The Incantation

Open your mind

The reality of awareness

According to the article by New Scientist, our brains manage the huge task of visual observation by extrapolating predicted visual inputs based on recent and relevant experience. 

"The brain expects to see things and really just wants to confirm it now and again," says Lars Muckli at the University of Glasgow, UK.

Predictable sights trigger less brain activity than unfamiliar stimuli, bolstering the view that the brain is not merely reactive, but generates predictions based on the recent past.

The finding follows a series of scientific discoveries that challenge our current view of awareness. It challenges our understanding of reality, and throws a curve-ball to philosophers and scholars alike, neither of which have ever been able to come up with any satisfactory explanation for the rational mind or the origin of consciousness.

Recent research has provided us with inconclusive evidence that awareness is a highly lucid and mindful experience that depend more on our frame of mind than on actual experience. 

According to the research there is about a 20/80 split between our expectation and the actual experience we perceive. All of which confirm something we have known for a while, that reality is a highly individual experience. 

If we add to that the latest revelation that our sense of observation mostly confirm our own presumption you'll start to see why your view on reality and consciousness is in urgent need for a change.


Since the historical debate on the nature of reality that started way back in the Age of Enlightenment has failed to provide us with any solid argument we can believe, I suggest the time has come to wipe what we think we know from the table, change our perspective, and begin our view on life with the conscious perception of mindful awareness, the mutual intention of curious abandon and having a good time.

By starting with a clean slate, and founding our arguments on what we know rather than what we believe, chances are good we may end up looking at ourselves in a totally different way, enlightened by the reason incumbent to life, and enthralled by the beauty and wonder of living it.

Since all of this is rather sudden and unexpected, not to mention virgin territory to such as me, I'd like to invite you to share your own experience, and would love to hear your point of view on reality, reason, and living from shared and present sense perspective.

Tired of feeling down?

"Happiness is a work ethic... It's something that requires our brains to train just like an athlete has to train."

Shawn Achor 

In a groundbreaking article on happiness, Walter Chen from Lifehacker gives us the first training programme that I have seen to ever be awarded the 101aware stamp of appease. Just like awareness, it's free! Similar to perception its easy-peasy, and just like perspective it is something that needs daily practice:

- Scan for the 3 daily positives.
- Give one shout-out to someone.
- Do something nice.
- Mind your mind.

If you forget one or two don't fret about it either, try to practice at least two a day. Put them on the fridge or something. All 4 and you'll be in the swing of it in a week!

Happiness, like any potential worth isn't in the doing so much as it is in the resonance. Resonance that only occurs when there is harmony found. Harmony that only exist when there's genuine around.

Genuine is of course something that is sometimes hard to find in the world that we're living but don't let that put you off trying. Research confirm that our mind will believe anything we tell it. It's called belief, and it's the reason we put up with most of the crap that society tends to feed us in the interest of self-preservation.

If you liked the article you should try my take on serendipity.

The perception of consciousness

According to the website of the Evolutionary Collective, awakened consciousness is characterized by heightened perception, fearless receptivity and penetrating insight. Many of us have experienced or intuited a flip into what they would call awakened consciousness. I prefer to simply call it being "aware". 

I suppose everybody has heard the claims made about the general health benefits of yoga and meditation, and in contrast to the not so distant past, the scientific community now has irrefutable evidence to show that regular yoga practice improves high blood pressure, decreases stress levels, boost our immune function, and lifts our spirit in addition to a growing list of benefits to the health and welfare of it's practitioners.
What hasn't been researched to the same extent is the reputed existence of extraordinary abilities that can be attained through the diligent practice of yoga, but they are well established and documented in the literature of yoga, where they are called siddhis.

