Imajicka's Weblog

Full Moon in August

Now glow'd the firmament

  With living sapphires; Hesperus, that led
    The starry host rode brightest, till the Moon,
      Rising in the clouded majesty, at length,
        Apparent queen, unveil'd her peerless light,
          And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw.

John Milton: Paradise Lost

Happy, happy full moon to all!  What a Moon She Be!

(Celtic Ruling Deity - The Sea God Manannan Mac Lir, a master of disguise…)

Most people associate the idea of the blue moon as there being two full moons in one calendar month, the second moon known as the blue moon.  However, I discovered earlier today this concept is a modern understanding, and whilst worthy of special recognition, the second calendar moon is not the blue moon our ancestral moon-gazers knew.  A blue moon was always the third of four full moons to glow fat in one season. There are typically only three full moons in a season, the period of time between a solstice and an upcoming equinox, or from an equinox to the following solstice. This month's August 19th full moon qualifies as a true blue moon because it's the third of four full moons to grace earth between the summer solstice and autumn equinox.  The moon’s phases realign themselves to the solar calendar every 19 years,  and today, the 19^th of course, is a cyclic marker; in 19 years time, on the 19^th august 2024, the moon will be blue again, completing the cycle. This 19-year synchronization between lunar and seasonal cycles, the Metonic cycle, works within the lunar month of an approximate 29.5 days!  Within a 19 year cycle, there are only 7 such blue moons, cosmically asserting 12 solar years (mirrored in months) are free of blue moons. 

Yet! The more modern understanding of a blue moon also occurs 7 times, though not on the same dates as the other model, thus doubling the concept to 14 blue moon years… only 5 yrs left blue moon free!

Hum…

This august moon is best known as the Sturgeon moon, named by the fishing tribes of Native Americans in honour of the huge fish that were readily caught in the Great Lakes during the month of August.  The idea of fish can also be seen in the Celtic lunar calendar, august being the month of the Hazel, a tree believed to be in fellowship with the Rainbow Salmon, the oldest and wisest animal in Druidic faith.  Highly flexible, lively and inspirational, the Rainbow Salmon calls for the creative imagination to be brought into the collective.  It is said to be the time of social awareness, Hazel folk encouraged to reveal their lively teaching minds, their artistic abundance.  Being directed by the ephemeral and flighty Mercury, we are reminded of the transience each months’ energy bestows, reminded to capture the swift and give it wingèd form. 

Mercury is, in fact, the messenger Hermes, able to transcend to the upper Heavens, (typically on the bow of the rainbow) and imperatively, can also descend into the depths of Hades’ underworld, returning to our middle earth unscathed.  We perceive the interconnectedness between such worlds and albeit elusive and fleeting, communion between the worlds becomes feasible.  Archetypes like Hermes call attention to our frigid determinates in western ideology, suggesting such absolutes like heaven and hell are far from separate ‘dead-ends,’ (excuse the pun) offering imaginative tools in which to discover, uncover and fuel our potentialities. These archetypes provide spaces in which we can express our differences creatively; they're the states of knowing and being.  We are the centrality, as Hermes’ mystical doctrine shows: we are the middleness of ‘As Above, So Below.’

Of course, back to our ethereal moon, one can perceive perhaps the solar flame of Leo cavorting and reflecting his sumptuous palette through such a moon, his childlike wonderment contagiously warming.  And indeed, to many other tribes this moon appears reddish on horizons, blushing her arrival through an almost sultry haze.

If not known as Full Red Moon, then she has certainly identity as the Green Corn Moon or Grain Moon.  One can only suppose these slight variations occurring because of the solar influences; Leo august moon is most certainly infused with greater red urgency than the Virgo greens.  Virgo is the mother-of-earth to all, symbolically mid-term in her carrying of the solar king, (Jesus/Pan) her woman-self the compliment other to the man-self, her Virgo sun-self paradoxically carrying the internal moon-child in the darkened womb in her opposite sign, the watery duality of Pisces, the mark of Jesus.  It is fascinating to observe this magnificent moon today reaching its pinnacle in the sign of the water bearer Aquarius yet within two hours of reaching fullness, the moon quickly moves into Pisces in anticipation of the Sun’s transition (dare I say penetration?) into Virgo.

Note the elusive nature of the gender roles?  One can almost breath the androgyny within the compliment self of both mother and father… what an incredible piece of space this is… this earth.

Tis the witching hour of night,
Orbed is the moon and bright,
And the stars they glisten, glisten,
Seeming with bright eyes to listen
For what listen they?

John Keats: Endymion

On route to school on morning, two of my children and I played a word game which left me feeling both disturbed and guilty of psychological/spiritual neglect!  The game was simple; I would provide a word to which the children would give as many meanings/interpretations as they could; the idea is reminiscent of connecting associative meanings in ‘a stream of consciousness,’ an outpouring of ideas.  On saying ‘tree,’ both children gave many a fine scientific fact about the noble tree yet failed abysmally to know the tree as having any symbolic value whatsoever.  It was at this moment I identified the sterilisation of word, the ‘dumbing down process’ that has become a catechism in the mouths of modern day political radicals.  The television was banished, communication and reading naturally taking predominance.  Without the use of ‘sense-enabled’ awareness in language, what hope could future children ever have of understanding the deeper meanings found in Keats’ question?

Seeming with bright eyes to listen
For what listen they?

It is the metaphor, the symbol, the mythology of language that provides self and community awareness that provides meaning and understanding whilst promoting psychological intellectual, physical, emotional and spiritual well-being.  As Joseph Campbell says in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, we must ask,

‘how [to] teach again… what has been taught correctly and incorrectly, learned a thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task. How render back into the light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark?

The moon’s many multicultural faces build a narrative of discovery by associative contrasts or similarities, yet it is fair to note many would find my interest non-sensical, idiotic even.   The moon is scientifically earth’s satellite, a ball of grey matter that merely pulls the seas into touch and keeps us grounded.  All personifications, symbols or mythologies are therefore rendered fantasies based in the dubious realm of the imagination and do not relate reality.  Throughout the history of English literature, narratives consistently re-iterate the same alternatives to the same secular and theological injustices; else they work in a moralistic present, showing mankind’s tragedies from a past perspective as if progress is the reality.   Poets like Keats are debased as escapists, or worse still, verging on mental illness. 

Somehow, the ‘internal’ experience needs reaffirming.  There are indefinable, effable truths within man that can only be illuminated by the process itself, by the affirmations, the rituals of calling them into the light.  As Goethe noted, the spiritual, metaphysical wonderment can be found in literature, within the words of experience itself.  He affirmed literary ‘symbolism is where the particular represents the more general, not as a dream or a shadow, but as a living momentary revelation of the Inscrutable.’  He continues, ‘allegory changes a phenomenon into a concept, a concept into an image… while symbolism changes the phenomenon into the idea, the idea into the image, in such a way that the idea remains always infinitely active and unapproachable in the image and will remain inexpressible even though it is expressed in all languages.’ Schiller also commented on how a poet employs a ‘symbolic operation’ to change inanimate nature into human nature, suggesting ‘nature should become a symbol of the internal harmony of the mind with itself… by a ‘symbolism, Symbolik, of the imagination.’

The blindfolds of ‘history’ cannot truly black out the imagination.  Neither should classic literature/poetry be imprisoned by historicism although universities will try.  To view texts historically can be nostalgic but it is all too easy to become enmeshed in the political bitterness of the time at the expense of the timeless text itself.  History does not show political progress, just another war with different names to focus on.  The real voices are those writing beyond such horrors, voices that offer the metamorphosis that the theological and political powers have systematically worked to hide.  Why else are these vitally alive infusions of word magic beheld as ‘high cultural artefacts,’ retained away from popular culture?

I believe mythologies are essential; they have lived and continue to live within the unconscious, both in the personal and cultural psyches.  These mythologies direct and motivate our actions.  Provoking an underlying myth into conscious awareness is of profound value, and offers new ways of seeing the world and our place within it.  It calls for constant adjustment, a fluid movement back and forth between myths personal and cultural, between past and present, often challenging what constitutes the real. 

The homelessness of my own psyche relates to the wandering Odysseus, Dante’s exile and feels Keats’ isolated world of the beautiful on earth.  The microcosm of the personal myth, when truly worked and revealed, always yields unto the universal macrocosm, reflecting both cultural and global concerns and needs. 

Perhaps this is the ultimate fear of Global Government.  That we, the little folk, can narrate a far more opulent existence all by ourselves, one that embraces global diversity and celebrates multiculturalism, one that believes and trusts the love humanity is capable of.

Enjoy the Richness of Lunar Light Rays J

Good even, good fair moon, good even to thee;
I prithee, dear moon, now show to me
    The form and the features, the speech and degree,
      Of the man that true lover of mine shall be.

Walter Scott

The Bear and I: Sign Posts Part One

The following post will be listed over several days according to 'chapter' segments.  Feel free to comment or initiate a new tangent!

The Bear and I: Sign Posts Pt One

“Matter at its most fundamental level cannot be divided into independently existing units or ever be fully described. Subatomic particles aren’t solid little objects like billiard balls, but vibrating and indeterminate packets of energy that could not be fully quantified or understood in themselves. Instead, they were schizophrenic, sometimes behaving like particles-a set thing confined to a small place-and sometimes like a wave-a vibrating and more diffuse thing spread out over a large region of time and space-and sometimes like both a wave and a particle at the same time. Quantum particles are also omni-present.”   The Field: Lynne McTaggart

A friend (affectionately known as the Bear) recently voiced concern about me. He was worried, he said, about my form of expression which he felt bore a schizophrenic tendency to speak through what I call ‘signs;’ ‘signs,’ he supposes, that ‘aren’t even there.’ The Bear, an intellectual cyber-nerd, blessed wholly with musical brilliance, (when he's NOT impersonating Robbie Williams, that is!) is wonderfully dynamic yet can also be fiercely protective over an ideologically established point of view. The Bear has often professed a failure in understanding me at all; it is as if I speak from a perverse language of altered meanings. I find myself momentarily feeling judged over being known, experience the loss in connection and I have been known to exhibit a rather unpleasant emotional response, marked by frustration… not good! Such moments have not endangered the friendship. The Bear has always maintained the necessary desire to understand me and my desire to shake the Bear into knowing the ways I see the world refuses to diminish. I feel I have to find the words that could uniquely trigger the necessary reflections within the Bear himself… such intensity was learnt in childhood, I’m sure. The wish to be understood once bullied my inner child yet now I sense such determination is somehow a blessing, that having dug into so many words within words, I am revealed into the magick that dwells within the spaces of narrative journeys, permitted to enter the sacred grove that grows throughout the history of all literature, irrespective of chronological order or supposed cultural identity.

The heart of the matter is knowing these moments of misunderstanding only occur when I am trying to express those infernal sparks of meaningful insights, those vital illuminations of truths essential to the vast internality that is self, the self being serendipitous in its motivational force. My quest in relation to the Bear is honourable insofar as my journey concludes only when the Bear’s quest, aiming to unite his microcosm of self to the macrocosm of the universal, begins in the process that will:

• Enrich the Bear’s personal experience by expanding visionary capabilities, the transcendental of the Logos, and,

• Open the channels to the myriad of reflections and messages that are scattered across time and space, connecting awareness to what is already connected, infinitely expressed through the HE(in)ART.

