Science and spirituality

The mathematics of the heart

2011-04-14T09:55:00.000-07:00

Math and the heart – the words soundcompletely opposed. We like to dividethings into “left-brain” and “right-brain” and never the twain shall meet. I’mthis or I’m that. In fact, thatneat distinction isn’t something neurology supports, and we might do betterto follow the Renaissance ideal – to achieve in all spheres. At the moment, most of our respect isreserved for the math side of things – for proof, for science, for goodempirical fact, for logic. And the moment we do that, we automatically consignall matters of the heart and emotion to a box labeled unscientific, illogical,unproven, fluffy. This is a dangerousway to live – and as we start to use math to explore the heart, we find outwhy.

The maths of being nice

In arecent article in the New Scientist, Martin Nowak explains how he’s usedmathematics to explore human cooperation – and been able to show somesurprising and powerful results. Forevolutionary psychology, cooperation is fascinating: why would we evolve tohelp each other, often to our own cost? Why should I tell you about a great jobopportunity if you’re more likely to get it than I am, or spend my weekendpainting your house when mine needs cleaning? How does that help natural selection in my favor? There are five main ways we cooperate that doact in our favor – some obviously, others more subtly:

kin selection – helping a closerelative, I’m painting your house because you’re my mom
direct reciprocity –tit-for-tat, I help you paint so you’ll help me clean
indirect reciprocity – if Ihelp you, other people will know and help me later
spatial selection – we’reneighbors, so we help each other and survive in clusters
group selection – we’re part ofa group who all help each other, plus that means we do better than other groups

Martin Nowak’s mathematical models are aneat, elegant way of showing how these different forms of cooperation work andbenefit us. As a strong religiousbeliever, he’s equally interested in looking at how his work overlaps withreligious beliefs:

I see theteachings of world religions as an analysis of human life and an attempt tohelp. They intend to promote unselfish behaviour, love and forgiveness. Whenyou look at mathematical models for the evolution of cooperation you also findthat winning strategies must be generous, hopeful and forgiving. In a sense,the world's religions hit on these ideas first, thousands of years ago.

The power of forgiveness versus punishmentis a point to which he returns. Punishment can be used to police cooperation – cooperate or else! – andmost people hold on to the belief that punishment works, or if at least itshould, or even if it doesn’t, we still need it, because not to have it wouldjust be… just be…

Not to have punishment would just beforgiveness. “Who would have thought,”says Nowak, “That you could prove mathematically that, in a world whereeverybody is out for himself, the winning strategy is to be forgiving, and thatthose who cannot forgive can never win?”

HeartMath

TheInstitute of HeartMath has a similar intersection between “left-brain”approaches to knowledge and a “right-brain” subject – except the “right-brain”aspect, emotion, might not be in the brain after all. As we explored in Listento Your Heart-Brain, the heart has its own brain. Neurocardiology looks at how our heart’sthoughts are communicated to the brain and the role that this plays in ourthinking, our life, and even our health. The relationship between stress and heart-attacks has been known foryears, but this heart-health relationship is now being explored much morewidely and in much more detail. Ahealthy metaphorical heart, seat of love and emotions, is intimately tiedtogether with a literally healthy heart. We weren’t such fools, after all, all those years that we said theheart, not the brain, is the seat of emotion.

Much of the Institute’s work and focus ison individual health and helping individuals deal with their emotions – whichis also, inevitably, helping individuals deal with their relationships. We are too rooted in society, it turns out,to deal with each individual as a separate entity. And our responses to each other are a crucialpart of our health. Interestingly, theInstitute also soon addressed the subject of forgiveness. A study compared the effect of feeling angryor caring towards other people, by measuring secretory immunoglobulin A(S-IgA). This antibody is a major partof our immune system, and used to indicate our general immune functioning. The higher your S-IgA levels, the strongeryour immune system.

Anger, it turns out, has an immediate andnegative effect on our own ability tofight disease and stay healthy. SuddenlyMichael Nowak’s mathematical findings start to make sense. Punishment really does hurt us more than theperson we punish, because our anger makes us vulnerable to disease andillness. Forgiveness really is the wayto win and those who don’t forgive can never win.

The HeartMath blog has plenty more to sayabout forgiveness, from the many ways it helps and heals your body, witheverything from back pain to depression, and also how to find the capacity toforgive within ourselves, those things that help us let go of our grudges, ourpain, and our bitterness, be that music, reflecting on our own faults andmistakes, remembering the feeling of being in love, or simply surroundingourselves with beauty.

Whatever happened, whoever’s fault, it istime to forgive. To move forward andevolve as a species, we need to take care of our hearts, we need to cooperate,and we need to forgive. We cannot move from a fear-based, hate-based society into a society based on love without passing through that crucial arch, forgiveness. And of all thevirtues, thegreatest of these is love.

Heaven and hell

2011-02-21T09:00:00.000-08:00

Wespeak often of creating heaven on earth by December 21, 2012 on this website.Before we go any further, we should describe what heaven is. For us, heaven is living in the love, light,vibration, and spirit in the moment. Throughout this website, we speak of raising our consciousness to achievethis heavenly experience. What does thatmean?

To help us understand the concept ofraising our consciousness, let’s start with the simple concepts ofself-conscious thoughts & ideas.

I’m not good enough. I’m not skinny enough. I’m notclever enough. I’m not lovable. They’re out to get me. No one likes me. They talk about me behind my back. They hate me. I hate them.

Do any of these ring a bell? These are the obsessive thoughts that wecling to, that create the darkness in our lives. These are the thoughts that create ourliving hell. These are theself-inflicting thoughts that close off the pearly gates and our ability toexperience heaven.

Original Sin

If welook at the story of Adam and Eve, it was a change in consciousness thatchanged the Garden of Eden from heaven to a living hell. In Genesis, Adam and Eve ranaround naked and experienced heaven until they ate an apple from the Tree ofKnowledge of Good and Evil and as a result became self-conscious of beingnaked. Perhaps being self-conscious wasour original sin; perhaps this story is a metaphor for the evolution of ourspecies to being self-aware and, as a result, self-critical. Eating that appleis a metaphor for the moment humanity evolved to the point ofself-actualization, creating a living hell where once only heaven existed.

Seven Deadly Sins

When we think of hell, we tend to think of“sin”. The word “sin” is actually anarchery term for “off the mark”. “Sin”means our thinking is off the mark. Andif we look at the “seven deadly sins” of the Christian faith, they aren’tactually actions but are emotional prisms through which we choose to view theworld and live our lives.

Wrath – anger or rage

Greed –excessive thoughts of or desires for wealth

Sloth – lazinessor indifference

Pride – a desireto be more important than others

Lust – excessivethoughts or desires of a sexual nature

Envy – desiresfor other’s belongings

Gluttony –excessive thoughts or desires for food.

If we choose to observe the world throughangry, lustful, or prideful eyes, we won’t see the light of heaven. If we choose to see the world through greedor envy, we won’t experience the love of heaven. And if we choose a life laziness andgluttony, we won’t feel the spirit of heaven. For this website, earth is already heaven – but to experience it, we,the human race, must evolve our emotional prism from fear-based emotions and“sin” to love-based emotions.

Raising our consciousness

Ultimately, the only way to raise yourconsciousness and is first, love yourself (with compassion, not arrogance) and second, love others. The second becomes much easier once we’vemastered the first. No matter what the perceived worldly human experienceappears to be through your self-critical ego-mind, if you can quiet the-selfconscious critics and see your experiences through the prism of love, your reality will be love. You’ll experience heaven on earth. Although this website looks at spiritualitythrough everything from neurology toquantummechanics, raising consciousness and experiencing heaven is not rocketscience. It’s just learning how to turnyour fear-based emotions into love.

Creating heaven on earth

Creatingheaven on earth is our planetary goal. Obviously, that’s more difficult than a single person experiencing the light, love, and vibration ofheaven at a single moment. But if wecan get enough individuals to experience heaven on earth through a prism oflove, and share this experience through social networks, this will rippleout. It ripples through simple cause andeffect, through mirroringneurons, through changing our noosphere.And through enough rippling changes to love-based thoughts, the human race canreach critical mass and experience a quantum leap in evolutionto experience heaven on earth as a species.

We’re already been seeing the power ofonline social networks to change consciousness, with twitter campaigns andFacebook groups stirring up genuine political movement, changes in policies,and shared awareness. We believe it canbe used the same way to change our planetary consciousness toward spiritualevolution – by creating a belief that love on a planetary scale is possible,even inevitable.

Evolutionary Mapquest

The evolutionary mapquest of the human racemight be as simple as going from an evolving body to an evolving mind to anevolving spirit. From a one-cell amoeba,to survival of the fittest & king of the jungle, to the Age of Reason, tothe Information Age, to the Age of Love, Light, and Spirit – our newage of enlightenment. And webelieve we can accomplish this, by December 21st, 2012.

The Noosphere

2011-01-24T00:00:00.000-08:00

EricWhitacre’s virtual choir

Creating the noosphere

We create the world we live in; we are partof the world that others have created for us. Throw your mind back a hundredyears, to 1911, just before the Jazz Age, before the Great War (which had to berenamed the First World War when we had another), when the telephone was stillnew and penicillin had yet to be invented. Throw your mind back anotherthousand years, to 911, deep in “the darkest of the Dark Ages”, way beforeprinting, before the Norman Conquest, before the vast Gothic Cathedrals flungtheir spires into the air, when the Byzantine empire peaked and Mayan civilizationcollapsed.

Theworld of the mind is as much part of our world as the landscape and the livingenvironment around us. It’s called the noosphere,to match the geosphere (the physical earth) and the biosphere (the plants andanimals) – in Greek, nous means“mind” and sphaira “sphere”. PierreTeilhard de Chardin introduced the term in 1922 in his book, Cosmogenesis, although he and Edouard leRoy may have first heard at a lecture by Vladimir Vernadsky. It’s the sphere ofthought, of our collective human intelligence: our spiritual, cultural, social,and technological abilities and development. We can see the evidence of it in everything around us, in the patternswe use to think, in the assumptions we make. But there’s also a suggestion thatwe might be able to measure it directly.

Measuring the noosphere

As the noosphere is collective human intelligence, the Global Consciousness Project has setabout to measure the effects of our thoughts directly – not just the actionsand creations they lead to. This projecthypothesizes that our thoughts themselves have direct effects. To prove this, they start with random-numbergenerators, nicknamed EGGs. If numbers are really random, then you can actuallyexpect certain patterns. Think of dice. If you throw a dice 1000 times, you’dexpect about a sixth of your throws to give a “six”. If six comes up much moreoften, you know the dice is loaded. Inthe same way, we can test the random numbers from the EGGs – are they properlyrandom? Most of the time, yes.

But the Global ConsciousnessProject’s theory is that massive changes in our thought patterns will directlyaffect the EGGs, so that they start producing non-random numbers. They have 66of these EEGs (it stands for electrogaiagram) distributed across the world,feeding their data into a central server. The project has analyzed data fromlarge-scale events such as Princess Diana’s death, the 9/11 attacks, New Year’sEve celebrations, and the Indian Tsunami. The results, they say, show that the numbers really do become lessrandom when large numbers of people are focusing on one thing. The numbers evenseem to show a change before the event – for instance, spiking during and before the 9/11 attacks. (That wouldsuggest either that our hive-mind has some kind of prescience, or that thoseevents have backwards causality, which should be impossible.)

