via Boing Boing
The subject of this paper grew up with a normal cognitive and social life, and didn't discover his hydrocephalus -- which had all but obliterated his brain -- until he went to the doctor for an unrelated complaint.
The authors advocate research into “Computational models such as the small-world and scale-free network”— networks whose nodes are clustered into highly-interconnected “cliques”, while the cliques themselves are more sparsely connected one to another. De Oliviera et al suggest that they hold the secret to the resilience of the hydrocephalic brain. Such networks result in “higher dynamical complexity, lower wiring costs, and resilience to tissue insults.” This also seems reminiscent of those isolated hyper-efficient modules of autistic savants, which is unlikely to be a coincidence: networks from social to genetic to neural have all been described as “small-world”. (You might wonder— as I did— why de Oliviera et al. would credit such networks for the normal intelligence of some hydrocephalics when the same configuration is presumably ubiquitous in vegetative and normal brains as well. I can only assume they meant to suggest that small-world networking is especially well-developed among high-functioning hydrocephalics.) (In all honesty, it’s not the best-written paper I’ve ever read. Which seems to be kind of a trend on the ‘crawl lately.)
The point, though, is that under the right conditions, brain damage may paradoxically result in brain enhancement. Small-world, scale-free networking— focused, intensified, overclocked— might turbocharge a fragment of a brain into acting like the whole thing.
Can you imagine what would happen if we applied that trick to a normal brain?
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
Friday, July 24, 2015
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
Perhaps the world's conspiracy theorists have been right all along
by Alex Proud via The Telegraph
We used to laugh at conspiracy theorists, but from Fifa to banking scandals and the Iraq War, it seems they might have been on to something after all, says Alex Proud
Conspiracy theories used to be so easy.
You’d have your mate who, after a few beers, would tell you that the moon landings were faked or that the Illuminati controlled everything or that the US government was holding alien autopsies in Area 51. And you’d be able to dismiss this because it was all rubbish.
Look, you’d say, we have moon rock samples and pictures and we left laser reflectors on the surface and... basically you still don’t believe me but that’s because you’re mad and no proof on earth (or the moon) would satisfy you.
It’s true that there was always the big one which wasn’t quite so easily dismissed. This was the Kennedy assassination - but here you could be fairly sure that the whole thing was a terrible, impenetrable murky morass. You knew that some things never would be known (or would be released, partially redacted by the CIA, 200 years in the future). And you knew that whatever the truth was it was probably a bit dull compared to your mate’s flights of fantasy involving the KGB, the Mafia and the military-industrial complex. Besides, it all made for a lot of very entertaining films and books.
This nice, cozy state of affairs lasted until the early 2000s. But then something changed. These days conspiracy theories don’t look so crazy and conspiracy theorists don’t look like crackpots. In fact, today’s conspiracy theory is tomorrow’s news headlines. It’s tempting, I suppose, to say we live in a golden age of conspiracy theories, although it’s only really golden for the architects of the conspiracies. From the Iraq war to Fifa to the banking crisis, the truth is not only out there, but it’s more outlandish than anything we could have made up.
Of course, our real-life conspiracies aren’t much like The X-Files – they’re disappointingly short on aliens and the supernatural. Rather, they’re more like John Le Carre books. Shady dealings by powerful people who want nothing more than to line their profits at the expense of others. The abuse of power. Crazy ideologues who try and create their own facts for fun and profit. Corporations supplanting governments via regulatory capture.
So, what are some of our biggest conspiracies?
The Iraq War
The most disgusting abuse of power in a generation and a moral quagmire that never ends. America is attacked by terrorists and so, declares war on a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks, while ignoring an oil rich ally which had everything to do with them. The justification for war is based on some witches’ brew of faulty intelligence, concocted intelligence and ignored good intelligence. Decent people are forced to lie on an international stage. All sensible advice is ignored and rabid neo-con draft dodgers hold sway on military matters. The UK joins this fool’s errand for no good reason. Blood is spilled and treasure is spent.
The result is a disaster that was predicted only by Middle Eastern experts, post-conflict planners and several million members of the public. Thousands of allied troops and hundreds of thousands of blameless Iraqis are killed, although plenty of companies and individuals benefit from the US dollars that were shipped out, literally, by the ton. More recently, Iraq, now in a far worse state than it ever was under any dictator, has become an incubator for more terrorists, which is a special kind of geopolitical irony lost entirely on the war’s supporters.
And yet, we can’t really bring ourselves to hold anyone accountable. Apportioning responsibility would be difficult, painful and inconvenient, so we shrug as the men behind all this enjoy their well-upholstered retirements despite being directly and personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of wasted dollars. And the slow drip, drip of revelations continues, largely ignored by the public, despite the horrendous costs which (in the UK) could have been spent on things like the NHS or properly equipping our armed forces.
Fifa
The conspiracy du jour. We always knew Fifa was shonky and bribey, but most of us thought the more outlandish claims were just that. Not so. As it turns out, Fifa is a giant corruption machine and it now looks like every World Cup in the last three decades, even the ones we were cool about, like South Africa, could have been fixes.
On the plus side, it seems that something may be done, but it’ll be far too late to help honest footballing nations who missed their moment in the sun. For those who say "it’s only a stupid sport", well, recently we’ve heard accusations of arms deals for votes involving... wait for it... Saudi Arabia. The Saudi connection makes me wonder if, soon, we’ll be looking a grand unified conspiracy theory which brings together lots of other conspiracy theories under one corrupt, grubby roof.
The banking crisis
A nice financial counterpoint to Iraq. Virtually destroy the western financial system in the name of greed. Get bailed out by the taxpayers who you’ve been ripping off. And then carry on as if nothing whatsoever has happened. No jail, no meaningful extra regulation, the idea of being too big to fail as much of a joke as it was in 2005. Not even an apology. In fact, since the crisis you caused, things have got much better for you – and worse for everyone else. Much like Iraq, no-one has been held responsible or even acknowledged any wrongdoing. Again, this is partially because it’s so complicated and hard – but mainly because those who caused the crisis are so well represented in the governments of the countries who bailed them out. Oh, and while we’re at it, the banks played a part in the Fifa scandal. As conspiracy theorists will tell you, everything is connected.
Paedophiles
This one seems like a particularly dark and grisly thriller. At first it was just a few rubbish light entertainers. Then it was a lot more entertainers. Then we had people muttering about the political establishment – and others counter-muttering don’t be ridiculous, that’s a conspiracy theory. But it wasn’t. Now, it’s a slow-motion train crash and an endless series of glacial government inquiries. The conspiracy theorists point out that a lot of real stuff only seems to come out after the alleged perpetrators are dead or so senile it no longer matters. It’s hard to disagree with them. It’s also hard to imagine what kind of person would be so in thrall to power that they’d cover up child abuse.
And the rest
Where do you start? We could look at the EU and pick anything from its rarely signed-off accounts to the giant sham that let Greece join the Euro in the first place. We could look at UK defence procurement – and how we get so much less bang for our buck than France. We could peer at the cloying, incestuous relationship between the UK’s political class and its media moguls and how our leaders still fawn over a man whose poisonous control over so much of our media dates back to dodgy deal in 1981 that was denied for 30 years. We could look at the NSA and its intimate/ bullying relationship with tech companies. And we could go on and on and on.
But actually what we should be thinking is that a lot of this is what happens what you dismantle regulatory frameworks. This is what happens when you let money run riot and you allow industries to police themselves. This is what happens when the rich and powerful are endlessly granted special privileges, celebrated and permitted or even encouraged to place themselves above the law. And this is what happens when ordinary people feel bored by and excluded from politics, largely because their voices matter so little for the reasons above. Effectively, we are all living in Italy under Silvio Berlusconi. What’s the point in anything?
But actually, there is some hope. While the number of rich and powerful people who think they can get away with anything has undoubtedly grown, technology has made leaking much easier. Wikileaks may not be perfect, but it’s a lot better than no leaks at all. The other thing that gives me succour is the public’s view of the bankers. We still hate them, which is absolutely as it should be. And slowly this contempt is starting to hurt the masters of the universe. It’s notable that, recently, banking has started tumbling down the down the list of desirable careers. So, I suppose the solution is simple: we need more regulation, we need more transparency and we need more public shame and disgust. We might even get the last two; I’m less hopeful about the first.
In the X-Files, Fox Mulder’s famous catchphrase was, “I want to believe” but that’s because the conspiracy theories he dealt with were rather good fun. Ours, by contrast, tend to involve an endless procession of wealthy old men abusing their power. So I don’t want to believe any more. I want my kids to grow up in a world where conspiracy theories are something you laugh at.
We used to laugh at conspiracy theorists, but from Fifa to banking scandals and the Iraq War, it seems they might have been on to something after all, says Alex Proud
Conspiracy theories used to be so easy.
You’d have your mate who, after a few beers, would tell you that the moon landings were faked or that the Illuminati controlled everything or that the US government was holding alien autopsies in Area 51. And you’d be able to dismiss this because it was all rubbish.
Look, you’d say, we have moon rock samples and pictures and we left laser reflectors on the surface and... basically you still don’t believe me but that’s because you’re mad and no proof on earth (or the moon) would satisfy you.
It’s true that there was always the big one which wasn’t quite so easily dismissed. This was the Kennedy assassination - but here you could be fairly sure that the whole thing was a terrible, impenetrable murky morass. You knew that some things never would be known (or would be released, partially redacted by the CIA, 200 years in the future). And you knew that whatever the truth was it was probably a bit dull compared to your mate’s flights of fantasy involving the KGB, the Mafia and the military-industrial complex. Besides, it all made for a lot of very entertaining films and books.
This nice, cozy state of affairs lasted until the early 2000s. But then something changed. These days conspiracy theories don’t look so crazy and conspiracy theorists don’t look like crackpots. In fact, today’s conspiracy theory is tomorrow’s news headlines. It’s tempting, I suppose, to say we live in a golden age of conspiracy theories, although it’s only really golden for the architects of the conspiracies. From the Iraq war to Fifa to the banking crisis, the truth is not only out there, but it’s more outlandish than anything we could have made up.
Of course, our real-life conspiracies aren’t much like The X-Files – they’re disappointingly short on aliens and the supernatural. Rather, they’re more like John Le Carre books. Shady dealings by powerful people who want nothing more than to line their profits at the expense of others. The abuse of power. Crazy ideologues who try and create their own facts for fun and profit. Corporations supplanting governments via regulatory capture.
So, what are some of our biggest conspiracies?
The Iraq War
The most disgusting abuse of power in a generation and a moral quagmire that never ends. America is attacked by terrorists and so, declares war on a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks, while ignoring an oil rich ally which had everything to do with them. The justification for war is based on some witches’ brew of faulty intelligence, concocted intelligence and ignored good intelligence. Decent people are forced to lie on an international stage. All sensible advice is ignored and rabid neo-con draft dodgers hold sway on military matters. The UK joins this fool’s errand for no good reason. Blood is spilled and treasure is spent.
The result is a disaster that was predicted only by Middle Eastern experts, post-conflict planners and several million members of the public. Thousands of allied troops and hundreds of thousands of blameless Iraqis are killed, although plenty of companies and individuals benefit from the US dollars that were shipped out, literally, by the ton. More recently, Iraq, now in a far worse state than it ever was under any dictator, has become an incubator for more terrorists, which is a special kind of geopolitical irony lost entirely on the war’s supporters.
