Metapatterns

To me, a metapattern is a pattern so wide-flung that it appears throughout the spectrum of reality: in clouds, rivers, and planets; in cells, organisms, and ecosystems; in art, architecture, and politics…

Tyler Volk

The most revolutionary time I ever had intellectually was in 1974 sitting with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for one week of what he called “Vedic Studies.”  He was going to explain consciousness from a non-dual perspective.  In the front row he had a bunch of PhDs: physicist, chemist, biologist, mathematician and an artist.  He told them, “Now stop me when you think of something.”   The experts did stop him when they thought of a parallel between Maharish’s explanation of consciousness and some branch of science.  Day after day they did that, until my mind began to freak: “Why!”

Why were there so many parallels between consciousness and what I thought of as “Laws of Nature”?

I finally hypothesized that it was because all of Creation was based upon Pure Consciousness (consciousness as Absolute -not the consciousness generated by the brain) - and what we saw as Creation were actually, inevitably, “Patterns of Consciousness.”   I viewed this as a working hypothesis as my mind just couldn’t really swallow it.  Trained in biology and chemistry I was a materialist.  Or, to paraphrase my niece a generation later, “I don’t see how any college graduate can believe in God.”  And while perhaps I’d have said I did believe in God, that didn’t necessarily translate into all Creation being created in His image.

However, I made a hypothesis and have been collecting examples, bits of data, ever since.

So, now it’s 2014 – forty years of watching – and I have just discovered the work of Tyler Volk.  Since 1995 he’s written about Metapatterns.  I think this is the science supporting what I called patterns of consciousness.  What precipitated this discovery of Volk’s work?   I am trying to understand Geomancy as practiced by Marko Pogacnik.  And in my poking around this week I came across a rather surprising pattern.  These correlations are always so surprising to me and always seem to evoke a sense of wonder and why!

To begin:  I was looking are Plant Hardiness Zone maps – those maps that tell you what plants can be planted where.  I was interested in what healing plants grow where.  Somehow in my Googling I came across a map that displayed the differences in the 1990 USDA hardiness zones and the 2006 arborday.org hardiness zones.  This map shows wheretemperature changes are occurring across the United States.  This is one way of visualizing the evolving global climate.  

What surprised me was how this map of the U.S. reminded me of the pattern seen in developing embryos.A classic image in biology is that master gene expression establishing developmental gradients.  Below is a fruit fly embryo revealing the distribution of maternal proteins in anterior/posterior axis. The A/P axis is set up by a protein called BICOID that is expressed in an anterior-to-posterior gradient.

When I was in college a favorite phrase among biology students was, “Phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny.”  That was just the smart way of saying it looks like evolution of the species follows the same pattern as developing embyro.  Here that pattern seems to extend to global climate… Why?  Just chance?

I define metapatterns by saying where they are found and how I use them.

But what are they? And are they out there (patterns sensed) or in here (patterns imagined)?

Tyler Volk

AH!  Here is the inside/outside question of consciousness! 

It all depends upon ones point of view regarding Consciousness.  Is it Egoic or Wholistic?  You’re your definition of consciousness state that it arises from the complex organization of the brain?  Or, does Pure Consciousness express itself as a Creative Intelligence (CI) arising from the VOID?

Egoic separation says the patterns lie outside and are observed. 

Wholistic vision realizes that CI repeats itself throughout layers of complexity and scales of size: physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, sociology, geology, astrophysics.

Experience seems to suggest to me that both viewpoints are valid.

I Never Sleep and Fighter Pilots

It turns out that fighter pilots accelerated to speeds that induce loss of consciousness can wake up through these same layers of light, bodily sensation, and no thought that I described in I Never Sleep. That kind of surprises me. Perhaps losing consciousness is simply losing consciousness and it doesn’t matter if that is precipitated by gravity draining blood from the brain or simply laying your head upon a pillow at night. Curiously, when the thinking brain falls behind and can supply no reason for the body’s sensations, the fighter pilot researches say that the brain then makes up a reason. I first heard this explanation of brain playing tricks on you from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He said the relaxation deep in meditation will start the body normalizing. Sensations, feelings arise for no external reason. Maharishi explained that we then experience “a mood on an abstract basis.” He went on to explain the mind cannot stand this lack of decent reason and so ascribes the sensation to some memory close at hand. “Ah, my friend is coming for a visit.”

