Having demonstrated some ideas pertaining to perception and consciousness briefly in recent blogs, I would like to take the chance to draw on some valuable footage that seems to remain on the late David Joseph Bohm (20 December 1917 – 27 October 1992), who was a U.S. born British quantum physicist who made significant contributions in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy and neuropsychology, as well as to the Manhattan Project.
Within this interview he lucidly describes how consciousness intertwines with aspects of the Universal whole, notes that human perception dictates how We perceive events that occur around us (as was discussed in Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle” vs “Make A Single Point”), AND how the “Whole” behaves like “Independent Parts” and vice-versa i.e. an idea that I have touched on many times before while discussing the Fractal Nature of the Universe in which We live.
He also draws pertinently on how a collage of World Views (particularly one that blends Eastern Philosophy with Western Science/Empiricism) will help humanity, as a Whole, posit a better understanding about how reality functions and, as a direct result, how We function within this reality… No doubt, once We have a more accurate understanding about our own position within this Universe, We will be able to function better and live in a mindful, peaceful, sustainable and ecological manner, here on planet Earth.
About David Bohm:
In 1950 David Bohm wrote what many physicists consider to be a model textbook on quantum mechanics. Ironically, he has never accepted that theory of physics. In the history of science he is a maverick, a member of that small group of physicists-including Albert Einstein, Eugene Wigner, Erwin Schrödinger, Alfred Lande, Paul Dirac, and John Wheeler–who have expressed grave doubts that a theory founded on indeterminism and chance could give us a true view of the universe around us.
Today’s generation of physicists, impressed by the stunning successes of quantum physics–from nuclear weapons to lasers-are of a different mind. They are busy applying quantum mechanics to areas its original creators never imagined. Stephen Hawking, for example, used it to describe the creation of elementary particles from black holes and to argue that the universe exploded into being in a quantum-mechanical event.
Bucking this tide of modern physics for more than 30 years, Bohm has been more than a gadfly. His objections to the foundations of quantum mechanics have gradually coalesced into an extension of the theory so sweeping that it amounts to a new view of reality. Believing that the nature of things is not reducible to fragments or particles, he argues for a holistic view of the universe. He demands that we learn to regard matter and life as a whole, coherent domain, which he calls the implicate order.
Most other physicists discard Bohm’s logic without bothering to scrutinize it. Part of the difficulty is that his implicate order is rife with paradox. Another problem is the sheer range of his ideas, which encompass such hitherto nonphysical subjects as consciousness, society, truth, language, and the process of scientific theory making itself.
The son of a furniture dealer, Bohm was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1917. He studied physics at the University of California with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Unwilling to testify against his former teacher and other friends during the McCarthy hearings, Bohm left the United States and took a post at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. From there he moved to Israel, then England, where he eventually became professor of physics at Birkbeck College in London.
Bohm is perhaps best known for his early work on the interactions of electrons in metals. He showed that their individual, haphazard movement concealed a highly organized and cooperative behavior called plasma oscillation. This intimation of an order underlying apparent chaos was pivotal in Bohm’s development.
In 1959 Bohm, working with Yakir Ahronov, showed that a magnetic field might alter the behavior of electrons without touching them: If two electron beams were passed on either side of a space containing a magnetic field, the field would retard the waves of one beam even though it did not penetrate the space and actually touch the electrons. This ‘AB effect” was verified a year later.
During the Fifties and Sixties Bohm expanded his belief in the existence of hidden variables that control seemingly random quantum events, and from that point on, his ideas diverged more and more from the mainstream of modern physics. His books Causality and Chance in Modern Physics and Wholeness and the Implicate Order, published in 1957 and 1980, respectively, spell out his new theory in considerable detail. In the Sixties Bohm met the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, and their continuing dialogues, published as a book, The Ending of Time, helped the physicist clarify his ideas about wholeness and order.
To see where I sourced the above information from, please click here.
OR… To simply find out more about David Bohm and what he got up to while he was here on Earth, please click here.
Wise Holy Men
December 1, 2009
Word spread across the countryside about the wise Holy Man who lived in a small house atop the mountain. A man from the village decided to make the long and difficult journey to visit him. When he arrived at the house, he saw an old servant inside who greeted him at the door. “I would like to see the wise Holy Man,” he said to the servant. The servant smiled and led him inside. As they walked through the house, the man from the village looked eagerly around the house, anticipating his encounter with the Holy Man. Before he knew it, he had been led to the back door and escorted outside. He stopped and turned to the servant, “But I want to see the Holy Man!”
