Tag Archives: spirituality

Deepak Chopra on Spirituality in the World

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Author, ‘War of the Worldviews’; Founder, The Chopra Foundation

Possibly a New World (Part 2)

Posted: 1/11/12 08:45 AM ET

It’s a well-worn truth that the modern world is built upon science and technology. But this truth doesn’t dominate everyday life as much as one might think. Science is materialistic, and it explains the world through objective data. People lead their lives, at least partly, apart from materialism. The spiritual side of life exists and always has, which defies objective data. So does art, which isn’t mystical, not to mention emotions, intuition, morality and much else that makes life worth living.

Most of the time we are satisfied with this kind of catch-as-catch-can dualism. One of the easiest precepts from Jesus to follow is “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” If you substitute “science” or “materialism” for Caesar, everyone does exactly that, compartmentalizing personal and spiritual experience in a separate box from iPads, microwaves and space shuttles.

The problem is that a compartmentalized life feels inadequate, which is why a public debate has been ongoing for 200 years about whether God or science is the ultimate master of reality. The answer matters. If you plump for God then miracles, mysticism, the soul and invisible forces have a chance to be real. If you plump for science instead, then physical existence can be completely trusted and the rational mind will in time solve all apparent mysteries. In either case, dualism no longer pinches; some kind of non-dualism wins the day.

In my posts, articles and books I’ve argued that science can expand to include miracles and mysticism. There is no need to deny the miraculous if everything is a miracle. There is no mystery surrounding mysticism if we look into the subtle essence of the human mind. More importantly, a non-dual world based on consciousness would be a better world. The fact is that science won’t reach answers to every riddle, so plumping for materialism is an empty gesture — even a hoax — when it comes to explaining a broad range of issues:

  • What is a thought? Who is thinking?
  • What connects body and mind?
  • Where does meaning come from?
  • Why and how does the body heal itself?

These questions seem so abstract, not to mention so huge, that everyday life seems content to pass the by, and materialists are content to call them metaphysics, putting them high on a shelf to gather philosophical dust. But I’d argue that no questions are more relevant to my life and yours, once we reduce them to the personal scale.

  • Why do I have the thoughts I have? Where are they taking me?
  • Can my mind change my body in positive ways when it comes to disease and aging?
  • What does my life really mean?
  • Can I make a difference in how my body heals?

One could add many other important issues to the list, but all would have one thing in common: until you understand the mind, you haven’t truly understood reality. Life comes to us as experience. This is true of driving a car, raising a child, catching a cold or building a super collider in order to detect subatomic particles. Experience is how we participate in the universe. The super collider isn’t set aside in some objective space, even though data tries to be objective. Every moment in every scientist’s life is a subjective experience. It consists of sensations, thoughts, feelings and images.

You can claim, as non-dual materialists do, that the subjective side taints the objective and should be considered an unreliable guide to truth. But to say this makes two mistakes, and they are whoppers. The first mistake is that the mind cannot be located in the material world. Primitive peoples, as we like to call them, believed that spirits inhabited physical objects, a perspective known as animism. Trees contained tree spirits, the sky was the home of rain gods, and little demons lurked all around. Yet when it says that mind exists in the brain, neuroscience is committing the same fallacy. The brain is made up of atoms and molecules. It is a thing, like a tree, and to say that the mind is only the brain means that you have attributed consciousness to atoms and molecules. No one has ever explained how mind suddenly arises in blood sugar when that sugar crosses the blood-brain barrier. It is simply assumed.

The second mistake, intimately connected to the first, is that observers can stand apart from what they observe. Instead of being a participatory universe, science asserts that outside reality is separate from us; we are like children with our noses pressed to a bake shop window, staring through the glass but never going inside. This view reduces experience to data and then goes further by saying that data is superior to experience. This cannot remotely be true. The data about your body, such as blood pressure, heart rate, hormone levels, etc., is essentially the same as the data from Buddha, Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and Picasso. It seems obvious that when you throw out all the factors that make these individuals unique, you have thrown out something pretty essential — the very meaning and purpose of life.

I’ve argued that a new world is being born in which nothing needs to be thrown out, and such a world can only be based on experience. Experience covers billions of people leading different lives, but one element is always present: consciousness. Thoughts and actions occur in consciousness. This is so obvious that it feels a bit meaningless, like saying that all marine life occurs in the sea. But the world’s wisdom traditions exist to open our eyes, seeing beyond the obvious to something incredibly important: If you delve into consciousness, you will find the essence of existence, meaning it purpose, direction and goal. You will know deeply and fully who you are, and when that unfolds, you will know what reality is.

