Reality Smashing Quotes

via Fractal Enlightenment  

“Quotations are like wayside robbers who leap out, brandishing weapons, and relieve the idler of his certainty.” ~ Walter Benjamin

Ah quotations, those little packets of redemption, those tiny bundles of emancipation. They take our tiny bowls of fixed thinking and stir them up into giant bowls of flexible thinking. They eclipse both certitude and uncertainty, intermittently. They intellectually crush out. In this article we’ll delve into ten quotations that tear the veil between the believer and his/her belief. Ten quotes that rattle the cage of our certainty, tease out the hypocrisy of our convictions, and force our heads over the edge of the abyss of the human condition. As Bradford Keeney pinpointed, “Words are only useful in teasing one another. In teasing we are less likely to get stuck in any particular belief, attitude, or form of knowing.”

Number one: “We understand nothing! If you understand this, you understand everything.” ~ Paul Mic

It’s okay that we’re fallible. It’s okay that we’re imperfect and prone to make mistakes. It’s even okay that we’re inherently hypocritical and torn between spirit and flesh. After all, we are a ridiculously young species in a preposterously ancient universe. Does this get us off the hook? Nope. But it does get us out of our own way, so that we’re able to focus on what really matters: life, love, and laughter. As, Jorge Luis Borges said, polishing up the predicament, “To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”

Number two: “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” ~ Richard Feynman

Indeed. Questions are infinite and free. Answers are finite and fixed. I would even go so far as to say that the only answer is to question. How could it not be? When you can question anything, ad infinitum. One could even question my declaration that the only answer is to question. As Elie Weisel said, “Every question possesses a power that does not lie within the answer.” Of course! In the end all one has are questions with which to challenge the lot; to usurp the throne it’s intellections, and make assumptions naught. And then there’s Franz Kafka’s thought on the subject that knocks it out of the park, “He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.”

Number three: “Time makes ancient good uncouth.” ~ James Russell Lowell

Such a thought keeps us open to new evidence, new arguments, and new experiences, so that we may perhaps evolve, or co-evolve, into having a healthier perspective of reality. We’re able to move from thesis to anti-thesis and into synthesis, and then back into thesis, to which a new anti-thesis becomes inevitable. Lest we doom ourselves to making the same mistakes as our ancestors did, it behooves us to intuit when an antiquated ideal has grown unhealthy and stale. As Aldous Huxley warned, rounding out the thought, “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”

Number four: “You must change in order to find your truest self. And keep changing. The false idol is any form that hangs around too long and gets fossilized. It’s worth considering that if your ideas of God don’t change, then your ideas are dead. God is not dead. He simply went elsewhere because you were too boring… Tease God. Do not fear God. A fool’s love is what God loves best. It represents the ready and available heart of a child at play.” ~ Bradford Keeney

Barring the idea that everything is an illusion, ‘change’ is perhaps the only certainty we have to hang our hats on. It seems to be the only permanent. Which is ironic, because change is the epitome of impermanence. Oh well. Might as well have a good sense of humor about it. Better to laugh with all the gods (and with the absence of god, if you’re an atheist) than to stare all self-serious and dead-mackerel-eyed into the infinite nothingness vainly tempting to force-feed “Truth” into a reality that doesn’t give a rat’s as*. Alan Watts smooths out the thought, “Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”

 Number five: “God emptied to the limit is man, and man emptied to the limit is God.” ~ Alan Watts

Imagine it: God emptied to the limit. What’s left? Man, in his imperfect, naked vulnerability: a finite, trembling creature at the seeming center of an Infinite Flourishing. Imagine further: Man emptied to the limit. What’s left? God, writhing in perfect union with all things, interdependently spread out into infinite ubiquity. Such is the existential predicament of mankind: a breath-gasping, sphincter-tightening, mortal beast daring his soul into transcending it all with the self-actualized symbolism of God. Either way, man is God and God is man. Especially considering Meister Eckhart’s thought on the subject, “The eye with which I see God, is the same eye with which God sees me.” Or? As Rumi said, “Maybe you are searching among the branches for what only appears in the roots.”

Number six: “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth may very well be another profound truth.” ~ Niels Bohr

Truth shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s ability to hold multiple conflicting dispositions at the same time regarding the same topic. In short: Truth is a slippery red herring. In order to handle it, the mind must be both flexible and sharp, all while not taking itself too seriously. This requires being circumspect with ideas while also attempting to sharpen them on the whetstone of probability. And then having the audacity to be circumspect with probability. Perhaps nobody said it better than Aristotle, “It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

Number seven: “’I don’t know’ is an unparalleled source of power, a declaration of independence from the pressure to have an opinion about every single subject. It’s fun to say. Try it: ‘I don’t know.’ Let go of the drive to have it all figured out: ‘I don’t know.’ Proclaim the only truth you can be totally sure of: ‘I don’t know.’ Empty your mind and lift your heart: ‘I don’t know.’ Use it as a battle cry, a joyous affirmation of your oneness with the Great Mystery: ‘I don’t know.’” ~ Rob Brezsny

Indeed. “I don’t know” frees us into a state of “prepared to learn.” We are liberated from the burden of having the answers. We shed the weight, so that maybe we can pack it back up in a healthier way that makes us more robust. We unlearn what we have learned. Then we shed the weight again, back into a state of “I don’t know.” We empty the cup, so that we can fill it back up with the fresh water of awe and wonder. Then we empty it again. Over and over. Education by perpetual astonishment is the thing. ‘I don’t know’ in order that I may be overwhelmed by my not knowing.

