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.

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.

On the “New Eve” of Evolution

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.

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

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A new age of enlightenment

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

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