The fourth century BC sage Patanjali enumerated the following siddhis in his Yoga Sutras (as listed by Targ and Katra):

Knowledge of past and future; understanding of the sounds made by all creatures; knowledge of past lives; knowing what others are thinking; prior knowledge of one’s death; the attainment of various kinds of strength; perception of the small, the concealed, and the distant; knowledge of other inhabited regions; knowing about the stars and their motions; knowledge of the interior of the body; control of hunger and thirst; steadiness; seeing the adepts in one’s own interior light; intuition; understanding of the mind; entering the bodies of others; lightness and levitation; brightness; control of material elements; control of the senses; perfection of the body; quickness of the body.

While science is slowly getting round to the idea of the individual health benefit of yoga, the Transcendental Meditation (TM) Organization has conducted several demonstration projects to show the effects on the surrounding community of a large number of people meditating in a group. This project occurred in Washington, D.C. between June 7 and July 30, 1993 and involved up to 4000 people meditating in a group. The surprising results were verified by an independent group of scientists who approved the research protocol and performed the statistical analysis  of the data.

Their report showed that homicides, rapes, and assaults decreased by 23% (significance p < 2="" ×="" 109) in D.C. during the period, and reverted back to normal levels afterwards, mimiking the results of a previous trial held in Iowa during 1982-1985 that monitored motor vehicle fatalities, suicide and homicide as main variables to change during a similar but smaller group of focused meditation.

If we consider the ever increasing body of evidence being collected, the inescapable conclusion we glean from these abilities, hard as it may be to believe, is that the mind not only functions through the senses, but also through extrasensory processes. This means that large regions of space, likely all of space; and large eras of time, most probably all of time, present, past and future may be open to it.

If you were wondering how you could unlock some of the extrasensory mental abilities we share you can begin by reading Are you suffering from empty thoughts.

See one, do one, teach one

A lesson from Medical School

Monkey see, monkey do

It may seem strange that one of the most valuable lessons I learned in Medical School was not how to save lives, but how to save the living. In my own point of view all life is sacred, but what's the use of saving a life when living has such a limited value?

Ethics has always been one of my favorite subjects, and the example of what do you do in the case of a suicidal emergency probably still feature as one of the classical questions that young medical students are required to answer to them self.   

The "rules" that govern conscious awareness haven't changed much over the last 3000 years, and then as now it is known that when you have to act in an emergency, ethical questions cloud your ability to think clearly, which compromise your ability to perform, and has a negative effect on the outcome.   

When your intention is clear, then saving the lives that has been placed in your care demand clear thought, a sharp mind, and sure action. Making judgement calls about quality of living, living standards or life choices make our actions inefficient, our decisions questionable, and our performance incompetent. 

Strong emotions makes people's brains 'tick together'

Human emotions are highly contagious. Seeing others' emotional expressions such as smiles triggers often the corresponding emotional response in the observer. Such synchronization of emotional states across individuals may support social interaction: When all group members share a common emotional state, their brains and bodies process the environment in a similar fashion.

Researchers at Aalto University and Turku PET Centre have now found that feeling strong emotions makes different individuals' brain activity literally synchronous.

Learn more at: Synchronized Brain

Rapid-fire Media May Confuse Your Moral Compass, Study Suggests

“For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection,” said first author Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of the USC Rossier School of Education. Humans can sort information very quickly and can respond in fractions of seconds to signs of physical pain in others.

Admiration and compassion - two of the social emotions that define humanity - take much longer, Damasio’s group found. Their study appeared online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read more at: Science Daily

Haunted by a memory?

Thinking over and over about how unsafe the world is after you’ve been victimized might ultimately do your head more harm than good. Finding something positive to think about–for example, how you were able to think and act under stress, or how people supported you afterwards–can help you fit the memory into your life in a positive way. Post-traumatic growth, they call it.

In addition, it appears that writing about the thoughts and emotions connected to an event can help post-traumatic growth. (The “thoughts” part is important. Just writing about emotions attached to it is not as helpful.)

Find out more about it: PsychCentral

Do more by talking about it!