Non-dual consciousness doesn’t celebrate subjectivity over objectivity. To do that is simply to take the mistakes of materialism and turn them on their heads. Non-dual systems all make the same claim: “Everything is made of X.” Science says that everything is made of matter and energy. Non-dual consciousness says that everything is made of mind. An alien landing on Earth in a spaceship, lacking bias either way, could easily see why these two worldviews consider the other preposterous. To say that everything is matter and energy is preposterous when you are trying to get at the mind and subjective experience. Non-dual consciousness is preposterous when you are trying to figure out where stars and galaxies come from. In other words, the physical seems secure in making its claims on us, while the mental seems just as secure when telling the story of inner life.

The great challenge is to decide which preposterous claim is, believe it or not, actually true. For thousands of years human beings had no difficulty believing that Creation was happening in the mind of God; the spiritual origin of the universe was certain. Today, people have no trouble believing that tiny physical things called atoms and molecules will reveal why we fall in love, create art and have thoughts in our heads. I’m not defending an ancient bias as opposed to a modern one. Rather, there has been an evolution, bringing us to the point where we can go beyond crude animism, whether of the spiritual or materialistic kind, at last seeing how consciousness works in the whole scheme of reality.

We can explain the galaxies and personal experience at the same time by finding the same origin for each. If nature goes to the same place — an invisible workshop beyond time and space — to create a supernova, a rose, human love and our craving for God, then non-duality solves everything. My position is that non-duality must be based in consciousness, since it is inescapable that the only reality we know comes through experience. Without a doubt we live in a participatory universe, and the sooner we surrender the delusion that data is superior to experience, the closer we will come to transforming the world.

from:   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/consciousness_b_1193968.html?ref=mindful-living&ir=Mindful%20Living 

Barbara Marx Hubbard on Conscious Evolution

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What is Conscious Evolution?

 

WHAT IS CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION? Due to the increased power given us through science and technology, we are learning how nature works – the gene, the atom, the brain. We are affecting our own evolution by everything we do. With these new powers we can destroy our life support systems …or we can move toward a hope-filled future of immeasurable possibilities.We are the generation of choice, and we do not have much time to choose!Conscious Evolution is the worldview that has arisen precisely at this moment in history to deal with the new human condition. It is a vision and a direction to help us navigate through this transitional period to the next stage of human evolution. As Einstein admonished, humankind cannot solve its problems from the same place of consciousness in which we created them. A new place of consciousness is required.In simple terms Conscious Evolution takes place when we intend to grow in consciousness and use our increasing awareness to guide our actions and achieve a positive future.Bela H. Banathy, author of Guided Evolution of Society, offers this additional understanding of Conscious Evolution:It is a process by which we can individually and collectively take responsibility for our future.It is a process of giving direction to the evolution of human systems by purposeful action.And most importantly, Conscious Evolution enables us, if we take responsibility for it, to use our creative power to guide our own lives and the evolution of the systems and the communities in which we live and work. It is a process by which individuals and groups, families, organizations, and societies can envision and create images of what should be, and bring those images to life by design.Conscious Evolution is at the core a spiritually-motivated endeavor. Its precepts reside at the heart of every great faith, affirming that humans have the potential of being cocreators with Spirit, with the deeper patterns of nature and universal design.The promise of Conscious Evolution is nothing less than the emergence of a universal humanity capable of guiding its own evolution into a future of unimaginable cocreativity

from:   http://www.barbaramarxhubbard.com/site/node/8

Gregg Braden on Science & Spirituality

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Deep Wisdom: The Marriage of Science and Spirituality

by Gregg Braden on May 30, 2011

During the last years of the Cold War, I had a front row seat as a senior systems designer in the defense industry to one of the most frightening times in the history of the world, and the thinking that led to it. During the last years of the most potentially lethal, yet undeclared, war in human history, the superpowers of the United States and the former Soviet Union did something that seems unthinkable to any rationally minded person today. They spent the time, energy, and human resources to develop and stockpile somewhere in the neighborhood of 65,000 nuclear weapons—a combined arsenal with the power to microwave the Earth, and everything on it, many times over.

The rationale for such an extreme effort stems from a way of thinking that has dominated much of the modern world for the last 300 years or so, since the beginning of the scientific era. It’s based in the false assumptions of scientific thinking that suggest we’re somehow separate from the Earth, separate from one another, and that the nature that gives us life is based upon relentless struggle and survival of the strongest. Fortunately, new discoveries have revealed that each of these assumptions is absolutely false. Unfortunately, however, there is a reluctance to reflect such new discoveries in mainstream media, traditional classrooms and conventional textbooks. In other words, we’re still teaching our young people the false assumptions of an obsolete way of thinking based on struggle, competition, and war.

