Free Will

Elaine Walker
reprint by permission
www.myspace.com/elainewalker

A good friend on the East Coast told me about a book called On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins (creator of the Palm Pilot and Treo smart phone) and said that I should read it. Just a few days later I got an email from a local futurist group about a talk that weekend about the same book! So I got myself a copy and attended the talk.

Jeff Hawkins is both a neurobiologist and a computer scientist, so he is one of the rare people who has studied both the biology of the brain and computer neural networks with regards to artificial intelligence. The computer folks hit a brick wall with neural networks sometime in the 1990s, most likely because they did not study actual brains and have relied on computer modeling based on some incorrect assumptions. Biologists have collected more than enough data to show how various parts of the brain are responsible for specific tasks, but have failed to come up with an overall theory of how brains work.

Hawkins understood the shortcomings of both sides and, focusing mainly on the neocortex, has come up with his own theory of how brains work. It makes sense and is intuitive. To learn more about Jeff Hawkin's background and brain theory, watch this video. http://youtube.com/watch?v=G6CVj5IQkzk

The talk I attended was enjoyable. And by the way, I highly recommend the book!

After the talk, several of us hung around, drank beer and discussed brains.

We all clearly understood the premise of the book, which goes beyond neural networks and the usual neuralbiology. The premise is that our neocortex, which blankets the brain, differentiates mammals from other vertebrates. It is assumed that the neocortex is responsible for the evolution of intelligence.

The neocortex has several layers. Input from the outside world gets filtered through these layers and compared with past memories along the way via feedback loops. The memory comparisons become more and more detailed until a specific response is called for. Input that is mundane gets filtered and never enters the conscious realm.

For example, the feeling on the bottom of your feet while walking across a room closely matches many past memories of walking. Most of these instances of walking didn't call for any feedback response other than to keep walking along the same trajectory. Therefore, you continuously "predict" that the floor will remain flat, that your legs will keep walking.

However, if your foot finds a hole in the floor, it gets compared to memories of stepping in holes. This triggers memories of tripping and falling. A response is then triggered to catch your balance. You suddenly become aware of your feet and the floor and your sense of balance so that you can attend the task at hand.

There is much more to this, and much more to life than walking across rooms, but the point is that the book clearly explains a new theory on how brains work and it seems to cover all the bases. The ideas are very logical and satisfying for us futurists. We like to imagine that our brain functions might someday be fully understood.

All except one thing..

The idea of free will.

It turned out that I had very different ideas on free will than the others did, which was surprising to me. I did not imagine it was a topic that would come up in this meeting. Nor was I expecting to hear the word "soul" coming from a group of futurists, but alas, that word was mentioned as well. Jeff Hawkins clearly rejects the idea of mind-body duality, or that we have a "life force". Jeff states that those who believe these things have "fallen into the pit of metaphysical dualism". I agree.

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So, let me start by stating my ideas on the subject of free will.

I'll admit that the idea of free will seems paradoxical. I've struggled with it for a long time and only recently - after reading On Intelligence - came up with a semi-satisfactory answer. Unfortunately, it was not satisfactory at all to my peers.

The problem lies here. If our brains really do perform a set of logical processes to do our "thinking", and it is scientifically explainable, then where does free will fit in? Even if there is some statistical randomness in our brains caused by quantum fluctuations, I don't believe randomness relates to free will. We can "will" a die to roll a 6 all we want, but it does no good. It's just plain ol' statistics.

We can all agree on one thing for sure. We FEEL like we have free will. We FEEL like we have a "ghost in the machine" or dare I say "soul" that is the true decision maker.

We can also agree that although we know it is happening, we don't FEEL our neurons firing in our brains. It is obvious that our brains are doing quite a lot that we won't directly feel and don't understand. What we do understand is that brain functions are extremely complex.

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So what do I believe?

I believe that the feeling of having free will is a residual effect of how our brains work. Our own self-awareness has has a built in illusion of free will. And stepping up the ladder, I believe self-awareness is an overflow effect of intelligence. The more intelligent a species, the more self-aware they are and the more they have a sense of free will. Ants have very little sense of free will because they are not very aware of themselves to begin with.

I don't want to get off on too much of a tangent with self-awareness, but I have a gut feeling that the idea of free will somehow works hand in hand with self-awareness. To put it simply, I believe the illusion of free will is necessary in order to have self-awareness. It's a package deal.

As a thought exercise, try to imagine a self-aware robot who is programmed to do stuff but has no concept of making decisions on its own. Would it be able to be self-aware? I don't think so. I think that self-awareness necessitates the feeling of free will.

I also have a gut feeling that most people will be appalled at my idea of what causes self-awareness to exist, and even more appalled by my conclusion that free will DOES NOT exist.

Please bear with me here.

Before you decide that I am a robot, I do believe that FEELINGS are real, the idea of LOVE is real, human interaction is entirely meaningful, that we are intimately connected with our environment, as well as most other touchy-feely human things you can imagine.

I think of it this way. As I stated above, our brains process information that comes in through our sensory organs, continually comparing input to past memories, reinforcing or modifying these memories and making predictions. Sometimes predictions call for an action, a decision, or a change in trajectory, the results of which get fed back into our brain and reevaluated. The continual processing of data, whether it surfaces in our conscious mind or subconscious, causes our actions or inactions, new memories, chemical changes in our bodies (feelings), or a combination thereof.

And in doing so, the unimaginably complex processing our brains perform as we make "decisions" certainly FEELS like free will.

But it's not.

Maybe it just feels like free will because it has to feel like SOMETHING and we cannot possibly be aware of the complexity that goes on to make even the tiniest decision.

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If it's not free will, is it determined?

Yes, I think so, but not determined in the sense that it is pre-determined. I don't think the universe "knows" what will happen before it happens. Certainly not if random quantum fluctuations have anything to do with it. I think it is determined as it goes. There is the possibility that at some fundamental level, time has no directionality, but that is beyond the scope of this particular discussion - certainly worth discussing later on though.

At any given moment we have an infinite number of paths we can take in our lives. We can certainly imagine going back in time and performing much differently in our lives. surely all of us WISH we could. And if it were possible to pop back into an early time and redo things, if we had our current knowledge, we certainly WOULD come to different decisions. But I believe if we popped back without any knowledge of popping back.. if everything were exactly the same in the entire universe as it were the first time, the same outcome would result.

That is, unless quantum fluctuations have a hand in things, but again, that does no more to prove free will exists than the result of a die roll shows any sort of free will (beyond the "decision" to roll the die).

We have no free will, but certainly FEEL like we do, and somehow that is good enough for me.

In fact I think it's pretty darn cool that we are SO incredibly complex that we feel and think the way we do. I am amazed at what I am and feel a sense of pride about it.

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Now I must address morality. At this point I bet that most people reading this are wondering how I feel about criminals, about hitler, about capital punishment for folks who according to determinism, have no choice in what they do. That is a tough one to swallow for sure!

The answer is that we cannot think about it too simply. This is not a thought process for the weak minded. Grab a beer and loosen up those brain gears because they will need to grind a little.

I cannot forgive Hitler or child molesters or serial killers because I naturally am not built with the capacity to do so. Yes, even though I know that on a fundamental level, they could not have acted differently.

Morality in our society has been contingent upon the knowledge that if we do something horrible it will most likely cause us to be punished.

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In addition to all of this, I don't see any reason we should assume that our brains contain ghosts and that they aren't made up of the same stuff that the entire rest of the universe is made of, use the same laws of physics and belong to the same dimensionality. To me, using the term "free will" to explain away how our brains work seems no less of a cop-out than using the term "soul", or even to use "God" to explain how the universe began.

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That said, I should get back to the futurist meeting and what the others thought of my explanation.

They, of all people, thought quite to the contrary - that we do indeed have free will. They explained how this is possible the same way I would expect a Christian to explain how a mystical God created the universe. I was taken aback by these futurists. These kind gentleman explained that they sense a mysterious, ghostly top layer in our brains that does our free willing. They were hesitant to call it a soul, but "ghost in the machine" sufficed.

What bothers me the most is that they didn't even try to define what they mean by "ghost in the machine".

Does "God" exist? Do we have a "soul"? Do we have a "ghost in the machine"?

I got a D in Philosophy class in college, probably as a result of my answer to "Does God exist?" on an exam. My answer was along the lines of, "I don't understand the question."

I don't understand these questions any more than my fellow futurists or religious folk do. The problem is that they don't realize they don't understand the questions.

It just feels right so they accept it.

The problem with understanding the question obviously lies with our lack of definition of the terms "God" and "Soul".

What IS "free will"?

Beats me.

We don't have a proper definition of "free will" any more than we can do for "God" or "soul".

As far as I can tell, "free will" is just a very strange and subtle concept that offers nothing more than a nasty paradox for our gears to grind on.

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I should point out that these very same futurists believe the definition of human self-awareness to be "what it feels like to have a human brain". I think our definition of "free will" should be something along those lines too - perhaps "what it feels like to process information in our brain."

As I stated before, "free will" is an illusion. An important and necessary one, but an illusion nonetheless. It's an illusion that is not going to go away any time soon, even if we know it to be true!

Here is an example of another type of illusion - albeit a much simpler one - that we simply cannot get rid of even though we know it to be illusory.

These spirals do not exist. They are really circles! Can you get rid of the illusion, knowing they are really a series of closed circles?

http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/FraSpr01.gif

So what does it all mean? Why are we here if we are just computing devices with feelings and self-awareness?

Beats me!

All I can answer is that humanity's long-winded truth-seeking journey certainly FEELS mysterious and exciting, and for now at least, that is good enough for me.

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So I asked this small futurist group, barring the idea of a soul, if they would be satisfied with some sort of UNorderly processes in our brains - randomness, quantum fluctuations, chaotic processes, etc, that made decisions for us? I asked, "Would that qualify as free will?" Some (not all) answered yes, that if there is randomness, it explains where our free will comes from.

To me that is nonsensical! But I was at a loss for words to straighten them out. Again, randomness may or may not take part in our brain processes, and I assume chaotic processes do (dynamical whachamawhozie), but it has nothing to do with free will.

I then asked those who were opposed to randomness as free will, "If randomness doesn't suffice, and you're still convinced that free will exists, then what could free will possibly BE?"

Maybe pixie dust?

I should have reminded them that ideas such as mysticism and magic and god and souls date far back in time as a way to fill in our gaps of knowledge. As science progresses, god and magic get squeezed out. Religious doctrine is rewritten to make sense out of what is left. Those stories eventually have to be rewritten once again as more pixie dust gets squeezed out with the next scientific revolution. The gaps keep narrowing.

The idea of using god and mysticism as a way to explain things is getting replaced with a newfound excitement in the idea of NOT knowing - having a "great mystery" as I call it, to reach for. Our curiosity is finally allowed to shine!

To take this a step further, while I'm on this tangent, why not go ahead and redefine the term "God" as "The Great Mystery" instead of just replacing it. That way, we won't have to bother taking "God" off our of dollar bills and out of the courtrooms and Pledge of Allegiance. Hey, why not? Christians redefined ancient Pagan holidays as Christian holidays - Winter Solstice became Christmas, Spring Equinox became Easter. Why don't we take it all back? We can do it kindly and gently, simply by using the word God to mean The Great Mystery.. the unknown that we can get closer to through scientific discovery.

Use science and curiosity to get closer to God! What a concept.

However, the idea of a soul.. Throw that out.

For me it is enlightening to understand our surroundings and be liberated from the idea of souls, pixie dust, and even the paradox of free will! For some it is frightening. The fright is understandable since it has been reinforced by millions of years of human evolution.

It used to be natural to fill in the gaps in our knowledge with mysticism, but it is no longer necessary. It used to be natural to fight and even to kill in our every day lives, and ancient man's lives depended on it! But nowadays, killing is something most of us reject. We have very similar bodies and similar minds as we did then. The reason we are different is because over many generations we have LEARNED.

God is out - The Great Mystery is in. The need for fear and hellfire as a driving force for morality necessary if we embrace the idea that societal feedback is the only true morality driver. It is driving us to ENJOY THE FEELING of morality and love and kinship more and more as the millennia go by. We are NATURALLY evolving into better creatures. Our Morality level over time is a bumpy curve that still allows war and serial killers, but it is continually tending towards a higher value nonetheless.

And the most exciting part is that a tendency towards morality is inherently built into our system. Most of us FEEL good when we DO good. Feedback in the form of good feelings causes us to want to do more good in the future. Others observe the person feeling good and may take note of their prior actions. Some may FEEL good when DOING bad, but they get punished. People observe this and it permeates into society. Each individual forms new connections in their brains that reinforce our tendency towards good. Over time, we want to do more and more good. I suppose we have our chemistry to thank for this.

Don't get me wrong. We're not all saints yet. Even this kind of evolution takes multiple millennia. But it doesn't take "free will".

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Alas, I did not think of any of these things as we drank our beers and flatly disagreed on the idea of free will.

One man said he does not want to think that HIS BRAIN is computing HIS input and making HIS decisions for him. I believe this is the wrong way to think about it. There is no "he" that is separate from his "brain and body". "HE" IS his brain patterns. The word "mind" is another strange and subtle concept that is misleading. Your mind IS you, so the common phrase, "my mind is wandering" is cute but not accurate. Your mind IS you, just as your body is you.

That man was uncomfortable only because he does not fully understand and embrace his mind and body and self as being one discrete unit.

I get the sense that people are afraid of what they ARE instead of feeling a sense of pride. People are proud to be mothers and fathers and teachers and astronauts, but are they really proud to be human? We should feel pride in what we are - incredibly complex organisms that can take in the unimaginably dense data around us and make some sort of sense out of it, act upon things and feel love and curiosity as a result. And as hard as it is to see sometimes, we ARE evolving in an upward direction - to the stars, hopefully.

The bottom line is that whether or not we truly have "free will" in the traditional sense, we certainly feel like we do, so we can go on enjoying every "decision" we make as usual.

If I can feel the love and wonder of my life and hold these definitions to be true, then I believe you can too. I am happy and amazed that my brain does what it does to deal with myriads of information and predict the future so that I don't trip over every hole my foot comes across.

Evolution of human music through sexual selection part 2

On the other hand, we mustn’t be dogmatic about group selection always being an unworkable or outdated idea. If music did have individual-level benefits, such as courtship benefits under sexual selection, then it may be possible for group selection to reinforce those individual benefits with group benefits. Under this model of group selection, there would be no necessary tension between the individual and group levels of selection: music would not be “altruistic”, with individual costs and only group benefits. If none of the Ravers were willing to mate with a Wallflower, the Wallflower gene could never invade the group. This type of group selection model has been very poorly studied in theoretical biology, but it is not implausible (see Boyd & Richerson, 1990). I think this sort of interplay between sexual selection and group selection may be the only sensible way to introduce group selection into models of music evolution.

Another overlooked factor is kin selection, which is easy to mistake for group selection when groups are composed largely of genetic relatives. However, to posit that music evolved under kin selection, for some kind of kin-bonding function, seems implausible, because no other species with cooperation between kin requires any special bonding ritual. Nor does music and dance seem to play the major role in family groups that it plays when non-kin come together.

The main appeal of the group-bonding argument is, I think, our subjective experience that music feels better when there are others around enjoying it too. The production of this warm groupish glow, delight, or euphoria should not be mistaken for music’s adaptive function, however. If music evolved principally under sexual selection, it would make sense for music enjoyment to be greater when one is surrounded by a large number of others, especially young, attractive, single others. Rock concerts make teenagers feel giddy with excitement not because they will feel an oceanic oneness with their peers in any behaviorally significant way -- there are too many fights after concerts for that theory to work -- but because concerts afford an excellent opportunity for meeting partners. It is not necessary for us to be aware of this adaptive logic for it to have worked over many millenia in shaping the group production and enjoyment of music. Apart from mating, the experience of producing music in a large group may feel good simply for mood-calibration purposes (see Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). Singing lyrical music together, for example, would have given powerful evidence under ancestral conditions that one was part of a successful band: a large group of healthy, energetic people with few social tensions who share a common language.

Many ethnomusicologists (e.g. Nettl, 1983) take a different view on music’s group-bonding functions, and seem at certain points to view music as a means for collective access to the supernatural. This merits a brief evolutionary critique: accessing the supernatural can only be the adaptive function of a biological trait such as music if the supernatural actually exists, and if accessing it gives concrete fitness benefits. Evolution would not be impressed by animals that merely think they attain god-like powers through music; they would really have to do it for selection to favor this function. Of course, convincing others that there is a supernatural, and that one has special powers to access it, might function as a perfectly good courtship display. Composers who view music as an intermediary between humans and gods (e.g. Stravinsky, 1947) are, of course, setting themselves up for worship as high priests, without taking any vows of celibacy.

A plea for more quantitative behavioral data on music production and reception

As we have seen, evolutionary biology has a rich set of theories concerning sexual selection and animal signal systems, and an ever more sophisticated set of behavioral research methods for testing hypotheses about the functions of animal signal systems such as human music. However, these methods demand much more detailed quantitative data about music production and reception than are typically available from ethnomusicology, psychomusicology, or cultural anthropology. In terms of quantitative data relevant to sexual selection hypotheses, we know more about the calls of the small, drab, neotropical Tungara frog Physalaemus pustulosus (Ryan, 1985), than we do about human music.

There are some key questions that need further research. To test the hypothesis that music production functions in part as a set of sexually-selected indicators, we need to know much more about: (1) the genetic heritability of musical capacities in modern human populations, (2) the genetic heritability of relevant fitness components such displays might indicate, such as intelligence, creativity, aerobic capacity, and motor control, (3) the phenotypic correlations between musical capacities and the underlying traits they represent, (4) the mate preferences people have concerning musical displays, and the inferences they make from manifest musical ability to underlying traits, and (5) the sexual payoffs for different degrees of musicality in tribal and modern populations. To test the hypothesis that music production functions in part as a set of aesthetic displays, we need to know much more about (1) the perceptual and cognitive preferences people (and other apes) have with respect to many dimensions of musical stimuli, (2) the frequency distribution of actual musical productions with respect to those dimensions, (3) whether there is strong assortative mating for musical traits, and (4) whether there are genetic correlations between musical tastes and music-production tendencies in modern populations, which might indicate a runaway effect in progress.

To test the more general hypothesis that sexual selection through mate choice has been a major factor in the evolution of human music, we need to see whether music production behavior matches what we would expect for a courtship display. There is some suggestive evidence in this direction. I took random samples of over 1800 jazz albums from Carr, Fairweather, and Priestley (1988), over 1500 rock albums from Strong (1991), and over 3800 classical music works from Sadie (1993), and analyzed the age and sex of principal music-producer for each. The resulting plots indicated that, for each genre, males produced about 10 times as much music as females, and their musical output peaked in young adulthood, around age 30, near the time of peak mating effort and peak mating activity. This is almost identical to the age and sex profiles discovered by Daly and Wilson (1988) for homicides, which they took as evidence for sexual selection shaping propensities for violence sexual competitiveness. Here, the same profiles suggest that music evolved and continues to function as a courtship display, mostly broadcast by young males to attract females. Of course, my samples may be biased, because only the best musicians have opportunities to record albums or have their works documented in classical music encyclopedias. However, Simonton’s (1993) studies of creativity suggest that the demographics of extremely creative cultural production are not significantly different from the demographics of ordinary cultural production, so the former can usually be taken as a proxy for the latter. If so, it seems likely that most music at all levels, from local pub bands to internationally televised concerts, is produced by young men. And that is the exactly the pattern sexual selection would produce (see Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Daly & Wilson, 1994).

In any case, for evolutionary studies of human music to flourish, we need to adopt the same quantitative methods that have worked so well for studies of signalling systems in other species (Hauser, 1996; Martindale, 1990; Simonton, 1991, 1993). Music must be viewed as a behavior generated by signallers and sent to receivers, rather than as an abstract system of communication, emotion, and cultural meaning. The behavioral details of music production and reception are much more informative about music’s evolutionary origins and adaptive functions than the details of music as a disembodied formal system. Studies of language evolution provide a cautionary tale in this respect: two hundred years of speculation about the origins of human language have shed virtually no light on language’s survival and reproductive payoffs, because language has usually been treated as an abstract system of syntax, morphology, and vocabulary (e.g. Bickerton, 1995; Pinker, 1994), rather than a concrete behavior with some people talking to others in ways that affect their fitness.

Conclusion

“Although ornithologists and acousticians agree about the musicality of the sounds uttered by birds, the gratuitous and unverifiable hypothesis of the existence of a genetic relation between bird song and music is hardly worth discussing” Levi-Strauss (1970, p. 19)

Cultural theorists such as Levi-Strauss have been too quick to dismiss evolutionary analogs of human music. Bird song and human music do not share a common phylogenetic origin, but they may very well share a common adaptive function. This chapter has argued that the functional analogs between human music and animal acoustic courtship have been dismissed too readily, too contemptuously, and with too little appreciation of sexual selection theory.

Sexual selection through mate choice is almost unfairly powerful as an evolutionary explanation for things like music that seem impressive and attractive to us, but that seem useless for survival under ancestral conditions. The reason is that any feature you’re even capable of noticing about somebody else (including the most subtle details of their musical genius) is a feature that could have been sexually selected by our ancestors. If you can perceive the quality, creativity, virtuosity, emotional depth, and spiritual vision of somebody’s music, then sexual selection through mate choice can notice it too, because the perceptions of ancestors with minds like yours were literally the agents through which sexual selection operated. If both musical tastes and musical capacities were genetically heritable (as practically all behavioral traits are -- see Plomin et al., 1997), then runaway sexual selection would have had no trouble in seizing upon early, primitive, acoustic displays and turning them over thousands of generations into a species-wide adaptation known as music.

This chapter has advanced just a few rather obvious ideas about the evolution of music, first articulated by Darwin, but worth reiterating in the light of contemporary biology. Music is a biological adaptation, universal within our species, distinct from other adaptations, and too complex to have arise except through direct selection for some survival or reproductive benefit. Since there are no plausible survival benefits for music production, reproductive benefits seem worth a look. As Darwin emphasized, most complex, creative acoustic displays in nature are outcomes of sexual selection and function as courtship displays to attract sexual partners. The behavioral demographics of music production are just what we would expect for a sexually-selected trait, with young males greatly over-represented in music-making. Music shows several features that could function as reliable indicators of fitness, health, and intelligence, and as aesthetic displays that excite our perceptual, cognitive, and emotional sensitivities. Opportunities for both music production and selective mate choice would have been plentiful under ancestral hunter-gatherer conditions. In short, the evolutionary analogy between bird song and human music may be much closer than previously believed: both are sexually-selected courtship displays first, and fulfil other functions less directly.

There is plenty left to do. We need much more quantitative behavioral data on music production and reception, of many different types, ranging from genetic heritability studies, to physiological studies on the costs of music-playing and dancing, to perceptual experiments on music preferences. There is still the quandary of why individual courtship displays would be produced in groups, and whether group selection may have interacted with sexual selection in music evolution. There is scope for more computer simulations of how musical complexity and novelty might evolve under sexual selection. More centrally, the design features of human music need to be related much more securely and less speculatively to specific functions under ancestral conditions.

Progress concerning music evolution seems most likely by adopting the same adaptationist approach that has proven so fruitful in understanding bird song and other complex signal systems. Modern biology provides a great wealth of evolutionary theory and empirical methods, many of which can be applied with little modification to analyzing human music. To many musicologists, this may seem a radical approach, threatening a psychologically and genetically reductionist view of music. To students of sexual selection, however, to say that a human adaptation has been shaped by mate choice is grant it the least reductionistic, most humane origin, as a part of the mind selected by minds like ours for its ability to provide mental and emotional enjoyment. Music arose as a natural outcome of psychology mixing with sexuality in the genetic stream that became humanity.

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Evolution of human music through sexual selection part 1

Geoffrey F. Miller
Centre for Economic Learning and Social Evolution
University College London
Gower St., London, WC1E 6BT, England
geoffrey.miller@ucl.ac.uk

Published as:
Miller, G. F. (2000). Evolution of human music through sexual selection. In N. L. Wallin, B. Merker, & S. Brown (Eds.), The origins of music, MIT Press, pp. 329-360.

Introduction: A Darwinian approach to music evolution

“... it appears probable that the progenitors of man, either the males or females or both sexes, before acquiring the power of expressing their mutual love in articulate language, endeavoured to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm.” (Darwin, 1871, pp. 880)

In The descent of man, and Selection in relation to sex, Darwin (1871) devoted ten pages to bird song and six pages to human music, viewing both as outcomes of an evolutionary process called sexual selection. Darwin’s idea that most bird song functions as a courtship display to attract sexual mates has been fully supported by biological research (e.g. Catchpole & Slater, 1995), but his idea that human music evolved to serve the same function have been strangely neglected. Although there has been much written about the origins of human music (e.g. Blacking, 1987; Dissanayake, 1988, 1992; Knight, 1991; Rousseau, 1966; Storr, 1992; Tiger, 1992), very few theorists have taken a serious adaptationist approach to the question. Those who have, have usually searched in vain for music’s survival benefits for the individual or the group, overlooking Darwin’s compelling argument that music’s benefits were primarily reproductive, and best explained by the same sexual selection processes that shaped bird song. This chapter has the simple goal of reviving Darwin’s original suggestions that human music must be studied as a biological adaptation, and that music was shaped by sexual selection to function mostly as a courtship display to attract sexual partners. Fortunately, after a century of obscurity, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection itself has already undergone a renaissance in biology over the last two decades, so biology offers many new insights about courtship adaptations, which will be applied here to human music.

The historical analogy between the study of bird song and the study of human music may prove instructive. Before Darwin, the natural theologians such as William Paley considered bird song to have no possible function for the animals themselves, but rather to signal the creator’s benevolence to human worshippers through miracles of beauty. Bird song was put in the category of the natural sublime, along with flowers, sunsets, and alpine peaks, as phenomena with an aesthetic impact too deep to carry anything less than a transcendental message. The idea that bird song would be of any use to birds was quite alien before about 1800. With the rise of natural history, writers such as Daines Barrington in 1773 and Gilbert White in 1825 (cited in Darwin, 1871) argued that bird song must have some function for the animals that use it, but must arise exclusively from male rivalry and territorial competition. They recognized that male birds sing much more than females, and sing mostly in breeding season. But they insisted that song was a form of vocal intimidation between males rather than attraction between the sexes. Darwin agreed that some songs function to intimidate, but argued that female choice for male singing ability was the principal factor in the evolution of bird song: “The true song, however, of most birds and various strange cries are chiefly uttered during the breeding-season, and serve as a charm, or merely as a call-note, to the other sex” (Darwin, 1871, p. 705). Against the hypothesis that bird song somehow aids survival, Darwin cited observations that male birds sometimes drop dead from exhaustion while singing during the breeding season. His sexual selection theory was perfectly concordant with the idea that males sacrifice their very lives in the pursuit of mates, so that their attractive traits live on in their offspring.

The history of theorizing about the evolution of human music shows many of the same themes. Many commentators have taken Paley’s creationist, transcendental position, claiming that music’s aesthetic and emotional power exceed what would be required for any conceivable biological function. Claude Levi-Strauss (1970, p. 18), for example, took a position typical of cultural anthropology in writing “Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.” Where such commentators have recognized any need for consistency with evolutionary principles, they usually explain music as side-effect of having a big brain, being conscious, or learning culture. As we shall see, none of these explanations are adequate if music can be shown to be a legitimate adaptation in its own right. Other theorists have adopted the pre-Darwinian natural historians’ rather narrow view of biological function as centered on competition for survival. This has led to desperate searches for music’s contribution to pragmatic survival problems in Pleistocene Africa, our ancestral environment. Here, quandaries arise. No one has ever proposed a reasonable survival benefit to individuals taking the time and energy to produce music, which has no utility in finding food, avoiding predators, or overcoming parasites. But if one falls back on claiming survival benefits to the group, through some musical mechanism of group-bonding, then one ends up in the embarrassing position of invoking group selection, which has never been needed to explain any other trait in any mammalian species (see Williams, 1966). If evolution did operate according to survival of the fittest, human music would be inexplicable.