Here’s RadioLab’s description of this research.

I Never Sleep

From the point of view of Consciousness, there is no experience of a dark, blank nothingness. Rather, there is only the ‘experience’ of itself, which means only the presence …of itself. This is neither deep, dark, blank, or asleep. It [is] dimensionless, present, luminous, alive and awake.
Consciousness is not the opposite of un-consciousness. For Consciousness there is no ‘off.’ It is always ‘on.’ ...What is considered to be deep sleep from the point of view of the waking mind is ‘wide-awakeness’ for Consciousness.
Now, with that as background, we can look more closely at the question as to whether identification remains at a subtler level in deep sleep.
Rupert Spira, interview

I think most people have had the experience of waking up the morning (or maybe days) after a disaster, a death, and for a moment you’ve forgotten. You’re simply there awake, until that first thought arises and with it the pain that sleep momentarily erased returns. Apparently, there are other versions of this story.

Recently, I’ve noticed the transition from being deep sleep to lying there in bed awake with a clarity that’s usually not there. What I notice is a buzz (and no thoughts), a luminescence (and no thoughts), and then fear (and still no thoughts), except its rather intense fear and thus physically uncomfortable. My mind quickly presents a list of reasons. This week they’re financial.

But, the process is kind of strange when you think about it. Why would I wake up gripped by fear for which there is no reason? (I here equate reason with a label, or a thought.) I think identification, attachment to beliefs, must remain deep inside me. My body must be listening to unspoken fears. How else could the sensation arise?

Thankfully, not all mornings are like this. Sometimes I notice that, “Oh, I was asleep.” And with that thought comes the understanding of Consciousness as presence, alive and awake: Even though I was asleep, I was awake all night. It was this experience that actually first attracted me to the video, I Never Sleep

And so, as the fear hit me this morning, I was reminded onceagain of the images. Rupert Spira so artistically presents the transition from deep sleep into waking. It doesn’t help my belly wake up any easier, but it’s something nice to share. It’s not your usual Advaita lecture.

The Illusory Self & Healing

What you saw was an illusory me running up an illusory tree.
Advaita founder, Adi Shankara, explaining his escape from a wild elephant

The Nour Foundation and Krista Tippett recently hosted a conference entitled To Be or Not to Be: The Self as Illusion. I found the discussion interesting as it introduced a point of view I don’t usually consider:

during cardiac arrest (we) know that the function of the brain stops; there's no blood flow in the brain. Within two seconds patients become unconscious, and the function of the cortex is gone, so there are no body reflexes, no pain reflexes; but also the abolition of brainstem activity is demonstrable, with the loss of the gag reflex and of the corneal reflex. Fixed and dilated pupils are found. The function of the respiratory center, located close to the brainstem, fails, resulting in apnea (no breathing). The clinical findings are that there's no function of the brain… the electrical activity in the cerebral cortex (but also in the deeper structures of the brain in animals) has been shown to be absent after 10–20 seconds (a flat-line EEG)…
I was raised as a physician and on the idea that consciousness was just a product of the function of the brain. As a cardiologist I was involved in many, many resuscitations. The moment I started to ask patients who had survived a cardiac arrest…if they had memories of the period of cardiac arrest, which is called clinical death… To my big surprise 12 out of 50 patients who had survived a cardiac arrest told me about an enhanced consciousness during this period of a supposedly nonfunctioning brain...In my view nonlocal or enhanced consciousness is received and not produced by the body.
Pim van Lommel, MD

Or, as Tippett restated the conclusion, “it’s not so much that the body produces consciousness, but rather that the body resides IN consciousness.” And this is what they discovered when the breathing stopped. The image of the breath stopping and consciousness continuing brings to mind the Taoist technique of primordial breathing during which the breath becomes increasingly more subtle, and may cease altogether. This can also happen during meditation and the feeling I’ve always experienced is that at this point breath is drawn not from air, but something much subtler - from prana or the life energy itself. At such moments you really feel beyond bodily confines.