Rather, it’s found throughout all the Arts and we must also include science here, for science, although reductive and potentially restrictive in certain circles, investigates the nature of life. It is no co-incidence Shakespeare reiterated and thus tried to amplify the words nature/nuture and natural, consistently playing the listener into questioning the secular world of government and power, forces that affect the culture in such monstrous ways as to seriously jeopardise the very nature that is humanity. As Stephen Pinker says in his new book The Blank Slate, ‘today’s intellectuals deny the existence of human nature, claiming that each of us is born a blank slate upon which the environment writes.'  Obviously, such a philosophical doctrine as the ‘blank slate’ has suited the ideology of maintaining control and power over the innate of humanity, a power that had once been depressed by theological means, doctrines steeped in hierarchal injustices, focusing on ideas that make promises in another world, a world that is specially awaiting the death of the victims, sufferers and martyrs from this one. Whilst enforcing focus on such unknowability, such ideology has not only served a grave injustice upon humanity in terms of the joy of life in the here and now, but has successfully detached us from a source that can be joyously creative and inspiring and, for many, determinately divine. Keeping people depressed has always been the intent of any hierarchal leadership. Think about it; to be depressed is not particulary a self-induced mind state; most psychologists will argue their role is in the digging out of the underlying cause. It would be a hard job to prove depression as anything other than an inflicted state of being, biological reasons aside. On the whole, societies have endured having ideologies pushed down onto the consciousness that fixiates a given cultural norm. Ideas become so entrenched as to confuse what constituates human nature yet if we step back and read within the gaps, we find disturbing facts that prove mankind has been manipulated by visual devaluations of anything that would compromise true empowerment. In truth, there has been a consistent diminution of anything that sparks humanity’s incredible gifts that can heal, inspire growth by interaction, appreciate knowing how equality is the only true state that could exalt creative individuality.

My daughter asked me recently why anyone would do such a thing. For her, the idea that mankind is completely disempowered by such means makes no sense and sounds too incredible. Yet, as I said to her, we evaluate in terms of conscience, obviously an innate part of human consciousness for its presence has always been realised; from the beginning of text, conscience has been exploited as seen throughout all the major religions in the world. In other words, our goodness is to power a weakness. But what happens when we remove human conscience from the equation? As I said to my daughter, we are awakening to the horrific knowledge that these powerheads have no conscience and are driven only in terms of power. They actively work against human nature, able to do so because we have become too accustomed to the depressed state of being, too busy responding to the negatives to even question our nature as being all-good. There was a moment, not so long ago, when I was debating such political nonsenses with the Bear who took the stance at the time that I was an idealistic freedom fighter... (and let's not imagine the ideal has any potential reality in this present political state... most universities and establishments render it mere fantasy.) The Bear believed I was not typical; he suggested I was thinking from an isolated intellectual position, most people incapable of realising such self-management for the good of all. But as a parent and as someone who questions the discrepancies I experience between inner self and cultural life, I can vouch how education has followed a systematic process of 'dumbing down' societies, especially within the mainstream. I cannot equate the education I received outside of England; it was possitively challenged yet worked on the belief that the pupil had rights to concentrate his/her talents in subjects that offered his/her best potential. Like Steiner philosophies, we worked with colour/music/preformance, well all arts as much as word, classrooms often artistically reflecting the subject at hand. We were shown the history of literature as a process that questions mankind's meaning in life; we acted the world as written by Shakespeare, we were shown the beautiful meanings of algebra (rather than merely accepting its existence and learning the equations.) Questioning the diverse standards as possibly national, I discovered my peer group in England also realised their standard of education far exceeded the standards we see today. I will be writing another blog about educational concerns soon and would appreciate your thoughts on the subject. However, I will add that none of this is usually enough to convince most without creditable facts, seen in black and white; it seems we have to have proof to be believed these days, a truly sad state of affairs in terms of human worth. Our experiences no longer account for much. So be it. I would ask anyone questioning the validity of educational standards to research the 'Black Papers' on the 1970's and investigate the subsequent acts that have enforced our children learn a 'consumer-orientated education,' 80% of whom will remain beneath the average intellectual levels, 20% utilised for the jobs that will keep the 80% in the mundane spheres. It is all there for the learning in black and white. (I looked at Derek Gillard's Education in England.) So in response to the Bear's analysis, I would argue that the bits of me he assumes seperate me from an average, are in fact, parts that my education refused to comprimise. All society can appreciate and is more than capable of understanding Shakespeare/algebra/preformance etc. In response to my daughter, I reiterated the necessity to think in terms of power for only then can she witness that in order to retain such global power, humanity has been kept in the dark of his own goodness deliberately. I asked her what would happen if we collectively re-learnt and exercised our amazing gifts to heal; what would happen to the immensely rich health authorities that govern the health of the world? What would occur to the need for governance if we realised life as a positive experience, and that true individuality comes from interactive creativity? Shakespeare is the Bard of English Literature because he saw society for what it was and his plays allow all to see it, placing the observer in the middle of all there is! No... they do not want Shakespeare realised in the masses. And we have a history that has actively obliterated difference;burn the witches, label living without a built structure as savage, create (a hierarchal/capitalist 's default) monetary difference then take poverty and instil ideas that such lack is a state of lowliness. It is a fashioned ideology, a mighty big illusion! What right do we actually have to ignore the people who have died trying to expose the ideological lie? It's time to wake up, inform ourselves and acknowledge human nature has been repressed, depressed from the affairs we live in. Human nature has been evaluated as a corrupting force! But how bizarre is that when we live in the midst of corruption without even having human nature validated? We are perverse in ignoring the obvious because of the very nature never acclaimed, acknowledged! (Nietzsche pointed this out when realising men accept corruption assuming they are dealing with other men with values and intent to do good.) I ask you to make truth and goodness whole. Look into the lives that have been negated, subjected to appauling invectives, all becausde they wrote in favour of nature and nuture. Writers have been censored, assaulted, threatened with criminal prosecution just for voicing in favour of realising our true, innately good natures! (See JP Rushton's The New Enemies of Evolutionary Science).

I believe we have merely forgotten how to question/know/read ourselves; it is a simple fact that such a misuse of power is not natural to the majority, to humanity as a whole. In effect, we cannot identify with the coercive and manipulative core behind the ultimate destructiveness in the world today; we are similarly oppressed by a history that can assert humanity has always been like this… Humanity has always been a territorial war-hungry animal, yeah? Do we really believe this true? The depressed will always show their depression. What a head-trip!

 

So, back to the matter in hand and to get to the nitty gritty! Hopefully… I aim to show the Bear how his ‘ass about face’ assumption is the mark of the biggest cultural dispossession of humanity’s power in the western world: the DEPRESSION of all that is assigned to the brain's right hemisphere in the brain, leading to left-sphere dominance. I will examine the ideas and consequences behind the indoctrination, which determines that to see in terms of signs, associations and relative meanings exhibits, in negative context, ‘schizophrenic’ tendencies. This is a distorted perspective as far as I know… at immense cost to both the individual and the collective community of humanity. In truth, any mindset that rejects another should automatically learn to question the denial on a personal level; the universe has a peculiar tendency to show what needs to be seen/learnt and that includes acts of closure within oneself. Once we direct our thinking to recognising denial and questioning both acts and reactions, we can see how we represented the microcosm of an entire history that proves, over and over, a failure to open to the new, evolve with difference, appreciate other cultures as having valuable insights. History proves our ignorance, time and time again, always in the present of undoing nothing. We live on a beautiful planet yet we have failed to note the imaginative state of Eden as a feasible parable; such a metaphorical failure manifests the cancerous eco-geographical monsters we know today. Did we really assume Eden unnatural to earth, hung up on a Golden age ‘back there’ somewhere? How did we fall into the idea that history proves our progress? We don’t ask enough of questions!

We have accepted so many wrong answers as reality that we have maintained the reality! We are like the old laws of science that merely describe what is, or is not! In fact, we have mostly accepted another’s projection of what is, or is not! We are all reflections of the science that stripped the cell down into its multifarious components without ever asking ‘why?

I will post part two very soon.  Any comments will be appreciated!

Recommended Reading: ’

Pinker, Stephen: The Blank Slate (BCA, London New York Sydney Toronto 2002) See also Pinker’s The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, two publications that expand on this subject

The Bear and I: Brain Matters Part Two

The Bear and I: The Being of Mindfulness Part Two

I was assured to know Serendipity was still working beautifully, when the Bear sent me a link to a site that deals with the dynamics of the human brain; the Bear has been investigating the nature of altered realities and such synchronised context should prove how the psyche of the DNA is very much into exalting its interconnectivity, consciously seeking to expand. Everything we are and do is in some way related to the whole of what we are collectively… if we fail to miss the multiplicities, it is simply that we have learnt compartmentalisation. It is a matter of questioning how one thing in our life connects to another… and another… and another! No matter how distant they seem! We are globally attached, spinning on the same axis....

You can see the site here: http://www.hiddenmeanings.com/dna.html

 

Hemispheric Synchronisation!

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act,
Falls the shadow
T.S.Eliot

The chart below can best explain the composites that our minds are capable of embracing; the chart clearly shows the fundamental and complementary roles of the left and right hemispheres of the brain:

Left Thread	Right Thread
Particular	General
Local	Non-Local
Objects	Relationships
The ONE	The MANY
Precise (quantitative precision)	Approximate (qualitative precision)
What (Who, Which)	Where (How, When)
Tonic	Harmonic
Internal Linkage (within)	External Linkage (Between)
Syntax/Semantics	Semantics/Precepts
Single Context	Multi Context
Exaggerate, Distort	AS-IS
Known	Unknown
Ordered	Disordered
Non-Change	Change
Ordinality	Cardinality
What IS	What IS NOT
Delusion	Illusion
Repression	Suppression
What WAS	What COULD HAVE BEEN
What WILL BE	What COULD BE
+1/-1	Zero/infinity
Text	Context
Foreground	Background
Quantitative	Qualitative
Expression	Behind Expression
Self	Others
The Dot	The Field
Particle Interpretations	Wave Interpretations
Metonymy (part-for-whole)	Metaphor (whole-for-whole)
Axon-like (pulse, FM = SEQUENCE, Ordinality)	Dendrite-like (wave amplitude, AM = SIZE, Cardinality)
Neuron	Synaptic 'soup'
Dopamine biased (internal linkage emphasis, internal integrity)	Serotonin biased (external linkage emphasis, social integrity)
Psychosis, schizophrenia	Neurosis, depression
Identify	Re-identify
Blend, bound (feeling terms for whole, parts)	Bond, bind (feeling terms for static/ dynamics)
Vectoring	Way pointing

In 2000, my daughter’s neurologist told me, after questioning and my performing some motor neurological tasks, that I had what is known in the practice as a Grasshopper brain, that is to say, both hemispheres assimilate and order information symbiotically. It certainly explained several anomalies I had encountered throughout my life, like the seemingly useless ability to write backwards from the time I could write forwards, (at high speed) working out mathematical/algebraic formulae without full understanding of how I ever arrived at the answers, (a certain detriment when considering how one must now show one’s workings!) and the natural affinity I had as a child to interpret and read hieroglyphs. As the neurologist confirmed, my early years were confusing in the conventional sense; I strained to understand the systematic expectations in processing information in an educational setting. Whereas fellow colleagues built answers upon a base system, I would have seen the end result yet had to work in reverse to fill in the pieces that seemed of little consequence in effect but were crucial in forming the body of any argument. (Perhaps one could argue it was because of such adaptation, I learnt naturally to see what lay within the spaces…)

I have, in the past, been acutely aware that my way of seeing the world was deemed unusual and I have suffered myself greatly for it. I walked a capricious path along the arrow of time, collecting and assimilating life experiences as ‘always-already’ in the flux. My ego-self had once conviction of isolated difference yet in recent years, in juxtaposition to the revealing truisms that expose the coercive and lying nature of political greed, there has been an increase in the chiming of mirrors, in the reflections of ancient absolutes, an upsurging of clarity in the transforming state of joy. Science made its leap. There is now, more than ever, an understanding that we have been ideologically and culturally repressed, undressed of true individuality, psychologically bereft of a true enlightenment. Look to history and observe the anti-nature of the power establishments that have deliberately debased sexuality, deformed divinity, enforced knowledge as a ‘civilised,’ ‘civilising’ power, retained and mystified the mystical in ancient doctrines and exploited sacred symbologies, all for the sake of masquerading as the all-encompassing third-eye in an ultimate God-given right to control-thus inflicting non-sense-able conformity across the globe. Yet, it is a fact that when you retrieve Truth for oneself and coalesce its Beauty, the Quest will always be in locating the means in which to emulate another’s flowering occurrence, recollected within the purest memoir of self. We are all echoes in the boundless reiteration of a quantum drum, capable of knowing the ineffable and affecting the collective communion.

