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Often on our quest for knowledge we forget that we don’t actually know anything with certainty. Why is that? What could be missing from the equation? This week, we hash it out with our favorite returning doctor, Tyler Kokjohn.Visit Tyler on his blog! Click here.
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A human being is an amalgam
A human being is an amalgam of Matter,Life, Mind, and Spirit. As an amalgam, they all interact, the laws of one effecting the others, yet their laws are also distinct, growing more subtle and plastic above Matter. Science at present deals mostly with matter, and attempts to modify the others, particularly Life and Mind, with Matters laws. But the laws of Life and Mind are higher than those of Matter, so only an inexact and unpredictable control can be imposed. This is why drugs such as antidepressants have an unpredictable and inexact effect.
The above theory leads naturally to the speculation that perhaps a more wholistic approach to intervention would be more effective than any one in isolation, for example, therapy in combination with antidepressants, in an attempt to direct and channel whatever physical effects of the antidepressants more directly towards the desired goal. I also wonder if drugs developed for Altzheimer’s/dementia could have their effects enhanced by developing some kind of brainwave biofeedback exercises to be used simultaneously, with the combination being more effective than any one in isolation.
BTW I believe the placebo effect is one example of the law of Mind over that of Matter; a pure belief, un-interfered with, resulting in a demonstrable change in matter. The positive outcome demonstrates the superior law of Mind over Matter, the fact that the process begins with a material substance demonstrates the interaction between, or interdependence of, the differing levels.
Jeremy, I’ve also been
Jeremy, I’ve also been somewhat obsessively tuned in to the media coverage of the Trump Imbroglio/political train wreck. While I don’t fear we’re in any greater peril than we were already in since we’ve been in this materialist/atomic/hegemonic age (which is peril enough aplenty), it’s a fascinating revelation of the under belly of the subjective interpretation of good and bad and the deep, anti-intellectual roots of ideologies and their native conflicts with objectivity. This seems to me to be unique, not in its reality, but in its visibility, enabled mostly by a primitive, narcissistic mind occupying the world’s highest office, and as disheartening as it all may be, it may be bringing things out in the open, where they can be dealt with, instead of present yet hidden behind a veneer of respectability, where they have been for too long, protected from direct scrutiny, and the urgency to confront.
I’ve also taken notice of the ads, not so much for their content, but for their methods of manipulation. One technique in particular stands out as present in almost every ad regardless of specific content, the manipulative nature of which I think I can explain, but before putting it out there I’d like to ask anyone if they can guess what it is or have noticed it too. Anyone?
I had to laugh when Tyler
I had to laugh when Tyler mentioned Dr. Hynek and his infamous “swamp gas” explanation for UFO activity in Michigan back in 1966! The first time I ever remember getting seriously interested in UFOs was when I was a kid and read about the “swamp gas” incident in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. At the time I wasn’t very old, but I remember thinking that the explanation sounded pretty dumb, and didn’t quite explain all that those people alleged that they had seen. Years later, after lots of reading, research, and one of the all-time crazy science fair projects of all time (you’d be amazed what you can do with an old hubcap and Christmas lights! 🙂 ), I discovered that Dr. Hynek was actually a legitimate scientist and researcher that did the best he could with what he had to work with, and very little back-up from the Air Force and other scientists. I was in a local second-hand bookstore recently and found and purchased a very old copy of Hynek’s ‘The UFO Experience’. When I saw ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, I may have been the only person in the theater that clapped hands with delight when Hynek appeared near the end of the film. He was an astronomer and a skeptic, but he followed the bed crumbs and soon realized that something was going on way beyond ‘swamp gas.’
There was a great variety of topics in this interview, and I always enjoy Tyler’s laid-back style!