I had out-of-body experiences myself as a young man, and in the beginning, they were extremely realistic and very convincing…They occurred in the context of very long ten-week meditation retreats. In the beginning I thought to myself, “Oh, boy, have you been so arrogant! All these stories about soul travel and astral bodies are literally true!” It was really shocking.
Now, I think they’re all complex hallucinations…
What gave me doubt about out-of-body experiences was that a friend, a professor of psychology asked me, “In an out-of-body state how do you move, say, from one point to another; when you’ve left your body and then you go to try to flip a light switch and it doesn't work and then you go to the window and try to fly out.” Initially, I was firmly against my friend's inquiries … And then I realized I don't walk during an out-of-body experience, instead I am in one place one moment and then in another place another moment, without any awareness of moving between the two places. So there are actually breaks or holes between memory points in terms of how movement is experienced in the out-of-body state. These breaks show us that out-of-body experiences are actually internal models the brain tries to create, and that these models have certain gaps because the brain creates them.
Thomas Metzinger, philosopher

The breaks and holes that Metzinger points out sound very much like Buddhist emptiness teachings on the arising and dissolution of any experience. The Buddhists conclude: there is no self or, at best, only an illusory self.

Yet too, this arising and dissolution reminds me of quantum physics’ story that discrete particles of material creation arise from the emptiness of the vacuum only to dissolve. Yet, we like to think that material reality is REAL - there is an objective reality existing “out there” outside the subjective nature of my mind.

I have been questioning what exactly is Real and what hallucination for several decades now. That’s why I call this blog, “Seeing for Myself.” I wanted my investigation to be experienced based. My Experience: real or illusion? How am I to rationalize experiences I have had, but would never have expected, given the scientific perspective of my upbringing? DO I need to go outside the paradigm?

Over the years my conclusions have swung dramatically. I had just about decided there is no such thing as a hallucination – all the “myths” are real, “all possibilities exist”… when the exact opposite: “it’s All an illusion,” could no longer be ignored. These days I am left straddling the fence. And I think this might be useful.

I revisit this issue again as I think about healing. How does healing really work? I mean nitty-gritty, rotting disease getting reversed. Mystics can proclaim “The world is illusion” as much as they want, but in the end, no one wants a brick dropped on their foot. The damage appears quite real. Sometimes it’s irreparable. And sometimes, the doctors have to hit “control, alt, delete” because observation doesn’t seem to jibe with pre-established fact.

But, if it is deeply true that reality springs into the mind in a discontinuous manner remarkably similar to material creation springing from the vacuum, then I think from time to time we ought to come across an example of the brick’s damage also presenting its self in discontinuous fashion, arising moment after moment from the gap in consciousness of self – and sometimes, changing just like that (snap the fingers) into another form called “healed”.

And so, I come to the story of Anita Moorjani, given 36 hours to live as her organs shut down from Hodgkins lymphoma. I don’t take this as a miracle or hallucination. I take it as mechanics of creation andmechanics of deep healing. Moorjani calls it, “Dying to be Me” which is great because yes, this is an issue ultimately rooted in the self, the true self and an illusory self. Curiously, she says that while on the other side she knew that if she chose to live the results of the blood tests would be changed to reflect that her organs weren’t in collapse. This is remarkably like the retroactive prayer and healing Joseph Rael described in House of Shattering Light.



...confusion exists because spiritual teachings point to something that doesn’t exist in the usual way. The nature of reality can’t be described or explained with words, and it can’t be experienced through the ordinary senses...
So we are left with a dilemma: It’s incomplete to say that there is no doer, it’s incomplete to say that everything is the doer, and it’s incomplete to say that I am the doer. It’s like a multiple choice test where all of the answers are wrong! Yet, what is it like to not have an answer? What’s it like to hold the question even when you’ve exhausted all of the possible answers?
Nirmila

Maybe it’s a way we can open ourselves to new forms of healing and new ways of being in the world.