“You already have,” said the old man. “Everyone you may meet in life, even if they appear plain and insignificant… see each of them as a wise Holy Man. If you do this, then whatever problem you brought here today will be solved.”
A Pertinent Interview With George Monbiot
November 28, 2009
Damn it’s getting hard! What with being in these times when I’m doing everything I can to cut my carbon emissions, lower the environmental impact that my actions are having on the world and its ecology, as well as seeding new patterns of behaviour in my own mind and being… I’m also becoming so aware that many people are taking my new behaviour personally.
While I actually don’t push my views into people’s faces (I just usually go about my day meditating on these new modes of greener living, and then let them naturally filter into actions that work in line with my own ecological awareness and sensibilities)… I have now noticed that when people, friends and family now come over to visit or stay, they observe these new “unorthodox” patterns that have crept into my life, and they ask me “why?” To which I usually answer honestly, mentioning that I am doing my best at directing the whole of my being into “new” daily routines that translate into a greener, more sustainable way of life for everyone. And when I say this… I notice a mild shock, a sort of horror, that seems to strike in most of their hearts… And with it, I witness their facial expressions change into a protective mask of, “Seriously, it’s really not that bad now, is it!?”
And when I say I think it is… Then comes the protective rambling about their own usual routines i.e. not composting, not growing their own vegetables, shopping at those big super market chains, walking around at home in winter dressed only in bermuda shorts with the heating on full blast, forgetting to do the recycling, using the car to drive to the corner shop that’s only a five minute walk away, etc, etc… And how that even if they did change, it might not actually make enough of a difference, because so many other people just can’t be bothered to change… And I just listen to this, while I throw the tea bags into the composter and add the milk that I bought from the local dairy farm that I now cycle to, which is only a few miles down the road… Thinking all the time, “Am I overreacting?”
BUT… In truth… I honestly don’t think I am overreacting in the slightest!!!
I know I’m not perfect… So don’t get me wrong. I’m well aware that it is not necessary to change… And I know that survival is not mandatory. But I can’t deny the way the Tao operates and flows. And I know that there will be hard times ahead for the 7 billion of us here on Earth. I am a scientist… And I have put the facts and figures together. But more than that, I know we live in a universe that relies on an affine self-similar mode of evolution that is created by chaos, which creates cycles of abundance and dearth… And from these periods, new patterns and modes of being come into play so that we may survive and live on. Change is the only certainty that we can be totally sure of… It is eternal. Darwin’s natural selection is deeply ingrained in this process, as many of us know. However we, as a global population, have not acknowledged the truth of these processes, let alone properly grasped the intricate workings of our environment and our own minds, which allow us to perceive these changes (OR NOT, as the case may be)… Processes, that when grasped, will demonstrate how our current states of being are not really sustainable in the slightest… Why can’t we see this? Probably because we haven’t properly appreciated the patterns of the past directly, and thus feel these cycles are still some type of fantasy that might not actually be true… Or even worse, that they don’t apply to us, what with our technology and current abilities… Too be honest, I don’t really know.
BUT… I have studied population biology extensively… And in doing so, I have seen the intricate workings of its mechanistic and cyclic flow… For those that don’t know… Population biology illustrates the deep structure that underlies the apparent confusion in the surface behavior of chaotic systems. It’s like looking at the phase spaces of seemingly random pattern that might occur in a system, and seeing a hidden structure emerge, as we do with Lorenz Attractors. Some animal populations exhibit a boom-and-bust pattern in their numbers over a period of years (as human populations have). In some years there is rapid growth in a population of animals, followed by a bust created when the population consumes all of its food supply and most members die from starvation. Soon the few remaining animals have an abundance of food because they have no competition. Since the food resources are so abundant, the few animals multiply rapidly, and some years later, the booming population turns bust again as the food supplies are exhausted from overfeeding. This pattern, however, can only be seen if much data has been gathered over many years… And as humans haven’t properly observed their own cycles of civilization, we haven’t, as a whole, seen that these rules actually apply to ourselves too. Yet this boom-and-bust pattern has been seen elsewhere, including in disease epidemics. Large numbers of people may come down with measles, but in falling ill, they develop antibodies that protect them from future outbreaks. Thus, after years of rising cases of measles, the cases will suddenly decline sharply because so many people are naturally protected by their antibodies. After a period of reduced cases of measles, the outbreaks will rise again and the cycle will start over, unless a program of inoculation is begun.
