken circle of unity in nature. However, throw in any large random mix of chemicals to test the whole math-based vision which creates synthetic chemicals and the circle is broken. Life in the heap dies. We see this with super-toxic waste sites. Nature’s premier unity is violated. For example, Monsanto’s Roundup is symbolic of the modern thrust that kills what is green around it.
EXTINCTIONS Since the 17th century, we have followed a death-delivering or “thanoptic” vision of nature. The proof is in the pudding. Life extinctions on earth have skyrocketed. It is predicted that half of all species will be dead and gone forever by the end of this century. We are destroying Eden.
HEALTH DECLINING In regard to the healing arts or where healing connects us to wholeness and awakens consciousness, the mechanical approach fails.Thus surgery, which cuts the body apart, is not a true depth-healing/connective modality nor is the prescribing of chemical drugs or radiation. Again the proof is in the pudding as health pandemics (cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and other ailments) are on the rise.
COMMERCIAL SOCIETY A commercial society is one where monetary (math-bound) relationships dominate. It doesn’t matter who owns the means of production, (corporate or socialist rulers), not if they both follow the same essential vision of the 17th century and at the expense of the earth. The underlying worldview has not changed an iota. It is not life-centered. It is not concerned or knowledgeable about what is consciousness to help evolve our lives. At the same time, socio-political relationships have suffered intensely as a result. For example, the single person living alone is now the largest growing social statistic. At the same time the political arenas are ever more corrupted by monetary influences, in capitalist and socialist societies, that have both consolidated and merged their power and influence internally and externally around the globe.
GLOBAL MIND CHANGE
The GREAT NEWS is that we can turn around all our greatest health, environmental, social and politically trends by making a global mind change. This means changing the deepest soul of our culture. Such a change occurred in the 17th century or in the shift from the Biblical to the current math-bound view. This was triggered by the discovery of an externalreversal illusion by Copernicus (helio rather than geo-centricity) and corroborated by Galileo. We really need a similar global mind change.This is because our vision actually reverses, in my experience, the universal essence of nature – life and consciousness – and thereby creates a looming “culture of death” This is not something to take lightly. What is consciousness and derivatively what is life are among the most important if not the most important of all questions to ask in our times. This, therefore, needs to be answered with the greatest of possible knowledge and the deepest of wisdom.
Nathan Batalion, Global Health Activist, Healingtalks Editor
(Healingtalks) When I first started a website called www.Raw-Wisdom.com with Melinda Elliott back in 2008, I wanted to promote a solution-based approach to major planetary problems. I believe our civilization has been following a hugely failing ideology that promotes itself as the truest, most objective (so-called”scientific”) understanding of nature’s essential laws – the mathematical view. It is actually a mechanical/dead view of nature that is a filtering screen for falsely seeing the essence of nature. Having been a math prodigy, at the age of 17 I had the equivalent of a stroke that temporarily shut down the left brain – that which mathematizes – and from the event had the enlightening experience to see how the mathematical view, my prior religion, did not represent a true view of nature’s essence. So I began the difficult task of reconstructing a vision of nature on much firmer ground – one that does not corrupt or illusionize (breakdown the integrity of consciousness) but heals – and where surprisingly the mathematical view introduced in the 17the century misguides us (most especially in the healing arts)
And so I advocate and uniquely outline a different life-and-consciousness centered vision of nature to renavigate all of life experience toward wholeness, being at one with nature, and thereby healed.
DETOXING OUR VISION OF NATURE Ultimately what we really need to detox-the-most what is not in our bodies but in our minds – healing our root vision of nature.
MAJOR PROBLEMS WE FACE Our modern culture must face the fact that half of all the earth’s life forms will soon become extinct unless we dramatically change our ways. The web of life is deeply interconnected, and so our human survival is also really threatened. Furthermore, our social fabric is simultaneously threatened with disintegration. The single person living alone is the largest growing social statistic of our times. Health statistics reveal our medical-care system is likewise failing apart at the seams with persistent and growing global health pandemics – like cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease. Conventional solutions, like “better living through chemistry” have not worked. The GREAT NEWS is that we can turn around all three of these harming trends by transforming the depths of our inner worldview.
HOW TO TURN AROUND OUR MAJOR PROBLEMS Our brains are wired with two main ways of seeing and which may compete for dominance: the left and the right brain ways. One is actually “catabolic” (seeing things systematically apart) and the other “anabolic” (seeing things systematically connected or whole). We critically need both working together, especially to best connect what is seen as separate. However, if the former, “the separative view,” dominates, we end up taking apart what is whole in nature, and thus creating catastrophes.
Unwisely and unknowingly we’ve chosen this former path as our guiding approach to nature. How? Again as a math prodigy, I used to belive nature’s depth essence was mathematical and then became a renegade from that view. for math symbols are the universal symbols of separation. One cannot connect or heal a vision of nature thereby – bringing us into oneness with nature.