Number eight: “The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” ~ Mark Twain

If, as Voltaire said, “Religion began when the first conman met the first fool,” then perhaps the fool gets un-fooled by realizing that the conman is just a man – fallible, flawed, imperfect, prone to mistakes, and more than likely just as wrong about his assertions as the fool is about his uncertainty. The absolute folly of the human condition is the only salvation for the fool, if only he could intuit it. But alas, as Mark Twain surmised, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

Number nine: “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” ~ Rene Descartes

Just as the folly of the human condition is the only salvation for the fool, so too is doubt the only salvation for the blindly faithful. And the predicament is much the same. How to get the blindly faithful passed their blind spot. It comes down to a problem of cognitive dissonance that’s exacerbated by people’s tendency to take themselves and their beliefs too seriously. But breakthroughs can be made. We just need to trip our ignorant religious tendencies into an enlightened spiritual dance. As Eckhart Tolle suggested, “Here is a new spiritual practice: Don’t take your thoughts too seriously.”

Number ten: “But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

There you are: a tiny human in a gargantuan cosmos, a small speck in a vast universe, a flash in the pan of Time heretofore. What to do with the existential angst? What to do with the delicious tearing between spirit and flesh? What to do with the preciously finite amount of time you have within an infinite reality? It’s all yours to take in. It’s all yours to open up to. It’s all yours to plant seeds so as to flourish into the healthiest, most open-minded version of yourself. It’s all yours to breathe in an out with a flexible and un-shatterable sense of humor. It’s all so serious that it’s not serious at all. Laughable, really. And yet, as Terence McKenna profoundly stated, “You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.”

Mista'peo

via Carl Jung Depth Psychology

Marie-Louise Von Franz: Dreams give the Naskapi complete ability to find his way in life

This inner center is realized in exceptionally pure, unspoiled form by the Naskapi Indians, who still exist in the forests of the Labrador peninsula.

These simple people are hunters who live in isolated family groups, so far from one another that they have not been able to evolve tribal customs or collective religious beliefs and ceremonies.

In his lifelong solitude the Naskapi hunter has to rely on his own inner voices and unconscious revelations; he has no religious teachers who tell him what he should believe, no rituals, festivals, or customs to help him along.

In his basic view of life, the soul of man is simply an "Inner Companion, " whom he calls "my friend" or Mista'peo, meaning "Great Man."

Mista'peo dwells in the heart and is immortal; in the moment of death, or shortly before, he leaves the individual, and later reincarnates himself in another being.

Those Naskapi who pay attention to their dreams and who try to find their meaning and test their truth can enter into a deeper connection with the Great Man.

He favors such people and sends them more and better dreams.

Thus the major obligation of an individual Naskapi is to follow the instructions given by his dreams, and then to give permanent form to their contents in art.

Lies and dishonesty drive the Great Man away from one's inner realm whereas generosity and love of ones neighbors and animals attracts and give him life.

Dreams give the Naskapi complete ability to find his way in life, not only in the inner world but also in the outer world of nature.

Thel help him to foretell the weather and give him invaluable guidance in his hunting, upon which his life depends.

I mention these very primitive people because they are uncontaminated by our civilized ideas and still have natural insight into the essence of what Jung calls the Self.

~Marie-Louise von Franz, Man and His Symbols, Pages 161-162

Transrealism: the first major literary movement of the 21st century?

via The Guardian

It’s not science fiction, it’s not realism, but hovers in the unsettling zone in between. From Philip K Dick to Stephen King, Damien Walter takes a tour through transrealism, the emerging genre aiming to kill off ‘consensus reality’

A Scanner Darkly is one of Philip K Dick’s most famous but also most divisive novels. Written in 1973 but not published until 1977, it marks the boundary between PKD’s mid-career novels that were clearly works of science fiction, including The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and his late-career work that had arguably left that genre behind. Like VALIS and The Divine Invasion that followed it, A Scanner Darkly was two stories collided into one – a roughly science-fictional premise built around a mind-destroying drug, and a grittily realistic autobiographical depiction of PKD’s time living among drug addicts.

It is also, in the thinking of writer, critic and mathematician Rudy Rucker, the first work of a literary movement he would name “transrealism” in his 1983 essay A Transrealist Manifesto. Three decades later, Rucker’s essay has as much relevance to contemporary literature as ever. But while Rucker was writing at a time when science fiction and mainstream literature appeared starkly divided, today the two are increasingly hard to separate. It seems that here in the early 21st century, the literary movement Rucker called for is finally reaching its fruition.

Transrealism argues for an approach to writing novels routed first and foremost in reality. It rejects artificial constructs like plot and archetypal characters, in favour of real events and people, drawn directly from the author’s experience. But through this realist tapestry, the author threads a singular, impossibly fantastic idea, often one drawn from the playbook of science fiction, fantasy and horror. So the transrealist author who creates a detailed and realistic depiction of American high-school life will then shatter it open with the discovery of an alien flying saucer that confers super-powers on an otherwise ordinary young man.

It’s informative to list a few works that do not qualify as transrealism to understand Rucker’s intent more fully. Popular fantasy or science fiction stories like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games lack a strong enough reality to be discussed as transrealism. Apparently realistic narratives that sometimes contain fantastic elements, like the high-tech gizmos of spy thrillers, also fail as transrealism because their plots and archetypal characters are very far from real. Transrealism aims for a very specific combination of the real and the fantastic, for a very specific purpose, that seems to have become tremendously relevant for contemporary readers.

The potential list of transrealist authors is both contentious and fascinating. Margaret Atwood for The Handmaid’s Tale and her novels from Oryx and Crake onwards. Stephen King, when at his best describing the lives of blue-collar America shattered by supernatural horrors. Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, among other big names of American letters. Iain Banks in novels like Whit and The Bridge. JG Ballard, as one of many writers originating from the science-fiction genre to pioneer transrealist techniques. Martin Amis in Time’s Arrow, among others.

This proliferation of the fantastic in contemporary fiction has at times been described as the “mainstreaming of science fiction”. But sci-fi continues on much as it ever has, producing various escapist fantasies for readers who want time out from reality. And of course there’s no shortage of purely realist novels populating Booker prize lists and elsewhere. Both sci-fi and realism provide a measure of comfort – one by showing us the escape hatch from mundane reality, the other by reassuring us the reality we really upon is fixed, stable and unchanging. Transrealism is meant to be uncomfortable, by telling us that our reality is at best constructed, at worst non-existent, and allowing us no escape from that realisation.

