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.
Showing posts with label electromagnetism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label electromagnetism. Show all posts
Monday, 6 September 2010
Monday, 16 August 2010
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 19th 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.
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:
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 21st 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.
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 19th 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
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 21st 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.
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