Steve44: There are so many things going on in those ‘ads’ that we typically mute them all when they appear, because we recognize what’s going on. Our favorite was a warning for some medication a couple of years ago that said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “… May result in the urgent need to go.” As my sweetheart and i have often joked, “Go where?” Besides the drug ads, the ones where they basically say that being a good person is not enough (one car manufacturer uses this one) or that we should all be entitled to more, more, more of whatever, and also putting ‘my’ in front of the product or company (MY Walgreen’s, for instance). Be aware, but mute, mute, mute…
As for Trump…’Trumps’- The Major Arcana of the Tarot and archetypes:
The Trumps are as follows:
The Fool
I – The Magician
II – The High Priestess
III – The Empress
IV – The Emperor
V – The Hierophant
VI – The Lovers
VII – The Chariot
VIII – Adjustment
IX – The Hermit
X – Wheel of Fortune
XI – Lust (The Passion)
XII – The Hanged Man
XIII – The Death
XIV – The Art
XV – The Devil
XVI – The Tower
XVII – The Star
XVIII – The Moon
XIX – The Sun
XX – Aeon (Judgement)
XXI – The Universe (World)
I get upset with Trump too, but a while back i got a different perspective when I began to view him as ‘The Trickster’ (The Fool) and in the flesh. He is reflecting back to all of us the worst part of ourselves, so how do we deal with that? If we lash back with hate and anger, or think he is just great, makes no difference. We should be going deeper than that, because either side is extreme. He’s full of surprises, each and every day, and is also the King of High Drama. Do we really want to be a part of that? If ever a human being was put here to help us examine our deep truths and the things in life that are truly important, it has to be this man, as infuriating as he may appear.
One last thing: Last night I read this from a paragraph in Stephen King’s ‘Wolves of Calla’:
“How wonderful, how strange. Potentially deadly as well, of course, but she had come to learn that also had its charms. It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.”
I read, and re-read that paragraph about 4 times, because so much was packed into it, and so simply stated. It got to the heart of so, so much of this reality…
Hi Cosmic, well, there
Hi Cosmic, well, there doesn’t seem to be much interest in my ‘adservation’, but having mentioned it I don’t want to leave it unsaid, so here goes:
I’m sure everyone’s heard that in times of great stress, such as physical danger, Time seems to ‘slow down’; our brains seem to shift into a sort of heightened awareness, I suppose to give us the best chance of reacting effectively. Here’s the trick: almost EVERY commercial depicts scenes in slow motion, either partially or completely. This, I believe is an attempt to ‘mimic’ the brains state of heightened awareness, in order to ‘trick’ it into giving the scene increased impact and importance, even though it warrants neither.
Also, I like your perception of the Trickster element in Trump, I think it has merit, though I’m not sure what the consensus will end up being: Trickster or just Clown.
Hi Steve, you may want to
Hi Steve, you may want to read the following article, or at least the discussion at the end…
The-Effects-of-Slow-Motion-on-Viewers-Emotional-and-Cognitive-Processing
http://www.scribd.com/mobile/document/6482164/The-Effects-of-Slow-Motion-on-Viewers-Emotional-and-Cognitive-Processing
Here is an extract…
“…One interpretation may be that slow motion impacts control processing in viewers. Slow motion may change perception of the currently occurring events as more important. As slow motion unfolds, audience may also raise expectation of the next events to be more interesting. Thus, audience put more efforts to absolve the information over time.
Against prediction, slow motion didn’t seem to affect arousal in viewers. This is contrary to general belief in TV production that slow motion exaggerates emotion…”.
…however there are suggestions, of how audience arousal might be increased, but these are outside the scope of this study.
Thanks Sherbet! It’s
Thanks Sherbet! It’s difficult to follow completely because it’s so densely packed with technical jargon, but it seems to contain some support for my theory though it’s difficult to derive singular conclusions. One thing I got from it is that it enhances cognitive responses more so than emotional ones, and where it does effect emotions it does so more with negative ones than with positive.
All of this makes sense if we refer back to the natural mechanism which, in my theory, this ‘imitates’, but which the article did not address; the brains response to a physically threatening situation. It would make sense to enhance cognitive, rather than emotional functioning since the former is what’s needed most in dangerous situations, even though they may be inherently emotional as well, and the enhanced negative emotional response over the positive may simply be a referral back to why the mechanism developed in us in the first place, to deal with physical danger.