The critics have a different interpretation. Truly random numbers will always createspikes and troughs. We expect randomness to create something smooth and even –tell anyone to draw random dots on a page and they’ll space them quite evenly. Really random dots,though, would be clumped and scattered. For instance, only two of these sets ofdots are actually random:

In the same way, genuinely random numbers will create spikes.What’s more, say independent scientists Edwin May and James Spottiswoode, theproject looks very selectively at their chosen time windows. Another critic, Jeffrey D Scargle, suggeststheir data analysis is off. (For data analysts: they check the p-value but notthe Bayesian analysis.) And finally, it’s not clear what – if anything – theEGGs are responding to. Even if there are statistically important changes, whatare we actually measuring? It might not be the noosphere at all.

Analyzing the noosphere

Another way to come to grips with thenoosphere is to analyze it by looking at memes. A meme is a cultural "gene" – abelief, idea, symbol, or practice, that is passed down through society, muchlike our genes are passed down from our parents. A catch-phrase can be a meme;so can a religious rite. A group of memes is a memeplex. The word was coined byRichard Dawkins in his 1976 book, TheSelfish Gene, and has proven very useful as away of talking about how ideas take shape and life beyond the individualperson. It’s also given rise tomemetics, supposedly the study of how memes reproduce, transfer, and evolve.The Journal of Memetics was short-lived,though, running from just 1997 to 2005, and the concept is fraught withproblems. Useful as the idea of memes might be, memetics doesn’t seem theanswer to understanding the noosphere.

Our understanding of how to analyze andmeasure collective knowledge and awareness is clearly still incomplete – in itsinfancy, some might say. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use that collective knowledge and awareness.

Joy of the Collective

The joy of the collective is incrediblypowerful: something larger than you, which can achieve so much more than just you,of which you are a part. Even witnessing a collective project is thrilling –look at Eric Whitacre’s choir and the spine-tingling goose-pimpling effect ofhaving all those individual people’s voices, each singing in their own home tohis silent conducting, come together in one chorus. A collective project,creation, or movement, especially a spontaneous or unled one, lifts us aboveourselves.

Creating Heaven on Earth

Thoughts are energy and energy can bemeasured. The purpose of our website and corresponding blogs isto get the human race to believe that creating Heaven on Earth is possible andcan be achieved by December 21^st, 2012. If the human race can create compassionate,loving thoughts through collective Intelligence (such as the internet andsocial media), mirror these loving thoughts through our day-to-day activities (byactivating mirror neurons or by simple cause & effect), create a vibrantcollective behavior, and energize our Noosphere with loving and compassionthoughts – is this creating Heaven on Earth? Will a vibrant Noosphere light up this planetand trigger the collective consciousness of the human race to take a quantumevolutionary leap in consciousness? Webelieve the answer is “Yes”.

Reflective behavior

2011-01-02T11:51:00.000-08:00

Karma

Cause& Effect

Youreap what you sow

Whatgoes around comes around

Bethe change you want to see in the world

Dounto others as you would like others to do unto you

There’s a lot of good advice out thereabout how to live one’s life and to assure it will be happy, healthy andtrouble-free. The ideas above could be summarizedas Newton’s third law: for every actionthere’s an equal and opposite reaction. But we could also say, for every action there’s a reaction and aco-action. When we watch someone else’s actions, weobserve them and react to them, but our brains also respond as if we’re doingthe action ourselves. This is down to “mirror neurons”.

Mirroring Behavior

Mirrorneurons are neurons that fire when we do something and when we watch someone else do something. If I smile, parts ofmy brain are activated. If I see you smile, some of the same parts areactivated. If I read the word “smile”, those same parts aren’t activated –mirror neurons are responding to the action, not the concept. This effect canbe exceptionally strong: ifI see you doing something, I may even get a false memory of doing it myself!

Until recently, researchers have foundthese neurons in animals, including primates, but only guessed that they’re inpeople too. Now, researchers believethey’ve found directevidence of mirror neurons in humans.

Mirror neurons seem to be the key to hugeswathes of human behavior. They will “dofor psychology what DNA did for biology” wrote V.S.Ramachandran, the acclaimed neuroscientist. They offer us insight into howwe learn, empathy and compassion, theory of mind, imitation, and collectivebehavior, to name a few.

Collective Behavior

Collective behavior is a social process orevent which doesn’t go according to existing social structures (laws, conventions,institutions, and so forth) but which appear to happen spontaneously. Christmas dinner, for instance, will have aset pattern in each house, part of a larger social pattern; the public responseto Diana’s death in 1999, on the other hand, was spontaneous and even out ofcharacter for the British.

Traditionally, collective behavior insociology includes the crowd, the public, the mass, and the social movementswhich creating behaviors like rumors, riots, trends, and fads – from brokenwindows at a demonstration to the popularity of a sneezing panda. We see collective behavior every day of ourlives, from the rumors that fly around the office to extreme change in fashiontrends we experienced in our lifetime. (So yes, we can blame collectivebehavior for bell-bottom jeans in the 70s, women’s shoulder pad in the 80s, andthe parachute pants of the 90s!)

Reflective Behavior

Let’stake this mirroring of actions and emotions a step further by looking at theadvice listed at the top of the page. Each piece of advice claims that whatever you put out will be mirroredback to you. That if you behave badly,and exhibit negative emotion, it will be mirrored back to you and negativethings will happen to you. If you showevil intentions and exhibit hatred in your heart, eventually evil and hatredwill be reflected back to you – what the Buddhists call “Karma”, what the Bibledescribes as “you reap what you sow”. It may be that mirror neurons explainneurologically how our behavior takes on a life beyond us, rippling outwards. Thiscan be extremely negative, as with the bystander effect,but it can also be a powerful good. (By the way, new research shows thatthe bystander effect is not as bad as we thought – we are more likely tohelp each other than not.)

Good Behavior

The beauty of mirror neurons and collectivebehavior is they can also be used for good. When I see you smile, part of mybrain experiences that smile as if it were my own. When I see your act ofkindness to someone, part of me experiences that act of kindness too. Oneperson intelligently breaking the bystander effect can galvanize an entirecrowd. And this also has implicationsfor creating heaven on earth by December 21^st, 2012. Part of the strategy to create heaven onearth is to use collective intelligence (internet and social media) to create acollective conscious thought, “to love one another”, to people around theworld. When people begin to act on thisconscious thought, mirror neurons kick in and create collective behavior. This,in turn, can create a critical mass, to create heaven on earth.

Every act of kindness you perform, everysmile you give, every skill you use in front of someone else, takes on a lifebeyond your own, in other people’s minds. The enormous power that mirrorneurons is the power to do good, for our actions to be larger than themselves.

Albert Einstein - quotes of relativity

2010-12-06T00:00:00.000-08:00

Throughout this blog, we discuss the evolution of the human race to create heaven on earth by December 21, 2012. Now if one of the greatest minds in the history of the human race, Albert Einstein, was alive today, what would be his thoughts on such an ambition? Perhaps we can look at some of his famous quotes to see how they coincide with our future world vision.

“Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."

In our posts, we try to explain the science behind the light, love, and spirit that we experience at moments during our human existence – for instance, our August 16 post on The Soul’s Electric Light and the understanding of electromagnetism. So religion, in terms of its spirituality and not its dogma, can be explained scientifically, which would give us substance to our faith. Having blind faith sounds like a strength, but having unwavering blind faith can be dangerous if it leads you in the wrong direction.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge."

“The only real valuable thing is intuition.”

Our May 17 post, The meek will inherit the earth, emphasized the need to balance the “yin & yang” on the planet by drawing on more feminine energies, such as creativity, imagination, and intuition. As Einstein understood, we need more than just rational, problem-solving thought. Our July 12 post, God Gave you a Brain – So don’t use it, looked at the importance of being at the level of Alpha brain waves for creativity, peak performances, and super learning, as opposed to the higher-frequency Beta brain waves, used for most thinking and problem solving. More brain waves is not always better.

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”

“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

“Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding”

Our April 19 post, For want of a nail, says that the cycle of fear and violence must end: with the human race’s current capability to kill one another, we cannot blindly, patriotically, and righteously fight another world war. We actually quoted Einstein in this post, on how we must change our thinking to solve our world problems. We need to move from fear-based thinking to love-based thinking.

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand apt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

Einstein understood that emotions like anger, hatred, and rage cannot drive our thinking if we want the human race to survive. We looked at the impact of emotions on our thinking in our September 20 post, Emotional Decisions, and the need to move to the emotions that raise our spirits – and just maybe, pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe. Image from Deviant Art.

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persist one”

“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

In these quotes, Einstein speaks about the illusion of reality and delusion of consciousness. We believe that this addresses the illusion that the human race is separated by time and space. In our March 15 post, What we know about the world can change, we write about how quantum physics is proving we are all connected and the need to start acting on that understanding.

“Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds”

This website consistently communicates the need for the human race to evolve from body to mind, and eventually to spirit. Our March 1 post, A New Age of Enlightenment, talks about moving from “Dare to Know” to “Dare to Be”. Einstein understood that knowledge on its own was meaningless and that tapping into spirit was the way to understand the universe.

By comparing our posts and our website to the quotes of Albert Einstein, we are by no means putting ourselves in the same region of brilliance. And to some extent, we do interpret what he says to fit our posts. But that said, we do believe that both our website and Albert Einstein’s words see the same changes that the human race needs. We need a paradigm shift in the way we think and interact as human beings. We need to move away from the illusion of separation and come to terms with the fact that we are all connected. We aim to provide the vision for these changes, both intellectually and spiritually.

The influence of music

2010-11-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

Think about the extraordinary power of music to comfort, inspire, and uplift.

Old Time Rock & Roll

The oldest musical instrument we’ve found, a flute, dates back to Neanderthal times, 35,000 years ago, around the time that modern humans started moving into Europe (A bit the reverse of the British Invasion!) It’s believed that music was a widespread part of society as far back as 40,000 years ago, according to Professor Nicholas Conard of Tubingen University – and that they used it pretty much as we do today. We have an innate understanding of how music shapes our moods and soothes the soul, which is increasingly backed up research.

“Old Time Rock & Roll”

Still like that old time rock'n' roll
That kind of music just soothes the soul
I reminisce about the days of old
With that old time rock 'n' roll
Bob Seger

Ever wondered why a thumping great tune makes you feel like you’re flying with happiness? The saccule is a batch of cells in the inner ear which normally responds to how your head moves – especially moving up and down, as in an elevator (although the saccule is usually not partial to Elevator music). It’s not normally used for hearing, but it does responds to loud music. And the saccule has a hot line to the hypothalamus, your brain’s pleasure center. That feeling of leaping euphoria, also sometimes called the “rock ‘n roll effect”, is basically what happens if you tickle your hypothalamus’s tummy. So to speak. And so the “Head Banger Bands” can thank fish for this one, because we inherited it from our fish ancestors. (New Scientist, 19 February 2000)

Glee & celebration

It’s widely acknowledged that singing makes us happy, even more so than listening to other people sing. As well as boosting your mood, it increases your levels of immunoglobulin A (S-IgA), which strengthens your immune system. Other medical benefits of music include helping people recover from strokes and enhancing memory for patients with Alzheimer's. With the recent popularity of shows like American Idol and America Got Talent, the joy the singers bring to the studio audience and television audience is tremendous. But the happiest people involved our the people standing behind the microphones.

Music doesn’t just benefit individuals, though. For one thing, it’s used to express social bonding. (It doesn’t cause social bonding, though, so much as show it.) Anywhere there is a celebration, from weddings to night clubs, from dinner parties to religious services, music is present. And this social bonding we see at these celebrations is created through something called social contagion – basically, one person being happy is good for everyone. One of the major neurological processes for human beings are our mirror neurons – the old “monkey see, monkey do” effect so feared and loved by parents around the world. These mirror neurons fire when we watch other people do something, to the point where we can even think we did it ourselves.