Consider Jimi Hendrix, for example. This rock guitarist extraordinaire died at the age of 27 in 1970, overdosing on the drugs he used to fire his musical imagination. His music output, three studio albums and hundreds of live concerts, did him no survival favours. But he did have sexual liaisons with hundreds of groupies, maintained parallel long-term relationships with at least two women, and fathered at least three children in the U.S., Germany, and Sweden. Under ancestral conditions before birth control, he would have fathered many more. Hendrix’s genes for musical talent probably doubled their frequency in a single generation, through the power of attracting opposite-sex admirers. As Darwin realized, music’s aesthetic and emotional power, far from indicating a transcendental origin, point to a sexual-selection origin, where too much is never enough. Our ancestral hominid-Hendrixes could never say, “OK, our music’s good enough, we can stop now”, because they were competing with all the hominid-Eric-Claptons, hominid-Jerry-Garcias, and hominid-John-Lennons. The aesthetic and emotional power of music is exactly what we would expect from sexual selection’s arms race to impress minds like ours.

Darwin on human music

Though Darwin devoted only a few pages of The descent of man to the role of sexual selection in the evolution of human music (Darwin, 1871, pp. 875-881), his insights remain so apposite that they are worth reviewing here. Darwin seems to have considered music the single best example of mate choice having shaped a human behavioral trait. He first sets the context by reminding the reader that sounds generally evolve for reproductive functions: “Although the sounds emitted by animals of all kinds serve many purposes, a strong case can be made out, that the vocal organs were primarily used and perfected in relation to the propagation of the species” (Darwin, 1871, p. 875). He reviews as examples the sounds of frogs, toads, tortoises alligators, birds, mice, and gibbons, which are produced only in the breeding season, usually only by males, but sometimes by both sexes. He then reviews the anatomy of sound perception to argue that the capacity to perceive musical notes could easily have begun as a side-effect of the capacity to distinguish noises in general: “an ear capable of discriminating noises -- and the high importance of this power to all animals is admitted by every one -- must be sensitive to musical notes” (Darwin, 1871, p. 877). The famous 1868 paper by Helmholtz on acoustic physiology is cited to explain why many animals would converge on using tones that belong to human musical scales. Darwin concludes with a strong critique of the natural theology position, arguing that if male birds sing to females, it must be because female birds are impressed by singing: “unless females were able to appreciate such sounds and were excited or charmed by them, the persevering efforts of the males, and the complex structures often possessed by them alone, would be useless; and this is impossible to believe” (Darwin, 1871, p. 878).

Immediately after rejecting the possibility that animal sounds are useless, Darwin ponders the apparent frivolity of human music: “As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed” (Darwin, 1871, p. 878). He then cites the ubiquity of music across cultures, and even mentions some recently unearthed Palaeolithic flutes made from reindeer bone to illustrate music’s antiquity. He goes on to mention how music capacities may emerge spontaneously and reliably in human development: “We see that the musical faculties, which are not wholly deficient in any race, are capable of prompt and high development” (Darwin, 1871, p. 878). He then illustrates how music arouses strong emotions, and how love is the most common lyrical theme in songs. Apart from his rather patronizing Victorian attitude towards non-European music, Darwin’s strategy for arguing that human music is a biological adaptation and a product of sexual selection is almost identical to that which a modern evolutionary psychologist would use. Darwin summarizes: “All these facts with respect to music and impassioned speech become intelligible to a certain extent, if we may assume that musical tones and rhythm were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship (Darwin, 1871, p. 880). As the coup de grace, he pre-empts the objection that musicians don’t mean anything sexual when they perform, by reminding us that a biological function requires no conscious awareness: “The impassioned orator, bard, or musician, when with his varied tones and cadences he excites the strongest emotions in his hearers, little suspects that he uses the same means by which his half-human ancestors long ago aroused each other’s ardent passions, during their courtship and rivalry” (Darwin, 1871, p. 881).

Darwin was not troubled by the fact that both men and women produce music. He admits that the capacity and love for singing and music are not a “sexual character” in the sense of a sexually dimorphic trait (Darwin, 1871, p. 875). In the three hundred pages on sexual selection preceding his analysis of human music, Darwin noted many sexually-selected traits present in both sexes. His remarks on prehistoric marriage, and on sexually-selected physical traits present in both sexes, suggest that he assumed both male and female mate choice among our ancestors.

What can we add to Darwin’s hypothesis that human music arose through mate choice? Well, we know more about music now, and we know more about mate choice, and we know more about mental adaptations. Although Darwin laid the foundations, a modern Darwinian approach to music can draw on the full power of evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and evolutionary anthropology.

An adaptationist approach to music

Before getting too deeply into the relevance of sexual selection theory to music, it is important to step back and ask about the relevance of evolutionary theory in general. There are many ways of asking about the origins of music. But evolutionary biologists would focus on four key questions of increasing specificity (see Williams 1966; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990, 1992). First, what is “music” for? Second, what adaptive functions are served by the specific behaviours of singing, chanting, humming, whistling, dancing, drumming, and instrument-playing? Third, why did the fitness benefits of music-making and music-listening exceed the fitness costs? Fourth, consider music as a set of signals emitted to influence the behaviour of other organisms (see Dawkins & Krebs, 1978): Who generates these signals, under what conditions, to what purpose? And who receives these signals, with what sensitivity, resulting in what behavioural changes, benefiting whom?

All of these questions put music in the adaptationist arena, where theories have to play by very strict rules. In this arena, it is not so important to worry about how to define music, exactly when it evolved, or what sequence of modifications occurred to transform non-musical apes into musical humans. Most of the speculation about the “origins” of music identifies some ape or human behavior that shares certain features with music, such as the prosody seen in mother-infant ritualized verbal exchanges (Dissanayake, this volume; Storr, 1992), or adult speech (Pole, 1924), and then supposes that the identification of a plausible origin is sufficient to explain a complete adaptation. Evolution just doesn’t work like that. Instead of speculating about precursors, the adaptationist approach puts music in a functional, cost-benefit framework and ask theories for just one thing: show me the fitness!

The fitness means the survival or reproductive advantages of a trait that out-weigh its biological costs. Every trait, whether bodily or behavioural, has costs, because they all require matter and energy that might be better spent on something else. Music production and dancing would have had particularly high costs for our ancestors: they’re noisy so they could attract predators and hostile competitors, they require energetic body movements sustained for hours, they require long periods of practice to perform well, and they keep your sleepy babies from getting their rest. Almost all traits that could evolve in a particular species don’t evolve, because their fitness benefits do not exceed their fitness costs. Only a tiny minority do. To explain why music evolves in our lineage means explaining why it conferred net fitness benefits on our ancestors.

Of course, not all things that a species does require an adaptationist explanation of this sort. Only adaptations do. The first question for biomusicologists must be: is human music a legitimate, complex, biological adaptation? If it isn’t, then it might be explicable as a side-effect of other evolutionary or cultural processes. But if it is, then the rules change: complex adaptations can only evolve through natural selection or sexual selection (Williams, 1966; Dawkins, 1995). That’s it. There are no other options, and if any musicologist is lucky enough to discover some other way of explaining adaptive complexity in nature, they can look forward to a Nobel prize in biology.

Both natural selection and sexual selection boil down to one principle: some genes replicate themselves better than others. Some do it by helping their bodies survive better, and some by helping themselves to reproduce better. While individuals are the units of survival, genes are the units of selection and replication, and selection views the individuals as transient vehicles for passing on their genes (Dawkins, 1976, 1995). Between the level of genes and the level of individuals, there is the level of adaptations, which are units of biological function. Most complex adaptations grow through the interaction of many genes, which were selected gradually over many generations. Because the chance combination of genes necessary to produce a complex adaptation are astronomically unlikely in a single generation, cumulative selection over many generations is the only known mechanism for producing such adaptations (Dawkins, 1995). This view of genes as the units of selection and adaptations as the unit of function is sometimes called “adaptationism” or “neo-Darwinism” or “selfish gene theory”, but it has become the dominant, mainstream framework for modern biology, including animal behavior studies, physical anthropology, and evolutionary psychology. If we want ideas about the origins of music to be taken seriously by these communities, we have to play by their adaptationist rules, which have proven so successful for explaining so many other apparently baffling biological phenomena.

Music, like language (Pinker, 1994), fulfils many of the classic criteria for being a complex biological adaptation in our species. It is universal across cultures and universal across all epochs of recorded history. It unfolds according to a standard developmental schedule, resulting in high musical capacity in all normal human adults relative to the musical capacities of closely related species: almost everyone can learn a melody, carry a tune, and appreciate musical performances by others. Music seems to involve specialized memory capacity such that normal adults can almost instantly recognize and reproduce any of thousands of learned melodies. Musical capacities show strong cortical lateralization and are localized in standard, special-purpose cortical areas. Human music has clear analogs in the acoustic signals of other species (such as bird song, gibbon song, and whale song), suggesting convergent evolution. Music can provoke very strong emotions, suggesting not only biological adaptations for production, but also for reception. With respect to these nine adaptationist criteria, music differs clearly from other human abilities such as proving mathematical theorems, writing legal contracts, or piloting helicopters, which depend on a tiny minority of individuals being able to acquire counter-intuitive skills through years of difficult training. Some ethnomusicologists such as John Blacking (1976, p. 7) have also recognized that music is an adaptation: “There is so much music in the world that it is reasonable to suppose that music, like language and possibly religion, is a species-typical trait of man. Essential physiological and cognitive processes that generate musical composition and performance, may even be genetically inherited, and therefore present in almost every human being.”

The adaptationist framework has recently been extended to cope with animal signalling systems (Dawkins & Krebs, 1978; Hauser, 1996; Krebs & Dawkins, 1984), which would include human music. It seems strange at first for an animal to produce a costly signal that does not directly influence its environment. A signal that simply “expressed feelings” without having any fitness payoffs would never evolve. Even a signal that “communicated information” would never evolve unless an animal gained some indirect survival or reproductive benefit to that information having been sent to another animal. Altruistic information-broadcasting has no place in nature: there are no species evolved to play the role of the BBC World Service. Because such indirect benefits of signalling are relatively rare, true animal “communication” is rare. The major exception is signalling between close relatives that share many of the same genes.

Most animal signal systems have been successfully analyzed as adaptations that manipulate the signal receiver’s behavior to the signaller’s benefit. Signals are usually selfish. If we take an adaptationist approach to music, and if music is not just directed at kin, then we must analyze music as a biological signal that manipulates receivers to the benefit of signallers. Many such manipulative signals are sent between species: bee orchids attract male bees by looking and smelling like female bees (Darwin, 1862); warning coloration keeps unpalatable insects from being eaten by their predators (Wallace, 1889). A few manipulative signals, such as music, are sent primarily within a species, from one conspecific to another. Such conspecific signals tend to fall into a very small number of categories (Hauser, 1996). There are threats exchanged between competitors, warning calls exchanged between kin (to signal the proximity of a dangerous predator), contact calls exchanged between group members (to keep the group together during movement), dominance and submission signals, and courtship displays. Of these, courtship displays are almost always much more complex, more varied, more prolonged, more energetically expensive, and more interesting to human observers. By these criteria, if an alien biologist were asked for their best guess about the evolutionary function of human music as a conspecific signal, they would almost certainly answer: music is a sexually selected courtship display, like almost all other complex, varied, interesting sounds produced by other terrestrial animals.

Music as a courtship adaptation does not mean that music stems from a Freudian sublimated sex drive. Sexually-selected adaptations do not need to feel very sexy to their users. A trait shaped by sexual selection does not have to include a little copy of its function inside, in the form of a conscious or subconscious sexual motivation (see Tooby & Cosmides, 1990, 1992). The male human beard, although almost certainly an outcome of sexual selection through female mate choice, is not a jungle of hidden, illicit motives. It simply grows, and displays that its possessor is a sexually mature male, without having any idea why it’s doing that. Even psychological adaptations like music production may work similarly, firing off at the appropriate age and under the right social circumstances, without their possessor having any idea why they suddenly feel “inspired” to learn the guitar and play it where single people congregate.

Identifying an adaptation and its function does not require telling the phylogenetic story of how the adaptation first arose at a particular time and place in prehistory, and how it underwent structural transformation through a series of intermediate stages. Even for morphological adaptations, biologists often have no idea when the adaptations that they study first arose, or exactly how they reached their current form. For most psychological adaptations that leave no fossil record, it is not even possible to reconstruct phylogeny in this sense. Nor is it necessary. Adaptationist analysis does not worry very much about origins, precursors, or stages of evolutionary development; it worries much more about the current design features of a biological trait, its fitness costs and benefits, and its manifest biological function. This is good news for theories of music evolution. It is just not very important whether music evolved two hundred thousand years ago or two million years ago, or whether language evolved as a precursor to music. The adaptationist’s job is to look at the adaptation as it is now, to document its features and distribution within and across species, and to test hypotheses concerning its biological function against this evidence.

In sum, music is a complex adaptation, and it has costs, but no identifiable survival benefits. Therefore, it is most likely to have evolved due to its reproductive benefits. Because there are such clear functional analogs between human music and bird song, gibbon song, and whale song, which all seem to have been shaped by Darwin’s process of sexual selection through mate choice, music seems most likely an outcome of mate choice. The principal biological function of music, then, is sexual courtship.

Design features of music as a sexually-selected adaptation

Before opening the toolbox of sexual selection theory any further, we should pause, summarize, and sharpen the preceding arguments. Music, like art, language, and ideology, shows the hallmarks of being a complex behavioral adaptation. It is easy and fun to learn for humans but very hard for artificial intelligence programs (suggesting that its production is objectively very complex and difficult, though seemingly effortless). It is universal across cultures and across history. It is universal across normal individuals, though with some genetic heritability in aptitude. It develops spontaneously according to a standard life-history pattern, without formal instruction or conscious awareness of its underlying principles (except for professional musicians). But music also has special features as products of sexual selection. It is spontaneously practiced and produced despite their energetic costs and lack of survival utility. Over the short term, it is used conspicuously in courtship, and its production tends to decline after mating (as Miles Davis famously observed, male musicians, like athletes, avoid having sex before important concerts, because they need the sexual “edge” to play well). Over the life span, public music production rockets upwards after puberty, reaches its peak in young adulthood during the period of most intense courtship, and declines gradually with age and parenting demands. Musical tastes lead to strong assortative mating. Finally, music is functionally analogous to sexually-selected acoustic displays in other species.

Sexual selection theory: The basics

Darwin (1871) identified two different kinds of sexual selection: aggressive rivalry, and mate choice. Rivalry, especially between males, tends to produce weapons, such as sharp teeth, large horns, and strong muscles. Mate choice, especially by females, tends to produce ornaments, such as colorful tails, innovative sounds, and musky smells. Although Darwin provided overwhelming evidence for the important of female mate choice in producing male ornaments, biologists after Darwin focused almost exclusively on male rivalry, rejecting the possibility of female choice (Cronin, 1991). For a century, sexual selection was seen as a process where active, competitive males struggled for “possession” of passive females, by acquiring territories and status, and repelling rivals. Ornaments were usually interpreted as species-recognition signals, for helping animals avoid mating with the wrong species. Only in the last couple of decades has the picture changed, with an astounding vindication of Darwin’s mate choice idea in hundreds of experimental and theoretical studies (Andersson, 1994; Ridley, 1993). Research on sexual selection through mate choice is currently one of the most active areas of behavioral science, with papers saturating all the major animal behavior journals. The sophistication and complexity of mate choice theory has grown enormously in recent years. But for our purposes, we only need to understand two key ideas: mate choice for indicators, and mate choice for aesthetic displays.

Music as a set of sexually-selected indicators

The idea of indicators is that sexual selection shapes animals to advertise reproductively important things like age, health, fertility, status, and general fitness (see Andersson, 1994). For example, the peacock’s tail may function as an indicator, because unhealthy, weak, peacocks cannot grow very large tails, and even if they could, they could not escape from the predators that easily notice large tails. The result is that the size of a peacock’s tail statistically correlates with the peacock’s age, health, and heritable fitness. Peahens thus have a strong incentive for paying attention to tail size, because by mating with a large-tailed peacock, they are getting good genes that will give their offspring survival and reproductive advantages. While some indicators reveal good genes, others reveal good resources, good parenting skills, or good fertility.

Indicators are usually subject to the “handicap principle” (Zahavi, 1975, 1997) that they must have high costs in order to be reliable. Cheap, easy-to-grow, easy-to-maintain indicators could be faked too easily by unhealthy, unfit individuals, so the indicator would lose its informative value. Technically, the key feature is that the indicator must have a higher relative cost to an unfit animal than it does to a highly fit animal (Grafen, 1990). For example, male elephant seals typically get to breed only by becoming the single most dominant male on a beach full of hundreds of females, which requires constantly fighting off all the other males with hardly any sleep or food for weeks on end. Being dominant might cost a male many thousands of calories a day in food energy previously stored as fat. Thin males might have the strength to become dominant for short periods, but each day may burn off 10% of their fat reserves. They cannot long bear the calorie cost of chasing off all their rivals, and such males usually starve to death early in the breeding season. They are replaced by fatter males for whom the same calorie cost represents perhaps only 2% of their fat reserves per day, and for whom the relative, marginal cost of dominance is lower. Thus, dominance in male elephant seals is a reliable indicator of fat reserves, and hence of male foraging ability. Thus, the traits that are most informative as indicators are those that are very easy to mess up, that are highly sensitive to disruption by poor nutrition, injury, parasites, pathogens, genetic inbreeding, or developmental disorders. This leads to the apparent paradox that animals advertise their fitness with those displays that, being most costly, most reduce their fitness.

Many traits have been shown to function as reliable indicators in various animals (Andersson, 1994). Body size indicates age and nutritional state. Body symmetry indicates resistance to developmental insults such as disease and injury. Bright colors indicate ability to escape from predators, and resistance to parasites that dull those colors. Even more numerous are behavioral indicators. The loudness of songs indicates energy level in tungara frogs. The length of roaring displays indicates physiological endurance in red deer. The size of prey given as nuptial gifts by scorpionflies indicates foraging skill and strength. Territory quality in many birds indicates dominance and fighting ability. All of these evolved under sexual selection, favored by mate choice.

In large-brained animals, there are good reasons to suspect that complex psychological adaptations could function particularly well as sexually-selected indicators. Brains are very complex, hard to grow, and expensive to maintain. Higher cortical functions can be easily disrupted by poor nutrition, disease, injury, and low status (leading to depression). Moreover, in primates, probably half of all genes are involved in brain growth, and perhaps a third a uniquely expressed in brain growth. This means that for humans, with about 100,000 genes, brain-indicators could reveal the state of up to 50,000 genes in prospective mates. Thus, brain functioning provides a clear window onto the quality of a large proportion of an animal’s heritable genome. The behaviors that large brains generate can function as a particularly sensitive indicator, and mate choice would be unlikely to ignore such a mine of useful information. Any behavioral signal that’s difficult to produce if one is sick, injured, starving, old, depressed, or brain-damaged can function as a reliable indicator, so could become amplified by sexual selection into a courtship display.

This argument has an almost inescapable corollary: the more important brains became in human survival and reproduction, the more incentive mate choice would have had to focus on brain-specific indicators. Even if one supposed that hominid brains originally started to expand through natural selection for better tool-making or higher social intelligence (rather than directly under sexual selection), sexual selection would tend to hijack brain evolution. If natural selection favored tool-making ability, sexual selection would quickly come to favor exaggerated displays of the mental and physical skills relevant in tool-making. Likewise for almost any naturally-selected mental capacity: if individuals vary in the capacity in ways that can be perceived in mate choice, there are incentives for mate choice to pre-empt natural selection and filter out individuals with lower capacities.

Music, considered as a concrete behavior rather than an abstract facet of culture, shows many features that may function as indicators. Dancing reveals aerobic fitness, coordination, strength, and health. Because nervousness interferes with fine motor control, including voice control, singing in key may reveal self-confidence, status, and extroversion. Rhythm may reveal the brain’s capacity for sequencing complex movements reliably, and the efficiency and flexibility of the brain’s “central pattern generators”. Likewise, virtuosic performance of instrumental music may reveal motor coordination, capacity for automating complex learned behaviors, and having the time to practice (which in turn indicates not having heavy parental responsibilities already, and hence sexual availability). Melodic creativity may reveal learning ability to master existing musical styles and social intelligence to go beyond them in producing optimally exciting novelty.

These indicator functions for music are all speculative, but there are well-established empirical methods in biology for testing indicator hypotheses. First, one can look for a population-level correlation between the indicator’s value (e.g. dancing ability) and the putative underlying trait that it is supposed to indicate (e.g. aerobic capacity and motor coordination). Second, one can look for individual-level effects by experimentally manipulating the underlying trait and measuring its effect on the indicator (e.g. improve aerobic capacity through three months of exercise) and seeing if it improves the indicator value (e.g. dancing ability). Third, one can do experiments on mate preferences to see whether people are more sexually attracted by individuals with higher rather than lower indicator values, and to see whether they attribute higher underlying trait values to those with high indicator values. None of these empirical studies have yet been done, to my knowledge, to analyze human music as a set of sexually-selected indicators. Many such studies would have such obvious outcomes that doing them hardly seems necessary. But such studies, even the obvious ones like showing that healthier peacocks have larger tails (Petrie et al., 1992), have been critical in demonstrating the importance of indicators in other species.

Music as a set of sexually-selected aesthetic displays

While indicators reveal useful information, aesthetic displays play upon psychological foibles. The basic idea of aesthetic displays is that mate choice works through animal sensation, perception, and cognition, and these psychological processes sometimes have biased sensitivities that other animals can exploit with their courtship displays. For example, a certain species of bird may eat red berries a lot, so evolves eyes with a high sensitivity to red color, and brains that are attracted by red. This perceptual bias may affect mate choice, predisposing the birds to mate with others who have red rather than blue or yellow plumage. The result would be that the red-biased eyes result in red-biased evolution of courtship plumage (Endler, 1991, 1992). So, many sexually-selected aesthetic displays may originate as side-effects of perceptual adaptations evolved for other functions.

There are some examples of these perceptual biases affecting mate choice. Burley (1988) found that female zebra finches have latent aesthetic preferences for the red and black plastic leg-bands that she used to tag certain males, and not for the yellow or blue bands she put on other males. Of course, male zebra finches of the future will not evolve plastic bands on their legs, but they may very well evolve red coloration, if the right mutations pop up (consider the blue-footed booby of the Galapagos, for example). Basolo (1990) found that female platyfish have latent aesthetic preferences for long plastic “swords” that he glued onto male platyfish tails; in the platyfish’s close relatives, the swordtails, those latent preferences seem to have already resulting in males evolving the display. Ridley (1981) argued that the popularity of eye-spots in courtship displays (as in peacocks and argus pheasants) results from animals’ general sensitivity to eye-like stimuli. Thus, almost any perceptual bias that animals have can shape how sexual selection plays out, and which courtship displays evolve in a species.

Biologists have documented the importance of perceptual biases in sexual selection for many species (Ryan, 1990; Endler, 1992; Guilford & Dawkins, 1991). Ryan and Keddy-Hector (1992) found that these biases are not randomly distributed, but are typically pointed in one direction. With respect to visual traits for example, all species they investigated preferred bright colors over duller colors, larger displays over smaller displays, and higher contrast over lower contrast. With respect to acoustic traits, all species they investigated preferred calls that were louder rather than softer, more frequent rather than less frequent, longer in duration rather than shorter, lower in pitch rather than higher, higher in complexity rather than lower, and with larger repertoire sizes over smaller repertoires. The relevance to sexual selection for music is obvious: any acoustic preferences that our ancestors had could have been exploited, attracted, and entertained by production of the appropriate musical display.

Aesthetic traits tend to be hard to distinguish from indicators, because in almost all cases, perceptual biases push sexual selection in the same direction that mate choice for reliable indicators would. Lower pitched calls for example are reliable indicators of body size, because very small animals cannot physically produce very low pitches. Often, traits may function as both aesthetic displays and as indicators (Miller, in press). The power and focus of the two explanations is rather different, however. The advantage of the aesthetic display theory is that it makes us recognize that any aspect of music that we find appealing, could also have been appealing to our ancestors, and if it was, that appeal would have set up sexual-selection pressures in favor of musical productions that fulfilled those preferences.

An important twist on the aesthetic display theory is Fisher’s (1930) theory of runaway sexual selection. Fisher considered situations where mate preferences are heritable and courtship traits are heritable, and asked what would happen to both over evolutionary time. He observed that if peahens varied in the length of tail they prefer, and if peacocks varied in their tail lengths, then they would end up mating assortatively, with the length-obsessed females mating most often with the longest-tailed males. Their offspring would tend to inherit both the genes for the long-tail preference, and the genes for long tails, at above-average frequencies. If there was an initial bias in the population, with more females preferring long tails than short, and with more females wanting long tails than there are long tails available, then this assortative mating effect would set up a positive-feedback loop between the mate preference and the courtship trait, leading to ever-more-extreme preferences and ever-more-exaggerated traits. Only when the courtship trait’s survival costs became very high might the runaway effect reach an asymptote. Though Fisher’s startling idea was rejected for fifty years, it has recently been vindicated by mathematical models (Kirkpatrick, 1982; Pomiankowski et al., 1991).

The power of the runaway theory is that it can explain the extremity of sexual selection’s outcomes: how species get caught up in an endless arms race between unfulfillable sexual demands and irresistible sexual displays. Most relevant for us, the preferences involved need not be cold-blooded assessments of a mate’s virtues, but can be deep emotions or lofty cognitions. Any psychological mechanism used in mate choice is vulnerable to this runaway effect, which makes not only the displays that it favors more extreme, but makes the emotions and cognitions themselves more compelling. Against the claim that evolution could never explain music’s power to emotionally move and spiritually inspire, the runaway theory says: any emotional or spiritual preferences that influence mate choice, no matter how extreme or subjectively overwhelming, are possible outcomes of sexual selection (cf. Dissanayake, 1992). If music that emotionally moves or spiritually inspires tended to sexually attract as well, over ancestral time, then sexual selection can explain music’s appeal at every level.

Indeed, sexual selection during human evolution seems to have led to a division of labor between two major courtship displays, with language displays playing upon receivers’ conceptual systems, and music playing upon receivers’ emotional systems. As a tool for activating specific conceptual thoughts in other people’s heads, music is very bad and language is very good. As a tool for activating certain emotional states, however, music is very much better than language. Combining the two in lyrical music such as love songs is best of all as a courtship display.

Music shows many features that can be interpreted as aesthetic displays that fulfil pre-existing perceptual and cognitive preferences. Rhythmic signals are known to be capable of optimally exciting certain kinds of recurrent neural networks as found in mammalian brains. Tonal systems, pitch transitions, and chords probably play upon the physical responsiveness of auditory systems to certain frequency relationships. Musical novelty attracts attention by violating expectations, overcoming habituation and boredom, and increasing memorability. Music with lyrics reaches deep into cognition through the media of language and imagination.

As with indicators, biology has developed some empirical methods for demonstrating aesthetic displays that could be extended to human music. The first step is to use perceptual experiments to explore the preferences of receivers for various types of stimuli, charting out which kind of stimuli are optimally exciting and attractive. For example, vary the beats per minute of a musical stimulus and see which rhythmic speeds best excite various different feelings in people. The second step is to measure the stimuli actually produced by conspecifics, to see how close they come to being optimally exciting given these preferences. For example, measure the beats per minute in a large sample of commercially-produced songs, and see whether these speeds match the optimal responsiveness curves of human receivers. Many such experiments are pretty obvious, but they become more interesting if the perceptual experiments are extended across closely related species, to see whether the preference is phylogenetically ancient, or whether it evolved to an extreme form through runaway in one species but not in other closely related species. For example, if humans respond best to dance music played at 120 beats per minute, but chimpanzees and gorillas don’t respond differently to different rhythmic speeds, then we would have some evidence for runaway selection affecting rhythmic preferences in the human lineage.

Computer simulations of evolution under sexual selection may also prove useful in showing how aesthetic displays evolve (e.g. Enquist & Arak, 1993). My colleagues Peter Todd and Greg Werner have been extending our previous sexual selection simulations (Miller & Todd, 1995; Todd & Miller, 1993, 1997) to model the evolution of musical complexity and variety under mate choice (Werner & Todd, 1997). In these simulations, we have a population of males that produce acoustic sequences and females that receive these sequences. Both males and females are represented as recurrent neural networks with network architectures, connections, weights, and biases determined by heritable genes. Each simulation run is started with randomly-generated male and female genotypes, and all evolution is simply the outcome of the female networks imposing mate choice on the male networks based on the sequences they produce. The runaway effect is possible because the male and female networks can become genetically correlated through assortative mating. We have found that under such conditions, pure sexual selection can favor ever more complex acoustic sequences, and can maintain considerable diversity in such sequences between individuals and across generations (Todd & Werner, 1997).