On Healing & Beliefs

Art by Joseph Rael

Last summer a woman came to me whose mother was going to have surgery on her hip. I said I was willing to dedicate a dance that we’d be doing in Australia in October for her mother’s healing, and, since I wouldn’t be going to Australia for another three months, her healing would be retroactive. Her mother went to the doctor two days later. They didn’t have to operate because, apparently, the hip was healing… I said her healing would be retroactive because Spirit told me to say it, though it didn’t make much sense at the time.
Joseph Rael, House of Shattering Light.

I have been poking around trying to better understand the role of consciousness in healing.
Consciousness includes many levels: Spirit, emotions, beliefs. So, in this regard I came across an interesting article not so long ago. It was scientifically tight enough to have been listed in the NIH’s National Library of Medicine archives (Pubmed). The article is looking at the results of a study out of Harvard on the effects of prayer. It is discussing experimental design – how we need to think differently when studying consciousness with proper scientific controls.

Here is the passage that has stuck in my head the past few weeks. Let me also point out that the healing Joseph Rael describes occurred not only retroactively in time, but also at a distance, i.e. “non-locally.” The article describes an experiment designed to test just such a possibility:
Israeli immunologist Leonard Leibovici highly skeptical of claims of intention/prayer studies designed an experiment that only some kind of nonlocal linkage could explain… in 2000, Leibovici identified 3,393 adult patients each of whom suffered from a bloodstream infection while in the Rabin Medical Center between 1990 and 1996 – that is to say four to ten years earlier. All of these patients were long out of the hospital. These patients were randomized into two populations; 1, 691 were assigned to the intervention group and 1,702 to the control group. The treatment group was the focus of therapeutic intention in the form of prayer… the study discovered that “length of stay in hospital and duration of fever were significantly shorter in the intervention group than in the control (P=.01 and P=.04 respectively).” …For this study to have worked, it seems that therapeutic intention from the “future” must have affected the “past” when it was the present to produce a biased outcome – not to have changed the past, but to have produced the original effect in the first instance.
Nonlocality, Intention, and Observer Effects in Healing Studies: Laying a Foundation for the Future

This is all very curious to me. Time is trickier than you think. Meditators learn this, as do physicists:
People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between the past, the present and the future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein

I think about my father. I have come to think of him as “a man ahead of his time” as it seems like every major discovery that I’ve made, Pop was already there. When I called home from college in 1969, wanting to learn TM but a bit scared to take the step, Pop knew all about it and encouraged me. When I discovered homeopathy, Pop knew about that too and shared his books with me. When I crashed badly after an awakening, Pop was the one who said “You have kundalini burnout.” I had never heard the term. And so it was with this precedence that in the early ‘80s Pop explored the Gerson Therapy. He met Charlotte Gerson. He attended seminars and talked with cancer patients who had survived the supposedly incurable. He bought all the books and tried to spread the word.

At the time, Pop’s deep interest in a cancer therapy, when no one in the family was affected, struck my sister as more than a little morbid. She fussed to me that she was afraid that this strange preoccupation would perhaps make Pop himself sick.
Now, I wonder if he was merely being true to something in his nature: he was a scientist open to the evidence. He was ahead of his time - at least in regards to his children’s interest. And he had an unwavering intention to always help and be there for us.
Thus, it was very natural this January when Evie needed to try yet another approach to cure her cancer, for us to turn to Gerson. Pop had done the due diligence research for us years ago.

My father died in 1996, but his prayer for us is clear and I am not so worried anymore about locality and time.
I am more concerned with being open to the gift. I’m discovering that with cancer being open means not only dealing with the body but dealing with our very understanding of reality. And the scientific moorings of our culture can make that very difficult. So, I’ll continue to look at beliefs both scientific and mystical as Evie walks her path of healing.

Dying to Have Known: A ten minute clip from a film about the Gerson Therapy that illustrates the solidity of the cultural beliefs that surround us as supposed truths.