There has recently been a lot of scientific investigative interest in the performance of the two hemispheres, especially in terms of hemispheric dominance and what affects/effects such dominance of one hemisphere over another. It is a peculiar fact that when Einstein’s brain was removed after his death and examined, (it is still pickled in a jar in Kansas!) his brain was found to have an unusually large corpus callosum, the part of the brain that connects and serves as a conduit or a bridge between both hemispheres. (A famous clairvoyant healer Edgar Cayce also left his brain for scientific research and his brain exhibited the same characteristics.) Neurologically, investigations have found without resorting to the usual logical, linear steps, those with a larger corpus callosum focus attention so intensely spatial that they are prone to losing a sense of the outside world. Early reading and development of abstract thought are typical characteristics yet this does not follow they excel in the early years; Einstein’s school report once defined him as a boy who would never go far in life! Scientists have concluded that the asset of such brain processing comes later in life, when the formal operative thinking, (the ability to move beyond the concrete world and work with abstractions) has matured a ‘decorum’ of structural order.

      'The Zero Point Energy Field is a repository of all fields and all ground energy states and all virtual particles-a field of fields. Every exchange of every virtual particle radiates energy.' (See McTaggart, The Field, p.28)

Although Einstein’s theories are being challenged today, (something Einstein himself was aware of in creating a space within his equations for that unseen matter, identified now as the Zero Point Energy Field) he still represents an emblem of ‘radical thought,’ an original thinker, a man capable of stepping outside accepted norms and daring to imagine the difference that could potentially represent a bigger, universal truth. Yet Einstein was certainly not uniquely gifted because of the physical variance that allowed hemispheric synchronization! Rather, Einstein’s brain acts as a catalyst, showing scientifically how interhemispheric transfer of information between the left and right brain produces a more integrated system, creating dynamic brain performance. It is not, however, a phenomenon of the minority genius. Today, Binaural Beat Technology proves to increase activity across the corpus callosum, exercising and strengthening the bridge of communication and, amazingly, the corpus callosum grows larger! There is a relative shift in hemispheric dominance (from left-brain to whole-brain dominance) and hemispheric synchronization, actualising harmony and unity in the brain-state. Tests prove singular hemispheric dominance can be reduced into firing a more interactive state, (that many report as inducing a more meditative perspective) capable of integrating the transmissions of information between thought and sensory feedback systems. In truth, we are all budding Einsteins! We need simply to exercise our ability to fire on all levels, so to speak, and experience hemispheric synchronisation.

The Science of Left

We should first look at the way we have been conditioned into left-brain dominance. Western ideology has always presupposed a certain view of scientific method of validating ‘what is’, which is often called inductivism or observationalism. This form of validating the world is, once again, heavily saturated in the ideology that man is born a clean sheet; all experience, thought, and consequent action of the individual is causal from the big ‘out there.’ The environment causes simple ideas (Locke) or impressions (Hume) to arise with in the individual. We have been led into viewing the world picture in a very deterministic manner, one that Titchener (psychologist) conceptualised when he said,

"We are agreed, I suppose, that scientific method may be summed up in the single word observation'; the only way to work in science is to observe those phenomena which form the subject-matter of science.”(1)

Karl Popper who wrote in the terms of The Philosophy of Science, proposed new ways of evaluating and studying science. Popper, like others, showed how mechanistic sciences represent a model of reality at variance to the rich evolving nature of reality.

The miracle for me has always been in cell’s ability, in gestation, in knowing how to differentiate when the DNA holds no obvious and particular independent coding from one cellular genetic to the next. Whilst we read about stem cells and learn of the outcry that doctors have been using abortive embryos to extract and use such cells, science is no closer to admitting there’s a mysterious force of the unseen that accounts for such differentiation. According to such laws, science again states truth is always ‘out there,’ therefore empirically asserting the suggestion that there can be no truth in man himself.

Karl Popper's claim that ‘the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its ‘falsifiability,’ is a viable statement. The growth of scientific knowledge begins with an ‘imaginative proposal of hypotheses,’(2) from which the scientist must search for illustrations or situations that falsify or negate the hypothesis. After rigorous attempts have been made to find the hypothesis untrue, the scientist may tentatively accept the hypothesis as true. However, if the hypothesis is found untrue, the scientist must reject his hypothesis. Popper claims that tentative acceptance is the only form of productive thinking that exists… Instead of the typical null hypothesis (whereby experimentation is based on trying to prove a negative is indeed negative) science should accept the new/strange/difference at face value but follow rigorous attempts to falsify the theory, thus actively researching to disprove it! Popper saw the nihilism of Pandora’s hope in theorists like Marx, whose materialism was stagnant and despairing, placed in juxtaposition with scientific thinkers like Einstein or Fitsche. 

Popper has set forth not only a working definition of a scientific theory, but has also ensured an environment wherein scientists can progress in the processes that is life. Even when scientists are wrong, science can still grow. He advocated an active ‘Open Society’ across all disciplines; that is to say, Popper voiced for a vital unity in epistemological/scientific and social disciplines... Popper also spoke against the pretensions of secret societies, the ‘planners and politicians who claim the right to impose their blueprints on the rest of us by virtue of their supposed knowledge on the course of history.’ Likewise, in contrast to Logical Positivism, Popper never held with ideas that saw non-scientific activities as meaningless or intellectually disreputable. What is disreputable is psuedo-science, when empirical theorists refuse to be deflected by observational disproof.

It is not, therefore, positive action nor is it good enough to assume how seeing in signs, associations and relatives is to see things that aren’t even there; Popper would have encouraged the Bear to accept the different perspective as an active presence in his life and would then have him work diligently to prove such thinking a falsehood, blindness... delusional and schizophrenic.

We need to broaden our horizons and accept our education as having been deliberately narrowing. I could never understand the so-called intellectual establishments who refuse to allow inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches and linkages between the various fields of study. There was I having to argue in terms of politicised Anglo-American feminism-with the argument that woman is exactly the same as man, entitled to the equal rights…entitled to enter the hierarchy… to rise to male standards…I mean! Yuck! As if political recognition is some value-mark of identity and freedom! The effect? Think of the Iron Lady, Mrs M Thatcher, the epitome of a woman’s ultimate power under such a frigid ideology! And anyway, (more to the point) what was the point debating gender in such terms when all along, science had proved the brain gendered? Such reductive thinking once again demolishes any ‘potential’ for the discovery of essential woman, let alone free masculinity from the history of his self-choking necktie.

I realised in such moments that whilst women have had to assert the right of voice, in doing so she let go of the very symbols laced in his-stories that had now raped and reasoned her into such a politically disheartened world. Beyond the demonised whore Magdalene and her Mother-in-Law, the virgin Mother, is a sensual essence, the experience of woman. Let us not be blinded to the even more obscure realisation that man has also been ripped apart from his dynamic Pan-self, his 'raw' bloodied and turned backwards into 'war.' Standing under a foreboding and ultimately wrathful godfather, man must also face the fact that his sex has been made to feel Luciferian. His penetrating life force is within the hellfire, fallen and twisted…

It’s Blake’s sick Rose…

Perhaps I argue from the perspective of my formative years, where a Flamenco stamped winged movements of purest passion upon...into my character… but this land, this England, this northern West... is virtually dead to it. All held in political containers… separated, disjointed within a system layered in variants of dominating factions. It is no mistake of judgement either; it’s deliberate; keep the disciplines as narrow as possible, maintaining knowledge as separate entireties... keep them always at odds. Patent that thought! Ownership is becoming a perversity that our egos buy into. How many people realise even our genes have been patented? Are people ever told how to consider such ownership? The idea is so integrated that the western world continues to buy stars in their name…

We have learnt all we know through the voices of the past, extending the ideas of yesteryears through the passages of time. I have many examples from university of people telling me, no… warning me, to save certain insights for myself, for my essays; others were apparently known to be quoting me without even a footnote. But I would not have had the ideas, or visions as some called them, without a) the text and b) the others. It is time to halt with the idea that we, as individuals, can possess knowledge for materialistic personal gain. Our knowledge flows conceptualised where space and time cannot; some of us simply press our imaginations deeper into the wells of inspiration. What we let out should impress another; that is the correct flow. In all probability, I expect any momentary insight could never been said without the energy and voice of another.

Matter is a range of possible things yet no particle of matter has any meaning in isolation; matter is always-already in relation to everything else…

  I will post Part three soon! Comments, as usual, are welcomed!

(1) See: E. B. Titchener, Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention 1908

(2) See: Edwards, Paul, Editor: Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Vols 5 and 6. (1967) pp 398-401.

(3) See: The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (NY, London Oxford University Press 1995) p.702

Recommended Reading: The Field Lynne McTaggart

Cathy, Imajickan & Marx

Hi Majickian

I tried to post a response to 'The Bear and I' but it didn't work.
Reading your second post, with a somewhat clearer head this morning I confess to still being mystified. What exactly is it you are saying? Or am I missing the point entirely? Come on, give it to me in a nutshell. Or are you saying that's what you're unable to do?

I love the look of the site.

Marx's materialism stagnant and despairing?? No!! Marx's dialectic dynamic and hopeful!

Regards,

Cath

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Hi Cath! Thanks for your post and your honesty! I will try and explain the best I can...

"Marx's materialism stagnant and despairing?? No!! Marx's dialectic dynamic and hopeful!"

I have a fundamental love-but-distant relationship with Marx but am able to identify with him greatly. He wrote in a time of great turmoil and wrote amidst the blatant uprising of Capitalist ideologies; in terms of such political issues, I hold immense respect with Karl Marx. In context with history, Marx's ideology is sound. Other literatures of that era highlight the struggles society was subjected to, all their fears and calls to pay attention have, in effect, been largely negated. (I have a fabulous source book from that time and you are willing to borrow and have a look at it!) However, I recently came to realise that Marx's work, although brilliant in the political spheres, is steeped in materialism, (but yes, his intent was good) and although I am for absolute equality and equal opportunity, I think we have to be very careful about exercising policies based on pure materialism alone! I can understand his position at that time what with the fall of religion, splintering hopes and faith into harsh barren realities that said God was a lie, society a sham...coerced to validate Kings whilst controling the masses... 'Religion is the opium of the people...' indeed! Christianity didn't offer anything except yet more control over the masses... but does that mean the soul doesn't exist? So, when I say materialism, I mean the concentrated emphasis on the political at the expense of all else... How many great literatures bestow philosophically-minded governments as a alternative to the hypocrisy that is? So many! That book you lent me had a council, a variant body of people from differing spheres, debating in such a way as to try and incur fair policy... Is this not because materialism is not actually enough on its own? People need to relocate some meaning outside the treadmill of the everyday. Ideally, philosophical government is thought to offer a more humane-centred council, rather than the secularised concentration on monetary issues that in reality aims to balance the bent books. (Philosophical government can only be an ideal... for it has never been a fair trial).

Society is starving without aesthetic/spiritual values, whilst law and reform ALWAYS falls into corrupt hands. But, the idea of law actually stems from divine laws of inner conscience. I am convinced that with a greater promotion and input of the positives throughout political thinking, filtering down with a greater emphasis on the arts in schools/local workshops/adult learning, society could start to heal, start reconciling those desperate isolations I see everywhere. High Culture is far removed from popular culture and that makes me mad! I cannot see that simply altering the financial base will ensure much difference... nor give people back their self-value, love of self, belief in self and others... That's why I see Marx having written in despair; I cannot see any practise in Marxism that could unite the people positively in today's cultural climate. This Capitalist world has almost gone too far in depreciating human values whilst promoting ideological identification with the world through difference! I fear practising Marxism today would entice fascism, which is a downright sin but that is what Capitalist thinking has done to the world. In fact, I fear they are actually one of a kind... 