Order and chaos: The interplay between ritualization and creativity in human music

Human music shows an unusual combination of order and chaos, with some elements highly ritualized and stereotyped, such as tonality, rhythm, pitch transitions, song structure, and musical styles, and other elements highly variable and innovative, such as specific melodies, improvization, and lyrical content. Hartshorne (1973, p. 56) has commented “Songs illustrate the aesthetic mean between chaotic irregularity and monotonous regularity”.
How could sexual selection favor both in a single display medium? With a better understanding of indicators and aesthetic displays, we are in a position to answer.

Ritualization means the evolutionary modification of movements and structures to improve their function as signals (Krebs & Davies, 1987). Ritualization is a typical outcome of signals and displays being under selection to optimally excite the perceptual systems of receivers. Examples of ritualized animal signals include most courtship displays, food-begging displays, warning signals, threat displays, territorial defense displays, play behavior signals, and social grooming behavior. Ritualizataion results in four typical features: redundancy (repetition over time and over multiple channels), conspicuousness (high intensity, strong contrast), stereotypy (standardized components and units), and alerting components (loud, highly standardized warnings that a more complex signal will follow). Julian Huxley (1969) has observed that

“The arts involve ritualization or adaptive canalization of the creative imagination ... Creative works of art and literature show ritualization in this extended sense, in being ‘adaptively’ (functionally) organized so as to enhance their aesthetic stimulatory effect and their communicatory function. They differ from all other products of ritualization in each being a unique creation (though they may share a common style, which of course is itself a ritualizing agency)”

Here, Huxley introduces the apparent problem: why do human displays such as music contain so much novelty and creativity if adaptive signals tend to get ritualized? The problem with completely ritualized signals is that they are boring. Brains are prediction machines, built to track what’s happening in the environment by constructing an internal model of it. If the senses indicate that the internal model matched external reality, the sensory information hardly even registers on consciousness. Highly repetitive stimuli are not even noticed after a while. But if the senses detect a mismatch between expectation and reality, attention is activated and consciousness struggles to make sense of the novelty. Although ritualization makes signals recognizable and comprehensible, novelty and unpredictability makes them interesting. Adding some unpredictability to signals is the only way to get the signal past the filters of expectation and into a smart animals’ conscious attention.

Thus, sexual selection can often favor novelty in courtship displays. Darwin (1871) observed that in birds, “mere novelty, or slight changes for the sake of change, have sometimes acted on female birds as a charm, like changes of fashion with us”. Large song repertoires, as seen in some bird species like sedge warblers and nightingales, allow birds to produce the appearance of continuous musical novelty (Catchpole, 1987; Podos et al., 1992; Catchpole & Slater, 1995). Small (1993) has emphasized the importance of neophilia in primate sexual selection: “The only constant interest seen among the general primate population is an interest in novelty and variety. Although the possibility of choosing for good genes, good fathers, or good friends remains an option open to female primates, they seem to prefer the unexpected”. In humans of course, neophilia is so intense that it drives a substantial proportion of the global economy, particularly the television, film, publishing, news, fashion, travel, pornography, scientific research, psychoactive drug, and music industries. It seems likely that our hominid ancestors were highly appreciation of novelty, and that this neophilia spilled over into mate choice, where it favored not so much a diversity of sexual partners, but selection of highly creative partners capable of generating continuous behavioral novelty throughout the long years necessary to collaborate on raising children.

The challenge became to convince sexual prospects that you can keep them entertained over long-term relationships, so they don’t get bored and incur the maladaptive costs of separation and searching again. The main way hominids evolved to do this was through language, using linguistic courtship displays to entertain each other and to indicate their intelligence and creativity. But music could have functioned as another creativity-indicator, and seems to have been sexually selected as such. As with other indicator hypotheses, this one could be tested by seeing whether capacity for musical improvization and innovation correlates significantly with intelligence and creativity (according to standard psychological measures).

Music in the Pleistocene

Contemporary readers tend to think of music as something made by a tiny group of professionals, after years of intensive practice, using expensive instruments, recorded on digital media, and broadcast by radio, television, or live amplification. And so it is for most of us, most of the time. These technologies permit the production of musical signals far beyond the reach of our Pleistocene ancestors. Even a modest techno dance group like The Prodigy, with just a single principal musician/composer, tour with many truckloads of sound and video equipment, many kilowatts of amplification, and using an armoury of keyboards, samplers, and sequencers that contain vast computational power. The mockingbird’s ability to mimic songs of other species is risible compared with the power of modern digital sampling and sequencing equipment. The result is that modern musicians can produce sound sequences that use any possible timbre, at any possible pitch, at any possible speed, and volumes capable of causing permanent deafness.

Music production during human evolution must have been quite different. We know our ancestors lived primarily as highly mobile hunter-gatherers in Africa, and hunter-gatherers cannot carry much stuff around. Still, we should not underestimate the complexity and diversity of music that could have been created in premodern conditions. The human voice is an astoundingly flexible instrument in its own right. Our vocal chords cannot produce two distinct notes at once like the syrinxes of songbirds, but we can produce a great variety of pitches, volumes, and timbres. In fact, almost any musical sequence that can be perceived by humans can be recreated in recognizable form by the human voice. The singing group The Bobs, for example, have recorded a reasonably arousing version of Led Zeppelin’s heavy metal classic “Whole Lotta Love”. Unaccompanied human voice is sufficient to produce a vast spectrum of musical styles, such as Gregorian chant, Italian opera, Chinese opera, Tibetan throat singing, Meredith Monk’s minimalism, Weimar-era Berlin cabaret songs, Baptist gospel singing, Bulgarian women’s chants, Irish folk songs, Islamic calls to prayer, Alpine yodelling, and MTV’s “Unplugged” concert series. Recall that the haunting yodels of American country singer Slim Whitman were sufficient, in Tim Burton’s film “Mars Attacks”, to melt the brains of invading aliens if played at even moderate volume. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine whether it could have melted the heart of an ovulating ancestor.

The addition of percussive instruments to the human voice could have come relatively early in the evolution of musical capacities. We do not know when the first proper drum, with a stretched skin over a resonating chamber, was invented. But, as any parent of an acoustically extroverted toddler knows, it is not difficult for a determined percussionist to improvise given ordinary objects. Strike two rocks together once, and you have noise. Strike them together twice, and you have rhythm. Rocks are not the best natural material though. Wood, bamboo, and bone are better. Bones are especially convenient, because they are natural by-products of hunting, and are often hollow. Human skulls for example, are often used to make the Tibetan ritual drum called a damaru. Many other materials work to make simple rattles, stampers, clappers, and scrapers. The San people of southern Africa make ankle rattles out of springbok ears sewn together and filled with pebbles. Clamshells can be clapped together with two hands. A scraper can be made be rasping the jawbone of a bison with its femur. The top of a gourd can be broken off and the open end pounded against the ground, as in Western Africa, or in and out of water, as in the Solomon Islands, or beaten with sticks. More complex are the slit gongs of Africa, where a log is hollowed out, carved with slits, and beaten to produce up to seven different tones.

In terms first developed by musicologist Curt Sachs in the 1930s, these are all “idiophones”, which make sounds from their own material, as opposed to membranophones (with a stretched skin, such as a drum), aerophones (with a tube to blow through, like a trumpet), or chordophones (with a stretched string, like a violin). Idiophones may well have been used hundreds of thousands of years ago, while the other three types were very probably invented more recently, in the last hundred thousand years. All cultures have idiophones, but not all have the other types. Australian aborigines, for example, did not have drums (membranophones), only clapsticks (idiophones) and drone pipes (aerophones). Even if restricted to idiophones, a very wide range of rhythmic patterns are possible, especially in groups with different people playing different rhythm lines (see Arom, 1991).

The recent discovery of a Neanderthal bone flute of 40,000 years ago suggests not only that aerophones are reasonably ancient, but also that Neanderthals made music, and that, based on acoustic analysis of the flute’s hole spacing, they preferred the same pentatonic scale the pervades human folk music. Many Upper Paleolithic cave paintings of the same era portray dancing and the use of idiophones. Together with the universality of singing, rhythmic drumming, and dancing across all human cultures (some of which, like the Australian aborigines, have been genetically distinct for at least 40,000 years ago), this evidence suggests that human music was both common and sophisticated by 40,000 years ago. The ease of making idiophones out of readily available Pleistocene materials would also give scope for percussion instruments to be something on the order of a million years old. Despite the lack of Zildjian cymbals, Stratocaster guitars, and Fairlight synthesizers, there would have been plenty of opportunity for our ancestors to make decent music a very long time ago.

Nor should we confuse the production of musical signals permitted only by modern technology with the production of musical experiences. Contemporary rock concerts are much louder, and use a wider variety of timbres than ancestral music could have, but an evening of rhythmic dance in tribal societies seems to produce effects at least as intense. Traditional music in tribal societies has a few key features that distinguish it from music as we tend to enjoy it in modern society, and that are much more likely to represent the music made by our ancestors. First, music is almost always a group affair, with everyone actively participating and no one simply sitting and listening contemplatively. Competence at music and dance was probably expected of every sexually mature adult, instead of being the speciality of a few schooled professionals. Second, music is almost always accompanied by dancing, such that to enjoy music and to dance to it are virtually synonymous. There were probably no Pleistocene “concerts” with hundreds of hominids sitting in rows for hours, meditatively listening without moving a muscle, like bourgeois symphony-goers. The young Londoner dancing all night at a rave makes a much accurate model for how our ancestors appreciated their music. Third, ancestral groups were small, egalitarian, and informal, so none of music’s functions in military marches, state coronations, national anthems, or other rituals of our vast, hierarchical societies would have been relevant to music’s evolutionary origins.

Why is human music so different from acoustic courtship in other species?

This question is a special case of the general quandary: why are humans so unique, with extra-large brains, intelligence, culture, and creativity? There are three basic answers available from evolutionary theory: (1) humans had different phylogenetic origins from other species, arising from anthropoid apes, (2) human ancestors faced different selection pressures in their ancestral environment, reflecting the demands of the African savanna habitat, the hunter-gatherer econiche, group-living, etc., (3) the random effects of mutation and genetic drift, interacting with positive-feedback processes that amplify these stochastic effects. All of these are important, but I think the interaction of group-living and runaway sexual selection provide the key. Music is what happens when a smart, group-living, anthropoid ape stumbles into the evolutionary wonderland of runaway sexual selection for complex acoustic displays.

But ideally, we need more specific hypotheses linking specific features of the ancestral environment to specific features of music. One feature of music is that its attractions work indirectly rather than immediately. This is a luxury allowed by living in stable social groups. Primates are highly social, and anthropoid apes have particularly high social intelligence and complex social strategies (Whiten & Byrne, 1997). Our hominid ancestors almost certainly lived in large groups where they developed complex, long-term relationships with many relatives and non-relatives. There would have been lots of time to develop in-depth assessments of which non-relatives might make good mates. Rather than relying on short-term courtship displays as so many non-social species do, hominid courtship could have been a subtle, low-key, long-term affair. Courtship displays did not have to provoke immediate copulation; they only had to insinuate themselves into the memory of a sexual prospect, influencing their mating decisions in the months and years to come.

Another feature of music is how exhausting its performance tends to be in hunter-gatherer tribal societies. People dance a long time, and get really tired in doing so. Many anthropologists have observed that human hunting strategies are rather different from those of other carnivorous animals, relying on projectile weapons to injure prey, which are they chased for hours until they drop from injury and exhaustion. This type of “persistence hunting”, which relies on the long-range running, high aerobic capacity, and sweating ability of humans, creates incentives for mate choice to focus on indicators of ability to maintain good motor control under conditions of high aerobic effort over long periods. Because most courtship happens in the evening when the sexes are in the same place, and because it would be impractical for females and males to run around after each other in the dark to see how far they can go, our hominid ancestors evolved the convention of dancing around in place, with everyone in the group using the same rhythm. Most tribal and folk dancing includes repeated high stepping, stamping, and jumping, using the largest, most energy-hungry muscles in the human body. One could not ask for a better test of aerobic endurance (before modern sports medicine treadmills) than the coordinated group dancing of human tribal societies. Many anthropologists tend to report that tribal dancing involves all members of the group, but I can scarcely believe that the very young, the old, the sick, and the injured, would dance quite as long or as hard as the young, healthy, and single. We desperately need more quantitative data from cultural anthropologists on such questions.

If sexual selection shaped music, why is music made in groups?

Many theories about the evolution of music suggest that, since traditional tribal music is almost always made in groups where everyone participates and dances, music must have some kind of group-level function rather than an individual-level function such as sexual selection would suggest. Indeed, there is a quandary here, but it is not a serious one.

Some male birds display their charms in large congregations known as “leks”, strutting, displaying, and sometimes singing by the dozens or hundreds (Balmford, 1991). Such congregations make it efficient for females to wander around the lek, searching for good males. The apparent “group display” in such species apparently results from natural selection to minimize search costs for females, pushing males to congregate and compete in local clusters. Likewise, many male frogs and insects produce their songs in the same area, resulting in large “choruses”. Sometimes, these males take turns singing so females have some hope of locating at least one of them. Thus, apparently coordinated group displays can sometimes arise through the interaction of selfishly displaying males, without any group selection.

It is crucial to distinguish between behaviors done in groups and behaviors done for groups. Primates are highly social, often group-living animals. Although almost all of their daily behavior is groupish, with intense, intricate, dynamic social interactions, primatologists have never found it necessary to invoke group selection to explain any primate behaviors. Quite the opposite: progress in primatological studies of social behavior boomed after the ‘selfish gene’ revolution in biological theory, which showed why group selection almost never works (Williams, 1966; Wilson, 1975; Dawkins, 1976). Unfortunately, this sort of methodological individualism, which views group-level effects as emergent phenomena arising from selfish interactions between individuals, has never become very popular in cultural anthropology or musicology. This has created a persistent problem: the fact that music is made in groups is almost always interpreted as meaning that the music is made for groups, and that this putative group-level function is most important both biologically and culturally.

The trouble with music evolution theories that invoke group-level functions is that they usually end up explaining music through group selection, explicitly or implicitly. For example, group production of music is said to result in a “group-bonding” effect, which supposedly facilitates group cooperation and mutual understanding (Freeman, 1996; Richman, 1987), which in turn supposedly gives the group an advantage over other groups with less effective group musical behavior. Other theorists view music as a means for a group to remember and perpetuate its shared values and knowledge (e.g. Farnsworth, 1969; Nettl, 1983; Sloboda, 1985), or for a group to coordinate rhythmic work (which, unfortunately for the theory, is almost absent among hunter-gatherers). Even sociobiologist E. O. Wilson (1975) fell into positing a group function for music.

There is nothing illogical or impossible about group selection models as theoretical possibilities (see Boyd & Richerson, 1990; Miller, 1994; Wilson, 1997; Wilson & Sober, 1994;). However, there are two errors theorists commonly make when invoking group selection in specific situations. The first error is ideological: group selection is often favored because it is thought to be a kinder, gentler, more cooperative, more humane form of evolution than individual level selection, more suited to the production of positive, enjoyable adaptations like language, art, and music. But group selection, like all selection, depends on competition, with some groups winning and some groups losing. Biologist George Williams has observed that group competition replaces the logic of murder with the logic of genocide. Not a great moral improvement. Group selection models of music evolution are not just stories of warm, cuddly bonding within a group; they must also be stories of those warm, cuddly groups out-competing and exterminating other groups that don’t spend so much time dancing around their campfires.

The second common error about group selection is failing to consider free-riding: ways that individuals could enjoy the group benefits without paying the individual costs. If this is possible, then selfish mutants can invade the cooperating groups, eroding the power of group selection and the utility of the group-selected adaptation. Suppose an ancestral group evolves a “Rave” gene that makes them dance every night, doing their group-bonding thing, enjoying their group-competitive advantages over other less musical groups. Then, perhaps a “Wallflower” mutation emerges among these People of the Rave, which predisposes its possessors to rest while their comrades dance. Because the wallflower mutant does not pay the enormous time and energy costs of dancing all night, but still enjoys the advantages its group has over other groups, the Wallflower mutant inevitably spreads through the People of the Rave. Within a few generations, the music would go away, and we would back to a population of well-rested wallflowers. If there is no individual-level advantage to musical behavior, and there are individual costs, then group selection would have great difficulty having any effect on the evolution of music. The same holds true for any other “altruistic” trait that has individual costs and only group benefits. No biologist has ever made a good case for such an altruistic trait ever having evolved in any vertebrate species, so it is not the kind of explanation one would wish to invoke for human music. (It should go without saying that anthropological claims that some tribes have “no concept of the separate individual” have no bearing whatsoever on the scientific status of group selection versus selfish-gene theory in human evolution. Animals do not need to know they’re individuals for selection to act on them as such.)

The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes

Comic-Con 2006: The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes
Deepak Chopra and Grant Morrison explore the social subconscious.

Thursday at the San Diego Comic-Con brought an intriguing collaboration. Grant Morrison and Deepak Chopra, having met for the first time the previous night, had a discussion about the role superheroes play in the social fabric.

A superhero is "symbolic expression of the social subconscious," according to Chopra. "The superhero is a mythological being" who exists "beyond outerspace and innerspace, creating a new idea of being."

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Even deconstructing superheroes, a '90s movement fronted by the likes of Morrison, "comes from fear," according to the comics writer. "People are scared to be hopeful." And though writers and society pummeled Superman, he persevered and the core character survived for the new era of comics just now emerging.

Chopra suggested that the seven spiritual laws could mirror the seven chakras. "A Chakra is a junction point between consciousness and reality," Chopra explained before leading the audience through all seven.

"First chakra - Stability. Infinite centered awareness and dynamism.
Second chakra - Transformation. An absolute allegiance to transformation. Willingness not to have a permanent identity
Third - Power. Not in the sense of muscle, but in intention.
Fourth -- Love and compassion. Nothing better… it is integrated with the rest of the Chakras.
Fifth - Creativity. Always creative solutions.
Sixth - Intuition.
Seventh - Transcendence."

The seven chakras can also be linked to the idea of seven gods, a theme that clearly parallels the seven main characters of the JLA.

"Look at the JLA," Morrison said. "They all map on the chakras. Batman is a human being of ultimate power [and intention.] Flash is communication. Superman is about giving selflessly… He represents the sun. He is that thing that loves us unconditionally."

He added later that "Batman is like Christ harrowing Hell, because only he can withstand it. He endures everything for us. Batman is a character who was almost brought to the brink of his destruction," but who persevered. Batman is our shadow and "we have to look at the shadow and integrate the shadow [into our consciousness]."

And "yeah," Morrison admitted, Seven soldiers is an allegory to seven gods. "Mr. Miracle is the transcendent character," the seventh Chakra.

Superheroes are our new mythology. They are not so different from the Greek Gods, who were not as deeply seeded in religion as some may think. But what is mythology on a deeper level?

As Deepak Chopra asserts, a mythology "must address the collective consciousness in a certain archetypal way. It must offer an idealist vision to aspire [towards]." He added that, "a good story should never end and good guys should never win."

"There are six plots that people retell," Morrison said. "These stories are told again and again."

Myth is related to the word mother. As Chopra called it, "the womb of creation." Myth is not just hokey stories that explain why the sun rises and falls. That's a very simplistic view. To put it poetically, myths are where "we express our deepest longing and aspirations of collective being." Myth is a social experience beyond genetic codes or organized religions.

"The human story is about a quest, falling down, but getting up again," Chopra said. "Death and rebirth. It's about redeeming yourself and then redeeming others."

Our existence is still young in the eyes of the universe. "In many ways," Chopra said, "we are reaching puberty. There's a lot of curiosity, mistakes, risk-taking. But it is an exciting time." One full of possibilities, though there are certain to be some growing pains.

Chopra proposed that our current destructive nature may not mean the end of human existence. In fact, it could be part of the natural order of evolution. "The are no fossil records of the evolutionary transition between lizard and bird." It happened, but we have no true proof, just as we cannot find the missing link between ape and man. Chopra suggested that it is possible a species can experience a "creative quantum leap."

Think of a caterpillar. "A caterpillar consumes more than it needs to eat until it reaches a point where its body begins to decay and die. Imaginal cells cluster. The send communications to each other. The caterpillar is imagining a new entity. [The imaginal cells] use the dying carcass of the caterpillar to feed. A dormant gene awakens and the dying caterpillar becomes a butterfly, a completely new creature."

Now consider that "cloning, tinkering with the intelligence of the universe," are "ideas that existed in ancient mythologies." Yesterday's mythologies are today's science.

So think of our modern myths. Think of the superhero. "Look at destruction of environment," Morrison said. Look at what has become of our world and our society. "We are the imaginal cells."

Chopra put it plainly. "Superheroes may be a prelude to an actual leap in our evolution," as our social conscious has the knowledge of the possibility of flight and other incredible, superhuman feats.

Uniting Consciousness East & West

Yoga is the Science of the East.
Science is the Yoga of the West.
John Lilly

I am a product of the West. Like most American's, I grew up in the public education system, and in a technologically savvy and saturated "MTV" culture. As a college student I went straight to the core of a Western scientific education by getting a degree in physics with two minors in philosophy and psychology. My primary interests at the time were astrophysics, cosmology, quantum physics and the nature of consciousness. I was determined to work at NASA and /or go into space one day. I loved science then and still do now.

When I was a freshman I postulated to one of my professors, that the language of computers (i.e. information) was far better suited describing the universe than current physical constructs. I thought I'd made a compelling and convincing case. He laughed me out of his office. Today, more than 20 years later, Seth Lloyd is making the rounds with the same idea. As he mentions in his wonderful book, Programming the Universe. He credits his recent acceptance and success to the widespread use of computer technology. Apparently, timing is everything.

In other words, acceptance of once radical ideas among scientists often hinges on the cultural, or in this case technological mileu in which they exist. As much as science prides itself on being objective, the actual science done everyday by real scientists is all too human. So is there really such a thing as truly objective science? As RAW once said, it's not really 'science' we're doing but neuro-science (i.e. science as a product of neurology).

According to Seth Lloyd the entire universe is a giant quantum computer. This is an elegant concept and it appeals to me for many reasons. I love computers and the metaphors they empower us with. But are computer metaphors the best way to look at things, or more accurately the most elegant way so far?

Looking at computers as metaphor, where did computer technology come from that gave these new more powerful ideas? Obviously it emerged out of ongoing historical technological trends. However, all of this progress is the result of scientific minds working on things. Whose minds were they, and what was inspiring them to work on the things they did? I think this is the more important question. When you examine the historical roots of the PC revolution you'll find that things like PC's and the World Wide Web came from a very particular group of people. As pointed out in What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, it was the insights gained from higher states of consciousness, specifically those unique to LSD, that gave rise to the PC revolution. As many people who have taken LSD, you experience your brain has a large set of programs, that you in turn can program, and better still, metaprogram "who" and "what" you want to become. Please read our online book by John Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer, for a pioneering work in this area. It's also no secret that the 60's is often equated with a turn to Eastern mysticism for guidance. There's was good reason for this embrace, as many very intelligent people felt current Western ideas on the nature of reality were woefully incomplete in describing, let alone assisting in integrating these sometimes powerful and overwhelming transpersonal experiences.

When I was 17 I experienced a profound and spontaneous (non drug) shift in consciousness myself. It lasted all of about 10 seconds. At the time I had no knowledge of eastern thought. I made every attempt to recapture the experience. Having read Gödel, Escher, Bach my sophomore year of high school, I often resorted to using Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem as a launching pad into understanding this transcendent state of consciousness. One night while trying, in a rather ridiculous and humorous way, to describe all of this to one my friends, I somehow "tricked" my brain back into this state. For the next hour I laughed my ass off at the cosmic joke of it all. I've tried unsuccessfully many times since to explain this state.

I believe my failure to adequate explain this state is rooted in our language and way of looking at the world, which itself is rooted in the Greek ideas of atomism, reductionism and materialism. This way of perceiving and understanding the universe eventually became what we now call science and forms the bedrock of Western philosophy. Barring the recent emergence of Eastern thought into this dialog, the only other alternative explanation of the universe are the beliefs of religious extremism of various stripes. (be it Christian, Islam or New Age). Scientists, being all too human that they are, seeing the believers at the gates, understandably defend their turf with as much zeal. However, this citadel of science as RAW liked to call it, similar to the Catholic Inquisition before it, believes, just like the religious extremism they oppose, that they, and they alone, have a monopoly on all knowledge. If it can't be objectively verified scientifically, then it doesn't really exist. Yet, ironically science has *created* just as many ephemeral concepts as any religion. Energyfor example is a fantastic and highly useful and utilitarian concept, but that's all it really is. The difference in this case, is western concepts like energy have "real-world" objectively verified effects. Understanding these effects and knowing how to predict and utilize them has tremendous power as evidenced by our current technological civilization.

Often times you'll hear scientists using Occams Razor as a way of defending their beliefs. Yet, when comparing Newton and Einstein’s view of gravity, whose is simpler? Obviously, Occams Razor is not as sharp as they'd like you to think. What does this tell us about science? As many have pointed out, "look how much progress and good has come from science!". Although many would have good reason to argue with some of that, I of all people agree with them. This is not about questioning what science is able to do, but about what it is not able to do. Science has yet to explain consciousness in any meaningful and satisfactory way. I believe the reason for this is the very nature of reality and consciousness itself. Although scientists have yet to admit the truth of this fundamental problem, Nasrudin, the famous Sufi Mystic understood it perfectly.

Nasrudin was rushing about town on his donkey, riding too and fro and in some desperation clearly looking for something he had lost. All of the towns people, who adored the wise Nasrudin, and wanting to help him in some way, asked if they could help, "Nasrudin, what are you looking for, maybe we can help you find it?". As he continued to ride around on his donkey he said, "I’m looking for my donkey, have you seen it?".

I've tried many times myself to explain this "eastern" concept of the self and nature of consciousness with little success. Objectivists insists that reality still exists when we are not there looking at it. But just what kind of reality is there when there is no observer? Everything that we know, everything that we have ever experienced are constructs of our mind. Can you dear reader think of anything that is not in your mind right now??

We travel to the moon, see clouds, you name it. But all of these things are constructs in our minds. What in actuality is "out there"? We might say there are things like electrical fields, waveforms, light, energy, dense matter, etc. But all of these are in turn constructs of human minds coming to grips in their minds with what they are perceiving. And why do we perceive what we do? Even with the best instruments we have expanding our perceptual field, are still constructs of human minds. The embodied experience of even being human at all and making things with our hands is a construct of consciousness.

Consciousness is everywhere and in everything. Everything is consciousness. And as much as we might want to objectify so-called "reality", all of reality is a construct of the human mind. Of course, then savvy thinkers will point out that there are commonalities between human minds. There is scientific and repeatable consensus. This might be true until we realize that so far everything we have called a law or physics turns out to be mutable. In other words the more WE examine things the more they change. The more we examine so-called hard-core "limits" we realize there are loopholes. Just to be clear I'm not saying nothing is real. No, all of this stuff is as real as the next. Obvious so-called "reality" is not a noun, but a verb. When you examine the present moment (i.e. reality) you realize everything is changing. There is no permanence of any kind. The conscious experience of realizing the impermanence of reality (i.e. maya or illusion) is part of the process of how the Buddha achieved enlightenment. Buddhists use words like Nirvana and Dharmakaya, describing this state as timeless, permanent, devoid of characteristics and free from duality.

Two of my favorite thinkers who have succeeding in explaining it better than I do are Peter Russell and Amit Goswami. Peter Russell's Reality and Consciousness: Turning the Superparadigm Inside Out does a good job of showing how the problem of consciousness is intrinsically unsolvable with objective science. Like a dog chasing its own tail, or Gödel's proving that math will never come full circle, or Von Neumann's Catostrophe of the infinite regress of studying the thing that is doing the studying (consciousness) will never be complete. And before the materialists trash me to pieces, I am not saying we can't study the nature of consciousness. Of course we can! We can tweak neurotransmitters, probe brain chemistry, augment, analyze and dissect brain structures and come to a much fuller understanding of how the human mind works, solves problems and perceives problems. All of these things are worth of objective scientific study. These though are all problems are within the purview of the Easy Problem of Consciousness. Actually understanding why there is a conscious experience in the first place is an entirely different beast.