Dancing Daffodils

Shadows, a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Williams Wordsworth

I have one lone daffodil growing up outside my front door by the driveway.
Yesterday, morning to my surprise and joy I noticed it had begun to bloom. As I sat in my car, waiting for the motor to warm, I stared down at the little daffodil. It didn’t look so healthy. It has a washed out color, not the classic bright yellow. Looking closer, I noticed that it looked to me like some animal had chewed away the petals just a bit. That was strange and I kept looking.
That was when I noticed the little fellow was shaking and bobbing just a bit. I enjoyed that – until I noticed, there wasn’t the least bit of wind. That was simply odd.
I put the car into reverse and drove away.

That evening when I got home, I sat for a moment in the car, looking once again down at the daffodil.
Yes, it seemed a bit chewed around the edges. And yes, there it was again, bobbing and shaking its head, in the wind… except there wasn’t the slightest stir of air anywhere around.
How odd. And I got out of the car to collect my mail.

Would "true perspective" mean "the perspective that correctly and accurately describes reality as it is, beyond perspectives?"
If so, I'd say that it's an incoherent notion…
Perceptions that are usually called "physical" occur as a kind of language that has no inside or outside… But there's nothing Out There to which any of these ideas refer.
Greg Goode

This morning, as I came out to my car, I was looking up at the sky thinking about Greg Goode and his tight philosophical reasoning that there are many, many ways that we can describe reality. I was thinking, it was even something of a prayer, “Please let me be open to seeing from the different angles. Please let me be open.”
Then once more I noticed the daffodil. I sat there in my car. “Hey, are you shaking now?”
It was not. It was still as any other object in my un-kept garden area.
Then, I felt awareness drop from in my head and open softly in my chest.
“How are you doing today?” I felt the thought leave me in a gentle, caring, consciousness to consciousness manner.
I noticed that simple change within myself. And, at that moment the daffodil began to twitch and shake.
Stunned, I started crying and the daffodil stood silent.
I bowed internally to the flower, “Thank you for that teaching.” And the daffodil immediately responded with a bobbing and a shimmy.
Again, I looked around for currents and a breeze. Again, there wasn’t the slightest motion anywhere.
I looked once more at the flower. Back in my head, I wanted to try for yet a third time. Yet, I knew going in this time once more in the mode of scientist I would not get a response.
And there was none – at least not from the flower.

For me, this was a huge confirmation. It may sound silly to many others and a proof of nothing.
But, all I know was I felt myself get out of my head and into my heart.
I felt a connection with the flower. And there was communication.
There was also a deep, deep blessing.

Apparently our eyes are locked to the daily perceptual reality we live in; therefore we program our eyesight not to see too many vibrations in our lives. That is because we do not want to be distracted… Once I apply “puuh” (to-be –cast –awayness) I can then see with deer eyes, not only the image of the physical plant, but additionally the spirit that usually steps outside and stands beside its plant home and talks telepathically.

The plants taught me to eat them for their medicinal properties because they enjoyed traveling the human digestive tract, through the pleasing landscapes that could only be found in the human anatomy. I would eat the leaf of a plant, and then I would wait fifteen counts. The plant part I had eaten would send back a report to the plant that had given the leaf and translate the messages of the eaten plant leaf back to me. The transmission had to be done quickly because after fifteen to twenty seconds the eaten leaf of the plant went into a pure bliss state and connections were lost.
Joseph Rael

Placebo

Dogs can respond to placebos when administered by their owners. Nicholas Humphrey interviewed by Richard Dawkins for “The Enemies of Reason” (part 2)

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist whom I find rather irritating, arrogant and anti-spiritual.

So, I was curious when I read:
Richard's eyes grew wider and wider as I gave a defense of alternative medicine, saying of course it works, and it works for a reason, because it gives people a safety signal.
It gives them the belief that they are in a secure environment in which they can now release their healing resources, they can afford to let down their guard.
Richard put the lengthy unedited out-takes from the interview on his Website. It's a very strange bit of film because the camera's wandering all over the place. Richard and I are throwing ideas around.
Nicholas Humphrey

So, I went to the video and I heard amazing things:

Eighty percent of the effect of Prozac has been shown to be placebo.  (part 2)

Curiously while the healing is placebo, the side effect of suicide in teenagers is actually attributed to the pharmacology.