This self-similar pattern is part of the divine universal flow… This is part of the Tao. If we are to honestly flow with the Tao, and see the “slinky-spring” relationship between cause and effect i.e. how change does NOT always yield immediate effect, but it rather takes time to catch up with our current actions… Then we might actually come to know and see that the effects from these current modes of being are still manifesting in the intricate chain of cause and effect. It’s not hard to understand… It really isn’t! Science, Buddhism and telecommunication have in essence supplied them to us on a silver platter… One only has to have the inclination and curiosity to see that these modes and patterns have already been proved time and again in all the scientific research currently documented… And it has been documented with much accuracy. But only a few of us have grasped this pattern, and even fewer are bringing it into our lives currently. And fewer still know them deeply enough to understand them properly, and be able to talk about them authoritively…
Thus… I want to drop in this blog a great interview with the man George Monbiot. For I feel, out of all the journalists spinning the green weave, this man truly has done his homework and so speaks it just like it really is…
About George Monbiot:
George Joshua Richard Monbiot (born 27 January 1963) is a British writer, known for his environmental and political activism. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books, including Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (2000) and Bring on the Apocalypse: Six Arguments for Global Justice (2008). He is the founder of The Land is Ours campaign, which campaigns peacefully for the right of access to the countryside and its resources in the UK.
To visit George’s website, please click here.
What Was The Beginning Of It All?
November 26, 2009
While I was watching a film the other day, I happened to come across a quote at the end among the credits… And having read it, I found that it touched a deep resonant chord within me about the nature of our reality and Being… And from this “chord” posited a beautifully simple, yet wondrously elegant, understanding about why We came into being…
For… When given the chance to do something… Surely it is in our nature to do, rather than not? Probability is everything… And as chance sometimes provides that possibility, so atoms take a chance on complexity, coming together in a gradually evolving divine countenance of planetary habituation… A habituation that many of us still see as “every-day” Life.
Perhaps as and when we choose to depart from this mundane acceptance of existence, and clearly stride towards a better realization of self, we might begin to See and understand what it is that Sri Aurobindo talks of here…
Sri Aurobindo (Aurobindo Ghosh) (August 15, 1872 December 5, 1950) was an Indian nationalist and freedom fighter, poet, philosopher, and yogi. He joined the movement for India’s freedom from British rule and for a duration (1905 10), became one of its most important leaders, before turning to developing his own vision and philosophy of human progress and spiritual evolution.
The central theme of Sri Aurobindo’s vision is the evolution of life into a “life divine”. In his own words: “Man is a transitional being. He is not final. The step from man to superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth’s evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner spirit and the logic of Nature’s process”.
The principal writings of Sri Aurobindo include, in prose, The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Secrets of the Vedas, Essays on the Gita, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, Renaissance in India and other essays, Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, The Future Poetry, Thoughts and Aphorisms and several volumes of letters. In poetry, his principal work is “Savitri – a Legend and a Symbol” in blank verse.
To find out more about Sri Aurobindo, please click here.
UNITY!!! Ickes!!!
November 21, 2009
Someone I know sent me a link to this David Icke video the other day…
And it got me thinking…
Yeah… I like Icke. I like him a lot… He speaks sense. A lot of sense. However… I’m not really into his hardcore attack of the system. Reason being is that I’ve done over 10 years worth of psychological research and have found that over 65% of the world would prefer to be living in the Western dream i.e. the car, the wife, the children, the 3 houses (one at home and two abroad), the supermarket, with the money, the TVs (yes, people love that TV!!!), Sky sports, paying lower taxes, have a God, etc… rather than living off the land, tilling the soil, growing their own food, and giving at least 20% of their income to the poorer, under-developed, struggling countries of the world, forgetting about cosmetics (but that doesn’t include soap, alright!), giving up their car, taking a pay cut, cycling to work, etc…
In my opinion… It’s more a case of human nature. Yes… Our nature… That’s what Icke should be working to change. Because if you don’t know yourself, or even have even a vague understanding about how the universe around you works… Or how it came about… Then you’re simply a part of the problem. You’ve either got to want to know where you came from i.e. this star stuff called atoms, that was forged in the hearts of stars… And you’ve possibly got to be able to understand a bit about probability, as well as know something of the huge number of variables that have allowed us to become “Life on a Planet’s Surface,” to see that we have won! WON THE LOTTERY… Not any old lottery, where you win just stupid bit of paper called money… Cause that’s just plain boring and stupid… WE’VE WON THE FUCKING LOTTERY OF EXISTENCE! Because if you don’t see it… Or even want to see it… Then you really couldn’t care less. And it’s probably too mind boggling to even think about!