I concede the over-riding focus on materialism has bred apathy... it has bred contempt of one another. Do we actually need money???

So, in a nutshell about Marx? Great political thinker, sound material ideas but his doctrine doesn't infuse the need to nuture soul from all angles of society.

The political needs to find a soul.... touch the heart of man where it matters.

Whilst we are on the subject though, of trying to find alternative politics, have you heard of a site called The Third Way? I am not saying I agree with all it's points but it is trying to establish fresh ideas for the future, some I find refreshing and feasible, especially the idea of abolishing one centralised government. You can find the site here:

http://www.thirdway.org/

As to the blog entries called The Bear and I. Well they are early entries and believe me, there's more to come... but in a nutshell? I am aiming to prove that the Bear, like many others including myself at times, has become so accustomed to thinking in scientific absolutes, in black and white, that we invariably can't equate with altered ways of reaching a reality that may differ from what we are culturally accustomed to. It has been scientifically proven that such thinking has incured left hemisphere thinking at the expense of the other hemisphere. I think Nietzsche was onto this when he advocated throwing morality to the recycle bin! It goes against moral values to steal but theft is invariably caused by necessity or, in our society, a need to gratify something we feel is missing. Rather than moralistically condemn theft, Nietzsche wanted desperately for society to look at the underlying causes of such acts; he wanted political society to realise its responsibility in playing a part.

Right brain expression is vital to all I have said about what is missing in Marx; it is the artists ability to see the narrative and meaning in music, in a painting, in poetry. So first I have to dismantal the Bear's REASON-ABLED thinking patterns, the ones that see, for example, mythological stories without having any basis of meaning in society, the thinking that says unless you can see it, it is heresy. It's about bringing what's beautifully humane inside, out into the vast material world, thus finding ways to reclaim and rejoice in life, value our physical/material existence! We all have wonderous talents, even if it is to smile at someone who had forgotten the smile... it's about time our miracle was realised.

Does that help at all? Going out on Marx, I cannot agree more than with 'workers of the world unite!' I just think we should do it for ourselves... stuff the world economy up its own..... Sit down on the floor and refuse to feed any more bullshite.   Surely communities wouild have to then pull together?  yes, well...

Hopefully as the blog unravels itself, all will become clearer! But mystified is an interesting state of being, surely? he he

Oh... perversely! Did you take part in Melvyn Bragg's recent 'Nation's Favourite Philosopher'vote? Marx won that pole much to the mystification of Bragg and myself! Is Marx a philosopher? Bragg's brilliant 45min debates can be heard again at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_archive_home.shtml

Until the next time... :)
Over and out for now... and thanks for your input! I have enjoyed it lots! X

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Posted by: Cathy Smith | 24 September 2005 at 04:11 PM

Well to cut to the heart of the matter...'but does that mean the soul doesn't exist?' (Re Marx's words on religion).
I am a materialist, but a dialectic materialist, like Marx. I simply believe that consciousness, and consciousness of consciousness, are natural products. No less beautiful, powerful and mysterious for that!
Is Marx a philosopher? Yes! First and foremost as well as in the literal sense; he was a student of philosophy and a Hegelian. He simply realised that philosophies serve the interests of a ruling group, and turned Hegel's dialectic on its head. Therefore 'consciousness does not determine social being, but social being determines consciousness'.
Now I imagine you will shudder at that word determine, but I don't think it is meant rigidly or mechanically, and may even be a clumsy translation for a German word that means something slightly but significantly different.
Can't write more as pc keeps freezing, this is the second time I've typed out the above.
Thanks for that wonderful Bragg link, the list of subjects looked fascinating; when I get a spare moment...

Cath

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Posted by: Cathy Smith |

Hi Cath! There is just tooooo much to say!  Sorry I have  taken so long!

But hey, this is fun! I am entrenched with Marxist critiques... I have not left the subject alone!

I am glad you like the In Our Time archive site! I have listened to the archives for hours... I love the scope of the subject matter and you can sign up for Melvyn's newsletter, which can be interesting... He returned on air this week... Phew!

Firstly though; when I asked if Marx was a philosopher, I was kind of playing Devil's advocate really (philosopher vs politician) although I am still surprised Marx won the pole, and I hope to explain my reasons. Feel free to correct me; I do, however, recognise Marx's philosophical background and believe the philosopher in him can be heard in his works, especially as a viable discourse in which to view the world.

To clarify a few points though, before I enter my typical labyrinthine mode of thinking!

To Quote:

“I am a materialist, but a dialectic materialist, like Marx. I simply believe that consciousness, and consciousness of consciousness, are natural products. No less beautiful, powerful and mysterious for that!”

You mention consciousness in response to the question about soul. Do you consider consciousness as a constitute/reflection of soul or a replacement of the idea of soul? And I have to ask you... what you mean when you say 'consciousness of consciousness.'

[Marx] “turned Hegel's dialectic on its head. Therefore 'consciousness does not determine social being, but social being determines consciousness'.”

Marx said, 'My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, ... the process of thinking [is] under the name of the Idea, which he even transforms into an independent subject... the demiurgos (creator) of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of the Idea. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought." (Marx, Capital.)

Hegel's dialectic was based in idealism, a metaphysical idealism that Marx believed served the philosophies and power of the ruling group. And history was, for Hegel, the unfolding of the metaphysic ideal. Marx argued that dialectics could be rescued from Hegel’s idealist outlook- 'turned on its head' to reveal a 'rational kernel within the mystical shell.' So... if I get this correctly... Marx deemed idealism as being a falsified consciousness projected by man's conscious mind out into an idealized external source of consciousness, God being an ideal picture sanctified by man, wrapped up nicely in a controlling religion. Because of this, Marx asserted there was no divine consciousness that determined man's social being, no destiny, and most importantly, no pre-ordained hierarchy. Looking at the ideology that maintained the ruling group, Marx could assert social being must therefore determine consciousness, as history could proved again and again, the evidence found within the struggles of power, the conflicts of material interests. Would you agree so far? The general agreement between the two could be seen in how they both were of their time insofar as they both looked to history to evaluate the path on which humanity was on, and both were of evolutionary thinking.

“I imagine you will shudder at that word determine...”

Nope! I think its a viable word... but I laughed at the thought of you thinking I'd shudder!

From here on in, I may seem to make statements about what you obviously know a lot about? I am simply trying to clarify if my ideated notions of Marx are correct! So slay me down if necessary!

Marx was ultimately about the emancipation of the working classes and he centered his thesis on the idea that history is made up/told in terms of the clashes between the ruling and working classes, hence he assumed an historical dialectic that worked on behalf of materialism and the workers, rather than the power of the rulers and their philosophies/religion. Now, whilst I can understand Marx's political stance, I truly have an immense and somewhat immediate problem with his 'dialectic,' possibly because 'dialectic' history is itself mutable. Dialectics is a way of seeing the world that initiated with the Greeks (Greek dialego) and originally meant 'to discourse, to debate.' In ancient times, dialectics was the art of assigning an active space/environment for a revelation of personal truth about personal responsibilities and/or social issues, a truth usually ascertained by the good nature in man, or the so-called God-nature. Typical to all forms of dialectics, these truisms of nature worked by disclosing the contradictions at work in the argument, thus providing the objectives for the viewer/reader/listener to hopefully overcome these contradictions. There were philosophers in ancient times who believed that the disclosure of contradictions in thought and the clash of opposite opinions was the best method of arriving at the truth and their theatrical platforms were believed an ideal setting in which to work the magic of dialectics. Unlike the powerful image of Roman individualism, the Greeks were notably self-defined by a common soul of the city-state, the unseen source that infiltrated say, for example, Sparta and united the common ideas of what it meant to be Spartan. In such a society, where temples and theaters bedeck geographic homelands, there is an understanding that there are forces that govern space and place alike. The theatrical arts especially allowed the dialectic into the space found on stage. Rudolf Steiner, speaking of Grecian societies, says of the temples (but can be applied to their amphitheaters),

“Traditions were preserved in art... these mutually supporting forces in space were recognised as they streamed hither and thither... they did not 'think out' the forms, but they perceived the forces streaming through space and working within the stone accordingly....” (Universe, Earth and Man: Rudolf Steiner)

I fully understand this ancient dialectical philosophy in the following terms:

Many scholars have noted how Shakespeare's plays create, in performance, a space that is largely undefinable. Some believe this space is filled by Shakespeare's own presence, whilst others point to the dynamic 'space of now-time,' which is activated during the theatrical performance. There are many views, but I believe this space is actually created by the binaries/multiplicities always at work between both the characters and the issues at hand, whether investigating morality, religion, hierarchy etc... etc. Shakespeare used the Greek understanding of dialecticism and placed the viewer in the space, in the middle; whereas my lecturer kept insisting how slippery Shakespeare was and was virtually impossible to pin down, I do not think you were supposed to pin him anywhere! He was the pen that could superbly present all options, resurrected each and every time when any performance is in motion. Shakespeare brought the viewer into the space of opposing and conflicting truths in order for truth to be viewed and decided for himself. That's why the genius of Shakespeare is still active; the space is 'always-already' immediate in performance, meaningful- and will remain so whilst the question of the nature of man remains in doubt, irrespective of history or time or any other aspect of earth-nature. He uses geographical or meteorological natures as constant forces to impact mankind's bad judgments/senseless acts as actually opposing the symbiotic laws seen throughout the outside natural sciences. True... Shakespeare, like Marx, used the dialectical understanding that determined man's nature should be expressed as an interconnectivity with all other natures, and both show man's act/ions in desiring power over one and another man invariably at odds with natural laws.

However, unlike Marx, Shakespeare does not simply question the rulers (which he does astoundingly well) but neither does he respond with the antithesis as a natural right answer; society should be beyond accepting power as being determined from the top levels moving downwards, nor should it recognise some unseen power at the base working upwards. All power corrupts because of man's inability to put his own dialecticism personally into practice for the good of self and thus becoming as a mirror for all mankind! Shakespeare takes society as an organic whole in hope mankind will realise, in looking at the bigger picture, hi/her own futility and, as an individual, recognise a better nature, his/her God-nature - that would work for the better of humanity and place mankind into some more natural order within the scheme of life; it is no mistake that the opening act of Romeo and Juliet shows all levels of the class system found within a patriarch society as propergating the bloodshed, the anger, the wrongs, all that works at suffocating Love's truth. Shakespeare suggests men's masochism and ideas of what constitutes masculinity is what's in question here and in effect, the unity of such masochism in Romeo and Juliet smashes down all class divisions, uniting the men in terms of their misappropriated natures that determine to pursue masochistic means in which to honor themselves. And such behavior is often found questionable in Shakespeare because it belongs to a historical seed that man has forgotten. Nowhere is this more evident than in Romeo and Juliet whose family's ancient grudge is never explained; it just is and society goes on propergating it.

One could argue this indeed follows a margin of Marxist ideology; that the material self is responsible for the consciousness that surrounds him as well as loosely fitting with Marxist dialectics that does not regard nature as an accidental agglomeration of things/of phenomena, unconnected/ isolated from/independent of each other, but as a connected and integral whole, in which things/phenomena are organically connected with, dependent on, and determined by, each other. Marx's dialectical method holds true with dialectic principals that state no phenomenon in nature can be understood if taken by itself, divorced and isolated from surrounding phenomena, inasmuch as any phenomenon in any realm of nature may become meaningless to us if it is not considered in connection with the surrounding conditions.