Look at the happiness on these faces – and see what a smile it brings to your own.

Uniting the World

And while musical preferences and styles may be cultural, their emotional content is not: emotions in music are universally recognized. We connect across cultures with music far more effectively than we do with the meanings given to colors, numbers, or physical gestures. We witness this time and time again at the opening and closing ceremonies of the Summer and Winter Olympics. Athletes, literally from all over the world, coming from every culture imaginable, come together to celebrate the games through music and dance. Positive emotions like joy, bliss and euphoria are created by the music and dance and magnified by social contagion. And for those few hours the differences that divide us are gone and the power of music literally unites the world.

Peace in Our Time

Throughout history music has also created cultural change for the better through the message in its lyrics

“The Times They Are A-changing”

Come mother and fathers
Throughout the land

And don’t criticize

What you can’t understand

Your sons and your daughters

Are beyond your command

Your old road is

Rapidly agin’

Please get out of the new one

If you can’t lend your hand

For the time they are a-changin’.

Bob Dylan

So why does a blog that concentrates on the evolution of the human race and the creation of Heaven on Earth by December 21^st care about the scientific, spiritual and historical impact of music? The reason is we believe music can play an important role in creating the environmental structure necessary for the human race to evolve and create its Stairway to Heaven. In our Sept. 20^th post, Emotional Decisions, we discuss how love-based emotions like joy, compassion, and even glee must make the decisions of the day if the human race is to evolve and we believe music can help create these love-based emotions both through its melody (tickling your hypothalamus’s tummy) and through its lyrics, creating a positive message to the collective intelligence. And through social contagion, with the help of social media, music can magnify these love-based emotions and messages and help lift the human race above the ideological walls of culture, politics, and religion that currently divide us. If the world we live in today is on the main floor, Heaven on Earth will be in the Penthouse – so let’s start building our Stairway to Heaven and create “Peace in Our Time”.

“Peace in Our Time”

Cause you and I know
What love is worth
We’re gonna build
A Heaven on Earth
Running in theWheels of fortune
Turning Water into Wine

Gonna make love the bottom line
Gonna make peace in our Time

Eddie Money

Imagine

We can start building our Stairway to Heaven now by imagining a world that lives as one and in doing so manifesting “Heaven on Earth” and “Peace in Our Time” on December 21^st, 2012 and beyond.

And remember
the truth that once was spoken:
to love another person is to see the face of God…
Do you hear the people sing…?

Stairway to Heaven

2010-10-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

“Creating Heaven on Earth” – what an enormous concept. We talk about it a lot in this blog and speak of creating “Heaven on Earth” by December 21st, 2012. That’s quite an ambition itself without even putting a deadline on it. The earth’s been around for over 15 billion years and now we give ourselves a little over two years to create Heaven of Earth. So if we’re really going to get serious here, roll up our sleeves and get to work, we need to first define what “Heaven on Earth” actually is: a vibrant planet full of loving compassionate people connected among themselves and their environment.

“But the Greatest of These is Love”
The key to creating Heaven on Earth is creating more love in the world. All religions speak of it (see our April 5th blog, But the Greatest of These is Love); Jesus Christ preached “love your neighbor as yourself” and even more radically “love your enemy”. At its current level of evolution, humans aren’t close to loving its neighbors, let alone loving its enemies. With a little over two years until our completion date, what’s our strategy to complete our goal when it seems so far away?

Step 1 – Listen to your Heart
The first step towards creating Heaven on Earth has to start with the heart. In our August 2nd blog Listen to Your Heart-Brain, we discovered that the heart actually has a brain that functions similarly to our head-brain. We discussed how the heart-brain can actually send emotional messages, such as love and intuition, to the head-brain. So the first step in our journey starts with listening to our hearts – and letting its love guide the way.

Step 2 – Don’t Listen to Head-Brain (as much)
In our July 12th blog, God Gave you a Brain, So don’t use it, we discovered that using our head-Brain less can actually be a better state of mind – that peak performances usually occur when our brain activity is actually at the Alpha state (7-13Hz), relaxed and meditative, rather than the Beta state (13-40Hz), when our brain is more stressed. So this step is about quieting our minds so we can let Step 1, Listening to Our Hearts, fill our existence with love, light, and spiritual guidance.

Step 3 – Make Love-based Decisions
In our Sept 20th blog, Emotional Decisions, we discovered that all decisions are ultimately decided by emotions. As much as we want to be logical and rational, emotion calls the shots. So let’s pick the right emotion. Let’s dismiss the fear-based emotions like hatred, anger, loneliness, and rage, and start making decision based on emotions like love, gratitude, hope, and joy. If the human race is to create Heaven on Earth by December 21st, 2012 it is only logical (that is, intuitive) that our decision-making will have to come from love.

Step 4 – Balance the Yin & Yang
In a world driven by masculine energy, now is the time for the rise of the feminine to balance the Yin and Yang of this planet. In our May 17th blog, The Meek will Inherit the Earth, we argue that traditionally feminine traits such as intuition, creativity, compassion and love are needed to compliment the traditionally masculine traits such as rationality, logic, and purposefulness that run the world today. Our May 31st blog, The Human Race hits the Mother Lode, showed how the world has evolved with the empowerment of women, and our June 21st blog, On The “New Eve” of Evolution, showed how women today are continuing to balance the Yin and Yang by getting in touch with their “divine feminine” to balance their masculine within themselves and the planet. To achieve our end game of creating “Heaven on Earth”, we must no longer see feminine as weak but as essential – so “The Meek will Inherit the Earth”.

Step 5 - Use Collective Intelligence
So to create “Heaven on Earth” we must open our hearts, quiet our minds, and discover the essential importance of the feminine energy. We must also share this new-found enlightenment with the world. In our May 3rd Blog, The Mayan Calendar’s Promise, we discuss how for the first time in human history an enlightened thought can be shared with the world at a moment’s notice, based on collective intelligence. That a conscious thought like “to love one another” can be shared collectively throughout the internet, create a critical mass, and actually change human behavior. We already know the internet can change behavior through fear-based messages that instill emotions such as hatred, anger, and rage. Now let’s change the emotion and see if love, hope, and compassion can create a more beneficial behavior – and create our “Heaven on Earth”.

Step 6 – Create a Self-fulfilling Prophecy
On the 2012 page of the website, we introduce the idea of using the Mayan Calendar prophecy as a tool to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people believe the Mayans predicted a spiritual leap in evolution, maybe the world will believe it – and our actions and behaviors will respond accordingly. To create Heaven on Earth by December 21st 2012, we must first believe it’s possible. A believed thought doesn’t recreate reality, it is reality. Instead of seeing Armageddon as inevitable (a very dangerous frame of mind), we must persuade the human race that Heaven on Earth is achievable.

Step 7 – Light the Spark
In our description of Heaven on Earth, we say we must create a vibrant planet. Our August16th blog, The Soul’s Electric Light, discusses how inner light may be the electricity that our brain uses (head and heart) and the electromagnetism that fills our body. We access this inner light by opening our hearts and quieting our minds, by believing Heaven on Earth is possible and by reinforcing this belief throughout the world through our collective intelligence. Our Sept 6th blog, Cosmic Attraction, introduced the idea that the beauty of our existence isn’t skin-deep, but spirit-deep, where our true nature and true inner beauty of love, light and vibration reside. Where the spark to create our Heaven on Earth will be lit by an evolving human species.

New Age of Enlightenment
Our March 1st blog, A New Age of Enlightenment, discussed the 18th Century enlightenment – The Age of Reason and how Immanuel Kant’s motto for Enlightenment is “Dare to Know”. In the New Age of Enlightenment, the motto for Enlightenment is “Dare of Be”. Knowing will not be enough to create to Heaven on Earth: it’s the light, love and vibration that will light this planet. The energy that resonates from being a body of spirit is what will create Heaven on Earth. Opening of our hearts, quieting our minds, tapping into feminine energy, making decisions based on love, and spreading the message of love across the planet are the steps necessary to create our Stairway to Heaven.

Emotional decisions

2010-09-20T00:00:00.000-07:00

Don’t get all emotional about it. He’s tired and emotional. I’m an emotional wreck. I don’t want to make some horrible decision based on out-of-control emotions. You just need to control your emotions. Think logically about it. Make a rational decision.

Emotions get a bad rep. We have a neat binary between emotion, on one side, and rationality and logic, on the other side. There’s no contest over which one wins! We value logic and rationality far above emotion, especially when it comes to making decisions. Even when it comes to relationships, which are defined by emotion, we want to be rational and logical. Because that’s good and emotion’s bad. So we draw lists, we weigh up the pros and cons, we conjure up various scenarios, we do everything in our power to make a purely rational decision. But there’s no such thing.

Decisions are emotional

The neurologist Richard Cytowic started off looking at people with synaesthesia (when one sense is stimulated but you experience another, like The Man Who Tasted Shapes). His research led him to some extraordinary discoveries about the brain – particularly about where we make decisions, and how we make decisions.

To make decisions, we have to evaluate what factors to include, how important they are, whether they’re positive and negative – all that list-making pro-and-con stuff. Neurologists call this “valence”, we call it decision-making. But here’s the thing. It’s not the nice, logical, rational cortex that’s in charge of calculating valence. It’s the limbic system – the “emotional core of the human nervous system”.

The limbic brain has retained its function as the decider of valence [during the evolutionary process]. What the cortex does is provide more detailed analysis about what is going on in the world so that the limbic brain can decide what is important and what to do. (Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes)

You can send your logical brain off for more information, you can demand lists from it, you can order up a detailed evaluation of pros and cons. But your logical brain can’t make the decision: biologically, it’s just not capable. It doesn’t have the wiring. The logical brain is the adviser; emotions are king. But the adviser is trying to get at the throne – and overthrow the king.

We make decisions behind our own backs

Since 1965, we’ve known that decisions somehow escape our conscious minds. Kornhüber ran experiments to test people’s decision-making. He wired them up, then all they had to do was move their finger, whenever they felt like it. He discovered that the brain built up its activity, its “readiness potential” to make the decision, almost a whole second before they made the conscious decision. (In neurological terms, that’s years!) By the time they made a conscious decision, the decision was already made. As Cytowic describes it…

Such a decision is an interpretation we give to a behavior that has been initiated someplace else by another part of ourselves well before we are aware of making a decision at all. In other words, the decision has been made before we are aware of the idea to even make a decision. If “we” are not pulling the strings, then who or what is? The answer is, it is an unknown part that is unfathomable to introspection. … Our conscious self is the tip of an iceberg.

We all know the feeling: that mad decision that got made almost behind our own back which we now have to explain to the world – and ourselves! Logically we think it’s the wrong choice; somehow we made that choice. Psychologists call this “cognitive dissonance”, the horrible feeling of holding two opposite ideas, and we try to smooth it over by explaining it all away, rationalizing it. We come up with logical reasons after the choice was made.

Getting access to our decision-making

If you consider that we all want to make rational decisions, and all our decisions are actually emotional, then we’re all suffering cognitive dissonance. Maybe, in this case, emotional dissonance is a better phrase. Emotions are going to make our decisions anyway, so instead of trying to ignore them or write them out the equation, perhaps it’s a good idea to look at them. Which emotions are going to make your decisions?

After a lifetime of dismissing our emotions from decision-making, it’s hard to learn to hear them again. The logical brain keeps jumping in and shouting. In her forthcoming book on Energy, Carol Hautot describes a range of access tools that let you make contact again with your emotions, with your energy, and with the universal energy. One of the simplest is just this:

Does it make me feel light or does it make me feel heavy?