“Transrealism is a revolutionary art form. A major tool in mass thought-control is the myth of consensus reality. Hand in hand with this myth goes the notion of a ‘normal person’.” Rucker’s formulation of transrealism as revolutionary becomes especially meaningful when compared to the uses transrealism is put to by the best of its practitioners. Atwood, Pynchon and Foster-Wallace all employed transrealist techniques to challenge the ways that “consensus reality” defined who was normal and who was not, from the political oppression of women to the spiritual death inflicted on us all by modern consumerism.

Today transrealism underpins much of the most radical and challenging work in contemporary literature. Colson Whitehead’s intelligent dissection of the underpinnings of racism in The Intuitionist and his New York Times transrealist twist on the zombie-apocalypse novel, Zone One. Monica Byrne’s hallucinatory road-trip across the future of the developing world and the lives of women caught between poverty and high-speed technological change in The Girl in the Road. Matt Haig’s compulsive young adult novel The Humans, which invites the reader to see human life through alien eyes. Transrealism has 30 years of history behind it, but it’s in the next 30 years that it may well define literature as we come to know it.

The Cultural Sickness Needs to be Named

by Joe Brewer

All over the world there is a feeling that something is deeply wrong. It is often felt more than seen, an unnamed darkness that keeps millions (even billions) of people disconnected from the reality of authentic life-affirming experience. Too many of our so-called leaders are asleep at the wheel — they talk about economic growth at all costs as the only viable solution to mass poverty, wealth inequality, the climate crisis, and other planetary-scale crises humanity must confront in the 21st Century.

Those with a spiritual bend might say that a shadowy presence has shrouded much of the Earth. People are sleeping through the same nightmare, unable to awaken within the dream. They are like Mr. Anderson and his peers in The Matrix movies, plugged into a cultural system that feeds on their bodies and souls while keeping them unaware that they are living in a dream world.

What if the pain so many of us feel is caused by the same cultural sickness? How might we diagnose it? What are its root causes? And most importantly — how do we heal ourselves and the world around us?

These are deep questions. Spiritual questions. They are questions asked by seekers of truth in a time when discernment is desperately needed. And now is such a time. Our dominant consumer culture is built on the dark side of human nature — the propensity for greed that employs tactics of division to stoke fear as a system of control.

This culture tells us that humans are selfish and greedy. It says that we are nothing more than individual islands of ego floating in a sea of chaos. It is the Great Myth of Separation that takes many forms. We’ve seen it as humans apart from nature, reason divided against emotion, body separate from mind, one tribe distinct from another. This mental tendency to categorize the world according to its separations is the root cause of illness in the world today.

And it has a name. It’s name is Wetiko.

My partners at TheRules.org have created a special campaign that invites people to practice Seeing Wetiko — in the world around us and also within ourselves.

“Wetiko” is the name given to this cultural sickness in the Algonquin language. It is described by Paul Levy in his book Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil, in this manner:

    Native American mythologies portray the mythical figure of wetiko as a cannibalistic spirit who embodies greed and excess and can possess human beings. The wetiko that was once a human being, but because of its gluttony and selfishness it was transformed into a predatory monster.

This mythic figure can be thought of as a state of mind, a psychosis or collective delusion that confuses the menu for the meal (for example, by confusing money for real wealth or treating nature as worthless while numbers in an accounting spreadsheet are considered to have value). A person inflicted by Wetiko is thought to have a heart of ice making it impossible for them to feel compassion or love for others.

It can be seen in the blind pursuit of money by those whose actions destroy the life-giving capacities of the Earth. It is whispered in the deep recesses of minds told there is something fundamentally wrong with them — an insecurity hole in their soul that can only be filled through mindless consumption of trendy products. It is the numbness of pornography replacing the erotic depths of emotional connection between human beings as one uses the other for carnal pleasure while giving nothing in return. And it is the psychopathic behavior of corporations that put profit above all else as the sacred purpose guiding CEO’s and investors.

Every time someone is seen justifying the destruction of life for profit — it is Wetiko.

Every time compassion is vitally missing during a time of suffering — it is Wetiko.

Every time a privileged person uses a “throw away” toy — it is Wetiko.

Every time fear or disgust is used to manipulate for personal gain — it is Wetiko.

Our purpose in telling stories about Wetiko is to cultivate healing experiences for people everywhere who are suffering through the unprecedented scales and pace of change unfolding around us. Without a clear concept for the feeling that the world has gone crazy, it remains vague and muddled. The antidote is to provide a name for this feeling — and imbue it with the power of good storytelling.

At TheRules.org we strive to reveal the hidden conceptual patterns that give rise to poverty, inequality, and ecological destruction. Using a combination of linguistic analysis and economic policy studies, we are beginning to see Wetiko all around us in the mechanisms that create these conditions in the social rules that guide the formation of trade agreements, financial policies, employment contracts, and other concrete applications.

For example, if we connect the dots well enough it becomes possible to see that:

•     Resource extraction is only possible when nature is treated as dead and worthless on its own. Thus it is possible to mindlessly consume forests and soils, deplete fish stocks, pour pollution into the oceans, and burn fossil fuels into the atmosphere.
•     Human labor is consumed as a “resource” that cannibalizes time, effort and enthusiasm. This is why so many of us are stuck in bullshit jobs while the Earth (and our local communities) are begging for meaningful service and a purposeful well-lived life.
•     The global network of tax havens is a vampire-like web that syphons the life-flow of human labor into the coffers of the super rich. As a result, the money supply becomes like blood that has been withdrawn from a living body.
•     Debt-repayment programs extract wealth from “developing” societies, disingenuously exploiting the morality of social responsibility to hoard massive wealth. Poverty is created and environments destroyed — at an accelerating pace — to keep this financial cannibal alive.
•     This debt-poverty disease inflicts “developed” nations as well. It can be seen in the exploding credit card and student loan debts, whereby people feel forced to serve money instead of pursuing their real passions.