But! It would be extremely hard to prove that the misappropriated nature Shakespeare speaks of is a direct result of Marx's specific theory of the mode of production, as a critique of political economy. The history of text goes hand in hand with the necessity of re-elevating issues of power; there are the documented debates in ancient Greece about man's need to 'compete,' recognised throughout a wide-sweeping diversity of different cultures/societies/tribes! How else could male dominance be so globally wide-spread? The Greeks believed there were several options to try and stop men killing one another whilst still recognising his need to shine, two suggestions immediately recognisable today; a) sport and b) honor bestowed on men of linguistic prowess... Homer's message springs to mind! The artist vs the warrior, both 'ideas' absconded by Plato in his republic, in some vain attempt to abolish man's need to parade glory all together! In fact, DH Lawrence's The Apocalypse deals vividly with this same issue; man's overt need to empower some area of his life, his need to strut 'like a peacock in his personal domain,' (hence the long history of man needing ownership of his space) and like Nietzsche, Lawrence tries to locate a passive way of fulfilling the masculine need to soar/shine like a superman! Men, both Lawrence and Nietzsche determine, (there's that word! ) have major conflicts with one another-Lawrence speaks of the power struggles that naturally occur in consequence of four men being left in a room together! Perhaps you may argue that Marx is saying just that; if mankind becomes conscious of itself, it would see human nature as also a progression of gendered conflicts and therefore has the knowledge to change it. But Marx, in his materialism, saw only the depressed worker-society governed by the ideology that the rulers were the all powerful; he believed only an economically-political revolution could re-appropriate the world and change the consciousness of man.

A tangential point here, but an important one no less: People today continue to doubt Shakespeare's authenticity and why? Because he was not of the higher cultural standing that would know so much about/of ancient knowledges; Shakespeare was so well read that many believe it ludicrous to believe he was a Joe Bloggs from the not-so-impressive Stratford-upon-Avon. Now I speak from within the spaces that ask why is it only the high-cultural population have access to these background arts – AND STILL DO - that still questions Shakespeare's intellectualism? And hang on a minute, I say... Queen Elizabeth was the only ruling politic who ever advocated that all schools must have access to the ancient arts! I am not saying there wasn't hierarchal systems still at play in Elizabeth's era, after all, she lived in a masculine world but she did not advocate intellectual eliticism. When else did we have historical proof of such an exciting and positive difference? She truly brought the magic of theatrical importance to the base levels of her society, never witnessed with such ferocity before or since. I cannot agree with Marx's assumption, therefore, that the productivity of material essentials should play a precedence over and above the arts nor can I agree that philosophy/arts etc should always be secondary, seen as elitist supra-structures. They were only ever secondary because the elite held on to them! There is a Beauty within the Arts that is as nourishing to the soul as is food to the stomach! Keats would feast his eyes upon the sea and beg you to do the same. What worries me about today is the starved soul cannot even note that whilst we here the West are all cared for to all intent and purposes, we are all so catered for because the hierarchy has moved out of eye-sight, earshot...

On the one hand it is easy to see where Marx was coming from; he believed the source of formation of the spiritual life of society, the origin of social ideas, social theories, political views and political institutions, should not be sought for in the ideas, theories, views and political institutions themselves, but in the conditions of the material life of society, in social being, of which these ideas, theories, views, etc., are the reflection.. But is this actually true anymore? The material difference is no longer evident down at the mines, in the industrialism. It is in those vegetables we see stacking the supermarket shelves, grown in Africa or other countries we exploit. It is in the Cola Cola made from diverse water supplies that cause the native tribes to suffer and die because these companies build dams and take all their local water! Clothes from sweat/slave shops! And the sickest part? Many of these 'slavery' items are called 'fair trade' because the pittance we pay these workers is so say enough to feed their families according to their own economies. So we can bring Marxist communism to the UK relatively easily I would think... and the rest of the world would suffer it because nobody really wants to give up their indulgences... nor do they truly realise the full extent of what it means when we say we live in a global economy... On another vein, I watched a programme recently where 300 American families were told how their government makes and supplies 99% of the world's cocaine. Not one family would even consider suffering their incomes to see Cocaine wiped off the planet, even knowing some of their income came from that industry. Materialism worries me... in isolation. And what about the Federal Reserve System? What I learned recently about the whole world economy is enough to tell me money is dead as a material means in which to survive. If we continue with it, we are soon to be mere robots too fearful to chance anything else. This Federal Reserve System is more horrific that any of us ever supposed. There is much to be said for a modicum of Marxism intertwined with local governance of communities. There is a lot to be said for the re-discovery of human faith.

There has been a huge division between science and theology, something most particular to Marx's era. With Darwinism came the death of religion, but let's be honest, the divide extends between the disciplines of the sciences and the arts too, a division that has remained consistent throughout the intellectual ages. This is a big motivation behind the The Bear and I entries... I am trying to show the miracle itself is wrapped in in the very theology of science!

There are several points of reference here:

• Just because religion has been largely proved a political weapon of mass deception over the masses, it should not automatically follow that just because 'evolutionary' thinking came into being with Darwin, religion should be killed because someone narrowed it by determining it as 'creationism,' an ideology that will (according to the establishments that be) always be in opposition to evolutionary thinking. Darwin's theories have been kept out of the mainstream educational system in the US because they completely negate biblical timescales and Darwinism is believed to abolish the religious creation theory, thus religious validity. Well, we have an overt problem here! The West has been insistent that the Bible is to be read literally... they still physically search for the Arc of the Covenant! Yet most people who encounter the mystery itself, myself included, would probably agree that the mystery is ineffable and the scriptures are a mystery unto themselves, deliberately obscure to entice the personal journey and without the personal... the mystery cannot be found. The grail will always remain an external object. Hence, the biggest religious lie of all time was the political/monarchical dis-empowerment of the theological.

• What both Marx and Engels do wrong, in my opinion, is to take the opposite standpoint and argue from that singular position. An example of this continuous error: “The question of the relation of thinking to being, the relation of spirit to nature is the paramount question of the whole of philosophy.... The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature ... comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.” (Marx, Selected Works )

• My point here is where is the middle-ness of divine humanity? The Ideal Material?The Material Ideal? It seems to me there is a middle ground here somewhere... somewhere we have forgotten in the bindings that political institutions have monopolized. This darn west wants everything politicized and that is the problem. Nothing can know or experience freedom when politics gets its teeth into it... the dialectic is even forgotten in the ideology that states dialecticism will always concur with two sides... but there are no two sides to life in reality! There is only abundance of all experience/forces that surround one at any given moment in space... These dualisms are just mirror reflections, set one against another by the establishment themselves! It keeps folk arguing for the yea or nay.

Isn't it true to say that Marx and Engels paradoxically spoke of the dialectical method as requiring that phenomena should be considered not only from the standpoint of their interconnection and interdependence, but also from the standpoint of their movement, their change, their development, their coming into being and going out of being? “All nature,” says Engels, “from the smallest thing to the biggest.... from grains of sand to suns, from protista [the primary living cells] to man, has its existence in eternal coming into being and going out of being, in a ceaseless flux, in unresting motion and change... [Therefore dialectics, Engels says] takes things and their perceptual images essentially in their interconnection, in their concatenation.” (Marx and Engels, Vol. XIV, pp. 484&23.) So how did economic materialism become so single-mindedly the dominant center from which all things should be considered? If ancient Greeks and Shakespeare are anything to go by, there are a multitude of factions that skirt the dialectic environment!According to Engels' speech above he would agree that the natural way is to consider all aspects that could be contributing to and from, not just from the material perspective.

I need to backtrack a little:

It must be stated that for Marxists in general, in contrast and in opposition to the dialectical method is the philosophy (the method of thinking) of the ruling classes. For the sake of clarity the philosophy of the ruling classes has been termed by Marxists as the Metaphysics - that is in the sense that the rulers' philosophies are anti-dialectical in that they do not adhere consistently and comprehensively to the standpoint of the evolutionary development of the natural world nor of human society. Metaphysics is often connected in one way or another with religion. It does not accept that change is a part of the natural world nor of human society, instead it views the world as being composed of fixed categories, in which each thing is equal to itself, that is each thing does not undergo change. Everything is permanent and unchanging; the solar system, the stars, all organisms. Change is part of a fixed system - there is something permanent, changeless within or behind the changes, i.e. God, gods or some kind of innate natural law. Yet, according to Marxists, when we examine and analyse the natural world, and human society, we find that this method of thinking is incorrect, indeed it is nonsense, for there is clear evidence of the evolutionary development of the natural world, and of human society and hence, we find the dialectic; Trotsky described the dialectic as being the logic of evolution. The foundations of the exact natural sciences were first worked out by those genii, the ancient Greeks who advanced the disciplines of mathematics, mechanics, geography, astronomy, anatomy, physiology, zoology, politics, sociology, and other sciences. The man who is acknowledged as being a founder of dialectics, Heraclitus, gave birth to the idea that everything is and is not. All is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away. He used the natural world itself for his materialism and so began an exploration into the natural world and its connotations for human society.

The idea that everything is in a state of flux is his most famous and the one most emphasised by his followers: “You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” Indeed is the river which flows into the sea that same river? Of course not, it is now the sea! And yet it is still the river, it is and is not. Also let us say, that the river bursts its banks an swamps everything around it, villages, fields of crops, livestock, everything. What would we say had happened to the environment? We would say a change had occurred; a violent change to the environment. Yet an evolutionary change...

Heraclitis also said: 'We are, and are not', in this he is absolutely correct. As Frederick Engels states, every organic being is every moment the same and not the same; every moment it assimilates matter supplied from without, and gets rid of other matter; every moment some cells of its body die and others build themselves anew. In a longer or shorter time the matter of its body is completely renewed and is replaced by other molecules of matter, so that every organic being is always itself, and yet something other than itself.

Perhaps I am getting hung up over semantics but the Metaphysical does not account for me as it did for Marx and other like-minded thinkers. I took the following definition which works for me from Wikipedia:

“Metaphysics (Greek meta = after/beyond and physics = nature) is a branch of philosophy, related to the natural sciences, like physics, psychology and the biology of the brain; and also to mysticism, religion, and other spiritual subjects. It is notoriously difficult to define, but for purposes of briefly introducing it, it can be identified as the study of any of the most fundamental concepts and beliefs about the basic nature of reality, on which many other concepts and beliefs rest.”

So, the metaphysical is an understanding that all things have a basic nature of reality, something Marx denied because of all he could see in history that made this basic reality a lie. But it was surely the rulers that lied, took that basic nature into a hierarchy for self-gratification! To negate the very idea that there is something sacred that binds us all together in the flux... as interconnected... one-in-all... becoming...being... is to completely miss something that is so beautiful, so joyful, so life-enhancing as to be almost blasphemy as far as my heart can feel to tell! Yes, publicize the facts that the rulers have distorted the very core that is our unified right for self-discovery! Yes, fight against hierarchy and the suffering it causes! But don't wipe out what is waiting to be enlightened! I have yet to find the words to speak of the wonderment I discovered within/without my self but believe me... it is all the unity of workers/nature/history/timefulness&lessness... and so much more besides!

There are a lot of mystics out there in this defining world of ours that will tell us how evolutionary thinking has placed history on a time-line that promotes the idea of progression when in fact, we have been moving away from the core of our truth for over 2,000 years. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness compounds this message... we dress ourselves in an individual materialism that renders us all the same.... only some are devils in disguise.

Yes, there is evolution. Yes, there is materialism... Here we are! Yes, there is the Metaphysical and it dwells where we cannot see. For every thinker who says, 'I think therefore I am,' there will always be another who says, 'I am where I think not.'

But evolution can be spiritual as is it material as Rudolf Steiner's essays convincingly prove. Marx, for all his negation of the Metaphysical reality, still believed all science was knowable... that science was a knowable reality. What is the difference? All I am saying is that beneath the visual knowable science, there is birthing the quantum that is starting to justify what the mystics and spirit-teachers have been telling us for centuries. Perhaps our evolution will return us to where it all began... all workers in the grand universal scheme of Being.

.......................................................................................................

Hey Majickan!

Thank you for your thought provoking reply! So much food for thought...and for response too...

But I have to beg you...please don't write so much all at one time! It's really hard for me to read and digest it all...I have read it all but...