And yet, we can’t really bring ourselves to hold anyone accountable. Apportioning responsibility would be difficult, painful and inconvenient, so we shrug as the men behind all this enjoy their well-upholstered retirements despite being directly and personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of wasted dollars. And the slow drip, drip of revelations continues, largely ignored by the public, despite the horrendous costs which (in the UK) could have been spent on things like the NHS or properly equipping our armed forces.
Fifa
The conspiracy du jour. We always knew Fifa was shonky and bribey, but most of us thought the more outlandish claims were just that. Not so. As it turns out, Fifa is a giant corruption machine and it now looks like every World Cup in the last three decades, even the ones we were cool about, like South Africa, could have been fixes.
On the plus side, it seems that something may be done, but it’ll be far too late to help honest footballing nations who missed their moment in the sun. For those who say "it’s only a stupid sport", well, recently we’ve heard accusations of arms deals for votes involving... wait for it... Saudi Arabia. The Saudi connection makes me wonder if, soon, we’ll be looking a grand unified conspiracy theory which brings together lots of other conspiracy theories under one corrupt, grubby roof.
The banking crisis
A nice financial counterpoint to Iraq. Virtually destroy the western financial system in the name of greed. Get bailed out by the taxpayers who you’ve been ripping off. And then carry on as if nothing whatsoever has happened. No jail, no meaningful extra regulation, the idea of being too big to fail as much of a joke as it was in 2005. Not even an apology. In fact, since the crisis you caused, things have got much better for you – and worse for everyone else. Much like Iraq, no-one has been held responsible or even acknowledged any wrongdoing. Again, this is partially because it’s so complicated and hard – but mainly because those who caused the crisis are so well represented in the governments of the countries who bailed them out. Oh, and while we’re at it, the banks played a part in the Fifa scandal. As conspiracy theorists will tell you, everything is connected.
Paedophiles
This one seems like a particularly dark and grisly thriller. At first it was just a few rubbish light entertainers. Then it was a lot more entertainers. Then we had people muttering about the political establishment – and others counter-muttering don’t be ridiculous, that’s a conspiracy theory. But it wasn’t. Now, it’s a slow-motion train crash and an endless series of glacial government inquiries. The conspiracy theorists point out that a lot of real stuff only seems to come out after the alleged perpetrators are dead or so senile it no longer matters. It’s hard to disagree with them. It’s also hard to imagine what kind of person would be so in thrall to power that they’d cover up child abuse.
And the rest
Where do you start? We could look at the EU and pick anything from its rarely signed-off accounts to the giant sham that let Greece join the Euro in the first place. We could look at UK defence procurement – and how we get so much less bang for our buck than France. We could peer at the cloying, incestuous relationship between the UK’s political class and its media moguls and how our leaders still fawn over a man whose poisonous control over so much of our media dates back to dodgy deal in 1981 that was denied for 30 years. We could look at the NSA and its intimate/ bullying relationship with tech companies. And we could go on and on and on.
But actually what we should be thinking is that a lot of this is what happens what you dismantle regulatory frameworks. This is what happens when you let money run riot and you allow industries to police themselves. This is what happens when the rich and powerful are endlessly granted special privileges, celebrated and permitted or even encouraged to place themselves above the law. And this is what happens when ordinary people feel bored by and excluded from politics, largely because their voices matter so little for the reasons above. Effectively, we are all living in Italy under Silvio Berlusconi. What’s the point in anything?
But actually, there is some hope. While the number of rich and powerful people who think they can get away with anything has undoubtedly grown, technology has made leaking much easier. Wikileaks may not be perfect, but it’s a lot better than no leaks at all. The other thing that gives me succour is the public’s view of the bankers. We still hate them, which is absolutely as it should be. And slowly this contempt is starting to hurt the masters of the universe. It’s notable that, recently, banking has started tumbling down the down the list of desirable careers. So, I suppose the solution is simple: we need more regulation, we need more transparency and we need more public shame and disgust. We might even get the last two; I’m less hopeful about the first.
In the X-Files, Fox Mulder’s famous catchphrase was, “I want to believe” but that’s because the conspiracy theories he dealt with were rather good fun. Ours, by contrast, tend to involve an endless procession of wealthy old men abusing their power. So I don’t want to believe any more. I want my kids to grow up in a world where conspiracy theories are something you laugh at.
Monday, July 20, 2015
Science and Synchronicity
by Damon Orion
“Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever exist.”
-C.G. Jung, “Synchronicity”
Miller: A lot o’ people don't realize what's really goin’ on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents an’ things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: Suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly somebody'll say, like, “plate,” or “shrimp,” or “plate o' shrimp” out of the blue. No explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness.
Otto: You eat a lot of acid, Miller, back in the hippie days?
-Repo Man
The other night I was having a “Where are they now?” attack: an uncontrollable urge to find out what’s become of old friends, ex-girlfriends, etc. My orgy of nostalgia culminated in the early hours of morning, when I decided to do a Google search for a long-lost buddy of mine that everyone used to call Chet. (Our reasons for calling him Chet were complex—suffice to say that they involved a character from a Cheetos commercial by the name of Chester Cheetah, and that everyone but Chet thought the nickname was just super.) I found a band on MySpace called Gathering Moss whose singer had Chet’s name, and there was someone on Facebook who looked like he might be the guy, but I couldn’t be sure either of these people was the Chet I was looking for. I went to bed, figuring, “Maybe some other time.”
“Some other time” came sooner than I’d expected. When I woke up in the morning, I found two emails waiting for me: one from the band Gathering Moss, and another from the Chet whose Facebook profile I’d just found. My astonishment quickly gave way to anger—clearly, there was spyware attached to my computer, and I was being sent junk mail based on recent Internet activity. Wrong. Both of these emails were from the man himself, my long-lost buddy Chet. Incredible, but true: After going more than 15 years without communicating, we’d both picked the same night to look each other up online.
It gets weirder: Impressed by this freaky alignment of circumstances, I flashed on the last time I’d spoken with Chet, which I believe was in 1993: I’d just returned to Santa Cruz after living in L.A. for about a year and a half, and I’d dropped by The Poet and the Patriot on a hunch that I’d run into an old friend there—probably Chet. Nothing was happening, so I gulped down my last few drops of beer, turned to the friend I was with and said, “Screw it. Let’s go to Taco Bell.” (I’ve learned a thing or two about diet since then, by the way.) As I was getting up from my seat, Chet walked in the door and immediately spied me. Standing there with Taco Bell bag in hand, he gaped at me in obvious disbelief, blurting out, “Dude! I just had a dream about you last night!”
Occurrences like these are examples of what Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung named “synchronicity”: “the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningful but not causally connected events.” For some people, such happenings are treasured confirmations that life is more than a disjointed mural of birthdays, board meetings and bee stings that keep our senses occupied as we trudge toward the coffin. For others, they’re simply twin lemons on the cosmic slot machine—amusing anomalies that the random event generator spits out from time to time.
The rationalist will explain this kind of thing, quite reasonably, as follows: If 500 different people think of Mickey Mouse at 2:45 today, the law of averages says that with all the Disney propaganda floating around the globe, at least one of those people will see a picture or replica of Mickey Mouse and think it “eerie.” In other words, there’s an awful lot happening on this planet, so it’s inevitable that some events from Column A are going to match up with events from Column B in weird ways. You call that supernatural? Go hump a gnome, star child.
If you’ve ever experienced a truly uncanny synchronicity yourself, though—or several in rapid succession, as is sometimes the case—then perhaps you’ve found that the issue isn’t quite so simple. Once in a while something happens that’s so unlikely, so patently absurd, that it leaves you with the unshakeable feeling that you’ve just gotten a prank call from the Other Side. I’m not talking about minor synchronicities, where, say, you’re dressed as The Devil on Halloween, and you make a purchase that leaves you with $6.66 in change; I’m talking about when on top of that, the cashier is dressed as an angel, and at the same time that she hands you your $6.66, you hear a line about “giving The Devil his due” in the song playing over the PA.
Right now some of you are rolling your eyes and grumbling to yourselves about what a mush-brained, dandelion-smoking Mork from Ork I am for suggesting that an oogah-boogah notion like synchronicity could possibly have any validity. Well … good. Not so very long ago, people were being hunted down, tortured and murdered for promoting the heretical notion that the Earth revolved around the sun, and I salute skeptics like yourself for fighting the kinds of superstitious belief systems that gave rise to that sad situation. Now, however, we find ourselves at yet another turning point, and as certain sacred dogmas of science are replaced by demonstrably more accurate models of reality, those who cling to the old mechanistic worldview risk becoming the new fundamentalists.
Consider the fact that no less of a scientific genius than Albert Einstein once dismissed nonlocality, the strange phenomenon in which one object has a direct influence on another object without being anywhere near that object or even exerting any physical force (now a widely accepted, though mysterious, aspect of quantum physics), as “spooky action at a distance.” Like synchronicity, such activity doesn’t fit our present models of How It All Is … but there it is, right before the researchers’ eyes.
{mosimage}Permit yourself the heresy of supposing, for a moment, that not all claims of synchronistic events are products of selective perception, the law of averages and/or outright delusion, but that some are eyewitness accounts of a particularly vexing form of “spooky action at a distance” that may one day be re-shelved from “metaphysics” to “physics.”
Given the author’s playful style, it was difficult to discern whether he literally meant that thinking about these sorts of issues would cause synchronistic events to happen, or that it would simply lead us to notice coincidences. The key point of the book, after all, was “What the thinker thinks, the prover proves”—that is, we tend to find whatever it is we look for. If you have it in your head that you’re going to find quarters wherever you go, you’ll notice quarters on the ground all over the place. If you think the number 23 has special significance, you’ll notice the number 23 everywhere. Conversely, if you’re convinced that synchronicity is a family-sized bucket of bull, you’ll collect data to help convince yourself of this.
Either way, Wilson’s statement checked out: Mere hours after I’d read that passage, a friend of mine dropped by my house and casually asked if I’d be interested in going to a conference in Palo Alto where some of the world’s foremost psychedelic philosophers would be speaking … including that “Prometheus Rising” guy, Robert Anton Wilson. This in itself made me do a double-take, but the clincher came at the conference the following day (Hell yes, I accepted my friend’s offer), when, by chance—or something—I found myself walking side-by-side with Wilson in a hallway at Stanford University. (Mind you, there were thousands of people at this conference, and Wilson sightings at this event were few and far between, so at the very least, we can say this was a fluky thing to happen.) Seizing the opportunity, I quickly introduced myself to Wilson and got right down to business: “So, I’ve been reading ‘Prometheus Rising,’ and I have some questions for you.” Thus began a half-hour conversation that ended on a pair of couches in the building’s lobby, where I picked the brain of the author whose book had just told me to be on the lookout for amazing coincidences. (Later that night, I’d also have a memorable dialog with Timothy Leary, but that’s a whole other cube of sugar.)