We invite you to help us tell stories like these and reveal the ways that Wetiko functions through each of us as we remain plugged into the Matrix.

Only by awakening to our true power — that it is us who individually and collectively dream this nightmare creature into being in each and every moment — will we begin the process of letting it go and “dispelling” the myth we currently speak, think, and feel into being through unconscious actions.

By seeing Wetiko, we glimpse ourselves as powerful agents of culture creation. We become that we are capable of producing something so destructive and horrible without even realizing it. This becomes deeply inspiring when we imagine what becomes possible if we harness this creative power to embrace life and instead feed our innate sense of connection, wonder, and awe for all living things.

The human impulse to create dream worlds has been co-opted by the Wetiko mindset for far too long. It is the great threat to Wetiko and therefore must be deadened for it to work its dark magic upon us. Let’s wield this creative energy together and bring light into the dark places!

Onward, fellow humans.

What You Need to Know About the World's Water Wars

via National Geographic

Beijing is sinking.

In some neighborhoods, the ground is giving way at a rate of four inches a year as water in the giant aquifer below it is pumped.

The groundwater has been so depleted that China’s capital city, home to more than 20 million people, could face serious disruptions in its rail system, roadways, and building foundations, an international team of scientists concluded earlier this year. Beijing, despite tapping into the gigantic North China Plain aquifer, is the world’s fifth most water-stressed city and its water problems are likely to get even worse.

Beijing isn’t the only place experiencing subsidence, or sinking, as soil collapses into space created as groundwater is depleted. Parts of Shanghai, Mexico City, and other cities are sinking, too. Sections of California’s Central Valley have dropped by a foot, and in some localized areas, by as much as 28 feet.

Around the world, alarms are being sounded about the depletion of underground water supplies. The United Nations predicts a global shortfall in water by 2030. About 30 percent of the planet’s available freshwater is in the aquifers that underlie every continent.

More than two-thirds of the groundwater consumed around the world irrigates agriculture, while the rest supplies drinking water to cities. These aquifers long have served as a backup to carry regions and countries through droughts and warm winters lacking enough snowmelt to replenish rivers and streams. Now, the world’s largest underground water reserves in Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas are under stress. Many of them are being drawn down at unsustainable rates. Nearly two billion people rely on groundwater that is considered under threat.

Richard Damania, a lead economist at the World Bank, predicts that without adequate water supplies, economic growth in the most stressed parts of the world could decline by six percent of GDP. His findings conclude that the most severe impacts of climate change will deplete water supplies.

“If you are in a dry area, you are going to get a lot less rainfall. Run-off is declining,” he says. “People are turning to groundwater in a very, very big way.”

But few things are more difficult to control than groundwater pumping, Damania says. In the United States, farmers are withdrawing water at unsustainable rates from the High Plains, or Ogallala Aquifer, even though they have been aware of the threat for six decades.

“What you have in developing countries is a large number of small farmers pumping. Given that these guys are earning so little, there is very little you can do to control it,” Damania says. “And you are, literally, in a race to the bottom.”

As regions and nations run short of water, Damania says, economic growth will decline and food prices will spike, raising the risk of violent conflict and waves of large migrations. Unrest in Yemen, which heavily taps into groundwater and which experienced water riots in 2009, is rooted in a water crisis. Experts say water scarcity also helped destabilize Syria and launch its civil war. Jordan, which relies on aquifers as its only source of water, is even more water-stressed now that more than a half-million Syrian refugees arrived.

Jay Famiglietti, lead scientist on a 2015 study using NASA satellites to record changes in the world’s 37 largest aquifers, says that the ones under the greatest threat are in the most heavily populated areas.

"Without sustainable groundwater reserves, global security is at far greater risk,” he says. “As the dry parts are getting drier, we will rely on groundwater even more heavily. The implications are just staggering and really need to be discussed at the international level.”

Below are answers to your key questions.

Where is groundwater the most threatened?

The most over-stressed is the Arabian Aquifer System, which supplies water to 60 million people in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The Indus Basin aquifer in northwest India and Pakistan is the second-most threatened, and the Murzuk-Djado Basin in northern Africa the third.

How did these giant basins become so depleted?

Drought, bad management of pumping, leaky pipes in big-city municipal water systems, aging infrastructure, inadequate technology, population growth, and the demand for more food production all put increasing demand on pumping more groundwater. Flood irrigation, which is inefficient, remains the dominant irrigation method worldwide. In India, the world’s largest consumer of groundwater, the government subsidizes electricity – an incentive to farmers to keep pumping.

How has irrigation changed farming?

Irrigation has enabled water-intensive crops to be grown in dry places, which in turn created local economies that are now difficult to undo. These include sugar cane and rice in India, winter wheat in China, and corn in the southern High Plains of North America. Aquaculture has boomed in the land-locked Ararat Basin, which lies along the border between Armenia and Turkey. Groundwater is cold enough to raise cold-water fish, such as trout and sturgeon. In less than two decades, the aquifer there has been drawn down so severely for fish ponds that municipal water supplies in more than two dozen communities are now threatened.

How much water remains?

More is known about oil reserves than water. Calculating what remains in aquifers is extraordinarily difficult. In 2015, scientists at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada concluded that less than six percent of groundwater above one-and-a-half miles (two kilometers) in the Earth’s landmass is renewable within a human lifetime. But other hydrologists caution that measurements of stores can mislead. More important is how the water is distributed throughout the aquifer. When water levels drop below to 50 feet or less, it is often not economically practical to pump water to the surface, and much of that water is brackish or contains so many minerals that it is unusable.

Is there any good news?

Depleted groundwater is a slow-speed crisis, scientists say, so there's time to develop new technologies and water efficiencies. In Western Australia, desalinated water has been injected to recharge the large aquifer that Perth, Australia's driest city, taps for drinking water. China is working to regulate pumping. In west Texas, the city of Abernathy is drilling into a deeper aquifer that lies beneath the High Plains aquifer and mixing the two to supplement the municipal water supply.