One commercial is
One commercial is particularly insidious. We now mute it immediately. It is for a particular vehicle, and it basically says things like being a good husband, father and person is not enough, and it is about being a “pro”. This is exactly the kind of brain-washing and messaging that feeds the fire of the angry, disgruntled, and disenfranchised Americans. We are allowing big business to define who and what we are and what is important in life. It doesn’t even bother to be subtle.
Steve44: Clowns are tricksters too, and most children are frightened by them… http://listverse.com/2017/02/10/10-psychological-reasons-why-people-are-afraid-of-clowns/
Thanks Cosmic, such a mindset
Thanks Cosmic, such a mindset is intimately associated with the motivation of our culture – expansive consumption. The importance of being ‘good’ is acknowledged, but being ‘great’ is a step higher in the accepted hierarchy of ‘self-actualization’, and while a conflict between the two is not acknowledged or even necessarily believed in, our economic and social structures tend to give more importance to and support of the latter; ‘goodness’ is thought to be a more private, interpersonal trait, and therefore is seen to have a more limited circle of influence, whereas ‘greatness’ is seen to be more universally recognized, accepted, and perhaps even more easily attainable because of its distance from moral ambiguity. Individual goodness is admirable, but its ultimately ‘nobody’s business’, whereas individual greatness is both the engine and the product of our “great” consuming society, which, as it turns out, may not be so much self-sustaining as self-consuming…
The clown article was interesting and I agree its an artifact more appropriate to an earlier period in our culture when we felt less threatened by the ‘unknown’, a period where we were much more sure of ourselves materially, morally, and spiritually than is allowed in the present time. Of course, that surety was really naively superficial and could not and should not have persisted.
Cosmic, another ‘adservation’
Cosmic, another ‘adservation’ which is widely used and obvious in its subterfuge is the phrase “That’s why there’s XXX” as if products arise naturally out of the void in order to solve our problems. It’s the advocacy of an unquestioning and uncritical attitude as proper which is insidious, if not ridiculous. So…hopefully desperate.
If everything is connected,
If everything is connected, how can there be a superior point of objective view? The only way to look at everything objectively then would be from the outside, and there be may no outside. There is just zero. You maybe can’t put yourself in that privileged position. The myth of objectivity is that we can see the world completely, in its true form. But if everything is subjective and ultimately connected, how can we veritably spy on ourselves? That may be the reason why it is so hard to see what one is doing (otherwise known as being too close to the problem) and therefore we need help from another person to give perspective. But if literally everything is connected, and the outside does not exist, there is no other by which to view ourselves. Or, it is possible we use non-existence to truly see ourselves, and consciousness and non-existence are part of the same system. What non-existence means is therefore the place from which we can objectively view ourselves.
As for our connection to time, evolution in our universe is tied to time because we are waking up from a more static position to a more active position. Time and motion appear to be closely paralleling each other, according to our human perspective as stable bodies. However, in moments of extreme speed and transcendence, we completely detach from a static framework, moving into the timeless. Consciousness can accomplish that. We are meant to eclipse the current circumstance, that is why it is called “kundalini rising”. Taking DMT or using meditation are methods by which one can transcend the static condition that exists as part of the darkness. Using the light to transcend the dark, conscious enters into free flow, extricating itself from limitations. Tension is released and resistance dissolves. The prison is the mitigating darkness that entraps us in cycles and locations. Cancelling out the influence of the darkness removes time from the equation. It is one of the functions of Art to move us out of our usual sphere of consciousness, into a timeless state that expands our notions of reality.