In my opinion this root thesis, underlying chemistry, physics. and the commercial nature of our society with which a marriage is made, is the greatest of vision-mistakes ever made. It is a dominantly catabolic or left-brain approachdominant to nature – what looks only at surface or surface-separate appearances and thus is illusionary. It is the chief cause underlying what now threatens, more and more, our environment as well as our social and inner health ecologies.
This is why an allopathic system of medicine, based on the prescribing of drugs, radiation and genetic modifications – oblivious to organics – causes a shambles of the medical arts and ends up being but a disease-care system for profit.
CONCLUSION
I thus try to offer in this blog some exciting, nowhere-else-to-be-found directives to see the deepest of deep flaws and illusions of our current culture – and to then effect a rescuing and revolutionary global mind change. I want to attract others, young and old, to our online and physical Raw-Wisdom community – to join us in envisioning this fundamental change, and thus creating a truly progressing and healing world – a real progressive heaven rather than non-sustainable movement and to hell on earth, the healing and nurturing rather than destruction and extinction of life – and as the main legacy we leave behind for all of life on earth, for ourselves, and for all future generations.
Raw wisdom is a revolutionary view of the essence of nature, shifting from the mechanical, machine-like and dead view to an oppositely life-centered vision – and to turnaround our major planetary ecological, social and health crises. It also involves a certain “pun” in using the term “raw.”
RAW-WISDOM
First the “raw” view refers to how our right brain sees naked of conceptual illusions. What is sees is an ocean of consciousness, the opposite of the left-brain separative view that gravitates to an atomic, mathematical understanding. Bertram Russell once contrasted this with two metaphors – the pain of molasses and the pail of sand vision of nature. Which is more true.
What I have discovered is that the surface appearance view or “maya” supports the separative, left-brain dominant kind of vision while a depth-perceptive right-brain dominant view is the oppositely more connective view. Our alternative use of the term “raw” is thus explained below and in this context.
ROLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Let me first say that the single greatest discovery of my entire life, spanning more than half a century, has been simply the understanding that what we experience as “consciousness” is really a tapping into a universal relationship of connection in nature, and this also forms nature’s core essence – its true “soul.” It also forms nature’s real rather than surface-illusionary laws. This is also the” molasses view” in contrast to the “pail of sand” view of nature. This differs profoundly from the mathematical orientation of physics and chemistry or we are all brought up with an yielding the centrality of an atomic focus. Because mathematics represents the “universal symbols for the separation of all forms of consciousness,” it really makes no rational sense to construct our dominant vision of nature out of mathematical patterns because laws are intended to connect and not separate profoundly our understanding of the fabric of events. Real causality is what deeply connects not separates events, why billiard ball mechanical laws do not describe depth-causality in nature. Sorry, Galileo and Newton, by in my experience you got it all wrong! What we think is the sanest of sane views, is actually not very sane. That we later pollute our world and create threatening atomic weapons should not come as a surprise.
RAWLIFE WISDOM
Secondly because the concentrated presence of consciousness forms life, bringing out what is life and from the bosom of nature and rather than bringing out – so-called “discovering” the mechanical and thereby designing and creating machines or factory-farming, etc) is a critical choice we can make. Here we can note that the term “raw” in the natural healing arts is often associated with living foods, and raw-wisdom is thus all about a raw life-centered as well as a raw or ideologically naked vision of nature – explaining finally the dual punning use of the term “raw.”
(Healingtalks) If life force is not even something real but all that occurs is reducible to a chemical/mechanical reaction, then we might not need anything more than the burning of calories. Our bodies are then like machines that just burn fuel. Our food elements are then all chemically defined – just carbs, sugars, fats, and proteins defined by mathematical descriptions (as chemicals).
Life Force Is Not Something Mechanical
But suppose there is such a thing as “life” and our life force and that this involves our consciousness.
Life’s foundation is rooted in this consciousness. Watch the video Planet Earth that shows the countless and awesome faces or species of life on Earth. They are all sentient. Every living being – from the tiniest nano-bacteria to the largest dinosaurs – exhibits awareness. They all act differently than what is mechanical – like telephone answering machine that have no recognition of the difference between a ferociously angry and a happy voice.
What is Consciousness
I have long advocated that consciousness is not an exclusively human attribute. It is rather represents a trans-personal, trans-human principle in nature – and forms the root universal relationship of connection in nature. Consciousness forms what connects everything. When concentrated, consciousness self-organizes life.