While we no longer face the nuclear threat that we did in the 1980s, the thinking that made the Cold War possible is still in place. This fact is vital to us all right now for one simple reason: For the first time in human history the future of our entire species rests upon the choices of a single generation—us—and the choices are being made within a small window of time—now. The best minds of our time are telling us that we must act quickly to avert the clear and present danger of a host of new crises that are converging in a “bottleneck” of time covering the first years of the 21st Century.

The journal Scientific American released a special edition (vol. 293, no. 3, September 2005) to bring the world up to speed on the critical situation we find ourselves in today. The title, Crossroads for Planet Earth, says it all. The way we solve the simultaneous crises—such as our response to climate change, the unsustainable and growing levels of extreme poverty, the emergence of new diseases, the growing shortages of food and fresh drinking water, the growing chasm between extreme wealth and extreme poverty, and the unsustainable demand for energy—will chart the destiny, or seal the fate of our global family that is estimated to reach a staggering 8 billion by 2025.

The key here is that the way we address the greatest crises of human history is based on the way we think of ourselves and the world. Clearly, the thinking that led to the war and suffering of the 20th century is not the thinking that we want the delicate choices of our survival based upon!

Developing a new level of thinking is precisely what we need to do today, and the magnitude of crises that face us may prove to be the catalyst for doing just that! The emerging bridge between the sciences that tell us how the universe works, and the spiritual traditions that give such knowledge meaning in our lives, plays a vital role in the new thinking that heads off the darkest possibilities of our future. But while the crises of the moment may be the catalyst for such a shift in thinking, something even deeper is emerging.

The new shift in thinking is the gateway to human transformation. And because of the sheer number of people involved in the shift, and the growing magnitude of the crises that are driving us to change the way we think, we are standing on the threshold of human transformation at a level unlike anything ever before known on Earth.

The spiritual traditions that I’m describing are the core principles of ancient and time-tested understandings—principles now confirmed by 20th century science that include the interconnected nature of all things, the power of the human heart to positively influence the magnetic fields of the earth and all life, and the cyclic nature of life, climate, civilization and change. The spiritual traditions of our ancestors got these principles right and embodied them at the core of their lives in their time. It’s the marriage of these holistic principles with the best science of today that helps us to tip the scales of life, balance, and peace in our favor.

While the specifics of spiritual principles may vary from tradition to tradition, the essence of their message does not. It’s simple, direct and states that we live in a world where everything has meaning, and is meaningful to everything else. What happens in the oceans has meaning for the climate of the mountains. What happens in a river has meaning for the life that depends upon the river. The choices that you and I make as we express our beliefs in our living rooms and around family dinner tables have meaning for the people in our immediate lives, as well as for those connected through the coherence fields of the human heart living halfway around the Earth.

By crossing the traditional boundaries that define the science, religion, and the history of our past, we are shown the power of a larger, integrated, and holistic worldview. I cannot help but believe that our destiny and fate as a species are intimately entwined with our willingness to accept the Deep Wisdom of a spiritually based science. It’s all about the way we think of ourselves, our relationship to the Earth and to one another. When the facts become clear, our choices become obvious.

from:    http://ervinlaszlo.com/forum/2011/05/30/deep-wisdom-marriage-of-science-spirituality/

Nicolya Christi on Spirituality

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Contemporary Spirituality for an Evolving World

Nicolya Christi

Breakdown Leads to Breakthrough

We are living in unprecedented times of accelerated change—change that is evident all around us and which we experience in every arena of our lives, from the political, economic and financial, to the social and religious.

More and more people are asking fundamental questions regarding their basic human rights and overall wellbeing, and beginning to question the influence that external “powers” have over our lives.

No longer content with dismissive answers from those in positions of “power,” people are beginning to recognize that they have the freedom to choose. The balance between “power” and empowerment is beginning to shift.

Humanity stands on an imminent threshold which is about to take it into a New Paradigm. We are witnessing the early stages of the birth of a New World.

As this New World emerges—as prophesied long ago by many advanced indigenous cultures, and portended by rare astronomical alignments currently taking place in our Galaxy, including the completion of a 26,000-year Galactic Cycle—everything is set to change.

We are now bearing witness to the collapse of political, economic, social and financial systems, as people respond to the call of the New World, the call of our time, and the call of their soul.