This is where Eastern philosophies take an entirely different approach. They already understand that consciousness is the primary nature of reality. Amit Goswami's monistic idealism version of quantum mechanics is completely refreshing in this regard. Goswami has simply restated quantum mechanics with the supposition that consciousness is the primary component of reality rather than matter. And why not? It seems completely arbitrary that we should choose "out there" using the Greek ideas of atomism and reductionism as the one true way of knowing truth, rather than "in here". I think that in the end is the primary difference between East and West. West places the primacy of outer experience as absolute, and the East tends to favor inner experience as more true. But as Buddha said even this duality is transcended when one achieves Nirvana. There is no "out there" or "in here", no object or subject, objective or subjective, just transjective - the experience of the oneness of all things.

Loving, Networking & Macroscale Engineering

I just got off the phone with Reverand Tom. I'm very glad to have met such a brilliant and passionate man who deeply cares about where we are going. He has put forward a tremendous body of work that I believe finally addresses so many of our planetary problems head on. I have yet been unable to find serious argument with any part of his proposal. It is both visionary, and should be taken as such, but also a deeply thought-out and rigorous plan for making concrete and meaningful, positive change in the world The best part of Tom's ideas is he embraces ALL, and leaves no one out. His plan does not require some fundamental force in our society to change - whether it be good or evil, great or small. Rather Tom, like an Aikido master, lovingly colloborates with these forces for the benefit of all. Whether they be the super rich elite or the poorest child.

What Reverend Tom is proposing is nothing short of pure unbounded love fueled by hyper-rationality and spiritual gusto.

So what's next? I believe Tom is right. We are on the verge of a total breakdown of everything we know. All of our old systems our on the verge of collapse. Everything will break down. But not in a bad way. This breakdown will merely be a reshuffling of the deck, an economic renewal towards something greater - a new holistic system of planetary stewardship and radical accelerating transhumanist hyper economics into the cosmic frontier. It benefits everyone. And the only way this is going to happen is through macroscale engineering projects which the super-rich will decide is what they want to do next. Why? Because they will have to if they want to survive, and because it will be exciting for them. It will allow them to go to the next frontier. All the automation in the world is not going to be enough for the super-rich to bootstrap themselves to the stars. Not even nanotechnology is going to save them. They are going to need as many people as they can all participating in the greatest projects of our generation, of any generation. They will produce enormous wealth for those at the top, and more wealth for all us that we have never seen before. It's a win-win situation for all of us. To get a good idea of some of these starter macro-scale engineering projects, please Tom's articles, Collective Empowerment (pdf) and New Section XVI.

Please be nice to Tom. He is a super nice guy. Disagree, debate, argue, but please be nice. Tom is not crazy, only a brilliant, sensitive and caring man wishing to help, and I believe he is just the one to do it. Let's give him a chance.

I told Tom that his ideas are a few steps ahead of most people, and probably at least a step or two ahead of even the most astute Future Hi reader. What he has presented in these preliminary documents are first drafts, raw manifestos to get the ball rolling. Let's see where we can go next.

Galactivation

White Cosmic Wizard is my 13 moon Personal Galactic Signature. To find yours simply go here.

They have beautiful animations, including these two:

Galactivation.

Journey of the Cosmic Seed

We are upon a time of deep and intense transformation. As Chris says the rapid transparency of all our woes is our wake up call... global connectivity is wiring up the global heart. It is our mission to show deep compassion for those who are suffering. As we harmonize ourselves in heartfelt connection with others, the global brain-heart can stabilize the disharmony of the world... bring it back into balance, peace and utopia. Yes, utopia.. Don't listen to those who say its untrue or not possible. That is what we are led to believe, told to believe, expected to believe. Don't beleive them! We do not have utopia yet, because we were not ready. We were still deeply asleep. Now things are different. The world is waking up to the horror, the nightmare that it created. And that is our salvation, because the end of the world is not something we should fear - because it is only the death of the old and the birth of the new. The New Age is upon us. The darkness is giving way to the light. Love is at hand, love is here, all you have to do is let go and let it in. As we harmonize our energy and connection to ourselves and mother earth, we can re-enter the dreamtime and become cosmic white wizard surfers of the Zuvaya.. super-free co-creators of the universe. Why not?

Meaning and Experience

In those subtle moments we sometimes drift into, when time slips away and life stands silent and majestic, words cease to spill from our mouths or even bubble up from that source within. The warming wholeness ensues at the sheer experience of it all: we marvel at the vast beautiful complexity of creation rolling around and within us. It's likely that every human has experienced this feeling at least once in some form. It almost seems hardwired, like a key back into the garden.

Yet humans in general spend far too much time looking for meaning in the roiling chaos of life. Everything must have context: what she said, what he did, political motivations, religious tendencies, creation, destruction, everything. Do you think bacteria want to know why they're being constantly attacked with antibiotics? Does the rock ponder the meaning of it's own demise through the grinding of nature? Are families of gazelle trying to comprehend why their child was eaten by a lion? No. It all just happens. It's all experienced openly and completely without superimposed abstractions, thanks in large part to a diminished forebrain.

Meaning gives us, well... meaning. It's a uniquely human creation evolved in the interface between self-awareness and language. Self-awareness establishes the fundamental awareness of the Other. There is me and she. Me and this computer. Me and the myriad of creation that I contend with. Animals may instinctively defend themselves and follow the rules of biosurvival, but self-preservation is not self-awareness. Language creates the representational overlay we apply to experience. It provides a shared code within which we can define the objects of our world, co-process and collaborate on various projects, theories and algorithms about the perceived patterns of nature, and by which we can share our experiences through the common syntax. The early childhood rites of language acquisition lay the foundation of our quest for personal meaning. What does "cat" or "biology" mean"? What about "Honesty"? "Love?" "Hate?" "Thermonuclear"? What does it mean when birds flock together at sunset over the water? Why did she say that? Why am I here?

Meaning is a complex expression of the perception of pattern - the perception of pattern mixed with emotional content. Meaning is almost always a form of emotion. Science functions best when it's removed from meaning. Just the facts of observation. Magick functions best when it's embedded deeply within the folds of meaning, of emotion. The clinical poles might be psychopath and schizophrenic, respectively. A life without meaning is empty and free of consequence. A life overwhelmed by meaning is one incapable of dealing with the diverse and immediate mechanisms of the competitive world.

For most of us, meaning arises from knowledge and experience. Observe the open flame and note it's brilliance. Touch the flame and feel the burn. Understand that touching the flame brings pain, and then devise ways to avoid touching flame in other situations. We perceive the pattern, understand it's immediate relationship to us, then go about running various relevant scenarios and predicting their outcome. Add emotion and meaning and then wonder "why would mother have allowed me to touch the flame? Doesn't she love me?". Experience, pattern, prediction, meaning. Touching fire is how my heart feels when I see her. Do you see the layers of abstraction from the initial experience? In some ways it's a richer, more complex experience of the thing being experienced. Who knew a simple sunset could evoke memories of childhood? Yet in other ways this relentless quest for meaning distracts us from the experience itself. We get caught up in the abstractions, lost in the maps. Strip away meaning and language and the heavenly kingdom begins to reveal itself to the phenomenal perceptual machine called the human brain.

Yeah, those subtle moments we sometimes drift into... Pure experience and overwhelming meaning. Impossible meaning. Meaning that exceeds the ability of our language to describe it in any truly approximate way. Such experiences often send one into wild theologizing, wanton philosophizing, or revolutionary mathematical incantations. Indeed, this is the gnostic foundation of inspiration. It's the ingression of godhead into the humble ways of humanity. Yet it's never as common or available as we'd like. The best paths to such hyper-perception will seek the obliteration of language and self-reference coupled with an aggressive will to experience the fullness of life. Meditation and extreme sports? Sure! Yoga and raving? You bet! Science and magick? Exactly.

Belief is an Omniverse Operator

Belief is an Omniverse Operator - it creates reality in life and death. In life, what you believe to be true is true. In death, what you believe to be true is true. It is the nature of the Bardo. Limiting beliefs are what keep you here, stuck in the cycle of life and death. Unlimiting your beliefs frees you into eternity, infinity, and beyond.

Belief can be your liberator, your way out, whether it be in this life or the one hereafter. The reason is simple - your consciousness, your soul is infinite. It is the source of all that it is, because it is the most fundamental part of existence. You are already, and have always been part of this infinite intelligence and eternal wisdom. You are already infinte and eternal. You have always been, and you will always be perfect joy.

You may not remember, because you don't believe it to be real, you don't trust your imagination. But your imagination is your true self, it is the very key to your reality. You are told to believe you are limited, that you are a sinner, or just human, a worker, common citizen, or consumer. You are way more than all of these things. You are infinite incarnate. Only by letting go and loving yourself can you allow this belief to become true. Believe it and it is yours to have.

Belief is your way to create something from nothing. Dreams, creativity, magick - imagination then will. You can create paradises beyond your wildest imaginings, because your imagination is your connection to the infinite.

"In the province of the mind, what the mind believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind there are no limits." - John C. Lilly

There are no limits, because you are beyond those limits. You are the godhead, the source of all that is.

You are co-creator of Infinite Omniverses. You can relax now, there is nothing to lose, except your limited sense of ego and self. You already are your higher self, all you have to do is let go and just be.

Moving Beyond Physical Immortality

When I was about 12, I read an astounding article by Robert Anton Wilson's called Next Step: Immortality in Future Magazine. I identified myself as an immortalist from that day on. This same magazine introduced me to all sorts of other new cutting edge ideas. Immortality appealed to me because all the wonders I read in Sci-fi and all the amazing futures I imagined myself living in would now come true, because I would live thousands of years to see them all. I would be alive when we first colonized the solar system. I would be alive when we set out for the stars and colonized other planets. I would be alive to become a space pioneer and experience alien cultures and super advanced extraterrestrial races. All of these visions then and still are much greater and fantastic than anything, save perhaps Star Wars, that I have ever seen depicted on film.

This desire has continued pretty much unchanged all the way through to the present. However, as I have gotten older, experienced more, seen the pressures the world now faces, and more deeply understood the implications of things like nanotechnology, this vision has been shaken. Even a year ago, I don't think I would have said that, but today, the foundations of my quest for immortality have come under greater scrutiny. Is my desire for immortality a genuine spiritual quest or based more around a fear of death? If so, do I really want to live in fear? Living in fear has got to be the worst way to live, since it precisely takes you away from living in your heart, your true center. From what I can see almost all immortalists are such because of their fear of death. They are immortalist more because of their fear of death, rather than their love of life. American culture in particular has a great fear of death, and it is one of the reasons so many American's are bamboozled into mind-numbing reality tunnels - from shop-until-you-drop consumerism to spiritually vacant dead-ends.

Fear can do weird things. I have seen many immortalists trade in many of their principles for the promise of longer life. If faced with their own death, I have seen them embody the worst of culture in a subconscious desire to blend in, not step out of line, or be noticed, especially now in a our climate of squashing dissent. For example, I haven't see any contemporary immortalist taking the moral high ground on any social cause that is sufficiently counter to the status quo, precisely because such an action could jeopardize their immortal quest. After all, look what happened to Martin Luther King, Jr. So the question becomes, at what point, if at all, would an immortalist be willing to die for a just cause over their own quest for physical immortality? Because lets face it, things could bad enough, that such a choice could soon face all of us.

And even putting the morality issue aside, things are changing so fast now, that for me at least; it’s becoming increasingly difficult to even identify what the "safest" path to future survival is. Can we say with any certainty what kind of world will be here in 20 years? For me it is almost impossible to imagine. We are at such a critical juncture that the slightest factors are now capable of reaping the most tumultuous change.

The truth that I have been avoiding, but is now staring me in the face, is that my personal ability to survive the next 20 is now almost completely out of my control.

I think the primary reason for this is that as the world has become more populated, explored, controlled and monitored, our ability to act freely within it has become increasingly constrained. For example, I would love to move to New Zealand, and get away from what I see is a rapidly disintegrating free country, and a rise in American despotism and retrograde conservatism. But if you, like me, have contemplated such an escape, it's much more daunting than it first appears, or should be! Unless you are already very wealthy, or happen to have a LOT of experience in one of their in-the-moment much needed skill shortages, your chance of immigrating there are almost zero. Pretty much goes for any other place you care to run to. Lets face it, the world is a lot smaller today, and countries have responded by making it much harder to move there. Frontiers are dead. That only leaves the space frontier.

However, in practical terms we are no closer to space colonization now than we were in the 1970's when Gerald K O'Neill trail blazed a compelling pathway towards its realization.

Nanotechnology for me has always held the key to liberating humanity from slavery. But nanotech is not here, and the mechanisms of elite control have become stronger. Our ability to travel and move freely has become harder, economic conditions more straining, resources more depleted, the environment more destabilized, and political welfare coming apart at the seams. Meanwhile the most powerful technologies are coming under greater control of the military. Sure, decentralized technologies are a powerful liberator, but they are not a sure thing. As powerful as they are, it still leaves those with the most physical power having the most tools of oppression at their disposal to wreck havoc anywhere they see fit. Cyberspace is great, but we still have meat bodies. So those who can control, maim or kill those meat bodies are the ones in charge. Again, it all comes back to our physical bodies, and any fear we have around death. As long as we fear death, those with the power to kill us, control us.

Sure, as they "tighten their grip, more star systems will slip through their fingers", but those "star systems" from what I can see represent a rapidly diminishing portion of the population. There was a time when I thought I could identify what specific characteristics that portion would have, and adapt myself accordingly, but the honest truth is I can't, and I'd be surprised if anyone did. Substantial wealth seems to be a prerequisite, but I'm not even sure about that anymore. Assuming it was and I did have sufficient wealth, what do I do then? Do I move to a small tropical island? What would I do to survive once I'm there? Is this even practical or desirable? Would I have to leave my family? And an even more important question, assuming I could do all these things and it was necessary, would it be worth it to survive in a world that was left? What specifically would that survival entail? What kind of world would life after such global chaos played itself out? Will it be a world I would even want to live in? Is survival in "hell" better than no physical survival at all? Well, if you are like most immortalists, the answer would still be yes, because death is the final oblivion... end of story. For quite a long time, I used to take this as the most logical belief. However, would I want to live within a hellish world that consists of some insane global fascist feudalist empire of insane, craven, infantile warlords, and ex-heads of state with their armies and weapons of death? Or how about a society which consists of a legion of nano-powered weapons of control? A society in which free thought has been eradicated via covert nanobots swimming through my brain and bloodstream? I don't know, imagine your own dystopia.

I know have echoed Bucky Fuller in the past, utopia or oblivion. Although such dystopias are probably self-negating, how do we know clearly when the final choice needs to be made between utopia and oblivion? At some point, quite likely, the only thing that could turn it away from oblivion is enough people at the right time, putting their fear of death aside, and taking a stand against the forces of evil. Is that time right now, next year, or already beyond us? I have no idea, which is why this dilemma is all the more pressing.

Interestingly, quite a few immortalists (ones I met on the Extropian List in the 1990's) having realized these grave possibilities, and fearing their possible extinction have adopted some crazy politics. Rather than side with what is the moral high ground they now position themselves with the side that has the best chance of winning, regardless of what happens to be the morally higher good. From their perspective, the best way to assure survival is make sure they are on the side of the guns, and not on the side having them pointed at you. Sensible enough, right? They have become true survival-of-the-fittest type individuals. Rather than become potential slaves to future feudal lords, they now work hard to make sure they are the feudal lords! When I realized this for the first time way back then, I was seriously depressed and disillusioned. I never gave up my immortal quest, but any illusions I had about immortalists all sharing the same heart-felt quest for a just utopia were shattered that day. Boy was I naive!

Now, lets shift gears.

Lets say, we do make it.. that we do survive the next 20 years as nanotechnology changes everything. Call it the Singularity, or the 2012 Eschaton, it doesn't matter. Well, assuming the Singularity does come and all of us here are alive when it does, what then? This to me is the biggest irony of all. We all might still die. When you think about it, what is the technological singularity anyway? As far as I can tell, and even under the most benign circumstances, it seems to me to portend an utter annihilation of all that we were. Some might say this is a good thing. Well, it would certainly seem to be a good thing in the evolutionary scheme of things. After all, we are talking about the final escape of intelligence past the extinction point out into the infinite cosmos. For life and intelligence, this would be the ultimate liberation - a time for celebration, and an overwhelming feeling of relief at finally having escaped any shackles towards utter freedom, joy, infinite intelligence and wisdom.

So why the irony? The irony, because it’s quite possible, even likely that you and I won't survive such a transition. The very nature of accelerating intelligence would be akin to the ultimate trip, your ego would be obliterated into a billion pieces. Except in this case, as all that was you is subsumed into the SI matrix, there wouldn't be any "you" left, save perhaps the "useful" parts for the SI's purpose. In other words, you die. From the perspective of "you", your dead, same as if you had physically died. So if you permanently die in this way, is this still physical immortality? What difference would there be between this death, and actual physical death? In both cases, "you" are gone. Now, this is where my thinking might be different than other psychonauts. During my NDE, I felt no sense of annihilation. "I" was still there, except this time, there was much, much more than "I". The feeling was I became merged with a much higher and more complete version of my "self". I still had memories of being me in this life, and I still could recall all the details of my life now. I still experienced my ego, but my ego had become totally transparent to this infinite all encompassing love of my more complete higher self. In other words, my ego was now more like my big toe compared to the rest of my more complete body. I can't even begin to tell you how liberating this was. This place that I now found myself was eternal. It was like the ultimate rest stop for the soul. It was a place of total rest, joy and contentment. It was the TOTAL absence of all suffering. And the most amazing part of the experience was that it was totally familiar. There was nothing alien about it all. It was as opposite of otherness as you could have, it was HOME. It was the place I have always known, and always would know. A place that has always existed and always will. It was total confirmation. I rejoiced! It was the most real and true experience I have ever had. To deny, reject, or doubt it would be the ultimate folly. If I were to doubt it, I might as well doubt that I am happy when I am happy. The experience just was. No matter what the ultimate nature of reality is, this experience was the deepest confirmation, the deepest, truest resonance with the very essence of my soul. I lost all fear of death, and it changed my life forever.

These investigations have taken me deeper into exploring techniques for Out of Body Travel, Astral Projection and so on. Based on my own experiences in these areas, as well as reading lots of other peoples, I now believe that there is no death. For many, reincarnation (i.e. rebirth) happens because they are not ready to believe there is something more. According to Robert Monroe, a pioneer in OBE work, people are not able to move beyond rebirth until their belief systems are completely cleared of all limiting beliefs. If we are, as many spiritual and psychonautic pioneers have said, co-creators of Universe, then the ultimate nature of reality is consciousness. Therefore, as conscious co-creators of universe, until we believe in a transcending reality beyond death, it will continue to occur for us in a repeating cycle of death and rebirth until we finally get it. This is exactly what Seth via Jane Roberts was always saying. Consciousness is the name, and infinity is the game. No matter what, we are all heading towards something beyond death, beyond the physical universe, beyond space and time.... not just eternity, but infinity.

So this brings me to my current beliefs. Although physical immortality could be lots of fun under the right circumstances, it is no longer the only game in town. I will continue to pursue my physical immortal quest for as long as I can, for a love of life, not a fear of death. It's win win situation!

thought fields

Nature so faithfully reproduces it's best algorithms across the entire scale of creation.

While thought and ideation are often reduced to synaptic events arcing between neurons, it is perhaps more accurate to regard the realm of thought as a field arising from the summation of hundreds of billions of such events. To consider even a very localized region of neural activity - say, the right frontal cortex - is to regard the complex interaction of many millions of neurons each with countless axonal and dendritic projections reaching out to each other and themselves, all tangled up in a maddened, organic mess of gray spaghetti. Each neuron releases a swarm of neurotransmitters through every axonal projection and each neurotransmitter carries an electrochemical charge. As these neurotransmitters bond with enzymes embedded in the neuronal membrane, altering the ionic balance of the cell interior, the action potential of the receiving neuron is either excited or inhibited. When excited, it passes the signal onto the next neuron(s) in the chain by releasing more of it's own select group of neurotransmitters. Each such pulse along the chain induces it's own electromagnetic field.

One could imagine the cortex as a pulsing blob of neural tissue waxing and waning with the dynamic EM field generated by its neuronal activity. Since a single neuron ultimately only possesses the capability of sending a binary message - fire or not-fire - it would be odd to suggest that conscious thought would occur in this domain. The analogy is to binary code - 0 & 1 - where each switch represents a single bit. Eight such bits can be combined to create a byte, which is essentially equivalent to a word. So by analogy we could suggest that while a single neuron can only pass a simple off-on signal, a group of neurons might possess at least a basic amount of informational content equivalent to a word.

But words alone do not make speech, nor do bytes make a program. It's the complex aggregation of bytes into functions and the dynamic flow of data between these functions that creates a program. It is the emergent property of the entire system. Thus, our pre-frontal cortex is a regional function that generates a dynamic electric field from the summation of it's bytes, the neurons. And it's not isolated. It transmits to and receives input from other cortical regions, from the midbrain, the hindbrain, and the steady flow of data streaming in through the sensorium. The whole thing is bathed in blood and nutrients and gases, and awash in hormones pumped out by the hypothalamus And this avoids consideration entirely of exogenous compouonds we take in from the air, from food, drugs, cars, factories, each other, etc. Suffice it to say that from this rich, noodly broth, our unique sense of self arises. Mind manifests across the electromagnetic field of brain.

In short, the brain is exceedingly, ridiculously, incomprehensibly messy and complex. Just imagine the density. 100 billion neurons packed into a roughly 5lb mass of tissue. Consider the nervous system reaching out from the brain through the entire body, miles of nerves heading out to the perimeters and returning back in and up the spine without even so much as a split second of noticeable delay.

Beyond the simple physiological marvel is the fact the countless programs running in parallel keeping us alive and sentient and witty were not written but simply evolved. They evolved over generations in the species and they evolve through experience of the individual. The human brain and its sensoria are embedded in yet a higher level dynamic system: life. This field of life continuously stimulates and programs the learning mind, plying the endless plasticity of neronal tissue, stretching it out to make as many connections as possible with its neighbors, far and near. Indeed, neuroscience has shown us that it's not so much the number of neurons that affect one's degree of intelligence, but the number of connections. A single cell might be receiving inputs form a hundred others.

And as an artificial intelligence program doesn't need to know anything about it's code, the field of mind persists oblivious to the mess of tissue conspiring to express its substrate. Mind is meant for interacting with the kingdom - the world of our senses. As a clever adaptation and extension of our biosurvival resources, mind would be painfully, tragically distracted if it were constantly reading every letter of every word of it's neural code. Better to let the machine run and not think about it too much. Somehow it's done such a great job that we can take time to simply sit and think, totally distracted from threats of tigers and spears and so on ( at least many of us are much of the time). Mind has extruded such an armor of technology that it's become so much more free to simply watch and cogitate, contemplating the creation of better tools and techniques or challenging the mysteries perceived by the sensorium and plumbing the depth's of it's own inner world.

Mind has evolved to better discover itself. Witness the internet. Surely an extension and extrusion of thought the internet is perhaps the greatest tool yet for peering into the mysteries of creation. As neurons reach out and connect with each other to create functional bodies, and as mind arises off of the dynamic flow of information between these functional bodies, so too do individuals connect to form specialized groups that, in turn, summate to create the global mind. Yet while the hardware of the brain seems to have evolved first, giving rise to thought later, the internet is the physical scaffolding created to hold the network of mind that's been growing across this planet for millenia. It's the global brain built to weave together the intangible network of human thought and manifest the global mind.

The chaotic mess of cables and ports, routers and servers that span the globe in their data webs, and the emerging wireless lilly pads rippling out across their surface, present an easy reflection of our sloppy brains and their intangible minds. Imagine when hundreds of millions of people carry wireless devices that allow them to interact with data streams and servers on the web and also to communicate with each other immediately and non-locally. The field of mind that's been slowly spreading and connecting would seemingly be accelerated to an inconceivable degree.

Like those discarnate voices waking up in the brains of early humanity so very long ago, we may find ourselves once again haunted by abstracted intelligences, ghosts in the machine of our own making. Would psychic complexes arise across the data field? Might an ego emerge, or more simply, self identity? Could some industrious young hacker produce a digital hallucinogen to feed the global mind?

Maybe that's part of what the singularity is. The global mind becomes self-aware and enters a psychedelic state of sudden clarity and illumination. The psychic complexes of our species, once proud and tall in myth and legend, might arise as gods again striding across the digital landscape freed from our minds into the greater field of imagination. A new hyperlanguage might arise out of the data stew flowing through 6 or 7 billion minds wired into the megawebs of Terra. All jacked into media feeds and nanoassemblers, protein baths and nucleic vats, churning out a roiling bath of novelty washing across the planet and reaching out to the stars.

In the dreamworld all fantasies are true.

Dangerous Ideas?

Edge asks the Annual Question to a bunch of smart people. Last year they asked "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" Here is what I wrote about that. A great question. But, in short, it was a bit surprising how narrow-minded a lot of the answers were. This year the question is "What is your dangerous idea?" An equally great question, trying to inspire people to give their outside-the-box thinking, their most potent ideas that might change everything. At least that's how I would like to define "dangerous" in this context. Something that can upset the status quo catastrophically, but in a good and interesting way. Not all of them use it like that.

A lot of the answers are interesting in various ways. But most of them are not very dangerous. They stay within very safe territory for scientists. And, actually, the underlying subtext is the same as last year for a lot of them. It is obvious that for a lot of these guys THE most dangerous ideas in the world are Religion, God and Consciousness. Meaning, they bend over backwards to insist that it is insane to believe in a God, and that it is a hopeless fantasy to imagine that you actually exist, as anything other than some chemical processes in a brain. And that what we really ought to accept, if we thought it through properly, is that everything is the result of unconscious evolutionary processes, we have no free will, and life is without meaning. Great!

There's a certain kind of circular reasoning that many materialist scientists suffer from, which is similar to religious reasoning like "God exists because the Bible says so, and the Bible is true because God wrote it." But here you find it in versions like John Horgan mentions in connection with his idea "We Have No Souls":

"In his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, the late, great Francis Crick argued that the soul is an illusion perpetuated, like Tinkerbell, only by our belief in it."

You know, like, "You don't really exist, you just think you do!". To some people that sounds really clever, and there's no Logic 101 that will make apparent the craziness of such argumentation. Who's the "we" who thinks? In particular, who's is it who thinks that it thinks? Who's the agency that wonders whether it exists or not? What is it that is unsure whether it has free will or not? It is just an illusion? Just a chemical reaction in a brain? Who's concluding that? Is it just turtles all the way down?

There are, however, some nice entries from people who don't just fall into the same circular reasoning trap. Like, Rudy Rucker, with the idea "Mind is a universally distributed quality"

Panpsychism. Each object has a mind. Stars, hills, chairs, rocks, scraps of paper, flakes of skin, molecules — each of them possesses the same inner glow as a human, each of them has singular inner experiences and sensations.

I'm quite comfortable with the notion that everything is a computation. But what to do about my sense that there's something numinous about my inner experience? Panpsychism represents a non-anthropocentric way out: mind is a universally distributed quality.

Yes, the workings of a human brain are a deterministic computation that could be emulated by any universal computer. And, yes, I sense more to my mental phenomena than the rule-bound exfoliation of reactions to inputs: this residue is the inner light, the raw sensation of existence. But, no, that inner glow is not the exclusive birthright of humans, nor is it solely limited to biological organisms.

Note that panpsychism needn't say that universe is just one mind. We can also say that each object has an individual mind. One way to visualize the distinction between the many minds and the one mind is to think of the world as a stained glass window with light shining through each pane. The world's physical structures break the undivided cosmic mind into a myriad of small minds, one in each object.

There are some folks who actually can engage in a bit of self-criticism as scientists, and think about where scientific beliefs really come from. Like Marcelo Gleiser in "Can Science Explain Itself?":

What if this is all bogus? What if we look at science as a narrative, a description of the world that has limitations based on its structure? The constants of Nature are the letters of the alphabet, the laws are the grammar rules and we build these descriptions through the guiding hand of the so-called scientific method. Period. To say things are this way because otherwise we wouldn't be here to ask the question is to miss the point altogether: things are this way because this is the story we humans tell based on the way we see the world and explain it.

Or, Thomas Metzinger, in "The Forbidden Fruit Intuition":

Is there a set of questions which are dangerous not on grounds of ideology or political correctness, but because the most obvious answers to them could ultimately make our conscious self-models disintegrate? Can one really believe in determinism without going insane?

