Tag Archives: Consciousness

Truce Talks at the Border Between Science and the Spiritual

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Volume 4, Issue 3

As science releases its restrictive thinking clamps, what then remains if anything of the supposed war between science and religion?

In our last conversation here, I explained that I see the “spiritual” as being historically the same domain as all inner experience, the same as consciousness. In my view our race began with this identity in mind across psyche, soul, personality, nous, and all the other terms that today we have separated into:

  • a grouping that is recently again accepted by science (the conscious mind) plus
  • a grouping that is largely ignored (the experiential dimension, which does not care how the underlying brain mechanics work but focuses on what it feels like from the inside and what options the conscious mind has in order to do something about its experiences), plus
  • a grouping that science has sniped at for centuries, which is the connection/relationship between the individual and divinity.

Of course it’s the divinity part that reductionist science has objected to. Occam’s Razor being itself only a heuristic hypothesis for reducing complexity to its minimum, is of course reflective in the end of a mere aesthetic preference for “elegance” over “complexity”. The Universe might not have the same aesthetic.

However, once science accepts the first grouping — consciousness as an actual reality phenomenon — where is the ground for science saying that the overall Universe might not itself be conscious the way we are? It is illogical to assume that consciousness exists but that it is somehow impossible for it to reside in places where some of us might not suspect.

Once you allow that proposition, then it is a very small further step to my Theory of the Conscious Universe, which is set forth in my upcoming book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That. All you have to add are the following premises:

  • Attention is one of the pivotal dimensions of consciousness.
  • Each of us present day Earth humans is living at a time of overwhelming information overload, maximizing the challenge to our newly-developed brains to pay attention to what is most important and not be distracted by mere distractions (Acceleritis).
  • Our minds operate by processing information.
  • The substrate hardware on which this information processing runs is the brain and nervous system in the matter realm, which corresponds to the operations and functions we sense through our experiential layer — our consciousness or spirit.
  • As with computers, our minds have certain processing power based on the underlying hardware and also on the degree of self-referential organizing we have done from within the experiential layer.
  • It is not only possible but likely that minds with far more processing power than present day Earth humans exist in the multiverse.
  • One can conceive of a mind with so much processing power that it can pay even more attention that an Earth human possesses, to each of more than one humanoid.
  • Amping up the latter point to virtual infinity there could be One Mind with enough processing power to be the sense of self within each of us, i.e. living through all of us simultaneously, with enough attention allocated to each of us to handle our experiences on Earth.

The spiritual methodologies from Yoga to Christian meditation to Sufism to the Jewish laying of tefellin and so on are all aimed at the cleansing and purification of automaticities we’ve purposely or accidentally set up as programs within us (brain and mind). Free of such programs, the awareness of our identity with the One Divinity becomes palpable.

Once this is understood, there is no reason for there to be any war between the spiritual and science. Hallelujah!

To be continued!

My best to you all,

Bill

Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe: Imagine That, coming soon.

For those interested in my work in the media business world you might want to check out this collection of videos.

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

We Suddenly Know What Heaven We’re In

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Volume 4, Issue 2

In his song “Begin the Beguine”, Cole Porter describes that miraculous moment in time when you really experience being in a heavenly realm, even though you are still on Earth. It is one of the higher levels of the Flow state.

Lovers can sometimes shift into that place together, as if tuning across to a parallel universe of bliss just a dimensional twist away from this universe where we assume a defensive stance against endless trials and challenges whose humor we can no longer see. Rarely are the lovers intending that shift consciously, although Tantric Yogis populate much of this rare group.

Just as often it is one person alone making the shift. Again it occurs by itself without conscious intent sometimes, though great numbers of people on Earth engage in practices long ago discovered to have the effect of potentiating and bringing on that state and other levels of Flow. Yoga is the science of those practices, its purpose being the realization within inner experience of connection with divinity.

Yoga, from Sanskrit, means to yoke up, as an ox is yoked up to a wagon, or an attention node of the One Consciousness is consciously yoked up to the whole of which it is a part. The corresponding linguistic root in Latin is religare (verb), or religio (noun), meaning to bind, very similar semantically with the additional connotation of a debt or duty to repay righteously. All religions are forms of practice designed to accomplish this shift in inner state. These inner states actually exist, as has long been obvious to common sense, and as is now beginning to be validated by the skeptical reductionist science dominant in Earth thinking for the last four centuries.