Focus on Bringing Out Life and Consciousness
If not naturally supported and elicited, we see but barren and dead landscapes. Suppose we want to bring out more, not less, of this life and consciousness in and at the core of nature. How do we go about it? Let us not turn to the chemical/mechanical model that brings out the opposite and ends up polluting and causing extinctions. That view actually misdirects our consciousness. Why? This is a long discussion. Without explaining why, we still can see simple the aftereffects – as with our modern, drug-based, allopathic medical approach that is wholesale failing to heal chronic ailments.
Bring Out Life and Consciousness With Raw Food Diet
One way to really bring out aliveness and healing is by eating life-enhancing foods. This refers to raw and living foods, especially greens. What exactly is in those foods that carry more life force? This turns out of be something akin to the sap of a tree and the blood of our vessels. It is the alkaline juices of fruits and vegetables. But why one might ask?
Why Add Juices?
A plausible answer is that if life is grounded in the presence of consciousness, and consciousness forms this awesome universal relationship of connection. What is most connective in our bodies, and in all of nature, should then contain that consciousness and life force. What is most connective turns out to be liquid rather than solid (solid separation). You can see this when you let go of a drop of water into a vast ocean. It reconnects with the whole. The separate identity of each drop disappears. If you bump two solid balls together (studying what is mechanical motion ) the two remain fully separate and do not connect except superficially by bumping surfaces together and against each other. This is why we use juice and green blended diets in therapeutic, life-enhancing ways.
Why Green Juices and Blends?
Green is the exact middle color of the rainbow, generally the most neutralizing, alkalizing and connective. We can see this in the laws of radiant light, or where the opposite colors of red and blue-indigo of the rainbow are pointed together with the middle color green, and whereupon the green pulls the two farthest color separations or far opposites together to remake white, color-separation-less or unified light. This is akin to what happens with drops of water, and water brings out the rainbow.
A Life-Centered Worldview
Such is part of the real, not a mystically imagined, order of nature – focusing on what is connective, conscious, and life-enhancing. This picture of a universe re-understood using life- rather than death- centered principles represents a revolutionary and rescuing global mind change.
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(Healingtalks) The cosmology of many American Indians is filled solely with images of plants and animals because they had a living vision of the essence of nature. We have instead moved instead to a dead, machine-like, mechanical vision of nature.
This impacts every aspect of our lives…. especially our foods.
Living foods with enzymes
I have the great respect for Ann Wigmore, one of the founders of the raw food movement. One of the things she advocated was that we should eat living foods primarily for their life-enhancing enzymes. These enzymes aide digestion. They also speed up countless chemical reactions in the body. If you heat a food over 11o degrees or more, the enzymes tend to die.
Because of life in our foods
There is life in our foods symbolized by enzymes but also permeating throughout, as long as raw foods are not heated to high temperatures. If you roast an almond and plant it in the ground, for example, it will not grow an almond tree.
Not Reducible to Math/Mechanical Explanations
It has been my philosophy of life that life itself is at the core of nature, making up the interior essence of the world we live in – an essence brought out by living things. The conventional philosophy of nature’s essence is that it is mathematical, an essence brought out or displayed by the invention of machine. But to me math symbols are not infallible tools to discover nature’s essence. To me this is the most powerful of misguiding visions. Why? Because they simply put, symbols are pointing tools and math symbols point to universal relationships of separation in our consciousness. We cannot best connect a vision when point to patterns of separation in nature. The number one is the universal separate whole. Count three apples and then make apple sauce with them. Afterwards you can no longer count them because they are not any longer separate.
Living Almond Tree
Math-designed things, like machines, tend to be dead
This because at the core of life is consciousness. What is that consciousness? For me it is a universal relationship of connection. I am conscious of something means I connect with it. But math symbols point oppositely! They thus would have the bias of pointing us away from what is life!
Chemical analysis (reducing nature to mathematics) will tell us there is no difference between a dead roasted almond… and a living non-roasted almond.
They just have the same potassium, calcium, magnesium and so on – and we are supposed to believe that that is all there is to nature.
A Life-Centered Understanding
There is a different way of looking at things, including the food we eat.
When we cut any whole food apart , some aliveness is thus lost. This is again because life is the concentrated presence of a conscious, thus whole organism, plant or animal.
Ultimately it is HUGE intellectual mistake to reduce life thus to mechanical (separate machine part-like or math-like) principles – the very principles whose universalization now threaten life on our planet. It is not accidental that Alzheimer’s patients routinely walk the halls of nursing homes like zombies after being given multiple synthetic chemical drugs that are math-designed.
Oh but some a new chemical cure is just around the corner to heal Alzheimer’s disease! Thus we fool ourselves into believing, following the modern ideology of nature. Actually we need a more enlightened understanding to uplift those who have fallen, including the Nobel Prize winning physicists and chemists who have died with Alzheimer’s disease. That fact, in itself, is very telling.
Why Consider Turning to a Raw Living Food Lifestyle