Your logical cortex can still do its job – gathering information, giving a detailed analysis – and it can learn its place. It doesn’t have the power to make decisions and no amount of stern self-control will rewire our brains. The ultimate decision is emotional: access the emotion.

The king is dead... Long live the king!

The reason emotions get such a bad rapis that we let the wrong emotions rule the day. With the goal of creating heaven onearth by December 21^st, 2012, isn’t now the time overthrow the kingand crown a new king? With fear-basedemotions such as anger, hatred, misery and rage ruling our existence for so many years, isn’t it about time the human species evolved to a morevibrant existence and crowned “Love” as the new king? Aren’t we tired of bowing to grief and guilt,sadness and suffering, hostility and hysteria? The problem isn’t living by your emotions: theproblem is what emotions we choose to live by.

Aren’t we, as a race, ready to live byemotions that lifts our spirits? Emotions like awe, euphoria, gratitude, hope, joy, and love – emotions that make us feel vibrantand light, and not dark and heavy. In our April 5^th blog, But the Greatest of these is Love, we looked at out how all major religions preach love without always creating much actual love: fear-based emotions toward people who don’t share their beliefs can overridethe conscious belief that love is the answer. Sohow do we resolve such an issue? By crowning a new, all-powerful king: unconditional love.

Now is the time to have anemotional rescue and let love make our decisions for us, without anyconditions. The first decision is tomake a more vibrant and loving planet by letting unconditional love rule theday – especially on December 21, 2012 and onward.

Cosmic attraction

2010-09-06T00:00:00.000-07:00

Electromagnetic attraction

In the last two posts, we’ve explored the important role that electromagnetism plays in the existence of the human species. We learned that the heart-brain sends electromagnetic signals to the head-brain, communicating through our emotional center (the sub-cortex) rather than directly with our logical thoughts (the cortex). We also looked at how electromagnetism resonates throughout our bodies and compared that to the way organized religions and spiritual movements talk about inner light. We can’t say, definitively and scientifically, “Electromagnetism is inner light!” But the connection between the two can offer us a great deal.

On the Science & Spirituality website, we talk about the relationship between science and spirituality. It’s complex and occasionally fraught, but still useful. Science offers spirituality new models of how the world works (think of how quantum physics has transformed our assumptions). Meanwhile, spirituality offers science a safe haven for unproven ideas – some of which, once dismissed as “old wives’ tales”, have since been proven. Of course, the two argue – mainly about how you know something is true.

With electromagnetism, science offers us an incredibly useful model for thinking about inner light, magnetism, and attractiveness. But why do we need a new model? Let’s look at what’s currently on offer.

Cosmetic Attraction

Today, whole industries fund themselves with the sole purpose of making us appear more attractive, “vibrant”, “shining” with that “youthful glow” (on the premise that young people are shiny – rather than the matt peachiness of actual young skin). Face-lifts and botox injections promise a vibrant, youthful appearance (and deliver a frozen, stretched look). People go to tanning saloons and apply tanning creams so to keep the “glow” of a deep, dark tan (which risks being matt erring on leathery). Teeth-whitening products are being sold to create “radiant smiles” (no toothpaste can actually make you smile) and men can turn their gray hairs dark in only five minutes to give them back their appearance of vim and vigor (as opposed to still tired, but now with dark hair).

We want to feel vibrant – and there’s nothing actually wrong with that. Feeling that you look good and youthful can raise your confidence, which in turn helps you keep your head up, your shoulders back, and a smile on your face - which certainly enhance your vibrant appearance. The sense of attractiveness and confidence lifts your spirits, which enhances your attractiveness more. At today’s level of evolution, the feeling we get from cosmetic attraction can be important to our wellbeing – if it all works as the marketing says. But there’s a fatal flaw in looking for our vibrance this way.

Fatal Attraction

Most marketing campaigns for cosmetics promise confidence-through-beauty. What they actually deliver is insecurity – which creates market “need”. They can’t be credited with the birth of physical insecurity, but they demonstrably fuel its flames. The fatal flaw of trying to maintain a youthful, vibrant appearance is that, eventually, it will be gone. There is no product that will make you look young and vibrant forever. Yes, you can alter or adjust aspects of your appearance in cosmetic ways, but if you want to live to a ripe old age, you’re going to look old one day. So if you rely on your physical features to bring you love, attention and self-worth, your life story will have a sad ending. But all this is assuming these multifarious products work. Most products don’t even make you look young and vibrant today. They don’t even make the model, usually selected for her youth and beauty, look like that. Dove recently ran a campaign showing the evolution from original model to billboard ad. (Watching this video has since been shown to reduce physical insecurity in young women.) They also ran a pro-age campaign, showing a selection of beautiful middle-aged and older women, all considered “too old to be in anti-ageing ad”.

If you are recognized in this world because of your vibrant spirit, there are no worries or mid-life crisis: your spirit does not have an expiration date. There is no shelf-life for being a loving and compassionate person. The ability to resonate electromagnetism can come from a 91-year-old as easily as a 19-year-old. Your true vibrant spirit should be your measure, not your ability to not-look-your-age.

So how about a different model of attractiveness – one which links attractive to light, not to body? Look back at Cosmetic Attraction. What are we really after? We want to look “vibrant”, “shining”, “glowing”, “radiant”… and feel confident. That’s not youth. Young people aren’t shiny! And they’re famously insecure. “Face-lift + shiny teeth + heavy tan + dark hair” doesn’t equal vibrant, smiling, relaxed energy. What are we actually chasing here?

What we’re actually after is vibrance – the kind of attraction that is both possible and genuinely attractive. Physical beauty and youth don’t necessarily offer that. But the cultural model, which tells us they do, is so powerful and entrenched. It’s hard to abandon that way of thinking, unless we can find a different model to replace it with. And that’s what the model of electromagnetism, in our heart-brain and in our bodies, offers us: a new way of understanding attractiveness, at a deeper and lasting level. We know the experience of seeing someone’s inner light: this gives us a way to conceptualize it.

Cosmic Attraction

When we see inner light in another person, it makes them more attractive – “magnetic”, we say, “shining”, “vibrant” – and someone we want to be around. It’s not so hard to move beyond physical appearance. After all, our brain only stores the bare basics of what someone’s face actually looks like, and quickly matches it up. People we love become more beautiful to us. Perhaps, by concentrating on someone’s inner light, even thinking of it in terms of electromagnetism, we can learn to step past physical appearance – and concentrate their true spirit, their inner light. In many Eastern religions and in the New Thought Spiritual movement, one person will greet another person by saying, “Namaste.” By saying this, they are actually honoring the spirit in you, which is also in me. Namaste also has been referred to as “the light in me sees the light in you”.

Imagine that the light in me, which sees the light in you, is the electromagnetic energy that comes from our heart-brain and that resonates in our bodies. Imagine that the electric impulses inside you are generating a magnetic field around you. This cosmic connection of honoring one’s spirit can give us a sense of depth far beyond our standard reaction to a physically attractive person. It shows us an option of evolving past our animal and materialistic instincts to a deeper spiritual connection.

Coming Attraction

At one stage of our evolutionary process, reproduction was the number one priority for keeping the existence of the species alive. Because of this collective agenda, the ability to reproduce strong, healthy offspring was the basis for picking a mate. Theories of beauty are very quick to trace our current standards of beauty back to this biological imperative (happily ignoring the very different standards of beauty across the centuries – compare the size zero debate to a Botticelli beauty!). But that biological imperative is something we need to rethink. Survival of the species is survival of the species – not the individual or even the individual’s genes. With the Earth population approaching 7 billion people, all of us reproducing offspring actually deters our survival. To insure the existence of our species, it’s not reproduction we need – it’s the ability to co-exist. A dark tan or a glowing smile will not enhance our co-existence. The ability to listen to our heart-brains, to radiate our inner light, will. And as part of the New Age of Enlightenment, this is where the human race is heading: past the level of skin-deep beauty to resonating our inner light, the same light that will illuminate this planet and create Heaven on Earth.

The soul's electric light

2010-08-16T00:00:00.000-07:00

Every day we hear expressions like “He’s got a magnetic personality”, “She has a radiant smile”, “The performance was electrifying”. Each of these is an example of raising our spirits – as individuals and in groups. We know these energies are contagious. A magnetic personality does raise the vibration of the group. A radiant smile can light up a room. The electrified performance does energize the audience. So what does all this talk of energy mean? And why does it impact us like it does? Perhaps we can shed some light on the subject by understanding electromagnetism.

We know the brain – the head brain and the heart brain – works with electricity. We also know that our brains react to electricity, whether that’s from its own chemical processes or from an external source. The New Scientist recently ran an article on how skull electrodes can boost our memory. Stimulating the brain with electricity can also make people recall memories, sometimes in astonishing detail. The Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield found that with some of his patients, when he stimulated the temporal lobes, “The patient ‘re-lived’ all that he had been aware of in that earlier period of time as in a moving-picture ‘flashback’.” (Creative Memory).

But electricity is also magnetism – or rather, they are part of the same thing, electromagnetism. Electric currents creates a magnetic field, and magnetic currents create a magnetic field. The electromagnetic spectrum is already familiar to most of us – from radio waves to the colors we see to x-rays and gamma rays.

We’ve always known about visible light and color, though we may not have known about its relationship with electricity. It was only in the late 19^th century, though, that we discovered the other parts of the spectrum – the radio waves, on the low energy side, the x-rays and gamma rays on the high energy side. These high-energy rays are invisible, useful, and dangerous.

Try to imagine how we would have thought about these dangerous, powerful, invisible “rays” before we could prove their existence. Would we call it magic? Would we be skeptical about their existence? Would it be some “flakes” insisting they’re real and powerful and scientifically-minded people shaking their heads wisely? What if I said that electric currents are evil, so people shouldn’t live near power stations? Most people would laugh. But electric currents create a magnetic field. And you can apply a magnetic field to part of the brain, you can destroy someone’s moral judgment – says MIT.

Ask yourself this question: is it worse to try to kill someone, and fail, or to kill someone by accident? Most people say it’s worse to try to kill someone. Intent is essential. Apply the magnets – and the same people will say it’s worse to kill someone by accident. It’s fine to try to kill someone and fail. After all, no-one died! Moral judgment is usually seen as the domain of the soul.

What we can’t prove yet isn’t necessarily wrong.

‘That’s argument by analogy.’
‘So? You’re arguing ad ignorantiam. Analogy doesn’t make it wrong!’
‘It’s not proof, either!’ Ray was adamant.
‘I am talking about not having proof for everything – that there’s a whole world of stuff out there that we can’t yet prove!’
‘So we can just make up what we like in the meantime?’
‘No!’
– Godspeed

We can’t just make it up – but perhaps we can admit that we don’t know everything. The limit of our knowledge isn’t the limit of the world. And sometimes, while we wait to prove things scientifically, we have other ways of knowing.

Think of how we talk about spirituality:

“People are always talking about light when they talk about spirituality – God being blinding, angels shining, Paul’s Damascus road experience, the word enlightenment, chakra light meditations, auras as colored invisible light, all that stuff. The Gnostics and Manicheans believed that our spirits were particles of light, trapped in a dark universe. Then all the hippy talk about vibrations and vibes, and a lot of that originally comes from Eastern religion … So all these different traditions of spirituality come back to the same metaphors about light, magnetism, and vibration.” – Ray of Light

The human body really is a vast energy system, storming with electro-magnetism. In Russia in 1939, Semyon Kirlian took the first photograph of the human energy field. An electromagnetic field surrounds all living and inanimate things. Our health, the level of stress in our lives, and environmental factors all affect that field. This life energy has been recognized for centuries by many healing traditions. We can call it an “aura” and depending on the level of someone’s vibration, it changes color – just like the color spectrum. In Chinese medicine, it's called qi; in India, it’s called prana.

