Tag Archives: mind

Of Elephants and Belief

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Are Your Thoughts and Beliefs REALLY Yours? The Story of the Spotted Elephant

June 3rd, 2022

By Dr. Michelle KmiecGuest Writer for Wake Up World

To explain the concept of molding your thoughts and beliefs to someone else’s i of what is or isn’t, we must take a look at how our minds work when it comes to believing or not believing that something exists. Whether it is true or not. This is especially important today when most of us get our news stories in single sentence alerts, and from single sources that already align with your belief system. Of course, this is exactly how we hope science doesn’t work.

Many perceive the human mind is of finite boundaries. In other words, we must be able to see things in a tangible manner; in a way that the mind can perceive the information. (Of course, our minds are not finite, but the Scientific Method has not evolved to take that into account; at least not yet). We make it finite by putting any gathered information in some sort of order. In mental boxes or file cabinet so that we are able to understand the information that enters our senses. If we see something that doesn’t make sense, we can’t just allow it to be simply something that doesn’t make sense…we must make sense out of the nonsense.

How is this done?

By using previously gathered information, which at all costs must be explainable, repeatable, and tangible in order to be considered “real”. Never mind that this method excludes a multitude of existing information. Kind of like how important evidence can be thrown out of a court of law due to improper procedures.

But isn’t information and evidence still exactly what it is…information and evidence?

And what happens when there is the need to prove something that isn’t really based on our definition of what is deemed to be real or not? Well, there is a hierarchy of so-called credible people that we automatically trust to tell us when something is real or isn’t real. Let’s explore how this works by looking at the following playful example:

NEWS ALERT: The Little Orange Elephant With Bright Red Dots

A person claims that they saw a little orange elephant with bright red dots, no bigger than a mouse, walk by.

Okay, well, besides being extremely unfashionable with such coloring, this occurrence may be a bit hard for you to believe. But… what if it was your friend that had seen the little elephant? What would you think? Would you believe them? Well, if you are like most of us, you might be thinking your friend may have a small problem and should consider seeking some “professional” help!

And what if it was the homeless fellow living on the street that saw this little orange elephant? What would you think then? I would wager a guess that you’d be crossing to the other side of the street in a pretty fast sprint!

Now let’s say that the person who saw this unlikely creature was the very eccentric artist who is known for her imagination? Would this make a difference? We may think “how cute” it is that she, “thinks” she saw a little orange and red elephant and, by the way, not at all unusual given the character of this creative artist.

Now let’s say that it was an influential person, such as some credible scientist, who saw this little colorful trunk-nosed animal. What would we think now? This is where we begin to really break the rules of “what is,” or perhaps where the “what is” was created.

Most of us would still probably think that this scientist had inhaled a few too many chemicals in his lab, while a few of us may stroke our chins and wonder, “what if he did see this thing? I mean he isn’t just anybody…he’s a scientist after all!”

Okay, okay…are you still hanging with me because now it’s really starting to get good!

Now let’s say that at the most recent annual conference of the Nobel Prize winners (now THESE are the most credible, influential people on the planet, right?) EVERYONE saw this little orange elephant with bright red dots walking across the stage. (And I’m not even going to go crazy by saying the little elephant was dancing across the stage…he was just merely walking; because that’s more believable, right?) Of these highly regarded scientists, how many would admit they saw this little guy? How many would believe it was, perhaps, some sort of terrorist attack? And once word had gotten out, how many of us would be glued to the 24-hour sensationalist cable news channels?

“Did you hear about the alleged little elephant sighting? They said he had red dots!”

“Did this really happen?”

“Are there more little elephants roaming our cities, or was this the only one?”

“Maybe they are really little aliens disguised as orange elephants with bright red dots and they are going to take over the planet!”

You know there would be a series of point-counter-point interviews with “specialists” from various arenas—if you watch cable news channels, by now you realize that there are specialists for everything! Perhaps there is a Cryptozoologist (the study of unknown animals…a “pseudoscience” of course) and a Zoologist (the study of known animals…you know, “real” science) for a “balanced” debate.

NEWS Elephants

Or maybe there is another debate between a Republican strategist and Democratic strategist—after all, it is a known fact that most scientists, as well as most of the academia, are “demo” liberals and it would be just like them to come up with something wacky like this to take the public’s focus away from the real issues – so say their Republican counterparts!

So the bigger question here is…how many people would now believe this all to be true? That there indeed is a little orange elephant with bright red dots no bigger than a mouse running around out there…and it’s still on the loose! I would even bet that there would be an immediate creation of something like The Colorful Little Elephant Society (TCLES)—website, theme song and all!

So, as with anything abstract or “imaginary,” it can be difficult for most people to comprehend information presented in this fashion, even for many scientists! Up until now, we have been comfortable with the certainty of Newtonian Physics that tells us to neatly place everything that is considered “known” into solid theories which ultimately become universal laws. So this shows how the scientific method requires specific criteria in order for something to be proven as truth and classified as “real”.

But what about those people who have been healed from “incurable” diagnoses outside of the required criteria? What of those who have survived cancers (even stage 4) from “alternative” methods? What of those who have been cured of diabetes in only a few months? And what of those who have been totally healed through energy medicine—the most intangible form of health care known (or unknown) to man yet?

We are in the infancy stages of this new idea. Many call it new science, new age, quantum physics. But whatever the term used, the essence of this theory scares many who have relied upon what is considered “known”. And it is incomprehensible to those scientists who feel they must be able to “touch” it, record it and most importantly control it.

Imagine when the idea that our world was not really the center of the universe was presented to the scientists of that time. The confusion, even denial, they must have felt. How can we expand our mind and see what we “think” isn’t there, yet, “know” that it really does actually exist? There is a story that on their first encounter with the Europeans, the American Indians could not see the first strange ship as it approached their shores, mainly due to the fact that it was not in their psyche to recognize it. Perhaps the same may be said about UFO sightings.

Isn’t it possible that this can also be applied to medicine? I think yes!

We seem to always want to “box” up different concepts and then forever rely on these packages for all things that require an explanation. And just like we are reluctant to throw away the boxes we have carefully stored in our attics, we continue to allow ourselves to be buried deeper and deeper in our dogmatic box. We stand with such dogmatic arrogance and conviction that we even deny the possibility of new and different concepts simply because we find it impossible to “box” the “unboxable”.

So why would some of us believe that this little orange elephant with bright red dots does exist, while others simply refuse to believe it? What if it turned out that quantum theory proves that parallel universes do in fact exist and that for a few moments we saw an example of something that lives in another world—a world that simultaneously exists with our own.

If what we actually “know” to be true is in fact not true, where does this put our current beliefs and moreover, our strongly dogmatic position of what reality really is? 

Science, via quantum physics, has found that everything we believe to exist really doesn’t exist as we think it does. Based on that premise, how can we state with true conviction what is real and what is not? How can we continue to trust those few who are so entrenched in a medically dogmatic position, even when it is obvious that the system is not just broken, but is decaying from its very core?

Pop Quiz: What color was the little elephant? Did you remember the elephant as orange or did pink pop into your head first? If you thought orange, good for you! If you thought pink, then this is a perfect example of the power of dogmatic belief in action!

Originally published at onlineholistichealth.com and reproduced here with permission.

from:    https://wakeup-world.com/2022/06/03/are-your-thoughts-and-beliefs-really-yours-the-story-of-the-spotted-elephant/

Joseph P Farrell on Mind, Heart, & Memory

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DISTRIBUTED MEMORY: THE BRAIN IN THE HEART

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DISTRIBUTED MEMORY: THE BRAIN IN THE HEART

You may recall that yesterday I blogged about an allegedly successful experiment in the “freezing”, or at least, “extreme cooling” of a human being, and his or her successful “reanimation.” The key to the allegedly successful experiment was, you might also recall, the removal of the patient’s blood and its replacement by an “ice-cold saline solution.” And I speculated that the whole procedure, since it was performed with the consent of the government, might have had as a hidden goal to discover what happened to that individual’s consciousness while undergoing the “procedure.”  We may now also wonder if, indeed, the removal of the individual’s blood was part of my hypothesized “consciousness experiment”; was the individual’s own blood even restored to him or her? Or was it someone else’s?

We don’t know, because there was scanty information provided about the whole alleged success; we were told only that its performer, Dr. Samuel Tisherman, promises to deliver a paper on the whole thing in 2020.

But in that respect, there’s another odd story that was spotted by M.C., who is due a big thank you for sending it along:

Second Brain Found in Heart Neurons – Trust Your Gut Feelings

Now, this is not exactly new; I have in fact blogged about the unusual nature of this “heart-brain” idea before; neurons are not confined merely to the brain, but appear in the heart as well. There was, however, something that caught my eye in this article, and I rather suspect it’s what caught M.C.’s eye as well and compelled M.C. to send the article along; you’ll note that the article enumerates various cases of individuals who have received heart transplants, and whose behavior suddenly changes to embrace habits and behaviors associated with the donor of the heart. While the article does not mention them, similar experiences have been recorded for other types of organ transplants. One wonders if a similar phenomenon can be associated with blood transplants.