Awakening Non-Symbolic Consciousness with Jeffery Martin

Jeffery Martin, PhD, is a Harvard trained social scientist who researches personal transformation. He specializes in bringing rigorous empirical research and testing to transformational techniques and theories that have previously been supported anecdotally. Jeffery is a leading expert on intentionality and non-symbolic consciousness. He holds graduate degrees in information technology, management, and transformative studies and has co-edited, authored, or co-authored over 20 books and numerous other publications; appeared in a wide variety of electronic media; and lectured widely in both academic and public forums. Jeffery is currently the director of the Center for the Study of Non-Symbolic Consciousness, and the Center for the Study of Intent. Portions of his research on power of thought and non-symbolic consciousness are also available in the popular fiction book, The Fourth Awakening.

Here he describes his research, beginning with neurophysiological measurements of individuals reputed to have attained a measure of spiritual enlightenment. He encountered over 200 related terms such as transcendental consciousness, god consciousness, and unity consciousness. His primary finding concerned changes that took place deep within the brain. Much was also learned by querying participants as to how they achieved their state of well-being. This led to a specific protocol for enabling people to shift into a state of persistent well-being. He concludes by defining, in everyday language, what the experience of non-symbolic consciousness is like.

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in "parapsychology" ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). His master's degree is in criminology. He has served as vice-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and is the recipient of its Pathfinder Award for outstanding contributions to the field of human consciousness. He is also past-president of the non-profit Intuition Network, an organization dedicated to creating a world in which all people are encouraged to cultivate and apply their inner, intuitive abilities.

Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.

via Wired

Merck was in trouble. In 2002, the pharmaceutical giant was falling behind its rivals in sales. Even worse, patents on five blockbuster drugs were about to expire, which would allow cheaper generics to flood the market. The company hadn't introduced a truly new product in three years, and its stock price was plummeting.

In interviews with the press, Edward Scolnick, Merck's research director, laid out his battle plan to restore the firm to preeminence. Key to his strategy was expanding the company's reach into the antidepressant market, where Merck had lagged while competitors like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline created some of the best-selling drugs in the world. "To remain dominant in the future," he told Forbes, "we need to dominate the central nervous system."

His plan hinged on the success of an experimental antidepressant codenamed MK-869. Still in clinical trials, it looked like every pharma executive's dream: a new kind of medication that exploited brain chemistry in innovative ways to promote feelings of well-being. The drug tested brilliantly early on, with minimal side effects, and Merck touted its game-changing potential at a meeting of 300 securities analysts.

Behind the scenes, however, MK-869 was starting to unravel. True, many test subjects treated with the medication felt their hopelessness and anxiety lift. But so did nearly the same number who took a placebo, a look-alike pill made of milk sugar or another inert substance given to groups of volunteers in clinical trials to gauge how much more effective the real drug is by comparison. The fact that taking a faux drug can powerfully improve some people's health—the so-called placebo effect—has long been considered an embarrassment to the serious practice of pharmacology.

Ultimately, Merck's foray into the antidepressant market failed. In subsequent tests, MK-869 turned out to be no more effective than a placebo. In the jargon of the industry, the trials crossed the futility boundary.

MK-869 wasn't the only highly anticipated medical breakthrough to be undone in recent years by the placebo effect. From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent. The failure rate in more extensive Phase III trials increased by 11 percent, mainly due to surprisingly poor showings against placebo. Despite historic levels of industry investment in R&D, the US Food and Drug Administration approved only 19 first-of-their-kind remedies in 2007—the fewest since 1983—and just 24 in 2008. Half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials drop out of the pipeline due to their inability to beat sugar pills.

The upshot is fewer new medicines available to ailing patients and more financial woes for the beleaguered pharmaceutical industry. Last November, a new type of gene therapy for Parkinson's disease, championed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, was abruptly withdrawn from Phase II trials after unexpectedly tanking against placebo. A stem-cell startup called Osiris Therapeutics got a drubbing on Wall Street in March, when it suspended trials of its pill for Crohn's disease, an intestinal ailment, citing an "unusually high" response to placebo. Two days later, Eli Lilly broke off testing of a much-touted new drug for schizophrenia when volunteers showed double the expected level of placebo response.

It's not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

It's not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It's as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.

The fact that an increasing number of medications are unable to beat sugar pills has thrown the industry into crisis. The stakes could hardly be higher. In today's economy, the fate of a long-established company can hang on the outcome of a handful of tests.

Why are inert pills suddenly overwhelming promising new drugs and established medicines alike? The reasons are only just beginning to be understood. A network of independent researchers is doggedly uncovering the inner workings—and potential therapeutic applications—of the placebo effect. At the same time, drugmakers are realizing they need to fully understand the mechanisms behind it so they can design trials that differentiate more clearly between the beneficial effects of their products and the body's innate ability to heal itself. A special task force of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health is seeking to stem the crisis by quietly undertaking one of the most ambitious data-sharing efforts in the history of the drug industry. After decades in the jungles of fringe science, the placebo effect has become the elephant in the boardroom.

The roots of the placebo problem can be traced to a lie told by an Army nurse during World War II as Allied forces stormed the beaches of southern Italy. The nurse was assisting an anesthetist named Henry Beecher, who was tending to US troops under heavy German bombardment. When the morphine supply ran low, the nurse assured a wounded soldier that he was getting a shot of potent painkiller, though her syringe contained only salt water. Amazingly, the bogus injection relieved the soldier's agony and prevented the onset of shock.

Returning to his post at Harvard after the war, Beecher became one of the nation's leading medical reformers. Inspired by the nurse's healing act of deception, he launched a crusade to promote a method of testing new medicines to find out whether they were truly effective. At the time, the process for vetting drugs was sloppy at best: Pharmaceutical companies would simply dose volunteers with an experimental agent until the side effects swamped the presumed benefits. Beecher proposed that if test subjects could be compared to a group that received a placebo, health officials would finally have an impartial way to determine whether a medicine was actually responsible for making a patient better.