Looking around, we see
Looking around, we see universal subjectivity, but to assume that the only ‘objectivity’ is therefore a non-existence, or in other words nothing else exists but subjectivity in its infinite forms and variations is not necessarily a logical conclusion. If what we mean by ‘objectivity’ is merely the opposite of subjectivity, but as available to our consciousness as the subjective, then it cannot be a non-existence, but instead must be an infinite consciousness, since the subjective arises out of limitation of consciousness.
Steve, I am talking about the
Steve, I am talking about the notion of nothingness. It is possible that non-existence is a form of consciousness that does not behave like normal consciousness. That is, it is absolutely unchanging, or “dead”. I call this the Invariant, the place where consciousness does not exist as motion. Similar to the idea of the involution you mentioned before. We may have decided to enter into the Invariant as spirits, that is what began the process of time unfolding in our Universe. Like Gods being “stunned in the stone”.The Big Bang explosion meant events did not happen simultaneously at once, but unfolded over incremental moments. We are on schedule to transcend the Invariant eventually, but for now it has a mitigating influence upon our motion, much like cold affects heat….it guides our evolution as well, acting as the basis for a parallel relationship with motion.
Hi Mace, I think we are
Hi Mace, I think we are talking, though with mental constructs, about the same truth. When you say we may have decided to enter the invariant as spirits, look what Sri Aurobindo said in ‘Savitri’:
“O mortal who complainst of death and fate,
Accuse none of the harms thyself hast called;
This troubled world thou hast chosen for thy home,
Thou art thyself the author of thy pain.
Once in the immortal boundlessness of Self,
In a vast of Truth and Consciousness and Light
The soul looked out from its felicity.
It felt the Spirit’s interminable bliss,
It knew itself deathless, timeless, spaceless, one,
It saw the Eternal, lived in the Infinite.
Then, curious of a shadow thrown by Truth,
It strained towards some otherness of self,
It was drawn to an unknown Face peering through night.
It sensed a negative infinity,
A void supernal whose immense excess
Imitating God and everlasting Time
Offered a ground for Nature’s adverse birth
And Matter’s rigid hard unconsciousness
Harbouring the brilliance of a transient soul
That lights up birth and death and ignorant life.
A Mind arose that stared at Nothingness
Till figures formed of what could never be;
It housed the contrary of all that is.
A Nought appeared as Being’s huge sealed cause,
Its dumb support in a blank infinite,
In whose abysm spirit must disappear:
A darkened Nature lived and held the seed
Of Spirit hidden and feigning not to be.
The eternal Consciousness became the home
Of some unsouled almighty Inconscient;
One breathed no more the spirit’s native air.
A stranger in the insentient universe,
Bliss was the incident of a mortal hour.
As one drawn by the grandeur of the Void
The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:
It longed for the adventure of Ignorance
And the marvel and surprise of the Unknown
And the endless possibility that lurked
In the womb of Chaos and in Nothing’s gulf
Or looked from the unfathomed eyes of Chance.
It tired of its unchanging happiness,
It turned away from immortality:
It was drawn to hazard’s call and danger’s charm,
It yearned to the pathos of grief, the drama of pain,
Perdition’s peril, the wounded bare escape,
The music of ruin and its glamour and crash,
The savour of pity and the gamble of love
And passion and the ambiguous face of Fate.
A world of hard endeavour and difficult toil
And battle on extinction’s perilous verge,
A clash of forces, a vast incertitude,
The joy of creation out of Nothingness,
Strange meetings on the roads of Ignorance
And the companionship of half-known souls
Or the solitary greatness and lonely force
Of a separate being conquering its world,
Called it from its too safe eternity.
A huge descent began, a giant fall:
For what the spirit sees, creates a truth
And what the soul imagines is made a world.
A Thought that leaped from the Timeless can become,
Indicator of cosmic consequence
And the itinerary of the gods,
A cyclic movement in eternal Time.
Thus came, born from a blind tremendous choice,
This great perplexed and discontented world,
This haunt of Ignorance, this home of Pain:
There are pitched desire’s tents, grief’s headquarters.
A vast disguise conceals the Eternal’s bliss.”