So, what if the electromagnetic spectrum offers us a way to look at, even to measure, spirituality? How would that change our view of it? The electricity that our brains – head and heart – use, the electromagnetism that fills our bodies, might just be the inner light we’re looking for.

Throughout this blog and the Science & Spirituality website we speak about creating Heaven on Earth by December 21^st 2012. What we mean by that is creating a vibrant planet full of spirited, compassionate, and loving people – a human race experiencing light, love and an energetic existence. By quieting the mind (lowering our brain waves) and open our hearts (accessing the heart brain) we can, as a human race, create the age of new enlightenment, where spirit creates spirit, magnetism creates electricity, and Heaven is created on Earth.

Listen to your heart-brain

2010-08-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

When we make important decisions, we talk about our hearts. Follow your heart. You know in your heart it’s true. What does your heart tell you? Listen to your heart. I’ve set my heart on it. I’ve had a change of heart. Our language is full of idioms about our hearts. But the heart is just a muscle, right? It pumps blood around your body. Those feelings are actually in your head, your brain. Billions of neurons, linked up by synapses, firing electricity back and forth – that’s what’s really happening... Or so we thought.

Then we discovered that the heart has its own brain. We already knew that the heart communicates with the brain, with nerve impulses, pressure waves, and biochemicals. But in 1991, Dr J Andrew Armour discovered that it also has about 40,000 neurons – just like the brain – and that it also communicates using electricity. Neurons + electricity: that’s how we think. The heart is capable of thought.

This is the study of “neurocardiology”, which would have sounded absurd 20 years ago – the study of how the heart thinks and how it communicates with our head-brains. The pathway of information from our heart to our head is very important, because it shapes how we interpret that information. The heart’s pathway to the head goes up the vagus nerve, to the medulla, then the sub cortex (with the thalamus and amygdala) to cascade up to the cortex. Let’s look at this, to see what that means.

The cortex is the “gray matter” around the top of our brains – what we usually think of when we talk about our brains. That’s the place of conscious, logical thought. But deeper inside the brain, other parts don’t think in that conscious, logical way – and are often more powerful. This is the sub-cortex.

The sub-cortex doesn’t deal in thoughts. It’s the arena of instinct, emotion, impulse. The amygdala, inside the sub-cortex, is especially important – it’s a storehouse of emotional memory, comparing what is emotionally familiar with new information. It also manages stressful situations and negative emotions: if something bad happens, the amygdala lights up. The thalamus, also in the sub-cortex, processes our senses, manages sleeping and waking, and is closely tied to consciousness. “These areas are directly connected to the base of the frontal lobes, which are critical for decision making and the integration of reason and feeling,” writes the Institute of HeartMath. The heart’s signals “cascade up into the higher centers of the brain, where they may influence perception, decision making and other cognitive processes.” We really are thinking with our hearts.

The vagus nerve is also important, because it controls the heart rate, and it's all about the heart rate.

But Hope was shaking her head. “Your nervous system, your emotions, everything points back to the heart. You get excited, your heart races. You feel calm, your heart slows. If you’re constantly stressed, you can get heart-attacks; a terrible shock can stop your heart...”
– Revelations, final book in the Godspeed Trilogy

We already know how important emotions are for health – that stress can cause heart-attacks, that meditation can slow the heart rate and improve health. Now we’re discovering the heart’s role in this. A steady, calm heartbeat is called “coherent”. We know that being calm is good for thought. But now we’ve discovered that our heart rate isn’t just a response to feelings or thoughts.

Our data indicate that when heart rhythm patterns are coherent, the neural information sent to the brain facilitates cortical function. This effect is often experienced as heightened mental clarity, improved decision making and increased creativity. Additionally, coherent input from the heart tends to facilitate the experience of positive feeling states. This may explain why most people associate love and other positive feelings with the heart and why many people actually "feel" or "sense" these emotions in the area of the heart. In this way, as will be explored further in the studies presented in this Overview, the heart is intimately involved in the generation of psychophysiological coherence.
– The Heart Math Institute

The heart has its own thoughts, it can communicate them to our head-brains, and it can change the way we think. The last post spoke about brainwaves and how adjusting our brainwaves can control our consciousness. The heart’s rhythms can change brainwave patterns. And we know that to reach our head-brain, our heart-brain’s thoughts have to come through the amygdala and the thalamus, the places of emotion and of decisions which run deeper than logic.

Perhaps, to be enlightened as part of the New Age of Enlightenment, we need to listen to our hearts.

God Gave You A Brain… So Don’t Use It

2010-07-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

As children growing up, when we did something stupid or without thinking, our parents would turn to us and say “God gave you a brain…so use it!” But between now and December 21, 2012, the human race will actually evolve not by using the brain more, but – surprisingly – by using it less. It sounds absurd, but let’s look at what’s happening in our brains with different brain waves:

“Delta brain waves are seen only in the deepest stages of sleep (Stages 3 and 4). Theta brain waves are seen in light sleep and drowsiness (sleep stages 1 and 2). Alpha brain waves are seen in wakefulness where there is a relaxed and effortless alertness. Beta brain waves are seen in highly stressful situations, and where there is difficult mental concentration and focus.” – The Biocybernaut Institute: Advanced Brain Wave Biofeedback Training using Neurofeedback

Scientists currently measure brain activity by using an electroencephalogram (or EEG) that measures the brain wave frequencies. Each brain wave has a different frequency:

Delta brain waves – less then 4Hz
Theta brain waves – 4-7Hz
Alpha brain waves – 7-13Hz
Beta brain waves – 13-40Hz

In deep sleep, we see Delta brain waves – your brain activity is very slow. As you surface and begin to wake, they speed up a little, and become Theta brain waves. Now imagine your alarm goes off and you jerk awake: you have to leap out of bed, rush, dress, bolt down breakfast, and race out the house. You zip straight into Beta brain waves, without passing through the Alpha brain wave stage. If you weren’t beginning to wake up already, you’ll miss the Theta brain wave stage as well. Like a car grinding from first gear to fourth, you’ll shoot straight from Delta to Beta. (Read more about sleep patterns and brain waves. http://www.dreamviews.com/sleepstages.php)

Actually, we spend most of our waking lives in a Beta brain wave state – not always at the high end of stress, but within that range. We’re using the highest frequency almost all the time – but the lower frequencies have a lot to offer us. By using our brain less, the human race can change levels of consciousness for the better. Let’s look at each type of brain wave more closely.

Beta Brain Waves

The brain activity working within the “Beta” level of frequency, the highest frequency, is considered the normal state of waking consciousness. Nearly all forms of action, thinking, and problem-solving are done with beta brain waves. You’re probably using them right now, to read this. Most people at our current state of evolution spend most of their waking moments in Beta State. It’s by far the consciousness we are most familiar with and many of us would consider it the real “I” or “me” of ourselves.

Alpha Brain Waves

In the Alpha state, the brain is in a state of relaxation and meditation. This is associated with creativity and super learning – that perfect concentration that feels partly effortless and partly like the most focused you’ve ever been.

Most meditations and energy healing techniques utilize Alpha brain waves for relaxation and healing. Peak performances are also associated with Alpha brain waves. Recently, sports scientists have shown an influx of Alpha brain waves activity during extraordinary performances. So a clutch basketball player will generate Alpha brain waves before hitting a crucial shot and an elite golfer will produce Alpha brain waves before hitting a critical putt. These pro elite athletes will describe it at “quieting the mind” and “living in the moment” or “being in the zone”. Other extraordinary performances include talented actors who can lose themselves in their character and gifted musicians who lose themselves in their music. These special performers find their exceptional amount of creativity by actually creating Alpha brain waves.

Theta Brain Waves

In the Theta state, the brain is barely conscious – just before sleeping and just after waking; the border between the conscious and subconscious world.

While in the Theta state, the mind is capable of deep and profound learning, healing and growth – it’s the brain wave where our mind can connect to the Divine and manifest changes to the material world. During the deepest levels of meditation, Tibetan Buddhist monks can attain the “Zen” level of consciousness by suppressing the superior parietal lobe portion of their brain. The Theta state is associated with this kind of deep meditation and shamanic journyes. (That’s the bit that tells you where you end and the universe begins!) Similarly, during deep prayer, Franciscan Nuns can experience the “Holy Spirit” in the same way. Here are the names of higher levels of consciousness from various spiritual traditions:

Christianity: the Holy Spirit
Bhuddism: Zen
Yoga: Super Consciousness
Gurdjieff: Objective Consciousness
Sufism & Hinduism: Cosmic & God Consciousness
New Thought: Christ Consciousness

Delta Brain Waves

In the Delta state, the brain is in a state of deep sleep and unconsciousness. This is the realm where your soul resides, your unconscious, which stores the collection of memories of everything you’ve ever done, your free will consciousness, your life purpose, the reason you came into life.

Body/Mind/Spirit

It’s said that the Mind is the bridge between Body and Spirit. Scientific studies show that the lower your brain wave frequencies are, the quieter your mind and the stronger your feeling of spirit within the body. Enlightened spiritual masters like Jesus, Buddha, Moses and Muhammad were able to create their amazing levels of spirit and higher level of consciousness through their ability to control their brain wave frequencies.

Making a Conscious Decision to use our brains less

The increasing popularity of activities like Yoga, Tai Chi and meditation show that the human race is making a conscious decision to raise our consciousness by using our brain less. Western medicine’s increasing acceptance of holistic medicine, the power of prayer and the benefit of meditation shows that your frame of mind does impact your immune system and our ability to heal. We talk freely about stress-related illnesses and the impact of stress; we recognize that these different activities lower our stress levels.

But most importantly, our ability to change our consciousness brings the love, light and vibration of spirit into our day-to-day lives. And as a result, this brings bliss into our existence. Through collective consciousness (our deepest level of consciousness) or even cause-and-effect if you prefer, bliss will bring bliss and will create a better world to live in.

So let’s mediate, let’s pray, and with the assistance of Spirit, let’s create Heaven on Earth by consciously deciding to use our brain less. Preferably by December 21, 2012.

Want to read more?

Sleep patterns and brain waves: Dream View: The Stages of Sleep
Alpha brain waves, creativity, and sleep patterns: The Biocybernaut Institute: Alpha Brain Waves
Theta brain waves and healing: Formula for Miracles: Brain waves
Changes in the brain during spiritual experiences: H2G2, Neurotheology - The God-Shaped Hole in the Head
Meditation and brain waves: Crystal Links: Meditation brain
Meditation and brain scans: Andy Newberg PhD

On the “New Eve” of Evolution

2010-06-21T00:00:00.000-07:00

We discussed the empowerment of women in our last post, The Human Race hits the Mother Lode – but this isn’t enough to reach our age of new enlightenment goals of 2012. It’s not enough for women to exist and flourish within the existing patriarchal structure: we need women to bring the “divine feminine” into our society to balance its Yin & Yang, as well as maintaining that masculine energy. Some amazing women are out there doing this exact thing. Women on the Edge of Evolution, created by Katherine Woodward Thomas and Claire Zammit, is a movement that is creating a Feminine Power Global Community, to explore the creative potential of women to become active and empowered agents of cultural evolution. Amazing women like Marianne Williamson, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Jean Houston, Arielle Ford, Alanis Morissette and Melissa Etheridge give twice-weekly tele-series discussing how to come into the fullness of your power, self-expression and active participation in co-creating a better future for the world.