In a 1955 paper titled "The Powerful Placebo," published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Beecher described how the placebo effect had undermined the results of more than a dozen trials by causing improvement that was mistakenly attributed to the drugs being tested. He demonstrated that trial volunteers who got real medication were also subject to placebo effects; the act of taking a pill was itself somehow therapeutic, boosting the curative power of the medicine. Only by subtracting the improvement in a placebo control group could the actual value of the drug be calculated.

The article caused a sensation. By 1962, reeling from news of birth defects caused by a drug called thalidomide, Congress amended the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, requiring trials to include enhanced safety testing and placebo control groups. Volunteers would be assigned randomly to receive either medicine or a sugar pill, and neither doctor nor patient would know the difference until the trial was over. Beecher's double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trial—or RCT—was enshrined as the gold standard of the emerging pharmaceutical industry. Today, to win FDA approval, a new medication must beat placebo in at least two authenticated trials.

Beecher's prescription helped cure the medical establishment of outright quackery, but it had an insidious side effect. By casting placebo as the villain in RCTs, he ended up stigmatizing one of his most important discoveries. The fact that even dummy capsules can kick-start the body's recovery engine became a problem for drug developers to overcome, rather than a phenomenon that could guide doctors toward a better understanding of the healing process and how to drive it most effectively.

In his eagerness to promote his template for clinical trials, Beecher also overreached by seeing the placebo effect at work in curing ailments like the common cold, which wane with no intervention at all. But the triumph of Beecher's gold standard was a generation of safer medications that worked for nearly everyone. Anthracyclines don't require an oncologist with a genial bedside manner to slow the growth of tumors.

What Beecher didn't foresee, however, was the explosive growth of the pharmaceutical industry. The blockbuster success of mood drugs in the '80s and '90s emboldened Big Pharma to promote remedies for a growing panoply of disorders that are intimately related to higher brain function. By attempting to dominate the central nervous system, Big Pharma gambled its future on treating ailments that have turned out to be particularly susceptible to the placebo effect.

The tall, rusty-haired son of a country doctor, William Potter, 64, has spent most of his life treating mental illness—first as a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health and then as a drug developer. A decade ago, he took a job at Lilly's neuroscience labs. There, working on new antidepressants and antianxiety meds, he became one of the first researchers to glimpse the approaching storm.

To test products internally, pharmaceutical companies routinely run trials in which a long-established medication and an experimental one compete against each other as well as against a placebo. As head of Lilly's early-stage psychiatric drug development in the late '90s, Potter saw that even durable warhorses like Prozac, which had been on the market for years, were being overtaken by dummy pills in more recent tests. The company's next-generation antidepressants were faring badly, too, doing no better than placebo in seven out of 10 trials.

As a psychiatrist, Potter knew that some patients really do seem to get healthier for reasons that have more to do with a doctor's empathy than with the contents of a pill. But it baffled him that drugs he'd been prescribing for years seemed to be struggling to prove their effectiveness. Thinking that something crucial may have been overlooked, Potter tapped an IT geek named David DeBrota to help him comb through the Lilly database of published and unpublished trials—including those that the company had kept secret because of high placebo response. They aggregated the findings from decades of antidepressant trials, looking for patterns and trying to see what was changing over time. What they found challenged some of the industry's basic assumptions about its drug-vetting process.

Assumption number one was that if a trial were managed correctly, a medication would perform as well or badly in a Phoenix hospital as in a Bangalore clinic. Potter discovered, however, that geographic location alone could determine whether a drug bested placebo or crossed the futility boundary. By the late '90s, for example, the classic antianxiety drug diazepam (also known as Valium) was still beating placebo in France and Belgium. But when the drug was tested in the US, it was likely to fail. Conversely, Prozac performed better in America than it did in western Europe and South Africa. It was an unsettling prospect: FDA approval could hinge on where the company chose to conduct a trial.

Mistaken assumption number two was that the standard tests used to gauge volunteers' improvement in trials yielded consistent results. Potter and his colleagues discovered that ratings by trial observers varied significantly from one testing site to another. It was like finding out that the judges in a tight race each had a different idea about the placement of the finish line.

Potter and DeBrota's data-mining also revealed that even superbly managed trials were subject to runaway placebo effects. But exactly why any of this was happening remained elusive. "We were able to identify many of the core issues in play," Potter says. "But there was no clear answer to the problem." Convinced that what Lilly was facing was too complex for any one pharmaceutical house to unravel on its own, he came up with a plan to break down the firewalls between researchers across the industry, enabling them to share data in "pre-competitive space."

After prodding by Potter and others, the NIH focused on the issue in 2000, hosting a three-day conference in Washington. For the first time in medical history, more than 500 drug developers, doctors, academics, and trial designers put their heads together to examine the role of the placebo effect in clinical trials and healing in general.

Potter's ambitious plan for a collaborative approach to the problem eventually ran into its own futility boundary: No one would pay for it. And drug companies don't share data, they hoard it. But the NIH conference launched a new wave of placebo research in academic labs in the US and Italy that would make significant progress toward solving the mystery of what was happening in clinical trials.

Visitors to Fabrizio Benedetti's clinic at the University of Turin are asked never to say the P-word around the med students who sign up for his experiments. For all the volunteers know, the trim, soft-spoken neuroscientist is hard at work concocting analgesic skin creams and methods for enhancing athletic performance.

One recent afternoon in his lab, a young soccer player grimaced with exertion while doing leg curls on a weight machine. Benedetti and his colleagues were exploring the potential of using Pavlovian conditioning to give athletes a competitive edge undetectable by anti-doping authorities. A player would receive doses of a performance-enhancing drug for weeks and then a jolt of placebo just before competition.

