The mathematics of the heart

Math and the heart – the words sound completely opposed.  We like to divide things into “left-brain” and “right-brain” and never the twain shall meet. I’m this or I’m that.  In fact, that neat distinction isn’t something neurology supports, and we might do better to follow the Renaissance ideal – to achieve in all spheres.  At the moment, most of our respect is reserved for the math side of things – for proof, for science, for good empirical fact, for logic. And the moment we do that, we automatically consign all matters of the heart and emotion to a box labeled unscientific, illogical, unproven, fluffy.  This is a dangerous way to live – and as we start to use math to explore the heart, we find out why.

The maths of being nice

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

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

Martin Nowak’s mathematical models are a neat, elegant way of showing how these different forms of cooperation work and benefit us.  As a strong religious believer, he’s equally interested in looking at how his work overlaps with religious beliefs:

I see the teachings of world religions as an analysis of human life and an attempt to help. They intend to promote unselfish behaviour, love and forgiveness. When you look at mathematical models for the evolution of cooperation you also find that 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 punishment is a point to which he returns.  Punishment can be used to police cooperation – cooperate or else! – and most people hold on to the belief that punishment works, or if at least it should, or even if it doesn’t, we still need it, because not to have it would just be… just be…

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

HeartMath

The Institute 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 Listen to Your Heart-Brain, the heart has its own brain.  Neurocardiology looks at how our heart’s thoughts are communicated to the brain and the role that this plays in our thinking, our life, and even our health.  The relationship between stress and heart-attacks has been known for years, but this heart-health relationship is now being explored much more widely and in much more detail.  A healthy metaphorical heart, seat of love and emotions, is intimately tied together with a literally healthy heart.  We weren’t such fools, after all, all those years that we said the heart, not the brain, is the seat of emotion.

Much of the Institute’s work and focus is on individual health and helping individuals deal with their emotions – which is 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 crucial part of our health.  Interestingly, the Institute also soon addressed the subject of forgiveness.  A study compared the effect of feeling angry or caring towards other people, by measuring secretory immunoglobulin A (S-IgA).  This antibody is a major part of our immune system, and used to indicate our general immune functioning.  The higher your S-IgA levels, the stronger your immune system.

Anger, it turns out, has an immediate and negative effect on our own ability to fight disease and stay healthy.  Suddenly Michael Nowak’s mathematical findings start to make sense.  Punishment really does hurt us more than the person we punish, because our anger makes us vulnerable to disease and illness.  Forgiveness really is the way to win and those who don’t forgive can never win.

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

Whatever happened, whoever’s fault, it is time to forgive.  To move forward and evolve 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 the virtues, the greatest of these is love.

Heaven and hell

We speak 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 achieve this heavenly experience.  What does that mean? 

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

I’m not good enough.  I’m not skinny enough.  I’m not clever 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 we cling to, that create the darkness in our lives.   These are the thoughts that create our living hell.   These are the self-inflicting thoughts that close off the pearly gates and our ability to experience heaven.

Original Sin

If we look at the story of Adam and Eve, it was a change in consciousness that changed the Garden of Eden from heaven to a living hell.   In Genesis, Adam and Eve ran around naked and experienced heaven until they ate an apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and as a result became self-conscious of being naked.  Perhaps being self-conscious was our original sin; perhaps this story is a metaphor for the evolution of our species to being self-aware and, as a result, self-critical. Eating that apple is a metaphor for the moment humanity evolved to the point of self-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 an archery term for “off the mark”.  “Sin” means our thinking is off the mark.   And if we look at the “seven deadly sins” of the Christian faith, they aren’t actually actions but are emotional prisms through which we choose to view the world and live our lives.   

Wrath – anger or rage

Greed – excessive thoughts of or desires for wealth

Sloth – laziness or indifference

Pride – a desire to be more important than others

Lust – excessive thoughts or desires of a sexual nature

Envy – desires for other’s belongings

Gluttony – excessive thoughts or desires for food.

If we choose to observe the world through angry, lustful, or prideful eyes, we won’t see the light of heaven.  If we choose to see the world through greed or envy, we won’t experience the love of heaven.  And if we choose a life laziness and gluttony, 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 your consciousness and is first, love yourself (with compassion, not arrogance)  and second, love others.  The second becomes much easier once we’ve mastered the first. No matter what the perceived worldly human experience appears to be through your self-critical ego-mind, if you can quiet the-self conscious 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 spirituality through everything from neurology to quantum mechanics, raising consciousness and experiencing heaven is not rocket science.  It’s just learning how to turn your fear-based emotions into love.