Just consider this… Out of all the suns in the universe… 80% of them burn for under 4-5 billion years… Bearing in mind life has taken over 4 billion year to emerge on Earth… We’re pretty fortunate to be here. Also… Bearing in mind that this hunk of a planetary rock that we call Earth was situated within the “sweet zone” orbiting around our long burning (10-14 billion year life expectancy) sun i.e. the zone that allows water to exist between freezing and boiling point… Thereby allowing it to “flow…” Something that gives Life the characteristic that we all take for granted. Then there’s fact that we have FOUR gas giants!!! Yeah… Not one, nor two, OR three… But four gas giants… Planets that are way bigger than our own, which have large gravitational fields that seem to swallow most of the debris left over from accretion… AND they didn’t swallow us up during accretion!!! AND there’s also the fact that there are just the right proportion of chemical elements on this hunk-of-a-rock planet, and the surrounding solar system, to allow life to even get its act together… All of which are built from intricate little particles that we call atoms, functioning much like little Lego bricks, with only certain possible arrangements from which to build shapes and patterns out of… That have their own unique physical and chemical properties that allow them to react in certain ways and not others… THEN… To consider that the Stromatolites even got as far as they did (Stromatolites were the first form of life to replicate very successfully and spread all over the planet i.e. they were the first forms of cyanobacteria that breathed CO2 and produced O2)… AND with one more of the millions more factors to be considered that gave Life favorable haven… That we are fortunate enough to have a magnetic field around the earth itself, to protect the thin 20 mile high atmosphere that we all take for granted daily…
It’s a fucking mountain of improbability that we’ve climbed to get here… It’s like winning the lottery of experience. And most of us don’t even glimpse at half of it… They’d rather let the government take the reigns and guide them… Keep them from thinking about the fact that this world is a small world, in an vast infinite inky black void of space and time… That is filled with asteroids between several hundred meters across to 20 miles in diameter… That might come crashing into the earth at any time. PRETTY SCARY EH??? You bet… And there’s death. What happens after we die? Who fucking cares… We’re here. So live in the now. That’s why most people just don’t want to think about it. The now, with all the TOTAL uncertainty is too much for them.
But saying that, they can handle little bits of uncertainty at a time… When I sometimes stand in the queue at my local Newsagent, I watch all these people who buy lottery tickets, scratch cards and other gambling stuff… I’ve been doing this for a while now, trying to understand why they do it. And I’ve noticed several interesting things… When they don’t win anything, they look rather glum. Some even look proper down-trodden. But yet next week, they do the same all over again… Buy another ticket, and look glum when they don’t win that either. Even when (and if) they do win, say a tenner off one of those scratch cards, their minds almost instantly go to the thought of what they’ll spend the money on i.e. “a cheap bottle of sherry,” one lady told me… Then when I pointed out to her that she could have easily bought a cheap bottle of sherry (about six quid) if she hadn’t of bought those ten scratch cards… And she scowled. Yet she, and many others, still come back week after week to buy another ticket, looking glum all over again if they don’t win… Waiting for the chance to change their lives with all that money can buy. Which isn’t a lot when you really think about it… I have mentioned to several of them, the ones that I have got to know quite well, that they’ve already won the ultimate lottery… That lottery of existence, which they bask (or paddle) in every day. And they laugh… Brushing it off as though they could never understand this huge truth of being… As though it possess too many questions, questions that should apparently have no certain answers… Questions that they feel might only show how bleak Life really is. And, in some ways, I can’t blame them.
65% of the world get REALLY FUCKING SCARED when they see experiments that show how easily we all can be manipulated psychologically… Most of us will know that science shows us facts… But it’s these fact… Facts that show us that consciousness is nothing more than chemicals flowing in a body, built from star dust, that life randomly formed on earth… It’s this lack of purpose that is the scary shit. They’d rather ignore that, than deal with what they are. Random! They’d rather have self importance than face the fact that if Earth blew up, the universe wouldn’t even notice.
Hell… Still freaks me out thinking about it all!!! We’d rather have a hard time living, not knowing the truth… Chasing our tails around and around with lottery tickets… Drowning the thought of being in a bottle of cheap sherry… We rather do all this… Then deal with REALITY in hard facts and be TRULY FREE!