The word “religion” today is not as useful in a conversation like this as it might have been. Organized religions have let people down on too many occasions due to corruption and wars and torture and molestation and God knows what else that is the obvious opposite of what religion must stand for if and when pure. The subtext of the word is therefore poisoned with that long history of going off course. The term I prefer to use as a result of that baggage is “Spiritual”.

I use the word “spiritual” in the context of the classical perspective that within what we can perceive of the whole of reality, there are two palpable aspects: matter and consciousness. We experience both and therefore common sense accepts that both exist. The remaining question is simply, “What is the relationship between these two aspects of reality?”

In that context, “experience”, “consciousness”, and “spirit” all mean the same thing to me. They are the names of the domain of reality that is not matter.

More about these thoughts — the levels of Flow state, the meaning of the spiritual levels of Flow, the practices of yoga and other spiritual methodologies, the meeting ground between the spiritual domain and science — in our next exciting installment.  🙂

My best to you all,

Bill

Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe: Imagine That, coming soon.

For those interested in my work in the media business world you might want to check out this video. Or this collection of videos.

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

What Is Humor?

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Volume 3, Issue 50

Like life itself, and consciousness, love, oneness, even Flow state, and so many other things we take for granted just because of long familiarity, have you ever stopped to wonder what is this weird sound-and-breath spasm thing we do sometimes? Laughing, I mean. What is that?

Feelings are one of the best clues to meaning. The meaning of any moment is most easily extracted from our feelings at that moment and in retrospect. Moreso than logical analytics alone.

(Side Note: The mind/body/spirit is in Flow state when all the detector and effector functionality is optimized together, feelings and intuition and analytics and perceptions and actions are not abstracted from one another, and inside/outside subject and object are one flowing process. A Oneness Singularity.)

What are the feelings associated with this bizarre phenomenon we take for granted? Laughing, that is.

We are pleased when we laugh, it’s fun, and it is an expression of at least momentary happiness, even if we do it ruefully during a negative feeling context.

Sometimes laughter is joy expressing itself bubbly and uncontainable, as when a child takes off on his first flight on a sled.

Humor is the intentional or unintentional causation of laughter. Of course the standup learns that sometimes it is the intention to create laughter without the fact of it.

Once we discovered that we liked this involuntary spasm (as we like orgasm, another preferred spasm, whereas we dislike and fear most spasms we experience) we began to purposely try to evoke it as much as possible under whatever circumstances befall us.

Laughter and orgasm may be related in ways we don’t know yet.

My dry cleaner is a comedian. Everything he says is intended to make you laugh. At least it makes him laugh, which is definitely a healthy thing. Good spasms are healthy spasms.

In the case of humor, sometimes our laughter expresses relief. The butt of the joke is being ridiculed, and since we are not the one getting the ridicule, we are relieved. Yet ridiculousness, related to ridicule, appears to be at the center of all humor.

When I have fallen from Observer state, I often get back up by realizing that if I can’t see the humor in the situation, I have clearly lost perspective. “These are the jokes,” I remind myself.

Enjoy this moment. And now this one.

Be prepared to laugh.

If you’re already smiling, you’re already prepared.

Wishing you laugh-filled days and nights,

Bill

PS – Top copywriter and genius Ed Ney of Young & Rubicam fame has moved on to the next classroom. Read his speeches and yours will be even better than they’ve been. Like Erwin Ephron, Ed used short pithy memorable sentences packed with meaning and impact, condensed intelligence and insight. Much to unpack. Rhythmic to the mind. Ed had been a reader of this blog. Treasured like all of you. So long, Ed, see ya. Somewhere somewhen down the long and winding.

Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe. Imagine That, coming in February.

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

How to Increase Your Luck

Volume 3, Issue 49

The flock of wild turkeys walks past my window facing the river, heads bobbing forward and back, through the light snow drifting down. Today, whatever guides me to decide to write about a specific thing in these posts has assigned me the subject of luck. My mind, like the snow, drifts through kaleidoscopic memories, recent ones of remarkable luck my two startups seem to be having, and for some reason, a particular moment one day in 1975.