Gorgeous poetry. I think that
Gorgeous poetry. I think that non-existence is just another type of consciousness, albeit much different from standard consciousness. We may contain non-existence as part of our being, and life forms may gather around the Invariant in order to derive sustenance from it. Whereas the light has a source, darkness also has a source.
Hi Mace, I quoted the above
Hi Mace, I quoted the above passage because I see several parallels in it to what you’re saying, such as our spirits entering the invariant, and its association with the beginning of Time. According to Aurobindo, the inconscience is fundamentally the Infinite Consciousness but deliberately disguising itself in order the play the Cosmic Game. There are two elements necessary for the Cosmic Game: the Inconscience as the ground or foundation, and our spirits’ willingness to enter it and play the role of individual souls within it, which is what is referenced in the above passage. If you’ve never read ‘Savitri’ it’s an epic poem Sri Aurobindo wrote over many years as part of his spiritual practice. It is over 700 pages long. He claims it did not originate in his mind, but from higher planes, and as his consciousness developed and he was able to go higher, he revised and added to it to reflect that. It’s well worth reading.
From a recent essay: energy
From a recent essay: energy events are either perceived as separate, or united. When we manage to successfully unite events, time is simultaneous, as a confluence. When we perceive them as separate, time passes incrementally. The difficulty in seamlessly uniting the parts may be the entire problem. How the pieces of the puzzle fit together is therefore the dilemma. We get distracted, fail to see how the parts fit together, and therefore observe time as passing sequentially. We have moments of unification, where time appears to slow down and is closer to simultaneous, but these are probably infrequent. As we age, time passes more quickly because the two hemispheres of the brain begin to separate, there is therefore less connection between the two halves. When we are younger, unification is stronger between the two halves, as evidenced by the corpus callosum, the interlink between left and right hemispheres in the brain. Time passage is a processing problem, uniting seemingly disparate entities enables simultaneous time to manifest. Once the puzzle pieces are united, incremental time evaporates. Everything may be connected ultimately, but just what this may be is so far unknown to us. An “intelligence deficit” problem. How the parts fit together is complicated.
I would say that different levels of the chakras correspond to differing energy events. Once the chakras are successfully united, time ceases to pass. Our perception that time passes from past to present to future may be because how the puzzle pieces fit together eludes our comprehension (the true context of events may literally go over our heads, passing us by). Energy from the exposure to energy events are then stored in the brain for processing, where sleep irons out the differences during slumber. Sleep is a reset, where energies in the brain and consciousness are dumped into a confluence (which is why dreams seem so strange) for unification.
If we begin to illuminate how energy events interconnect, we can approach the unification problem like an engineer, knitting together apparently disparate entities so they are united. Energy events are specific subtle niches, like quantum packets of energy.
I’ve seen how energy can be unified in a singularity. All the parts and how they corresponded to each other was revealed.
Take the subject of remote
Take the subject of remote viewing. Our bodies may believe in the existence of time, but our minds can see reality from a larger perspective, where light has already cancelled out the darkness. We simply know this on an unconscious level and we can apply this knowledge, using remote viewing techniques or psychic abilities. Where everything is connected, light has cancelled out darkness, therefore time ceases to exist.
This shows that our
This shows that our consciousness is not bound BY its subjectivity as much as bound TO it for a specific period of time and for a specific purpose. When you say light canceling darkness, isn’t it synonymous with consciousness withdrawing from its ‘habitual’ subjective point of view, to a larger, if still subjective point of view? If so, then the ultimate or non-subjective point of view must be possible.
Well, simply from a smaller
Well, simply from a smaller and ignorant point of view to a larger and more complete view, yes. But these are both part of everything being connected. I mention nothingness as something distinct from normal consciousness, in certain regards. However, if non-existence and consciousness are connected as well, there may be no outside to that. That’s all, that’s everything, the end.
Non existence may be a mirror of sorts, by which we can perceive ourselves fully. If we see ourselves from the point of view of non-existence, we avoid tampering with our state of being. Thus, we detach from one point of view to see it clearly.