Thus… While Icke is shouting and raving about “THEM” i.e. the corporations of the world controlling us… It’s a statistic that most of us would chose the “blue pill” and live in bliss and ignorance, than see “how deep the rabbit hole really goes.” No doubt, even some of us die hard nutters who have scoured the facts and figures, who have pushed themselves inside out to understand what we are, always trying to see past the self imposed delusion that we shroud ourselves in almost all the time… Even some of us, if we were give half the chance, would take that fat pay cheque and wrap ourselves up in consumerist cotton wool, and forget the quest for the “Holy Grail…” Just have look at the Milgram Experiment and Stanford Prison Experiment. We’re only human. It’s not an excuse… It’s an evolutionary condition.
So… I love you Icke. I hear, dude! You rock. But… I have to have compassion for the rest of us who have a hard time dealing with this reality blow. Because it’s a tough smack around the old mind-sets. And spewing one’s rage at the masses doesn’t break the psychological conditioning that has occurred over millions/billions of years of evolution. We all need to do the work for ourselves… And learn how fortunate we are… Just how easily we can be led (read Noam Chomsky’s “Media Control” for starters)… Once we have grasped these basic home truths, which apply to us all, the we can learn how to work with ourselves for positive effect, bring benefit into our lives and other peoples lives… Then we can meditate on all this and awaken ourselves into harmony, truth, love and compassion…
Mainstreaming Psychedelics: From FDA to Harvard to Burning Man
November 18, 2009
Sustaining
November 15, 2009
Orange and gold carp,
Living beneath ice.
Incaring of the world above,
Sustained by the water below.
In the rapidly chilling autumn, ponds begin to ice over. The waters become deep, dark, and mysterious, but in those depths the fish can survive the coming winter.
Tao may be known as directly as water is knowable to a fish. My Tao will not be the same as your Tao. We are both individuals, with different background and thoughts. As soon as Tao enters into us, it takes on the colors of our inner personalities. When it passes out of us, it returns again to its universal nature. This is an ongoing and constant process, like water flowing through a fish’s gills. Just as the water nurtures the fish, so too does Tao nurture and sustain us. As long as we continue our immersion in Tao, we will be as safe as a carp in water. When we separate from Tao, we are as helpless as a fish out of water.
“The Grand Illusion of Consciousness”
November 14, 2009
Once again I’d like to bring to the attention of the reader a lecture by the infamous Dr Susan Blackmore about consciousness being nothing more than just an illusion. I won’t say anymore, as I feel the title adequately describes the point being made.
“The Grand Illusion of Consciousness”
A bit about Sue Blackmore:
Dr. Susan Blackmore is a freelance writer, lecturer and broadcaster, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth. She has a degree in psychology and physiology from Oxford University (1973) and a PhD in parapsychology from the University of Surrey (1980). Her research interests include memes, evolutionary theory, consciousness, and meditation. She practices Zen and campaigns for drug legalization.
Sue Blackmore no longer works on the paranormal.
She writes for several magazines and newspapers, blogs for the Guardian newspaper and Psychology Today, and is a frequent contributor and presenter on radio and television. She is author of over sixty academic articles, about fifty book contributions, and many book reviews. Her books include Dying to Live (on near-death experiences, 1993), In Search of the Light (autobiography, 1996), and Test Your Psychic Powers (with Adam Hart-Davis, 1997)…
For more information on Sue Blackmore, please visit her website, which you can do by clicking here.
Singing
November 14, 2009
Rain comes, and birds-
Silhouettes against the pearlescent sky-
Respond excitedly in song.
They open their throats to heaven’s nectar,
And rhyme with the drops.
All of nature is song. Sometimes the song is in a minor key, with purple tones that stir the soul, bursting the heart with pent-up emotions. Sometimes it is joyous, full of rich melodies and grand chords that bring electric thrills. Sometimes it descends into strange modes, guttural chants, and obscure dissonances.
It is up to each of us to sing as we feel moved by the overall song of life. Do we harmonize with it? Do we sing a counterpoint? Do we purposefully sound discordant tones?
Perhaps a student first encountering Tao endeavors to harmonize with it, but that isn’t all that there is to having a relationship with Tao. Tao gives us the background, the broad circumstances. It is up to us to fit into it, go against it, or even flutter off on oblique angles. Don’t look at Tao as one big inexorable stream in which we float like dead logs. What could that lead to except logjams?
No, let us be like the birds. Who sing when Tao sends them rain. Who know what to do when winter comes. Who embroider the sky with their own unique paths. Who will sing a counterpoint when they need to. Who will sing poetry that is discordant when it must be and rhymes when it is proper.
