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.

Nine better ways to wake up!

Scientific research has shown that different people take different times to wake up, and that there are even people who only really wake up in the afternoon when most of us are getting tired and thinking of going home. But for those people who have difficulty getting out of the bed in the morning there may be hope. 

Various studies have confirmed that there are many things that we can do to make sure that we wake up in the morning.

As a bonus many of these also enhance your mood, give you more energy and lower your stress.

So if you have difficulty in waking up in the morning, and even if you don't, why not try some of the following 9 things, you have nothing to lose and it may just change your life for good!

• ensure that there are no unresolved issues of the day before you go to bed. Waking up with the knowledge that there are problems to be faced could be enough reason to stay in bed.

• change your alarm ringtone. Most people believe that they will only wake up with the loudest, worst sounding tone imaginable. While this may be true for some, most other people will wake up much better with something bright and happy.

• get up as soon as you hear the alarm. There is a reason why we do not hear people lament the woe's of getting up immediately. Just as the previous sentence is difficult to make sense of, it is difficult to understand why anyone would press snooze just once.

• sing a happy tune first thing in the morning. A simple song like "Bare nesessities" from Jungle Book can put a smile on your face and a skip in your step before any of the days worries can weigh you down. And once you are going it takes much more to slow you down.

• stretch in the morning, even before you get out of bed. Scientists have found that people who stretch are less stressed, more relaxed and more awake then those who do not.

• change your routine, or get one. Eat serial before you drink coffee or brush your teeth first thing after you get up.

• take 10 minutes of the morning and spend them outside. There is nothing that can beat the crisp morning air to clear away the fog of a nights sleep.

• tune in to your senses. Our modern day morning routines provide us with ample opportunity to stimulate all of our senses and it makes good sense. Research even proved that the smell of coffee can stimulate the brain to a wakened state in he same way as caffeine.

• do a 10 minute exercise routine each morning. Science tell us that any morning exercise that cause us to break a sweat increase our metabolism significantly for the rest of the day, and a higher metabolism means you are more awake.

Knowledge is only the key, it is up to us to turn it!

Just sometime, it sucks

 

Is it a pal?

Is it a toy?

Is it a Hoover

to hug and play? 

Birds do it, bees do it

 Image via Wikipedia

... and don't quote me on this, but I have a sneaky suspicion even fleas do it. But before you get carried along in the enthusiasm of the classical song, this article has got nothing to do with love. (At least not as far as popular convention goes) I'm talking about flow.

Not the kind you may find in a river, or the molecules in a body of fluid mass, but the universal flow that has been known since the dawn of man. Until recently, not much about flow has been known, even though it is commonly found throughout nature, is one of the very few life experiences considered to be truly shared, and the only feeling known to man that remains the same no matter who they are, or what they did to trigger it. It doesn't matter what the persons sex, age, color or creed that describe it, the qualities of flow remain constant all over the world.

The best way to describe it, as those in the know would agree, is a profound sense of purpose and freedom, of effortless being, and feeling suspended in time and space. People often refer to a flow experience as having the best time of their life.

If you would like to know more about flow, you are welcome to take a look at some of my earlier articles on the subject, like What is flow? and Being in flow that describe the experience in more detail, and define most the qualities of flow that we know, Meeting God or reality and belief that explore flow as a spiritual experience.

The ice age cometh!

It is a testament to the sheer tenacity of our existence that we find our collective consciousness will be spared the gloom and guilt that industry and electronics, genetic and biochemical engineering, quantum physics, and the increasing gorge on non-renewable energy leave in our wake. I still remember a time not long ago that we were doomed to suffer in calamity by nothing less than a plan of our own design, a time where sloth and gluttony was the only reason that the human race was running out of time on earth.

Our saving grase is that it seems our waste and ruin only "hasten" our headlong rush into the gloom of yet another ice age, one we should have seen coming a long time ago. Were it not for some genius that figured out we may not be the only blame for global warming and the ice caps melting, and that the catastrophic climate changes we face is nothing more than a natural cycle that began way before the appearance of man, we would probably be all but suicidal now. A species driven mad by the damning knowledge that they have only them self to blame for wiping countless of species from the planet in their search for something they refuse to see.

It is too early to know with certainty if the bright spark that originally came up with the idea that gave us hope of absolution did us any favor, but history has shown that life will carry on regardless of our self, and that's a chilling thought.

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.