Wilson has written exhaustively on the subject of synchronicity, but the idea of his that’s most relevant to our discussion is a point he made about quantum physics in the documentary film Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, released four years before his death in 2007. Here, he recounts an event that befell him and his wife in the early ’90s after they’d moved from Los Angeles to what they thought was Santa Cruz: “We had something stolen from our car, and we called the police, and it turned out we didn’t live in Santa Cruz—we lived in a town called Capitola. The post office thought we lived in Santa Cruz, but the police thought we lived in Capitola. I started investigating this, and a reporter at the local newspaper told me we didn’t live in either Santa Cruz or Capitola; we lived in a unincorporated area called Live Oak. Now, quantum mechanics is just like that, except that in the case of Santa Cruz, Capitola and Live Oak, we don’t get too confused, because we remember we invented the lines on the map. But quantum physics seems confusing because a lot of people think we didn’t invent the lines, so it seems hard to understand how a particle can be in three places at the same time without being anywhere at all.”
While it might sound like a bliss ninny’s wishful thinking to say there’s a scientific case for the idea that all things are connected, this is, in fact, exactly what Bell’s Theorem implies. Described by physicist Henry Stapp as “the most profound discovery of science” in 1975, Bell’s Theorem points to a conundrum known as entanglement, in which two physically related particles are linked in such a way that anything that happens to one of these particles is instantaneously communicated to the other, regardless of distance. According to quantum mechanics, any two things that have ever interacted are entangled in this way forevermore.
Bruce Rosenblum, professor of physics at UCSC and coauthor of the book “Quantum Enigma,” notes that although the present record distance for this kind of communication between particles is 144 km. (89 miles), “physicists don’t really doubt that it would also work from Moscow to Manhattan. According to quantum theory, this should happen across the universe.”
Rosenblum, who claims to have met Einstein in the 1950s and John Bell in the late ’80s, adds, “What quantum mechanics is saying is that there’s an interconnectedness to the universe. For big things, it’s not demonstrable: It’s too complicated, too messy. But in principle, it’s there.”
Yes, even big things like human beings. According to Rosenblum, if two people meet and shake hands, they are forever entangled, but this entanglement is so complicated that it can’t be observed. After all, those two people have also interacted with the floor, with the air, etc., etc., etc.
{mosimage}When you consider the fact that human beings are composed of subatomic particles that are constantly sending and receiving information, it seems worth asking whether the kind of complex entanglement Rosenblum describes might be what’s going on backstage during certain types of synchronistic events. If so, we probably needn’t bother trying to figure out what that event “means” or “why” it happened—we’re dealing with a system of connections so vast and elaborate that trying to understand this individual occurrence would be like trying to follow the path of a single thread in a ball of string the size of Jupiter.
A 1978 experiment led by Dr. Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (later replicated by neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick of London) provided what may have been a demonstration of quantum entanglement on the macroscopic level: Two test subjects were put in individual electromagnetically isolated rooms, and each subject’s brain was hooked up to an electroencephalograph. One test subject was then shown a series of strobe light flashes, which produced a unique brainwave pattern on the EEG. Strangely, the same pattern appeared on the other test subject’s EEG, although he was not shown the flashes. When the first test subject was given no stimulus, this correlation of brainwave patterns did not occur, nor did increases in distance affect the reproducibility of the experiment. In reference to this experiment, theoretical nuclear physicist Amit Goswami, PhD has written, “I am convinced that the transferred potential can be interpreted as the effect of quantum nonlocal interaction effect between correlated brains.”
As noted in books by the likes of Brian Clegg, Fritjof Capra and Gary Zukav (as well as in the regrettably New Age-y film What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?), the findings of quantum mechanics more and more frequently confirm notions previously associated exclusively with mysticism. One of the latest enthusiasts of such discoveries to come into public consciousness is French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat, who was announced as the winner of the $1.4 million 2009 Templeton Prize, the world’s largest annual award to an individual, on March 16. According to the award’s organizers, d’Espagnat’s work in quantum mechanics affirms a spiritual dimension of existence: Mysteries such as entanglement have led the scientist to perceive an interconnectedness and wholeness to the universe and a “veiled reality” underlying space, energy and matter.
Rosenblum, too, has had his paradigm remodeled by the “quantum enigma.” “To me there’s no question: It changes your worldview,” he states. “Even if you don’t know it, the worldview that everybody, including physicists, lives with is Newtonian: It’s the real world; everything has a cause. Oh, yes, there’s some randomness, of course, but basically, things separate, and one thing doesn’t influence the other. Hey, we know the Newtonian worldview works, but ultimately, we know it’s flawed. Does that affect you spiritually? Some people say yes.”
Perhaps enigmas like entanglement and synchronicity will eventually be demystified in this way, and we’ll find that they only seem weird to us because of our somewhat primitive perspectives (“primitive,” of course, being relative to what lies ahead). For now, when we encounter such mysteries, it might be useful to think of ourselves as third-century folks confounded by the riddle of the tuning forks. These tuning forks don’t have some mutual destiny or some message for each other, and there’s no specific “meaning” to the fact that one causes the other to vibrate; rather, we’re face-to-face with some kind of connection we don’t yet understand.
As I hammer these last words into my laptop at a coffee shop, the sight of a man walking through the front doorway is jolting the three women at the table behind me from their discussion of the archetypes that Wagner’s music evokes. “What an amazing coincidence!” one of them shouts to the man, who, it turns out, has some kind of profound connection to Wagner. “Were your ears burning?”
I could speculate here about people’s brainwaves entraining at a distance, about these people resonating in sympathy with each other by way of a “shared overtone” (the thought of Wagner) or some such “spooky” thing, or I could simply categorize this as yet another coincidence (one of many that have intersected with my awareness since I began writing this piece). Instead, I think I’ll follow my own advice and leave such questions to be answered in the future, when scientists and mystics alike are ready to abandon certain dearly cherished beliefs, and humanity is ready to see beyond boundaries that, as Wilson pointed out, exist solely in our minds.
Jung Einstein
Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity has been entangled with quantum physics from day one. As revealed in Jung’s “Letters, Vol. 2,” it was a series of dinner conversations with Albert Einstein in Zurich between 1909 and 1913 that first got the psychiatrist “thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality. More than thirty years later, this stimulus led to my relation with the physicist Professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic synchronicity.”
Jung met Pauli shortly after the idea of synchronicity began to take solid form in Jung’s mind. Pauli, who, at age 21, wrote a book-length critique of Einstein’s theory of relativity that Einstein praised as accurate, insightful and thorough, was instrumental in establishing the foundations of quantum mechanics. One of his major contributions to science is the exclusion principle, which physicist F. David Peat describes in his book “Synchronicity: The Bridge between Matter and Mind” as the “discovery of an abstract pattern that lies hidden beneath the surface of atomic matter and determines its behavior in a non-causal way.” The influence of such concepts on Jung’s theory of synchronicity is unmistakable.
In 1934, after having Jung analyze several of his dreams, Pauli had a dream in which a man who looked like Einstein told him that quantum physics was only a one-dimensional part of a deeper reality. The following year, Einstein and physicists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen presented a paper that inadvertently illustrated a mysterious, acausal connectedness between particles. This EPR (Einstein/Podolsky/Rosen) paper lodged three complaints against quantum mechanics, one of them being the implausibility of nonlocality: the direct influence of one object on another object from far away. (Einstein famously scorned such activity as “spooky action at a distance.”)
{mosimage}In the mid-’60s, physicist John Bell responded to the EPR paper by proving a theorem that provided a way of testing the validity of these “spooky actions.” The experiments that followed produced empirical evidence of nonlocality. Thus, Einstein inadvertently opened the gates to the study of two different kinds of “spooky action at a distance”—synchronicity and quantum entanglement (the latter of whose implications he ironically found disconcerting)—and Pauli deliberately helped bring these ideas into focus.
In Synch
All over the globe, we see a tendency of organisms and even inanimate objects to synchronize with each other. One of the most intriguing examples of this principle is entrainment, which is believed to be nature’s way of conserving energy. Entrainment was discovered in 1665 by Dutch scientist Christian Huygens, who found that if you put several grandfather clocks whose pendulums are swinging out of synch with one another in the same room, their pendulums will be moving in time with each other within a day or two.
Entrainment exists within the animal world as well: Through the phenomenon of collective motion, groups of organisms such as flocks of birds, schools of fish, swarms of insects and colonies of bacteria move as a single body. In a more romantic vein, there are multiple instances of synchronized courtships, such as when groups of male fireflies in Southeastern Asia flash their lights on and off in perfect synchronization to attract females, or when frogs or crickets “serenade” potential mates in unison. Recent research at Cornell University has also revealed that while mating, mosquitoes synchronize the frequencies of the beats of their wings (400 Hz for the female and 600 Hz for the male) into a “male/female” harmonic of 1200 Hz.
In human biology, we see the principle of synchrony at work in both the locking menstrual cycles of women who live together and in the activity of pacemaker cells (the cells that control a person’s heart rate): When two pacemaker cells are in close proximity to each other, they quickly fall into rhythm with one another, building and releasing charges in unison.
{mosimage}By analyzing a film of children on a playground at lunchtime, a graduate student working under the supervision of anthropologist Edward T. Hall found another example of synchrony in the human realm: Kids all over the playground were unknowingly moving in rhythm with each other, as if dancing to the beat of a song. Similarly, by analyzing films of people in conversation, Boston University School of Medicine psychologist William S. Condon noticed that the listeners’ bodily gestures were in perfect synchrony with the speakers’ voices. Stranger still, when he hooked up pairs of people in conversation to separate electroencephalographs, he found that the brainwaves of people engaged in “good” conversation oscillated “in harmony” with each other. Similar experiments have revealed that the brainwaves of attendees of church sermons and students listening to lectures generally oscillated in synch with those of the speaker, and that only when this kind of brainwave entrainment occurred was the class or church service perceived as “good.” Such data convinced Condon that human beings are not “isolated entities sending discrete messages to one another,” but rather are participants within “shared organizational forms."
“Synchronicity is the love underlying the happenings of the time. Love brings everything together. Now, there is a resonating field. There is a field that tries for everything to come together, because we live in this unified field, and love is always trying to pull us into being unified. As we become more and more conscious, we enter that unified field of love, and then we have synchronistic experiences. Love is not a feeling—it’s pure reason. As we interact with each other, as we become more and more aware, as we have our desires placed out there, everything on the planet tries to bring it forth.”
“I have spent much of my adult life trying to understand these events, and although I believe their true origin is beyond human comprehension, it has much to do with the spiritual concept that time is an illusion, and events can be orchestrated by entities in spirit form (including our higher selves) which are designed to keep us on our true path.”
“Synchronicity, along with déjà vu, is a phenomenon that people too easily take for granted. People regularly toss off this everyday minor miracle with a ‘Wow! What a weird coincidence,’ not really thinking about it again. We should pay closer attention in these moments, ‘smell the rose of synchronicity,’ if you will, as there is probably something important happening if we look a little closer. I think of synchronicity as experiential proof of the interconnectedness of all things and the existence of a higher power. I think that if one could somehow empirically measure the countless individual synchronistic events across the globe at any given moment and simultaneously show all of them to the people of the world, it would go a long way to bind us together … or maybe that would just make us like The Borg … Either way, resistance is futile.”
“Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever exist.”
-C.G. Jung, “Synchronicity”
Miller: A lot o’ people don't realize what's really goin’ on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents an’ things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: Suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly somebody'll say, like, “plate,” or “shrimp,” or “plate o' shrimp” out of the blue. No explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness.
Otto: You eat a lot of acid, Miller, back in the hippie days?
-Repo Man
The other night I was having a “Where are they now?” attack: an uncontrollable urge to find out what’s become of old friends, ex-girlfriends, etc. My orgy of nostalgia culminated in the early hours of morning, when I decided to do a Google search for a long-lost buddy of mine that everyone used to call Chet. (Our reasons for calling him Chet were complex—suffice to say that they involved a character from a Cheetos commercial by the name of Chester Cheetah, and that everyone but Chet thought the nickname was just super.) I found a band on MySpace called Gathering Moss whose singer had Chet’s name, and there was someone on Facebook who looked like he might be the guy, but I couldn’t be sure either of these people was the Chet I was looking for. I went to bed, figuring, “Maybe some other time.”
“Some other time” came sooner than I’d expected. When I woke up in the morning, I found two emails waiting for me: one from the band Gathering Moss, and another from the Chet whose Facebook profile I’d just found. My astonishment quickly gave way to anger—clearly, there was spyware attached to my computer, and I was being sent junk mail based on recent Internet activity. Wrong. Both of these emails were from the man himself, my long-lost buddy Chet. Incredible, but true: After going more than 15 years without communicating, we’d both picked the same night to look each other up online.
It gets weirder: Impressed by this freaky alignment of circumstances, I flashed on the last time I’d spoken with Chet, which I believe was in 1993: I’d just returned to Santa Cruz after living in L.A. for about a year and a half, and I’d dropped by The Poet and the Patriot on a hunch that I’d run into an old friend there—probably Chet. Nothing was happening, so I gulped down my last few drops of beer, turned to the friend I was with and said, “Screw it. Let’s go to Taco Bell.” (I’ve learned a thing or two about diet since then, by the way.) As I was getting up from my seat, Chet walked in the door and immediately spied me. Standing there with Taco Bell bag in hand, he gaped at me in obvious disbelief, blurting out, “Dude! I just had a dream about you last night!”
Occurrences like these are examples of what Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung named “synchronicity”: “the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningful but not causally connected events.” For some people, such happenings are treasured confirmations that life is more than a disjointed mural of birthdays, board meetings and bee stings that keep our senses occupied as we trudge toward the coffin. For others, they’re simply twin lemons on the cosmic slot machine—amusing anomalies that the random event generator spits out from time to time.
The rationalist will explain this kind of thing, quite reasonably, as follows: If 500 different people think of Mickey Mouse at 2:45 today, the law of averages says that with all the Disney propaganda floating around the globe, at least one of those people will see a picture or replica of Mickey Mouse and think it “eerie.” In other words, there’s an awful lot happening on this planet, so it’s inevitable that some events from Column A are going to match up with events from Column B in weird ways. You call that supernatural? Go hump a gnome, star child.
If you’ve ever experienced a truly uncanny synchronicity yourself, though—or several in rapid succession, as is sometimes the case—then perhaps you’ve found that the issue isn’t quite so simple. Once in a while something happens that’s so unlikely, so patently absurd, that it leaves you with the unshakeable feeling that you’ve just gotten a prank call from the Other Side. I’m not talking about minor synchronicities, where, say, you’re dressed as The Devil on Halloween, and you make a purchase that leaves you with $6.66 in change; I’m talking about when on top of that, the cashier is dressed as an angel, and at the same time that she hands you your $6.66, you hear a line about “giving The Devil his due” in the song playing over the PA.
Right now some of you are rolling your eyes and grumbling to yourselves about what a mush-brained, dandelion-smoking Mork from Ork I am for suggesting that an oogah-boogah notion like synchronicity could possibly have any validity. Well … good. Not so very long ago, people were being hunted down, tortured and murdered for promoting the heretical notion that the Earth revolved around the sun, and I salute skeptics like yourself for fighting the kinds of superstitious belief systems that gave rise to that sad situation. Now, however, we find ourselves at yet another turning point, and as certain sacred dogmas of science are replaced by demonstrably more accurate models of reality, those who cling to the old mechanistic worldview risk becoming the new fundamentalists.
Consider the fact that no less of a scientific genius than Albert Einstein once dismissed nonlocality, the strange phenomenon in which one object has a direct influence on another object without being anywhere near that object or even exerting any physical force (now a widely accepted, though mysterious, aspect of quantum physics), as “spooky action at a distance.” Like synchronicity, such activity doesn’t fit our present models of How It All Is … but there it is, right before the researchers’ eyes.
{mosimage}Permit yourself the heresy of supposing, for a moment, that not all claims of synchronistic events are products of selective perception, the law of averages and/or outright delusion, but that some are eyewitness accounts of a particularly vexing form of “spooky action at a distance” that may one day be re-shelved from “metaphysics” to “physics.”
That Synching Feeling
At age 19 (back in the early ’90s, when Chet and I were the best of friends), I was introduced to the ideas of philosopher Robert Anton Wilson by way of his book “Prometheus Rising.” One passage from the book struck me as especially intriguing: At the end of a chapter about archetypes, Wilson wrote, “Contemplating these issues usually triggers Jungian synchronicities. See how long after reading this chapter you encounter an amazing coincidence.”Given the author’s playful style, it was difficult to discern whether he literally meant that thinking about these sorts of issues would cause synchronistic events to happen, or that it would simply lead us to notice coincidences. The key point of the book, after all, was “What the thinker thinks, the prover proves”—that is, we tend to find whatever it is we look for. If you have it in your head that you’re going to find quarters wherever you go, you’ll notice quarters on the ground all over the place. If you think the number 23 has special significance, you’ll notice the number 23 everywhere. Conversely, if you’re convinced that synchronicity is a family-sized bucket of bull, you’ll collect data to help convince yourself of this.
Either way, Wilson’s statement checked out: Mere hours after I’d read that passage, a friend of mine dropped by my house and casually asked if I’d be interested in going to a conference in Palo Alto where some of the world’s foremost psychedelic philosophers would be speaking … including that “Prometheus Rising” guy, Robert Anton Wilson. This in itself made me do a double-take, but the clincher came at the conference the following day (Hell yes, I accepted my friend’s offer), when, by chance—or something—I found myself walking side-by-side with Wilson in a hallway at Stanford University. (Mind you, there were thousands of people at this conference, and Wilson sightings at this event were few and far between, so at the very least, we can say this was a fluky thing to happen.) Seizing the opportunity, I quickly introduced myself to Wilson and got right down to business: “So, I’ve been reading ‘Prometheus Rising,’ and I have some questions for you.” Thus began a half-hour conversation that ended on a pair of couches in the building’s lobby, where I picked the brain of the author whose book had just told me to be on the lookout for amazing coincidences. (Later that night, I’d also have a memorable dialog with Timothy Leary, but that’s a whole other cube of sugar.)
Wilson has written exhaustively on the subject of synchronicity, but the idea of his that’s most relevant to our discussion is a point he made about quantum physics in the documentary film Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, released four years before his death in 2007. Here, he recounts an event that befell him and his wife in the early ’90s after they’d moved from Los Angeles to what they thought was Santa Cruz: “We had something stolen from our car, and we called the police, and it turned out we didn’t live in Santa Cruz—we lived in a town called Capitola. The post office thought we lived in Santa Cruz, but the police thought we lived in Capitola. I started investigating this, and a reporter at the local newspaper told me we didn’t live in either Santa Cruz or Capitola; we lived in a unincorporated area called Live Oak. Now, quantum mechanics is just like that, except that in the case of Santa Cruz, Capitola and Live Oak, we don’t get too confused, because we remember we invented the lines on the map. But quantum physics seems confusing because a lot of people think we didn’t invent the lines, so it seems hard to understand how a particle can be in three places at the same time without being anywhere at all.”
Quantum Metaphysics?
As Wilson stated, the fabric of the universe doesn’t play by human rules—even scientific ones. To understand just how strange things can get in the quantum realm, we need to take a look at Bell’s Theorem, often referred to as the Pandora’s box of modern physics. As long as Wilson has gotten us into this mess, let’s let him do the explaining (again from “Prometheus Rising”): “Bell’s Theorem is highly technical, but in ordinary language it amounts to something like this: There are no isolated systems; every particle in the universe is in ‘instantaneous’ (faster-than-light) communication with every other particle. The Whole System, even the parts that are separated by cosmic distances, functions as a Whole System.”While it might sound like a bliss ninny’s wishful thinking to say there’s a scientific case for the idea that all things are connected, this is, in fact, exactly what Bell’s Theorem implies. Described by physicist Henry Stapp as “the most profound discovery of science” in 1975, Bell’s Theorem points to a conundrum known as entanglement, in which two physically related particles are linked in such a way that anything that happens to one of these particles is instantaneously communicated to the other, regardless of distance. According to quantum mechanics, any two things that have ever interacted are entangled in this way forevermore.
Bruce Rosenblum, professor of physics at UCSC and coauthor of the book “Quantum Enigma,” notes that although the present record distance for this kind of communication between particles is 144 km. (89 miles), “physicists don’t really doubt that it would also work from Moscow to Manhattan. According to quantum theory, this should happen across the universe.”
Rosenblum, who claims to have met Einstein in the 1950s and John Bell in the late ’80s, adds, “What quantum mechanics is saying is that there’s an interconnectedness to the universe. For big things, it’s not demonstrable: It’s too complicated, too messy. But in principle, it’s there.”
Yes, even big things like human beings. According to Rosenblum, if two people meet and shake hands, they are forever entangled, but this entanglement is so complicated that it can’t be observed. After all, those two people have also interacted with the floor, with the air, etc., etc., etc.
{mosimage}When you consider the fact that human beings are composed of subatomic particles that are constantly sending and receiving information, it seems worth asking whether the kind of complex entanglement Rosenblum describes might be what’s going on backstage during certain types of synchronistic events. If so, we probably needn’t bother trying to figure out what that event “means” or “why” it happened—we’re dealing with a system of connections so vast and elaborate that trying to understand this individual occurrence would be like trying to follow the path of a single thread in a ball of string the size of Jupiter.
A 1978 experiment led by Dr. Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (later replicated by neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick of London) provided what may have been a demonstration of quantum entanglement on the macroscopic level: Two test subjects were put in individual electromagnetically isolated rooms, and each subject’s brain was hooked up to an electroencephalograph. One test subject was then shown a series of strobe light flashes, which produced a unique brainwave pattern on the EEG. Strangely, the same pattern appeared on the other test subject’s EEG, although he was not shown the flashes. When the first test subject was given no stimulus, this correlation of brainwave patterns did not occur, nor did increases in distance affect the reproducibility of the experiment. In reference to this experiment, theoretical nuclear physicist Amit Goswami, PhD has written, “I am convinced that the transferred potential can be interpreted as the effect of quantum nonlocal interaction effect between correlated brains.”