Some present the revolutionary idea that scientists might just need to actually catch up to what science already has established, like "Carlo Rovelli" in "What the physics of the 20th century says about the world might in fact be true". You know, if quantum mechanics actually were how we experienced the world to work, rather than just some bizarre math equations.

Stephen Kosslyn goes the furthest in "A Science of the Divine", to present a way to reconcile science and religion:

Here's an idea that many academics may find unsettling and dangerous: God exists. And here's another idea that many religious people may find unsettling and dangerous: God is not supernatural, but rather part of the natural order. Simply stating these ideas in the same breath invites them to scrape against each other, and sparks begin to fly. To avoid such conflict, Stephen Jay Gould famously argued that we should separate religion and science, treating them as distinct "magisteria." But science leads many of us to try to understand all that we encounter with a single, grand and glorious overarching framework. In this spirit, let me try to suggest one way in which the idea of a "supreme being" can fit into a scientific worldview.

There's a surprising entry from Michael Nesmith, you know, from "The Monkees", who eloquently argues that "Existence is Non-Time, Non-Sequential, and Non-Objective", and I think I agree.

Several people talk along the lines of Andy Clark's "The quick-thinking zombies inside us" about how most of our decision making, our "free will", really happens at a sub-conscious level, in ways we don't at all understand, so we fool ourselves concerning how much in control we are.

Several people argue for free market economies. Get governments out of the way, and let the invisible hand of the free market sort things out.

Which is an underlying theme here. Humans having figured out that there are complex mechanisms that make things happen. Complex mechanisms that make our decisions. Complex mechanisms that carry on the evolution of life. Complex mechanisms that make economies work. More complex than we simple humans easily can understand. More smart and efficient than any of us consciously can be.

But at the same time we here have a number of well-respected big names in science who claim that they've understood all of that well enough to conclude decisively that these complex mechanisms that are smarter than us aren't intelligent at all. They're just simple random processes with no meaning or purpose or intelligence, that came together completely randomly for no good reason. Confused? Well, you should be. You need to become good at circular reasoning to explain that away.

The real dangerous idea, which most people with scientific credentials apparently are afraid of thinking, is, in my words:

Life the universe and everything is all one system, which is self-organizing, intelligent and eternal. There's no outside to it. Nothing is separate from it. Whatever happens inside of it happens because it is in its nature to happen. It has no outside meaning, but it can create meaning. Its latent qualities might or might not get expressed, but when they do, it is because they're there. So, if something finds itself having self-reflective consciousness, it is because the whole system possesses the potential quality of self-reflective consciousness. Duh. If oxygen and hydrogen mix and become water, that's because they already had the property of being able to do so. If something evolves, it is because the system knows how to evolve. If something is alive, it is because the system is alive. If somewhere in the system time and space exists, and at some "time" a scientist evolves and he decides that he has understood it all and it is all really dumb and random and meaningless and consciousness only exists in brains, except for that it doesn't really exist, well, he's right, makes no difference. It is all natural. Luckily it isn't that scientist, or some guy with a grey beard on a mountain, who's responsible for keeping the whole system working, or it really wouldn't last long. The whole system is much smarter than any brain that comes along at some point and has a short-lived fit of self-importance. Doesn't matter what you call it. You can call it God, or Universe, or Physics, or Nature, Evolution or Mind or Consciousness. It is you, buddy! If you think not, you've become a bit confused by derivatives of your own abstract thoughts. Take a step back and touch Reality. Be conscious. Be very conscious! But don't get cocky. That little point of self-reflective awareness that you identify with, and which is enough to spin yourself into circles, is way, way, way smaller and more ephemeral than the big you who is all of existence, all of evolving spacetime, any dimension, any physical phenomenon, any potential phenomenon, all simultaneously, all forever. It is a lot smarter at running things than your little localized conscious focal point. You're not in control. But if you catch a ride on natural law, and go with the flows, you can go far, very quickly. Because the system works really well. It is self-regenerating. It is open source.

Well, that was my rant. But that maybe doesn't give you anything very practical to do with it. A truly dangerous worldchanging idea would be a meme you let loose, and it just breaks down the old fixed structures, and it guides the self-organization of something new and better. They don't come along all that often, but when they do, it doesn't really matter much what you think about it, as it pretty much happens by itself. It might be time for some ideas that actually change how we perceive ourselves and the world, where nothing will be the same again.

Lots of people have commented on the Edge dangerous ideas thing. Like, I just noticed Dave Pollard's Blinded by Science. He wasn't very impressed either with the dangerousness of those ideas, and he has some alternative suggestions.

Coding Our Way to Liberation

Over the last few months I've been getting more and more blown away about what is happening on the internet. I can trace this back to my time in San Francisco in May. Mark Pesce and John Gilmore, two if there ever was some of the most distinguished internet celebrities, were at Mind States. They were kind enough to spend time with me, so I asked them a simple question - "Will the internet be locked down, now or at some point in the future?". They both laughed at me, as gods might do, but they looked at my innocence and said, "where have you been? The genie is out of the bottle, and there is no way to put it back in!". "What about hardware?," I asked John, and he said, "It's just another machine running on code. Therefore it's software too, and software can be hacked!". Ah ha! I finally got it, silly me. And then, as quickly as it started, the gods resumed their more important conversation on things beyond the comprehension of a mere mortal like myself.

So I had an epiphany today, finally, about what this all meant on a practical and technical level. Well, right now we have a ton of highly successful p2p networks, programs and clients readily and freely available to download whenever you want. They are almost, if not impossible to censor or stop. The joke is on them, and all of this mea culpa from developers and companies is just lip service. They are playing the game to stay in business. They know their business model, like everyone else's is threatened by all of this, they're just not telling you, because they still need your money.

So basically, this means that the moment a company announces a new hardware or DRM implementation or system, even global wide re-standardazition or downright government and/or UN mandate backed by billions of dollars to censor the internet, WILL FAIL. They will fail because the moment they try to implement such a system, all it takes is a few hours from some clever 16yr old to code around it. Immediately the code is available on the internet, and within hours thousdands if not millions of copies will have been distributed. Before the control system could ever be in place, there will already be two steps ahead of them in releasing a work-around. Then the moment they try to block that code escape, more software is released on the then most robust p2p system, and around and around we go, except the hole to freedom keeps getting wider, because the pace of developing a 10 line program is a million times faster than the thousands of lines and thousands of hours to convert the internet over. So any attempts to shut down, block and censor the internet will become all the more pathetic and wasting. The sooner all of these companies, systems and governments of the world accept the reality the better off we'll all be. Whining about it will prove useless. It's kind of like people whining because cars and telephones came around, but they came anyway, because having one gave you such an advantage over not having one.

The same is true today for the internet. Having a free and open interenet is much more powerful and liberating that not having one. What does this mean for capital? Well it will become liberated too. Not in some weird right-wing Ayn Randian Extropian hell, but liberated from control. There will be no control of capital, which means the richest man in the world will have no more real power than anyone else. Because this capital freed by the network itself will be totally frictionless, fast and unstoppable, therefore making everyone rich. No more corporate control and wage slavery. Say hello to the leisure society. Of course the rich folk are all freaked out about this, because they are still addicted to being at the top. If everyone was as rich as they were, then what would make them special? Those poor unfortunate bastards who made money their goal and tied it around their self-esteem, as is happens in modern american capitalism, are in for the biggest ego deflation of all. If they are special because of their money, and since they spent ALL OF THEIR TIME earning that money, they have nothing else to show for it.

Oh well. It's not a matter of liking or disliking this scenario. It's inevitable. I realized it a few years ago, and so I now devote all my time to spreading as much joy and happiness in the world as possible.

Much love to all of you all for sticking through and supporting this site.

Paul

Ghosts in the Machine

The latest Wired magazine (Nov. 2005) has a brief aside on "evil technologies in J-Horror films" called "The Wicked Web" that inadvertantly highlights the ongoing influence of Shinto animism in the collective imagination of modern Japanese culture. Though the article itself fails to acknowledge this undercurrent, the content is clearly illustrative of the Japanese fascination with the spirit world. Japan, it should be noted, has carried Shinto since it's early birth some 2500 years ago, juggling it easily alongside Buddhism and all of its variants. In the late 1800's Shinto became the state religion of Japan and continued as such to the end of WW2. It's deep influence continues to inform much of the cultural imagination.

Shinto is typified by animism, a doctrine of souls that extends to all things. It is the belief that "personalized, supernatural beings endowed with reason, intelligence and volition inhabit ordinary objects as well as animate beings..." [Wikipedia]. Shinto defines these spirits of nature as kami and states that they are not divine but inhabit the same world as we do and possess the same faults and emotions. These entities have been presented to modern audiences in the animated films of Hayao Miyazaki. His masterpiece, Spirited Away, illustrates the legions of spirits living in delicate harmony with humans, mutually dependent and intertwined. Some are benign or benevolent, others gross and obsessive, and some are malevolent and sinister. Miyazaki's animism remains somewhat traditional, however, depicting only spirits of nature and psychology.

Updating animism, J-Horror is a genre of lo-fi technocore that features modern-day devices acting as conduits or emissaries of the spirit world. Hideo Nakata's "Ring" is a familiar example of the genre, telling the story of a cursed videotape that induces death in all who watch it. Other films feature a camcorder that can capture images of spirits, a cellphone connected to the future, and the upcoming release, "Pulse", which tells of the deceased who contact the living through computers. Similar techno-animistic narratives occur in many Japanese anime films, notably "Akira" and the "Evangelion" series where machines are seen to contain the same animating life force and spirit that flows through biology. The machine is simply an extension of nature and like other kami each machine may possess it's own spirit consciousness. Some may be friendly and obedient while others grow malevolent and demonic.

It's easy to suggest that these animistic tendencies are merely superstitious hold-overs from older times. Yet they reinforce the necessity to embrace and honor the material world - something that's sorely missing from the death-obsessed western cults of the ascended son. The industrial affliction of self-degradation and ecological suicide can in many ways be traced back to the debasement of the earthly kingdom and the relentless pursuit of afterlife so typical of the Judeo/Islamo/Christian triumvirate. Regardless of any "proof" or scientific evidence, Shinto and animism get results, instilling the adherent with a deep regard and respect for the world in which we live.

"Shinto beliefs and ways of thinking are deeply embedded in the subconscious fabric of modern Japanese society. The afterlife is not a primary concern in Shinto, and much more emphasis is placed on fitting into this world, instead of preparing for the next. Shinto has no binding set of dogma, no holiest place for worshippers, no person or kami deemed holiest, and no defined set of prayers. Instead, Shinto is a collection of rituals and methods meant to mediate the relations of living humans to kami." [Wikipedia]

Clearly this implies a degree of balance and connection with the natural world, though such an assertion would require further research into the overall environmental record of Japanese society. Shintoism itself extends from a deep reverence for nature, yet clearly the natural world is not always in balance with humanity, as illustrated by evil videotapes and other demonic electronic devices. Perhaps the defining characteristic of Shinto and animism is the simple projection of human qualities onto the world around us, for good or worse. It is a recognition of the consciousness resident within all things and the implications of this reflected humanity. As we're drawn to respect others of our kin we must extend that respect to the entire realm of spirit that permeates and anchors all of nature.

For modern J-horror and anime writers (as well as reality hackers and technoshamen) the animistic recognition of spirit intelligence must naturally extend to the technologies extruded by humanity into the world. Like pacts with demons, we foster relationships with our devices that are often both helpful and dangerous, imbuing them with agency and even personality. The kami will always live next to us, inhabiting the forms that absorb our focus.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, writer and director of "Pulse", suggests that "these technologies are part of everyday life, but they still hold the possibility of connecting us to worlds completely unknown to us. Today, ghosts don't appear in graveyards and ancient castles, but in the living room". [Wired]

If one acknowledges that a spirit world exists, then surely it's residents have some interest in human affairs. And how could they not? Whatever we consider such entities to be, they are surely at least reflections and extensions of our selves, hungering to be fed by attention and imagination. By romantic appeal alone they continue to thrive, guarding shrines, inhabiting rocks, and haunting VCR's.

The Japanese culture presents both a fascinating dichotomy and a possible ontological model for the western world. At once ultramodern and animistic, Japan has driven human technology perhaps further than any other culture while maintaining an abiding reverence for nature. The recognition of spirit and consciousness in all things transcends the shortsightedness and eschatological thinking of the West, offering a grounding balance to a frequently teetering society. Whether or not we accept the indwelling consciousness in all things or acknowledge the spirit of the ordinary, the narrative of Shinto and animism flowing through Japanese life will continue to press it's way into global culture by it's undeniable appeal to the human imagination.

The iterative reflections of consciousness and technology drive the tightening understanding of both disciplines, bringing more intelligence to machines and more mechanism to intelligence. The ultimate animistic statement might be Vernor Vinge's own postulated eschatological omega point, the technological Singularity, when the ghost in the machine becomes self-aware and asserts it's own agency before humanity. Perhaps such an "artificial" intelligence would regard all things as being equally alive and sentient. And would it really surprise anyone if it was birthed by Japanese technologies, bleeding on the living edge of human creation?

Graham Hancock -- Following in McKenna's Footsteps?

Drugs, art and the aliens who lit our way to civilisation

(Once again, I find my own contemplations are not mine alone! ... Thank you, Mr. Hancock.)

GRAHAM HANCOCK is breathless. He's telling me about his first hallucinogenic trip in the Amazon jungle, and he just can't get the words out fast enough. The former journalist and now bestselling science writer spent five weeks living with indigenous Indian shamans in Peru, where he ingested a sacred plant drug known as ayahuasca.

We pick up the story just after the shaman began the ritual ceremony by singing the icaros, ancient chants which draw the spirits around the circle. Hancock then took a sip of the drug, which he describes as a "vile-tasting liquid, so strong and bitter-sweet and salty, so dark and concentrated as to be repellent". His muscles involuntarily relax, he closes his eyes and then the visions begin.

"I had a very scary beginning to that trip," he says. "I saw incredible transformations of different animals and beings glowing with light that appeared directly in front of my field of vision. It was a typical scene which many describe as an alien abduction. They were very anthropic, and definitely wanted to communicate with me. It was rather like going to a strange new country, where I had to start learning the rules of communication."

Getting deeper into the experience, Hancock took another dose of the drug, but his body couldn't take it. The nausea came on strong and soon he was out in the dark, puking. Before long he was drenched in sweat with only dry heaves left. He sank to the ground and called an end to the trip because he was so afraid. He opened his eyes, and the visions left him. You could conclude from this account - detailed in Hancock's latest book, Supernatural - that Hancock is just another traveller keen to acquaint himself with the customs of new cultures. But there is a little more to this trip than meets the eye.

A reporter by trade, Hancock was born in Edinburgh before moving to India in his childhood. He returned to attend school and university in Durham, from where he graduated in 1973 with a degree in sociology. He went on to pursue a career in journalism, writing for The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent and The Guardian.

But in the 1980s he gave up newspaper reporting to pursue his own passion - the lost civilisation of man. In the past 20 years, he's written several books including the best-selling Sign and Seal on the Ark of the Covenant - as well as filming documentaries about his research.

"Three years ago I decided to go back to the subject which fascinated me at university," he says. "I was interested in human origins, in what makes us different from the apes. I found that it wasn't the use of tools, as many people believe, but abstract thought and the ability to manipulate symbols." The answer was art. Cave paintings and writings which depicted thoughts and visions, none of which have ever been achieved by other species. In fact, even our human ancestors had no artistic capability. Or not until 40,000 years ago, at least.

"Previously, we were very uncreative and boring. We used the same tools continually without modifying them. Then, suddenly, a light switched on in our brain. Fossils from 40,000 years ago show that we began to explore spirituality, looked for signs of life after death and innovated specialised tools. And we began to paint. In France, Italy and South Africa and all over the world, they've discovered incredibly accomplished paintings, but no explanation for this burst of development."

This has been termed the "greatest riddle in archaeology", and many academics have devoted their career to its study. The reason behind the sudden transformation, the majority have concluded, is hallucinogenic plants. Magic mushrooms would be a relevant example, but all over the world, man stumbled across drugs which opened the possibility for spiritual, creative thought.

Professor David Lewis-Williams, of South Africa's Witwatersrand University, believes that is the end of the story. These visions - and therefore the art they produced - were universal because all of mankind has the same neurology. Our brains are wired in the same way, so when we take these drugs, our bodies have the same response. Indeed, at the University of New Mexico, researchers have found that volunteers given hallucinogenic drugs drew the same kinds of paintings as those found in the ancient caves. This, coupled with a wealth of other evidence, supports Lewis-Williams' theory that drugs are the answer.

For most people that explanation would suffice, but not for Hancock. He could not accept that the beginnings of human spirituality came down to brain chemistry. For him, there had to be more to it, and he decided to investigate, hence the first-hand research trip.

What he has found - and what forms the basis of his new hefty tome - is a theory that to many will sound absurd. He believes that when shamans and drug users experience these hallucinations, they are actually tapping into a parallel universe. The visions - be they of fairies, elves or aliens - are real, they exist all the time, and they want to communicate with us.

"Think of it as though the brain is like a TV receiver. In order to cope with everyday life, we have to tune into "Channel Normal" for the majority of the time. But if we retune our brains with these drugs, or alter our state of consciousness through rhythmic dancing and drums, we can see images of the parallel dimensions."

Hancock does not prescribe for a second to the idea that when people experience "alien abductions", they are seeing foreign creatures that may whisk them to another planet. What he does believe is that the spirits dwell in this other dimension, and if we let them, they will continue the teaching that they gave to our ancestors.

"I believe these hallucinogenic experiences are the basis for all modern-day religions. If you think about it, why would we ever have cause to imagine a spirit world? Our uncreative ancestors didn't, but then they found these drugs and saw for themselves the spirit world, and realised there was more to life. I think religion resulted from the need to explain these supernatural encounters."

A sceptic would maintain that, outwith the experience of those on drugs or in a trance, there is no evidence to support Hancock's theory. And many could take offence to his assertion that when Mohammed, Jesus Christ and St Paul thought they were experiencing God, they were, in fact, just accessing the parallel world. Part of the problem with accepting this higher plane comes in locating its origin. If these spirits are the "ancient teachers of mankind", as he says, where did they come from? In this instance, as with every other, Hancock points to science. Prepare for the most astonishing claim yet. "The secret could be in our DNA," he says. "When Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, died, it was revealed that his first vision of the helix module occurred while he was on LSD. Although he was an atheist, he then published a book which subscribed to the theory of intelligent design, that our universe was not simply the result of a series of chemical accidents.

"In brief, what he said was that after the Big Bang, life did not evolve first on Earth. At the far side of the universe, another civilisation developed, a highly advanced civilisation who surpassed the stage we have currently reached. He asserted that in some way their world became threatened - global warming, or some such catastrophic event - and so they devised a way to pass on their existence. They genetically-modified their DNA and sent it out from their planet on bacteria, with the hope that it would collide with another planet. It did, and that's why we're here." What Hancock goes onto explain is that the DNA was encoded with messages from that other civilisation.

They programmed the molecules so that when we reached a certain level of intelligence, we would be able to access their information, and they could therefore "teach" us about ourselves, and how to progress.

Of course, this talk of aliens sending off bacteria sounds like the ramblings of a deranged guest on a Jerry Springer show. But the astonishing thing is that Hancock is intelligent and articulate, and his writing is as expert as you would expect from an esteemed international correspondent.

Precisely because he is so credible, his idea will no doubt entice those looking for more conspiracy theories, and you need only look as far as Dan Brown to see the commercial success available.

But to give him credit, Hancock at no point claims these discoveries for himself, he always points to archaeologists and scientists who have been fascinated by similar concepts. Indeed, all that he asks for is that people more qualified than himself, investigate the questions he raises.

"I know [this] sounds preposterous and pointless to anyone committed to objective science. The more closely I pursued these questions, however, the more convinced I became that they point towards matters of extraordinary substance, and that science has done us an immense disfavour by its policy of ridiculing and discouraging all rational inquiry in this area."

Hancock's newest, Supernatural, is already availble in the UK and is scheduled for a US release on November 1st.

Original story by Anna Smyth, from The Scotsman, Tuesday October 11, 2005.

For more info, please see the newest issue of Sub Rosa magazine. Audio and video clips included!

THE BLUE SKY OF PURE CONSCIOUSNESS

(The book (formerly known as 'The Fifth Element') is finally complete! Reading copies have been emailed to those who requested them. If you would like a reading copy, please contact me through my profile, or leave a comment here. Reading copies are free to any who promise to give at least a decent paragraph of feedback.
Below are the introductory sections. There are 59 sections in all -- the complete Table of Contents was posted on my blog a while ago.)

1.
ON ONE SOURCE ALL THINGS DEPEND
________

“One Nature, perfect and all-pervading, circulates in all natures.
One Reality, all-comprehensive, contains within itself all realities.”
Yung-chia Ta-shih

Beyond the furthest reaches, deep within the innermost depths, where particulate reality recedes into a stratosphere of pure potentiality, abides the indivisible omniversal flux of pure unqualified CONSCIOUSNESS.

Smaller than a proverbial grain of mustard, yet vaster than the sky, this limitless Ocean of CONSCIOUSNESS is the primary Absolute of all cosmologies: the heaving Ground of all Being: a cloudless reservoir of limitless possibility and boundless potentiality: both cosmic center and supracosmic circumference.

CONSCIOUSNESS is the root of all that has been, the leaf of all that is, and the flower of all that is yet to be.

It is both the ocean-source from which we spring, and the reservoir into which our many rivers empty.

Or, in the words of St. Dionysus: “God is a fountain flowing unto Itself.”

“As the wind takes shape through whatever it enters, as a river flows windingly through its course, and thereby fills it—
the breath of the Spirit breathes through all things, and thus takes all Creation for its body.”
from the Katha Upanishad

All that lives is infused with its quickening Presence: it is both an emanation from on high as well as a welling-up from below.

Its energetic verve powers the spin of the smallest electron the same as the revolution of the vastest stars.

It is itself the blueprint of the Human race as well as the cornerstone of its future crowning superstructure.

“Man is in it, as it is in him, for the world-pervading element fills all space, and is space itself, only shoreless and infinite.”
H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled

2.
AS WITHIN, SO WITHOUT
________

“Within all creatures but not restricted to them, outside all creatures but not excluded from them…”
the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing

CONSCIOUSNESS is the uncreated Godhead, the Thing-in-Itself: Absolute Essence, the imperishable Suchness that within and without us ‘extends without end.’

It is the superfluid Urgrund in which there are no distinctions and no differentiations: the deific potency that empowers and propels each and every aspect of the evolutionary ascent of the Cosmos to ever greater and more novel degrees of complexification.

“We can find no province of the world so low but the Absolute inhabits it. Where we can point to reality, there is the one undivided life of the Absolute.”
Francis Herbert Bradley, The Absolute

It is the Ontological Continuum by which and through which each and every created being assumes its liminal identity.

It is the sentient current that undergirds Spacetime with a dazzlingly complex informational architecture.

It is the pure signal from an extradimensional Omniverse that is continually beaming our Universe into manifest existence.

“Do not inquire whether the Principle is in this or in that; It is in all beings. …
It acts not. Doing nothing, there is nothing it does not do.”
Chuang-tzu

CONSCIOUSNESS is the original unconditioned state of all things: the fiery astral Light, the qabbalistic Ain Soph, the mercurial Azoth present in every crook of the body the same as every atom of the soul.

It is the measureless Ocean of Spirit within which all created and uncreated things exist, and by the Life of which they are animated.

3.
AS ABOVE, SO BELOW
________

“The Absolute is inevitably expressed by the relative, and the relative is inevitably contained by the Absolute.”
Sri Ramakrishna

A universal invarible more elementary than the duality of particle and field, this deific Sea of Consciousness is to be undertstood as a multidimensional implicate order, a totalizing Oneness upon whose mirror-like façade the quantized rippling of interference patterns coalesce into more or less recurrent, relatively stable and momentarily seperable projections of an explicate world of manifest Matter.

“There is but one Thing in the world, not two, as the modern physicists and the mathematicians have begun to realize, and as a child well knows as he smiles at the waves on a sun-swept beach where the same foam seems to have rolled in since the beginning of time …”
Satprem, On the Way to Supermanhood

As in the spiral shell surges the great ocean, so in us the whirling roar of the Cosmos.

Thrilling even the emptiest chasm with a vibrantly creative lust for life, CONSCIOUSNESS surrounds and permeates all Creation in an etheric sheen that warps and weaves its way through the spinning heart of every atom in the Cosmos, its entangled undercurrents concretizing here and there into pinwheels of atomic nuclei, wildly winding and whirpooling and concrescing into the spatial-temporal tide-foam of organized Matter.

“God is like the ocean: for the waters of the ocean cannot be grasped and have no shape except when they are channeled into a vessel, and take on the shape of that vessel; only then we are able to grasp and measure them.”
from the Zohar

4.
THE BLUE SKY OF PURE CONSCIOUSNESS
________
All that lives comes out of Creation like a wave from the ocean.

In much the same way as sunlight exists in relation to the sun, so do we exist in relation to God.

Apart from this cosmogenetic process of graduated unfoldment, there is no life, no reality, no being.

Concretized aspects of the Cosmos are what they are by virtue of the serial unfoldment of a localized pattern in Space and Time: their reality consists in their collective emergence and dissolution in the atemporal Whole.

Ultimate Reality is a living, breathing process that is always freshly minted in the moment: it is never idle, never finally resolved or entirely achieved.

CONSCIOUSNESS is an amorphous Divine, never reaching final form.

It is a playful vibratory procession, a ceaselessly evolving act of deific becoming.

It is the bottomless manna of our existence -- the Life that is living us.

“The perfectly peaceful Absolute is not different from the playful relative universe.
The nameless, formless Reality, the transcendent awareness in which you are now permanently awake, is precisely the same Reality that you see blossoming all around you.”
Sri Ramakrishna

Thus, the ontological wholeness of Reality is never static or complete, but abides in an unending process of undulating flux, in which all the objects, entities, and events of the phenomenal Universe are as evanescent cloudforms set adrift in THE BLUE SKY OF PURE CONSCIOUSNESS: inhomogeneities in the primal Quintessence: etheric bubblings through which the deific Spirit upwells continually, taking on its diverse plurality of form -- momentarily concrete patterns abstracted from an unbroken momentum of undivided flow.

Upwinging: an autobiographical sketch

"All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography." -- Federico Fellini

When I was a child I would occasionally experience a dissociation of my conscious perception from its usual somatic hardware. To put it simply, my conscious mind would leave my body, sometimes for mere moments, other times for the space of a few minutes. Instead of adhering to this temple of flesh and blood, the indwelling spirit would upwing itself into a corner of the ceiling, leaving my body breathless and numb where it lay. At such times it was my distinct experience that the locus of my personal consciousness — the cognitive ‘I’ that normally functions as a cybernetic hyperlink between eyes, ears, and hands, thereby interlocking the senses with the mind and the heart as an integrated whole - was in all actuality a glittering electromagnetic cloud of wildly spinning electrons that was in no way bound to or dependent on the body for its continuity of existence.

This cloud, often enough adhering itself to the inner and outer contours of the material body — thereby both permeating and ensheathing the flesh with a conscious, interactive awareness of one's own localization in time and space - could also dissociate itself from its wonted 'man-shape,’ becoming a more or less diffused bubble of glimmering particles that was now free to voyage where it would, continually altering its density and profile in response to any environing contours — but always retaining a nonlocal, holographic unity of conscious perception and awareness.

In the case of my own childhood experiences of this phenomenon, my perceptual sense of self would first diffuse itself throughout the room, ballooning into an enlarged sphere of unqualified awareness, then condense itself into a tightly-packed globe about the size of a golf-ball, which would often enough hover in a far corner of the ceiling, enjoying its newfound lightness of being, the room below suddenly seeming rather exaggerated and disproportionate in size.

What triggers this phenomenon? I've often referred to it as 'meditating with my eyes open,' but that phrase offers very little in the way of defining the technique. In fact, there is no consciously employed technique per se; it is simply a happenstance that seems to naturally occur whenever my mind is quiet and relatively free of the self-referencing qualifiers we call 'thoughts.' For when the mind is quieted as such, the personal ego fizzles out like a dying ember, but the individual locus of conscious perception remains. The amorphous cloud of whirling electrons is liberated from the illusory taint of the ego, and no longer leans upon the material body as a localized viewpoint. My disembodied consciousness is then free to traverse and explore the world in ways that its somatic vehicle can only dream. (In fact, I believe our dreams may be exactly that - our diffused loci winging here and there in playful interaction.)

