Merkabah

dang said:

Thanks for sharing your perspective. I love it when somebody like Donald or Bush Jr., the type of guys that John Fogerty wrote the CCR song Fortunate Son about, complain about people feeling they are entitled to things like affordable health care, social security, disability, and unemployment benefits during a recession. Many of the Boomers who have had power in recent years have simultaneously been very fortunate, had a strong sense of entitlement, and have totally compromised their principles in favor of doing what was in the best interest of themselves and their cronies. Many people who are sheltered from life's harsh realities never develop compassion for those who are less fortunate, and even those who do often sell their souls when the opportunity arises. The so-called Woodstock generation has become so hypocritical in so many ways. My uncle, who had a major stroke, saw the Grateful Dead a bunch of times when he was younger, but then became a neoconservative who loved Bush Jr. and the invasion of Iraq. It is pretty mind boggling. In many ways the Boomers have passed the buck. They will be gone when we and future generations have to deal with crises like environmental pollution. And now we have a president elect who shits in a golden toilet. Lovely.

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I love it.
They had practically free college for all...healthcare was at manageable costs...people could find full time jobs that were not just jobs, but careers...people had pensions, retirements, vacations.
They had a LIVING wage and they had it in a single income family.
They fucked around after HS and did all the drugs that they then later made illegal for future generations - then were still able to find a job and buy a car, a house, etc.
They burned it to the ground...they have gouged the generations that came after them to support their entitlements.
We all have a stake in what is taking place right now though...it isn’t just the BBs.
Remember that thread I started called “Can we please talk about racism?”?
Pretty much people seemed to think that by talking about it and discussing it that it was somehow perpetuating it as well.
Well - that’s a bunch of horseshit.
Anyhow...you know I can go on and on about this so I will stop here lol.
We have some tough fights ahead of us I feel.

melissa* said:

The quote from 'Fringe Knowledge for Beginners' says;
"Higher knowledge is therefore fringe knowledge because those who pursue it have been alienated to the fringes of society. These fringe truth seekers open their hearts and open their minds, having placed more importance on the liberation of their souls than the conventions of society.

It strikes me that 'living on the fringes on society', is also an unconscious, automatic reaction which is as much about what your opting out of as much as it is about where your heart is taking you (e.g. away from the main stream view of things).

The article above 'Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science' looks pretty amazing. Great in depth point there. I can't wait until the person is viewed holistically in medicine and in society. So much will change with different way of viewing the world that that will bring.
I think we will also look back at this time and how we have separated all kinds of knowledge, and academia,- each subject area off from each - as being really backwards. I hope that gene technology and the development of artificial intelligence does not advance too fast, before science can get it's head around this 'right' awareness.

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I would only say it is “fringe” because most of the related type phenomena are not popularly accepted due to lack of physical evidence and the taboo that has been perpetuated that there is no soul or spirit...just a brain...a meat computer giving us the illusion of choice when we actually have none.

This is why I never bought into that theory....what would be the reason for the brain tricking itself into thinking it has “free will” if every choice we make is actually predetermined by the programing and algorithms in the powerful meat-computer of a brain?
Why bother with the illusion at all?
What would nature gain from such a line of thinking when quite often it is the cause of much cognitive dissonance and conflicts?

Scientists and Buddhists from all over the world are starting to see the similarities between their disciplines, and the research which is emerging as a result is truly exciting.

A classic example of a scientist diving into ancient wisdom is Nikola Tesla, whose work was heavily influenced by Vedic philosophy.

You can read more about that here.

Here is a great clip of world renowned quantum physicist Dr. John Hagelin at an event discussing transcendental meditation.

Findings within neuroscience, dealing with things like past lives and reincarnation, also correlate with Buddhist philosophy; perhaps this is why Carl Sagan said that reincarnation deserves serious study, and since his passing, it has received some.

In 2008 University of Virginia psychiatrist Jim Tucker, for example, published a review of cases suggestive of reincarnation in the journal Explore.

You can read that study and find out more about it here.

Without a doubt, various ancient Eastern traditions are closely tied with certain aspects of modern day science.

Though it may seem counterintuitive to some, it seems as though science is actually working to catch up to the teachings of ancient philosophy and mysticism rather than the other way around.





It's great to see that in today's day and age, multiple prominent scientists from all over the world have started to study non-physical phenomena and human consciousness.

Christof Koch, the Chief Scientific Officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and a leading American neuroscientist, has illustrated how new theories in neuroscience suggest that consciousness is present in all things.

A couple of years ago he took a trip to India to discuss the topic with a group of Buddhist monks and ended up debating with the Dalai Lama for an entire day.

During his conversation with the Dalai Lama, Koch was most struck by his ideas about ‘panpsychism': the belief that consciousness is everywhere, “and that we have to reduce the suffering of all conscious creatures.”

Sam Littlefair Wallace from Lion's Roar offers some insight into Koch's background and views:

Koch, who became interested in Buddhism in college, says that his personal worldview has come to overlap with the Buddhist teachings on non-self, impermanence, atheism, and panpsychism.