Reason that pertain to your reality

Identify the shared perspective

It may tickle your fancy that research findings bear witness to the fact that your attitude is still one of the best predictors to having a good time.

Not to mention the fact that good intention is by far the best way to foster positive engagement and honest deed is by any and all means the best expression to entrain the synergy of mutual heed, and synchronicity pertain to be the only consideration to proffer the harmony incumbent to existence. Harmony in turn engender resonance, a quality perceived as inherent to reality, and which evoke the requited principle of serendipitous afford.

From a shared perspective, synchronicity makes perfect sense, harmony a blessed sensibility, and with resonance bespoke as unconditional reward, my only question is why it doesn't seem to find accord.

My guess is lack of information about the reality of change, lack of knowledge about the principles that pertain to harmony, the absence of experience incumbent to resonance, the constant heresy embedded in almost every aspect of our modern day society, and the ever present all-prevailing propaganda for repentance and damnation of the false belief that preach a social "quid pro quo" in stead of the instinctive "hoc in quod", despite the abundant evidence evident.

I'd love to hear your point of view!

The reality of change

Reality has a natural tendency to change

• in the obvious presence of increasing levels of entropy
• proportional to our ability to conceive of it
• in direct response to any personal conviction of added value or gain
• to indisputable evidence or personal experience
• in full realization of a shared perspective
• with a common belief of it's collective worth
• to a positive attitude

What changes your reality?

10 things you should know about your mind

1. You cannot lose it, unlike the neurons that conduct the electrical impulses that eventually combine to become your mind. Neurons seem to whither at the slightest challenge, like the pill you popped last night, or any binge that end in a hangover. Fortunate for us our mind display a high grade of plasticity, which mean that function lost due to neural death could be taken over by others.

2. You have what you use, and what you don't gets lost as quick as last season's fashion. Which is a bit of a shame as research continue to come up with surprising new and uber cool abilities that babies have. Take for example their efficiency in cross species facial recognition, and then compare it to "I think they all look the same".

3. No challenge is too big or detail too small if you believe it matters. Our brain just love a challenge and can even construct special neural thingamabobs to handle new technologies like cellphones. When challenged to survival it remembers even the minutest of details, like the drop of blood sliding down the blade of grass you saw while crawling away from a fatal explosion.

4. Memory is but a fickle thing, and nowhere near what some people want to make of it. For a start, our brain excel in pattern recognition. Most of our memory is scattered across various neural sites, each one specializing in its own sensory pattern recognition. When we think of something our mind will trigger a harmonious event across the different sections needed to build the memory we want.

5. There is no difference between reality and imagination, at least not to your brain. You may want to argue, but it is a scientific fact that what you think become. Take for instance recent findings that power make hypocrite's of those who play its game, or the curious observation that we model morals to our situation.

6. When emotion kicks in, your ability for objective reasoning go out the window. Lame excuses such as you were angryor upset should not be tolerated in the company of choice, any choice. When we become emotionally involved our brain literally changes to a different operating system where reasoning take a distant second place to feeling.

7. Your brain retain an embryonic stem cell capability that can differentiate to any of a wide range of specialized neural cells and structures. We still don't know exactly how to use it, but at least the farming of stem cells from dead babies will not be necessary to treat the growing number of mental diseases of age like Alzheimer and Parkinson's.

8. You can tune your brain to any mental state by listening to bin-aural frequencies in the range of awareness that you require. The effect depend upon a "frequency following" response, a naturally occurring phenomenon of the the human brain. So if you need to be alert you simply listen to a bin-aural beat that entrain to somewhere in the Beta range, between 12-30 Hz.

9. Babies are born with minds that are messy, and exactly what it is that prevent it from tripping in a massive electrical short circuit is still unknown. What we do know, is that exposing babies to certain auditory stimuli, such as Baroque music before and after birth give them a significant and overall advantage above their peers. The metered beat of the music seem to provide a natural rhythm that order and accelerate the mental development of babies.