As noted in books by the likes of Brian Clegg, Fritjof Capra and Gary Zukav (as well as in the regrettably New Age-y film What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?), the findings of quantum mechanics more and more frequently confirm notions previously associated exclusively with mysticism. One of the latest enthusiasts of such discoveries to come into public consciousness is French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat, who was announced as the winner of the $1.4 million 2009 Templeton Prize, the world’s largest annual award to an individual, on March 16. According to the award’s organizers, d’Espagnat’s work in quantum mechanics affirms a spiritual dimension of existence: Mysteries such as entanglement have led the scientist to perceive an interconnectedness and wholeness to the universe and a “veiled reality” underlying space, energy and matter.
Rosenblum, too, has had his paradigm remodeled by the “quantum enigma.” “To me there’s no question: It changes your worldview,” he states. “Even if you don’t know it, the worldview that everybody, including physicists, lives with is Newtonian: It’s the real world; everything has a cause. Oh, yes, there’s some randomness, of course, but basically, things separate, and one thing doesn’t influence the other. Hey, we know the Newtonian worldview works, but ultimately, we know it’s flawed. Does that affect you spiritually? Some people say yes.”
Meta-Metaphysics
Strike a mounted tuning fork that produces the pitch of A, and its oscillations will cause another mounted A tuning fork in the same room to vibrate “in sympathy.” Though this probably would have seemed magical to pre-scientific societies, physics tells us that these forks are connected by the air particles that surround them, and that one responds to the other because of a shared overtone. That doesn’t mean that such activity isn’t amazing—it simply means that there’s an explanation for it. Similarly, if someone who had never been exposed to television saw the same program coming through two different TV sets, he or she might be baffled as to how information could “travel” so quickly from one television to the next, never suspecting much there was a bigger picture.Perhaps enigmas like entanglement and synchronicity will eventually be demystified in this way, and we’ll find that they only seem weird to us because of our somewhat primitive perspectives (“primitive,” of course, being relative to what lies ahead). For now, when we encounter such mysteries, it might be useful to think of ourselves as third-century folks confounded by the riddle of the tuning forks. These tuning forks don’t have some mutual destiny or some message for each other, and there’s no specific “meaning” to the fact that one causes the other to vibrate; rather, we’re face-to-face with some kind of connection we don’t yet understand.
As I hammer these last words into my laptop at a coffee shop, the sight of a man walking through the front doorway is jolting the three women at the table behind me from their discussion of the archetypes that Wagner’s music evokes. “What an amazing coincidence!” one of them shouts to the man, who, it turns out, has some kind of profound connection to Wagner. “Were your ears burning?”
I could speculate here about people’s brainwaves entraining at a distance, about these people resonating in sympathy with each other by way of a “shared overtone” (the thought of Wagner) or some such “spooky” thing, or I could simply categorize this as yet another coincidence (one of many that have intersected with my awareness since I began writing this piece). Instead, I think I’ll follow my own advice and leave such questions to be answered in the future, when scientists and mystics alike are ready to abandon certain dearly cherished beliefs, and humanity is ready to see beyond boundaries that, as Wilson pointed out, exist solely in our minds.
Jung Einstein
Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity has been entangled with quantum physics from day one. As revealed in Jung’s “Letters, Vol. 2,” it was a series of dinner conversations with Albert Einstein in Zurich between 1909 and 1913 that first got the psychiatrist “thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality. More than thirty years later, this stimulus led to my relation with the physicist Professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic synchronicity.”
Jung met Pauli shortly after the idea of synchronicity began to take solid form in Jung’s mind. Pauli, who, at age 21, wrote a book-length critique of Einstein’s theory of relativity that Einstein praised as accurate, insightful and thorough, was instrumental in establishing the foundations of quantum mechanics. One of his major contributions to science is the exclusion principle, which physicist F. David Peat describes in his book “Synchronicity: The Bridge between Matter and Mind” as the “discovery of an abstract pattern that lies hidden beneath the surface of atomic matter and determines its behavior in a non-causal way.” The influence of such concepts on Jung’s theory of synchronicity is unmistakable.
In 1934, after having Jung analyze several of his dreams, Pauli had a dream in which a man who looked like Einstein told him that quantum physics was only a one-dimensional part of a deeper reality. The following year, Einstein and physicists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen presented a paper that inadvertently illustrated a mysterious, acausal connectedness between particles. This EPR (Einstein/Podolsky/Rosen) paper lodged three complaints against quantum mechanics, one of them being the implausibility of nonlocality: the direct influence of one object on another object from far away. (Einstein famously scorned such activity as “spooky action at a distance.”)
{mosimage}In the mid-’60s, physicist John Bell responded to the EPR paper by proving a theorem that provided a way of testing the validity of these “spooky actions.” The experiments that followed produced empirical evidence of nonlocality. Thus, Einstein inadvertently opened the gates to the study of two different kinds of “spooky action at a distance”—synchronicity and quantum entanglement (the latter of whose implications he ironically found disconcerting)—and Pauli deliberately helped bring these ideas into focus.
In Synch
All over the globe, we see a tendency of organisms and even inanimate objects to synchronize with each other. One of the most intriguing examples of this principle is entrainment, which is believed to be nature’s way of conserving energy. Entrainment was discovered in 1665 by Dutch scientist Christian Huygens, who found that if you put several grandfather clocks whose pendulums are swinging out of synch with one another in the same room, their pendulums will be moving in time with each other within a day or two.
Entrainment exists within the animal world as well: Through the phenomenon of collective motion, groups of organisms such as flocks of birds, schools of fish, swarms of insects and colonies of bacteria move as a single body. In a more romantic vein, there are multiple instances of synchronized courtships, such as when groups of male fireflies in Southeastern Asia flash their lights on and off in perfect synchronization to attract females, or when frogs or crickets “serenade” potential mates in unison. Recent research at Cornell University has also revealed that while mating, mosquitoes synchronize the frequencies of the beats of their wings (400 Hz for the female and 600 Hz for the male) into a “male/female” harmonic of 1200 Hz.
In human biology, we see the principle of synchrony at work in both the locking menstrual cycles of women who live together and in the activity of pacemaker cells (the cells that control a person’s heart rate): When two pacemaker cells are in close proximity to each other, they quickly fall into rhythm with one another, building and releasing charges in unison.
{mosimage}By analyzing a film of children on a playground at lunchtime, a graduate student working under the supervision of anthropologist Edward T. Hall found another example of synchrony in the human realm: Kids all over the playground were unknowingly moving in rhythm with each other, as if dancing to the beat of a song. Similarly, by analyzing films of people in conversation, Boston University School of Medicine psychologist William S. Condon noticed that the listeners’ bodily gestures were in perfect synchrony with the speakers’ voices. Stranger still, when he hooked up pairs of people in conversation to separate electroencephalographs, he found that the brainwaves of people engaged in “good” conversation oscillated “in harmony” with each other. Similar experiments have revealed that the brainwaves of attendees of church sermons and students listening to lectures generally oscillated in synch with those of the speaker, and that only when this kind of brainwave entrainment occurred was the class or church service perceived as “good.” Such data convinced Condon that human beings are not “isolated entities sending discrete messages to one another,” but rather are participants within “shared organizational forms."
The Mystical Perspective
“Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irreprehensible, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing. The synchronicity phenomena point, it seems to me, in this direction, for they show that the nonpsychic can behave like the psychic, and vice versa, without there being any causal connection between them.”
- Carl Jung, “On the Nature of the Psyche”
“Synchronicity is the love underlying the happenings of the time. Love brings everything together. Now, there is a resonating field. There is a field that tries for everything to come together, because we live in this unified field, and love is always trying to pull us into being unified. As we become more and more conscious, we enter that unified field of love, and then we have synchronistic experiences. Love is not a feeling—it’s pure reason. As we interact with each other, as we become more and more aware, as we have our desires placed out there, everything on the planet tries to bring it forth.”
- Risa D’Angeles, founder and director of the Esoteric & Astrological Studies & Research Institute
“I have spent much of my adult life trying to understand these events, and although I believe their true origin is beyond human comprehension, it has much to do with the spiritual concept that time is an illusion, and events can be orchestrated by entities in spirit form (including our higher selves) which are designed to keep us on our true path.”
-Mystic Life, editor of SynchronicityTimes.com
“Synchronicity, along with déjà vu, is a phenomenon that people too easily take for granted. People regularly toss off this everyday minor miracle with a ‘Wow! What a weird coincidence,’ not really thinking about it again. We should pay closer attention in these moments, ‘smell the rose of synchronicity,’ if you will, as there is probably something important happening if we look a little closer. I think of synchronicity as experiential proof of the interconnectedness of all things and the existence of a higher power. I think that if one could somehow empirically measure the countless individual synchronistic events across the globe at any given moment and simultaneously show all of them to the people of the world, it would go a long way to bind us together … or maybe that would just make us like The Borg … Either way, resistance is futile.”
-Chet (now married, a father of three, and working as a retail manager in Chicago)
Saturday, July 18, 2015
Warming of oceans due to climate change is unstoppable, say US scientists
via The Guardian:
The warming of the oceans due to climate change is now unstoppable after record temperatures last year, bringing additional sea-level rise, and raising the risks of severe storms, US government climate scientists said on Thursday.
The annual State of the Climate in 2014 report, based on research from 413 scientists from 58 countries, found record warming on the surface and upper levels of the oceans, especially in the North Pacific, in line with earlier findings of 2014 as the hottest year on record.
Global sea-level also reached a record high, with the expansion of those warming waters, keeping pace with the 3.2 ± 0.4 mm per year trend in sea level growth over the past two decades, the report said.
Scientists said the consequences of those warmer ocean temperatures would be felt for centuries to come – even if there were immediate efforts to cut the carbon emissions fuelling changes in the oceans.
“I think of it more like a fly wheel or a freight train. It takes a big push to get it going but it is moving now and will contiue to move long after we continue to pushing it,” Greg Johnson, an oceanographer at Noaa’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, told a conference call with reporters.
“Even if we were to freeze greenhouse gases at current levels, the sea would actually continue to warm for centuries and millennia, and as they continue to warm and expand the sea levels will continue to rise,” Johnson said.
On the west coast of the US, freakishly warm temperatures in the Pacific – 4 or 5F above normal – were already producing warmer winters, as well as worsening drought conditions by melting the snowpack, he said.
The extra heat in the oceans was also contributing to more intense storms, Tom Karl, director of Noaa’s National Centers for Environmental Information, said.
The report underlined 2014 as a banner year for the climate, setting record or near record levels for temperature extremes, and loss of glaciers and sea ice, and reinforcing decades-old pattern to changes to the climate system.
Four independent data sets confirmed 2014 as the hottest year on record, with much of that heat driven by the warming of the oceans.
Globally 90% of the excess heat caused by the rise in greenhouse gas emissions is absorbed by the oceans.
More than 20 countries in Europe set new heat records, with Africa, Asia and Australia also experiencing near-record heat. The east coast of North America was the only region to experience cooler than average conditions.
Alaska experienced temperatures 18F warmer than average. Spring break-up came to the Arctic 20-30 days earlier than the 20th century average.
“The prognosis is to expect a continuation of what we have seen,” Karl said.