Here is just a small sample of what these amazing women are discussing:

Barbara Marx Hubbard
Barbara speaks of the crucial role of post-menopausal women in our world today, where the motivation of women moves from birthing babies to birthing the self: moving from Procreation to Co-creation. Women must become the “New Eve” for the world to return to the garden.

Marianne Williamson
Marianne speaks of the 17,000 children that die each day from starvation – one every five seconds – and if women were empowered and in the right frame of mind, this would never happen. What does that mean – the “right frame of mind”? According to Marianne Williamson, it’s not enough to empower women: women must become their true divine self.

Diane Musho Hamilton
Diane speaks of the The Gender Paradox – like a pendulum, women swung to their masculine energy to empower themselves, and now the pendulum begins to swing back to the feminine. The paradox is whether women have to choose between masculine and feminine energies, an either/or, or whether the real solution to the paradox is and/both.

Susan Schachterle
Susan speaks of how women can’t be leaders at the expense of being healers. The healing this planet needs right now can’t be done through political and military action. The healing necessary for the human race’s evolution will come from the intuitive wisdom and spiritual inclination of the feminine. And this feminine will evolve when women fall madly in love with themselves and work from a larger sense of purpose.

Dr. Anodea Judith
Anodea speaks of the need for our consciousness to evolve to the Divine consciousness when the human race has God-like powers – to birth humanity to early adulthood of God-hood. This evolution will change the love of power to the power of love.

Lucia René
Lucia speaks of unplugging the patriarch and the need to balance the feminine and masculine (lunar or solar) in our human existence. The human species must raise its heart-based consciousness in balancing feminine and masculine energies, as the Heart chakra is the natural balancer of the lower chakras (masculine) and upper chakras (feminine). This great linear change will happen in the year 2012 and the change will be enormously impacted by the role of women.

Marilyn Nyborg
Marilyn speaks of how our world is shaped by the masculine mind and women walk into this world not creates by their source. In the eventual wholeness for both males and females, both can experience their masculine and feminine energies, and we can unravel the patriarchy that’s in ourselves and our society.

Amy Ahlers
Amy speaks of cultivating a nurturing relationship with oneself – turning back to our feminine, which we currently devalue. This means waking up to our deeper wisdom and cultivating the courage to act on it: how receiving is powerful; how intuition is powerful; how we can’t listen to the big fat lies. We keep thinking that if we get one more thing, that will be enough – instead of saying, “I am enough, right now, and let’s play with that.”

August Gold
Answer the call. Life is talking. Are you listening?
Life is a conversation with yourself and your job is to learn its language. Once you learn its language, you will have all the support you need on a daily basis – moment to moment. Life talks to you through Life, personally and directly, and all of life is a movement toward perfection. So look at what’s happening to you instead of what’s happening for you. For those who listen, life will lead you to your destiny. For those who don’t listen, Life will drag you along anyway!

The “New Eve” of Enlightenment is upon us

With the year 2012 approaching, women are taking it to the next level. After 5,000 years of a patriarchal society, what are the odds of a “divine feminine” movement upon us right now, bringing the feminine energy we all need? Is this movement part of the New Age of Enlightenment? Is this movement part of the great spiritual enlightenment the Mayans predicted for 2012? For me, it’s hard to believe it’s not.

Listen to the Women on the Edge of Evolution audio library.

The Human Race hits the Mother Lode

2010-05-31T00:00:00.000-07:00

For thousands of years, patriarchal societies have systematically denied women’s rights, independence, and intelligence. From Ancient Greece to the Middle Ages, women were treated as minors and as property, literally “given away” in marriage, as possessions. In early modern Europe, under the patriarchal religion of the day, 40 000 to 100 000 “witches” were executed – most of them women. The US Constitution left women with zero rights and zero representation.

At the time, most of these patriarchal abuses were considered appropriate, just – even natural. Today, society would be appalled at the very thought of the witch-trials in the Inquisition, and think of not giving Constitutional rights to women as barbaric. But are we still making decisions based on patriarchal prejudice? In 150 years from now, will historians look back at our era as inhumane and barbaric? Let’s look at where we’ve been – and at where we still need to go. Not only the treatment of women, but in the context of poverty, the military and the way we treat our planet environmentally – we will look back at ourselves with disbelief.

Women’s suffrage

The “first wave” of the feminist movement was fighting for the right to vote, in the 19th and 20th centuries. Of course women had rebelled against their lot for hundreds of years before – most famously Christine de Pizan (15th century) and Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792. But only in 1918 did women get the right to vote in Britain – if they were over 30 and owned houses! In 1928, this was changed to all women over 21, while in 1920, all US women got the vote. For most of us, this means our grandmothers’ mothers couldn’t vote.

Equal rights

Having the vote didn’t bring equal treatment. Swathes of discriminatory laws remained and the prejudices of a patriarchal society were deeply embedded. Pay wasn’t equal, women lacked civil rights and family planning support, contraceptives were illegal in some US states, marital rape was legal, as was discriminating against pregnant women, the Military Academies didn’t accept women, and many universities and colleges were men-only. The “second wave” of feminism, in the 1960s and 1970s, campaigned against all this, with massive legal success – and they changed not just the laws, but also many of the social attitudes towards women.

Breaking the “glass ceiling”

Nevertheless, many of these attitudes persist, and changing the law doesn’t change people’s behaviors. The City of London, district of stockbrokers, is notorious for rampant sex-discrimination and New York’s Wall Street is no better. But the world is still changing.

With female Prime Ministers and Presidents elected all around the world and the additional influence of women within the three branches of the U.S. Federal Government, the glass is starting to crack. Women are graduating at a higher rate then men from college and about a third of family breadwinners are now women.

It’s easy, and tempting, to conflate women with feminine energy. Certainly, our cultures encourage men to develop masculine-energy traits & women to develop feminine-energy traits. Often, showing the opposite trait is heavily criticized – women are called “bitches”, men are called “wimps”, and so forth. But as the last post discussed, both sexes work better with both energies. Women having higher positions in society doesn’t necessarily mean they bring feminine energy. For one thing, not all women are necessarily dominant in “feminine” energy, plus those values are traditionally undervalued compared to the “masculine” counterparts, so achievement is often through masculine energy in both sexes. Nevertheless, as our society learns to revalue women, so it learns to revalue “feminine” values.

The “feminine” impact on society

In the United States, since the signing of 19th Amendment, many compassionate laws and social programs would soon follow in the United States. Social programs like unemployment benefits, Medicare and Medicaid, and social security were provided to the most vulnerable. The Civil Rights Act, the Equal Rights Amendment, and the Americans with Disability Act followed to protect the minority citizens of a society. These social programs, laws and amendment were about creating a more evolved and vibrant society, as proposed by FDR’s New Deal, JFK’s New Frontier, and LBJ’s Great Society . With the year 2012 upon us, the next “feminine” agenda should address saving our planet — how about BHO’s “New World”? These great social program and initiatives aren’t exclusively credited to women – but we can credit them to a renewal of feminine energy and values: the soft, inward, receptive, intuitive, creative, multi-tasking, compassionate, and loving.

Women’s impact on society

The empowerment of women has immense benefits for a society. When women are educated, baby and child deaths decrease and family health improves – regardless of whether the woman’s income changes. Their children are more likely to be educated, and to do better at school. The Microcredit Campaign found that women are a better credit risk, and the UNCDF proved they are more likely than men to invest new income in their families and societies – when a woman benefits, so does everyone around her. A World Bank report showed that societies that discriminate against women are poorer, with worse government, a lower standard of living, and slower economic growth. Women are less prone to corruption and nepotism, are more politically active when they’re educated, have a lower carbon footprint and are more likely to take personal action to help the environment. Women’s rights don’t depend on them being so all-round-brilliant, but it’s a foolish world that refuses to benefit from all this!

A mother lode of feminine energy

So, after thousands of years of patriarchies, it’s obvious what a positive impact this influx of feminine energy has had. Empowerment for women reaps extraordinary benefits. More feminine energy is essential to balance the yin & yang and unravel our current patriarchal world – and this burden should not be placed on women exclusively. With the year 2012 approaching, and the Age of New Enlightenment upon us, we need feminine energy to increase the vibration of the planet.

The meek will inherit the earth...

2010-05-17T00:00:00.000-07:00

For hundreds of years, we’ve divided our energy into “masculine” and “feminine” – whether we call it masculine and feminine energy, yang and yin, or left brain and right brain.

Masculine (Yang)
Hard
Outward
Projecting
Rational
Logical
Focused
Firm
Purposeful

Feminine (Yin)
Soft
Inward
Receptive
Intuitive
Creative
Multi-tasked
Compassionate
Loving

We’ve convinced ourselves that if we want to achieve anything, masculine energy is better. So look at the feminine energy again. Look at what we’ve tried to stamp out from our personal success – how our society runs – how corporations and governments function – how we treat our planet. Does part of you read that list and think “weak”? Can we afford to live without those qualities? Can we live without those qualities?

Every aspect of human life works better with a balance of feminine and masculine energies.

Individuals

We live in a competitive society. We want good, healthy, fulfilling things – a home, family, good food, our loved ones safe, a sense of purpose and achievement, the chance to do something that matters. To get these things, we have to compete, at school, in job interviews, at work, for money and bonuses, on the housing market, for promotion… So yes, we do need to be hard, outward, projecting, rational, logical, focused, firm, purposeful.

Masculine energy shows us HOW – feminine energy shows us WHY. It’s a cliché and a truism that wealth doesn’t bring happiness; equally true, lack of money can bring unhappiness. But it’s not the money or success – that’s only our HOW. We all know the trope of a wealthy man or woman, sitting in a palatial home, surrounded by fine art and expensive carpets, desolate and sick with emptiness. Feeling like somewhere on the road to achieving all their dreams, they lost something priceless. It’s true. They have. But not lost – perhaps, just buried.

We are emotional people. Whether we like it or not – and many of us don’t. In The Man Who Tasted Shapes, 1998, the neurologist Richard Cytowic showed that our decisions are not rational, logical, and purposeful as we like to think – they are, ultimately, emotional. Research continues in this area. Our rational brain plays, at most, the role of consultant. Even the most hardcore-logical person can never escape their emotion. It’s at the base of who we are. Our motivations, our WHY, is ultimately human, and emotional. It’s soft, inward, receptive, intuitive, creative, multi-tasking, compassionate, and loving.

If we keep the HOW and we lose the WHY, we end up tired and unfulfilled. We know what we’re trying to achieve – but none of us dares ask “What’s the point of it all?” Why? Because we’re compassionate and loving, that’s why. Because unless we’re dead, we care.

Society

Let the WHY back in, for a moment. Let yourself feel. Let yourself care about this: 50% of the world’s wealth goes to 2% of the human race. Most of the world goes to bed cold, hungry and illiterate. 100 million children live on the street. 17,000 children died of hunger today. And yesterday. Another 17,000 will die again tomorrow. And the day after. Yes, without the HOW there’s nothing we can do about this. But by all that is sacred, let the WHY back in.
Why? Because we can. We can fix this. “Handouts don’t work,” you say – yep, apparently so. And equally clearly, microcredits do work. We can’t say the HOW is impossible – HOW is what we’re good at, all we’ve been good at. But if we ignore WHY, we don’t.

By providing world class education, living wages, equal justice and universal healthcare for all citizens, we can create a safe environment that creates success. In a perfect “yin & yang” world, society should create a safety net that doubles as a spring board – compassionate and purposeful.

We have the means. We have the expertise, the technology, and the infrastructure available to take care of the whole world. What are we doing with all that?

Big Business

In its current form, the corporate structure wants the bottom line – at any cost. This environment encouraged the behavior of such companies as Enron and WorldCom, who found the devastation of others acceptable in acquiring their own personal wealth. The Alpha Male environment of our financial institutions, our banks and stock markets, is a recipe for disaster. Three key factors in the banking crisis were:

• unwillingness to be wrong or appear weak (so you trust yourself against the facts)
• an intensely male environment (this drives up testosterone, which in turn drives up excessive risk-taking)
• rewards for short-term success (instead of long-term stability)

This has already devastated us. But corporate and banking culture remains the same, flawed model. And this is some of what corporations control in our society:

Media ~ Finances ~ Agriculture ~ Real Estate ~ Manufacturing ~ Insurance ~ Health ~ Entertainment ~ Transportation

Are you comfortable with that?

Corporations seem like monolithic powerhouses – but they’re not. They’re made up of people, each with their own HOW and buried WHY, and all of us need to return to our why. Otherwise, we’re not only purposeless – we are well and truly screwed.

Of course the masculine HOW is not the only way, however traditionally dominant it is. New management styles are emerging and many corporate leaders and entrepreneurs show profound compassion: Bill Gates, with the Gates Foundation, AIDS vaccine, and malaria research; Omidyar, with the micro-loans; Richard Branson, with Green Energy. Everyone’s a mix of masculine and feminine – and we need both.

Government

Governments are no different. Traditionally and still male-dominated, most maintain a heavily alpha-male environment focused on masculine energy – with all the pitfalls we saw in the banking crisis. It’s not a question of “add more women”. Women are just as capable as men of suiting up in masculine energy. It’s a question of revaluing feminine energies – in men and women. While our masculine energies start wars, snatch resources, and modernize the military to the point of potential self-destruction of the human race, meanwhile failing the duty of care to its own citizens, the problem is obvious. Yet world leaders who do exhibit compassion and offer non-violent solutions – King, Gandhi, and Mandela – go down in history as our greatest. Even Jesus Christ said, “Love your enemies.”

The World

We live in a patriarchal world, emphasized by our need for progress even at the expense of our Earth. Masculine energy sees feminine energy as weak, and meek. But we can make ourselves whole again, and we can evolve. And the meek will inherit the earth

The Mayan Calendar’s promise

2010-05-03T09:00:00.000-07:00

What does the Mayan Calendar tell the human race is coming – inevitable Armageddon? Inevitable Enlightenment? Something in between? Nothing at all? Both NASA and the Mayan elders agree: disaster isn’t imminent. Instead, our evolution could take a huge leap forward, through collective intelligence.

Not disaster but enlightenment

Prophecies of doom for December 21, 2012 are plentiful. Planet X is going to collide with us – or possibly Niribu – or a massive solar flare will torch us all – or the earth will turn on its head – or a massive planetary alignment will destroy us all… Reassuringly, no scientific evidence backs up any of these fatal forecasts. Ian O’Neill, an engaging science writer, runs through the misunderstandings behind the different claims in his articles on 2012 and even NASA steps in to reassure us there’s no imminent disaster. The stuff of movies is not the stuff of fact.

Mayans themselves say 2012 is not the end of the world – quite the opposite. Gerardo Barrios, who grew up among the Maya Mam tribe in Huehuetenango, interviewed close to 600 traditional Mayan elders about the calendar and its prophecy. The Manataka American Indian Council website quotes his brother Carlos’s book, Kam Wuj: El Libro del Destino: “They say that the world will end in December 2012. The Mayan elders are angry with this. The world will not end. It will be transformed.”

Measuring more than time

The Mayan calendar is intricate – unlike our own, it doesn’t just measure the seasonal year and mark the moons. In fact, it uses three calendars simultaneously: the Haab, the Tzolkin, and the Tun.

Thanks to Quantum Co-creation for the basis of this image

Imagine the three calendars as three cogs, each turning one day at a time. The Haab has 365 days – that’s for seasons, farming, and taxes. The Tzolkin has 260 days, and gives the intention of creation for each day. The Tun has 360 days: this is the prophetic calendar which traces the wave of creation. They all start together, and all turn together, but each lasts a different length of time – so to get back to their original starting point takes a very long time. About 5,125 years. (One could spend many happy, meditative / mathematical hours with these numbers.) And that is the Mayan long count. That’s what comes to an end on December 21, 2012. To an end – but also to a new beginning.

It measures not only time, but also the nine levels of consciousness of the human race that lead up to enlightenment. These are the nine underworlds, represented by the nine-stepped Mayan pyramids.

Get this image as wallpaper here

All nine underworlds end at the same time: December 12, 2012. Counting backwards, each one lasts 20 times the previous one. And each one represents a distinct stage in development and consciousness:

Cycle	Consciousness	Event	Starts	Lasts
Cellular Cycle	Action/Reaction	First Live Cells		16.4 Billion years
Mammalian Cycle	Stimulus/Response	First Live Births		820 Million years
Familiar Cycle	Stimulus Individual Response	First monkeys: Australopithecus Afarensis		41 Million years
Tribal Cycle	Decision Making	First humans: Homo Sapiens		2 Million years
Cultural Cycle	Reasoning	Spoken language		102,000 years
National Cycle	Law & Punishment	c. Stonehenge	Aug 11, 3114 BCE	5,116 years
Planetary Cycle	Power		Sep 14, 1756	256 years
Galactic Cycle	Ethics		Feb 28, 2000	12.8 years
Universal Cycle	Enlightenment		April 5, 2012	0.72 years

2012, the time of enlightenment, is almost upon us. Does it really look like the human race is going to make a quantum leap in evolution? Our current behavior is hardly persuasive. But there is something we have access to which could help with such a transformation: collective intelligence.

Collective intelligence

Collective intelligence is a shared, group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration of many individuals. It appears in a wide variety of forms, one being the network of computers and knowledge which is the internet. Mass communication inevitably affects mass behavior. One conscious thought can be shared collectively, in critical mass, all in a single moment. Now just think what would happen if the one conscious thought was to love one another. And how do you think that would affect mass behavior? And would this change in behavior be a quantum leap in our evolution to the new age of enlightenment?

The Mayan calendar, having tracked evolution since the Big Bang, predicts that the human race will evolve to a new level of consciousness in the year 2012. What are the odds, after those billions of years of existence, that this is the moment when we have the capacity to organize a conscious thought to love one another all in a single moment?

Perhaps a critical mass of simultaneous, conscious thought of love can catapult the human race to the next level of evolution. Perhaps this is the evolution the Mayan Calendar predicted – or perhaps our reaction to the Mayan Calendar prophecy can create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

For want of a nail...

2010-04-19T09:00:00.000-07:00

Cause links on to effect, until a single assassination has led to a holocaust, nuclear destruction, and the threat of destroying our whole species. We need to stop this. We need to think in a new way.

At the beginning of the 20th century, trouble was brewing in Europe. The Industrial Revolution had transformed societies, bringing steam trains to quiet backwaters, mass-production, and urbanization. The British and German Empires were flexing their muscles; the Ottoman Empire was declining; the Austrio-Hungarian Empire wrestling to unite its national groups; and Imperial Russia was reeling from its first revolution. These various powers were tenuously held together with a patchwork of treaties and alliances, and at its center, the Balkans: the “powder-keg of Europe”.

Then the keg blew. On June 28th, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were killed by Serb Nationalist Gavrilo Princip during a formal visit to Sarajevo. This triggered a series of diplomatic events that led to the beginning of World War I, 15 million deaths, and the eventual devastation of Germany.

Rather than "the war to end all wars", WWI just led to worse. The severe punishments dealt out to Germany allowed Adolf Hitler to rise to power. This in turn led to World War II, with 73 million military and civilian deaths, a holocaust and attempted genocide – and the use of nuclear weapons by the United States. This weapon started its own chain: the United States and the USSR started a cold war, stockpiling nuclear weapons. The fate of the human race hung on Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD): if one side fires, both will end up dead. (Similarly, before World War I, Europe thought its “balance of power” would keep it from war.)

More powder-kegs were created. As well as advancing weapons of mass destruction, World War II led the UN to create Israel as a country for the Jewish people. This attempt at peace-making has led to tension, hostilities, and outright war in the Middle East for the last 60 years. The cycle of hatred, fear and violence just keeps going.

Was it all down to one death? What if Archduke Ferdinand had never been assassinated? What would the world look like—dramatically different, or is the cycle of fear and violence inevitable? Were the dominoes already in place; was it only a matter of time before first domino fell? Nobody knows. But we do know that when that first domino fell, the world wasn’t such a dangerous place. We weren’t capable of destroying our own species.

Can we carry on like this? In 2010, almost 100 years later, knowing that we’re able to kill our whole species, can we blindly wrap ourselves in our own flag, quiver at the sounds of our own politicians’ preaching the fear of the unknown, and hope and pray MAD will keep us safe from people who want to harm us? I believe we can’t. And it’s the natural selection of our own species that will end this level of thinking.

Albert Einstein once said “The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them”. In response to having invented the H-bomb, he and Bertrand Russell wrote in the Russell-Einstein manifesto, “We have to learn to think in a new way … Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”

With Einstein’s wisdom, with our instinctive survival mode of natural selection, I believe it is time for the human race to evolve and raise its consciousness to a new level of thinking. It’s not enough to stop the next domino from falling: we need to remove the dominoes from existence completely.

The cycle for fear and violence has to end. So what’s the solution? I think, deep in our hearts, everyone knows the true solution – TO LOVE ONE ANOTHER. The most difficult thing on the planet to do is what the human race needs to do now. And I believe we have it in us, as a species, to evolve to this challenge.

But the greatest of these is Love

2010-04-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

How can religion, a touchstone of morality and compassion, seem to create hatred? Perhaps it’s not religion that’s at fault, but how we attach ourselves to religion. If we detach our egos from our beliefs, we can follow our beliefs more truly – and learn to love.

How can religon invoke hatred? Some argue that the problem is believing in one true God. If you believe that, you have to be partisan and believe the other religions just have it completely wrong. But let’s look more carefully at the monotheist religions. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all Abrahamic religions, named after Abraham, the father of Israel. Abraham had two sons: Isaac, through whom the Christian and Jewish lines descend; and Ishmael, the ancestor of Muhammad, the Muslim prophet of God. That first divide sowed the seeds of the Crusades: almost two hundred years of bloodthirsty war. Christianity and Judaism separated with the birth of Jesus. Years of anti-Semitism and persecution followed, while Judaism and Islam still fight a horrific battle over their shared Holy Land. Did religion cause this violence?

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all preach love – above all. In the New Testament of the Bible, Jesus says, “The greatest of these is Love.” Judaism says that God chose the Jewish people to set an example of holiness and ethical behavior, through what they do. In Islam, one of the five pillars of faith is charity, or zakāt. This is literal charity, giving 2.5% of their wealth to the poor, but it’s also more: it’s sharing happiness among God’s creation, be it through kindness, smiles, or taking good care of the environment and animals. Sikhism, another major monotheist religion, declares that everyone is equal and should be treated equally, and that a good life involves meditating on God and good deeds to others.

Other religions also put love and compassion at the center. For example, the Hindu ethical code, Dharma, asks its followers to act in service to God and to humanity. Shinto, a Japanese faith, promotes harmony and purity in everything – not just in actions, but in a pure, sincere heart. Paganism says, “An’ it harm none, do as you will.” Buddhism has five precepts that all its believers should follow, and the most important is "Avoid killing or harming any living thing."