But in any case, what caught my attention in this article was this statement:

Neurologist Dr. Andrew Armour from Montreal in Canada discovered a sophisticated collection of neurons in the heart organised into a small but complex nervous system. The heart’s nervous system contains around 40,000 neurons called sensory neurites that communicate with the brain. Dr. Armour called it “the Little Brain in the Heart”. It has been known for many years that memory is a distributive process. You can’t localize memory to a neuron or a group of neurons in the brain. The memory itself is distributed throughout the neural system. So why do we draw a line at the brain? (Emphasis added)

This idea of distributed memory sounds a bit like a hologram, and the article quickly proceeds to try to avoid the unpleasant aspects of that by quickly trying to tie it all to good-old-fashioned-and-purely-materialistic speculations:

Other medical experts offer different explanations, but all agree that it is not so much mystical as it is science, and a science that needs further exploration.Professor Pr Paul Pearsall and Pr Gary Schwarz got together.

Professor Gary Schwartz says that “Feedback mechanisms are involved in learning. When we talk, for example, about how the brain learns, we talk about what we call neural networks in the brain. It turns out that the way a neural network works is that the output of the neurons feeds back into the input of the neurons. And this process goes over and over again. So long as the feedback is present the neurons will learn. If you cut the feedback, there is no learning in the neurons.”

The Mind is Not Just in the Brain

Dr. Candace Pert, a pharmacologist at Georgetown University believes that the mind is not just in the brain, but also exists throughout the body. This school of thought could explain such strange transplant experiences. “The mind and body communicate with each other through chemicals known as peptides. These peptides are found in the brain as well as in the stomach, in muscles and in all of our major organs. I believe that memory can be accessed anywhere in the peptide/receptor network. For instance, a memory associated with food may be linked to the pancreas or liver and such associations can be transplanted from one person to another”.

Now I’m all for feedback loops as I’ve talked about them in all sorts of contexts. And for that matter, the idea of the heart being part of a kind of “distributed brain” also appeals to me; for one thing, octopuses appear to have this type of structure to their nine brains. But more importantly, I’ve always been an advocate of the more ancient idea that human reason is not mere ratiocination, but incorporates and includes what the ancients would have called the passions, a deeper word than “emotions.” So it appeals to me for this reason as well.

But it’s that “distributed memory” idea and its “holographic” overtones that really appeals, for lurking deeply within that idea is the idea that memory is not local, existing or concentrated in this or that area of the brain, or the body. It rather as if what is implied by that idea is the opposite: that the body exists within a memory, and is imprinted with it like a psychotronic object. If it’s distributed, and non-local, then perhaps it’s also an indicator that the body, in order to be a body, is integrated at the quantum level, by quantum tunneling, perhaps, and that memory may be a function of this somehow. Whatever one makes of my speculations here, I strongly suspect that this idea of distributed memory means that those old Cartesian dualisms and epiphenomena are, like all over-simplified dualisms, going to go the way of the dodo bird, and that the relationship between the tangible physical body and the immaterial intangible world of things like memory are going to turn out to be far more complex than we imagined, and that those “feedback loops” between the two are the key.

See you on the flip side…

from:    https://gizadeathstar.com/2019/11/distributed-memory-the-brain-in-the-heart/

Changing Perspective

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The After-Effects of Awakening

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AwakeningSteve Taylor, Ph.D. – As a psychologist, I have been studying what I call “awakening experiences” for a decade, and have recently published (with a co-author) a new study of 90 such experiences in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology.

Awakening experiences are moments in which our awareness expands and intensifies. We transcend the worries that normally preoccupy us and feel a sense of elation or serenity. Our perceptions of the world around us become more vivid, and we feel a sense of connection to nature, other human beings or the whole universe in general. We feel a sense of love and compassion, and there is a strong sense that we have transcended a limited state, and that awareness has become more authentic than normal. At higher intensities of awakening experiences, we may even feel that we have lost our normal sense of identity and somehow become one with the whole world.

My research has found that there are three contexts that consistently show up as major triggers of awakening experiences. Around a third occur in situations of stress, depression and loss. For example, a woman described how she was devastated by the end of a seven-year relationship, “facing a suffering that I didn’t imagine could possibly exist.’” However, in the midst of this suffering, she “began to experience a clearness and connection with everything that existed…I was in a state of such pure happiness and acceptance, that I was no longer afraid of anything. Out of that depth arose such a compassion and connection to everything that surrounded me.”

The second major trigger of awakening experiences identified by my research is contact with nature. Around a quarter of the experiences take place in natural surroundings, apparently induced by the beauty and stillness of nature. People reported awakening experiences that occurred while they walking in the countryside, swimming in lakes, or gazing at beautiful flowers or sunsets. And the third most significant trigger of awakening experiences according to my research— with a similar frequency to contact with nature—is spiritual practice. This primarily means meditation, but also includes prayer and psycho-physical practices such as yoga or tai chi. The relaxing, mind-quietening effect of these practices seems to facilitate awakening experiences.

Enduring Transformation

However, perhaps the most significant thing about awakening experiences is their after-effects. Even though they are typically of a very short duration—from a few moments to a few hours—they frequently have a life-changing effect.

Many people described an awakening experience as the most significant moment of their lives, reporting a major change in their perspective on life, and in their values. In our 2017 study of 90 awakening experiences, the most significant after-effect was a greater sense of trust, confidence, and optimism. For example, one person reported that even though “that whole experience was brief, it left a little piece of knowing and hope. While I still was and am on a journey of self-reflection, it left me knowing that your inner truth is always there for you.” Another person reported that, “To know that it’s there (or here, I should say) is a great liberation.”

One person had a powerful awakening experience while suffering from intense depression during which she “felt the most intense love and peace and knew that all was well.” The experience only lasted for a few minutes, but in its aftermath, she found that the feeling of dread had disappeared from her stomach, and she felt able to cope again, which led to a new, positive phase in her life. As she described it, “I looked around and thought about all the good things in my life and the future. I felt more positive and resilient.” Another person described how her awakening experience “allowed me a glance into the other side and opened me to the knowing that I am never separate, alone, nor unheld.”

Such changes in attitude sometimes led to significant lifestyle changes, such as new interests, new relationships and a new career. Some people reported becoming less materialistic and giving up high-powered professional careers for a simpler, more altruistic lifestyle.

This shows that awakening experiences have a powerful therapeutic effect. They make us realize that the world is a much more benign and meaningful place than we normally perceive it to be. And once we have glimpsed this, it becomes a permanent reality to us. As the great psychologist Abraham Maslow noted – in relation to what he called peak experiences — ‘A single glimpse of heaven is enough to confirm its existence.’

from:    https://www.shiftfrequency.com/the-after-effects-of-awakening/

Accessing the Higher Self

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Our Higher Selves And The Cosmic Cycles

March 11, 2016

Our Higher Selves And The Cosmic Cycles

by Daniel Mitel
OM Times

Drunvalo Melchizedek explains to humanity in his last book, The Mayan Ouroboros, how the cosmic cycles come full circle and how this relates to our higher selves. Melchizedek’s book is a continuation of Serpent of Light, and recounts the spiritual guidance our native Mayan ancestors share with us.

I have received many questions from people all over the world regarding what is going to happen on January 2016 and the months or years after that. It seems the whole world is asking what is going to happen from the Mayan perspective.

Well the Mayans themselves do not know exactly what is going to happen; or when, exactly. We have learned from Drunvalo about a ‘window’ that opened in 2009 and remained open until 2016. Anytime after this period of time, we might have a massive change of energy and vibrations. But the question is not when, why, or what. The question is how we will go through this process.

In this period of time, the most important thing is the connection with our ‘higher selves.’

What is the higher self? The higher self is the fragment of God which dwells within humans. It is the absolute and unqualified assurance that humans can find God. Every human who is consciously or unconsciously following the lead of the higher self is living in accordance with the will of God. Consciousness of the higher self is consciousness of God’s presence.

The higher self is the absolute essence of an infinite being imprisoned within the mind and soul of a finite creature. It is the humans’ infallible compass through the cosmic cycles, always and unerringly pointing the soul God-ward:

  • Our higher selves are possessed with unlimited ability to communicate with us and they are doing it each moment. They are our spirits, pure spirits; presumably, absolute spirits. They are also pure energy. God is the source of pure energy and pure spirit, so his fragments would be both.
  • Our higher selves are helping us each moment to transform our human nature and temporal, creature selves into the divine nature of an eternal being. Our higher selves are particularly interested not just in our intellectual capacity but more in our spiritual perception. What is the potential of our souls and the spiritual capacity of receptivity.
  • Our higher selves understand our difficult assignments to live here in the third dimension. However, communication with the higher self does not automatically bestow ease of living and freedom from strenuous thinking. Although, such a divine gift could confer a sublime peace of mind and a superb tranquility of spirit.