And they introduced me to a new term, Darwinian Medicine:
until less than 100 years ago, there was hardly anything a doctor could do that would be effective in any physiological medicinal way—and still the doctor's ministrations often "worked".

That's to say, under the influence of what we would today call placebo …

The reason this works is that it reassures people—subconsciously —that the costs of self-cure will be affordable and that it's safe to let down their guard.  It’s an evolutionary situation… how we use our immune system… we don’t want to get better before [it’s] time, if in fact it’s not safe to do so. 

Not yet safe to get better! 
Humphrey is speaking about how evolutionarily an organism never wants to spend all its energy at once.  We always need to hold a bit in reserve for the next disaster. 
But, I think of cancer patients, real survivors, not recovering until their entire life patterns have been altered.  The body didn’t heal until the psychological stress, the life rules of their environment, have been altered also.

This is a deep healing indeed.  And Humphrey has expanded his investigation into broader implications which make me wonder about our specie’s current push to awaken much quicker than in the past:
If placebo medicine can induce people to release hidden healing resources, are there other ways in which the cultural environment can "give permission" to people to come out of their shells and to do things they wouldn't have done in the past? Can cultural signals encourage people to reveal sides of their personality or faculties that they wouldn't have dared to reveal in the past? Or for that matter can culture block them? There's good reason to think this is in fact our history.

And all of this speculation that resonates and excites a Yes! comes from two hardcore scientists:
How far do you think the so called alternative practitioners believe the mumbo jumbo…?
Dawkins

In many cases they are self-deceiving.  Well it’s not even self-deceiving.  They have seen in their own experiences that these treatments work… They have to invent a rationale and then all sorts of nonsense may come… some spiritual and magical explanation…

Supposing you were Jesus and that lame men got up and walked when you told them to. 
You’d be rather impressed with yourself.
But, I am sure it was placebo effect.
Humphrey  (part 3)

And I am not so sure we understand all the layers at which placebo operates.  Dawkins and Humphrey also admit that there may be new laws of physics awaiting discovery.  Dawkins says he’s even suggested to the true believers that they aim at a Nobel Prize.
I like that notion an awful lot.
In fact, it harkens back to why I learned meditation in the first place.  I wasn’t interested in ending my suffering or world peace or getting better grades. I wanted to see if the rumors were indeed true – did Jesus really walk on the water?
Because, if that were true it would change science for millenia.
It would change everything.
Or so I thought when I was nineteen.

Which puts me in mind of yet another personally irritating man, the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, writing last October about the discovery of a faster than light particle:

It cannot be. Yet, this is not a couple of guys in a garage peddling cold fusion. This is no crank wheeling a perpetual-motion machine into the patent office.
These are the best researchers in the world using the finest measuring instruments, having subjected their data to the highest levels of scrutiny, including six months of cross-checking by 160 scientists from 11 countries.
But there must be some error. Because otherwise everything changes.
We shall need a new physics.
A new cosmology.
New understandings of past and future, of cause and effect.
Then shortly and surely, new theologies.

One Step Over the liNE

white stripe , a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

My friend’s cat has been quite ill and my friend has started wondering:
Is she getting better? or
Is she dying?
Where is the line, the demarcation?

Long ago, my father taught me the phrase “asymptotically approaching.”
He was a chemist by training and shared many such wonderfully polysyllabic phrases.
I miss Pop. He crossed that Line over 15 years ago.
And yet, how is that possible?
If there is a finish line, and each step that you take gets you half way there… then even though you keep getting closer, you’re always only half way there.
In short, you can only “asymptotically approach.”

This reminds me of the biggest regret I have from my days of teaching biology.
It happened when I was in graduate school.
I taught an introductory lab course that was filled with non-biology majors, college freshman to juniors. The brightest student in there was a young kid from a local high school who was just sitting in.
One evening he hung around till everyone was gone to ask me a question:
Where was the line between inanimate and animate?