With everything being connected, this creates a difficult scenario that may be very perplexing. That’s why non existence may be an invaluable tool by which to perceive the state of everything being connected at once, without messing with it while observing it. The hallmark of consciousness is direct, active interaction, consciousness influences and interacts with other forms of consciousness. Non existence does not actively interact. It does not change due to the impact of consciousness.
I also posted this under
I also posted this under ‘Insight’, but feel I should also post it here:
Last night was highly strange and not a restful night. Of course, there is so much going on here in Texas that it is affecting us in unexpected ways.
I was having what felt like a dream, but that became very real and physical near the end. I was with various (unknown) people, and we were moving between dimensions and timelines, as if we were trying to correct something. i’m not sure what, but while in the middle of this, something woke me up. I immediately felt the lower of part of my body being morphed and shaped to fit through a very small space, and for want of a better term, a portal. The feeling in my lower extremities cannot be described, and the best that I can come up with is they felt like water, as I felt myself being pulled back out of the portal. This was physical and ‘real’, and it took a few moments for the vague discomfort to pass, and the rest of the night I did not sleep very well. VERY weird…
HOLY CATS, CL!
The reason i
HOLY CATS, CL!
The reason i did Jeremy’s show was on that specific premise. Where the spirit(traveling part of the soul) is taken and used in an energy ship like an anchor to traverse across realities to go adjust & repair. Seeing forward how the adjustments shake out. Then, the spirit is returned only moments after it was actually extracted!!!!
I feel better, thanks.
Oh, btw, as a fellow Texan, my mom, sister and her youngest son live in the Houston area. I hope the rain you got was just enough for the grass & flowers.
HG
Harley,
I know what you mean,
Harley,
I know what you mean, I’m pretty sure that I must have volunteered for this gig a long time ago. 🙂 I had another dream along the same lines back in June, and the night that I listened to the Hawaiian roundtable. I sent information about the dream to Jeremy the next morning, but I don’t think I ever mentioned here.
Here is a copy/past of my email to Jeremy:
I entered some comments about the Hawaiian round table on ‘The Experience’, but there is more that happened as I listened to the speakers, and after during dreamtime. Please feel free to run this past the round table members, because I would really like their take on my own experience.
As I listened to the discussion on ‘The Experience’ yesterday, that old Leon Russell song, ‘Back to the Island’, kept going through my head. If you are not familiar with the song, here is a link on YouTube (Let me know if it conjures up anything for you, because when I pulled it up just now and listened to it again after all of these years, I cried like a baby….Some deep, deep feeling there. That song never affected me that way when it was first released):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7MoZuP3JBo
Anyway, last night I had a very odd and lucid dream. The dream started with me standing on a small platform somewhere outside and in nature. I was vaguely aware of others around me. I started a ceremony that I thought of as ‘magic’ in the dream. While performing the ceremony, I felt tingly and electrical ( I was consciously aware of this in my real, physical body, as I lay in bed. It felt very real) Of course, I can’t be sure of how long this all really went on, but it felt like this dream went on for an hour or more. The ceremony that I performed was in 3 sections, and each of those sections had 3 steps that were to be performed, and in a certain order (Yes, I know. Sounds kind of Masonic!) When I was performing the last part of the ceremony, I suddenly felt a sharp slap on my back, that woke me up briefly. I remembered thinking at that point that my sweetheart may have hit me by accident as he slept. Once again, it felt fully real and physical. I also felt disappointed that I had been brought out of the dream, and thought it strange that the dream got shut down so quickly when my ceremony was so close to completion. In a flash, I had what seemed to be a remote view of a panel of people sitting around a large table. The man, who seemed to be in charge, told the others that he had to shut it all down because I had been attempting to change something in the past. I woke up completely at that point, and worse yet, I could NOT get back to sleep for the remainder of the night. I looked at my bedside clock, and I became fully awake a little after 3 AM.