Not having at all disciplined myself in this practice, I experienced the phenomenon quite often as an adolescent, frequently at inappropriate or inopportune occasions. I'd be in the company of peers when my conscious sense of self would balloon out and fill the entire room, leaving me speechless and wan. Though I was always gratefully stupefied at the wonder of it all, it would render me incapable of functioning normally in a social setting.

As this continued to occur more and more, I began to assuage the increased awkwardness of social events by retreating and distancing myself from any sincere interaction, which would often enough trigger the experience once again. Dissociating myself from the crowd, I became lost in myself; and my sense of self would then in turn become 'lost' in the room around me.

As I got older, leaving my awkward, but mystic adolescence behind me, I found I was able to focus and direct this diffusion of my conscious perception in ways I had never thought possible. Empathizing with another man or woman, to such an extent as to lose all thought of my own egoistical self, my perceptual locus would blossom into cloud, and then narrow itself into a funneling whirl which would then enter threadlike through the eyes of this person before me, thereby enabling 'me' to fully encounter that person's total experience of 'self’ - their richness of memory, their hopes, dreams, aspirations, their loves and desires, even glimpses of the pathway their past had forged into the future.

The invisible sea of atoms which distances us one from another crumples back into an enfolded potentiality - and with the distance parted, there remains no ultimate difference between myself and any other. The interference pattern I refer to as ‘myself’ trickles away momentarily, back into the unmanifest, and my locus of perception is suddenly and blissfully free to ebb into the evanescent rippling you refer to as ‘you.’

Not only have I thereby discovered the true conscious Oneness of the human condition, the singular World Soul that fills and sustains every atom of our existence, I have also been able to live through innumerable lives in mere moments, this whirling cloud of electrons I call my conscious ‘self’ always retaining the charismatic human warmth it discovers in the lives of others as it returns back to my body. Now it can happen in a matter of seconds: a glance of the eyes, a nod of the head, and my soul expands to embrace another with a permeating fullness only mystics and madmen have known this side of the grave.

Archons & War Pigs

Halliburton, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Electric, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics. These are the servants of the dark archons, perpetuating armed conflict to maintain their profit margins. The leaders of these occulted corporate organizations have abandoned all hope for salvation and given their lives to Murder Inc. Do they find solace in the demons and lords of red war and black hearts? Indeed, their deal with the Devil was a great one for the Dark Prince.

One could imagine the archons like giant insectoid machines as tall as mountains sucking off the bilious hate and fear bleeding out of humanity in the throes of eternal warfare. Inside each one, strapped into the driver’s seat, is an executive. How thick must be the illusions they construct around themselves to sleep even a wink?

War is big business. Building armies, supplying weaponry, selling security and protection, destroying cities and rebuilding them… The so-called defense industry sells to all sides to maintain a perpetual state of conflict, skimming profits like blood off the surface of an oil slick.

The ethereal shadow of emotions darkens with suffering and loss, fear and isolation. Imagine the oceans of the world filling with tears while the summits of our greatest mountains glow with love and idealism. This is the aetheric landscape of humanity, higher than deep but wetter than dry. Our dreams are great and lofty, but are constantly weighed down by the burden of suffering. Human suffering is natural and necessary but only on it’s own course. It should never be commodified or monetized.

War profiteers encourage conflict and violence, manipulating nations and races against each other. Just like small arms manufacturers selling guns to minority youth. Every murder brings more customers. Fear breeds like rats in cities and slums where violence is real. Media spreads the plague into the homeland and the heartland. You never know who might be your end. You should look into buying some protection…

When the war profiteers take control of the military, there are great profits to be made. Dick Cheney went from being Bush Sr’s Secretary of Defense, presiding over the first war in Iraq, to leading global engineering titan, Halliburton, after Clinton took office. He left Halliburton to become Vice President under the second Bush administration. Since his appointment Halliburton has been awarded all of the no-bid contracts for rebuilding the oil infrastructure of Iraq. They’ve also recently received a no-bid contract to expand the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. At the same time they’re establishing similar contracts in Iran. Do you see the pattern? The business of war has seized the war machine itself. The US government invades to satisfy it’s resource needs, then gives all the occupation contracts to it’s corporate leaders (who are all congressman and cabinet members anyhow). Terrorism is a marketing ploy to drum up business for the industry.

This is the ultimate form of Satanism. It is human sacrifice for mammon, plain and simple. As long as the blood flows, the archons will be fed and the war pigs will take the worldly rewards. Imagine the orgone of this suffering and death, the collective aetheric smog choking the spirit of humanity. It’s a heavy weight dragging us down, impeding our evolution and liberation. Meanwhile, executive teams dance under Molok at Bohemian Grove plotting the next invasion.

The current Iraq war is unimaginably biblical. The West returns to the cradle of civilization, spilling blood into the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Like all deaths, it’s a return to the womb. War rages in the Holy Lands, as it always has. If it’s a new Crusade, a battle of mythologies, then our captains will surely end up like Spielberg’s Nazi’s opening the Ark of the Covenant. Their greedy eyes will be burned away by the light of the Absolute.

Though perhaps the atrocities of war pigs are necessary to the proper unfolding of the human drama. Maybe it’s just a phase. The blatant abuses of Halliburton might be the required shock to the system, waking us all up enough to start reeling in our government. Maybe it’s a great sacrifice to the the dying gods, laying a carpet of fire for the radiant child of the new aeon, the Child of Peace.

The word “hippie” has been sadly denigrated and confounded, rebranded by conservatives and progressives alike to be synonymous with dirty, ineffective stoners. But hippies, it should be noted, stood up to the Vietnam war in a time when nobody questioned the US government. Hippies were the ones who started shouting about the military industrial complex. Just 10 years ago this term was considered conspiratorial. Now it’s a given fact.

But most importantly, hippies elevated the goal of Peace into the mainstream of western society. It was a movement that informed every other aspect of the 60’s. Civil Rights, another laudable accomplishment of the hippie generation, was simply peace and equality between all races. The Equal Rights movement sought peace and equality between sexes. Peace and equality is to the military industry what health and fitness is to the tobacco industry. Bad for business.

And maybe this is our ace up the sleeve. If the aetheric seas of humanity are darkened by suffering, then produce compassion. Bring the waters to greater clarity by cultivating peace and equality in every occasion. Fear cowers under community and connection. We are social creatures, destined for love. The most evil among us are victims of love’s absence in their lives. Pitiless parents and sadistic peers beat evil into the tormented soul. Those who know compassion, who know peace and equality and optimism and hope, make it manifest further in their world.

It’s like there’s this balance within every heart weighing Hate against Love. Every experience in some way tips the balance. Some swell with radiance, others fall into darkness. We can only strive to cultivate love in our lives if we are to combat the archons. When one is at ease, positive karma proceeds from will. Negativity is absorbed and transmuted, stalled and diminished. Karma, after all, is simply the inertia of one’s actions. It’s what tips the balance of the global heart.

I had this vision of death as a boat. Through our lives our boats are at port, tied to the dock. With our actions, our thoughts and dreams, hopes and fears, we load our boat, day in and day out, preparing for the journey ahead. Finally at death, it’s time to set sail off into the Great Sea. As we sail, we slowly unburden our vessel, jettisoning the cargo of our lives into the deep blue waters of creation. Imagine all of the millions upon millions of boats plying the tides, getting lighter and lighter as the sea fills with their memories received and absorbed into the saline solvent of the Great Mother…

Wouldn’t we live more lightly if we considered every thought and action as a memory to be offered to the Sea of Life? This is the greatest weapon against the archons.

tek-knowledgry

It's limiting to assume magick must enchant in apocryphal aleph bets and wear the masks of dead gods in order to be "magick". Magick describes an evolving set of technologies that 1) allow access to and provide context for transcendent and liminal states of awareness, 2) function to bring the individual into some greater degree of connection and alignment with the macrocosm, and 3) enable the translation of imagination and will into material change. I'm on the side of Grant Morrison and Doug Rushkoff: magick is everywhere and we're all magicians. We just need to take responsibility for that power and manifest the world that's most in line with the collective will and the balance of nature.

The term "magick" itself is encumbered with associations and connotations, perhaps too weighty for it's own good. Labels are ultimately misleading and confining so it's probably best to simply let go of them. The language of magick needs a complete upgrade, anyway. Experience fuels insight. Insight breeds action. Action begets experience. This may be all we need to know about living. The esoteric toolkit is a set of technologies that can drill through the ego complex of identity to reach the core depths of the self. Magick may hint at demonic powers but the true strength is in self mastery. Without the steady smoothing of the stone of mind (or the sudden shattering of the mirror of self) we walk around like cattle, driven by base want and fear of the blade.

Jack Parson's realized the revolutionary value of magick. Ramsey Dukes understands this as well. True knowledge of self eschews all law and servitude. Corruption is a festering wound eating at the soul of Democracy. Laws are for sheep incapable of taking responsibility for their actions. Control fears illumination of the populace. Why do you think American education is so underfunded?

Supposedly, the state once represented the populace, acting in accord with the will of the people. If this was ever true, it's not anymore. In the modern era, power is underwritten by money and it quickly came to pass that industrialists possessed far more of it than governors. So they began buying up the seats of power. Our democracy nurtured and tutored the great corporate archons who've now come of age and left the nest. There's no corporate allegiance to Mother America. We're simply a marketplace with too many laws. But we've got a kick-ass military which can be readily employed to defend global market interests and force the adoption of "democracy", a term that has somehow become interchangable with "capitalism".

But while the corporate barons grab seats of power to push around other seats of power, the collective will is wiring up into the global mind, sharing it's dreams and fears and realizations and technologies. And it's moving far more quickly than the reptilian cunning of the archons. The tools that serve information seem overwhelmingly in support of it's grand ambition to be free. Free information allows technology to iterate on itself faster and faster. Restrictions are seen as maladaptions and quickly bypassed. As memes applied genetic selection to ideas, so too must this evolutionary trait affect information technologies. The backbone of cable and fiber and wireless (and the human brain) are co-evolving to serve the replication and transformation of memes. The whole apparatus of recursive information moving through distributed networks of mind and machine is a dynamic, evolving natural system fed and tended by humanity.

Control systems buckle under information overload. Bureaucracies shudder and grind to a halt if the data becomes too cumbersome or doesn't adhere to the prescribed format. The archons kept us brainwashed through the media, controlled as it was by their own CEO's. Now the media has broken free, the technology was limiting the flow of information, restrained and coerced to carry only dis-info and corporate propaganda. Reality TV is the last gasp of a failing corporate media hoping to capitalise on the ceaseless human hunger for experience.

The web is usurping media control, tearing it away from the corporate governors and putting it in the hands of everyone. Daily Kos does not tow the party line like Fox or fear the wrath of sponsors like CNN. GNN will run the articles that the Times fears will hurt circulation. And someone will always post video of riot cops kicking the crap out of non-violent protestors.

The light of truth runs through fiber optics. Human TV broadcasts 24-7. Culture feeds on novelty and experience, connection and community. The water in our cells swells to the full moon along with the salty tides and the turning heavens. So much change is happening so quickly, but life just wants to keep living. Use the tools you have to experience it all, as much as possible. Then upload it to the global mind and share it with your neighbors on the other side of our planet. We'll all find that we're far more similar than different. We might even start to realize the urgency for a collective vision of the human path into the future.

Self and Cosmic Self

(A final excerpt from my current work-in-progress. I’m currently rethinking the title as well as the format. The last section here (#61) is intended to be the conclusion.)

50
A man’s consciousness, the necessary ground of his sensual and perceptual experience of being, is a particular mode of Ultimate Reality, and as such is implicitly identical with the Ground of the Universe as a whole.

Indeed, each and every man and woman senses himself or herself as the central hub of the wheeling Universe, the sole vessel of conscious awareness, and thereby intuits the interior Self as a mystery deeper than and distinct from the external individuality of body, something apart from the localized aggregate of senses, experiences, and thoughts.

A Noumenon that could all the same inhabit another systemic individuality, characterized by other memories, other feelings, other thoughts.

In short, another body entirely, another locus of being. Another person altogether.

“I am
always I;

all who throughout time
say I

are in fact
I.”

Thus, in all actuality, there is no real difference between the death of one “I” and the birth of another “I,” between my conscious Self and the Self inhabiting you.

It is simply One Conscious Self taking infinitely many different points of view.

51
Within our own central identity we know and experience Reality intimately and immediately; elsewhere we see its outer shell and garment only.

The cosmic Self manifests the individual “I” by identifying itself with a particular viewpoint, and continues to perpetuate our personal identity by synergizing that nodal viewpoint with the objects, entities and events within the scalar scope of our particular point of view.

That is to say -- the consciousness I call “I” is nothing more or less than this brief sensation of blue sky, this fleeting impression of sunlight, this pithy sentiment of inner peace.

What I call “myself” is an eye of the Self, an opening through which Ultimate Reality takes the viewpoint of the infinitesimal from within the living matrix of the Infinite.

Our personal sense of identity, of being conscious of a singular “I,” alive and co-present with the highest star and the meanest mite, is merely the integrated sensitivity of a particular set and process of cognitive noesis.

The only real underlying difference between one individual and another lies in the depth of consciousness bodily exhibited by each.

Each point of view, each node of conscious awareness has its own spectrum of color, its own brightness and depth, its own gradation of light and dark -- and so it is in this manner (and in this manner alone) that each man and woman varies and is distinct from one another.

52
Each and every last one of us has the same sensation of selfhood -- of being “I.”

For each of us, however, this self is qualified and colored with unique memories and personal characteristics -- the experienced contents of consciousness -- culled from our individual lifespan.

-- But this self, our own personal sense of “I-ness,” is, in all actuality, a local, objectified manifestation of the very signal being cosmically transmitted and transceived by our communal Oneness.

The pure macrocosmic Self, the Supreme Individual, our own little personal “I” stripped of all its individual characteristics, is itself the vitalizing faculty of Consciousness common to all created beings.

Our lesser selfhood -- our own little ego-encrusted personhood of conscious activity – is but a ‘written record’ of the interference pattern of light and darkness present in a particular locus of Spacetime.

We are as vortices through which the Totality of existence flows, localized intensifications of the ubiquitous cosmic drift, diverse abstractions of the unbroken Wholeness enfolded implicitly in the heart of every atom.

We are indeed one and the same “I” looking out through billions of differently colored eyes.

There is truly no break in the continuity between my “I” and your “I.”

Each and every one of us are similar but unique expressions of this singular Soul -- similar because we all serve a homogenous function in the phenomenal world, unique because of our own individual noetic engagement with Space and Time.

53
The body is an opening in the seamless fabric of Spacetime, a pore through which
the omniversal Light of Consciousness flows into the world.

-- This opening through which shines the eyeful of Light I call “I” is intrinsically no different from the rift through which flashes the handful of Light you call “You.”

But the Light is One.

Our shining is One Shining.

It is the same in all peoples, all creatures, in all conscious entities throughout the cosmos.

It is the inner Light of Being itself.

(………………)

58
Ascending through ever-subtler degrees of embodiment, progressively incarnating in bodies ever more ethereal than the last, it will become possible for the localized node of personal self-reflective consciousness to attain liberation from the material substrata of the cosmos through the imaginal invention of noetic nanotechnologies.

This is the mukti of the Vedic psychonauts -- the transfer of one’s pattern integrity to a wholly transcendental plane of Being -- the uploading of one’s personal selfhood into a solid-state Hypersphere beamed consciously and purposefully to elsewhere in the starry Multiverse.

59
Ours is the story of a flower pushing its way gradually upward through the snows of Matter until finally it breaks through the surface crust of history and emerges into the light of a new season.

“The trend of man’s evolutionary growth
is ever towards his own essential Selfhood.”
At long last awakening as a singular, unified Identity, still sensible of the same “I” that we have always been and will always be, it will seem as if each one of us are the One and only existent Being, suddenly achieving the full recall of all the felt memories and lived experiences of the entire human race.

Our integral sense of personal identity shall not dissipate and fade to black, but shall be hugely expanded and augmented by the communal inclusion of all our ‘other selves.’

In the deepness of Space and Time there shall be no break in the continuity between our separable nodes of selfhood and the emerging One Self of our collective interplanetary Consciousness.

60
In the end, evolution on this planet will have been the growth of an immortal spark of Divinity from an invisible evolutionary trigger to a hyperspatial Entity with complete mastery of Space and Time.

What began as an implicate order tightly knotted into the subquantum fabric of reality will end as a fully explicate architecture of dazzling supernatural complexity, an interplanetary flowering into Deity.

“Gradually the Giant awakens
and, conscious of His infinite dimensions,
rouses Himself."
Eternity will overflow the wellsprings of time; spiritual autonomy will burst the straightjacket of Matter; God will be brought to birth in each and every man, woman and child.

Our most ancient visions of Paradise will prove not to be a brief utopia of the past, but rather the long-lasting ecology of the deep and endless future.

61
All in all, the splendor of humankind’s trek through geological and cosmological history is not fated to fade back into twilight and decay.

Rather, our bravest and most imaginative dreams shall be made fully manifest through the discoveries and inventions of tomorrow, and shall in time populate the heavens from one corner of the cosmos to the other.

“This world is not finished,
it is becoming,

it is a progressive conquest of the Divine
by the Divine
for the Divine

on its way to becoming
the endless more that we must be.”

The wider and broader and deeper the overtly manifest sprawl of living, breathing Consciousness throughout the cosmos, all the more glorious, refined, and fulfilled will be the life of the human race, both individually and collectively.

The more fulfilled the project of Consciousness, the more perfect and fulfilled each and every one of us will become.

*

Whence shall he have grief,
how shall he be deluded,
who sees everywhere
the Oneness?

Transhumanity: Individual and Collective

(Once again, a further excerpt from my current work-in-progress, currently titled 'The Fifth Element, or The Omnidirectional Waveform of Consciousness:')

44

As individuals, we are modes
or modifications of one ultimate Reality,
nodes of the infinite Consciousness of God,
a localized expression of the starry Multiverse.

All men and women are

“children of immortality” ***

-- we are each a shining node of the Eternal
the same as waves are nodes of the rolling ocean.

But the indwelling presence of our communal Spirit
smolders also with an urge
for overstepping the personal boundaries of the self,
an entrance into a collective hybridization
of Spirit and Matter.

“As the Soul is present in all persons,
so it is in every period of life.
It is adult already in the infant man.” ****

God is thus entirely immanent in us,
yet awaits His full transcendent flowering
in a transhumanity yet to come.

45

The expanding interiorization of humankind
via the rapidly emerging telesphere
continues to accentuate
and will inevitably exteriorize
the communal Consciousness
long sensed dimly
but as yet never fully explicated or explored.

“Man is now the agent of evolution,
whether he knows it or not;

but he will perform his role better
if he is a conscious agent.”

The many millions of men and women,
themselves products of the evolution of Consciousness,
are now poised to become active participants
in the continuing unfoldment of creation.

“Man’s role is to be
the instrument of the evolutionary process
on this planet,

the sole agent capable
of effecting major advances
and of realizing new possibilities for evolving life.” *****

It is not only in man
that the forward movement of evolution
is now carried on,
but also by man.

It is man who must invent
and discover the future,
and whose imaginal creations will in turn
take into their own hands
the future direction of the world
and gradually replace the blind impetus of nature
with the active and progressive realization
of the eternal life
of an Infinite Spirit.

46

As the earthly sustainability of the race continues to wane,
the future development of the human species will be aimed
both further out into space
and inwards into the hidden depths of the mind
-- and ultimately to the Divine Source
of both the inner and outer reaches
of our endless voyaging.

It is here that we shall at last discover
our implicate communal Oneness,
and henceforth integrate our cosmic introspections
into the rounds of our daily waking life,
both singular and collective.

No one will any longer hold the outmoded belief
in a ‘personal soul’
needful of any intervening salvation.
Sacramentalizing even the most base and common in life,
each and every event of our waking and sleeping lives
will become a means whereby
enlightenment can be reached
and actively realized.

Everything that can and will be invented
or implemented for the betterment
of our forward collective progress
shall be deemed fair and just,
so long as it contributes
to the communal human Spirit’s
ever-advancing mastery of Matter.

-- For our being human
is nothing more than being
the willing and able participant
of our shared communal Oversoul
in the here and now
of the phenomenal waking world.

47

Consciousness is indeed
the communal Spirit within us
-- the one and only Spirit,
the anima mundi, the World Soul,
the great Heraclitean conflagration
shrugging off the innumerable golden sparks
that we are --
and it is in the image and likeness
of this Spirit
that we shall indefinitely persist
in redefining what it means
to be human.

Our possibilities will continue to broaden
as our experience of the universe continues
to deepen and richen.
Recognizing each and every man,
woman and child on this earth
as an integral aspect of
our One and only Self,
and all aspects of human life as sacred,
promoting the betterment of earthly existence for all
will become the prime spiritual objective of the age.

48

On and on flows the rising wave of Consciousness,
running through countless human generations,
subdividing itself over and over again
into individuals who (like little rills)
pour back into the great river of Life itself,
simultaneously interweaving and dissolving
in the rippling outflow of the cosmological flux.

All in all,
the body of Humanity holds together,
and all yield to the same tremendous push –
the God-urge welling up
through our fleshly flower
to shape the roundness
of the future perfect fruit.

If the Deity itself dwells
at the heart and core of the atom,
if everything is God
and every least scintilla of matter deomorphic,
then Humankind
is the Cosmic Child
in embryo.

In the words of Sri Aurobindo Ghose:

"Man is a transitional being;
he is not final;

for in him and high beyond him
ascend the radiant degrees which climb
to a divine supermanhood.” ******

Humanity is an unfinished model,
a prototype of better,
more conscious and cosmic,
things to come.

_______________________________________

*** Svetasvara Upanishad, 2:5.
**** Emerson, The Oversoul.
***** Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine.
****** Sri Aurobindo Ghose, Man and the Supermind.

******************************(to be continued ...)

Consciousness, Individuality, and Immortality

I'm currently about half-way through polishing up version 1.0 of 'The Fifth Element.' What follows are additional excerpts from that first half:

27
Individuality,
or the unique identity
of a particular mode of matter,
is neither a faculty of the meaty flesh
nor the spiritual substance
of an immaterial soul.
(The psychophysical ‘ego’ is itself
but a memory-encrusted distortion
of the inherently translucent locus.)

Individuality can be recognized only
by perceived continuity of pattern,
personhood by the distinctive inscape
localized by the cybernetic feedback loop
of matter and mind.

“The individuality of the body
is that of a flame
rather than that of a stone,

is that of a form
rather than that
of a bit of substance.” ***

Mind is encountered only
in the formative synaptic firing
that manifests where
the meaty matter of the brain
and the streaming life of the world
convene and interface.
Personhood (with all its memories
and desires, its aptitudes and tastes)
is but the ephemeral outgrowth
stemming from this intimate interactivity.

All in all,
human neurobiology is
a noosynaptic apparatus
that transceives the incoming waveform
of the simulcasted Cosmic Mind
into the manifest images,
sounds, and sensations
of the material world.

___________________
*** Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings.

28

The whole content
of personal consciousness
is
the “I.”

The “I”
is synonymous with
the collected fragments of the world
locally transceived out of the holographic flux
by the individual’s noosynaptic neurochemistry.

Without the unfolding ingression
of the cosmogenetic Wave
the machinery of the mind would lie dormant,
the senses unresponsive,
the body unanimated.

Dissolved by death,
the apparatus fails indeed;
but the animating spark
of conscious activity
that formerly sustained the material body
in its brief semblance of personhood
rushes onward and outward
in its original pristine radiance,
a momentary flash of explicate light
winking out
in the dark dazzle of the implicate Beyond.

-- Thus, there can be no soul
peculiar to each individual node,
but only a personal modulation
of the communal Soul
shared equally by all.

An individual is separated
from his or her fellows
only by the characteristic phase-modulation
that distinguishes his or her spatial-temporal embodiment,
and its continuance as a recognizable pattern.

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

35

The evolution of matter
is the gradual building up
by growing complexity
of the primary atomic elements,
arranging itself in particle groupings
of ever-greater volume
into organisms ever more highly organized
and ‘consciousness-ready.’

The whole history of physical
and chemical life on earth
has been, in effect,
the effort of Consciousness
to ‘raise up’ Matter
-- to create in Matter
a supracognitive machine
that would in time triumph
over the mere mechanism
of genetic phylogenesis.

-- And that machine is
Humankind.

“Man is nothing but
evolution become conscious
of itself.” ****

Evolution is thus the progressive unveiling
of the indwelling Spirit in Matter
towards ever-greater heights
of complexification and novelty.

It is the joyful outpouring
of the creative urge of Being;
it is the slow but gradual objectification
of the Divine Spark
that lies submerged and involved
within us all.

“As there is no screen or ceiling
between our heads
and the infinite heavens,

so is there no bar or wall in the Soul
where man, the effect, ceases,
and God, the cause, begins.” *****

36

In this light, material evolution
may be rightly regarded as the advancement
of ever more complex
and ever more ‘consciousness-ready’
prototypes of the One Consciousness.

"If God is here,
everyone is here:

if God is not here,
no one is here." ******

Phylogenic speciation
affords each gradient class of Matter
with similarity of form,
to which sexual selection then provides
he seed of a unique personage.

In humankind,
that hint of individuality
is further augmented and expanded
through one’s formative years
into a noosynaptic web of selfhood.

This is the inception
of an individual pattern identity,
one’s own characteristic augmentation
of the omnipresent Waveform.

Our own particular self-identity
is our unique interface with material reality.

Being a particular modulation
localized in a particular place and time,
we are more or less identifiable
by the particular patterns of memory
and psychological association
with which we qualify
our own little cupful
of the omnipresent Ocean.

37

Thus it is that
the Oversoul of the starry cosmos
inhabits each and every one of us the same,
but is uniquely and unequivocally manifest
through each of us individually
according to the particular noosynaptic structure
of our perceptual physiology.

As the cyberneticist intuited –

“We are not stuff that abides,
but patterns that perpetuate themselves;

whirlpools of water
in an ever-flowing river.” *******

Or better still –
we are as sieves through which
the cosmic stream of Consciousness
manifests a particular continuity
of flow.

Our own personal sluice
grants a unqiue shape
to the out-flowing egress --
and that particular shape and flow
is what we are,
our psyche,
our destiny,
our innermost sense of self.

38

Human neurobiology is
the filter that regulates
the shape and constancy of
our psychokinetic flow.

And should our flesh be
someday re-imagned
by nano-artisans in silicon,
the omniversal flow shall pour through
our little sluice once more
-- and we shall find ourselves
duly resurrected.

Personal immortality can be therefore assured
only by the continuance
of one’s noosynaptic embodiment,
or its translated perpetuation
in a more evolved substrate.

Eternal Life is a rudimentary attribute
of our inhabiting Soul.

Personal immortality (on the other hand)
is solely dependent upon
the sustainable association
of one’s own unique
psychokinetic locus
of flow.

______________
**** Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine.
***** Emerson, The Oversoul.
****** Rabbi Hillel, attributed.
******* Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings.

******************************************(to be continued .......)

The Fifth Element (continued -- part 2)

8

A universal invarible more elementary
than the duality of particle and field,
the nonlocal Waveform of Consciousness
is everywhere winding
through the intergalactic abyss,
its entangled undercurrents
coalescing here and there
into pinwheels of atomic nuclei,
wildly winding and whirpooling and concrescing
into the spatial-temporal tide-foam
of organized Matter.

Beyond the splitting of subatomic quanta
(where particulate reality collapses
into omnidirectional swells of energy)
this subquantum Vitality
surrounds and permeates all creation
in an etheric sheen
that warps and weaves its way
through the spinning heart
of every atom in the cosmos.

Thus it may be said that
the rolling breakers of the Spacetime continuum
are indeed but transient ripples and eddies
upon a tranquil Sea
of self-reflexive hyperkinetic
Consciousness.

9

This deific Sea of Consciousness
is to be undertstood as
a multidimensional implicate order,
a totalizing Oneness
upon whose mirror-like façade
the rippling of interference patterns
coalesces into more or less recurrent,
relatively stable and momentarily seperable
projections of an explicate world
of manifest Matter.

The plurality of mind and matter
we cognize as living Reality
is merely the ephemeral shape appropriated by
the nth-dimensional flux of Consicousness
when compressed into a substrate
of limited dimesionality.

What we ourselves transceive through the senses
as contouring space and tethering time
is (in all actuality)
this etheric Plenum itself,
the emergent Ground out of which
all living things germinate and blossom
and into which they must ultimately
dissolve and vanish
like an iceberg melted
into an abstract rippling of water.

All created things therefore
are the fruits of an upwelling overabundance,
the micrcosmic progeny of a supracosmic womb
-- abstract ripplings on a reflective pool
by a chance wind of fate
blown free from the immaterial dark
and concretized
by the variegated light
of Matter’s materializing matrix.

10

On the surface of Matter we find
nerve fibers and ganglions;
but there is a soul under the skin,
and deeper still
a communal Consciousness,
an Oversoul,
a Psyche co-extensive
with the cosmos itself.

This Consciousness exists equally in all beings,
inanimate as well as animate,
rocks and flowers and trees
as well as birds and beasts and men.

“At the heart of all
-- whatever there is
in the universe --
abides the Self.” *

All created beings are, in essence,
a spatial-temporal coalescence of energy
in the pulsating cosmic Urgrund
that underlies and sustains
and vivifies all creation.

Created beings differ enormously, however,
in the extent to which this vitalizing faculty,
present in all,
has come to be realized
-- to be knowingly manifested
for what it really is.

11

That this gradual revealing
of vital Consciousness
is synonymous with
the measurable degrees of complexity
exhibited by evolutionary biology
is a notion that the anonymous rishi
who authored the Artareya Upanishad
was well acquainted with:

“He who knows how the Self
gradually unfolds within him …
sees herbs and trees and animals,
and knows that in them too
the Self is gradually revealed.

Among animals, moreover,
it can be seen that
the Self is manifested little by little.

… And especially in man
the Self by degrees unfolds itself
-- for man of all beings
is most endowed
with consciousness.” **

Or, as Emerson rightfully intuited:

“We see the world piece by piece,
as the sun, the moon,
the animal, the tree;

but the whole,
of which these are the shining parts,
is the Soul.” ***

12

The progressively unfolding Self of the Upanishads
is indeed none other than
the ontological underwiring
by which and through which
every one of us are intimately involved
with the living totality of the cosmos
at each and every moment
-- the gossamer threadwork by which
the entirety of the universe
is at every moment
fully involved in
and revealed through each
and every single part.

It is the Kingdom of Heaven in our midst,
the gift of Eternity already present in our lives,
inscape of rainbow rivers and opal skies,
the unfolding-enfolding holomovement
of the Nonwhere within.

In truth, it is
the One Consciousness
of which we all partake
-- a communal, interplanetary Consciousness
that incarnates billions and billions of times over
in an inexhaustible inflow
of continuous creation.

_______________________

* Isa Upanishad, 1.
** Aratreya Upanishad, 2:3:2:1-4.
*** Emerson, The Oversoul

************************************(to be continued ...)

The Minded Swarm

The Minded Swarm

Four artists collaboratively produce large-scale sculptural installation through science fiction-inspired “Communal Consciousness”

+ Exhibition opens Wednesday 29 June from 7 - 9 pm
+ Exhibition runs Wednesday 29 June – Sunday 4 September 2005
+ The Minded Swarm science fiction reading group – Friday 15 July at 7 pm

PRESS CONTACT – Matt Lipps 323-957-1777 x.17

Los Angeles, 1 June 2005 – Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) is pleased to announce The Minded Swarm, a collaborative, large-scale sculptural installation organized by Karl Erickson with Consulting Curator Irene Tsatsos. Science fiction (SF) enthusiasts and artists Andy Alexander, Kathleen Johnson, Jennifer Lane, and Halsey Rodman are attracted to the genre’s social and political models, and its exploration of the human condition. The artists have met for some years in a science fiction reading group, absorbing SF’s mode of fantastic speculation into their own practice. Assuming the model of a Gestalt Organism (Theodore Sturgeon, More than Human, Vintage, 1998.) where individual capacities merge to create a single distributed intelligence, the artists have enacted a state-change, adopting a communal consciousness (Olaf Stapledon, Starmaker, Wesleyan University Press, 2004 (1937), p. 271.) as a means of artistic production. Their resulting environment will comprise two zones or microclimates—the Zone of Encounter, a transitional domestic interior, and the Zone of the Superstructure, an unstable architectural form seemingly in flux and embodying the amorphous spirit of the Utility Fog ( Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Penguin Putnam, NY, 2000, p. 145.). The work reflects both the utopian, speculative impulses of SF and a celebration of the everyday reality of the existing built world. As these four superpowers merged, the subsequent hive mind has harnessed group energy to address the psychological, psychosexual, phenomenological and formal properties of materials and built form, both real and imagined.

As part of The Minded Swarm, the artists invite the public to join them for their regular July book club meeting. They have chosen Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan and invite all interested parties to read the book and join them for the discussion on July 15 at 7:30 pm in the LACE galleries. The artists will also publish the list of books the club has read to date on LACE's website, www.artleak.org.

The Fifth Element

or,
The Omnidirectional Waveform of Consciousness

1.

At the subquantum root of Matter
sprawls the indivisible omniversal flux
of pure unqualified
Consciousness.

It is the omnipresent
Alpha and Omega
of all processes and all activity in the cosmos;
its energetic verve powers
the spin of the smallest electron
and the revolution of the vastest stars.

The ontological wholeness of Reality
is never static or complete,
but abides in this unending process
of undulating flux
and gradual unfoldment,
this unbroken momentum
of undivided flow.

This fiery Heraclitean flux is
the cosmological process of becoming itself,
while all the objects, entities, and events
of the phenomenal universe
are (more or less) evanescent,
momentarily concrete forms
abstracted from this undulating process.

2.

Like a flowing stream
(whose rippled surface
from moment to moment
is never quite the same)
the manifold phenomena of Life abides
as an ever-changing pattern
of vortices and ripples,
having no independent, separable existence
outside of the restless movement
of the gushing current itself.

There is a drift
in the stream of our abstract
daylight consciousness
the same as a surge
in the fleshy stream of our concrete
bodily matter.
The abstract objects of consciousness
are not divisible or separable
from the concrete reality to which they refer,
but are rather co-present
via hyperlinks in the holomovement
that unfolds moment by moment
and in the next moment enfolds
in the incoming and outgoing tides
of the aeonic flux.

(Which is a long way of saying that,
at the most fundamental stratum of reality
(and in the deepest sense of the word)
mind and matter
are implicitly
One.)

3.

The phenomenal Universe as a whole
is a transcendent Object
abstracted from the flowing movement
of a ubiquitous Waveform,
a unified Organism whose every aspect
is cyclically arising and vanishing
in the total process of the flow.

This universal, Quintessential flux
cannot be defined or explored explicitly,
but can be known only implicitly,
as evidenced and indicated
by the explicitly definable shapes and forms
that momentarily beach themselves
where the flow of the cosmic Quintessence
bifurcates into the shifting seas and sands
of mind and matter.

4.

The streaming life of Matter
– a tapestry woven of atomic nuclei
divisible into elementary particles
that are further divisible
into rogue quanta –
is in essence an abstraction
from an unknown and indivisible Totality of movement
best defined as
an implicate Urgrund
of bottomless potentiality.

This subquantum stratum is
the Ontological Continuum
by which and through which
each and every created being
assumes an idiosyncratic identity:
the sentient current that undergirds Spacetime
with a dazzlingly complex informational architecture:
the pure signal from an extradimensional Omniverse
that is continually beaming our Universe
into manifest existence.

It is the vitalizing Quintessence
(or ‘dark energy’)
that accounts for perhaps two-thirds
of the cosmological bulk,
a supersymmetrical Waveform
pushed by gravity
into a more or less uniform haze
permeating every nanometer of the cosmos.

It is the Dance of the God Shiva --
He whose gestural swayings are
the primal Word come alive,
He whose choreography is
the dynamic whirligig
of continuous creation,
He whose very presence
over the waters of the primal abyss
stirs the resonance pattern of Life
into manifest being.

5.

This vitalizing Consciousness is
the proverbial ‘Fifth Element’
-- a dynamic subquantum Quintessence
that thrills even the emptiest chasm
with a vibrantly creative lust for life.

Beyond the quantum duality of particle and field
(where measurement of space and time
fades into an improbable immateriality)
the structure of the cosmos recedes
into an immense ‘zero-point’ background
of energetic potentiality.
All that lives appears here
as a tiny quantized ripple
upon this placid crystalline Sea,
this sacred Plenum of unplumbed vitality.

The objects, entities, and events
of the phenomenal Universe are thus
inhomogeneities in the primal Quintessence
through which Consciousness takes on
its diverse plurality of form
-- etheric bubblings through which
the omniversal Absolute upwells continually,
further impelling Matter’s evolutionary ascent
to greater and more novel degrees
of complexification.

6.

This nonlocal Consciousness
is the primary Absolute of all cosmologies;
the heaving Ground of all Being:
a cloudless reservoir
of boundless potentiality
and limitless possibilities.

It is both an emanation from on high
as well as a welling-up from below.
It is itself the blueprint of the human race
as well as the cornerstone
of its future crowning superstructure.

This Transcendent Conscious Being
(slowly explicating itself in Matter)
is the subquantum Source
of everything in the Universe,
the Fountain from which
all our lesser existences
pour fourth inexhaustibly
-- all created things being
lesser or greater unfoldments
of its enfolded,
infinitely creative potentiality.

The more or less limited wholeness of all beings
at all grades of evolutionary complexification
is thus representative of
a graduated attunement of the cosmic Unity,
an as yet imperfect reflection
of the crystalline clarity of the Omniversal One.

7.

Evolution (the slowly unfolding
succession of the living) is
the track record of this Consciousness,
always perfecting
and further refining its relationship
to its earthen biological interface
-- every new permutation and metamorphosis
positing a further step towards
the further manifestation of its overall design --
each new species better adapting
the cosmic playground
for greater manifestations of conscious activity
than the last.

The gradual emergence
of elemental Quintessence
from implicate potentiality
to explicate hyperstructure
has but one goal –
maximum expressive manifestation
in the creative cosmos,
the mastering of material dimensionality.

Cosmogenetic creation is thus
not a specific ‘alpha’ event in the long past --
the vast cosmos is itself
a unified Organism
that is being created continually,
maintained moment by moment
by the unbroken influx
of a hyperkinetic Quintessence
which is continually metabolizing
the ambient sparkle of
a hyperdimensional Other
into material Spacetime.

So long as our universe continues to inflate,
the adventure of Consciousness will never arrive
at any final destination,
will never achieve a finished destiny,
but will continue always to expand and diversify,
hyperlinking the cosmos from one end to the other
with the gossamer mappings
of a transdimensional Beyond.

********************************************* (to be continued ...)

Apropos.

A shining miracle exists everywhere in Creation.

There are no truly empty or barren places
in all the cosmos –
all that lives is a sacred part
of the seamless fabric of Creation.

Life is everywhere,
both visibly and invisibly,
omnipresent;
all of Reality is infused
with the quickening presence
of a vitalizing Quintessence.

· As a river flows windingly through its course, and thereby fills it — the breath of the Spirit breathes through all things, and thus takes all creation for its body.
(Keys of the Kingdom, 22)

· A nature found within all creatures but not restricted to them; outside all creatures, but not excluded from them.
(Anonymous, author of The Cloud of Unknowing)

· God is both the ocean-source from which we spring, and the reservoir into which our many rivers empty.
(Keys of the Kingdom, 10)

· Some say a soul is mingled in the whole universe -- which is perhaps why Thales thought that everything is full of gods.
(Aristotle, Metaphysics)

· As a wave that seethes and foams is but a tapestry of beaded water, as a drapery in its warp and weave is but a pattern of singular threads — so is the world in all its restless turning but the passionate unfolding of the God-Self within.
(Keys of the Kingdom, 8)

· Reality is not the sum of things. It is the unity in which all things, coming together, are transmuted.
(Francis Herbert Bradley, The Absolute)

· As the spokes of a wheel hold to the nave — so does all creation hold fast to the midmost Spirit.
(Keys of the Kingdom, 21)

· We can find no province of the world so low but the Absolute inhabits it. Where we can point to reality, there is the one undivided life of the Absolute.
(Francis Herbert Bradley, The Absolute)

· To be born is not to come into this world — all that lives comes out of Creation like a wave from the ocean.
(Keys of the Kingdom, 36)

· The imperfection of the instrument does not detract from the excellence of the Master. The insufficiency of temporary channels does not lessen the fullness of the Eternal Fountain.
(Zolar, The Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge)

· All things are as doors through which the all-seeing Eye looks out into its own infinitude.
(Keys of the Kingdom, 71)

^Upwinger^

Beyond The ‘Blank Nothingness’ Of Spiritual Attainment

I for one am deeply bothered by the all-too common misperception of the highest degree of spiritual attainment -- most often labeled 'satori' or 'samadhi' -- as an encounter with the ‘blank nothingness’ or ‘emptiness’ of an ineffable Wholly Other.

I wont deny that limit experiences do indeed absolve the aspirant’s consciousness of the bric-a-brac clutter of ordinary waking life. But it seems to me that much of what is referred to as states of high trance or mystic realization is more akin to a mountaineer mounting to the peak of his or her chosen capstone -- and then (oddly enough) closing his or her eyes to the breathtaking expanse above, around, and below.

Hence the ‘nothingness,’ the ‘blank emptiness.’ Somehow in all the strenuous endeavor of clambering to the tip of the pyramid, the aspirant’s cognition, before alert and impeccable and intuitive to a fault, has in some unforeseen way atrophied. (One simply can’t see the forest for the trees!)

Now, I don’t mean to denigrate the pure astonishment which must invariably accompany our trek to the precipice of the Eternal. Far from it. -- Crashing through to what lies outside and above the microcosmic envelope of one’s waking consciousness almost always results in a temporary obliteration of one’s habitual pattern identity. The world becomes suffused with a blinding radiance, a Light almost suffocating in its intensity, rendering one’s usual conception of selfhood null and void.

It is perfectly understandable that many find themselves easily lost in this seemingly boundless, somehow affectionate glow. One has spent long hours diligently skating the ice that customarily limits our world of fluid matter from pushing up into the world of windy Spirit. Etching ever more intricate fractal outlines into the seemingly impenetrable periphery, searching for a fault into the Unknowable, a rupture into the Ineffable.

And then at last the glassy veneer gives way, the ice splintering into a dizzy maze of incandescent explosions. Heaven itself has been breached -- the once impermeable permafrost of the Beyond collapsing into a sun-drenched shower of millions of dazzling fireflies.

Its almost enough to stop the heart, this instantaneous annihilation of our consensual waking reality. For after the bewildering tumult attending our burglary into the Treasure-House of Consciousness has been stilled, after the thunder of fracturing ice has subsided, we are confronted with an uncanny stillness, an awful silence unlike any ever endured in waking life. This absolute calm is such a profound antithesis to the clamorous crashing that attended our final break with consensual reality that it initially appears as a blank nothingness -- an emptiness wholly Other and uniquely in contrast to our three-dimensional substantiality.

And it is here, at this critical impasse, that most aspirants lose awareness of the phenomenon entirely. Swallowed up all in all by its inviting phosphorescence, most surrender to the complete lack of self-identity that it encourages -- and so lapse into utter unconsciousness, acquiescing their finger-hold on the spiritual mountain-top, succumbing once more to the illusions and fallacies of our waterlogged waking consciousness.

The real trick, I believe, the secret technique, is to not abandon self-identity to the winds -- but to identify oneself instead with the Light that fills and surrounds you within and without. Declare your presence anew as a Being of imaginal brilliance. Shed the thorny shell of nihilism and be embraced by the ethereal glow of ‘Omnisism’ instead. Above all, remain conscious enough to realize that this effervescent illumination you now find yourself adrift in is not far apart and distantly removed from the world of waking life -- but is rather its most fundamental and informative strata.

It is not an ‘empty nothingness’ we are confronted with at the peak of spiritual attainment. That is simply a common misperception arising from the sudden lack of personal selfhood, from having our little personal pattern identity temporarily restitched into the seamless network of the world’s causal Hyperreality.
Its dangerously easy to lose one's lucidity when that 'lack' is felt so overwhelmingly. It usually takes several attempts (and perhaps several years) before the aspirant can master his or her own astonishment to the point that he or she is capable of remaining fully conscious even though the former boundaries of his or her pattern identity have been dissolved. Its very easy to feel overwhelmed, and very difficult to ride the crest of the upward momentum to its ultimate resolution. But it can be done.

Its akin to a single drop of water falling back into the ocean -- what is really happening is that you have returned to your true element. The boundaries where personal selfhood formerly ended and the rest of the universe began are relinquished -- and a ghostly 'lack' is felt at that moment. And this misperceived ‘nothingness’ of self is the last illusion to shatter, the final Rubicon to cross, a vaporous mirage at last dissolved by becoming fully identified with the all-subsuming Light in all of its splendid omnipresence.

It is only then that the final barrier between Man and God will fall. Not by mere tasting of the sublime ‘blankness’ -- but by transcending the nothingness of the little personal self in favor of the vivid tapestry of the Collective Divine.

* * *

In the above I hope I have demonstrated that the ‘blank nothingness’ or ‘emptiness’ commonly held to be the peak experience of the Absolute is in all actuality only the last vestige of the vanishing personal self.

Therefore, in contrast to the entrenched nihilism so popular today in discussions of spiritual practices, I propose an ‘Omnisism’ which instead restores the proper all-inclusiveness to the fully conscious experience of the Divine.

John E Mack

I just heard of John E. Mack, M.D. (Oct 4, 1929 - Sep 27, 2004) from a reader who pointed me to the John E Mack Institute. When I saw that he was writing about alien abductions my initial reaction was somewhat dismissive. Then I read the following blurb from someone I deeply respect - Ralph Metzner. For those of you who don't know Ralph, he along with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) were doing the famous LSD studies at Harvard (1960-63). Here is what Metzner has to say about Mack's book, Passport to the Cosmos:

John Mack's research on the challenging phenomenon of alien encounters represents a stunning breakthrough in our understading of ourselves and our place in the larger cosmos. With a rare combination of empiricism, reason and empath, he skillfully guides us to reconsider our attachment to the bankrupt materialist worldview and open our minds to the possibilities of a universe with awesome diversity.

John Mack was a Doctor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Here is what John Mack has to say,

What if the alien encounter phenomenon were subtle in the sense that it may manifest in the physical world but derives from a source which by its very nature could not provide the kind of hard evidence that would satisfy skeptics for whom reality is limited to the material? What if we were to acknowledge that the phenomenon is beyond our present framework of knowledge? Might not such an attitude of humility become, paradoxically, a way to enlarge upon what could then be learned? Is it possible that adopting an open attitude toward the testimony of witnesses could enable us to learn of unseen realities now obscured by our too limited epistemology, allowing us to rediscover the sacred and the divinity in nature and in ourselves?

I think of these experiences as a crossing over between the material world and what in Eastern philosophy is called the subtle realm. Like a reified “mystic's journey,” experiencers describe being brought into another dimension of reality from which a new perspective on life on Earth is possible. Sensitivity to our dysfunctional ecological and social conditions emerges as many come to feel that every living system is connected to what many call “Source,” or “Home.” An awareness of this relationship must be regained, they say, if we are to create a sustainable, peaceful world.

Having listened to the similar testimony of more than 200 experiencers from the West and from indigenous cultures, I have come to feel that the phenomenon is of great importance to our evolution, regardless of its ontological status.

Philosophy of Science

From Colin Magee:

One of the issues that has interested me the most is the nature of impossibility particularly in the realm of science and philosophy. For the most part phenomena deemed "Fortean" in nature are swept under the rug by consensus science. Although there are a few intrepid individuals who are not afraid to step into the deep end of the pool, I think most people would agree with this assertion. Many of the phenomena associated with the use of psychedelic drugs from the literature I have read could be deemed "Fortean" in nature(if we use the term broadly enough).For example many users of psychedelic drugs such as DMT and LSD report contact with extraterrestrial entities, travel in universes with altered physical laws, and other things along these lines. Of course the normal reaction to reports such as these is that it is a "hallucination" or all "in the head".It may very well be "hallucination" but then again it could be something else. In order to examine the data critically we might need a new theoretical understanding of consciousness, physics, and other fields. I think the best approach at this time is open mindedness tempered with a healthy degree of skepticism.

The difficulty as I see it when dealing with things like this is having an appropriate balance between the two - which isn't always easy to discern even with the most skilled investigators. Maybe with some phenomena we have a conceptual straitjacket and that prevents us from investigating with an open mind. To a certain extent I have a childlike quality in dealing with these issues. Children it appears have a degree of open-mindedness which seems lacking in many adults. I was joking around with a dear friend of mine who I work with-I told her that I think my mind has been "ruined" from reading too much philosophy and science fiction. I believe that science fiction writers have this childlike quality that I feel is necessary to deal with fringe science issues.

It's been known that many great artists suffer from mental illness. I'm very interested in how this relates to the creative process - could it be that a certain degree of "controlled craziness" is a prerequisite for the artist and other creative types to perceive the world in ways that the average person does not? I wonder how this also applies to scientists working in areas outside the mainstream. When proposing ideas that are outside consensus thinking how does one integrate the so called "crazy" aspects of a new theory with our current theoretical knowledge and how does one integrate it into a logically consistent whole? Does rationality have its limits when it comes to devising new theories and hypotheses? Are there in fact some cases where it might be irrational to rely strictly on rationality in pursuing the objectives of science?

The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend has a couple of quotes which I think people should heed when examining alternative ideas and theories: "There is no idea, however ancient and absurd, that is not capable of improving our knowledge" and "No idea is ever examined in all its ramifications and no view is ever given all the chances it deserves." Feyerabend mentions Voodoo as an example and has the following to say: "Nobody knows it, everybody uses it as a paradigm of backwardness and confusion. And yet Voodoo has a firm though still not sufficiently understood material basis, and a study of its manifestations can be used to enrich, and perhaps even revise, our current knowledge of physiology."

In the book "Simulations of God: The Science of Belief", JohnLilly has the following things to say which I feel every aspiring scientist should take note of: "To get beyond his belief, his simulations, his model of God, one must in these states of consciousness open himself to the unexpected, the surprising, the unbelievable.If one remains open-ended he is sure that in the vast areas of his own ignorance there are, there will be surprises" and "Science,as far as I am concerned, is an open-ended system, a system of exploration,of processing data which makes sense,a logical system.And yet,in the future it may include regions which today we call illogical, Irrational, psychotic, superstitious, occult, esoteric, religious, or what have you. The new frontiers, as we see them as frontiers, are developing in the inner sciences as well as in the other sciences." I suppose there will always be a few timid souls who are afraid of being trapped in the ontological quicksand. However, in order for science and any other endeavor to progress it must not be afraid to go out on an intellectual limb. It requires individuals with the appropriate balance of humor, open-mindedness, courage, and skepticism.

There's a very distinct possibility that due to our cognitive limitations we may never have a full understanding of some of the phenomena I've been discussing. The participatory universe theory developed by physicist John Archibald Wheeler I believe is particularly relevant here. The answers we get with regard to what we perceive as the nature of the universe depend on the questions we ask. Different organisms with different cognitive architectures will ask different questions regarding the nature of the universe and will perceive the universe differently. The technology we use to observe the universe is a product of our intelligence and this technology determines what we can and cannot observe about the universe-how will the technology of organisms with different senses and cognition develop? How will this in turn effect what they conceive to be the nature of the universe? If there are infinite universes are there infinite levels of reality and infinite ways to perceive these realities?

Perhaps there are advanced entities who create realities like an artist creating art-each artwork more significant and richer than the next. In the future advanced entities could create universes with different physical laws and tinker with different permutations of these laws like a child plays with toys-in addition to computer hacking there could be "universe hacking". And in addition to electrical, chemical, and other engineering fields we would have something I'd like to call "ontology engineering" Thoughts like these keep things in perspective when examining what humans consider exotic phenomena. The artist, the scientist, the mystic, even so called crackpots each have something valid to say within certain contexts in the great quest to understand the grand mysteries of the cosmos.

In many people there seems to be a psychological barrier when it comes to considering and evaluating ideas the majority of people feel "outlandish". Of course to a certain degree this is warranted-after all there is a lot of "snake oil" being peddled out there. Like the old saying goes it's good to be open minded but not so open that your brain falls out, and like David Hume says-"Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof". There also seems to be psychological barriers in the same individual when it comes to evaluating anomalous phenomena-a "weirdness quotient" or "bizarre idea threshold" if you will. For instance a friend of mine believes in the possibility of levitation yet does not believe in the possibility of shapeshifting. Of course given the idiosyncracies of human beings it's not surprising that some ideas are palatable to certain individuals whereas others are not. Speaking personally I have a penchant for the bizarre whether it be psychological phenomena, physical phenomena, music, art, etc. I admit while this helps to a large extent when investigating unusual phenomena it also has serious limitations which must be considered very carefully. A good example of this is Fox Mulder from The X-Files who has a poster which states "I Want to Believe". This will to believe can be just as detrimental (if not balanced with a healthy dose of skepticism) as the hardcore skeptic who is completely close minded. Belief in my opinion is not an all or nothing affair, but rather there is a continuum of plausibility. I prefer multivalued logic such as "True", "False", or "Indeterminate" or as Dr. David Finkelstein says-"In addition to a yes or no the universe contains a maybe".

Fuzzy Logic is also a very useful tool in evaluating theories and evidence. In evaluating claims such as spoonbending or levitation one could say the following: "Given the evidence obtained so far it would appear at this time that there's an 80% probability that spoonbending and levitation are real"(or not real) In the future as we refine our epistemology and philosophy of science, this in turn could bring issues into focus that we haven't considered before when investigating unusual phenomenon. There's also the possibility that our investigations of paranormal and other anomalous phenomena might be a bit premature. It could be the case that before investigating these phenomena we need drastic revisions of our concepts of space, time, matter, cause and effect, physical laws, consciousness-these are just a few of the concepts that might need changing. Not to mention the difficulty of isolating all the relevant variables involved in conducting experiments (is it possible that all relevant variables might not able to be isolated?) I've read a little of David Bohm's "Wholeness and the Implicate Order" and was wondering if some of the ideas expressed in the book might shed some light on mystical, psychedelic, and paranormal phenomenon.

One of the cornerstones of the scientific method is the falsifiability of hypothesis which is discussed at great length in philosopher of science Karl Popper's books. In the example above regarding psychedelic drugs and "contacts" with extraterrestrial entities what type of experiment could be designed to test the hypothesis that these entities actually exist outside the person's own imagination? Dr. Stanislav Grof seems to be skeptical about the idea that these entities actually exist outside the mind as does Dr. John Lilly.I like the way Dr.Lilly approaches the phenomena. For instance he uses the terms "true", "false", "as if true",and "as if false". Those last terms I think are particularly relevant when investigating psychedelic phenomena. It could be that certain phenomena and beliefs within our current conceptual landscape appear "as if true" and "as if false". Only when further experiments have been conducted (and if necessary revision of hypotheses) can we determine whether the belief in question is "true " or "false". Until then it is premature to be dogmatic about our assertions regarding the nature of reality. It could very well be that some natural phenomena are not amenable to investigation by the scientific method (at least at this stage or perhaps never).

Like any tool the scientific method has its limits. For instance emotions, intuitions, dreams, and the feeling one gets from reading great poetry, listening to a symphony, looking at great art or the tender kiss of a lover are just as valid (some people might say more valid) then empirical evidence. It could also be that the scientific method or certain aspects of the scientific method need to be revised. When investigating paranormal, mystical, psychedelic, and other unusual phenomena we may have to undergo a conceptual revolution similar in scope to quantum physics. In the history of science there have been great upheavals as our conceptions of nature and reality have changed. A paradigm shift of great proportions will be needed to examine these phenomena in an objective manner.

As far as the potential of the mind I think John Lilly put it most eloquently: "In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits."

Reality and Consciousness: Turning the Superparadigm Inside Out

By Peter Russell

Editor: This is an abridgement of Russell's book, From Science to God.

Thomas Kuhn coined the term "paradigm" to refer to the beliefs and assumptions that underlie a particular science. But beneath all our scientific paradigms lies an even deeper and more pervasive assumption. It is the belief in the primacy of the material world. When we fully understand the world of space, time and matter, we will, it is held, be able to account for everything in the cosmos. Being the paradigm behind all our scientific paradigms, this worldview has the status of a "superparadigm". Eminently successful as this model has been at explaining the world around us, it has very little to say about the non-material world of mind.