Anyway, re your questions..'Do you consider consciousness as a constitute/reflection of soul or a replacement of the idea of soul? And I have to ask you... what you mean when you say 'consciousness of consciousness.'

To me, consciousness means soul. Except that I believe individual consciousness dies with the death of the body; do you believe that?
I do believe it survives insofar as it is remembered by, or has affected, others. Eg I am still massively affected by the consciousness of William Blake - and therefore also all the people he has been affected by - and etc etc. As you - and therefore I - am affected by the consciousness Of Elizabeth I. And we are all affected by Shakespeare!  So there is an inter-relatedness there. You say 'To negate the very idea that there is something sacred that binds us all together in the flux... as interconnected... one-in-all... becoming...being... is to completely miss something that is so beautiful, so joyful, so life-enhancing as to be almost blasphemy'. I believe that interconnectedness of which you speak is a simple fact of our existence as species-being. To me, the universe itself, as a physical and metaphysical reality, is so profoundly beautiful and mysterious that there is no need to look beyond it for answers.
As for consciousness of consciousness...well animals have consciousness (have souls) but are not, I would argue, conscious they are conscious. We humans are. In all the known universe, there is no yet known organic structure as complex as a human being. Perhaps then we represent the universe becoming conscious of itself?
As for the old Marxist chestnut...base and superstructure...as I understand it, Marx called art and culture secondary to food, drink and shelter only insofar as one must meet those primary needs first before satisfying those secondary ones. In other words, the imperative is to feed the baby before painting the picture...where the hideous and violent poverty in our world condemns adults and infants to suffer and die in their thousands in the midst of productive forces that could meet their needs hundreds of times over, the rationalising of the sharing of our productive forces must be our first priority...?
Now I won't accuse you of shuddering, again, but this time I imagine you shaking your head as I consign art to a secondary role...not at all! It's a dialectic, not a static heirarchical judgement.
To me, the dialectic is the best explanation of our nature...the inbuilt contradictions...how to reslove them...and the new contradictions that will result...
I'll read your post again, and perhaps post a further response, but I'll send this now, and meanwhile thanks again,

Cathy

...............................................................................................................

Hi Cathy!

I shall, for once, keep this short and answer the question you asked.... and recognise perhaps we hold faith in very similar things except for, perhaps, that one question... a question whose answers have strangely taken my path onto new questions recently!

Up until relatively recently, I did not hold an absolute regarding conscious life after death.  I was pretty open-minded about it because I had made up my mind some 6 years ago that what I really couldn't know, I really couldn't answer nor form an opinion.  I am very wary about saying I do not believe in something just because I have not experienced it.... nor do I believe a closed mind conducive to receiving answers.  For example...many of my friends would ask my opinion about re-incarnation but I didn't know so remained open about it.

In respect of this, one thing I have known to say is that I am predominantly a Pantheist... (& not a Pagan as many define me!) http://www.pantheism.net/ and http://www.pantheism.net/paul/

However.  Something did happen about 6 months ago and I really need to articulate it into word and post it here.  What happened to me was beyond the normal realms of reality and split my fairly safe ideological structures in pieces... so one could say I did have pre-conceptions of a sort.  Basically, without going into too much detail... I was shown (completely out of the blue) that this isn't it!  This life we know is not the be-end-and-end-all and yes, there was a conscious knowing of self in this spirit world due to an ability to tap into this earthly one if one wanted because of our life-experience we have been given.  Other than that we were consciously all.... I really must write it up! So this experience changed my direction somewhat although I am still trying to scramble onto my feet and discover where I should be applying my energies... I had been so political... so motivated by freedom of suffering and lies... I think we are meant to turn now and be freedom and truth but how? I am yet crawling.

So I will leave that with you, write up part III of the Bear and I and look forward to hearing from you more, my friend!

Sorry about my writing too much!

Love Light and Freedom

Imajicka

The Cosmos is divine,
all share divinity.
Divinity does not transcend reality
It surrounds us, and is within. ...Divinity is immanent.

Robb Miller

"Faith in wilderness, or in nature as a creative force...  is a philosophy, a faith; it is even, if you like, a religion. It puts your ultimate trust not in human intelligence, but in whatever it is that created human intelligence."

Joseph Wood Krutch

25 September 2005 at 10:50 PM

The Bear and I: The Multiplicity of Rightfulness. Part Three

 

Be in Multiplicity

If the Doors of Perception were cleansed,

Everything Will Appear to Man as it Is:

Infinite… (William Blake)

At the University of Aarhus, Denmark (may 2002) there was a second European conference of the International Society of literature and science. The conference was based on scholars having forged transversal lines and links between the various fields and wanted to further investigate and discuss such interdisciplinary approaches and linkages between the study of culture, literature, visual arts and techno-science, basically between science and the arts. Their ideas encompassed the connectivity seen in the following examples:

• Links between fact and fiction

• Transversal lines between science and story-telling

• Links between cultural imaginaries and scientific practices

• Semiotic-material practices

• How metaphors matter and matter performs metaphorically

• Intersections and incommensurability between visual arts, literature,

• Culture and techno-science

• Translations between physical and virtual spaces

• Cyborg identities and cyborg bodies

The list continues but the point is, whilst many discuss such interplay, the value has yet to filter into any semblance of interconnectivity within our universities. All I witnessed throughout my last three years of study was active resistance to any suggestion of a scientific compliment other. Not that I would have any understanding of this without the education I received, but University thinking would have me compounding all into that reductive thinking in the very compartments many literary authors opposed! Come to think of it, throughout the history of the western literary tradition we could even argue how authorial success is eminently found in the voices that resisted the political norm, the permeates of hierarchy, that cultural sycophant. Many authors are the subjected ‘others,’ connecting to their culture through inscription.

What a cunning decoy… this education system of ours! Get the Einsteins, the Jungs or the Blakes of this world enlisted in the only place offered to them in terms of expressing their truths, the universities that behold the universals! When the really bright sparks stand in the self-researched glories of the PhD, get them working for the same system that has no intention of allowing any of their beautiful truths to fall onto the grassroots. The system will never let the subaltern speak, nor will it be overtly honest with scientists’ integrity. Watching the devastation of Hiroshima, Albert Einstein said,

“If I had only known… I would have become a plumber.”

I believe there’s a rather potent hermetic message in there somehow but I will leave that for you to fathom! Do not allow such a manipulative closure of your Self or your fellow’s humanity! Consider the beautiful totality within quantum laws, allow yourself ‘to see the world in a grain of sand.’ The overt message is to allow the multidisciplinary into the everyday, assimilate, coagulate and communicate your discoveries! Consider there is no line of progress, only the process that continues to unfold. There is neither order nor absolute conclusions for you unless you enter the chaos of your own potential that is capable of manifesting coherence in any moment. The ineffable is right there… within you. With acceptance of the mind’s dualistic perspectives, we may transcend the conceptualisation of the immediate as having no greater significance. Self-conscious differentiation transports us away from observing everything as being of the same basic, ordinary, nature and consciousness that remains universally and timelessly the same. In mystic shadows, there is the synchronisation, the synthesis of oppositions, where we experience duality whilst in a non-dualistic consciousness.

And there is the truth.

 

The Quantum of Right

The field is the only reality...

Einstein.

There is no need, however, for anyone to think they need the aforementioned Binaural beat treatment! Quantum physicists’ have found practises that can best exemplify humanity’s incredible ability to transform and initiate changes, proven through tried and tested experiments in the field of consciousness. Reassuringly, there is a path of least resistance! I will not bore anyone with my wonderment in quantum physics but it is true to say physicists have found the triggers that can cut across the unnatural bridge of hemispheric dominance and a little investigation can unleash pure potential. In the highly acclaimed book The Field, Lynne McTaggart unifies the principles from the top frontier physicists working around the globe, pioneers in a new world view that proves we exist as a “coalescence of energy… in a field of energy connected to every other thing in the world. This pulsating energy field is central to our being and our consciousness; it is the alpha and omega of our existence.” (The field, p xv) What we perceive as real, the static material world of matter is completely unsubstantial in the quantum world; electrons and nuclei are perpetually popping in and out of existence. What is perhaps more considerable is the nature of the field itself, what we conceive as empty space, as an ocean of vibration- forces that transport the most vital form in the universe; the concentrated presence of thought. As Dr Wayne Dyer says, the world of quantum physics provides the ‘hard evidence for what spiritual masters have been telling us for centuries.’ We are all masters capable of change, possessing our own internal third eye of observational prowess-birthed in hemispheric synchronisation- that can unearth difference. The visionary breathes sight into the space, hearing the ancestral voices singing infinitely upon vibrating waves.

Fine Tuning

The quality common to all researchers in the quantum field has been ‘a simple willingness to suspend disbelief and remain open to true discovery, even if it meant challenging the existing order of things.’ (The Field p 16) Dr Karl Pribram had concurred the language of the brain is the ‘language of phase, amplitude and frequency, the spectral domain.' We perceive the world by resonating with it… 'aiming to be on its wavelength.^”

I look at it as tuning in to the miraculous, opening channels that disbelief has always kept locked shut. And this is not mere poetic fantasy either; physiology proves that emotional, mental and physical concepts are potentially enforced by neuron repetition, ‘Fire together… Wire together!’ In other words, our minds have learnt various patterns of how to see the world and developed automated modes of response in relation to past experiences; we have literally moulded our synaptic processes into set patterns of behaviour, especially in terms of how we see the world. The initiative starts to break those long-term relations by interrupting chemical-thought process, principally by observing the effects within the self. It is as simple as taking heed to how we sound, what we say, noting how others respond to us and importantly, assign awareness to how we feel. The Buddha would advise paying attention to our surroundings, conscious of mindful reactions occurring in the vibrational presence of I, within any given space. Essentially, we may learn how to see the physical self from the outer sides and whilst doing so, become aware of how others may see us; thus, we trigger new neurological pathways to open. From ‘out there’, we are able to distinguish the models we had fashioned from past experiences. To break moulded patterns, one need only pay attention to other perspectives… so, observe intently. We then become the subjective-objective. We become the multiple. Monumentally, we become enabled to the visionary inscribed in the metaphor of the blinded poet, from Homer to Milton to Derek Walcott’s Omeros. It was only after the naïve Gloucester had suffered having his eyes plucked out, could he know to cry, ‘I stumbled, and I saw!’

So, start to envisage yourself in quantum levels of being! Research… investigate… partake in discoveries that keep resonating/repeating themselves around you and remember to share your discoveries too. Listen and learn different areas of thought, find an alternative to what you read; participate in what is different! And vibrate in the collective!

Climb into the quantum understanding that there is no ‘you’, no ‘me’, no ‘not-you-me’ duality in your body in relation to the universe; leap into the knowledge of the one, all encompassing energy that is. Irrevocably, it is time we discover our humanity; that is to say, we need to remember our essential natures beyond nationalism, cultural defines, sex, colour or creed. Science can finally prove the beautiful, reflect a sense of the divine, and dissolve the boundaries that have suffocated half of our brain! Defy conditioning that dictates how you see this world.

Clasp your individuality in your hands and seek the new focus! Seek and you shall find!

 

Signs of the Miraculous

I shall exemplify the incredible affect our exquisite minds can have in and on our miraculous life.

Water

Dr Masaru Emoto first started studying water in the 1990s, and was soon to publish astonishing and supremely beautiful photographs of water crystals taken under the microscope. Exposing water to Hado, ( as the intrinsic vibrational pattern at the atomic level in all matter and the smallest unit of energy. Its basis is the energy of human consciousness) Emoto discovered through diverse and sublime water crystals that thought/intent is everything on water. Emoto set up many experiements and I cannot say any other than get his book and see the extraordinary miracle for yourself! (Book details are found at the end of this chapter) The crystal below is of Mozart's incredible influence on water, the vibrational force creating a unique water crystallisation! (Intriguingly, Mozart’s music has also been found to trigger hemispheric synchronisation.)