Benedetti, 53, first became interested in placebos in the mid-'90s, while researching pain. He was surprised that some of the test subjects in his placebo groups seemed to suffer less than those on active drugs. But scientific interest in this phenomenon, and the money to research it, were hard to come by. "The placebo effect was considered little more than a nuisance," he recalls. "Drug companies, physicians, and clinicians were not interested in understanding its mechanisms. They were concerned only with figuring out whether their drugs worked better."

Part of the problem was that response to placebo was considered a psychological trait related to neurosis and gullibility rather than a physiological phenomenon that could be scrutinized in the lab and manipulated for therapeutic benefit. But then Benedetti came across a study, done years earlier, that suggested the placebo effect had a neurological foundation. US scientists had found that a drug called naloxone blocks the pain-relieving power of placebo treatments. The brain produces its own analgesic compounds called opioids, released under conditions of stress, and naloxone blocks the action of these natural painkillers and their synthetic analogs. The study gave Benedetti the lead he needed to pursue his own research while running small clinical trials for drug companies.

Now, after 15 years of experimentation, he has succeeded in mapping many of the biochemical reactions responsible for the placebo effect, uncovering a broad repertoire of self-healing responses. Placebo-activated opioids, for example, not only relieve pain; they also modulate heart rate and respiration. The neurotransmitter dopamine, when released by placebo treatment, helps improve motor function in Parkinson's patients. Mechanisms like these can elevate mood, sharpen cognitive ability, alleviate digestive disorders, relieve insomnia, and limit the secretion of stress-related hormones like insulin and cortisol.

In one study, Benedetti found that Alzheimer's patients with impaired cognitive function get less pain relief from analgesic drugs than normal volunteers do. Using advanced methods of EEG analysis, he discovered that the connections between the patients' prefrontal lobes and their opioid systems had been damaged. Healthy volunteers feel the benefit of medication plus a placebo boost. Patients who are unable to formulate ideas about the future because of cortical deficits, however, feel only the effect of the drug itself. The experiment suggests that because Alzheimer's patients don't get the benefits of anticipating the treatment, they require higher doses of painkillers to experience normal levels of relief.

Benedetti often uses the phrase "placebo response" instead of placebo effect. By definition, inert pills have no effect, but under the right conditions they can act as a catalyst for what he calls the body's "endogenous health care system." Like any other internal network, the placebo response has limits. It can ease the discomfort of chemotherapy, but it won't stop the growth of tumors. It also works in reverse to produce the placebo's evil twin, the nocebo effect. For example, men taking a commonly prescribed prostate drug who were informed that the medication may cause sexual dysfunction were twice as likely to become impotent.

Further research by Benedetti and others showed that the promise of treatment activates areas of the brain involved in weighing the significance of events and the seriousness of threats. "If a fire alarm goes off and you see smoke, you know something bad is going to happen and you get ready to escape," explains Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at Columbia University. "Expectations about pain and pain relief work in a similar way. Placebo treatments tap into this system and orchestrate the responses in your brain and body accordingly."

In other words, one way that placebo aids recovery is by hacking the mind's ability to predict the future. We are constantly parsing the reactions of those around us—such as the tone a doctor uses to deliver a diagnosis—to generate more-accurate estimations of our fate. One of the most powerful placebogenic triggers is watching someone else experience the benefits of an alleged drug. Researchers call these social aspects of medicine the therapeutic ritual.

In a study last year, Harvard Medical School researcher Ted Kaptchuk devised a clever strategy for testing his volunteers' response to varying levels of therapeutic ritual. The study focused on irritable bowel syndrome, a painful disorder that costs more than $40 billion a year worldwide to treat. First the volunteers were placed randomly in one of three groups. One group was simply put on a waiting list; researchers know that some patients get better just because they sign up for a trial. Another group received placebo treatment from a clinician who declined to engage in small talk. Volunteers in the third group got the same sham treatment from a clinician who asked them questions about symptoms, outlined the causes of IBS, and displayed optimism about their condition.
Rx for Success

What turns a dummy pill into a catalyst for relieving pain, anxiety, depression, sexual dysfunction, or the tremors of Parkinson's disease? The brain's own healing mechanisms, unleashed by the belief that a phony medication is the real thing. The most important ingredient in any placebo is the doctor's bedside manner, but according to research, the color of a tablet can boost the effectiveness even of genuine meds—or help convince a patient that a placebo is a potent remedy.—Steve Silberman

Yellow pills make the most effective antidepressants, like little doses of pharmaceutical sunshine.

Red pills can give you a more stimulating kick. Wake up, Neo.

The color green reduces anxiety, adding more chill to the pill.

White tablets— particularly those labeled "antacid"—are superior for soothing ulcers, even when they contain nothing but lactose.

More is better, scientists say. Placebos taken four times a day deliver greater relief than those taken twice daily.

Branding matters. Placebos stamped or packaged with widely recognized trademarks are more effective than "generic" placebos.

Clever names can add a placebo boost to the physiological punch in real drugs. Viagra implies both vitality and an unstoppable Niagara of sexy.

Not surprisingly, the health of those in the third group improved most. In fact, just by participating in the trial, volunteers in this high-interaction group got as much relief as did people taking the two leading prescription drugs for IBS. And the benefits of their bogus treatment persisted for weeks afterward, contrary to the belief—widespread in the pharmaceutical industry—that the placebo response is short-lived.

Studies like this open the door to hybrid treatment strategies that exploit the placebo effect to make real drugs safer and more effective. Cancer patients undergoing rounds of chemotherapy often suffer from debilitating nocebo effects—such as anticipatory nausea—conditioned by their past experiences with the drugs. A team of German researchers has shown that these associations can be unlearned through the administration of placebo, making chemo easier to bear.

Meanwhile, the classic use of placebos in medicine—to boost the confidence of anxious patients—has been employed tacitly for ages. Nearly half of the doctors polled in a 2007 survey in Chicago admitted to prescribing medications they knew were ineffective for a patient's condition—or prescribing effective drugs in doses too low to produce actual benefit—in order to provoke a placebo response.

