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Perspective Is The Only Thing You Own
“Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot.”
— Alan Watts
We don’t truly have possessions in this world. — Alan Watts
We acquire things throughout our life, all of which degrades or gets passed down from generation to generation, but we don’t really have possessions.
When we die, we cannot take any of them with us, especially our money.
We can try to control as many things as we want in life, but the only thing we truly own and the only thing we can truly control is our perspective.
Perspective is what drives humanity.
Perspectives create relationships and cause war.
Most importantly, perspective can improve or weaken our relationship with ourselves.
Perspective is the single most important thing that empowers you because the way you adapt to life largely depends on your perspective.
[video=youtube;Sy9HPkgnvos]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Sy9HPkgnvos[/video]
Most of the things we want in life are desired because our perspective tells us we should have these things, all of which are based entirely from the ego.
We want to win an argument because our ego wants to feel better than the other person or it is afraid to look stupid, and we fail to honestly re-examine our perspective of the conflict.
If we lose our job, car, or home our ego feels the loss of something it was attached to.
We begin to feel inadequate and embarrassed because we have fallen below the accepted perspective of what an accomplished member of society is.
The ego and its attachments once again stop us from re-examining our perspective.
For example, some of us grow up being told from a very young age that we should be doctors when we grow up because that is one of the guaranteed ways to become successful.
We therefore invest a lot of time and energy into this pursuit and our world is destroyed if we fall short and don’t get into medical school.
The ego feels like it is not good enough or worthy.
Not good enough for whom?
Mom and Dad?
Society?
Who told you that you had to be a doctor?
Did you ever explore and consider what it is that you truly want to do with your life?
Did you want to be a doctor because you love it or did you want to be a doctor because it makes a lot of money?
Were you attracted to the prestige that comes with being a doctor because your strict parents planted that idea in you when you were really young?
Has your perspective been constructed by the competition of trying to get into the top Ivey League schools and now a rejection letter is the straw that broke the camel’s back?
When something bad happens to us we feel like we are the victim because the Ego has lost or wasn’t able to acquire something it was attached to.
Most of our problems are trivial.
I say most because I don’t want to write off every challenge the human condition faces as something that a simple shift in perspective could fix.
There are people out there suffering from terrible diseases, injuries, and conditions that I can’t even imagine.
Even in the worst circumstances in life, if you are on the path, it is an opportunity for you to re-evaluate your priorities of what really matters to you.
Aside from people who are facing the harsher aspects of reality, those who are caught up in trivial circumstances require less to bounce back on their feet with a change in perspective.
We live in a day and age where first world problems run rampant and a large portion of society has become fixated on a false sense of identity.
When something bad happens you should ask yourself: Are you alive? — Yes.
Are you now wiser from this experience than you were before? — Yes.
Does this wisdom add any value to your strengths moving forward? — Yes.
What will other people think of your failure, will their opinion of you change, will it truly help you on your journey?
Maybe it is time to let go of fair weather friends in your life.
Maybe this will be a time for you to see how much your circle of influence cares about you.
Nobody owes you anything, but you shouldn’t waste your time with people who abandon you when you no longer fit their perspective of an ideal friend.
In contrast, maybe it was something you did out of ignorance and your former friends made a good call to not associate with you anymore.
Maybe it’s time for you to re-evaluate your behavior and why it may be repulsive to your friends and family.
Your ability to let go of trivial attachments determines your ability to roll with the punches and keep fighting the good fight.
Life can beat you down at times and your perspective of being a victim or a victor of the challenge has a profound impact on your self worth.
Even when you fail at something in life, you are perceiving it as failure because you are attached to the success of that outcome.
If you didn’t get into your dream college or land your dream job, or if a business deal fell through or relationship didn’t work (or you otherwise dropped the ball on something important, etc.), it is you who is processing this event as a bad experience.
Reality is indifferent; it just happens, and human beings are the only ones who judge whether a situation is good or bad.If you are in foreclosure (or power of sale for all my Canadians) should you just shrug your shoulders and say, “Oh well, such is life?”.
No, that’s not what I’m saying.
I am not implying that you should cease all attempts to preserve what is important to you and your family.
Rather you should not be attached to the results of the outcome if things go south.
You should not be attached to what other people will think about you if you lose your house.
You should not focus on fear and loss and allow that to navigate the trajectory of your future.
Maybe you had to downgrade to a small apartment; be thankful for what you have and realize that you have lost nothing and gained more in wisdom.
Still strive to recover and get back on your feet but always evaluate your perspective.
You might become financially successful one day and after the experience of losing your home, you might realize that you don’t want to have a house that large anymore.
At this point you may feel perfectly fine living in your apartment, or you will move into a new home but not one that was as big as the one you lost before.
When you lose things, the stuff that really matters will be more present in your life.
We forget that bad experiences can also be blessings.
Wise people grow from the most unfortunate circumstances.
Sometimes these situations show you that you are not meant to be doing this and you should move on to what you are destined to do.
It could mean that it’s not the right time, or it could be that you are doing what you are passionate about and destined for but you needed that bad experience to show you your errors.
Many people would think that this type of wishful thinking is baloney.
Why would anyone want to live life if they lose everything?
The question is, why would we want to live life caged by our attachments?
After everything is taken away, the only thing you have left is you – your awareness of being alive.
It is only then that you can live in the present moment and be grateful for your existence.
To many people across the world, this is not enough, however it is a fundamental realization of wisdom in order have everything.
The most insignificant things suddenly become not so insignificant.
If you ever hit rock bottom, I would suggest that you get away from the chaos, get away from the city for a moment, and spend sometime in the wilderness by yourself.
Just you, your thoughts, and nature.
Nature should remind you of the unsullied rawness of existing – free of manmade constructs, be they social or physically engineered; everything that is there is pure from the impurity of man’s Ego.
“You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.”
— Alan Watts
It may or may not sink in but for some of you who are on the path you will soon realize that most of your problems are trivial because you are attached to perspectives that get in the way of knowing your true self. — Alan Watts
You exist and are a part of the totality of this world.
The things you have lost are pale in comparison to the fundamental core of who you are.
There is a strength and resilience in knowing this.
It is this wisdom and strength that will propel you to move forward and solve one smaller problem at a time until you don’t have the bigger problem anymore.
“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
— Alan Watts
You feel like shit because you think that because you don’t have enough of XYZ that you are not worthy of being an ideal human being.— Alan Watts
You think because you have too much of ABC, you are not worthy.
You are fearful of falling behind in the pack that you have become fixated on running a tireless race to catch up to.
Some of us who are even more ambitious want not only to simply keep up, but we want to get ahead and join the upper echelon of the pack.
We often don’t allow ourselves to see the wisdom in our failures.
Instead we fixate on what the ego didn’t acquire, which makes us feel like we are not important enough.
If you accept that you are always important no matter what, you will have the will power to pull yourself out of the mud.
“You are a divine being.
You matter, you count.
You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.”
— Terence McKenna
Just understand that at the end of the day, you are attached to the outcome of whatever happened or didn’t happen to you because your mind is attached to things that you think make you worthy when truly, you always were.
“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes.
Don’t resist them — that only creates sorrow.
Let reality be reaity.
Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”
Lao Tzu
Don’t resist them — that only creates sorrow.
Let reality be reaity.
Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”
Lao Tzu
As people lay dying, vivid dreams or visions bring comfort to nearly all, Buffalo research suggests
Studies find a handful of common themes to the phenomenon:
a comforting presence, getting ready for a trip, engaging in some way with the dead, or experiencing a sense of loved ones waiting
Studies find a handful of common themes to the phenomenon:
a comforting presence, getting ready for a trip, engaging in some way with the dead, or experiencing a sense of loved ones waiting
As an 88-year-old man lay dying, he dreamed of driving somewhere unknown and then heard his mother say, “It’s all right. You’re a good boy. I love you.”
A 54-year-old dying woman dreamed of a deceased childhood friend who had caused her great pain.
The friend appeared as an old man and told her, “Sorry, you’re a good person” and “If you need help, just call my name.”
A dying 62-year-old woman reported comforting visions of a little girl dancing in her room.
These are just some of the dreams of the dying collected in a recent study in Buffalo, the first rigorous examination from dying patients’ perspectives.
As the end of life approaches, people experience dreams in which they see dead relatives waiting for them or describe preparing to take a trip.
Deceased friends visit and tell them everything will be OK.
It’s a mysterious phenomenon reported since ancient times and given little attention by science.
But the project in Buffalo indicates the experiences can be profoundly meaningful to patients and warrant more attention from doctors.
“In the dreams, you can see the person working through their fears and becoming more peaceful,” said Kathleen Hutton, whose sister, Rosemary Shaffer, participated in the studies.
Rather than dismiss dreams and visions, or try to stop them with drugs, the research strongly suggests that caregivers understand their significance.
Among the key takeaways of the work here: Dreams and visions are common among the dying, they’re so vivid they feel real, and they appear to be part of a process of coming to terms with death.
“It’s a built-in mechanism for soothing a dying patient,” said Dr. Christopher Kerr, chief medical officer at Hospice Buffalo.
The researchers took pains to distinguish end-of-life dreams and visions from hallucinations or delirium.
Seeing the deceased
The dreams and visions of dying patients follow a handful of common themes, according to the studies.
Patients generally describe a comforting presence, usually dead friends or relatives, preparations to take a trip, engaging in some way with the dead, or a sense of loved ones waiting for them.
One 96-year-old woman told investigators about a dream of her late mother in a beautiful garden telling her that everything will be OK.
They’re not always positive, though.
Patients also replay distressing life events.
Shaffer, a Catholic school educator who died of cancer about a year ago, initially dreamed of frightening spiders.
Later, in another dream, the spiders turned into friendly ladybugs.
As with the other patients, the dreams occurred with an unusual vivid quality, like a waking reality.
“Rosemary told me the ladybugs meant she didn’t have to be scared anymore. They were a good thing. It put death into perspective,” Hutton said.
In interviews with 66 dying patients, the investigators found that near-death dreams and visions don’t resemble typical dreams and are distinctive from the hallucinations or confusion associated with medications, dementia or illness.
Nearly 90 percent of the patients in the studies reported having at least one near-death dream or vision, and 99 percent of those believed the dreams or visions to be real.
About 50 percent of the experiences occurred while the person slept, 16 percent while they were awake, and the rest while both asleep and awake.
Sixty percent of the patients said the dreams and visions provided a sense of peace, while 19 percent considered them distressing, and 21 percent found them both comforting and distressful.
Religious content was minimal, but there was a common existential thread.
“A statement we heard from people is that very little is said in their dreams and visions, but they extract huge meaning and comfort from them,” said Pei C. Grant, director of research at the Palliative Care Institute.
Two studies, done in collaboration with faculty at Canisius and Daemen colleges, were published last year in the Journal of Palliative Medicine and the American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine.
The institute, a part of the Center for Hospice & Palliative Care in Cheektowaga, anticipates publishing more results after examining the phenomenon over a longer period of time this year with patients who received hospice care at home.
Still ‘spiritually alive’
As people in the studies got closer to death, their dreams became more positive attempts to find meaning and reconcile past life events.
“Death is a paradox,” said Kerr. “You are dying physically, but still emotionally and spiritually alive.”
Previous studies suggest that as many as 60 percent of conscious dying patients experience end-of-life dreams and visions, but the actual number likely is higher because the phenomenon is considered underreported by patients and family members for fear of embarrassment.
The researchers urge doctors to carefully consider how they treat dying patients, because dreams and visions mistakenly medicated with drugs for delirium may prevent the comfort and sense of acceptance that the experience appears to evoke in many people.
Families also lose an opportunity to make a deeper connection with loved ones when dreams and visions are discounted as the ramblings of a confused person.
“Dreams and visions lessen the fear of dying and make the transition easier,” Grant said.
The findings of the project provide much-needed recognition that the spiritual side of the end of life deserves more serious study and attention from caregivers and family members, said Betty Ferrell, a palliative care expert at City of Hope cancer center near Los Angeles. Ferrell reviewed the research.
“Patients are having these experiences whether or not we acknowledge them,” she said. “We’re so busy, with good intentions, providing medical care. But, in our haste, we’re not focusing enough on what’s happening spiritually. We need to honor what’s happening and help people talk about it.”
Kerr will describe the research he and his colleagues are doing at TEDxBuffalo, a daylong event taking place Thursday in Asbury Hall at Babeville, 341 Delaware Ave.
The conference is an offshoot of the national TED series devoted to sharing ideas.
[video=youtube;sUyknQuBTKc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=sUyknQuBTKc[/video]
Can these mysterious 'crop circles' in Kazakhstan be explained by modern science? Or is it New Age stuff?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/nasa-puzzled-by-huge-8000-year-old-mystery-structures-in-kazakhstan-that-resemble-ancient-crop-a6717766.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/nasa-puzzled-by-huge-8000-year-old-mystery-structures-in-kazakhstan-that-resemble-ancient-crop-a6717766.html
Why the distinction between the two?
Science will explain this when one of them has the guts to come forward and do so.
For now...it's New Age stuff. :w:
Very curious.
I have often wondered at the legitimacy of most crop circles…I think there is good evidence that art students are more likely responsible than aliens.
But yes, such huge hieroglyphs have been found all around the world…some of them are measured to incredible accuracy.
And then one has to ask why build such things that can only be seen from the air if man did build them in the ancient past when supposedly no one would be able to see the overall picture?
Hahahahaha....you're joking right?
Most of them could never be created by humans. The plants are bent in interlacing configurations no human could even do much less create it in one night. The plants are still alive too. You should do some research on them. Look back to the old videos before people used the digital technology. You'll see some astonishing stuff. Exact precision on a grand scale. Plants flowing in to one another. They even took energy readings and the energy levels within the circles are off the charts. People reported feeling energized after lying down in them.
Most are created by by technology unknown to the majority of humans on the planet at this time. Whether it's aliens or not...I don't know...but I'd bet you a million dollars it is.
I’m still up in the air about crop circles!!
I admit it would be incredibly difficult to make some of them, and I know the claims of residual radiation, the stalks of the plants not being broken, etc.
Do you think that they are alien in nature, or perhaps some kind of natural energy vortex perhaps?
They are aliens working WITH nature using the abundant energy available here on this planet.
Thanks!
I DO believe that there are aliens or something, perhaps they are inter-dimensional travelers, or maybe even ourselves thousands or millions of years from now returning to study us at a less evolved stage?
I really haven’t studied crop circles enough to make my own determination.
I have no opinion about whether aliens in space ships are visiting us in secret. If they are coming, I hope not to see the Death Star. Imagine a civilization dominated by young souls rather than mature and old souls coming for a visit!!!
Michael Newton's book Destiny of Souls describes "hybrid souls" that incarnate as humans on planet Earth. They are either old souls that want experience from living on other planets or souls whose home planet has destroyed, sort of like Superman. If you have an intelligent but socially maladapted neighbor, that is probably one.
The Michael Teachings say that our civilization is too belligerent to be visited by aliens. Our species is a predator and social hierarchies are in place to secure the dominance of alpha personalities. Our perceived planetary isolation is by design to ensure our survival. Perhaps fear would strike and somebody would push the nuclear button. The film Wargames comes to mind.
Hmmmm…that makes me think of the many universes theory, that says there are infinite numbers of “you”, it wouldn’t be too far of a stretch to imagine that some of those worlds have indeed met their demise be it at our own hands or a meteor or such. Firstly, it makes one question how far and wide our own consciousness stretches, could our spirits be simultaneously living in these multiple realities at once or are they independent spirits who are somehow connected to us?
I wonder if we can feel that “decoupling” from these other realities when that expression of yourself is destroyed or killed?
Life on Earth is tough for hybrid souls.
Destiny of Souls case 61:
"Dr. N: I can see that. Kanno, what is the most troubling aspect about the human brain for you?
S: (abruptly) Ahh-it’s the impulsive behavior-the physical reaction to things-without analytical thought.
There is danger in connecting with the wrong kind of human being, too ... treachery ... I can’t deal with
this."
Destiny of Souls case 61:
"Dr. N: I can see that. Kanno, what is the most troubling aspect about the human brain for you?
S: (abruptly) Ahh-it’s the impulsive behavior-the physical reaction to things-without analytical thought.
There is danger in connecting with the wrong kind of human being, too ... treachery ... I can’t deal with
this."
Interdisciplinary subjects are interesting. Could you possibly create a new subject from physics and psychology to expand knowledge and work out new scientific hypotheses for testing?
Also case 61 from Destiny of Souls:
"Dr. N: Let’s talk about travel, Kanno. As an interdimensional traveler, you probably know if there is
a finite number of dimensions around our physical universe.
S: (flatly) I do not know.
Dr. N: (cautiously) Well, is your home dimension next to ours?
S: No, I must pass through three other dimensions to get here.
Dr. N: Kanno, it would be helpful if you would try and describe what you see as you pass through
these dimensions you are familiar with in your travels.
S: The first dimension is a sphere full of colors and violent explosions of light, sound and energy ...
I think it is still forming. The next is black and empty-we call it the unused sphere. Then there is
a beautiful dimension which has both physical and mental worlds composed of gentle emotion, tender
elements and keen thought. This dimension is superior to my original dimension and your universe as
well."
But the materialists will have none of that.
Also case 61 from Destiny of Souls:
"Dr. N: Let’s talk about travel, Kanno. As an interdimensional traveler, you probably know if there is
a finite number of dimensions around our physical universe.
S: (flatly) I do not know.
Dr. N: (cautiously) Well, is your home dimension next to ours?
S: No, I must pass through three other dimensions to get here.
Dr. N: Kanno, it would be helpful if you would try and describe what you see as you pass through
these dimensions you are familiar with in your travels.
S: The first dimension is a sphere full of colors and violent explosions of light, sound and energy ...
I think it is still forming. The next is black and empty-we call it the unused sphere. Then there is
a beautiful dimension which has both physical and mental worlds composed of gentle emotion, tender
elements and keen thought. This dimension is superior to my original dimension and your universe as
well."
But the materialists will have none of that.
Yes they are interdimensional travelers. They are aliens...and they can do that sort of thing.
Yes....they could be our descendants coming back in time to give us signs of hope and messages to turn us on....to wake us up ... so to speak.
I've listened to some of Michael Newton's work. I've also read a few books written by Dr. Brian Weiss PhD on the same subject.
Michael is correct on all counts. Except now that we've moved on through the Dec 21st 2012 time marker - things are changing such that the aliens will now be able to visit us. We need just a little bit more time....
Actually - I've seen craft in my sky over my home already. Look up. You might see something amazing.
I've listened to some of Michael Newton's work. I've also read a few books written by Dr. Brian Weiss PhD on the same subject.
Michael is correct on all counts. Except now that we've moved on through the Dec 21st 2012 time marker - things are changing such that the aliens will now be able to visit us. We need just a little bit more time....
Actually - I've seen craft in my sky over my home already. Look up. You might see something amazing.
The Michael Teachings claim that the Infinite soul is coming back to say "shame on you" to unruly adults.
This looks highly speculative in my opinion and I will not believe it until I see it.
These news are old, circa 2000, and need update. Here are the links if you want to read:
http://library.truthloveenergy.com/Michael-Teachings/infinite-soul-update-0899/
http://library.truthloveenergy.com/Michael-Teachings/infinite-soul-probabilities-circa-2000-channeling/
I will take a look at the sky to perceive its beauty.
Jokes:
Early bedtime and no dessert for Gordon Gekko. :attention: :nono:
I guess that IS would skip champagne in Capitol Hill and instead behave like the pope and princess Diana (she went to speak with the homeless in front of TV cameras).
Destination Pong (Precognition and the Quantum Brain, pt. 1)
For decades, parapsychologists have been looking to quantum physics as the cavalry that might rescue them from their scientific exile by providing a theoretical justification for psi phenomena.
Particles in quantum systems can teleport, become entangled so they behave in unison (no matter how far apart they are), and exist in multiple states simultaneously; also their interactions are identical going backward as going forward.
Naturally, the fact that such interactions verifiably exist in nature has held out hope that quantum principles might one day explain stuff like telepathy, remote viewing, and precognition, as well as psychokinetic effects.
Over the past two decades, however, a growing number of findings in biology are revising this picture: Quantum processes do occur at a macro scale, and even in warm, wet, and messy biological systems; they are even essential to life as we know it.
Quantum tunneling–the ability of a particle to pass through a barrier by becoming a wave, taking multiple paths simultaneously–is essential to photosynthesis, for example, leading the discoverer of this phenomenon (Graham Fleming) to suggest that plants are, in some sense, quantum computers.
Quantum tunneling is also essential to the catalytic action of enzymes, and quantum entanglement may be involved in magnetoreception (navigation by magnetic fields), for instance in birds.
The problem, and the reason skeptical critics have been justified in dismissing any link between claimed psi phenomena and quantum physics, is that Alice-in-Wonderland quantum principles describe the very microscopic world of particles, not the world of people.
They have mainly been known to “scale up” only in very special conditions, when very small groups of entangled particles can be strictly isolated from interaction with their environment and thus protected from what is known as “decoherence”: Entanglement washes out very quickly once particles interact with other particles–making it hard to see how it could really be used to explain things like telepathy or remote viewing.
In a laboratory, sustaining quantum-coherent systems has proved difficult to achieve other than at very low temperatures (approaching absolute zero) and generally only for very small (still microscopic) objects, for very brief lengths of time.
The suspicion that the brain may also have quantum properties and that this may provide some kind of explanation for consciousness goes back three decades, to Roger Penrose’s idea that microtubules in neurons may be sites of quantum effects enabling entanglement both within and between brain cells.
Penrose teamed with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to formulate the controversial “orchestrated objective-reduction” (Orch-OR) theory, positing that neurons themselves act as quantum computers and are the real locus of computation in the brain.
Other researchers have focused on narrow ion channels in neuronal walls, which control the movement of neurotransmitters into the cell and thus their voltage, as possible sites of quantum effects.
In their recent book on the emerging field of quantum biology, Life on the Edge
There’s no proof for any of this as yet, but clearly the race is on to discover quantum processes in the brain, and thus we are at the dawn of a new era of quantum neuroscience to go along with quantum biology.
It certainly makes sense that if any biological system capitalizes on quantum principles and scales them up–including their spookier and more baffling properties–it might be the brain, famously the most complex structure known to exist in the universe.
Like many people, I’m skeptical of the effort to explain consciousness per se as an effect of brain processes, even quantum brain processes.
Invoking quantum physics doesn’t make the endeavor any less philosophically unsound (quantum or not, the brain will always be demonstrably “within consciousness” no matter how much we assert the reverse).
Mainly, though, I think it is a bit of a red herring and represents a semantic confusion, since the real operative term that we mystics and mysterians ought to be interested in is something more like “enjoyment,” whose properties are very different from what we ordinarily think of when we hear the word “consciousness.” (Some of the functions associated with consciousness–including any sense of self and memory–I feel surely are mediated by the brain.)
Nevertheless, I am cheered by the exercise of searching for consciousness (whatever it means) in the quantum-friendly microstructures of neurons because I think the unintended byproduct of this confused effort is likely to be precisely the physical explanation for psi that parapsychology has always dreamed of but could never specify.
That is to say, even if consciousness is a basic mystery, I don’t think psi is, and I think we can do better than invoke vague ideas of “nonlocality” and the “holographic universe.”
If the brain turns out either to be a quantum computer or, more realistically, to have quantum computing properties in tandem with its better-understood classical properties, this could even open the door eventually to a realistic–and most importantly, testable–physical explanation for the most causally outrageous form of psi, precognition.
Dropping the Bohm
In some recent articles, Jon Taylor has proposed a very interesting theory of precognition as memory of one’s future experiences, based on a “resonance” between similar brain states at different points in time.
He bases this idea on David Bohm’s argument that similar spatial configurations are somehow naturally linked across space and time.
The similarity of configurations of cortical firing at different time points could, Taylor proposes, enable such a resonance between different points in the brain’s timeline and thus produce precognitive effects.
These would preferentially favor precognition of events closer rather than more distant in time, due to ongoing plasticity (creation of new synaptic connections) that gradually changes our neuronal architecture.
Limited telepathy is also potentially supported by Taylor’s model, although it would be less common given the relative dissimilarity of different people’s brains (the similarity of siblings and twins, between whom telepathic experiences are commonly reported, being the exception proving the rule).
Taylor’s hypothesis resembles Rupert Sheldrake’s argument about “morphic resonance” as the basis of memory; precognition would be essentially a future-resonating mirror of memory’s resonance with past brain states.
But as a physical explanation for how this could work, I’m not very persuaded by the Bohmian resonance argument that similar spatial configurations somehow share a special affinity.
This is what bugs me about Sheldrake’s arguments as well: The idea that forms “resonate” seems to require someone somewhere to decide what counts as a form in the first place, and how to measure a form’s similitude to another form.
It’s a Platonic model, and as such I think it puts the cart of form before the horse of embodied human conscious or unconscious agency … for instance in the form of psi. (Jung’s theory of synchronicity suffers the same problem, as I argued in my anti-synchronicity diatribe this past spring.)
I lean strongly to the view that psi is mostly, or possibly even only, precognition, given the difficulty of excluding this source of information even in studies of purported telepathy and remote viewing (and even spirit mediumship).
Some form of feedback or confirmation has been present in most experimental and real-world demonstrations of these abilities, it seems, and ‘forensic’ examination of individual cases suggests that psychic subjects often are receiving information from “scenes of confirmation” in their own future even when they think they are getting it from other minds or distant points in space.
It’s a suspicion that has hovered over ESP research from early on, and has led researcher Edwin May to argue that all psi is basically precognition.
I also agree with Taylor that precognition is inextricably connected to associative memory processes (more on this in the next post).
An interesting alternative avenue for thinking about how precognition of one’s own future experiences could occur comes from recent developments in quantum computing and research in the transmission of information via quantum teleportation.
In 2010, Seth Lloyd and colleagues proposed that teleportation can be used to send information back in time, not just across space; they then tested this idea in 2011.
Lloyd’s idea is monumental, because it has shown for the first time how a real kind of time travel can be achieved non-relativistically, without massively bending space as in a black hole or Kardashev III-style wormhole (for instance as depicted in the movie Interstellar).
Lloyd’s method rests on parapsychologists’ favorite quantum concept, entanglement … but not in the usual way it is typically invoked to explain telepathy and remote viewing.
Entanglement of two particles causes one particle to affect the other instantaneously; they do not “communicate” in any way that must obey the speed of light.
In 1993, Charles Bennett proposed that this could be used to teleport information across space.
Say you have a pair of entangled particles A and B, separated by some distance; you can compare particle B to another, third particle C to determine their relative properties (destroying the properties of C in the process).
Once this is done, you can relay the information about B and C’s relationship to someone at the distant location, who can measure A and, from the knowledge about how B and C related, infer or reconstruct information about C.
It sounds like a convoluted Rube Goldberg contraption, but it is cool because it amounts to the destruction of information in one place and the replication or reconstitution of that information in another place–basically, a transporter beam.
If the vague transporter effects of Star Trek don’t help you visualize this, picture video-gamer “Flynn” (Jeff Bridges) accidentally digitizing himself with a laser and being beamed into the world of Tron–that’s exactly how it works.
This principle has since been demonstrated experimentally many times, over distances of as much as 89 miles (I believe the current record), using lasers to send one of a pair of entangled photons through open air.
What Lloyd showed was that this setup can be modified to send information back in time instead of (or as well as) through space, if one of the two entangled particles is allowed to become fully entangled with that third particle C, breaking its entanglement to the first.
As before, as long as particle A and B are entangled, information associated with them is shared; if particle B then an hour later becomes entangled with particle C, the original entanglement between B and A is broken, and information originally associated with the new particle C becomes lost by C but associated with the other “divorced” particle A in the original pair, and in the past–effectively, that “associated” information travels back in time.
If I understand this correctly (and I invite more quantum-savvy readers to correct me here), you’d find that that “lost” information from C already was associated with A–you just didn’t notice it or have any way of interpreting it until you performed the operation of entangling B with C, within a setup where the outcome was pre-determined through a process known as “post-selection”–more on that below.
(A good, clear explanation of Lloyd’s idea can be found here.)
Lloyd considers this a way that information and potentially even matter could be teleported into the past.
For this, you could perhaps picture Jeff Bridges being digitized by the laser, same as before, but this time materializing ten years earlier inside an old Pong console. (We’d later come to find he’d become ruler of a dull virtual table tennis scenario, and gone mad from the boredom.)
I think the informational possibilities of this teleportation method are even more exciting than the possibility of beaming physical objects or people into the past, given the concurrent effort to understand the quantum-computer-like properties of the brain.
If the brain or its constituent cells can scale up quantum effects by creating systems of entangled particles that are kept coherent over spans of time (that is, protected from jostling with other particles and used to perform calculations, even just over milliseconds or seconds), then information could be sent into the past and extracted by observation/measurement.
Precognition, in other words.
The Death of Randomness
Lloyd’s theory takes advantage of the principle that, at a quantum level, information is never lost, but only traded back and forth among particles as a result of their entanglements; future entanglements thus can influence the past.
This is where, to understand Lloyd’s breakthrough, you need to appreciate a possibly even bigger deal in quantum science, the slow death of the old doctrine that particles behave randomly–the “God playing dice” idea that so offended Einstein.
Turns out, a lot of physicists think Einstein was probably right.
According to the “two-state vector formalism,” the apparent random behavior of particles is only an effect of our inability to take into account the influences of their future measurements (i.e., interactions with other particles).
In other words, particles’ future histories determine how they behave in the present as much as their past histories.
“Randomness” is really “noise” from which no signal can be extracted, because we don’t know the properties of the particles that a given measured particle will be associated with in its future.
Post-selection means that outcomes must fall within the range of possibility to be allowed; this is what prevents Lloyd’s quantum computer/teleportation scenario from committing the paradoxes associated with time-travel, such as the “grandfather paradox.”
The only states that can emerge as outcomes are ones that do not prevent that outcome from occurring, yet a range of paths are permitted to get to that outcome. (One “spooky” feature of particles is their ability to take multiple paths simultaneously to a destination in space, known as a quantum walk; post-selection seems to be sort of a temporal version of this idea, although I have not seen it explained that way.)
Some accounts of Lloyd’s theory of time travel even suggest that outrageous twists of fate would arise in some cases to prevent future-cancelling outcomes.
The special conditions stipulated in Lloyd’s scenario–that is, a quantum computer in which sequestered entangled particles can be carefully re-entangled while subjected to the constraint of post-selection–is the exception to this rule.
In such a circumstance, since the endpoint or output of the computation is restricted to a particular result, the meaning of particles’ prior behavior–that is, the information associated with them that was the “result” of a future entanglement–can be extracted in the past, and thus the “future cause” known in advance.
Although post-selection is used in a quantum computing context as a kind of programming choice, Its implications for how we think about reality itself are profound.
In a sense, post-selection is just a special application of the larger principle that we live in a possible universe.
When applied to the problem of precognition, all post-selection means is that informational time travel must produce a possible outcome and not a contradiction.
But we are looking at it wrong in thinking that outrageous measures would be taken by the universe as prophylaxis against paradox; the point is, the information would not have traveled in time in the first place if it caused a contradiction, not because some deus ex machina intervened, but because it wouldn’t be information, just noise whose origin couldn’t be pinpointed.
We are really forced to resort to circular reasoning to describe reality: Things that happened happened, things that didn’t didn’t.
The only way to make this seem non-tautological is to parse it out and walk around the loop on foot, seeing only part of the whole at a time.
Logic (and perhaps the limits of human understanding, or at least left-hemisphere understanding) requires we we play this game of pretend, which is essentially what mechanistic causality always was.
But the basic structure of reality is a “cell” formed by backward-in-time data informing action that either leads to some event which generates the data or is noise, in which case the information we suspected came from a future event didn’t actually emanate from that event or was misinterpreted.
It is only precognition if and to the extent that it comes true.
This can give you a headache to think about, but it really points to the insufficiency of causality: It’s a social model used to assign responsibility and “blame” for events, but zoom out too far and its fictitiousness becomes apparent.
If all this sounds like an argument for total determinism (or at least, for precognition as precognition of what must occur), it is not.
We are really no closer to settling the determinism vs. free will question, because “particle randomness” was never the savior of free will anyway, even when back when we thought God played dice.
It seems to me that an essential characteristic of precognition is its non-total, imperfect nature: Psi information is only information to the extent that it can be matched against reality–that is, confirmed–and this probably falls in a gradation or range (or “smear”).
There’s no absolutely correct or total psi information because then there wouldn’t be an “outside” to the information, and no way of knowing it even existed; on the other extreme, totally wrong information wouldn’t be information, only noise, and no one would have acted upon it.
This is what I meant several months ago (in my attack on Jung) by the strange attractor; the strange attractor is between psi information and noise.
It is noise to the extent that our knowledge (potential or suspected psi) does not match the future.
Noise is one wing of the butterfly.
The other wing is when our knowledge (potential psi) does match.
In this case, we call it psi.
But the point is, there is always a backflow or backwash of proto-information traveling into the past; only within a coherent structure like a quantum computer may it be usable and actionable as information per se, yet precisely the energy invested in heeding the information or using it to orient toward the right answer in the future deviates the right answer, altering the status of the information the psychic received.
Frank Herbert keyed in on this when describing Paul Muad’Dib’s precognitive abilities in Dune:
The prescience, he realized, was an illumination that incorporated the limits of what it revealed–at once a source of accuracy and meaningful error. A kind of Heisenberg indeterminacy intervened: the expenditure of energy that revealed what he saw, changed what he saw.
Psi, as Rhine Center parapsychologist James Carpenter argues, is basic to our thinking and functioning, not some superficial add-on “ability” (or as some would have it, “superpower”).
Precognition may be a basic function whereby the brain sends information into its own past–or more likely, billions of miniature quantum computers within the brain are sending information into their pasts.
Hypothetically, a statistical perturbation in particle behavior (for instance, in those microtubules or the ion channels of synapses) would produce a perturbation in the system at a macro level that stimulates certain associations and not others, in a way that can be minimally trusted by the (classical) associative system as carrying usable information.
That minimal trust in one’s future neural architecture is a function of repetition and habit–we must establish habits or rituals of confirmation (these may be totally unconscious), which build up the psi-system’s trust in future information, which our psi guidance system can then home in on.
In other words, habit and expectation create a kind of minimal “post-selection.”
(On a conscious level, ritual can serve this purpose in any project of working with psi, such as in precognitive dreamwork.)
Rubbing my temples, I foretell that a future neuroscience of psi will find that something like this interaction between quantum computation involving “closed timelike curves” within neurons and the system- or circuit-level architecture of association will turn out to be the basic function of the cortex, although it will also depend crucially on subcortical reward regions, as I suggested in a previous post, as these are crucial in reward and the development of habits.
If this is the case, it could be that infant cognitive development amounts to learning to sort out psi signal from noise, and that this involves building up the basic self-trust of “me in a half second,” “me in a few seconds,” and so on that enables precognitive information to be reliably used for basic motor tasks.
During our development, we gradually home in on the minimally useful short-term psi signal that enables planning but doesn’t screw things up for us socially, again by building up that structure of self-knowledge and trust in our associative and cognitive habits.
Meanwhile, social learning imposes strict limits on overt, conscious expression of precognition, for a wide range of cultural reasons.
I also wonder whether our behavior might turn out to have relatively little to do with using information from memory to fashion mental representations and action plans–that that whole story (i.e., cognition as occurring “in the past,” prior to action) may be an inadequate or incomplete picture that needs psi to supplement it.
Effective (i.e., skilled, Zen-like) motor action might occur from a place after action, a place that already knows the outcome.
I think of this possibility as “Libet’s golem,” because it would be like an ironic, science-fictional perversion of Benjamin Libet’s troubling/awesome discovery that conscious intent follows motor actions by a half second.
It could be this is true because our conscious intent is unknowingly pulling our meat puppet’s strings from a position dislocated slightly (e.g., a half second) into the future, where the results of the action are already more or less known.
This would be especially the case when engaged in a skilled activity, and would account for the slightly dissociated feeling that accompanies intuition and creative or athletic flow states.
(Gives a whole new meaning to “be here now.”)
Quantum Promiscuity
This all remains highly speculative … obviously.
But regardless of whether Lloyd’s setup or something like it characterizes computing operations in the brain, the significance of the new developments in quantum theory for understanding time and causality itself cannot be overstated, because they provide the necessary context within which precognition will eventually be rendered palatable to the scientific mainstream.
For at least a century, scientists have sought to understand the emergence of order within a universe governed by the entropy, our best proxy for time’s arrow, and it has never quite seemed to add up.
Again and again, keen thinkers have resorted to invoking some sort of as-yet-unidentified form of retrocausality.
In 1919, Paul Kammerer argued for “seriality” as a kind of determination from the future, a convergence on future order.
His theory was highly influential on Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity, which tried to replace causality with meaning as the glue connecting events.
Then, within the field of general systems theory, some theorists proposed some sort of countervailing force to entropy that would make sense of the emergence of complex and intricate forms despite the supposedly inexorable tendency toward chaos.
Various theories under the umbrella of what Luigi Fantappie called “syntropy,” have proposed that systems gravitate toward future attractors (I highly recommend DiCorpo and Vannini’s recent book Syntropy
The reconsideration of randomness as the omnipresent but impossibly noisy effect of the future on the present comes alongside a major realization about what causes entropy in the first place.
The second law of thermodynamics had always been understood and explained as a statistical product of randomness–almost as if math, the law of large numbers, could magically exert a causal effect on a system.
Random behavior of particles leads any ordered system to move inexorably toward disorder, an averaging out of differences and thus a loss of information, but randomness does not by itself explain how heat dissipates through a medium and why order tends toward chaos.
This is something that Arthur Koestler intuited in his excellent 1972 book on ESP, The Roots of Coincidence: The law of large numbers cannot explain anything–it is a statistical tendency, but math alone is not determinative; statistics don’t cause things to average out.
Resorting to tricks of statistics has really been one of science’s fig leafs, when it comes to some of the most basic phenomena in nature at a macro scale.
The reason for entropy, it now turns out–once again, because of Seth Lloyd’s work–is our old friend entanglement: Particles, when they come into contact with each other, take on the properties of their new mates, and simultaneously lose their previous, more distinctive properties.
I like to think of this as quantum promiscuity–particles behave like little rock stars or college students in a sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll haze, sleeping with a new partner or two each night, swapping clothes, prescriptions, playlists, and cold sores.
These attributes diffuse through a community of interacting individuals, resulting in their becoming more and more similar.
By the end of their freshman year, all college students are alike–the same clothes, diseases, musical tastes, etc.
Same with particles, given enough time.
Entropy is just the promiscuity of particles tending to share each others’ attributes.
Entropy, in other words, is not a loss of information but a sharing and homogenizing of information in the present, sending more distinct information into the past; it is the increasingly complicated nature of particles’ entanglements that produces the “averaging out” behavior seen in thermodynamic systems, making the information purely virtual (or noise).
“The arrow of time is an arrow of increasing correlations,” Lloyd says.
So another way of looking at it is this: Lloyd’s model of time-traveling information is an idealized model of what all particles are doing all the time, but in such a haphazard, rapid, out-of-control way that no meaningful information can be extracted from the way they behave when measured, because those future entanglements are unknown to us and there is no known-in-advance endpoint to work back from.
Randomness is an illusion caused by particles’ unrestrained future promiscuity and the open-endedness of future time.
The retrocausal effects of quantum entanglement provide an alternative, and most importantly empirically supported mechanism to theories like syntropy and seriality, as well as a more coherent and specific answer to vague “resonance” theories a la Sheldrake and Bohm.
Astrobiologist Paul Davies has even argued that this influence of the future behavior of particles, and specifically the principle of post-selection, help explain the arising of life in the universe.
The take-home is this: The future is exerting an omnipresent influence on us, at the most intimate level of the matter and energy constituting us and our world.
It is right here, right now, a whole backwards-facing tidal wave of causality that is just as important for dictating nature’s unfolding as its billiard-ball past is; it is just far more obscure.
And nature does allow–and Seth Lloyd proved it–for special situations in which little pieces of that massive backwards wave of influence can be used to inform us of events still to come.
Since Lloyd’s system rires “perfect” replication of information in the past, on the model of a transporter beam or an error-free computer circuit, the ability to fix the end parameters must be absolute.
But human precognition need not be total and perfect, any more than any sensory information is total and perfect.
It just needs to be “good enough for government work,” as they say.
In other words, it’s okay if any given Jeff Bridges isn’t replicated perfectly within his boring Pong game, but looks odd or has three arms or two heads.
With billions of cells performing similar precognitive calculations, the brain could arrive at an adequate approximation, a “majority report” that is good enough to guide its behavior.
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What??? I never heard that in anything offered by Michael Newton. I must have missed that message.
Naw.... they're not "coming back" to shame us. There is no shaming or guilt tripping or anything like that going on. So I don't blame you for not believing it.