In the coming months and years, when the energy of our Mother Earth will change, we need to connect with our higher selves. We need to go in our hearts and listen. Our higher selves will change our feelings of fear to unconditional love and peace. But they cannot do it mechanically; this is our task. Knowing how to go into the heart and stay there will make the difference when Mother Earth changes vibration to a higher level.

When it comes to marking the difference between what is really right or wrong (not merely what you may call right and wrong), you can be sure that your higher self will always participate in a definite and active manner in such experiences.

And remember that our higher selves are concerned not just for this life but for our future lives, too. They are interested in helping you here, and to also see you progress to the higher level of consciousness. As you may be a human parent, so your higher self the divine parent of the real you–your advancing self, your better spiritual self.

They are the unceasing urge that leads humans to attempt the mastery of the material and present existence in the light of the spiritual and future cosmic cycles. Our higher selves are interested in, and concerned with, our daily doings and the details of our lives, to the extent that these are influential in the determination of our significant, temporal choices and vital spiritual decisions, Hence, higher selves are factors in the solution of our problems related to soul survival and eternal progress.

The connection with the higher self is affected by our unsteady and rapidly shifting mental attitudes. The work of the higher self is greatly retarded by our own preconceived opinions, settled ideas, and long-standing prejudices. Because of these handicaps, we may have a slow connection with our higher selves, so confusion of concepts is inevitable. Therefore, safety lies only in prompt recognition of each and every thought and experience for what it actually and fundamentally is, without regard for our fear of what it might have been.

The higher self is not devoted to influencing our human thoughts. This is our exclusive personality prerogative. They cannot interfere with our believe patterns. They are dedicated to communicating with us and helping to improve, modify, adjust, and co-ordinate our thinking process. They are devoted to the work of building up spiritual counterparts of our career, of our true advancing selves.

Regardless of the year we are in the cosmic cycles or the change in the energy ,we must have faith and remember the difference between faith and belief. Belief fixates, faith liberates. Belief may become group possessions, but faith must be personal. Theological beliefs can be shared with a group, but faith can rise up only in the heart of the individual. Living faith does not foster bigotry, persecution or intolerance. The energy and vigor of faith is according to our knowledge and its striving is the preludes to sublime peace.

FROM:    http://in5d.com/our-higher-selves-and-the-cosmic-cycles/

The Healing Power of the MInd

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12 Stories To Make You Believe In The Power Of Your Mind To Heal You

October 2, 2015 

12 Stories To Make You Believe In The Power Of Your Mind To Heal You

by Dr. Lissa Rankin,

My book Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself is full of data scientifically proving that the mind can heal—or harm—the body. But data can be dry, and sometimes what resonates most deeply within our souls are stories. So sit back, grab a cup of tea, and let’s have story time. I’m going to tell you a few true stories that will demonstrate to you how powerfully the mind affects your physiology.

1. Mr. Wright

As reported by Bruno Klopfer in the Journal of Projective Techniques in 1957, Dr. West was treating Mr. Wright, who had an advanced cancer called lymphosarcoma. All treatments had failed, and time was running out. Mr. Wright’s neck, chest, abdomen, armpits, and groin were filled with tumors the size of oranges, his spleen and liver were enlarged, and his cancer was causing his chest to fill up with two quarts of milky fluid every day, which had to be drained in order for him to breathe. Dr. West didn’t expect him to last a week.

But Mr. Wright desperately wanted to live, and he hung his hope on a promising new drug called Krebiozen. He begged his doctor to treat him with the new drug, but the drug was only being offered in clinical trials to people who were believed to have at least three months left to live. Mr. Wright was too sick to qualify.

But Mr. Wright didn’t give up. Knowing the drug existed and believing the drug would be his miracle cure, he pestered his doc until Dr. West reluctantly gave in and injected him with Krebiozen on a Friday.

To his utter shock, the following Monday, Dr. West found his patient walking around out of bed. Mr. Wright’s “tumor masses had melted like snowballs on a hot stove” and were half their original size. Ten days after the first dose of Krebiozen, Mr. Wright left the hospital, apparently cancer free.

Mr. Wright was rockin’ and rollin,’ praising Krebiozen as a miracle drug for two months until the scientific literature began reporting that Krebiozen didn’t seem to be effective. Mr. Wright, who trusted what he read in the literature, fell into a deep depression, and his cancer came back.

This time, Dr. West, who genuinely wanted to help save his patient, decided to get sneaky. He told Mr. Wright—that some of the initial supplies of the drug had deteriorated during shipping, making them less effective, but that he scored a new batch of highly concentrated, ultra-pure Krebiozen, which he could give him. (Of course, this was a bold-faced lie.)

Dr. West then injected Mr. Wright with nothing but distilled water. And a seemingly miraculous thing happened—again. The tumors melted away, the fluid in his chest disappeared, and Mr. Wright was feeling great again for another two months.

Then the American Medical Association blew it by announcing that a nationwide study of Krebiozen proved that the drug was utterly worthless. This time, Mr. Wright lost all faith in his treatment. His cancer came right back, and he died two days later.

2. The Hexed Girls

As described by George Engel in the Annals of Internal Medicine, Baltimore Case Study Number 469861 was an African American woman born 22 years earlier on Friday the 13th in the Okefenokee Swamp near the Georgia-Florida border. She was the third of three girls delivered that day by a midwife who proclaimed that all three girls, born on such a fateful day, were hexed. The first, she announced, would die before her 16th birthday. The second would not survive her 21st. And the patient in question was told she would die before her 23rd birthday.

The first two girls died within one day of their 16th and 21st birthdays, respectively. The third woman, terrified that she would die on her 23rd birthday, showed up at the hospital the day before her birthday, hyperventilating. Soon afterwards, before she turned 23, she died, proving the midwife’s predictions correct.

3. The Blind Women of Khmer Rouge

As described in Anne Harrington’s The Cure Within, 200 cases of blindness were reported in a group of Cambodian women forced by the Khmer Rouge to witness the torture and slaughter of those close to them, particularly the men in their lives. Examination of these women found nothing physically wrong with their eyes. The conclusion those trying to help them came to was that by being forced to view the unbearable, “they had all cried until they could not see.”

4. Multiple Personalities With Different Health Issues

Anthony Robbin’s Unlimited Power : The New Science Of Personal Achievement describes a case of a psychiatric patient with a split personality. One of her personalities was diabetic, while another was not. Her blood sugars would be normal when she was in her non-diabetic personality, but then when she shifted into her diabetic alter ego, her blood sugars rose, and all medical evidence demonstrated that she was diabetic. When her personality flipped back to the non-diabetic counterpart, her blood sugars normalized.

Psychiatrist Bennett Braun, author of The Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder, describes the case of Timmy, who also had multiple personalities. One personality was allergic to orange juice, and when this personality drank orange juice, Timmy would break into blistering hives. However, another personality was able to drink orange juice uneventfully. If the allergic personality was in the midst of an allergy attack and he shifted back to the non-allergic personality, the hives would disappear instantly.

5. Stamatis Moraitis

Stamatis Moraitis was a Greek war veteran who was living in the United States when he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and told he had only 9 months to live. He was offered aggressive treatment, but after 9 doctors apparently assured him that it wouldn’t save his life, he decided to save his money, decline treatment, and move with his wife back to his native Ikaria, a Greek island where he could be buried with his ancestors in a graveyard overlooking the Aegean Sea.

He and his wife moved into a small house on a vineyard with his elderly parents, where he reconnected with his faith and started going to his old church. When his friends got wind of the fact that Stamatis was back home, they showed up with bottles of wine, books, and board games to entertain him and keep him company. He planted vegetables in a garden, basked in sunshine, savored the salty air, and relished in his love for his wife.

Six months passed, and not only did he not die, he was actually feeling better than ever. He started working in the untended vineyard during the day, making himself useful, and in the evenings, he’d play dominos with friends. He took a lot of naps, rarely looked at a watch, and spent a lot of time outdoors. At one point, 25 years after his diagnosis, Stamatis went back to the United States to ask his doctors what had happened. Apparently, the doctors were all dead. Stamatis finally died this year in Ikaria. He was 102 years old.

6. Anita Moorjani

In her book Dying To Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing, Anita Moorjani tells the story of how she was dying of end stage Stage 4 lymphoma when she experienced the classic “white light” near death experience many have described. As she traveled to the other side, she was able to look down upon her loved ones, even though some of them were not in the same room with her. Her heart was filled with a feeling of profound unconditional love, and she was happy to be free of her dying, tumor-riddled body.

Then she was told that she had a choice. She could stay in the white light and die, or she could go back and share her story with others. She didn’t want to come back. Her body had been in so much pain, and her soul had been suffering. But she was told that if she came back, her cancer would be cured. She believed what she was told, and felt called to come back so she could share her experience.

Anita’s cancer was gone within several weeks. This all happened under the care of her bewildered doctors, who documented her spontaneous remission. Anita is now on the Hay House speaking circuit with me, spreading the message that death is nothing to fear. I will get to hug her this weekend at Hay House’s I Can Do It conference in Pasadena.

7. Hope heals

As described by Dr. Bernie Siegel in Love, Medicine and Miracles, a chemotherapy regimen called “EPOCH” was being studied in a research protocol for efficacy. Most of the study centers were reporting consistent results—some benefit from the chemotherapy, but nothing earth-shattering. But one study center was getting dramatically better results, so the research team investigated. What were they doing differently?

Turns out the doctor in the center with better results had renamed the chemotherapy regimen. Instead of telling his patients they were getting EPOCH, he rearranged the letters and dosed them with HOPE.

8. Fake surgery heals knees

In an article in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Bruce Moseley, an orthopedic surgeon renowned for the knee surgeries he performed on people with debilitating knee pain, reported about a brilliant study he designed to prove that his signature knee surgery was more effective than others.

The patients in one group of the study got Dr. Moseley’s famous surgery. The other group of patients underwent an elaborately crafted sham surgery, during which the patient was sedated, three incisions were made in the same location as those getting the real surgery, and the patient was shown a prerecorded tape of someone else’s surgery on the video monitor. Dr. Moseley even splashed water around to mimic the sound of the lavage procedure. Then he sewed the knee back up without actually doing anything.

As expected, one third of the patients getting the real surgery experienced resolution of their knee pain. But what really shocked the researchers was that those getting the sham surgery had the same result! In fact, at one point in the study, those getting the sham surgery were actually having less knee pain than those getting the real surgery, probably because they didn’t undergo the trauma of the surgery.

What did Dr. Moseley’s patients think about the study results? As one World War II veteran who benefited from Dr. Moseley’s placebo knee surgery said, “The surgery was two years ago and the knee has never bothered me since. It’s just like my other knee now.”

9. Fake surgery heals chest pain

In the past, ligation of the internal mammary artery in the chest was considered standard treatment for angina. The thought was that, if you blocked blood flow through the internal mammary artery in the chest, you’d shunt more blood to the heart and relieve the symptoms people experience when they’re not getting enough coronary blood flow. Surgeons performed this procedure for decades, and almost all of the patients experienced improvement in their symptoms. But were they really responding to the ligation of the internal mammary artery? Or were their bodies responding to the belief that the surgery would be helpful?

On a quest to find out the answer, one study compared angina patients who got their internal mammary arteries ligated with patients who underwent a surgical procedure during which an incision was made on the chest wall, but the artery itself was not ligated. What happened? 71% of those subjected to the sham surgery got better, whereas only 67% of those who got the real surgery improved.

10. What you believe affects your life expectancy

Researchers in San Diego examined the death records of almost 30,000 Chinese-Americans and compared them to over 400,000 randomly selected white people. What they found was that Chinese-Americans, but not whites, die significantly earlier than normal (by as much as 5 years) if they have a combination of disease and birth year which Chinese astrology and Chinese medicine consider ill-fated.

The researchers found that the more strongly the Chinese-Americans attached to traditional Chinese traditions, the earlier they died. When they examined the data, they concluded that the reduction in life expectancy could not be explained by genetic factors, the lifestyle choices or behavior of the patient, the skill of the doctor, or any other variable.

Why did the Chinese-Americans die younger? The researchers concluded that they die younger not because they have Chinese genes, but because they have Chinese beliefs. They believe they will die younger because the stars have hexed them. And their negative belief manifests as a shorter life.

11. Generosity is potent medicine

After 9 heart surgeries, Andy Mackie’s doctors had him on 15 medications, but the side effects made him miserable. So he decided to stop all his medications and spend his remaining days feeling as good as he could. His doctors said he would die within a year, so Andy decided to do something he had always wanted to do. He decided to use the money he would have spent on his heart medicines to buy 300 harmonicas for children, with lessons. And when he didn’t die the next month, he bought a few hundred more. Thirteen years and 20,000 harmonicas later, Andy Mackie finally passed away.

12. The mind affects hair growth

Thirty percent of patients who thought they were getting chemotherapy but were actually getting nothing but saline lost their hair. And bald men in the Rogaine trials who were getting nothing but sugar pills grew hair. Go figure.

Still Not Convinced? I have zero attachment to converting skeptics of mind-body medicine into believers. I’m just a curious scientist who can’t ignore the evidence that the mind is more powerful that we yet understand. If you’re curious like me, read more evidence of the mind’s power to heal the body in Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself or watch my Public Television special Heal Yourself: Mind Over Medicine (watch the trailer and check listings here.

from:

On Brain & Mind

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The Nature Of Mind And The Holographic Brain

https://i1.wp.com/themindunleashed.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/minddd.jpg?w=584
By: Brandon West

What is the true nature of mind, and what is the real function of our brains?

The purpose of this article is to provide evidence that strongly indicates that you are not your brain, or your body for that matter, and that the nature of mind, of memory, and of our brains may actually be vastly different than we have been lead to believe.

Since time immemorial, man has been fascinated by the mind, leading great thinkers from Hippocrates to Descartes to ponder the nature of mind with wonder. Fast forward to modern times and observe how the mind is still revered and is dominating our culture. We have a lot of firm beliefs about the nature of mind, and I believe the ego – our limited perception of ourselves – and thus human ignorance, is intricately tied in with these beliefs.

But the truth of the matter is that we only understand a fraction of the minds potential, i.e. it’s capability of rote memorization and other analytically orientated functions, and we use even less.

We know hardly anything about the brain let alone the nature of mind. Is it possible that we are missing crucial aspects of its function and entire areas of development and potential that simply slide under the radar because they are not accepted by modern thought?

In this article we will explore the idea that the brain itself, with its tissue and neurons that we have until now deemed the source of our thoughts and identity, is actually just a tool, a receiver of human intelligence and consciousness, but not its source; and that the human mind is not sourced in the brain any more than the internet can be found in your laptop or your modem.

“My brain is only a receiver. In the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.” – Nikola Tesla

Projected Memory on the Screen of Consciousness

To begin I would like to delve into the work of a Canadian neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield. Through his work with epileptic patients spanning from the 1930′s into the 1970′s he found that “stimulation of the human cerebral cortex with a gentle electrical current sometimes awakens specific memories, at other times dreams.” His work gave him insight into the function of the brain, memory, mind, and the interactions between them.

(This information on Wilder Penfield’s experiments is from his lectures The Mechanism of Memory, and Some Mechanisms of Consciousness Discovered During Electrical Stimulation of the Brain unless otherwise specified.)

During brain surgery once the brain was exposed, he found that by using an electrode that produced a “gentle” electrical current, he could stimulate areas of the brain and get specific, repeatable, intriguing and often times simply fascinating results. The patients were kept conscious throughout the procedure so that the doctors could carry out a conversation throughout the operation and receive immediate feedback on the nature of the experience these electrical currents would produce.

In one case an area he stimulated caused a man to not only hear a piano being played, but also to see the man sitting in front of him playing the piano. In another case a boy reported seeing men sitting on a chair and singing, and in yet another case the patient heard a complete orchestra. In each of these situations the individuals involved didn’t see fleeting shapes of people, or the wisp of a song, but they saw the image as vivid and clear as if they were actually there in the room.

One woman even heard a song, which turned out to not even have been one of her favorite songs, being played when an area of her brain was being stimulated. When stimulated at intervals without her knowledge (because the brain has no tactile sensation), the same song began playing again from the exact same spot.

The sound was so clear and flawless that she mistook a device in the operating room as a musical device that they were stopping and starting at intervals.

In all cases the patients recalled the events not like you would commonly recall a memory, which is usually as a fleeting mental image, but rather in such explicit detail that it was literally like they were reliving the event in question. Some patients literally saw people in front of them, and heard them just as clearly as if they were actually there.

As Dr. Penfield phrased it, it was like the mind was able to “project a memory or a dream upon the screen of consciousness.” Moreover he found that when he stimulated the brains of individuals and they remembered something, an image, or sound, or a feeling, those memories were always accompanied by the thought processes that accompanied them at the time. Therefore our brains record sensory data as a whole unit.

Holographic Memory and the Nature of Mind

In my article the unified field and the illusion of time, we explored some evidence supporting the understanding that all information is encoded directly into the field – the energy density of space/time – all around us (which unfortunately is beyond the scope of this article). But if we apply that understanding to the perception going on in this circumstance when Wilder Penfield stimulated the brains of his patients, what occurred was that his patients seemed to have perfect recall of past events and in visual cases, 3D or holographic memory.

This is not normal perception.

What if the stimulation of the brain itself caused his patients to project their memory onto the field? Or what if that information was already present in a holographic sense meaning that those images, and those songs and memories were encoded within the field, possibly recording directly into the field by the brain itself, and the stimulation by chance allowed them to perceive the memory directly in the field?

This not only suggests the possibility of holographic memory in human beings, but a very different understanding of memory itself (which we shall explore later).

The other thing that is interesting is that the events which were brought back were entirely mundane, meaning they were generally ordinary events of no significance. This suggests that our brains actually record every detail of our lives, even the mundane and ordinary, and that they are accessible to us if we could figure out how to access it, or in other words, how to tap into the full potential of our minds.

Wilder Penfield himself remarked that if the brain was indeed recording all of experience, then it is only natural that when dipping into this massive archive of information and memory that we happen upon ordinary events considering the vast quantity of information recorded in our lifetime (from How To Know God by Deepak Chopra).

In Deepak Chopra’s book How To Know God, he also cites how Wilder Penfield noted that the brain even retains memory while dormant, such as the fact that when patients are under deep anesthesia during surgery, about one percent of the population has a recollection of what the doctors were saying, and even some details of the procedure. It is interesting that…

“Under deep anesthesia, there are practically no higher brain waves at all, making it impossible for the cerebral cortex to accomplish anything so complex as remembering what a surgeon is saying.”(How to Know God, p. 217)

This is one of the reasons why Wilder Penfield concluded after nearly 40 years of research that the mind was an entity separate from the brain, and which did not rely on the brain to function.

Who Is The One Doing The Moving?

Deepak Chopra in his lecture series with Wayne Dyer entitled Living Beyond Miracles tells of another of Wilder Penfield’s experiments where he is stimulating the motor cortex of a patient’s brain which causes the patient to raise their arm in front of them. If we were to ask the man if it is him moving his are, he would reply that ‘No, I AM not.’

But when Penfield asked him to move his arm to the side the patient could move his arm, and he responded with something akin to ‘I AM moving my arm’, or ‘now I AM moving my arm’. Who is this I AM presence who is doing the moving? And why is it not activated when the body is moving on its own?

If our brain is the source of who we are, then any stimulation thereof which resulted in motion should give us the perception that it is us who is moving, but as Deepak Chopra states, because that is not the case this is indicative that our brain is not who we are, that the brain and body is only superficially related to who we are, and that the brain most certainly is not the source of who we are.

Brain Tissue Is Apparently Optional

Removing a hemisphere. Evidence for the holographic brain concept, and that our brain is only a recorder of experience and not the source of the mind can be found in a study done by Johns Hopkins University (J.H.U.) where they worked with brain-damaged children. They found that they could improve their level of intelligence and physical coordination by removing the damaged hemisphere of their brain. In essence, they literally cut out the damaged chunk of the children’s brain.

Within our current understanding of the brain this operation should significantly damage, if not irreparably hinder the child’s ability for memory and cognitive functions. From conventional understanding all of the functions which that hemisphere of the brain took care of would no longer be implemented leaving the child mentally deficient, or fragmented in some form.

If memories are stored in the brain, then after this operation those children should have lost those memories pertaining to the removed portion of their brain … if memories are stored in the brain. Yet the results were astonishing, and once again defied conventional thought.

Dr. Eileen P. G. Vining of J.H.U. studied 54 of the children who underwent the operation and she was simply astounded by the “retention of memory, and by the retention of the child’s personality and sense of humour.” A new version of the study was published in 2003 by John Hopkins University that dealt with 111 kids who had the operation between 1975 and 2003. Out of these 111 children 86% of them were seizure free or no longer needed medication (David Wilcock, The Source Field Investigations).

The mystery of hydrocephalus. For more evidence we move towards the work of Dr. John Lorber who is one of the world’s top experts on the condition known as hydrocephalus. Hydrocephalus is due to a problem with the flow cerebral spinal fluid which surrounds and cushions the brain, and when there is a blockage in this flow the pressure within the individual’s cranium is increased. Hydrocephalus means literally “water on the brain,” and brain swelling in this case leads to an oftentimes dramatic compression of brain tissue.

Dr. Lorber studied a total of 253 people with this condition. In the most severe cases, the pressure in the brain would increase to such a high level that the brain tissue would be compacted leaving the patient with only a fraction of their original amount of brain tissue. In Dr. Lorber’s study 9 people reached this severity with around only 5% of their total brain tissue left. That means only 5% of their neurons, brain cells, synapses, and so one were available in the patient’s brain.

Amazingly 4 out of 9 of those people with less than 5% of their brain tissue had an IQ over 100, and 2/9 had an IQ greater than 126. In other words 66.6% of them were fine. Given the drastic loss of brain tissue the obvious question is how is this possible? How can someone with almost literally no brain be intelligent at all, let alone above average?

Dr. Lorber was directed to a student at his university by his peers, literally based on the intriguingly large size of his head, they thought he may be of potential interest. This student had an IQ of 126 and had a “first-class honours degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal.”

A brain scan was done on this individual with surprising results. It was found that out of the normal 4.5 cm of brain tissue, his condition had been compressed to only a few millimeters. In other words his head filled with cerebral spinal fluid, and only a few millimeters of brain tissue, yet he was still high functioning with above average intelligence (David Wilcock, The Source Field Investigations).

I have no technical understanding of how this is even possible except to simply suggest that possibly the conductivity and crystalline nature of water may be a contributing factor. Yet what this should clearly illustrate that we know very little of the true nature of mind, or the brain. Both of these once again demonstrate that the mind is independent of the brain.

The Nature of Mind-Brain Connection

This evidence raises some important questions:

What is the real function of our brains? Is it the brain tissue itself that creates our intelligence, or is it the electrical and conductive nature of the brain that allows us to connect to intelligence? More or less like a sophisticated antennae, just like Nikola Tesla observed of himself early in the 20th century.

All of this information so far creates a lot of friction with the current propagated understanding of the brain, if it doesn’t debunk it altogether. The information that Penfield discovered is suggesting that our brains are independent of our minds, and that all our memories are recorded in their entirety, and with the same detail that we experienced them. From where we do not yet know.

I also suggest that this is evidence that we have the potential for holographic memory. This hypothetically is a possible function of our minds where our memory is projected powerfully onto reality (onto the screen of the universal consciousness) so that we can experience and relive our memories in 3D. After all, this is what Wilder Penfield’s patients experienced.

As Johns Hopkins University, and John Lorber’s research found, it may not be that our brains are really that important. If children can have half their brains removed and retain their memories and personality, and if people can function with less than 5% of their brain tissue with above average intelligence, then what is the true purpose of the brain but as a vehicle for intelligence, not as the source of intelligence?

Like a highly sophisticated bio-technology that we use to experience this level of reality, create reality, and express ourselves. Like in the movie Avatar, maybe we are not actually our bodies but are just operating them.

Is our brain really where memories are stored? There is actually no evidence to support that even our memories are stored in the brain, and never has there been a memory discovered in the brain. This is because our brains are constantly changing and are not fixed structures.

The evidence is finally lining up with ancient spiritual truths from every culture which expressed explicitly that we are divine, and that our true nature is conscious awareness, and that we are merely a fragment of that divine consciousness expressed in physical form.

Conclusion

We may be vastly underestimating the power of our minds, and our true abilities to use them. If our minds can remember entire songs to perfection or orchestral performances that we only heard in passing then what is stopping us from accessing this on a conscious level?

It seems that every single detail of our lives is recorded with our brain, so the question I have is how do we access that information, and from where do we access it?

This evidence provides a truly exciting shift in the way we can view our minds, and more importantly our potential. If an electrode in our brain is able to stimulate such vivid recollection, is it not possibly that we can develop our imagination and our mental abilities to this point naturally so we can use that ability at will?

Is it not possible that there is much more going on during a simple thought process or recollection of an event than we give ourselves credit for? That is exactly what Wilder Penfield found which caused him at the end of his career to see the nature of mind as a field of energy or information which Deepak Chopra (I believe) termed the ‘mind-field’.

What if your essence is not in your brain, or in your body, but in a formless field of energy?

About the Author

Brandon West is the creator of Project Global Awakening. A website dedicated to the research of a variety of scientific and spiritual disciplines, and applying that knowledge to help you live an inspired life and change the world. Follow Project Global Awakening on Facebook, and Twitter.

from:     http://themindunleashed.org/2015/01/nature-mind-holographic-brain.html

On Losing Your MInd

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How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One

How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One

20th July 2014

By Katrin Geist

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

Breaking the habit of being yourself requires – dare I say it? – discipline. Daily discipline. And once you embark on it, it’s the most wonderful process in the making. It is exciting and fun, and it becomes easier and easier with every time you practice, just like training a muscle. You do indeed create your life! You’re in the driver’s seat, entirely. And if that’s not great news, I do not know what is! You absolutely have the power to change your life in any way you desire. You create your life every day, with volition or without, on a nerve cell/brain structure and thought/quantum level.

So why not actively create your life, instead of mostly running in automatic-reactive-survival mode? Why wait to change your life until crisis hits? A crisis can be a great catalyst – yet we’re free to choose change now. So why not create out of joy instead? We all can. And lasting change is not only possible, it is fun to set in motion. The following article shares ideas from a fabulous book by Dr. Joe Dispenza (see review below).

Interacting with the quantum field

Nobody is doomed by their genetic makeup or hard wired to live a specific way for the rest of their lives. YOU mold the clay that is the quantum field, and you do so by aligning your thoughts, feelings and actions (refer to my website for more information on the quantum field, or ‘the field’ for short).

Says Dr. Joe Dispenza, successful chiropractor with postgraduate training and continuing education in neuroscience, biochemistry, brain function and memory formation:

“You… broadcast a distinct energy pattern or signature. In fact, everything material is always emitting specific patterns of energy. And this energy carries information. Your fluctuating states of mind consciously or unconsciously change that signature on a moment-to-moment basis.“

In essence, we influence the quantum field through our Being-states (and not only through what we want).

Vision and creative mode

A brain region called the frontal lobe plays a key role in envisioning the life you desire. Ask yourself: Who do you I see myself as? How do I show up every day? What would I choose as my predominant Being-state, and how much am I living it on a daily basis? What’s the greatest ideal of myself? Who do I want to be? What would I have to think and feel in order to express that? The clearer you see this, the faster you can change into it. The universal quantum law applies to finances as much as happiness, health and relationships. No exception.

If you can hold a vision regardless of what’s going on around you, you are in creative mode, i.e. you refuse to respond to any triggers in your environment, and you KNOW with 100% certainty that your vision must come, as it already happened in the quantum field.

This is exactly what we admire in great leaders: Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa, etc. Their vision made a difference. They refused to give in to circumstance, did not blame their spouse nor the weather – they did not suffer from ‘excusitis’. Holding a vision is a means to achieving a Being-state which transcends circumstance.

Mechanics of change and the art of ‘becoming familiar with’

Repetition is the mother of all skill – and it is what wires brain cells together to create new neurological pathways. Contrary to the paradigm I grew up in which said that brain cells cannot regenerate nor change, we know today that this is completely false. The brain is highly adaptive (neuroplasticity), and changes occur all the time. The moment you learn something new, your brain makes new connections. A long standing habit can be seen as a broad, very well trodden path, a super-highway where neurons fire when a habitual thought or behaviour triggers them. A new thought or behaviour (i.e. nerve cell circuit) becomes established through use.

The more you practice a new thought or behaviour, the better you get at it, just like training a muscle. Paying attention to where you want to go is key. Become aware of how automated (in terms of thoughts, feelings, and actions) your life really is. Keep what you like, and change the rest. Not all automated brain circuits are negative. Some of them are exactly what you want. Others are not. By withdrawing your attention (i.e. quitting to walk the established path) and thinking about how you would rather be (breaking into new territory and establishing a new path), you dissolve those old highways, bit by bit (they disconnect when focus is withdrawn). Self-love is when you respond differently to what you’ve practiced all your life.

In order to truly change, we must think greater than we feel. Remember your vision. If you have none for your life, develop one! Now. Not tomorrow… and it’s not about painting some grand picture of your life straight away (but feel free if this feels good to you now).

Instead, you can pick out single aspects and start with those. Know what you want, and then assume the corresponding Being-state. This is completely scaleable, i.e. you can expand your vision as you go. But start having one! Having no vision is like going to the airport saying: ‘I want a ticket’, or saying to a waiter: ‘I want food’. You’re going nowhere fast and nothing can come to you if you don’t specify what you would like, and expect it to come. Vagueness equals standstill. In other words, in the context of creating, it’s a no-no, and you must know your target.

If you truly can do this (thinking greater than you feel), you have mastered your life. That’s how big this short sentence really is. To envision means to see something into existence. It means to create something with volition and expecting to see it, without having any idea of the ‘how’. That step is up to the field and not your job. Your job is to hold the vision and feel its fulfilment. Your job is to become familiar with the feeling-states of your desires.

See it and rehearse it over and over, daily. This process rewires your brain (creating new and wanted super-highways, replacing the automatic old ones). By the way: the Buddhist definition of meditation is ‘to become familiar with’. Meditate on desired feeling states. Familiarize yourself to the n-th degree with them. Live as if. Until it is second nature. Or first. =)

Why we get stuck in repetitive patterns & how to overcome them

Mind is what the brain does. Psychologists tell us that c. 95% of our mind is subconscious. Yet it runs us, 24/7, 365. And that’s good! Because if we had to do it all consciously, good luck surviving even a single second, trying to orchestrate our some 50 trillion cells that constitute the body. Not to mention regulating heart beat, digestion, detox, breathing… our innate intelligence takes care of it all and frees us up to create consciously. A marvellous set-up.

Some unconscious patterns do not serve us. So how do we change them for good? This is the essence of the process Dr. Dispenza proposes, detailed further in his book (see below):

First step: make them known.

Second step: undo them and replace them with what you prefer.

Third step: practice the new state.

We have many unconscious patterns that we did not choose ourselves, i.e. they arose from our environment (parents, peers, culture, etc) at a young age and were accepted as true. If unchanged, they still operate. That is how people become stuck in repetitive patterns without knowing why.

Experiences and events in life produce emotions, which eventually dictate how we behave, unless we intervene. When you think negatively, you feel bad. Feeling bad gives rise to more negative thoughts, which result in feeling worse…do you see the cycle? Most of us are trapped in it, without ever questioning it, living a very reactive life with little room for creating the life we truly desire. Most people do not know how to do this, and that it’s even possible. And it is.

Our brain cannot distinguish between something we imagine, and something that is really happening. As far as the brain is concerned, it’s one and the same. So there’s little physiological difference between remembering a negative situation and actively being involved in one. In other words: every time you beat the drum of how bad it is (in response to an observation or a memory), you activate and reinforce those thought and feeling patterns. Eventually, they become automatic, and we forget why we emotionally react as we do – we just react. The perfect stuck state. And it leads to an identity we think is us. But is it? Of course not. A question worth exploring is: What have I memorized emotionally that I live by that I think is me?

In this automated state, the body becomes the mind: it knows exactly how to respond to a situation and just does it. A good example is driving a car. When you first learned it, you concentrated a great deal (making new neural pathways). And before too long, you habitually arrive at work, with the car seemingly driving by itself. Your body knows very well what to do. And yes, you take in traffic, etc. and respond accordingly. But it’s all well practiced and smooth, and you don’t think about it. When the body becomes the mind, we live in reactive, unaware mode. This is good for some situations, and not so good for others.

The power that you have is one of focus. You can change from a reactive state to a creative one by disconnecting the dots that produce a specific reaction. You do so by focusing on what you prefer instead. When thought becomes the experience, you’re there. When your vision is so compelling and so real you forget everything else, and it feels as if five minutes elapsed instead of three hours, then you’re a creative powerhouse.

We all have been in those situations. Whether it’s playing music, reading a great book, participating in an engrossing conversation – time just flew and we could have done it all day. Harness those situations by tagging them with a little intention for your life. The feeling state is perfect – add some directive thought and watch what happens. Mind and body must be aligned, i.e. thoughts and feelings must be congruent to effect real change.

To sum it up: what you think and feel today determines how you live tomorrow. Your thoughts and feelings are that important and potent. So why wait learning how to think and feel right? Learn how to dance with your thoughts. It’s fun!

I invite you to experiment with influencing the quantum field to your liking. Have FUN! And let me know your outcomes.

References:

Here’s the video”   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0JPunoP6Io

 

from:    http://wakeup-world.com/2014/07/20/how-to-lose-your-mind-and-create-a-new-one/

Consciousness & The Brain by Dr. Dossey

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Why Consciousness Is Not the Brain

Larry Dossey

Physicist Freeman Dyson believes the cosmos is suffused with consciousness, from the grandest level to the most minute dimensions. If it is, why aren’t we aware of it?

“We don’t know who first discovered water, but we can be sure that it wasn’t a fish,” the old saw reminds us. Continual exposure to something reduces our awareness of its presence. Over time, we become blind to the obvious. We swim in a sea of consciousness, like a fish swims in water. And like a fish that has become oblivious to his aqueous environment, we have become dulled to the ubiquity of consciousness.

In science, we have largely ignored how consciousness manifests in our existence. We’ve done this by assuming that the brain produces consciousness, although how it might do so has never been explained and can hardly be imagined.

The polite term for this trick is “emergence.” At a certain stage of biological complexity, evolutionary biologists claim, consciousness pops out of the brain like a rabbit from a magician’s hat. Yet this claim rests on no direct evidence whatsoever. As Rutgers University philosopher Jerry A. Fodo flatly states, “Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. So much for our philosophy of consciousness.”

In spite of the complete absence of evidence, the belief that the brain produces consciousness endures and has ossified into dogma. Many scientists realize the limitations of this belief. One way of getting around the lack of evidence is simply to declare that what we call consciousness is the brain itself. That way, nothing is produced, and the magic of “emergence” is avoided.

As astronomer Carl Sagan expressed his position, “My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings—what we sometimes call mind—are a consequence of anatomy and physiology, and nothing more.” Nobelist Francis Crick agreed, saying a “person’s mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make up and influence them.”

This “identity theory”—mind equals brain—has led legions of scientists and philosophers to regard consciousness as an unnecessary, superfluous concept. Some go out of their way to deny the existence of consciousness altogether, almost as if they bear a grudge against it. Tufts University cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett says, “We’re all zombies. Nobody is conscious.” Dennett includes himself in this extraordinary claim, and he seems proud of it.

Others suggest that there are no mental states at all, such as love, courage, or patriotism, but only electrochemical brain fluxes that should not be described with such inflated language. They dismiss thoughts and beliefs for the same reasons.

This led Nobel neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles to remark that “professional philosophers and psychologists think up the notion that there are no thoughts, come to believe that there are no beliefs, and feel strongly that there are no feelings.”

Eccles was emphasizing the absurdities that have crept into the debates about consciousness. They are not hard to spot. Some of the oddest experiences I recall are attending conferences where one speaker after another employs his consciousness to denounce the existence of consciousness, ignoring the fact that he consciously chose to register for the meeting, make travel plans, prepare his talks, and so on.

Many scientists concede that there are huge gaps in their knowledge of how the brain makes consciousness, but they are certain they will be filled in as science progresses. Eccles and philosopher of science Karl Popper branded this attitude “promissory materialism.”

“Promissary materialism is a superstition without a rational foundation,” Eccles says. “It is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists … who confuse their religion with their science. It has all the features of a messianic prophecy.”

The arguments about the origins and nature of consciousness are central to premonitions. For if the promissory materialists are correct—if consciousness is indeed identical with the brain—the curtain closes on premonitions.

The reason is that the brain is a local phenomenon—i.e., it is localized to the brain and body, and to the present. This prohibits premonitions in principle, because accordingly the brain cannot operate outside the body and the here-and-now. But consciousness can operate beyond the brain, body, and the present, as hundreds of experiments and millions of testimonials affirm. Consciousness cannot, therefore, be identical with the brain.

These assertions are not hyperbolic, but conservative. They are consistent with the entire span of human history, throughout which all cultures of which we have record believed that human perception extends beyond the reach of the senses. This belief might be dismissed as superstition but for the fact that modern research has established its validity beyond reasonable doubt to anyone whose reasoning has not clotted into hardened skepticism.

To reiterate a single example—the evidence supporting foreknowledge—psi researchers Charles Honorton and Diane Ferrari examined 309 precognition experiments carried out by sixty-two investigators involving 50,000 participants in more than two million trials. Thirty percent of these studies were significant in showing that people can describe future events, when only five percent would be expected to demonstrate such results by chance. The odds that these results were not due to chance was greater than 10 to the twentieth power to one.

One of the first modern thinkers to endorse an outside-the-brain view of consciousness was William James, who is considered the father of American psychology. In his 1898 Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard University, James took a courageous stand against what he called “the fangs of cerebralism and the idea that consciousness is produced by the brain.”

He acknowledged that arrested brain development in childhood can lead to mental retardation, that strokes or blows to the head can abolish memory or consciousness, and that certain chemicals can change the quality of thought. But to consider this as proof that the brain actually makes consciousness, James said, is irrational.

Why irrational? Consider a radio, an invention that was introduced during James’s lifetime, and which he used to illustrate the mind-brain relationship. If one bangs a radio with a hammer, it ceases to function. But that does not mean that the origin of the sounds was the radio itself; the sound originated from outside it in the form of an electromagnetic signal. The radio received, modified, and amplified the external signal into something recognizable as sound.

Just so, the brain can be damaged in various ways that distort the quality of consciousness—trauma, stroke, nutritional deficiencies, dementia, etc. But this does not necessarily mean the brain “made” the consciousness that is now disturbed, or that consciousness is identical to the brain.

British philosopher Chris Carter endorses this analogy. Equating mind and brain is as irrational, he says, as listening to music on a radio, smashing the radio’s receiver, and thereby concluding that the radio was producing the music.

To update the analogy, consider a television set. We can damage a television set so severely that we lose the image on the screen, but this doesn’t prove that the TV actually produced the image. We know that David Letterman does not live behind the TV screen on which he appears; yet the contention that brain equals consciousness is as absurd as if he did.

The radio and TV analogies can be misleading, however, because consciousness does not behave like an electromagnetic signal. Electromagnetic (EM) signals display certain characteristics. The farther away they get from their source, the weaker they become.

Not so with consciousness; its effects do not attenuate with increasing distance. For example, in the hundreds of healing experiments that have been done in both humans and animals, healing intentions work equally well from the other side of the earth as at the bedside of the sick individual. Moreover, EM signals can be blocked partially or completely, but the effects of conscious intention cannot be blocked by any known substance.

For instance, sea water is known to block EM signals completely at certain depths, yet experiments in remote viewing have been successfully carried out beyond such depths, demonstrating that the long-distance communication between the involved individuals cannot depend on EM-type signals.

In addition, EM signals require travel time from their source to a receiver, yet thoughts can be perceived simultaneously between individuals across global distances. Thoughts can be displaced in time, operating into both past and future.

In precognitive remote viewing experiments—for example, the hundreds of such experiments by the PEAR Lab at Princeton University—the receiver gets a future thought before it is ever sent. Furthermore, consciousness can operate into the past, as in the experiments involving retroactive intentions. Electromagnetic signals are not capable of these feats. From these differences, we can conclude that consciousness is not an electric signal.

Then what is it? My conclusion is that consciousness is not a thing or substance, but is a nonlocal phenomenon. Nonlocal is merely a fancy word for infinite. If something is nonlocal, it is not localized to specific points in space, such as brains or bodies, or to specific points in time, such as the present.

Nonlocal events are immediate; they require no travel time. They are unmediated; they require no energetic signal to “carry” them. They are unmitigated; they do not become weaker with increasing distance. Nonlocal phenomena are omnipresent, everywhere at once. This means there is no necessity for them to go anywhere; they are already there. They are infinite in time as well, present at all moments, past present and future, meaning they are eternal.

Researcher Dean Radin, whose presentiment experiments provide profound evidence for future knowing, believes that the nonlocal events in the subatomic, quantum domain underlie the nonlocal events we experience at the human level. He invokes the concept of entanglement as a bridging hypothesis uniting the small- and large-scale happenings. Quantum entanglement and quantum nonlocality are indeed potent possibilities that may eventually explain our nonlocal experiences, but only further research will tell.

Meanwhile, there is a gathering tide of opinion favoring these approaches. As physicist Chris Clarke, of the University of Southampton, says, “On one hand, Mind is inherently non-local. On the other, the world is governed by a quantum physics that is inherently non-local. This is no accident, but a precise correspondence … [Mind and the world are] aspects of the same thing … The way ahead, I believe, has to place mind first as the key aspect of the universe … We have to start exploring how we can talk about mind in terms of a quantum picture … Only then will we be able to make a genuine bridge between physics and physiology.”

Whatever their explanation proves to be, the experiments documenting premonitions are real. They must be reckoned with. And when scientists muster the courage to face this evidence unflinchingly, the greatest superstition of our age—the notion that the brain generates consciousness or is identical with it—will topple.

In its place will arise a nonlocal picture of the mind. This view will affirm that consciousness is fundamental, omnipresent and eternal—a model that is as cordial to premonitions as the materialistic, brain-based view is hostile.

Copyright © 2013 by Larry Dossey. All Right Reserved.

from:    http://www.phoenixregenetics.org/resources/dna-monthly/current-issue#consciousness

How Thinking Entraps

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15 Types of Distorted Thinking

distorted

Here are the 15 types of distorted thinking:

  1. Filtering: You take the negative details and magnify them, while filtering out all positive aspects of a situation. A single detail may be picked out, and the whole event becomes colored by this detail. When you pull negative things out of context, isolated from all the good experiences around you, you make them larger and more awful than they really are.
  2. Polarized Thinking: The hallmark of this distortion is an insistence on dichotomous choices. Things are black or white, good or bad. You tend to perceive everything at the extremes, with very little room for a middle ground. The greatest danger in polarized thinking is its impact on how you judge yourself. For example-You have to be perfect or you’re a failure.
  3. Overgeneralization: You come to a general conclusion based on a single incident or piece of evidence. If something bad happens once, you expect it to happen over and over again. ‘Always’ and ‘never’ are cues that this style of thinking is being utilized. This distortion can lead to a restricted life, as you avoid future failures based on the single incident or event.
  4. Mind Reading: Without their saying so, you know what people are feeling and why they act the way they do. In particular, you are able to divine how people are feeling toward you. Mind reading depends on a process called projection. You imagine that people feel the same way you do and react to things the same way you do. Therefore, you don’t watch or listen carefully enough to notice that they are actually different. Mind readers jump to conclusions that are true for them, without checking whether they are true for the other person.
  5. Catastrophizing: You expect disaster. You notice or hear about a problem and start “what if’s.” What if that happens to me? What if tragedy strikes? There are no limits to a really fertile catastrophic imagination. An underlying catalyst for this style of thinking is that you do not trust in yourself and your capacity to adapt to change.
  6. Personalization: This is the tendency to relate everything around you to yourself. For example, thinking that everything people do or say is some kind of reaction to you. You also compare yourself to others, trying to determine who’s smarter, better looking, etc. The underlying assumption is that your worth is in question. You are therefore continually forced to test your value as a person by measuring yourself against others. If you come out better, you get a moment’s relief. If you come up short, you feel diminished. The basic thinking error is that you interpret each experience, each conversation, each look as a clue to your worth and value.
  7. Control Fallacies: There are two ways you can distort your sense of power and control. If you feel externally controlled, you see yourself as helpless, a victim of fate. The fallacy of internal control has you responsible for the pain and happiness of everyone around you. Feeling externally controlled keeps you stuck. You don’t believe you can really affect the basic shape of your life, let alone make any difference in the world. The truth of the matter is that we are constantly making decisions, and that every decision affects our lives. On the other hand, the fallacy of internal control leaves you exhausted as you attempt to fill the needs of everyone around you, and feel responsible in doing so (and guilty when you cannot).
  8. Fallacy of Fairness: You feel resentful because you think you know what’s fair, but other people won’t agree with you. Fairness is so conveniently defined, so temptingly self-serving, that each person gets locked into his or her own point of view. It is tempting to make assumptions about how things would change if people were only fair or really valued you. But the other person hardly ever sees it that way, and you end up causing yourself a lot of pain and an ever-growing resentment.
  9. Blaming: You hold other people responsible for your pain, or take the other tack and blame yourself for every problem. Blaming often involves making someone else responsible for choices and decisions that are actually our own responsibility. In blame systems, you deny your right (and responsibility) to assert your needs, say no, or go elsewhere for what you want.
  10. Shoulds: You have a list of ironclad rules about how you and other people should act. People who break the rules anger you, and you feel guilty if you violate the rules. The rules are right and indisputable and, as a result, you are often in the position of judging and finding fault (in yourself and in others). Cue words indicating the presence of this distortion are should, ought, and must.
  11. Emotional Reasoning: You believe that what you feel must be true-automatically. If you feel stupid or boring, then you must be stupid and boring. If you feel guilty, then you must have done something wrong. The problem with emotional reasoning is that our emotions interact and correlate with our thinking process. Therefore, if you have distorted thoughts and beliefs, your emotions will reflect these distortions.
  12. Fallacy of Change: You expect that other people will change to suit you if you just pressure or cajole them enough. You need to change people because your hopes for happiness seem to depend entirely on them. The truth is the only person you can really control or have much hope of changing is yourself. The underlying assumption of this thinking style is that your happiness depends on the actions of others. Your happiness actually depends on the thousands of large and small choices you make in your life.
  13. Global Labeling: You generalize one or two qualities (in yourself or others) into a negative global judgment. Global labeling ignores all contrary evidence, creating a view of the world that can be stereotyped and one-dimensional. Labeling yourself can have a negative and insidious impact upon your self-esteem; while labeling others can lead to snap-judgments, relationship problems, and prejudice.
  14. Being Right: You feel continually on trial to prove that your opinions and actions are correct. Being wrong is unthinkable and you will go to any length to demonstrate your rightness. Having to be ‘right’ often makes you hard of hearing. You aren’t interested in the possible veracity of a differing opinion, only in defending your own. Being right becomes more important than an honest and caring relationship.
  15. Heaven’s Reward Fallacy: You expect all your sacrifice and self-denial to pay off, as if there were someone keeping score. You fell bitter when the reward doesn’t come as expected. The problem is that while you are always doing the ‘right thing,’ if your heart really isn’t in it, you are physically and emotionally depleting yourself.

Source: Thoughts & Feelings, by Matthew McKay, Martha Davis, & Patrick Fanning.

Photo by Francesca Michelle Lugo

from:    http://theunboundedspirit.com/15-types-of-distorted-thinking/

The Mind as A Stargate

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The Mind as a Stargate

 

“And so I went out to meet them.  And they taught me about the stars.”

The human mind is a stargate.  In fact, it is probably the only real stargate there is.  We don’t realize that because from the time we become aware as children, we are told that we live in a tiny box called earth.  Within that tiny box the mind inhabits another even tinier box called the human body.  From these two boxes, there can be no escape but death, which is not really an escape from the box, but the moment the mind and its personality enters an eternal oblivion.   Many people actually believe this and some of them have the audacity to call me a buzzkill.

I used to believe what people told me.  I believed my brain held my personality and kept it within the confines of my skull. I thought my heart is what kept everything alive. My soul was some nebulous thing that also existed. I just wasn’t sure where it was located.  The problem I had, of course, is that throughout my life I had been receiving messages and subtle clues from people that were not like me.  These people didn’t seem to always use bodies or to live by the same rules that I did.  Some of these clues were unimaginably terrifying, but perhaps only because I was so grounded to the world I was told to believe in, a world whose reality has begun to fall away to some extent.

Part of my problem was that I was a a devotee of my own anger and resentment.  I used these as far as I could take them as an outlet to work through the dross I had both made through my own actions as well as what I inherited from my family lines.   The more I was able to pull down the veil of my inward imperfections and shortcoming, the more the light was beginning to shine through.  First as a tiny glimmer and then as a blazing sun.

What I witnessed did not terrify me, but for the first time allowed a clean break with the well-ordered world I had belonged to and believed in for so long.  The old world was a world of laws and scientific explanations.  In that world both meaning and mystique were crowded out by endless explanations that sapped the meaning out of things.  Wonder was becoming eroded by unsatisfying ideas, each one new and innovative, yet wholly dead.  If we couldn’t see, hear, touch, taste, or smell a thing it didn’t exist.  The newly elected priests of the modern world explained everything away with science.  The  sun, moon, and stars had no significance.  They were dead celestial bodies floating in space.   Everything had an explanation, and if it didn’t have one somebody somewhere was hard at work on one. The modern world, sadly, has travelled an outward path away from what is real and therefore science becomes increasingly superficial.  Instead of giving fulfilling answers, it can only give us explanations that may or may not be true.

While the intellect taken to its logical conclusion can deliver a person to the door of the real, it cannot nudge them through it.  There comes a point where reason and intellection become a curse that anchors one to the world of death’s reign.  If the imagination does not take over, the journey dies utterly.  But it is not enough to merely imagine, one must literally exit the unreal by entering the doorway that has always remained open for us. The difficulty of that feat depends on how much we have come to believe in the world we were told to believe in.   Ultimately, the depths of the mind must be plumbed to the point of finality, which is really the beginning point of the real world.

To open that door to the real world, the reasoning mind must be kept absolutely still, it must put the world as we believe it to death. This doesn’t come with effort, but rather in the absence of effort.  It doesn’t come by struggling to create landscapes and characters in the mind.  It arrives, strangely, when the mind no longer puts forth any effort whatsoever.  In a word, the mind literally surrenders any idea of knowledge upon realizing that the real world doesn’t require wisdom or knowledge, but spontaneity and being.  It must simply become what it was before it was forged by the experiences of life, both good and bad.  The ”reality” we see everyday is only one part of a much greater world that is unseen, but always present in the eternal now.

This world beyond is really the world we live in right now, minus the box we attempt to place it in.  Death, no matter how you look at it, removes that box exposing us to the real world.  Those that seek to keep that box in place, the box that leads to all pain and suffering, experience the worst of the postmortem states.  They attempt to retain the piece because they cannot face the whole truth of what they are.  For that reason alone a kind of pseudo-physical world is often entered upon death.  I have seen it many times, I have spoken to those living there, and I have seen strange things that could not possibly come from me or the use of my imagination alone.  These postmortem worlds run the gamut of ugliness and beauty.

“At some point I found that even though I was a single piece, a veritable illusion, that stars were growing in my mind.  Slowly my identity was expanding into a completion that had no further need of growth or evolution.  This is who I really was.  I was becoming all while still remaining “me.”  This was death and I was very happy.  This was a happiness I had never known in life. ”

The world we have been told to believe in is a lie.  This is not a new age platitude or an airy-fairy state of mind I am talking about.  This is the unfathomable reality we are not yet ready to face.  An apocalypse is on the horizon, and this apocalypse will create a divergent path in humanity. It may be collective, it may be individual.  Some will remember and others will continue to forget.  That is simply the way things are.
from:    http://decryptedmatrix.com/live/the-mind-as-a-stargate/