These courageous people are reaching out for a better quality of life, for equality, for their basic survival needs to be met, and for an overall sense of wellbeing, all of which are our fundamental birthright.

People are reclaiming their individual power; and if they can use this wisely, this will help to empower millions of fellow humans across the globe. We are bearing witness to a re-evolution, on a global scale.

The energy of change is sweeping the globe. People are “waking up” to the reality of their lives and to the current state of the world.

Under the spotlight of radical questioning and these sweeping changes is religion, or in a broader sense, spirituality. Are religion and spirituality one and the same?

At the center of all religion lies a spiritual heart. However, this spiritual heart, like the human heart, lies buried under thousands of years of conditioning and distortion, which has dominated and hidden the pure heart of religion.

The heart of religion and the human heart are not dissimilar in their historical fate. For the most part, both have remained buried under eons of fear-based constructs, which have manifested a distorted and unrecognizable caricature of religion, and of the human being.

It is said that all rivers lead to the same ocean and that, in a similar way, all religions lead to the same fundamental message and meaning: Love.

"Canyon Tree" 2012 © Sol Luckman“Canyon Tree” 2012 © Sol LuckmanContemporary Spirituality

What is Contemporary Spirituality? We could say that Contemporary Spirituality is an extraction of the purest essence of all religion.

It is what lies at the heart of all religion and at the heart of any spiritual practice or philosophy which has developed a complex doctrine, a fundamentalist and inaccurate set of scriptures and texts, and a dysfunctional set of rules and code of conduct.

Contemporary Spirituality is a current spirituality that speaks directly to us now in the times we live in. It is a Way which brings our spiritual focus into the Now.

Religion is an ancient system that was birthed in an unrecognizable (to our modern mind) and vastly different time in our ancient human history. Its rise to prominence took place when our conscious evolution was in its formative stages.

The heart of religion was adapted beyond all original meaning by those who held power, in order to control, manipulate and dominate the human being of 2,000 and more years ago.

Our conscious evolution has come a long way since then. We are no longer in the infancy stages of our conscious evolutionary development.

Therefore, it is entirely out of context to be following antiquated religious doctrine created by, and for, our less consciously evolved predecessors.

Contemporary Spirituality consists of a Way, which is uncorrupted, uncomplicated, and non-fundamental. It is an expression of spirituality and religion in its purest form. It represents the true heart of all religion, which was hidden by power hungry rulers long ago.

The heart of Contemporary Spirituality is open and available for all to see. It is a heart that is exquisite in its simplicity, transparency, beauty, and purity.

Contemporary Spirituality invites ALL, no matter what race, denomination or creed, to be inspired and seek to aspire and embody its proposals. It is a Way which is an infinitely pure and true expression of what lay at the heart of religion and certain spiritual paths.

Contemporary Spirituality invites us toward Self-mastery, in which we learn to master our bodies, senses, emotions, thoughts, and lives. It encourages us to cultivate self-discipline, self-love, self-awareness, self-knowing, and self-realization.

Contemporary Spirituality leads us along a clear path, devoid of rules, judgments, expectations, dogma, or fundamentalist belief systems. It guides us towards enlightenment.

Contemporary Spirituality requires no intellectual predisposition, as it is a language of the heart. It invites us to explore, practice and master the Seven Cornerstones of Contemporary Spirituality (see below).

The joy of Contemporary Spirituality is in its simplicity. It is a stripped back to the core spiritual Way forward for humanity.

It gently encourages and guides us to let go of dualistic and separatist religious indoctrination, and instead, embrace the concept of equality, unity, and unifying as one global family, with one “religion,” one spiritual practice, at the heart of humanity—that of Love.

This is something that we are now ready to embrace as contemporary, consciously evolving human beings.

The Light Shadow

Contemporary Spirituality embraces the human shadow, recognizing that when we explore ourselves with consciousness and awareness, and are therefore engaged in our own evolutionary process, the shadow is not dark, but indeed Light.

Contemporary Spirituality discounts the existence of a fundamentally dark nature within the human being, and instead acknowledges that there exists, within each of us, a primal wound, a separation from Source (God, Divinity, our Divine Nature).

However, this is not a wound we must bear as part of being human. We experience it only because we have been steeped in dualism, brought about by the misinterpretation or obscuration of what lay at the heart of religious and spiritual philosophies throughout human history.

The Light Shadow is referred to as such because by becoming aware of and healing the human shadow, its existence has brought us further enlightenment.