His interest in Buddhism, he says, represents a significant shift from his Roman Catholic upbringing.
When he started studying consciousness - working with Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick - Koch believed that the only explanation for experience would have to invoke God.

But, instead of affirming religion, Koch and Crick together established consciousness as a respected branch of neuroscience and invited Buddhist teachers into the discussion.


Koch collaborates with Tononi on a regular basis, and believes ITT to be the only truly promising fundamental theory of consciousness.

The theory states that physical systems all contain consciousness, and that this consciousness can be measured as a theoretical quantity, which they are calling 'phi'.

Tononi has developed a measuring system for phi in the human brain, where scientists send a magnetic pulse into a human brain and observe the pulse echo through the neurons.

The idea is that the longer and clearer the reverberation, the higher the tested subject's level of consciousness.

The test can be used to tell whether a patient is awake, asleep, or anesthetized.

What Tononi and his team are trying to do is measure consciousness.
The fact that it has yet to be measured explains why a large portion of mainstream academia rejects the notion of consciousness existing as a separate entity, outside of the brain.

Tononi and Koch recently published a paper in 'Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B' (Consciousness - Here, There and Everywhere?), emphasizing that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality, like other aspects that we can see and perceive with our senses.

The theory states that any object with a 'phi' greater than zero possesses consciousness.

This would mean that even protons are conscious beings, which wouldn't be too far off considering that when you observe them at the quantum level, their behavior changes, almost as if they know they are being watched.

In the video, Koch describes how Buddhist teachings led him to study consciousness scientifically:

I was confronted with the Buddhist teaching that sentience is probably everywhere at varying levels, and that inspired me to take the consequences of this theory seriously...

When I see insects in my home, I don't kill them.

It's fantastic to see this merging of science and philosophy, even if determining the source of consciousness remains a task beyond our grasp.

Scientific theories like IIT help to further push the much-needed study of consciousness into mainstream academia.

At the end of the nineteenth century, physicists discovered empirical phenomena that could not be explained by classical physics.

This led to the development, during the 1920s and early 1930s, of a revolutionary new branch of physics called quantum mechanics (QM).

QM has questioned the material foundations of the world by showing that atoms and subatomic particles are not really solid objects - they do not exist with certainty at definite spatial locations and definite times.

Most importantly, QM explicitly introduced the mind into its basic conceptual structure since it was found that particles being observed and the observer - the physicist and the method used for observation - are linked.

These results suggest that the physical world is no longer the primary or sole component of reality, and that it cannot be fully understood without making reference to the mind.

Dr. Gary Schwartz
Professor of Psychology, Medicine, Neurology, Psychiatry and Surgery at the University of Arizona (source)

Below is a great video from Dr. Gary Schwartz (quoted above) in which he discusses whether consciousness is the product of the brain or a receiver of it.

It's a fantastic and short overview of an immense amount of research.

This subject has tons of peer-reviewed scientific research behind it which not many people have the time to go through themselves, and he has thoughtfully condensed that research to allow more people access to it.

Serenity said:

So much good material to go through!

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Thanks!!!
Please if you find any good articles or have some sage advice from a meditation session post it up!
It’s nice to see you back around here again.
Is everything generally okay?
Things here are strange as of lately...I have to say though, my morning meditation routine I have been doing has been very helpful.
Still...everything has a different feeling to it...it just changed recently, I don’t know if you felt anything either?
Much love!

Serenity said:

Spirit wanted me to do a Four-Directions Reading for everyone in response to this, so here it goes:

Spoiler

From the Warm Hearth of the East, we are reminded that in an age where we have a hard time trusting people to remember how easy and freely trust, not just others, but themselves. Trust yourself, trust your intuition, but trust that there will always be help there for you in some way, shape or form when you ask, and don't be afraid to ask for it when you need it. More play is needed, and rest from work. Keep optimistic and do the things that you enjoy. Keep smiling and showing kindness, even on your crabbiest days.

From the Waters of the South, we're told that it's an ideal time for long-term planning, especially in matters involving money. make sure you have multiple forms of it set aside in your planning process. It's also a reminder that the less you[ focus your thoughts on]worry about money, the "more" you will have available. Abundance is always available. You are constantly creating and refining your future. You must keep moving forward with grace no matter what..

From the echoing stones and minerals of the West, We are encouraged to keep informed and to keep learning. Knowledge is very powerful at this time and helps keep the mind grounded, yet expansive And that despite the way things may seem in the world, we are actually still on the right path in the Grand Scheme of things.

The the Cool Winds of the North advise us to slow down and take time for our families, for healthy family ties create healthy communities, which create healthy counties and cities and so-on. We must acknowledge our pain in order to heal from it, and at this time, we are all in great need of taking time to allow ourselves to heal, especially at the Heart-level

I feel separate from the energetic chaos at the moment, I feel like we are in the eye of a storm, and it's quite unsettling. I've also been getting these insanely crazy downloads over the fast few weeks in particular, which have left me feeling "invisible" if that makes sense. Grounding is getting increasingly difficult for me, especially when I bathe. I phase out very readily when I am in water.