 

Tap water in cities subjected to chlorine treatment failed to form crystals at all, with no sign of the characteristic hexagonal (6-fold) symmetry of snowflakes. Partial crystals sometimes appeared, as if trying desperately hard to be a clean water. Whenever the quality of water was good, complete crystals formed, each distinctive in detailed pattern and colour. Some of the loveliest, most perfect crystals were from natural, unpolluted water sources.

What is probably the most astounding fact in Emoto’s work is the crystallisations brought into being by meditating certain thought processes into the water. A recent film, based on quantum ways of seeing the world, called What the Bleep Do We Know? uses Emoto’s images, highlighting the Chi of Love water crystal...

 

Now, to me.... that is breathtakingly divine....

Here's another amazing crystalisation brought into being by meditating upon love and gratitude:

The Divine Fire Within: Water and Light

Physicists have already found how atoms and molecules exhibit collective behaviour, forming coherent domains. Water has the quality of becoming ‘informed’ into single coherent waves, tending to polarise around any charged particle, storing and carrying information even if the molecule is removed. (Consider homeopathy! The dilutions still carry the energy charge of a molecule no longer in existence within the solution.)

Japanese physicist Kunio Yasue discovered water plays a vital role in organising discordant energy into coherent photons, in a process called superradiance.(1) We can think of water as a physical medium, a channel that conducts not only the signature frequency of the biological process, but organised into patterns, can also carry the imprint of wave information; water not only sends signals but amplifies it so as to be read at a distance! Whereas water is usually in a state of random disorder, microtubules (cellular scaffolding) within neuron/dendrite cells within the brain contain water that has a perpetual state of coherence, a state that enables photons of light to travel a pulse along the microtubules, what Hameroff calls the “light pipes” in a phenomenon known as self-induced transparency. (2) Able to work at the quantum levels of ‘action at a distance,’ the light tubes resonate in unison, accounting for the instantaneous operations within the brain. Superradiance would certainly account for EEG findings that show brain activity strives for synchronization, seeking interhemispheric equilibrium!

We can learn to see the reflections, the patterns that insist we are the microcosm painted throughout the layers of all material being, mirrors of the macrocosm. We can compare these ‘light tubes,’ (when acting as ‘waveguides’ for photons) to the ley lines of ancient tracks… spread across the body of Earth, with their alignments focused by the energy of sun rays. Like the sites ‘seemingly’ unconnected to the main ley lines, the ‘light tubes’ can act as tiny tracks for lesser light waves that fire upon all sites! This applies to the body of man and land alike. What may appear unconnected is connected by the unseen yet once connected physical relationship which holds its attraction for life, for infinity! It is this relationship that permits the famous quantum dictum, ‘action at a distance.’ Physicists know that once association has been made, interconnectivity will continue endlessly. I could knock into someone by accident, not knowing him/her before of after the incident, yet our connection is made; we will vibrate a connection thereafter! How amazing is that?

Science now proves conclusively that we have synaptic thunderstorms occurring throughout the brain; certain images, and audible resonates or physical responses fire measurable light on specific areas of the brain. (Remember! It is these storms that can become 'fixated.') Yet amazingly, tests now prove that when we close our eyes and are asked to remembering/to imagine a scene from earlier, the same light storm occurs in the same area of the brain!

So... Do the eyes see... or is it the mind? This is the hermetic spark of our own interior miracle, the ability for that thunderbolt of light to spark upon water, our very own interior electrochemical synthesis. We really are the Bear’s vision he had one evening; we are all water sacs, sparkling light within... without…

Newton’s material world in which the material follows absolute laws of motion in time and space - the mechanistic universe - is unfounded, as is Descartes' ideology that resulted in the concept that we stand outside this universe looking in. Our consciousness, erased from the centre, had then to contend with Darwin’s theories. But we are not an evolutionary accident, nor do we need to be the best at another’s expense to survive. We are not genetic terrorists! Nor do we have to believe life is about winning at finales, reaching nonsensical conclusions. We can finally share in the deconstruction of such separateness, shedding ego-manic distrust for the humble Id of totality and unity. We are a proven energetic charge of living potential!

 

Beyond Time and Space

Scientists later discovered that these brain light rays act as a signalling radar, vibrating an interaction out into the field itself, associating and transferring electrons, beyond any laws of distance. Our conscious minds are immediate and can act at a distance.

That demands some thinking about... a pause for reflection, surely?

Fritz-Albert Popp, amongst others, went on to conclude with the heretical thought,

“Consciousness was a global phenomenon that occurred everywhere... and throughout the body, not just in the brain. Consciousness, at its most basic, was coherent light.”

There is also the added anomaly in the Copenhagen interpretation, that famous quantum statement that the observer affects electron measurability; the electron freezes into a particular state until the act of observing is over, when it resumes its state of potentiality. We project, we affect! In essence, if all matter resumes a state of potentiality unless observed, does any matter have absolute form? This is a question that the film, What the Bleep Do We Know? shows most succinctly. For now, it is suffice to realise our powerful position in terms of being the observer. Do other’s projections... yours… or my own... govern this world?

We have walked into a timely epoch, my friends. We have all heard the mantra to, ‘wake up!’ Now we can scientifically justify our intent to enter the plethora of inter-dimensional spaces, experience altered realities without the ridicule from ‘out there’ that would have convinced us we were experiencing a nervous breakdown! For there is no true reality, nor is there a sub or un-conscious; there is only the right hemisphere awaiting acceptance for hemispheric synchronisation. Let your right be heard! Let your quantum light create! Be a vital part in creating the world around you! Repeat and own what Nelson Mandela would have us remember:

Our deepest fear
is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are
powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness,
that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.

Your playing small doesn't serve this world.

There's nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God
that is within us;

It is not just in some of us - it's in everyone!

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others! (1984)

 

The Physical Reality of Rightful Change

In a world of constants, when light falls on a semi-transparent mirror, exactly half reflects, the other half transmits through the mirror. When a single photon arrives at the mirror, it will either reflect or transmit at a 50/50% ratio. With such binary absolutes, when science became able to record the wave transformations of ‘negative entropy’ (the move away from potential randomness into ordered coherent states) the effect of living consciousness on the field offered no such absolutes, although the results were staggering. (These experiments were designed to show conscious thought as having ability to cause material effects. If merely by observing matter, we affect it’s potentiality by fixing it into a given, then somehow the observer was creational, able to master the outcome. Scientists had only to prove it conclusively.)

Yet McTaggart tells us,

“Every scientist engaged in consciousness research was thinking the same thought. Why was it some people were more able to influence, and some conditions more conducive to influence, than others? … Dr William Braud looked hard for the common thread in all… experiments. He noticed several characteristics, which tended to more readily guarantee success: some sort of relaxation technique (…meditation, biofeedback for example); reduced sensory input or physical activity; dreams or other internal states and feelings; and a reliance on right-brain functioning.”

Braud worked with findings reported by the Moscow Brain Research Institute’s Laboratory of Neurocybernetics. Using transcendental meditation techniques, the institute had conclusively proved meditation as an exercise that improves the areas of the cortex dealing with the assimilation of information, with a marked increase in the functioning of communication between left and right brain hemispheres. Meditation opens the doors of perception a little further! Using techniques of the ganzfeld, German for ‘whole field,’ (a method that reduces sensory input by blindfolding the volunteer in a soundproof room whilst using headphones to play low volume static) Braud showed, alongside others, how thought projection/telepathic experiments were in all cases more successful by a staggering 82% after meditating! The odds were billions to one… It would seem ‘the left brain is the enemy of the field,’ yet it takes only the practise of relaxation techniques, those basic brain exercises, to improve right hemisphere response and induce synchronisation. Opening the channels that are receptive to the field’s frequencies proved symbiotic with the knowledge that the field is constantly tapped into and mobilized; it would seem the interior mutterings of everyday life inhibits the ability to perceive it. The relaxed, passive and receptive world of the field proves highly responsive to our intent in extending superradiance into the world. As The Field exemplifies, conclusive testaments of the dynamic relationship between humanity and the field highlight many areas of conscious agility, like remote viewing, healing, intuition, telepathy, clairvoyance and many similar information phenomena. All seem to be easily explained by means of the nonlocal quantum hologram... (more to come on this!)

Quantum physics reincarnated the aether, known collectively as the zero point field, a seething cauldron of quantum potential and unmanifest energy where particles and antiparticles spontaneously arise and then disappear. The very fabric and structure of space/time itself is again in question; it’s structure and its metric under intense investigation have raised far more questions than answers .  For the purposes of this web entry, we will be focusing in the near future on, a) the emission/absorption phenomenon, and b) the structure and mechanics of non-locality. 

A powerful and telling series of experiments conducted by Dean Radin at the University of Nevada (1997) followed a decade long set of equally significant experiments by Brenda Dunne, R. Nelson and Robert Jahn at Princeton University. (1988) Their experiments provide insight as to the subtleties involved in this level of mind/brain functioning.  Jahn, Nelson and Dunn provided overwhelmingly that subjects could intentionally produce statistically skewed results in mechanical processes normally thought to be driven by random processes. Radin went further; he discovered that audiences watching a stage performance would skew the output of nearby random number generators during periods of high emotional content in the stage performance. The thesis in  the Princeton experiments was that participant intentionality created a non-random effect to bias the skewed  distribution.  In the Radin experiments the results were not intentional, as the participants were unaware of the experiment, but the hypothesis was that  attention (in particular, rapt attention) drove the system away from chaos (randomness) and toward greater order (reduced entropy).  These results suggest that attention and intention provide closely correlated  outcomes, and furthermore, that  randomness may not be a general property of nature... that what is perceived as random noise in a system may be information (a pattern of energy) that is not in resonance at that moment with the particular perceptual system, yet is in the process always of becoming...

In the upcoming installments of The Bear and I, we will investigate what this means in layman's terms and how we can best apply ourselves to a) opening the right hemispheric channels and b) learn what effects we can best achieve in doing so. We will encounter new ways in which to view the world and will especially question Truth. This web entry started in the desire to explain/justify how I evaluate truths which seem surreal and at odds with the Bear's. The practices which follow can offer viable explanations and working definitions.... In the meanwhile, knowing all we have just learnt, I leave you with these following thoughts... for a little rumination! Don't forget... you are more than welcome to comment as usual!

Einstein once said that Imagination is far greater than knowledge... this is a statement that appears contrary to a world that tells us knowledge is the ultimate power. But consider... Imagination is always the forerunner of any knowledge, of any material existance in this physical plane we inhabit... Without imagination, nothing innovative can materialise... no new story be written... no alterior truth be realised. We change our perspectives frequently as science moves along the arrow of time... Paradigmatic shifts in cosmological truisms have been our conductors, orchestrating our perceptions and playing into our thinking. Yet always... the great Imagination is primary to any given material...

Pause a little while... and play and tease the word, I-magi-nation... I, either I of the individual personal... or else, I as an eye... of interiority. Then we have the Magi, plural of the Magus... the Mage of Wisdom, the internal knowing... investigate for yourself what Magi are sparkled throughout time, both East and West, North and South! From the Zoroastrian astrologer-priest from ancient Persia, from which is derived the terms magic/ magician, to the wisdom of the three magi of the bible, and shamans.... seek Imaginations ancestral voice! And finally... the Nation. Anyone who has delved within the microcosm of his/her internal self will vouch for my observation when I say that the more we delve within, the bigger the expanse of the universe becomes....

Ingenious, wouldn't you agree?

Recommended Reading: Emoto, Dr Masaru: Messages from Water (HADO Kyoikusha Co., Ltd., Tokyo, 1999/2001)

1. See: M Jibu, S Hagan, S Hameroff et al: Quantum Optical Coherence in Cytoskeletal Microtubules, Implications for Brain Function. BioSsystems 32: 1994

2. See: Hameroff, SR: Ultimate Computing Biomolecular Consciousness and Nanotechnology (Amsterdam, North Holland Publishing, 1987)

Hemispheric Journey

To think the last words uttered were: "Anyone who has delved within the microcosm of his/her internal self will vouch for my observation when I say that the more we delve within, the bigger the expanse of the universe becomes....