A young lady let’s call Sue regards me as her spiritual coach and is ever eager to ask me questions, which I am happy to answer. Her pattern though is to guess at the answers as I am midway through the first sentence of an answer. I’ve patiently indulged her in this for some months. At times she appears to be reading my mind and at other times just wanting to be the smart one, making ridiculous statements, and I’ve woven whatever she says back into the conversation, playing Socrates and maintaining my own self-amusement. But on this particular day something happens that’s clearly out of the ordinary.

She has asked a question, I have started to answer it, and she interrupts. However, as she speaks, there is a crash of thunder. The sky is cloudless and there is no prediction of rain. She smiles and starts again, and again the thunder interrupts her. This time she waits and looks around kiddingly, seconds go by, and then I go back into giving my answer. She waits only a moment before interrupting, and again the thunder overrules her. This goes on for some time. The exact concurrence of the thunder with her interruptions is unbelievable — the explanation of the concurrence as a random coincidence being the unbelievable part. Somehow when I speak there is no thunder, and when she interrupts, there is.

When these strange synchronicities occur, as they do billions of times a day around the Earth, something has changed the odds. Luck — good or bad depending upon one’s point of view — is not a constant. Some kind of energy has changed the probabilities of things. Like the way the value of pi is theorized to change near a large gravitational source. In my observation, a person in Flow state appears to increase the probability of synchronicities.

Philosophy seems so impractical when one is living through a period of Acceleritis. As if the preconscious mind is saying to itself, while choosing among flitting mental impulses as to which ones to shine the bright light upon, “Cogitating about the nature of reality would be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic — I’ve got to stay grounded in fielding all this incoming traffic.”

Unfortunately that’s a suboptimal procedure. The nature of reality has a very practical significance in every decision we make. Putting aside learning about the nature of reality is like deciding to keep playing a game without learning the rules, or like trying to win at cards without taking the trouble to keep track of which cards are already out.

In these posts and in my new book You Are The Universe I have laid out the case for strongly suspecting that consciousness is not a rare happenstance in the universe, but rather the essential nature of every part of it. This (some would say just accidentally) happens to explain the observer effect in quantum physics and relativity, and why Charles Tart’s objective statistical analyses of paranormal phenomena shows that the occurrence of telepathy, precognition, and remote sensing are statistically significant and the odds of a random explanation are billions to one. My theory also explains why sometimes our hunches are uncannily accurate, and explains the highly unlikely synchronicities that happen all the time.

Our culture makes us think that we are alone in our minds, whereas if my theory is correct (I am betting my life on it) we are all pseudopods of one mind, and hence anything but alone. There is a higher level of significance to everything that happens to us, and we are in a constant interactive game of life with a higher part of ourselves, the overall universe in which we are not a separate ball-bearing rattling around in a disparate box, but rather a morphing feature on the apparent surface of one Whole.

What luck is, then, is not a Monte Carlo procedure of random chance, but only appears that way because we do not understand all the purposes and causes impinging on every outcome of every action.

I feel intuitively certain that the next step for science is a subtle shift in point of view that will make everything fall into place, and will lead us to discover new ways of tapping into energy fields that will yield so much power that we can all afford to live like kings and queens. With his magnifying transmitters, Tesla had the start at a system of converting the Earth’s rotational magnetic energy into electricity — free to the masses. That was electromagnetism, one of the four fundamental forces, and perhaps all four can be tapped into in an analogous way. Will consciousness play a role as a fifth force in future technologies involving energy fields, not unlike the way the observer influences the outcome of quantum experiments?

Wishing you all luck that you consider extraordinarily good. I recommend objectively testing whether such “positive” luck can be attracted by flowing helpfully with every implied or explicit request that anyone makes of you. And that you dissect whatever appears to be “negative” luck so as to detect what the universe seems to be guiding you toward. I’d love to hear how your testing comes out — I do read your Comments, though most come by email.

Happy, lucky Chinese New Year!

Best to all,

Bill

P.S. Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe. Imagine That, coming in February.

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.