The main objections to more widespread placebo use in clinical practice are ethical, but the solutions to these conundrums can be surprisingly simple. Investigators told volunteers in one placebo study that the pills they were taking were "known to significantly reduce pain in some patients." The researchers weren't lying.

These new findings tell us that the body's response to certain types of medication is in constant flux, affected by expectations of treatment, conditioning, beliefs, and social cues.

For instance, the geographic variations in trial outcome that Potter uncovered begin to make sense in light of discoveries that the placebo response is highly sensitive to cultural differences. Anthropologist Daniel Moerman found that Germans are high placebo reactors in trials of ulcer drugs but low in trials of drugs for hypertension—an undertreated condition in Germany, where many people pop pills for herzinsuffizienz, or low blood pressure. Moreover, a pill's shape, size, branding, and price all influence its effects on the body. Soothing blue capsules make more effective tranquilizers than angry red ones, except among Italian men, for whom the color blue is associated with their national soccer team—Forza Azzurri!

But why would the placebo effect seem to be getting stronger worldwide? Part of the answer may be found in the drug industry's own success in marketing its products.

Potential trial volunteers in the US have been deluged with ads for prescription medications since 1997, when the FDA amended its policy on direct-to-consumer advertising. The secret of running an effective campaign, Saatchi & Saatchi's Jim Joseph told a trade journal last year, is associating a particular brand-name medication with other aspects of life that promote peace of mind: "Is it time with your children? Is it a good book curled up on the couch? Is it your favorite television show? Is it a little purple pill that helps you get rid of acid reflux?" By evoking such uplifting associations, researchers say, the ads set up the kind of expectations that induce a formidable placebo response.

The success of those ads in selling blockbuster drugs like antidepressants and statins also pushed trials offshore as therapeutic virgins—potential volunteers who were not already medicated with one or another drug—became harder to find. The contractors that manage trials for Big Pharma have moved aggressively into Africa, India, China, and the former Soviet Union. In these places, however, cultural dynamics can boost the placebo response in other ways. Doctors in these countries are paid to fill up trial rosters quickly, which may motivate them to recruit patients with milder forms of illness that yield more readily to placebo treatment. Furthermore, a patient's hope of getting better and expectation of expert care—the primary placebo triggers in the brain—are particularly acute in societies where volunteers are clamoring to gain access to the most basic forms of medicine. "The quality of care that placebo patients get in trials is far superior to the best insurance you get in America," says psychiatrist Arif Khan, principal investigator in hundreds of trials for companies like Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb. "It's basically luxury care."

Big Pharma faces additional problems in beating placebo when it comes to psychiatric drugs. One is to accurately define the nature of mental illness. The litmus test of drug efficacy in antidepressant trials is a questionnaire called the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale. The HAM-D was created nearly 50 years ago based on a study of major depressive disorder in patients confined to asylums. Few trial volunteers now suffer from that level of illness. In fact, many experts are starting to wonder if what drug companies now call depression is even the same disease that the HAM-D was designed to diagnose.

Existing tests also may not be appropriate for diagnosing disorders like social anxiety and premenstrual dysphoria—the very types of chronic, fuzzily defined conditions that the drug industry started targeting in the '90s, when the placebo problem began escalating. The neurological foundation of these illnesses is still being debated, making it even harder for drug companies to come up with effective treatments.

What all of these disorders have in common, however, is that they engage the higher cortical centers that generate beliefs and expectations, interpret social cues, and anticipate rewards. So do chronic pain, sexual dysfunction, Parkinson's, and many other ailments that respond robustly to placebo treatment. To avoid investing in failure, researchers say, pharmaceutical companies will need to adopt new ways of vetting drugs that route around the brain's own centralized network for healing.

Ten years and billions of R&D dollars after William Potter first sounded the alarm about the placebo effect, his message has finally gotten through. In the spring, Potter, who is now a VP at Merck, helped rev up a massive data-gathering effort called the Placebo Response Drug Trials Survey.

Under the auspices of the FNIH1, Potter and his colleagues are acquiring decades of trial data—including blood and DNA samples—to determine which variables are responsible for the apparent rise in the placebo effect. Merck, Lilly, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi-Aventis, Johnson & Johnson, and other major firms are funding the study, and the process of scrubbing volunteers' names and other personal information from the database is about to begin.

In typically secretive industry fashion, the existence of the project itself is being kept under wraps. FNIH staffers2 are willing to talk about it only anonymously, concerned about offending the companies paying for it.

For Potter, who used to ride along with his father on house calls in Indiana, the significance of the survey goes beyond Big Pharma's finally admitting it has a placebo problem. It also marks the twilight of an era when the drug industry was confident that its products were strong enough to cure illness by themselves.

"Before I routinely prescribed antidepressants, I would do more psychotherapy for mildly depressed patients," says the veteran of hundreds of drug trials. "Today we would say I was trying to engage components of the placebo response—and those patients got better. To really do the best for your patients, you want the best placebo response plus the best drug response."

The pharma crisis has also finally brought together the two parallel streams of placebo research—academic and industrial. Pfizer has asked Fabrizio Benedetti to help the company figure out why two of its pain drugs keep failing. Ted Kaptchuk is developing ways to distinguish drug response more clearly from placebo response for another pharma house that he declines to name. Both are exploring innovative trial models that treat the placebo effect as more than just statistical noise competing with the active drug.

Benedetti has helped design a protocol for minimizing volunteers' expectations that he calls "open/hidden." In standard trials, the act of taking a pill or receiving an injection activates the placebo response. In open/hidden trials, drugs and placebos are given to some test subjects in the usual way and to others at random intervals through an IV line controlled by a concealed computer. Drugs that work only when the patient knows they're being administered are placebos themselves.

Ironically, Big Pharma's attempt to dominate the central nervous system has ended up revealing how powerful the brain really is. The placebo response doesn't care if the catalyst for healing is a triumph of pharmacology, a compassionate therapist, or a syringe of salt water. All it requires is a reasonable expectation of getting better. That's potent medicine.