Ingenious, wouldn't you agree?"

Cathy... You Oscillate Rainbows!

My first reaction was firing on all spirals to channel my emotive response into 'psychologically deconstructing' such a poignant journey...

My second was to know to let it go... just for once... let it go! 

It's beautiful.

Posted by: Cathy | 09 October 2005 at 10:09 AM

OK here we go...

Hemispheric Journey

I go inside my head. I am standing at the bottom, and can see on either side of me the two giant hemispheres, one to the left and one to the right. They are vast and grey, both, as always, identically sized, I am relieved to see. I fly up to the bridge at the top that links the two. Again, I am relieved that it is strong, a rope bridge. I decide to look in the left hemisphere first; I climb on the bridge and open the tiny door to my left brain. I go in and see what I always see, the attic room, dimly lit, light coming in through one small window, dust motes dancing in its beams that fall on the dusty furniture that clutters the room. I go first to my desk, as always, papers sticking out of the drawers...I open the top left drawer and yes it is my manuscript 'The New Barns Story'(rather dog-eared by now). I have never opened any other drawers, but I pull open the one beneath. It contains all my notes and study on dyslexia and teaching. I open the drawer below that and it contains my fictional writing. Then I open the top right hand drawer and find in there my correspondance, letters from my friends. Next I notice, for the first time, the computer on the desk. I turn it on. Windows XP. I connect to the net and check my school account. The usual messages are there. Then I click on Imajicka's weblog. At once there is an explosion of light. Everything in the room has vanished and there is only light. I wait in the light. I wait. And wait. I want something to happen. Nothing happens. I try to bring back my room; it appears briefly, but greyed out. I go back to the light and wait some more. I try to accept that nothing will happen, that the light is all there is. And still I wait for something. Nothing.
I decide to visit my right brain. I squeeze out of the door back onto the rope bridge. So strong, that bridge! (It's a single rope) I swarm across it and through the door to my right brain. Immediately I am out on my beloved hillside, with the river and the countryside below spreading as far as the eye can see. I can see the little cottage on the other side of the river, the one I have visited so many times...
Suddenly, from the woods to my left, a deer appears. This is the first time I have met this creature! He is a full antlered stag, very beautiful. For an instant, I see hunters pour from the woods, but they disappear as soon as they arrive...
The deer and I approach each other. I touch and stroke him, he is beautifully warm and so strong. I clasp my hands around his antlers and slide onto his back. His warmth and softness under my belly, his strength and hardness in my hands. He runs with me, he soars into the night sky with me and we have left the world behind. We fly into the stars, and he and I grow, he is stars now, his hooves are stars, the tips of his antlers are stars, I his rider am stars, and we are giants circling and falling in the cosmos...
It's beautiful, but I want to go back to my left brain now, to see if it is still pure light-nothing or if my attic room is back. So, back across my rope bridge and cautiously I open the door. There is strong light now coming from it, but not dazzling. I go in the room now. The room is bathed in the simple light of day. I can see everything clearly. I can see all the books in the room. I want to explore some more of my left brain now. I want to go downstairs. As I descend the stairs (narrow, stone) they go into darkness. The stairs are not taking me outside, but down to a cellar. Darker and darker...I reacher the cellar. Pitch black. I explore the cellar. Stone, cold, water and mud and bits of straw on the floor. Walls rough, damp, moss on the walls. A musty smell. Then - in the corner - I find her. I explore her body. Thin, painfully thin. Clothed in rages. But warm, trembling, a beating heart. Around her left ankle, a steel band, she is chained to the wall. The band has chafed on her skin, I can feel the scabs and rawness. I feel in my jeans pocket and yes I have a key. I unlock the restraint. I begin to carry her up the stairs. Oh, she is like a little baby bird in my arms, she clings to me.
I take her through the attic room, I take her out onto the bridge. She clings to my back like a baby monkey, so light, but it is harder now I have her to cross the bridge. I have to cross it like a monkey, upside down, if she wasn't clinging so tightly (but lightly!) she would fall into the abyss!
We go through the door into the right brain. I am amazed to see it is now dark in the land of my dreams, my glorious playland. Not pitch or angry dark, but soft beautiful moonlit dark. Never have I visited this world at night before! I set her on the grass. In the moonlight I can see how emaciated she is, the huge dark circles under her eyes, the sharp decaying little teeth. She shivers. I consider what I should do for her. Plainly she needs food. Also, she is filthy dirty, she needs to be washed...I should take her to the river...
But first I want to feed her. I look around, where is the food? The deer is standing by the wood, he indicates a hazel tree with some ripe nuts on it. I pick the nuts and crack them, feed her the insides. She eats them, a handful. So inadequate! She needs so much more food than that!
I carry her to the river. I want to bathe her, get all that dirt off her, make her clean and soft. When we reach the river, she cries out with delight. She wants to get into the river and swim away, she can only get strong if she swims away by herself into the river and gets her own life. I cry out 'No!' I can't let her go. I can't bear to lose her. But if I keep her she will always stay stunted, emaciated, underfed...I turn to the deer, he watches with steady, silent eyes. I know, I know I should let her go. I can't do it! I love her too much. I would die without her. My dilemma fixes me. I call out 'Oh Christ'. Christ appears. The child goes towards him. He passes his hands across her ruined body and she collapses into a pile of bones. She is free! She is gone! I rush forward and fling myself over the bones, crying. I have lost her! I look up. Christ is there. The deer is there. Also is the Buddha, fat and many-armed. And Allah, on his steed, his armies at his back. And Lahksmi, adorned with gold, children and homes and happiness around her. All the Gods are watching me. I hate them. They are Gods, they will never know loss. I scream at them 'You understand NOTHING' and I fall again on the bones of my beautiful girl and cry, and I will not be comforted.
And when eventually I lift my head again they are still there. They are not angry with me, far from it, I see in their eyes an infinite pity and an infinite love.
I am comforted.

Cathy

Posted by: Cathy | 09 October 2005 at 11:00 AM 

Introducing The Leafy Glade!

Jim, a friend of mine from Chicago, suggested we add a poetry section that folk can inscribe into... and I found this a bewitching idea!   So, after much ado with time, I have eventually founded The Leafy Glade.

I sincerely hope you are encouraged to submit and would love to see The Leafy Glade adorned with a plethora of various phainesthai!

All you need do is submit a poem through the 'comment on this post' section.   I will publish your submissions under your own post section... under your own intellectual copyright.

Smiles to all...

Love and Light Always

By the Degree of Difference

They have cut through.

You are detached, behind the core of pain

With no mind to absorb the stimulus

Of suffering.

You drift into the expanse

The space of emptiness

You breathe into the timeless

As the arousal of an unknown dream

(the one you've befriended a thousand times before)

Strokes' suggestions of divinity inside out.

Still

You assert these peculiarities behind

The mind’s eye.

After all... you aren’t sheltered like this.

You are so careful to linger within

The locked Safe.....

Isn’t the shadowy world too

Centered in uncertainty?

Perhaps....

But the swills are shaking your hands

As you seem to agitate your purposes

Into many dead ends.

Your directional winds pull

You elsewhere... anywhere! Rather than here

Where the North-East gusts would find you.

But as you hasten yourself away

Your frantic calls blare intrusively into the nothing

You have created.

Who will listen now?

Time is hanging in a tree.

It sways...

But stays all ways rooted in Mother’s nature.

You feel its strangulation strained against

The vocal cords.

How all seems stood stilled whilst you want more!

More of others' lives

But they are lived on the remote shores

Of ordinariness.

You cry for their normality, cribbed nicely

Within a system,

For you cannot stamp any title upon your forehead!

But O!

How you’ve striv'd to be let in!

So why can’t you pretend?

Surely

If your quest is to seek some acceptance

Why not conform your head to fool the heart?

Why is your afflicted empathy enfeebled into

Your every Being

And!

Your eyes are deadened.

Deadened

For having no belief in what

You have, of late, been understanding.

It further creates the model foreigner

You trust yourself to be.

Strange though, wouldn’t you agree, how the stranger

Carries such baggage on the very Heart

Of home?

That in this jaded journey to find oneself

You so freely belittle

Your distinctive birthmarks

When they are the stamps of unique value.

We are hardly the counterparts of our progenitors

Yet the fraternity of familiarity

Would have us ordained so.

But we do meet others

Whose dissimilarities rest upon our consciousness

With the easefulness of opulence...

So what does it matter if the majority

Fail to touch the significance of quality?

They are surrendered into the modus operandi!

To the quantitative schemes of self-worth!

Are the judge-mentals really inscribed in such brain-washed purity that

They can name the accused

Without having even felt them born?

Are they favored towards your happiness and lovefulness

Or does fortunate achievement blind

Their senses?

If you listen to them

You'll employ a judge to decide

What Character stands alongside you.

He'll wear your name

And mind you with psychology...

(And what need gave birth to such head-hunters?)

So Arise! Conjoin!

You must people love's labyrinthine

Within the deepening passages of Self

Where the trusting certainty can be felt as profit

For heart’s authenticity!

We have most

Dismissed originality at the cost of our hearts.

We fear our affections,

Dread the rebuttals from all we know

For we are learned to shake

In the buttressing docks of judgment.

We are all sided, it seems...

As we rise to the Justice of the self.

But to whom will you listen?

And who will listen now?

Imaicka 1997

Sonnet of Boscawen-un

Stone Mother

White Mother Stone rebounds a yesteryear

That darkly hearkens round some incubus

Oppressed by word.  It sounds androgynous,

Alien, pulsed upon a pressured ear,

To remind the re-opening.  Native

Of memory hides... whilst the big divide

Rapes, decries and lies for the wars worldwide.

But something lurks around this allusive

Stone. My pen is stilled for no word inscribes

This knowing, signed in an entirety

Of giving life - beating by ten thousand vibes.

It will kill Man’s pride and futility.

Heartily, I strangely listen in time

To her Sirens and a fearless sublime.

 

Written at Boscawen-un Stone Circle

Where Maijick Is

Still

Dilemma

I walked through a forest of orderly trees
Patiently waiting their turn to be felled
(Not the sound  of a bird could be heard on the breeze)
Coppiced and gated, for timber all fated,
They spoke to each other as I passed them by
‘Patience – your life will begin when you die.’

Then, through a gap in the trees I espied
A forest as lively as this one was grim
As this one was dim, it was airy and light
With leaves green and glowing, all moving and growing
And so, hardly slowing, I entered right in
And sweet music played in that warm forest glade
Where there in a bowl of rock crystal made
A fountain was dancing, with waters so clear
And sparkling, that heedless, I ran to be near
And bent my head down to its crystalline rim
Touched my lips to its edges in bubbles all clad
Quenched a thirst that I’d not even known that I’d had.

But, as I swallowed that first vital draught
My eyes widened in shock, for below me I saw
Under that surface, all shining and bright
Were rocks sharp and vicious, with edges like knives
Jagged and leering, they called from beneath
Yes – play with our waters – be torn by our teeth.

I wrenched myself back from that fountain of light
Retraced with slow steps those I’d joyfully run
Turned back down the path along which I had come
And each step that carried me further away
From the waters I still could hear dancing at play
Was breaking my heart, but it had to be done.
And then, on that path (I thought, all alone)
I stumbled and fell, perhaps over some stone
Reached out in the darkness, to find that a hand
Was there to grasp mine and to help me to stand
And my heart felt much lighter now that I knew
I was walking that path, not alone, but with you.

Hand in hand in the darkness, and where should we go?
Back into the forest where solemn trees grow?
While still my heart longs for those waters so bright
I don’t want to go back into the night
I wish we could still snatch our joy from the teeth
That menace and threaten so bleakly beneath
Am I deceiving myself, and you, too?
Or to forest and fountain both, can we be true?

Cathy

Copyright © 2006 Cathy Smith