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"I feel separate from the energetic chaos at the moment, I feel like we are in the eye of a storm, and it's quite unsettling. I've also been getting these insanely crazy downloads over the fast few weeks in particular, which have left me feeling "invisible" if that makes sense. Grounding is getting increasingly difficult for me, especially when I bathe. I phase out very readily when I am in water.”

That’s it...the eye of the storm.
Hmmm.
As for downloads...it’s now a daily occurrence for me to have a sense of Deja Vu several times throughout the day followed by me remembering bits and pieces of long lost obscure dreams that fade in and out...sometimes, like I’ve said before...I seem to forget the images and dreams/thoughts as I am simultaneously remembering them...which is an odd feeling that is hard to describe.
Sometimes when I bathe I will put the big chunk of black tourmaline I have in the water with me...that might help with your grounding in water.
It’s makes for a nice bath anyhow.

I think you hit the nail on the head with the “eye of the storm”.

Thank you for such a cool and awesome reading!!!
Much Love!!

@melissa*

I wholeheartedly agree with what you wrote and thank you for the additional information you posted!!

My video choice for the day I decided should somewhat go along with that subject.
If you have never heard Dr. Greyson speak it is a delight.
Everyone please enjoy!

A video to compliment the last.
This is a new one I haven’t seen...good stuff!

For decades, physicists have performed versions of John Stewart Bell’s famous test to confirm that quantum mechanics is indeed as strange as it appears to be.

None of those Bell tests have required telescopes staring into the heavens—until now.

By using light from stars in the galaxy to determine the measurements performed on pairs of entangled photons, researchers have demonstrated a violation of Bell’s inequality.

The results appear in a study that was posted 21 November on arXiv but that has not yet been accepted for publication.

The clever experiment builds on the already overwhelming evidence that quantum mechanics is not secretly rooted in the classical concept of local realism.

It also adds an important safeguard: Unlike previous experiments, the cosmic Bell test ensures that the choices of measurement settings are free of influence from causally connected events that occurred just before the test.

Last year, separate teams at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, NIST, and the University of Vienna performed loophole-free Bell tests, which eliminated what many physicists considered the two major limitations of prior experiments.

The researchers measured their entangled particles with detectors spaced far enough apart that a speed-of-light signal couldn’t inform one detector of the measurement performed by the other.

The scientists also used detectors that were efficient enough to ensure that the measured particle properties were representative of all the particles in the experiment, detected and undetected.

Yet as Jason Gallicchio, Andrew Friedman, and David Kaiser explained in a 2014 Physical Review Letters paper, even so-called loophole-free tests are not immune to the setting-independence, or free-will, loophole.

Even if the detectors can’t communicate with each other, the trio noted, hidden variables may influence the choice of detector settings.
Most Bell experimenters have used quantum random number generators to determine which measurement a detector makes on an entangled particle.

The shared history of those number generators, the detectors, or both could, at least in theory, bias a Bell test.



Ruling out that unlikely yet plausible prospect requires setting the detectors via causally disconnected sources, wrote Gallicchio, Friedman, and Kaiser. Their solution: Use the light from quasars located on opposite sides of the visible universe to determine the detector settings.

If such a cosmic test revealed a violation of Bell’s inequality, then the only way hidden variables could be involved is if they conspired to rig the detector settings billions of years ago—long before the formation of the planet on which the detectors reside.

The scientists haven’t yet used quasars in a Bell test, but they have used Milky Way stars. Working with Anton Zeilinger's quantum optics group at the University of Vienna, the team set up telescopes spaced about 1.5 km apart and pointed them at stars located on opposite sides of the sky.

Meanwhile, the researchers beamed entangled photons toward the two telescope stations.
The color of the stellar photon collected by each telescope (either red, with a wavelength greater than 700 nm, or blue) determined which setting the station’s detector would have when an entangled photon arrived.

Because, the authors argue, the wavelengths of stellar photons are determined at the time of emission and don’t change en route to Earth, those photons cannot conspire at the last moment to rig the measurements.

Like the results of every other published Bell test, the cosmic version revealed a violation of Bell’s inequality.
But this new finding demonstrates that if hidden variables intervened in the measurements, they did so at least 575 years ago because the closest star observed in the experiment is roughly 575 light-years away.

As the researchers write in the arXiv paper, their work “represents the first experiment to dramatically limit the space-time region in which hidden variables could be relevant.”

The researchers say that in addition to tracking quasars, future experimenters could rely on patches of the cosmic microwave background or primordial gravitational waves to set their detectors.

The farther those intrepid scientists push back, the more we can be confident that the universe follows the probabilistic set of rules that have left physicists scratching their heads since the development of quantum theory a century ago.