So what’s going wrong? The hatred and violence didn’t end with the crusades. It’s not restricted to the war in the Middle East, or to terrorists. It breathes every time we look at hate and suspicion at those who don’t follow our beliefs. It breathes when we condemn people who don’t do what we think is right. It breathes when we think like the Pharisees. It breathes in every angry hate-filled campaign. But however strongly we feel about something, hate, anger, and violence can never be right. You can’t defend your religion by breaking its most important rule – love. So what do we do?

The religions aren’t wrong – they preach love. We’re wrong. It’s not religion that’s at fault, it’s how we relate to our religions. The problem is the ego-mind, which says “my beliefs”. The important word must never be “my” – it must be “beliefs”. The belief must always matter more than ourselves. We have to let go of our egos and our need to be right, so we can put the true message first. And the true message doesn’t say hate the unbeliever, scourge them into obedience, harangue them into belief – it says LOVE. Love everyone. Help everyone. Hurt no-one. And as that little voice rises up saying, “Yes, but…” – let go of it. That’s not the religious creed speaking: that’s the ego, needing to be right. Let go.

The key is detachment. The ego will always exist and want to be right, but we don’t have to obey it. We can put our beliefs above our egos. And until we do, we’re like hungry people holding a recipe for cake, saying “Isn’t this great?” But the recipe isn’t the cake – it’s how to make cake. Having the recipe is not eating the cake. We have to follow the recipe. The recipe says, in every different language, love one another. This has to be more important than being “right” and not following the recipe can never be right.

In the end, no matter what religion you practice, spirituality is not an intellectual exercise that is either right or wrong. It's a state of being, where you experience light, love and a feeling of connection. The need to be right only puts up a wall to this state of being. Detachment from our ego-mind’s need to be right tears down this wall and opening our hearts magnifies the experience of this state. And for the human race to learn how to detach ourselves, while practicing our most fundamental beliefs, will be the corner stone of our spiritual growth and evolution.

How can we detach? The ego says, “But they’re wrong!” – let go. We mustn’t attach to religion, pinning our egos to it – we must follow the beliefs. And the same is true of this blog: this is not The Way, this is a way. And here are some of the ways to detach. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

• Christianity: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (New Testament)
• Christianity: “Now these three remain – faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.” (New Testament)
• Islam: “Yet of mankind are some who take unto themselves (objects of worship which they set as) rivals to Allah, loving them with a love like (that which is the due) of Allah (only) - those who believe are stauncher in their love for Allah.” (Al-Baqara)
• Hinduism: “One who performs his duty without attachment, surrendering the results unto the Supreme Lord, is unaffected by sinful action, as the lotus is untouched by water.” Bhagavad-Gita
• Buddhism: "Whenever thinking imbued with sensuality [or ill will or harmfulness] had arisen, I simply abandoned it, destroyed it, dispelled it, wiped it out of existence." (Thanissaro)
• Buddhism: “When his mind is rightly-gone, rightly developed, has rightly risen above, gained release, and become disjoined from sensual pleasures, then whatever fermentations, torments, & fevers there are that arise in dependence on sensuality, he is released from them. He does not experience that feeling.” (Thanissaro)
• Sikhism: “The answer is simple: without this absolute surrender of the last vestiges of ego and selfhood and without such complete absorption in the object of one's love, one cannot attain that unwavering concentration of all one's faculties which is the prerequisite of all inner progress. Absolute love and self-surrender are only other aspects of complete and flawless concentration.” (Adi Granth)
• Judaism: "You shall not covet...anything that is your neighbor's... You shall not desire your neighbor's house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or anything that is your neighbor's. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also". (Old Testament)
• Baha'i: “by detachment is intended the detachment of the soul from all else but God.” …and… "The essence of detachment is for man to turn his face towards the courts of the Lord, to enter His Presence, behold His Countenance, and stand as witness before Him." (Tablets of Baha'u'llah)
• Taoism: “Fame or Self: Which matters more? Self or Wealth: Which is more precious? Gain or Loss: Which is more painful? He who is attached to things will suffer much. He who saves will suffer heavy loss. A contented man is rarely disappointed. He who knows when to stop does not find himself in trouble. He will stay forever safe.” (Tao Te Ching)

What we "know" about the world can change

2010-03-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

Quantum physics gives us bizarre paradoxes which challenge the most basic facts we know about the world. We can argue against them and pretend it’s not true, or we can change the way we look at the world – and see that actually, we’re connected.

Quantum physics gives us some bizarre paradoxes. It tells us things which contradict everything we “know” about the world. Think of the last time you sat on an airplane – on the screen they have a picture of where the plane is and how fast it’s going. The pilot has to know that, or the plane won’t arrive!

But what if you have an electron, instead of an airplane? Then we meet Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. This says you can know an electron’s speed or its position, but not both. The more accurately you measure its speed, the less you know its position. The more accurately you measure its position, the less you know its speed. So if you can’t say where it is and how fast it’s going, how do you work anything out? Heisenberg used a probability distribution – an equation saying all the places it might be and all the speeds it might be traveling at. He even said that the electron actually was in all those places, at all those speeds. It only chooses its path when we measure it. Bizarrely, this works just fine. Even more bizarrely, the electronics in that airplane are using quantum physics!

For our picture of the world, this is mad. Nothing can be in two places at once, never mind lots of places. Everyone finds quantum physics bizarre, including quantum physicists. And so they come up with different explanations and interpretations, trying to figure out what this tells us about how the world really is.

The most standard explanation is the Copenhagen interpretation – but even within that, there are differences. These break down like this:

atheism: of course the electron isn’t in all those places! That’s ridiculous. It’s just a mathematical model. “What cannot be observed doesn’t exist.” (This was Bohr’s stance. It’s called “positivist” or “subjective”, and is similar to the Ensemble interpretation.)
agnostic: we have no idea whether the electron’s in all those places or in one place. But who cares? The math works just fine. (This was Von Weizsäcker’s view.)
believer: it’s all real. The electron really is all those places, and/or none. Its path comes into existence when we observe it. (This is “realism”, and it’s Heisenberg’s approach.)

(And if you think that’s weird – another widely-accepted interpretation is the many-worlds theory: each possibility gets its own world to happen in.)

Quantum physics contradicts what we “know” about the universe. The atheist view, positivism, says that everything we knew before is right, an electron can’t be in more than one place, and that’s that – no matter what the math says! The agnostic view just shrugs. This blog goes with realism, the “believers”: the math works, and it’s true. The electron changes when we observe it. It’s all real. The observer is influencing reality – if not actually creating it.

What we “know” about the universe can be wrong – and we can learn, and we can change. We don’t have to cling onto what we used to “know” was true. We can learn new truths. We can create new paths.

But surely this only applies to particles? Quantum physics is for very tiny, very fast things, and Newtonian physics is for normal things, like cars and people and rolling balls and airplanes. Right? Not quite. Scale up the calculations, try making a mega-equation for every electron in the airplane. If the math doesn’t kill you, you’ll discover this: it predicts the same thing as Newton’s laws. Newton’s laws are just quantum-physics-for-big-stuff. In fact, most classical physics is now seen as a special case of quantum physics. (There is gravity, though – gravity affects large objects, like us, and not tiny particles. Physicists would sell their souls en masse for a theory which combines gravity & quantum physics.)

Our assumptions about the world have to change. People try to say, “The world doesn’t work like that!” and find they’re arguing with hard math which says, “Oh, yes, it does.” We assume we’re separate. How can we affect an electron just by observing it? But we’re not – we are connected. Literally, physically. Our assumptions often rest on science, and science often rests on our assumptions, but sometimes newness enters the world. This gives us a new way of looking at the world: connection. This is the new age of enlightenment.

Instead of assuming we’re all separate, we assume we’re connected. We’re not isolated individuals, each trapped in our own lonely box of skin – we’re connected, with light and love humming a web between us. Between each other, between us and the world. We’re a part of it.

Instead of assuming we only have an effect when we choose to, we assume we’re having an effect all the time. Our happiness leaps from person to person, like a smile from a stranger on the way to work. Our sorrow reaches out into the world, asking for help. The more we know this, the more we live it, the more it’s true.

A new age of enlightenment

2010-03-01T09:00:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Science and Spirituality – a new blog to open up conversation and about our nature as human beings and how we’re changing. We want to be part of a paradigm shift – a shift that is already happening, towards compassion and connection: towards a new age of enlightenment.

We believe humans have the capacity for change, and that we stand on the brink of a fundamental change – in how we understand the world, live our lives, and relate to each other. We are a changing race. The evolution of our bodies allowed our brains to grow, and allowed us to carve out a new niche for ourselves – to use tools, to develop speech. Our consciousness awakened. Our brains are the key to our survival – the things we’ve invented, the things we’ve built. But our brains are also our downfall – the things we’ve destroyed, the people we injure. It’s time to take the next leap forward in evolution: from body, to mind, and now to spirit. We know how much a change in our thinking can change our world. We’ve seen it before – in the Enlightenment, in the 18th Century.

The 18th century Enlightenment was the Age of Reason – it said arguments should be based on reason and logic. It said everyone was equal and everything could be analyzed and criticized – nothing was too sacred. This was a massive change in how people thought about knowledge and the world around them, including their traditions, morality, and institutions like the government and the church. So many of the values we cherish sprang from this: the importance of freedom and democracy, religious tolerance, the scientific method, the belief – above all – in being rational. Immanuel Kant’s motto for the Enlightenment was “Sapere aude!” – Dare to know! That Enlightenment brought the freedom to use one’s own intelligence. Today’s Enlightenment is the freedom to experience one’s own spirit.

The new Enlightenment’s motto is, “We are connected.” In terms of physics, we’re connected to matter, our observations changing what happens in an experiment. In our lives and souls, we’re connected to a universe far beyond ourselves. In society, we’re connected to each other. The wellbeing of every individual is wrapped up in the wellbeing of their society and the wider world. What benefits one person in a group can’t help but benefit the rest of the group. Good generates good – and sometimes in the most unexpected ways. For example, increasing a woman’s literacy raises her child’s life expectancy – regardless of her income, her social class, or where she lives. Globally, it’s increasingly obvious that we are connected at every level: economically, environmentally, politically, socially. No country can stand alone; no person can untangle their fate from the world’s. So let’s use that – instead of trying to live despite the world, let’s embrace it. Embrace it: accept it, but also hug it close, because it is a power for good stronger than we realize.

Let’s build on these connections – intellectually, but also spiritually. Intellectually, let’s help develop our emerging, new way of thinking: the understanding that we’re all connected. Just like the first Enlightenment showed, a massive shift of assumptions is possible: changing the way we think can change the world. But for the new Age of Enlightenment, our hearts need to be signed up too. Love: light: connection: optimism: however we phrase it, this is a change we need to feel. The world may seem to be teetering on the edge of darkness, with recession, and wars, and climate change – but all around us we can also see green shoots sprouting, new promise. People’s unstinting generosity to each other, when it’s needed most. A concern and horror for war that we’ve never seen before in human history. An energy for change and a willingness to sacrifice our own pleasures for the good of the planet. We hope you’ll join us – thrashing out ideas on the blog, spreading the word, and changing the paradigm to…

compassion
love
connection

Coming soon!

2010-01-27T11:37:00.000-08:00

The Science and Spirituality blog will be launched on Monday, March 1, 2010. Click here if you want us to send you an alert when our inaugural post goes up! Meanwhile, check out our website: we explore connections between science & spirituality, and aim for 2012 as a tipping point in human evolution, drawing on the best the human spirit can offer.