10. Most of the actions that you perform daily are not the result of your intention, but a carefully calculated flow of expected events. Our minds are constantly busy predicting the future to provide us with normal motion and fluid movement, allowing us act and play with minimal attention. Once mobile, our senses only monitor events for anything unusual or out of place, while the rest just happen without the need of thought.

The science of walking on fire

According to Wikipedia:

Walking on fire has existed for several thousand years, with records dating back to 1200 B.C.[3] Cultures across the globe, from Greece to China, used firewalking for rites of healing, initiation, and faith.[3] Firewalking became popular in America during the 1970s when author Tolly Burkan began a campaign to demystify the practice. He offered evening firewalking courses that were open to anyone in the general public.

Where firewalking used to belong to the realm of mystics and magic it suddenly became within the reach of anyone with the mental ability to change their perception. Those who have experienced it find it liberating and empowering to bear witness to the power of mind over matter, while those who witness it cannot help but stand in awe of a feat that defy logic in direct opposition to our instinct to survive.

Even though it is a practice that has been around since the time of Genesis, the actual physics that explain why people do not get burned during the experience can only be found in some very recent scientific discoveries about the nature of water. And while you may think that the molecular properties of something as common and important like water would be old news, fact is we have only recently begun to understand its nature.

Water has a highly crystallized structure, even when it is in a fluid state. , and this affinity to form crystal lattices is one of the main reasons why proteins all have a specific three dimensional structure. It is the structural variety of proteins that give them the ability to combine and interact with other proteins in what can almost be described as a molecular dance. A dance that expresses itself in the infinite variety of life that share our planet.

When protein molecules are exposed to increasing temperature, it is the collapse of the supporting water molecules that causes proteins to lose their structure, but water is also known to exhibit a period of latency between the time that it reaches boiling temperature and the time it eventually begins to boil. It is this natural ability of water that provide the scientific explanation why it is physically possible to walk on fire.

Thus the belief that the fire walkers express as part of the ritual of walking on fire seem to be translated to a force that allow water molecules to maintain their crystalline structure under the extreme duress of temperatures that can be as high as a thousand degrees centigrade. It also supports various other experimental findings that intention can influence the crystal structure of water, and bears testament to the incredible ability of human consciousness and the power of intention.

As much as what the eye can see…

How much would that be? In answer I guess most people would offer something that would depend on visual acuity, or the absence of visual obstruction. While it seems perfectly normal that what you see is what you percieve, quite the opposite is true.

A recent physics article in physorg.com explained it as follows:

This is a consequence of the eye's main characteristic, namely as a detection threshold. Below a certain threshold number of incoming photons, the eye remains blind (no light is seen), whereas above the threshold the efficiency (i.e. the probability of seeing) is close to one.

In their calculations, the authors also considered the influence of experimental imperfections, such as photon losses, which are inevitable in a real experiment. They found that the setup is surprisingly robust. A strong Bell violation can be obtained even in case of high losses, demonstrating the presence of entanglement. This is a very astonishing feature since entanglement is generally an extremely fragile property, highly sensitive to experimental imperfections such as losses.

I may have this wrong, but what I think it means is that our eye’s make things up, in this particular case it is photon’s, but it could be just about anything you see.

If you can imagine your perception as a flat screen TV in which there are increasingly more pixels dead, our perception of the degrading picture will remain as it was without any dead pixels.

But perception is not the only ability that can be influenced by entanglement? It also plays a role in something known as the placebo effect.

The story of water

Water is the most common molecule found on the earth, and at the same time also the most strange. Water is the only molecule that was created by the word of God, and while most people accept water for what it can do, very little ever give a second thought to what it does.

When I was in school someone used the example to illustrate how much power water has, by saying that it was the flow of water in rivers that will eventually erode all the rocks there are on earth and carry the sand back to the sea. When I did some research 30 years later I found a reference to something similar that explained how the expansive quality of water when it freezes is responsible for cracking open rocks and granite. Both examples are quite mind blowing in their scope, but they still do not even come close to the real power of water on our planet.