What a wonderful question!
In fact, I had taken it as my own for several years and really studied it. The answer is incredibly illusive.
While anyone can see a rock is inanimate and a parakeet is obviously animate,
there is actually no clear line of demarcation.
Animate: inanimate. What is a virus?
Life: nonliving? Crystals grow, reducing entropy and thus do not decay.
Alive: dead. When do we pull the plug on vegetative states?
If the extremes are so clear cut, why is an actual demarcation point impossible to find?

Curiously, back into 1960’s there was a Letter to the Editor published in the flagship science journal, Nature.The writer wanted to point out that since there could be no demarcation between animate and inanimate, it followed there could also be no clear demarcation for the arising of consciousness.
For if there were, we could simply make that the criterion for life and thus solve that question recognized as unanswerable.

Alive: dead.
Getting better: dying.
Consciousness present: consciousness absent.

Make no mistake – this issue is totally about consciousness.
It’s about the inseparable, unity of Creation, dependently arising, and how It also appears dualistically.

Oh! And why do I regret the boy asking me this question?
Because when he asked I was tired. It came at the end of a long day and I didn’t have the energy and the enthusiasm that young man deserved.  I feel sorrow for that lapse.
But, I’m also betting he just looked elsewhere for his answer.
Scientist, you see, are seekers through and through.

A History of the Sky

Everything that happens in a person is like clouds… A thought is like a cloud, an emotion is like a cloud, a feeling is like a cloud… but what a person really is, is the sky.  They are the space which everything passes through.

But this is poetry.  No one should believe me.  This is something to discover, simply by being with yourself… everything passes through, except for you.

It’s so easy to watch. 

If you look at the sky –the sky never moves… lightening or thunder or sunshine.  But the space in which it happens doesn’t move at all.

It’s sort of a poetic way to try to talk about What’s this?  What’s that?

Benjamin Smythe

So, I invite you to watch the poetry.

With thanks to my friend at the Cassandra Pages for the head’s up.

In Passing

All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology.*
Lynn Margulis

Taking Vedic Studies with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1975 forever changed the way I think.
What Maharishi suggested, but somehow didn’t say flat out – or at least not in a manner that I could hear – was that since the Absolute is the Source of all relative creation, the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, mathematics, astrophysics, and all the arts… they are just the mechanics of Consciousness expressed in different words.

It was maybe a year later that understanding dawned and I abbreviated the concept in my head as “patterns of consciousness.”
The laws of Nature and laws of Consciousness follow the same pattern.
I have sought and admired these patterns ever since.

Lynn Margulis was a scientist who argued similarly, not from any Vedantic rationale, but from keen observation, good science, and a brilliant and tenacious mind.
Yesterday, she died.
And I am saddened by her passing.

Among other things she helped James Lovelock articulate the Gaia Principle.
Perhaps the best tribute I can offer is to let her words about Gaia correct any misconception you may have regarding Gaia:

Lovelock would say that Earth is an organism. I disagree with this phraseology. No organism eats its own waste. I prefer to say that Earth is an ecosystem, one continuous enormous ecosystem composed of many component ecosystems.
Lovelock's position is to let the people believe that Earth is an organism, because if they think it is just a pile of rocks they kick it, ignore it, and mistreat it. If they think Earth is an organism, they'll tend to treat it with respect.
To me, this is a helpful cop-out, not science… And I realize that by taking the stance he does he is more effective than I am in communicating Gaian ideas.
If science doesn't fit in with the cultural milieu, people dismiss science, they never reject their cultural milieu! …
Gaia is a tough bitch — a system that has worked for over three billion years without people. This planet's surface and its atmosphere and environment will continue to evolve long after people and prejudice are gone.

And long after Lynn Margulis is gone, biology students will be learning principles she discovered.


*And again to not lose context and to demonstrate the remarkable flexibility of her mind, the larger quote:
You can reduce the study of nervous systems to physics and chemistry but you're missing the microbiological step. It's as if you documented the changing surface of the Earth at urban sites using Landsat images, without knowing anything about the people.
Think of the nerve as coming from what had formerly been a bacterium, trying but unable to rotate and swim. Thought involves motility and communication, the connection between remnant spirochetes. All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology.