Newsletter - July 19th, 2015 - Volume 2, Issue 9 |
TSW Posts from
the Past Week |
Trevor Blake, the author of Three Simple Steps, has lead an inspiring life. Rising from poverty and a dysfunctional home in his childhood in Britain he eventually became an elite officer in the British military and most recently started and successfully sold a couple of medical / biotech companies. Along the way he discovered how to harness the power of his thoughts to create and bend reality in his favor. Further along, he discovered there was a scientific basis for these techniques and though, most mainstream scientists did not view the world in this way, there were clearly connections to be made between quantum science principles and these techniques of the mind.
In an energetic based reality, sound vibration becomes an important source of manipulating our personal energy levels. Music lovers of all ages instinctually know its healing properties and use it indirectly for that purpose on a regular basis. But this is just the tip of ice-berg when it comes to what sound can do for our health.
Stanford physics
professor emeritus William Tiller in February 2015 wrote a paper titled – “What is Human Consciousness and How Do We Significantly Increase Its
Magnitude in Our World?”. In the paper Professor Tiller outlines a mathematical model to represent consciousness, but a portion of the paper that is more easily accessible to a broader audience is his description of consciousness using Richard Barret’s model (which is based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs). It’s a good model to visually understand the levels involved in increasing your own consciousness over time.
As Pope Francis unveiled his very important plea to save the planet over the last few weeks, here is another Catholic who also has a positive message – that humanity is still evolving and that we all need to do our part. Dr. John F. Haught, Distinguished professor of Theology at Georgetown University spoke about that imperative in What is Enlightenment magazine some ten years ago. His words are as relevant as
ever.
Links worth Investigating |
- How Engineers Think in terms of Systems: "The core of the engineering mind-set is what I call modular systems thinking. It’s not a singular talent, but a melange of techniques and principles. Systems-level thinking is more than just being systematic; rather, it’s about the understanding that in the ebb and flow of life, nothing is stationary and everything is linked. The relationships among the modules of a
system give rise to a whole that cannot be understood by analyzing its constituent parts.” - Guru Madhavan in his book - Applied Minds: How Engineers Think
- The Dawn of System Leadership. The deep changes necessary to accelerate progress against society's most intractable problems require a unique type of leader—the system leader, a person who catalyzes collective leadership. - from The Stanford Social Innovation Review
- Designing the Future, by
Jacques Fresco. Fresco, a long time scientist, inventor, and master level systems thinker is the CEO of the Venus Project. If you think
George Lucas has a creative mind, then you must check out the work of Jacques Fresco. He has a bold vision for a future that is beyond politics, war, and poverty. It’s based on using technology and automation to unleash humans from resource scarcity which will usher in a new level of peace and abundance for every world citizen. It will of course require a dramatic rise in human consciousness and the reuniting of science and spirituality to get there (something which Mr. Fresco
doesn’t seem to fully appreciate (but that’s ok, we need to start someplace, and his dramatic technological vision is breath-taking in scope). "The Venus Project proposes an alternative vision of what the future can be if we apply what we already know in order to achieve a sustainable new world civilization. It calls for a straightforward
redesign of our culture in which the age-old inadequacies of war, poverty, hunger, debt and unnecessary human suffering are viewed not only as avoidable, but as totally unacceptable. Anything less will result in a continuation of the same catalogue of problems inherent in today's world. Today many people believe what is needed is a higher sense of ethical standards and the enactment of international laws to assure a sustainable global society.” [p.s. in my opinion, the first manifestation of
this “future automated reality” will be driverless cars. They will lower costs, improve safety, and provide humans more time to do other things while commuting from place to place...]. You can also watch the Future by Design documentary on
Youtube.
Proactive Access to Knowledge and Wisdom |
- The book Limits to Growth was right. New research shows we're nearing collapse. Four decades after the book was published, Limit to Growth’s forecasts have been vindicated by new Australian research. Expect the early stages of global collapse to start appearing soon. from The Guardian newspaper, September
2014
- The short film (6 minutes), The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the
afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe.
To Live Our Lives Like Water. Thomas Merton and Lao Tzu make compelling cases for flowing around obstacles rather than butting up against them. - from
OnBeing.com
- Consciousness: Why Materialism Fails, by Larry Dossey, MD. "The most urgent issue we humans face is how we conceive ourselves — whether as complex lumps of matter guided by the so-called blind, meaningless laws of nature, or as creatures who, although physical, are also imbued with something more: consciousness, mind, will, choice,
purpose, direction, meaning and spirituality, that difficult-to-define quality that says we are connected with something that transcends our individual self and ego. Every decision we make is influenced by how we answer this great question: Who are we? There is growing awareness that the endless arguments between proponents of these two views are more than hairsplitting disagreements among experts, but they have real consequences for our future on earth, and perhaps whether we shall have a
future. As novelist and statesman André Malraux (1901-1978) said, the twenty-first century will be spiritual, or it will not be.” - from OpenSciences.org
- Fierce with Reality: Living and Loving Well to the End. Parker Palmer with three tools to help us show up as we really are and live and love fully as we engage with the world.
- from OnBeing.com
- Center for Integral Wisdom founder Marc Gafni’s impressive essay on Evolutionary Enlightenment.
- The Challenges and the Future of the Christian Tradition (video). Brian McLaren describes his journey from Bible based Fundamentalist Christianity to a spirituality that allows questioning of entrenched beliefs and synthesizing Religion, Science and the Arts. He is a prominent Christian pastor, author, activist, speaker and leading figure in the emerging church movement. McLaren is also associated with postmodern Christianity and progressive Christianity and is a major
figure in post-evangelical thought. He has often been named one of the most influential Christian leaders in America. - from the 2014 Science and NonDuality Conference.
- Who is "the other"? Sharon Salzberg in her column "Proximity Leads to Understanding," calls us to cultivate deep curiosity for the lives and struggles of others, and to move away from the "Us-versus-Them" mentality. She includes a meditative exercise that's worth trying out. - from OnBeing.com
- Consciousness Transformation Model from the venerable Institute of Noetic Sciences. Consciousness Transformation is a fundamental shift in perspective or worldview that results in a clearer and more expanded understanding of self and the nature of reality. Such transformations can lead one to a greater sense of meaning and purpose and a reorientation of priorities toward the health and wholeness of both self and the larger
community. Over a twelve-year period, IONS researchers engaged in a series of studies that included analyses of individual narratives of personal transformations; focus groups with teachers of transformative processes; in-depth interviews with sixty representatives of ancient and modern wisdom traditions; surveys of more than two thousand people who had experienced their own transformations; and longitudinal studies of people engaged in transformative practices. This led
them to develop a working model of consciousness transformation that is depicted in the diagram below. It shows that transformation begins with a subjective experience of inner (noetic) knowing and then follows a continuing process of exploration and practice, leading to the enrichment of both the individual and the collective.
- "Today, while the titular head of the family may still be the father, everyone knows that he is little more than chairman, at most, of the entertainment committee.”
- Ashley Montagu
- “Perhaps we will slip through the eye of the needle and pass through the next decade unharmed. Perhaps we won’t. One hundred years from now, our moments of angst and greatest torment will mean very little. What will matter is how we lived these moments, not for progeny but for
ourselves. For in the world of the soul, there is no time. And in the end, it is what we have gleaned from life that matters. There personalities and situations that we are now so caught up in will return to emptiness from which they came. Years from now all of this will seem like some kind of dream, which it is. It is a dream that we are creating and believe to be real. From the perspective of the soul, the important things of life are not what we take
them to be. The qualities of heart and mind that we develop through the act of living is the treasure - not the things we do or the things we accumulate. And so at the end of our lives, when we are taken from the Great Wheel of Life, there will only be a few questions. Did we become more compassionate or more hateful? Did we learn to embrace life, or did we run from it?” - Tom Kenyon, Psychotherapist, Brain Researcher, Shaman, and Sound
Healer
- “So, according to the Buddha, the problem is suffering, the cause is ignorance, the remedy is waking up, and the path is living mindfully, meditating, and cultivating our wisdom.” There is really only place all that happens: in our minds. “- Melvin McLeod
- "The Danish author, Torr Norretrander reminds us that the human conscious mind can only process less than 50 bits of information per second while the human unconscious mind can process more than 50 million bits of information per second. Thus, it is the latter that actually gathers the multiple data streams of information flowing through a human at any point in time. It appears that our
unconscious system gathers such information, organizes such information and refines such information. It then appears to create small kernels of prepared relevant information to send to the conscious mind.” - Stanford Physics Professor Emeritus Bill Tiller. [so if you want to tap into this real supercomputer in your head and optimize the pathway between your subconscious and conscious mind, then meditate daily and master mindfulness
practices...]
- "Love is the only freedom in the world because it so elevates the spirit that laws of humanity do not alter its course." - Khalil Gibran
“Evolutionary Non-Dualism is the notion that humanity is
striving to get beyond the predominant false dualities that tend to separate our hearts from our minds, our science from our spirit. There’s sort of a functional reason for those separations when you’re working in the physical world and you need to put aside aspects of yourself to focus on other aspects. But to structure an entire society around that leads us to a place where health care sometimes is divorced
from healing, and peace-making includes weaponry. There are these insanities that come out of this false duality, and part of what IONS has been working for for so long has been to at least bring these into conversation with one another if not to see what happens when you actually eliminate the boundaries.” - Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) CEO, Cassandra Vieten
- "The key to achieving abundance and a high standard of living for every person on the planet is to automate as much as possible in the shortest period of time. By replacing human labor with machines and implementing a global resource-based economy, everyone lives better than the wealthiest of today... Cybernation, the merging of
computers with production, will unleash an outflow of goods and services never before experienced. There is much work to be done on artificial intelligence (AI). AI is computer programming that simulates human decision-making and hypothesis testing along with self-correction. AI redesigns mechanical and electronic systems to simulate and improve upon human performance. As exciting as these developments are, we are just at the beginning of the possibilities. Cybernation can be regarded as the only real emancipation proclamation for humankind when used humanely and intelligently. It enables people to have the highest conceivable standard of living with practically no labor. It frees people for the first time from the routine of repetitive day-by-day activity. When humans are free of the outmoded methods of a monetary system, we will finally begin to understand what it means to be
civilized.” -Jacques Fresco, CEO of the Venus Project, writing in his manifesto, Designing the Future
- "Empty phrases such as “genetic programs” and “brain mechanisms” are used to explain almost everything.
They imply that the answers are known in principle, leaving only the details to be worked out, with the answers only a few years (or decades) away. Committed materialists are committed precisely because they believe that materialistic explanations will be found in the future. They put their trust in what they hope for — in what is not yet known. The philosopher of science Karl Popper called this attitude “promissory materialism” because it involves issuing undated promissory notes
for future discoveries. Promissory materialism is a faith. In the nineteenth century, materialism seemed quite straightforward. Old-style materialists thought that matter was made up of hard, enduring stuff, with atoms like little billiard balls, pushed around by known forms of energy. But the nature of physical reality — which materialists think of as the only reality — is much more
problematic today. Quantum theory has dissolved matter into vibratory patterns of activity within fields. And most cosmologists and astronomers believe that about 96% of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, whose nature is literally obscure. These names may be placeholders, but what they mean is that 96% of what materialists or physicalists believe in is unknown. How can we be sure that dark matter and dark energy — the basis for the existence of galaxies and the evolution of
the universe — are completely mindless and unconscious?” - progressive biologist Professor Rupert Sheldrake
Question to Ponder for the Week |
If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
While on a recent college visit to the University of Pittsburgh, we managed to get to a high elevation for a great look at the beautiful city. No doubt now why Pittsburgh is considered to be one of the most livable places in the U.S.
Have a Great Week, Stay Positive, and Proactively Choose Your Thoughts to Create Your Desired Reality.
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