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
Monday, July 13, 2015
The automatic writings of Jung
By Phillip Coppens
Watkins’ bookstore in Cecil Court, just off Charing Cross Road in London, was founded in 1891 by John Watkins, and is still London’s premier hermetic bookstore. One of its many notorious visitors was Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist who would, together with Freud, define the field. Watkins was later to become Jung’s publisher, bringing out the private 1925 edition of Jung’s “VII Sermones ad Mortuos”.
For a well-known psychiatrist to chose a hermetic bookstore as the publisher of a book might seem odd, and it is. The text is purportedly by “Basilides of Alexandria” and is a Gnostic text – a religious document, largely Christian in nature. Why Watkins was chosen as the publisher however becomes clear when we know that Jung had received this document via automatic writing – something most psychiatrists would push towards the lunatic fringe… but not Jung.
Freud and Jung are considered to be the instrumental characters of defining psychotherapy. Both originally worked together, but Jung broke with Freud in 1911. Jung felt that psychotherapy was too narrow in focus – and his ideas were based on personal experience. Jung had “spirit guides”, one of whom was named “Philemon”. Jung observed that “Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. […] Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight.” To anyone else, Philemon might be a figment of Jung’s imagination, or evidence of his madness. But Jung felt that Philemon was real – yet somehow dead, and somehow “talking” to Jung – to Jung’s mind.
Jung thus felt he was not insane; he felt that Philemon was a source of information that was legitimate: somehow, Jung was able to receive information from a source of information outside of his head – not existing in this physical reality. It opened the way for his theory of the collective unconscious, a type of library containing everything ever known, and archetypes, “active principles” that interacted between that “dimension” and ours.
Was Jung sane? He had a life-long fascination with Nietzsche, but he realized the need to distance himself from Nietzsche for fear that he might be like him and therefore suffer the same fate: Nietzsche (1844-1900) became hopelessly insane. But more than 15 years later, Jung spoke to a “highly cultivated elderly Indian”, who told Jung that his experience was identical to many mystics. In his case, his “spirit guide” or guru had been a commentator on the Vedas who had died centuries ago. Rather than be mad, Jung felt that he had stepped into the same shoes as the ancient priests and others thought have experienced the divine.
Thus, in 1916, Jung received the best-documented help from demons: Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, or “The Seven sermons to the dead written by Basilides in Alexandria”, “transcribed by Carl Gustav Jung”.
Jung stated that the start of the work was very identical to a possession. “Then it was as if my house began to be haunted. My eldest daughter saw a white figure passing through the room. My second daughter, independently of her elder sister, related that twice in the night her blanket had been snatched away; and that same night my nine-year-old son had an anxiety dream. Around five o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday the front doorbell began ringing frantically. It was a bright summer day; the two maids were in the kitchen, from which the open square outside the front door could be seen. Everyone immediately looked to see who was there, but there was no one in sight. I was sitting near the doorbell, and not only heard it but saw it moving. We all simply stared at one another.”
With such madness about the house, Jung felt he had to act. He shouted: “For God’s sake, what in the world is this?” Then they cried out in chorus, “We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.” Over the next three evenings, the book was written, and as soon as he had begun to write, “the whole ghostly assemblage evaporated. The room quieted and the atmosphere cleared. The haunting was over.”
Basilides was a real person, born in Syria, teaching in Alexandria during the years 133-155 AD. Whereas most channelled material is often nothing better than that which can be found in gossip columns, Jung’s text has been labelled a “core text in depth psychology”.
The text is intriguing for several reasons. For one, he uses the name Abraxas to describe the Supreme Being that had first generated mind (nous) and then the other mental powers. Still, Jung did not teach the return of human essence to the Gnostic pleroma, where individuality was lost, but instead adhered to individuation, which maintained the fullness of human individuality. Most metaphysics today argue that both possibilities can be encountered – and are encountered in many religions: that the soul at its final stage can chose to melt with the One (the pleroma) or maintain its separate identity inside the One (individuation). The easiest parallel is with the hologram, in which each “replica” is unique, yet also the whole. If any “replica” was aware, and would at one point have to ask what it wanted, some would ask to surrender into the greater hologram, whereas other “replicas” would ask to retain their individual memories – even though they are part of the whole.
It is clear that this experience created the framework in which later the collective unconscious would take a prominent place. He described it as such: “The collective unconscious is common to all: it is the foundation of what the ancients called the sympathy of all things. It is through the medium of the collective unconscious that information about a particular time and place can be transferred to another individual mind.” But analysts have stated that it was not just the automatic writing, but the contents of the writings themselves, that shaped his ideas. Jung himself wrote: “These conversations with the dead formed a kind of prelude to what I had to communicate to the world about the unconscious . . . All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images.”
As early as August, 1912, Jung had intimated in a letter to Freud that he had an intuition that the essentially feminine-toned archaic wisdom of the Gnostics, symbolically called Sophia, was destined to re-enter modern Western culture by way of depth-psychology. Of primary sources, the remarkable Pistis Sophia was one of very few available to Jung in translation, and his appreciation of this work was so great that he made a special effort to seek out the translator in London, the then aged and impecunious George R. S. Mead, to convey to him his great gratitude.
Subsequently, he stated to Barbara Hannah that when he discovered the writings of the ancient Gnostics, “I felt as if I had at last found a circle of friends who understood me.” Gnosticism would remain his main dedication for the rest of his life. With the success of books such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail, The Templar Revelation and The Da Vinci Code, all which carve out a special place for the feminine, and often the Pistis Sophia itself, it is clear that Jung successfully predicted the “return of the feminine”.
Philemon and Basilides are but two of the “spirit guides” that were in contact with Jung. The list of other guides also included one “Salome”. In 1926, Jung had a remarkable dream. He felt himself transported back into the 17th century, and saw himself as an alchemist, engaged in the Great Work. Jung felt that alchemy was the connection between the ancient world of the Gnostics and the modern era, which would see the return of “Sophia”.
For Jung, alchemy was not the search for the substance that would transform lead into gold, but the transformation of the soul on its path to perfection. Jung’s dreams in 1925-6 and thereafter frequently found him in ancient houses surrounded by alchemical codices of great beauty and mystery. Inspired by such images, Jung amassed a library on the great art which represents probably one of the finest private collections in this field. Jung’s collection of rare works on alchemy is still extant in his former house in Küsnacht, a suburb of Zurich. His work culminated in his chef d’oevre, published in 1944, and entitled Psychology and Alchemy.
Jung believed that the cosmos contained the divine light or life, but this essence was enmeshed in a mechanical trap, presided over by a demiurge: Lucifer, the Bringer of the Light. He contained the light inside this reality, until a time when it would be set free. The first operation of alchemy therefore addressed itself to the dismemberment of this confining structure and reducing it to a condition of creative chaos. From this, in the process of transformation, the true, creative binaries emerge and begin their interaction designed to bring about the alchemical union. In this ultimate union, says Jung, the previously confined light is redeemed and brought to the point of its ultimate and redemptive fulfilment.
Jung made it clear that his theory was not new. It is similar to the Cathar doctrine and he himself stated that he was restating the Hermetic gnosis and explaining the misunderstood central quest of alchemy. Alchemy, said Jung, stood in a compensatory relationship to mainstream Christianity, rather like a dream does to the conscious attitudes of the dreamer. It has been “underground”, part of a secret tradition that ran throughout Christianity, but always “subconscious” – visible by its shadows and theh traces it leaves only.
He also felt that this process allowed for a better understanding of male-feminine relationships, and notions such as love. It is in this approach that he no doubt left Freud the furthest behind. In The Psychology of the Transference, Jung stated that in love, as in psychological growth, the key to success is the ability to endure the tension of the opposites without abandoning the process, even if the process and its result appear to have been brought to naught. In essence, it is the “stress” that allows one to grow – to transform.
The union of opposites, the focus of the alchemist, was for Jung also the focus of the Gnostics, whom he felt had been incorrectly labelled as radical dualists, i.e. believing in the battle between good and evil – without any apparent union possible between the two. For Jung, dualism and monism were not mutually contradictory and exclusive, but complimentary aspects of reality. As such, there was no good or wrong, no order or chaos, just two opposites, who constantly created grey, and demanded of mankind to be united, transformed.
It is clear that Jung’s psychology is that of the end of the 20th century. In essence, he was the father of the New Age, giving a theoretical framework for channelling and other “New Age practices”. Still, it is clear that Jung is seldom if ever mentioned in this line. Instead, he is referred to as the “opposite” of Freud, who was fixated in trying to reduce the entire human psychology to the sexual constitution of Mankind. However, it was Jung who stated that such opposites had to be integrated…
Watkins’ bookstore in Cecil Court, just off Charing Cross Road in London, was founded in 1891 by John Watkins, and is still London’s premier hermetic bookstore. One of its many notorious visitors was Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist who would, together with Freud, define the field. Watkins was later to become Jung’s publisher, bringing out the private 1925 edition of Jung’s “VII Sermones ad Mortuos”.
For a well-known psychiatrist to chose a hermetic bookstore as the publisher of a book might seem odd, and it is. The text is purportedly by “Basilides of Alexandria” and is a Gnostic text – a religious document, largely Christian in nature. Why Watkins was chosen as the publisher however becomes clear when we know that Jung had received this document via automatic writing – something most psychiatrists would push towards the lunatic fringe… but not Jung.
Freud and Jung are considered to be the instrumental characters of defining psychotherapy. Both originally worked together, but Jung broke with Freud in 1911. Jung felt that psychotherapy was too narrow in focus – and his ideas were based on personal experience. Jung had “spirit guides”, one of whom was named “Philemon”. Jung observed that “Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. […] Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight.” To anyone else, Philemon might be a figment of Jung’s imagination, or evidence of his madness. But Jung felt that Philemon was real – yet somehow dead, and somehow “talking” to Jung – to Jung’s mind.
Jung thus felt he was not insane; he felt that Philemon was a source of information that was legitimate: somehow, Jung was able to receive information from a source of information outside of his head – not existing in this physical reality. It opened the way for his theory of the collective unconscious, a type of library containing everything ever known, and archetypes, “active principles” that interacted between that “dimension” and ours.
Was Jung sane? He had a life-long fascination with Nietzsche, but he realized the need to distance himself from Nietzsche for fear that he might be like him and therefore suffer the same fate: Nietzsche (1844-1900) became hopelessly insane. But more than 15 years later, Jung spoke to a “highly cultivated elderly Indian”, who told Jung that his experience was identical to many mystics. In his case, his “spirit guide” or guru had been a commentator on the Vedas who had died centuries ago. Rather than be mad, Jung felt that he had stepped into the same shoes as the ancient priests and others thought have experienced the divine.
Thus, in 1916, Jung received the best-documented help from demons: Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, or “The Seven sermons to the dead written by Basilides in Alexandria”, “transcribed by Carl Gustav Jung”.
Jung stated that the start of the work was very identical to a possession. “Then it was as if my house began to be haunted. My eldest daughter saw a white figure passing through the room. My second daughter, independently of her elder sister, related that twice in the night her blanket had been snatched away; and that same night my nine-year-old son had an anxiety dream. Around five o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday the front doorbell began ringing frantically. It was a bright summer day; the two maids were in the kitchen, from which the open square outside the front door could be seen. Everyone immediately looked to see who was there, but there was no one in sight. I was sitting near the doorbell, and not only heard it but saw it moving. We all simply stared at one another.”
With such madness about the house, Jung felt he had to act. He shouted: “For God’s sake, what in the world is this?” Then they cried out in chorus, “We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.” Over the next three evenings, the book was written, and as soon as he had begun to write, “the whole ghostly assemblage evaporated. The room quieted and the atmosphere cleared. The haunting was over.”
Basilides was a real person, born in Syria, teaching in Alexandria during the years 133-155 AD. Whereas most channelled material is often nothing better than that which can be found in gossip columns, Jung’s text has been labelled a “core text in depth psychology”.
The text is intriguing for several reasons. For one, he uses the name Abraxas to describe the Supreme Being that had first generated mind (nous) and then the other mental powers. Still, Jung did not teach the return of human essence to the Gnostic pleroma, where individuality was lost, but instead adhered to individuation, which maintained the fullness of human individuality. Most metaphysics today argue that both possibilities can be encountered – and are encountered in many religions: that the soul at its final stage can chose to melt with the One (the pleroma) or maintain its separate identity inside the One (individuation). The easiest parallel is with the hologram, in which each “replica” is unique, yet also the whole. If any “replica” was aware, and would at one point have to ask what it wanted, some would ask to surrender into the greater hologram, whereas other “replicas” would ask to retain their individual memories – even though they are part of the whole.
It is clear that this experience created the framework in which later the collective unconscious would take a prominent place. He described it as such: “The collective unconscious is common to all: it is the foundation of what the ancients called the sympathy of all things. It is through the medium of the collective unconscious that information about a particular time and place can be transferred to another individual mind.” But analysts have stated that it was not just the automatic writing, but the contents of the writings themselves, that shaped his ideas. Jung himself wrote: “These conversations with the dead formed a kind of prelude to what I had to communicate to the world about the unconscious . . . All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images.”
As early as August, 1912, Jung had intimated in a letter to Freud that he had an intuition that the essentially feminine-toned archaic wisdom of the Gnostics, symbolically called Sophia, was destined to re-enter modern Western culture by way of depth-psychology. Of primary sources, the remarkable Pistis Sophia was one of very few available to Jung in translation, and his appreciation of this work was so great that he made a special effort to seek out the translator in London, the then aged and impecunious George R. S. Mead, to convey to him his great gratitude.
Subsequently, he stated to Barbara Hannah that when he discovered the writings of the ancient Gnostics, “I felt as if I had at last found a circle of friends who understood me.” Gnosticism would remain his main dedication for the rest of his life. With the success of books such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail, The Templar Revelation and The Da Vinci Code, all which carve out a special place for the feminine, and often the Pistis Sophia itself, it is clear that Jung successfully predicted the “return of the feminine”.
Philemon and Basilides are but two of the “spirit guides” that were in contact with Jung. The list of other guides also included one “Salome”. In 1926, Jung had a remarkable dream. He felt himself transported back into the 17th century, and saw himself as an alchemist, engaged in the Great Work. Jung felt that alchemy was the connection between the ancient world of the Gnostics and the modern era, which would see the return of “Sophia”.
For Jung, alchemy was not the search for the substance that would transform lead into gold, but the transformation of the soul on its path to perfection. Jung’s dreams in 1925-6 and thereafter frequently found him in ancient houses surrounded by alchemical codices of great beauty and mystery. Inspired by such images, Jung amassed a library on the great art which represents probably one of the finest private collections in this field. Jung’s collection of rare works on alchemy is still extant in his former house in Küsnacht, a suburb of Zurich. His work culminated in his chef d’oevre, published in 1944, and entitled Psychology and Alchemy.
Jung believed that the cosmos contained the divine light or life, but this essence was enmeshed in a mechanical trap, presided over by a demiurge: Lucifer, the Bringer of the Light. He contained the light inside this reality, until a time when it would be set free. The first operation of alchemy therefore addressed itself to the dismemberment of this confining structure and reducing it to a condition of creative chaos. From this, in the process of transformation, the true, creative binaries emerge and begin their interaction designed to bring about the alchemical union. In this ultimate union, says Jung, the previously confined light is redeemed and brought to the point of its ultimate and redemptive fulfilment.
Jung made it clear that his theory was not new. It is similar to the Cathar doctrine and he himself stated that he was restating the Hermetic gnosis and explaining the misunderstood central quest of alchemy. Alchemy, said Jung, stood in a compensatory relationship to mainstream Christianity, rather like a dream does to the conscious attitudes of the dreamer. It has been “underground”, part of a secret tradition that ran throughout Christianity, but always “subconscious” – visible by its shadows and theh traces it leaves only.
He also felt that this process allowed for a better understanding of male-feminine relationships, and notions such as love. It is in this approach that he no doubt left Freud the furthest behind. In The Psychology of the Transference, Jung stated that in love, as in psychological growth, the key to success is the ability to endure the tension of the opposites without abandoning the process, even if the process and its result appear to have been brought to naught. In essence, it is the “stress” that allows one to grow – to transform.
The union of opposites, the focus of the alchemist, was for Jung also the focus of the Gnostics, whom he felt had been incorrectly labelled as radical dualists, i.e. believing in the battle between good and evil – without any apparent union possible between the two. For Jung, dualism and monism were not mutually contradictory and exclusive, but complimentary aspects of reality. As such, there was no good or wrong, no order or chaos, just two opposites, who constantly created grey, and demanded of mankind to be united, transformed.
It is clear that Jung’s psychology is that of the end of the 20th century. In essence, he was the father of the New Age, giving a theoretical framework for channelling and other “New Age practices”. Still, it is clear that Jung is seldom if ever mentioned in this line. Instead, he is referred to as the “opposite” of Freud, who was fixated in trying to reduce the entire human psychology to the sexual constitution of Mankind. However, it was Jung who stated that such opposites had to be integrated…
Meditation 101: A Short, Animated Beginner’s Guide
via Open Culture:
Katy Davis (AKA Gobblynne) created an immensely popular video animating Dr. Brené Brown’s insights on The Power of Empathy. Now, she returns with another animal-filled animation that could also put you on the right mental track. Narrated by Dan Harris, this one lays out the basics of meditation and deals with some common misconceptions and points of frustration. Give it a quick watch, and if you want to give meditation a first, second or third try, check out these Free Guided Meditations From UCLA.
Friday, July 10, 2015
Waking Life
http://thearcanefront.com/waking-life-film-video/
Waking Life is about an unnamed young man living an ethereal existence that eventually becomes a full-on existential crisis. He participates actively in philosophical discussions involving other characters—ranging from quirky scholars and artists to everyday restaurant-goers and friends—about such issues as metaphysics, free will, social philosophy, and the meaning of life. Along the way, the film touches also upon existentialism, situationist politics, posthumanity, the film theory of André Bazin, and lucid dreaming, making references to various celebrated intellectual and literary figures by name.
Gradually, the protagonist begins to realize that he is living out a perpetual dream, broken up only by occasional false awakenings. So far he is mostly a passive onlooker, though this changes during a chat with a passing woman who suddenly approaches him. After she greets him and shares her creative ideas with him, he reminds himself that she is a figment of his own dreaming imagination. Afterwards, he starts to converse more openly with other dream characters, but he begins to despair about being trapped in a dream...
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xhalb0_waking-life_shortfilms
Waking Life is about an unnamed young man living an ethereal existence that eventually becomes a full-on existential crisis. He participates actively in philosophical discussions involving other characters—ranging from quirky scholars and artists to everyday restaurant-goers and friends—about such issues as metaphysics, free will, social philosophy, and the meaning of life. Along the way, the film touches also upon existentialism, situationist politics, posthumanity, the film theory of André Bazin, and lucid dreaming, making references to various celebrated intellectual and literary figures by name.
Gradually, the protagonist begins to realize that he is living out a perpetual dream, broken up only by occasional false awakenings. So far he is mostly a passive onlooker, though this changes during a chat with a passing woman who suddenly approaches him. After she greets him and shares her creative ideas with him, he reminds himself that she is a figment of his own dreaming imagination. Afterwards, he starts to converse more openly with other dream characters, but he begins to despair about being trapped in a dream...
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xhalb0_waking-life_shortfilms
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Monday, July 6, 2015
Consciousness - The final frontier
Dada Gunamuktananda: Yogi and Meditation Teacher
Bio: Dada Gunamuktananda has trained in meditation, yoga and natural health sciences in Australia, the Philippines and India. He has been a meditation teacher of Ananda Marga since 1995 and has taught and lectured on meditation in New Zealand, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East.
www.anandamarga.org
Title: Consciousness : The Final Frontier
Synopsis: The exploration of inner space, our own consciousness, is ultimately connected to our discovery of outer space. Just as the world becomes a smaller place with increase in communication and transport technology, so the universe becomes a smaller place with the increase in meditation technology!
Gulf Stream is slowing down faster than ever, scientists say
via The Independent
The Gulf Stream that helps to keep Britain from freezing over in winter is slowing down faster now than at any time in the past millennium according to a study suggesting that major changes are taking place to the ocean currents of the North Atlantic.
Scientists believe that the huge volumes of freshwater flowing into the North Atlantic from the rapidly melting ice cap of Greenland have slowed down the ocean “engine” that drives the Gulf Stream from the Caribbean towards north-west Europe, bringing heat equivalent to the output of a million power stations.
However, the researchers believe that Britain is still likely to become warmer due to climate change providing the Gulf Stream does not come to a complete halt – although they remain unsure how likely this is.
Calculations suggest that over the 20th century the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation – the northward flow of warm surface water and the southward flow of deep, cold water – has slowed by between 15 and 20 per cent, said Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
“There is more than a 99 per cent probability that this slowdown is unique over the period we looked at since 900 AD. We conclude that the slowdown many have described is in fact already underway and it is outside of any natural variation,” Professor Rahmstorf said.
The scientists calculated that some 8,000 cubic kilometres of freshwater has flowed from Greenland into the Atlantic between 1900 and 1970, and this rose significantly to 13,000 cubic kilometres between 1970 and 2000.
Freshwater is lighter than salty water which means that it tends to float on the surface of the ocean and in doing so disturbs the normal sinking of dense, cold saltwater to the ocean floor, which is the main driver of the Atlantic circulation.
In a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, Professor Rahmstorf and colleagues point out that maps of global surface temperatures have consistently indicated an overall warming trend around the world, except for the region of the North Atlantic south of Greenland.
“It is conspicuous that one specific area of the North Atlantic has been cooling in the past hundred years while the rest of the world heats up,” said Professor Rahmstorf, who added that previous research had indicated that a slowdown in ocean currents may be the explanation.
“Now we have detected strong evidence that the global conveyor has indeed been weakening in the past hundred years, particularly since 1970,” he said.
The study used proxy measurements of the Atlantic currents, using ice cores, tree rings, coral growth and ocean and lake sediments, to estimate regional temperature variations and so assess how the Gulf Stream has changed over the past 1,000 years.
Jason Box of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, who helped to calculate the amount of freshwater flowing into the Atlantic from melting ice caps, said that the slowdown can be linked to man-made climate change.
“Now freshwater coming off the Greenland ice sheet is likely disturbing the circulation. So the human-caused mass loss of the Greenland ice sheet appears to be slowing down the Atlantic overturning, and this effect might increase if temperatures are allowed to rise further,” Dr Box said.
Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University said: “Common climate models are underestimating the change we’re facing, wither because the Atlantic overturning is too stable in the models or because they don’t properly account for Greenland ice melt, or both.”
The Gulf Stream that helps to keep Britain from freezing over in winter is slowing down faster now than at any time in the past millennium according to a study suggesting that major changes are taking place to the ocean currents of the North Atlantic.
Scientists believe that the huge volumes of freshwater flowing into the North Atlantic from the rapidly melting ice cap of Greenland have slowed down the ocean “engine” that drives the Gulf Stream from the Caribbean towards north-west Europe, bringing heat equivalent to the output of a million power stations.
However, the researchers believe that Britain is still likely to become warmer due to climate change providing the Gulf Stream does not come to a complete halt – although they remain unsure how likely this is.
Calculations suggest that over the 20th century the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation – the northward flow of warm surface water and the southward flow of deep, cold water – has slowed by between 15 and 20 per cent, said Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
“There is more than a 99 per cent probability that this slowdown is unique over the period we looked at since 900 AD. We conclude that the slowdown many have described is in fact already underway and it is outside of any natural variation,” Professor Rahmstorf said.
The scientists calculated that some 8,000 cubic kilometres of freshwater has flowed from Greenland into the Atlantic between 1900 and 1970, and this rose significantly to 13,000 cubic kilometres between 1970 and 2000.
Freshwater is lighter than salty water which means that it tends to float on the surface of the ocean and in doing so disturbs the normal sinking of dense, cold saltwater to the ocean floor, which is the main driver of the Atlantic circulation.
In a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, Professor Rahmstorf and colleagues point out that maps of global surface temperatures have consistently indicated an overall warming trend around the world, except for the region of the North Atlantic south of Greenland.
“It is conspicuous that one specific area of the North Atlantic has been cooling in the past hundred years while the rest of the world heats up,” said Professor Rahmstorf, who added that previous research had indicated that a slowdown in ocean currents may be the explanation.
“Now we have detected strong evidence that the global conveyor has indeed been weakening in the past hundred years, particularly since 1970,” he said.
The study used proxy measurements of the Atlantic currents, using ice cores, tree rings, coral growth and ocean and lake sediments, to estimate regional temperature variations and so assess how the Gulf Stream has changed over the past 1,000 years.
Jason Box of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, who helped to calculate the amount of freshwater flowing into the Atlantic from melting ice caps, said that the slowdown can be linked to man-made climate change.
“Now freshwater coming off the Greenland ice sheet is likely disturbing the circulation. So the human-caused mass loss of the Greenland ice sheet appears to be slowing down the Atlantic overturning, and this effect might increase if temperatures are allowed to rise further,” Dr Box said.
Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University said: “Common climate models are underestimating the change we’re facing, wither because the Atlantic overturning is too stable in the models or because they don’t properly account for Greenland ice melt, or both.”
The oceans can’t take any more: Fundamental change in oceans predicted
via Disinformation:
Our oceans need an immediate and substantial reduction of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. If that doesn’t happen, we could see far-reaching and largely irreversible impacts on marine ecosystems, which would especially be felt in developing countries. That’s the conclusion of a new review study published today in the journal Science. In the study, the research team from the Ocean 2015 initiative assesses the latest findings on the risks that climate change poses for our oceans, and demonstrates how fundamentally marine ecosystems are likely to change if human beings continue to produce just as much greenhouse gases as before.
Since the pre-industrial era, the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has risen from 278 to 400 ppm (parts per million) — a 40 percent increase that has produced massive changes in the oceans. “To date, the oceans have essentially been the planet’s refrigerator and carbon dioxide storage locker. For instance, since the 1970s they’ve absorbed roughly 93 percent of the additional heat produced by the greenhouse effect, greatly helping to slow the warming of our planet,” explains Prof Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-author of the new Ocean 2015 study and a researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research.
But the oceans have also paid a high price: as far down as 700 metres the water temperatures have risen, which has forced some species to migrate up to 400 kilometres closer to Earth’s poles within the past decade. Given the increasing acidification in many regions, it’s becoming more and more difficult for corals and bivalves to form their calcium carbonate skeletons. In Greenland and the western Arctic, the ice is melting at an alarming rate, contributing to rising sea levels. As a result of these factors, the biological, physical and chemical processes at work in marine ecosystems are changing — which will have far-reaching consequences for marine life and humans alike.
In their new study, the research team from the Ocean 2015 initiative employs two emissions scenarios (Scenario 1: Achieving the 2-degree goal / Scenario 2: Business as usual) to compile the main findings of the IPCC’s 5thAssessment Report and the latest professional literature, and to assess those findings with regard to the risks for our oceans. “If we can successfully limit the rise in air temperature to two degrees Celsius through the year 2100, the risks, especially for warm-water corals and bivalves in low to middle latitudes, will become critical. However, the remaining risks will remain fairly moderate,” explains lead author Jean-Pierre Gattuso. But a rapid and comprehensive reduction of carbon dioxide emissions would be needed in order to achieve this ideal option, he adds.
If instead carbon dioxide emissions remain at their current level of 36 billion tonnes per year (the 2013 level), the situation will escalate dramatically. “If we just go on with business as usual, by the end of this century the changes will hit nearly every ecosystem in the oceans and cause irreparable harm for marine life,” claims Pörtner. This would in turn have massive impacts on all areas in which human beings use the oceans — whether in capture fisheries, tourism or in coastal protection.
Further, the researchers point out that with every further increase in the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, the available options for protecting, adapting and regenerating the oceans dwindle. As the authors summarise in the closing words of their study: “The ocean provides compelling arguments for rapid reductions in CO2 emissions and eventually atmospheric CO2 drawdown. Hence, any new global climate agreement that does not minimize the impacts on the ocean will be inadequate.”
The researchers’ statement above all addresses those individuals who will attend the international climate conference COP21 in Paris this December. Their study offers four key takeaway messages for the negotiators and decision-makers who will convene there:
1. The oceans greatly influence the climate system and provide important services for humans.
2. The impacts of anthropogenic climate change on key marine and coastal species can already be seen today. Many of these plant and animal species will face significant risks in the decades to come, even if we succeed in capping carbon dioxide emissions.
3. We urgently need an immediate and substantial reduction of carbon dioxide emissions in order to avoid widespread and above all irrevocable harm to ocean ecosystems and the services they provide.
4. Fourth, as atmospheric CO2 increases, the available protection, adaptation and repair options for the ocean become fewer and less effective, and with them the odds that marine life forms can successfully adapt to these rapid changes.
The Ocean 2015 initiative was launched to provide extensive information on the future of the oceans as a resource for decision-makers participating in the COP21 conference. The international research team is supported by thePrince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, the Ocean Acidification International Coordination Center of the International Atomic Energy Agency; the BNP Paribas Foundation and the Monégasque Association for Ocean Acidification.
Over the past several years, publications by researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, have greatly contributed to our current state of knowledge. One of the chief questions their efforts addresses is: “How will climate change affect ecosystems in the polar regions?.”
Our oceans need an immediate and substantial reduction of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. If that doesn’t happen, we could see far-reaching and largely irreversible impacts on marine ecosystems, which would especially be felt in developing countries. That’s the conclusion of a new review study published today in the journal Science. In the study, the research team from the Ocean 2015 initiative assesses the latest findings on the risks that climate change poses for our oceans, and demonstrates how fundamentally marine ecosystems are likely to change if human beings continue to produce just as much greenhouse gases as before.
Since the pre-industrial era, the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has risen from 278 to 400 ppm (parts per million) — a 40 percent increase that has produced massive changes in the oceans. “To date, the oceans have essentially been the planet’s refrigerator and carbon dioxide storage locker. For instance, since the 1970s they’ve absorbed roughly 93 percent of the additional heat produced by the greenhouse effect, greatly helping to slow the warming of our planet,” explains Prof Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-author of the new Ocean 2015 study and a researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research.
But the oceans have also paid a high price: as far down as 700 metres the water temperatures have risen, which has forced some species to migrate up to 400 kilometres closer to Earth’s poles within the past decade. Given the increasing acidification in many regions, it’s becoming more and more difficult for corals and bivalves to form their calcium carbonate skeletons. In Greenland and the western Arctic, the ice is melting at an alarming rate, contributing to rising sea levels. As a result of these factors, the biological, physical and chemical processes at work in marine ecosystems are changing — which will have far-reaching consequences for marine life and humans alike.
In their new study, the research team from the Ocean 2015 initiative employs two emissions scenarios (Scenario 1: Achieving the 2-degree goal / Scenario 2: Business as usual) to compile the main findings of the IPCC’s 5thAssessment Report and the latest professional literature, and to assess those findings with regard to the risks for our oceans. “If we can successfully limit the rise in air temperature to two degrees Celsius through the year 2100, the risks, especially for warm-water corals and bivalves in low to middle latitudes, will become critical. However, the remaining risks will remain fairly moderate,” explains lead author Jean-Pierre Gattuso. But a rapid and comprehensive reduction of carbon dioxide emissions would be needed in order to achieve this ideal option, he adds.
If instead carbon dioxide emissions remain at their current level of 36 billion tonnes per year (the 2013 level), the situation will escalate dramatically. “If we just go on with business as usual, by the end of this century the changes will hit nearly every ecosystem in the oceans and cause irreparable harm for marine life,” claims Pörtner. This would in turn have massive impacts on all areas in which human beings use the oceans — whether in capture fisheries, tourism or in coastal protection.
Further, the researchers point out that with every further increase in the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, the available options for protecting, adapting and regenerating the oceans dwindle. As the authors summarise in the closing words of their study: “The ocean provides compelling arguments for rapid reductions in CO2 emissions and eventually atmospheric CO2 drawdown. Hence, any new global climate agreement that does not minimize the impacts on the ocean will be inadequate.”
The researchers’ statement above all addresses those individuals who will attend the international climate conference COP21 in Paris this December. Their study offers four key takeaway messages for the negotiators and decision-makers who will convene there:
1. The oceans greatly influence the climate system and provide important services for humans.
2. The impacts of anthropogenic climate change on key marine and coastal species can already be seen today. Many of these plant and animal species will face significant risks in the decades to come, even if we succeed in capping carbon dioxide emissions.
3. We urgently need an immediate and substantial reduction of carbon dioxide emissions in order to avoid widespread and above all irrevocable harm to ocean ecosystems and the services they provide.
4. Fourth, as atmospheric CO2 increases, the available protection, adaptation and repair options for the ocean become fewer and less effective, and with them the odds that marine life forms can successfully adapt to these rapid changes.
The Ocean 2015 initiative was launched to provide extensive information on the future of the oceans as a resource for decision-makers participating in the COP21 conference. The international research team is supported by thePrince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, the Ocean Acidification International Coordination Center of the International Atomic Energy Agency; the BNP Paribas Foundation and the Monégasque Association for Ocean Acidification.
Over the past several years, publications by researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, have greatly contributed to our current state of knowledge. One of the chief questions their efforts addresses is: “How will climate change affect ecosystems in the polar regions?.”
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