Creating heaven on earth

Creating heaven on earth is our planetary goal.  Obviously, that’s more difficult  than a single person experiencing the light, love, and vibration of heaven at a single moment.   But if we can get enough individuals to experience heaven on earth through a prism of love, and share this experience through social networks, this will ripple out.  It ripples through simple cause and effect, through mirroring neurons, through changing our noosphere. And through enough rippling changes to love-based thoughts, the human race can reach critical mass and experience a quantum leap in evolution to experience heaven on earth as a species. 

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

Evolutionary Mapquest

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

The Noosphere

Eric Whitacre’s virtual choir

Creating the noosphere

We create the world we live in; we are part of the world that others have created for us. Throw your mind back a hundred years, to 1911, just before the Jazz Age, before the Great War (which had to be renamed the First World War when we had another), when the telephone was still new and penicillin had yet to be invented. Throw your mind back another thousand years, to 911, deep in “the darkest of the Dark Ages”, way before printing, before the Norman Conquest, before the vast Gothic Cathedrals flung their spires into the air, when the Byzantine empire peaked and Mayan civilization collapsed. 

The world of the mind is as much part of our world as the landscape and the living environment around us. It’s called the noosphere, to match the geosphere (the physical earth) and the biosphere (the plants and animals) – in Greek, nous means “mind” and sphaira “sphere”. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin introduced the term in 1922 in his book, Cosmogenesis, although he and Edouard le Roy may have first heard at a lecture by Vladimir Vernadsky. It’s the sphere of thought, 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 patterns we use to think, in the assumptions we make. But there’s also a suggestion that we might be able to measure it directly.

Measuring the noosphere

As the noosphere is collective human intelligence, the Global Consciousness Project has set about to measure the effects of our thoughts directly – not just the actions and creations they lead to.  This project hypothesizes that our thoughts themselves have direct effects.  To prove this, they start with random-number generators, nicknamed EGGs. If numbers are really random, then you can actually expect certain patterns. Think of dice. If you throw a dice 1000 times, you’d expect about a sixth of your throws to give a “six”. If six comes up much more often, you know the dice is loaded.  In the same way, we can test the random numbers from the EGGs – are they properly random? Most of the time, yes.

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

The critics have a different interpretation.  Truly random numbers will always create spikes 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 of dots are actually random:

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

Analyzing the noosphere

Another way to come to grips with the noosphere is to analyze it by looking at memes. A meme is a cultural "gene" – a belief, idea, symbol, or practice, that is passed down through society, much like 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 by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, and has proven very useful as a way of talking about how ideas take shape and life beyond the individual person.  It’s also given rise to memetics, 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 with problems. Useful as the idea of memes might be, memetics doesn’t seem the answer to understanding the noosphere.

Our understanding of how to analyze and measure collective knowledge and awareness is clearly still incomplete – in its infancy, 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 incredibly powerful: 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 of having all those individual people’s voices, each singing in their own home to his silent conducting, come together in one chorus. A collective project, creation, or movement, especially a spontaneous or unled one, lifts us above ourselves.

Creating Heaven on Earth

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

Reflective behavior

Karma

Cause & Effect

You reap what you sow

What goes around comes around

Be the change you want to see in the world

Do unto others as you would like others to do unto you

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

Mirroring Behavior

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

Until recently, researchers have found these neurons in animals, including primates, but only guessed that they’re in people too.  Now, researchers believe they’ve found direct evidence of mirror neurons in humans.

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

Collective Behavior

 Collective behavior is a social process or event 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 a set pattern in each house, part of a larger social pattern; the public response to Diana’s death in 1999, on the other hand, was spontaneous and even out of character for the British.

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

Reflective Behavior

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

Good Behavior

The beauty of mirror neurons and collective behavior is they can also be used for good. When I see you smile, part of my brain experiences that smile as if it were my own. When I see your act of kindness to someone, part of me experiences that act of kindness too. One person intelligently breaking the bystander effect can galvanize an entire crowd.  And this also has implications for creating heaven on earth by December 21^st, 2012.  Part of the strategy to create heaven on earth is to use collective intelligence (internet and social media) to create a collective conscious thought, “to love one another”, to people around the world.  When people begin to act on this conscious 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, every smile you give, every skill you use in front of someone else, takes on a life beyond your own, in other people’s minds. The enormous power that mirror neurons is the power to do good, for our actions to be larger than themselves.

Albert Einstein - quotes of relativity

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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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.

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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

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

“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

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 rap is that we let the wrong emotions rule the day.  With the goal of creating heaven on earth by December 21^st, 2012, isn’t now the time overthrow the king and crown a new king?  With fear-based emotions 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 more vibrant 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: the problem is what emotions we choose to live by.

Aren’t we, as a race, ready to live by emotions that lifts our spirits?  Emotions like awe, euphoria, gratitude, hope, joy, and love – emotions that make us feel vibrant and 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 override the conscious belief that love is the answer.  So how do we resolve such an issue?  By crowning a new, all-powerful king: unconditional love.

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

Cosmic attraction

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

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.