A very good example of what water does can be found in the way it provides the scaffolding for the structure of biological molecules, molecules like the proteins in DNA that are the building blocks of our human existence.

Proteins are also used as messengers across the complex hormonal networks in our bodies. It is the structural form of these proteins that determine what function they have, and that allow them to communicate across the various receptors that can be found throughout our bodies. Messengers that switch things off or on and regulate things like our immune system and memory.

Water is as much part of you and me as it is part of everything in nature. We can observe the way that it has formed our land, we experience it in the constant cycles of our weather patterns, we marvel at the infinite variety it expresses in every single snowflake, and we drink it to keep us alive.

Water is part of us and who we are.

Water is life.

More on nature, laws and such...

It seems when looking for "laws" to help in defining nature and life that this is probably not the wisest thing to do, as the mere concept of "laws" still have some wrinkles to iron out. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, three issues are especially pressing ones.

The first concerns whether laws “govern” the universe, exactly what it means to say that they do, and how that affects our understanding of lawhood.

The second is the issue of whether there are any contingent laws of nature. Necessitarians continue to work feverishly on filling in their view, while Humeans and others pay relatively little attention to what they are up to; new work needs to explain the source of the underlying commitments that divide these camps and to figure what each group is doing right.

Finally, more attention needs to be paid to the language used to report what are the laws and the language used to express the laws themselves.

It is clear that recent disputes about generalizations in physics and the special sciences turn on precisely these matters, but exploring them may also pay dividends on central matters regarding ontology, realism vs. antirealism, and supervenience.

The Universal Truth of Balance

In the realm of chemistry we find a concept called diffusion that describes the universal truth of balance. In essence it describes the movement of particles from a high concentration to a low concentration when two solutions of different composition come into contact with each other. This movement will continue as long as the solutions remain in contact with each other until they contain the same concentration of particles.

In the example above the concept specifically relate to chemistry and solutions, but the same principle can be seen with temperature, particle physics, color, sound and the behavior of waves. It is the basis of many scientific principles, including those of Fourier, Einstein and Galileo. While these universal “laws” may take some time to explain, there are numerous other examples that occur almost constantly around us.

Some of these we hardly ever notice, like the way that a group of people seem to walk in step with each other, or the way the pendulums of different grandfather clocks seem to swing in unison when they are put in the same room. Some of the examples are seen as scientific curiosities, such as the behavior of quantum particles in String theory, or the way that random number generators are influenced by a collective conscience.

The principle of diffusion can also explain various “alternative” healing practices like homeopathy and Reiki, and the curious observation that the hormonal cycles of any group of females that live together become synchronized.

It also provides a plausible theory

to recent research that show how happiness can benefit totally unrelated “friends of friends” as well as various cultural practices that believe in the mutual benefit of maternal stroking of small infants.

Most of these examples are grouped together under the “new age” concept of entrainment that describe the principle of diffusion in various other systems, including some of those mentioned like chronobiology and physics. According to Wikipedia, chronobiology is “the alignment of a circadian system's period and phase to the period and phase of an external rhythm”, and entrainment in physics is “the process whereby two interacting oscillating systems assume the same period”.

Given the examples provided it is obvious that diffusion is a universal truth that can be observed in the mathematical, quantum, physical, chemical, emotional, spiritual and even in mixed state realms of our existence. According to scientists at the University of Illinois a virtual pendulum with an instantaneous bidirectional coupling to a real pendulum will exhibit the same entrainment that we observe in the physical world.

The universal truth of balance exists everywhere and influences everything. It can be demonstrated in our physical, virtual and spiritual experience. By consciously acknowledging its existence we begin to align ourselves with the universe. By understanding the effect of balance we discover why we do not have to try so hard to control everything in our lives. By living the truth of balance we find that choice is divine, and that each one of us have the power to change our existence.