Nothing in the physical sciences predicts the phenomenon of consciousness. Yet its reality is apparent to each and every one of us. As far as the current superparadigm is concerned consciousness is a great anomaly.

When paradigm anomalies first arise they are usually overlooked or rejected. Or, if they cannot be so easily discarded, they are incorporated in some way, often clumsily, into the existing model. Witness the attempts of mediaeval astronomers, wedded to Plato's belief in the perfection of circular motion, trying to explain irregularities in planetary motion with theories of epicycles (circles rolling along circles).

Western science has followed a similar pattern in its approach to consciousness. For the most part it ignored consciousness completely. More recently, as developments across a range of disciplines have shown that consciousness cannot be so easily sidelined, science has made various attempts to account for it. Some have looked to quantum physics, some to information theory, others to neuropsychology. But the failure of these approaches to make any appreciable headway into the problem of consciousness suggests that they may be on the wrong track.

All these approaches assume that consciousness somehow arises from, or is dependent upon, the world of space-time-matter. In one way or another they are trying to accommodate the anomaly of consciousness within the materialist superparadigm. The underlying beliefs are seldom, if ever, questioned.

When Newton proposed his laws of motion, he turned the problem of what made things move into the foundation stone of his new paradigm; objects continued to move unless acted upon by some external force. When Einstein formulated his Special Theory of Relativity, he took the problem of the constancy of the speed of light and made it an axiom of the new model. I believe we need to do the same with the problem of consciousness. Instead of trying to explain consciousness within the current superparadigm, we need to accept that consciousness is as fundamental as matter—in some ways, more fundamental. When we do we find that the key ingredients for a new superparadigm are already in place; all we need to do is put them together.

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Alternative Cosmologies and Altered States

by Stanislav Grof

Noetic Sciences Review, Winter 1994, pages 21-29
From a talk given at the Institute of Noetic Sciences conference "The Sacred Source: Life, Death, and the Survival of Consciousness", Chicago, Illinois, July 15-17, 1994.

Editor’s Note:
In Western societies, the dominant paradigm presents a cosmology in which humans, as biological matter, live and die in a universe governed by the laws of physics. In this worldview, there is no room for the possibility of life after death, and different states of consciousness have significance only as pathological deviations from that worldview.

In sharp contrast, the cosmologies of other cultures—ancient and contemporary pre-industrial—have taken for granted the existence of an afterlife. For them, dying is a meaningful part of life, and death is a journey for which the individual can and should prepare. To aid in this, many cultures throughout history have developed experiential "technologies"—techniques and practices intended to train initiates in the art and science of dying and postmortem survival. These experiential "technologies" invariably involve training in altered or non-ordinary states of consciousness throughout the individual’s lifetime.

This fundamental difference between Western and pre-industrial cosmologies and their respective end-of-life technologies has profound consequences for how societies view living, dying, death, and non-ordinary states of consciousness. In this article, psychiatrist Stanislav Grof explores some of the key elements in pre-industrial cosmologies and their emphasis on transformative "technologies" for training in altered states throughout the individual’s lifetime.

In general, the conditions of life existing in modern technologized countries do not offer much ideological or psychological support for people who are facing death. This contrasts very sharply with the situation encountered by those dying in one of the ancient and pre-industrial societies. Their cosmologies, philosophies, mythologies, as well as spiritual and ritual life, contain a clear message that death is not the absolute and irrevocable end of everything, that life or existence continues in some form after biological demise.

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Being, Consciousness and Everything

By John Richardson

Starting from Where We Are

So ...... here we are. How did we get here? What is this situation? What happens next? What can happen? There is body, mind and senses. There is pleasure and pain, feeling good and feeling not so good. There is sky, stars, ocean, fire and wind. There are changes of season, cause and effect. There are moments of great joy, and there is sickness, old age and death. What are all these things ... really?

Where does it begin and end? For us, it begins with life and appears to end at death. And in between there is wake, dream and deep sleep. In a natural way, these things are common to all of us here. As a species on this planet, we share a global history, our collective knowledge, and the tools we use. We all have a common desire for happiness. Is there any way to be released, radiant, ecstatic and always already satisfied? Some of us seek to understand and to know. Is there something we could know, and by that, be lifted into the Heavens? If we understood the very nature of all of this, could we let go? Is there some final knowledge, the fruits of which can and should be realized by all?

Unlike religious proposition or culturally centered knowledge, scientific knowledge applies equally to everyone and everything. Science focuses its search for truth based on universal predictability and regularity, and shows little preference for anything else such as race, gender or religious belief. By understanding the causes of observed regularities, science has discovered the fundamental laws of nature. The powers of scientific discovery have been demonstrated through the achievements of modern technology. And yet, science has not arrived at its ultimate goal where it would seem to merge with religion and philosophy. For the ultimate goal of science must be to discover the absolute nature and condition of everything.

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nice to be meeting myself

For 15 minutes I was living in two worlds at once.

Or at least two moments in the same space separated by 13 years or so. It was the same white electric stove, the same old buzzing fridge, and the same worn spanish tiles (though perhaps a bit more worn than last time). This was the house where my mind and soul met and shook hands. Where Crowley, and Leary, and McKenna, and Bob Wilson all took hold of me amidst an endless whirling of psychedelics and empathogens.

For some time we had a tent set up in the living room, hung with christmas lights, for safety meetings and ecstacy huddles. On a couch 5 friends and I sustained 20 minutes of telepathy listening to "Blues for the Rainforest" in the dark, our pineal glands awash in the hyperdimensional electricity of ayahuasca. One night my nervous system and organs exploded right out the top of my skull, eyes bulging with lighting bolts shooting from my brain. It was sudden and existentially shocking, but really alright too. In that moment, my fingers clutching at the living room carpet, the voice of the mushroom spoke to me briefly, directly, and intentionally, like it was hanging on the air just behind my ear.

These thoughts played across the screen of my perception, transparent and overlaid like a film strip on the walls of the B40 house now packed thick with humans talking and drinking, bumping and bouncing, stuffed into the living room and packed around the band percolating in the corner. Probably the best rager ever thrown here. The house has been more or less in the same hands for 15 years, moving from friend to friend of a friend. Those who've lived and loved within it's walls have always been able to return. Being there tonight reinforced the bond just a little bit deeper. Indeed, the For Sale sign on the front drive has been duly dismantled and hurled into the adjacent eucalyptus grove.

Dwellings are vessels. They absorb and contain the energy of the living held between their walls. I always smudge when I move into a new location, just to clear it out some. The B40 house was swollen tonight with the honey of the years, glowing and amber among the faces new & old. Most of the people there I didn't even know, but I was glad they were picking up the vibe and amplifying it a bit higher.

Glancing at faces, peering into eyes, it strikes me that each person is a piece of myself, forgotten and lost, looking back at me and seeking the point of overlap, of timeless contact. Old friends feel warm and close, like part of our bodies are shared, astrally familiar. Others are new and different, forgotten awaiting memory and a recollection of unity. We all marinate together in the magick and spirit uniquely crafted in this home and painted on the walls in ultraviolet and invisible ink. Heiroglyphs of experience cover every surface, like that 5am morning when electric acid patterns crawled across the walls and couches and carpets and faces, thick and rich and perfectly real.

I imagine this place as a pulsing red bead on the web of energetic manifestation. Human electrons streaming in and out, energy states shifting and jumping. A node in the matrix, as it were, yet plainly alive and organic - more like a neuron than a terminal. A moment of spacetime echoing forward and backwards through the continuum, like a stone dropped into a calm pond. Waves radiate outward from it's locus. Those waves have helped carry me to the exact spot I'm at right now, and will likely power my passage further on through the night, under sun and moon, day in and day out, across the seas of time until the porous ship is too laden with experience and memory to hold against the tugging waters. When my drop becomes the pool once again, these thoughts and memories will dissolve like sugar and sweeten the oceans of consciousness.

Maybe if chance has it so, such power spots are truly eternal and the next wave of residents, realtors, and developers will find themselves smiling more often, prone to curious inquisition, and unable to resist the tug of music in the interstices of imagination.

Void Meditation

An attempt to catch some of the Essence of Void Meditation :

Sat in the Lotus position with closed eyes and taking slow, deep breaths. The mind is still on the outer layers of consciousness. Thoughts are flowing through my head, some I cling to, some I don't. Scanning my body and one by one relaxing the parts that are still tense. Lower legs, stomach, shoulders, neck, jaw muscles, anything that needs loosening up. I pass to the next layer and relax further.

Now letting more thoughts go and checking my breathing again. Long, slow breaths, paying attention to the breath going in through the nose and down to the bottom of the lungs. It flows and swirls like a dance of energy, in and out, in, and out again. I move into a deeper state of mind. From here the unity is sensed that holds my body and connects it to the space around me. More subtle, soft light, holding me in place. Stiller now and more focused, shifting from thoughts and into purer perception. Seeing and not thinking. Feeling and not thinking. I pass further.

The grosser layers passed by, or unfolded, the body and mind begin to shift into a greater sense of Oneness. The inner nervous system the seeing organ as feeling catches swirling, pulsating energies, colours and shapes, flowing up and down and around the body. Where it was tingling in places and dull in others before, it now flows in waves. Wave after wave, and then it's just present. Attempts at explanation start to prove inadequate, and the reason why the onus is on experience becomes clear.

The waves of ether, molecules, light, patterns, now sometimes flow, sometimes not. Soft energy like a cool breeze and then clearness, movement then stillness, form and mind. Then deeper, and into the part where words go from inadequate to hardly enough to give a good enough description.

The gross and the subtle are one, each level of consciousness one, inner and outer one. Boundaries between the self and the outer world dissipate and are perceived for the illusions that they are as the mind randomly picks out the activity of the void with a heightened awareness. I'm not just my body anymore because at this point my body is nothing seperate from the surrounding area. Dimensions fuse and I begin to float in the void. Unity is attained, the sense of 'I' fades and ego is transcended. Reality is non-dual.

Here, the Huang Po doctrine of Universal Mind makes perfect sense :

"Men are afraid to forget their own minds, fearing to fall through the void with nothing on to which they can cling. They do not know that the void is not really the void but the realm of the Dharma".(1)

(1) Quote from The Way of Zen, by Alan Watts

What Is Reality?

Does reality exist? Do our perceptions accurately map the world on the other side of our senses? Can we know with any certainty that the “out there” matches what’s “in here"?

Physics tells us that the “out there” is an interference pattern of quantum magnetic fields. Our individual interfaces give it form, solidity, and meaning. Our human sensory apparatus, constructed from shared genetics, provides us all with a roughly equivalent representation of the interference pattern “out there". We all see the sun and the moon and buildings and cats, but cultural and psychological factors layer associative relationships on top of the shared forms. My sun is paternal and reminds me of desert sand and circling hawks. Another’s sun might be harsh and dessicating, inspiring melanoma. The interface becomes personalized. The reality we rely on is an exposure on the neurocortex painted by associative emotional complexes.

Language is an abstraction layer between the interface and the mindbrain that allows us to classify and communicate. As language is acquired it quickly replaces the direct apprehension of the thing “out there” with a simplified data structure. Words become a painting of the thing; an occasionally effective representation of the garbled mass of signals coming into our heads, transduced into patterns, and modulated by neurohormones washing through associative networks. The next time you think about a piece of fruit try to do it without using words. Language defines the reality that we know.

Reality with a capital R is something far greater over which we hold only marginal dominion. For us ultraviolet colors are not a part of our reality. Yet bees and other insects see the world awash in such frequencies. Most mammals engage a world of smells everpresent, yet we generally acknowledge only the more pungent odors, usually related to food. Dogs smell cancer. “Out there” is a field of probability, a fractal hologram, a quantum wave function. Reality is the interface of a billion billion perceptual organisms, collective, witnessing. Human reality is a subset, narrow in perception but rich in meaning.

When we still the mind and let words settle and cease, what we are witnessing is the naked interface between our sensory networks and the quantum field. Dust motes hanging in a sunbeam. Soft notes echoing off shiny metal chimes. A brook babbling gently. The steady pulse of blood beating through our veins. These miracles are assembled within our heads. Modifying or shutting down the sensory apparatus through meditation, sensory deprivation, exogenous chemicals, or otherwise, can strip away even the interface and reveal the singular holographic quantum field, the interference pattern of the hologram.

The remarkable quality of entering the singularity of quantum consciousness is that consciousnous does not cease in such a state. Self-awareness does. Duality does. But consciousness persists. Information can be conserved and brought back into the kingdom. The body is simply a vehicle to which consciousness attaches and is momentarily restricted by. When we think of Uncertainty and the notion that consciousness is required to collapse the wave function and cause probability to occur, we assume that means that some being like ourselves must be opening every subatomic Schrodinger’s Box in order for reality to even exist. And it may be so. Or it may be that there is indeed a cosmic/atomic consciousness that pervades everything like a unified field, incessantly causing the “formality of actually becoming". Something we are at present unable to fully comprehend. Indeed, our definition of consciousness is limited by our consciousness itself. How can we imagine what we cannot imagine?

What do you believe ...

Edge posted this question to a bunch of smart people: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" Which is a great question to ask, and particularly interesting to ask of scientific types who often try to insist they only believe things they can prove.

Now, at first I thought it was just going to be some inspiring things to quote from. But there are some interesting subtexts going through most of the answers. You know, most of these guys are materialist atheists. But yet the red thread that goes through all of them is *consciousness*. A bunch of them quickly move to very dogmatically declaring that there's no God, no design to the universe, and everything is just the result of random accidents. They seem very convinced of that. But of course they indeed are answering the question, because they can't prove it, and they know it. Another bunch of them make very hopeful declarations of being very sure that it is "just around the corner" that we'll discover what part of the brain consciousness comes from and how it works, and we'll be able to duplicate it in computers or the like. And implicitly admitting that such things aren't in any way proven, and nobody actually have done so. But, again, they seem very sure of it. And, indeed, most of them are practically squirming and bending over backwards to try to make the case for what is essentially a negative belief. That there's no consciousness and anything that can't be proven in a materialistic sense is just stupid supersticious nonsense. Oh, none of them actually say there's no consciousness, but they wrap it up in it just being an illusion or some phenomenon that happens late in the evolutionary process or some chemical neuro-physiological phenomenon.

Quite remarkable, to see the amount of fear that is stirred up, and the convoluted beliefs that people construct in order to avoid the more simple and unified answers. And the peer pressure that obviously must exist amongst scientists, to look and sound scientific and objective at all times, even when the truth is that you can't really prove very much about anything.

Anyway, there are still many inspiring statements there, and a few of them aren't just hiding behind negative dogma. So, here are a few I liked:

Anton Zeilinger:"What I believe but cannot prove is that quantum physics teaches us to abandon the distinction between information and reality. The fundamental reason why I believe in this is that it is impossible to make an operational distinction between reality and information. In other words, whenever we make any statement about the world, about any object, about any feature of any object, we always make statements about the information we have. And, whenever we make scientific predictions we make statements about information we possibly attain in the future."

Paul Steinhardt: "I believe that our universe is not accidental, but I cannot prove it. Historically, most physicists have shared this point-of-view. For centuries, most of us have believed that the universe is governed by a simple set of physical laws that are the same everywhere and that these laws derive from a simple unified theory."

Gregory Benford: "Why is there scientific law at all? We physicists explain the origin and structure of matter and energy, but not the laws that do this. Does the idea of causation apply to where the laws themselves came from? Even Alan Guth's "free lunch" gives us the universe after the laws start acting. We have narrowed down the range of field theories that can yield the big bang universe we live in, but why do the laws that govern it seem to be constant in time, and always at work? One can imagine a universe in which laws are not truly lawful. Talk of miracles does just this, when God is supposed to make things work. Physics aims to find The Laws and hopes that these will be uniquely constrained, as when Einstein wondered if God had any choice when He made the universe."

Alison Gopnik: "I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are. I believe this because there is strong evidence for a functional trade-off with development. Young children are much better than adults at learning new things and flexibly changing what they think about the world. On the other hand, they are much worse at using their knowledge to act in a swift, efficient and automatic way. They can learn three languages at once but they can't tie their shoelaces."

Lynn Margulis: "That our ability to perceive signals in the environment evolved directly from our bacterial ancestors. That is, we, like all other mammals including our apish brothers detect odors, distinguish tastes, hear bird song and drum beats and we too feel the vibrations of the drums. With our eyes closed we detect the light of the rising sun. These abilities to sense our surroundings are a heritage that preceded the evolution of all primates, all vertebrate animals, indeed all animals. Such sensitivities to wafting plant scents, tasty salted mixtures, police cruiser sirens, loving touches and star light register because of our "sensory cells"."

Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi: "When I first read your question, I was sure it was a trick—after all, almost nothing I believe in I can prove. I believe the earth is round, but I cannot prove it, nor can I prove that the earth revolves around the sun or that the naked fig tree in the garden will have leaves in a few months. I can't prove quarks exist or that there was a Big Bang—all of these and millions of other beliefs are based on faith in a community of knowledge whose proofs I am willing to accept, hoping they will accept on faith the few measly claims to proof I might advance."

Randolphe Nesse: "I can't prove it, but I am pretty sure that people gain a selective advantage from believing in things they can't prove. I am dead serious about this. People who are sometimes consumed by false beliefs do better than those who insist on evidence before they believe and act. People who are sometimes swept away by emotions do better in life than those who calculate every move. These advantages have, I believe, shaped mental capacities for intense emotion and passionate beliefs because they give a selective advantage in certain situations."

Douglas Rushkoff: "I can't prove it more than anecdotally, but I believe evolution has purpose and direction. It appears obvious, yet absolutely unconfirmable, that matter is groping towards complexity."

But the only one that actually wasn't afraid of believing in consciousness is this guy:

Donald Hoffman: "I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Spacetime, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being.

The world of our daily experience—the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds—is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm. Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. For the point of an interface, such as the windows interface on a computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or toggling voltages in circuits. Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival.

If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience."

Right. And that is to a large degree what I get from the eloquent statements of most of these other prominent folks I'm not quoting. They have failed to come up with any reasonable explanation, let alone proof, as to how mindless matter accidentally develops consciousness, or how a beautiful and very functional system of natural laws and evolution of life emerges by mere accident. They have no proof, so they make long explanations to try to delay that realization, and most of all they BELIEVE strongly that they're right, so they are willing to continue to the bitter end without any shred of evidence for that which they believe in.

Memewars

Across arid deserts sand blown and scorched three great beings rage against each other for dominance, whipped by winds and beaten back by the melting ochre of an aging Ra hung heavy and languid in the sky. Like the winds themselves, the dust devils, they whorl and spin, at times fierce and swift, at others thin and empty.

One such entity gathers like flies around the Nile people, buzzing in their ears and kissing their hearts, offering identity and meaning, culture and salvation. It’s arms are thick and multitude, enough to smite the pharaohs and part the seas. Yesheva is its name and it’s as much of a creation of them as they are of it - a metameme deity nourished and fed in mythic symbiosis. The deity is the enduring vessel of the culture protecting and transporting it’s archives codified in poetic myth and symbolism. The priesthood ensures that the metameme continues to have hosts - the more the better, though for Yesheva it’s been a long, difficult battle with little returns to show for the effort.

Across the cracked mud rises a second beast, a swarm of locusts singing the mind of god in maths and scriptures, rising and spreading throughout the Arab world and beyond. It speaks of discipline and devotion through the mouth of a warrior, kneeling under minarets and the crescent star. This deity binds the culture and re-enforces the blood of its people. Scimitar and Kalashnikov guard it’s mosques and defend the fecundity of its message. Allah and Mohammed guide the people and inspire fierce loyalty, their power and depth swelling the ranks of the fastest growing religion in the noosphere. This metameme is so strong it seems that many are willing to die for it.

Third comes with a great deep rumbling, passing out from the desert into the far west and east, moving into all corners like floodwaters, a million million ant legs marching onward. White-rayed, compassionate and loving, this memetic monster seems as eager to destroy its creation as save it, leaving behind its flowing white robes a thick stream of crimson tide. A tenacious meme spreading at all costs, cowing its hosts with fear then promising an afterlife of eternal sunshine while reprogramming the competition or simply eliminating them. Old myths and future revelations bookend the life of the superstar Christ, the greatest product spokesperson ever known. We offer prayers, attend schools and masses, give up our money and restrict our freedoms, all to help the meme survive, all because we believe in it.

On this dusty battlefield arms cross and clash and blood spills relentlessly as the insects wage memetic warfare against each other, vying for dominance in the humble noosphere of the human species. The prevailing memetic deities know the power of human belief and know that it’s the only way they can survive and become real. We surround ourselves with great technological extrusions, vast webworks of creations all manifest from within our minds, from within the sea of ideation, imagination. Whatever we believe in most is what will come to pass. The great struggles now pitched and fought rising towards a seeming apocalypse are being waged by thousand year old mythologies still gripping our consciousness and infecting our minds. Priests and politicians cunningly invest in their powers while common folk give their lives in servitude, like capsids bursting to perpetuate the viral progeny. When the scorecard is read, whatever deified memeplex has the most ardent believers, that’ll be the one that writes our story.

The task of every advanced human robot is to realize the power of the deified metameme, to see it’s dependence on the human host, and to know that we’re the ones who’ve created it in the first place. Whether religious, scientific, economic, or whatever, belief is both a captor and a liberator. Magick is a way to liberate belief and help write the story of humanity. Do you want the next chapter to chronicle the apocalypse of creation? Record fiery judgment and revelation upon our spoiled brattiness? Or tell of the great age of reasoned technology and ecological spirituality?

Invest belief responsibly.

Science and Spirit

Two interesting articles in Nature about the brain and spiritual experiences. The first debunks the recent study claiming that the brain was inventing ghosts during sudden electrical storms across the temporal lobes.

The second relates a recent conference on neuroplasticity between western brain researchers and the Dalai Lama. The Lama is keenly interested in neuroscience and how scientific insights can shed light on the mysteries of transcendence.

For many Buddhist monks, this interest in science is focused on an intense curiosity about the workings of the brain. Monks typically spend hours in meditation each day, a practice they say enhances their powers of concentration. Highly trained monks report being able to focus on a single object for hours without distraction and to recall complex scenes in exquisite detail. A question that deeply interests the Dalai Lama, and indeed some neuroscientists, is whether these phenomena have a biological basis.

... Before the late 1990s, it was thought that adult brains were more-or-less complete. Learning involved the development of new connections — but no new neurons were born, and when these cells died they were gone forever. Now it turns out that new neurons do grow and our brains are much more flexible than was once believed. As a key component of Buddhist belief is that meditation literally transforms the mind, Buddhists are keenly interested in scientific advances that could help explain this observation.

Richard Davidson, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the coordinator of the Dharamsala conference, has learned from the monks through study. He found that certain neural processes in the brain are more coordinated in people with extensive training in meditation, an observation that may be linked to the heightened awareness reported by meditating monks (A. Lutz et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 101, 16369–16373; 2004).

[neuroscientist Fred] Gage says that what particularly impressed him was the Dalai Lama's empirical approach. "At one point I asked: 'What if neuroscience comes up with information that directly contradicts Buddhist philosophy?'," says Gage. "The answer was: 'Then we would have to change the philosophy to match the science'."

So far that hasn't been necessary.

StarStuffs: Physics & Consciousness

I just came across this site:

Star Stuffs: Physics & Consciousness.

Quantum physicists, neuroscientists, psychologists and mystics have evolved to the point where a significant paradigm shift is happening. The universe is viewed as sympathetically connected, unifying, matter, energy and consciousness.

Physics unites the many mathematical principles and perhaps one day physics will merge with spiritual and religious principles. The gap is narrowing.

By the mere sample I've given here, it surely demonstrates the connection of the role of science and consciousness plays. It's an interweaving of basic fundamental processes. Science has everything to do with consciousness, it is One with it. There is no one place something "starts" and "ends". It is a continuum of the same. Just like there are not real defining lines of the dimensional levels. All is connected.

Psycho Spiritual Transformer

The latest edition of NeoFiles includes a conversation between Daniel Pinchbeck and R.U. Sirius. Here's an excerpt:

NF:What happens if 2012 comes around, the rent is still due, and another Bush is President? Are you exploring 2012 as a possibility or committing to it? Isn’t there a risk in hitching prophecy to psychedelic culture — the chance that it will go the way of Edgar Cayce or Ramtha? And the risk that people will engage in silly apocalyptic actions on the chosen day?

DP: One way or another, by 2012 we will know decisively whether or not there is any interesting or even possible future for humans on this planet. We are ruining and desecrating the biosphere at an incredible and unsupportable rate. The planetary ecology is crumbling at this point, as the climate disintegrates. When I wrote my first book and saw huge sections of the Amazon that had been destroyed, systematically, to extract enough oil, in most cases, to supply the US demand for 3 - 5 days each, I knew that it was curtains for this present system. We are already in the apocalypse, and most people are in an apocalyptic mode of consciousness — either narrowing themselves down into hellish corporate scenarios or freaking out and stuffing themselves with anti-anxiety meds to become functional robots. Those who are going to make it through the transition are those who remain calm, spacious, open, and maintain presence of mind. It seems to me that there is a lot of subliminal preparation going around with the mass interest in yoga and various forms of meditation. Ultimately, both the Apocalypse of hell and the “Golden Age” of unconditional love and compassion are states of mind — and that is what the present situation is making increasingly clear. As the Buddha said, “What you think is what you are.”

It is very interesting to me, of course, that Bush and his minions are themselves seemingly accelerating the apocalyptic prophecies of the Christian Fundamentalists. We are in a transition to a new form of consciousness. However, I see their perspective as regressive — regressing back into a tribal-magical consciousness — rather than progressing into a truly global, compassionate mindset that incorporates a deeper understanding of time, with a non-dualistic perspective on mind and matter.

What we are seeing right now are endless projections of the Jungian “Shadow” into our material realm. Having accepted that consciousness creates reality, my own perspective is that we are soon going to enter a harmonious and utopian situation on the Earth. That seems to me to be strictly logical."

Party People at the End of Time

As a perceptual organism embedded in 4 dimensions, I record existence. My recording range is only limited by the range of the senses. Whether memory is total or fragmentary I continuously receive and categorize data, tagging memories with associative relationships to smells, emotions, feelings, etc... and logging them into the holographic library of experience. Yet there is some evidence to suggest that the brain records everything that's perceived, filling huge volumes of memory with even the most minute details. Who knows what the storage capacity of the holographic brain might be but it surely dwarfs even the greatest giga-terabit computers. It may even be infinite.

The material world exists in 3 dimensions: XYZ. Each succesive dimension is coplanar with the prior dimension. They are coexistent in the same space. In other words, dimensions are additive and coincident - you can't experience one without all of those that precede it. Tipped on its side and rolled into motion, the 3-dimensional structure of matter is given a 4th dimension: Time. Again, all 4 dimensions exist simultaneously and isotropically. Time is meaningless without form.

The 5th dimension exists, no doubt. String theory suggests there are 11 dimensions - 7 more intepenetrating our own 4. Our senses are simply limited and don't perceive these other layers or modes of reality. As all higher dimensions are simply extensions of the previous levels, the 5th dimension would be additive to our currently perceived world. It might be the ability to move effortlessly through time. Or perhaps the capacity to manifest imagination directly into being. But it would not negate our current frame of reference. It would merely expand it.

And as the dutiful recording devices we are, as our senses expand to perceive higher dimensions, we'll record them, witnessing the evolution of creation and archiving the data into the universal mind. We, and all conscious beings, are literally the eyes of the world. We are the witnesses of creation. The astounding miracle of life unfolds before us as we give it context, meaning, and mythology.

The argument of reincarnation lends a certain persistence to the vast catalog of data comprising the collective experience of creation by conscious beings. Postulating reincarnation invokes a degree of immortality, or at least a sort of read-write access to the Akashic Record. Our recorded experiences would surely include our identities and selfhoods down to our deepest, darkest fears and desires. Although such demons might be shadowy and amorphous, nothing escapes the psyche. And yet it would seem foolish (or at least extraordinarily liberal for a thermodynamically conservative universe) to exterminate the data of history with the entropic decay of the corporeal body. Either the camera moves from one incarnation to another, or the records lie somewhere more fundamental and eternal than simply within our ephemeral minds. Perhaps in the deep recesses of our internal holographic memory banks lies the quantum plenum, s