When compassion and empathy are offered as balms with which the human shadow can be healed and transformed, this results in its integration, and the conscious evolution of the human being.

For thousands of years we have lived under dictatorships, flawed regimes and a misinterpretation of the fundamental meaning of all religions, which is Love.

We have lived in duality, at a personal and collective level. We have been separated from the heart of religion and spirituality, and therefore our own hearts.

The primal wound of humanity, separation from Source, is one which can be healed. The way to healing all perceived sense of separation (for we have never truly been separate, only perceived ourselves to be so) is to become Love and only Love.

To live, breathe, sleep and live Love in every moment. To be a Master of the Heart. To reclaim and embody our natural state of being—which is Love.

This is what lies at the heart of Contemporary Spirituality: a new Way forward for a new human and a new world.

Seven Cornerstones of Contemporary Spirituality

The following is a list of the Seven Cornerstones of Contemporary Spirituality. Each is a teaching in itself, and all tend to be explored, practiced and embodied at the same time.

Each supports the transformation of the Light Shadow into a vast and beautiful Light which can surround and radiate from us.

The Seven Cornerstones are as follows: Unconditional Love, Empathy, Compassion, Forgiveness, Conscious Communication, Unconditional Positive Regard, and Compassionate Action.

When all seven of these foundational qualities of Contemporary Spirituality are mastered and lived realities, every day, we have attained Self-mastery.

This is when our true essence is fully awakened. This is when the heart has become fully transparent. When all humans embody this Way, as a lived reality, we will live in a transcendent world.

Copyright © 2012 by Nicolya Christi. All Rights Reserved.

[Nicolya Christi is Founder of WorldShift Movement, Co-founder of WorldShift International, and Co-initiator of WorldShift 2012. Nicolya’s focus is on human evolution, inner peace, and world peace. She is author of 2012: A Clarion Call—Your Soul’s Purpose in Conscious Evolution. Visit her website at www.nicolyachristi.com.]

from:    http://www.phoenixregenetics.org/resources/dna-monthly/current-issue

Spirituality & Society

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Pythia Peay

Author and writer on spirituality, psychology and American psyche

 Spirituality And Social Change: An Interview With Corinne McLaughlin
Posted: 5/18/11 08:38 AM ET

Those who despair over the gap between their vision of a more environmentally sustainable, just and peaceful planet and the world as it is can find inspiration in Corinne McLaughlin’s call to become practical visionaries: Those activists, she says, who remain steady in their work over time by keeping their “eyes on the horizon, their feet on the ground, and their hearts on fire.”

McLaughlin, a spiritual and political activist who has taught politics at American University, is coauthor of “Spiritual Politics”with her husband Gordon Davidson (author of the forthcoming “Joyful Evolution”). They are as well founders of The Center for Visionary Leadership and The Sirius Community, and are fellows of The World Business Academy and The Findhorn Foundation.

The following is an edited version of my interview with McLaughlin on her recent book,“The Practical Visionary: A New World Guide to Spiritual Growth and Social Change”.

Pythia: I’d like to start with a simple question. What is your definition of a “visionary”?

Corinne: A visionary is someone who sees the future with both insight and foresight: Insight into the deeper causes and meaning of events in the world, and foresight, or an intuitive grasp of the big picture, such as the trajectory of politics and popular culture.

Pythia: You write in your book that you’ve seen many visionaries fail to manifest their inspiring visions. What do you find is the biggest obstacle most visionaries face?

Corinne: The problem I find with a lot of visionaries is that they’re too far ahead — perhaps their vision won’t happen for another hundred years. That’s why I like to help people focus on “next step” visions that are more doable.

Pythia: Why is being too far ahead of one’s own time a problem?

Corinne: Thinking that something that is far in the future can come sooner leads to unrealistic expectations, as well as rigid and dogmatic perspectives. It can also prevent visionaries from seeing what’s possible right in front of them. Our work is to translate what we might receive from a flash of insight into things that are useful today.

Take for example the recent uprising in Egypt. I could hold a positive vision of how this could all turn out, but I know it’s not going to be as simple as that. It’s one thing to get rid of a dictator. The harder part is to create a viable democracy that empowers people. But what I found inspiring in Egypt is how, during the revolution, the people organized their neighborhoods, created street clinics to help the wounded, and cleaned up after their demonstrations. These may seem like small things, but to me they are examples of practical, effective visionaries at work.

Pythia: You write that as a young woman in the sixties you were inspired by people in government and their dedication to public service — such as President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy — to enter government service yourself. You then went on to work at various Federal agencies, such as the Social Security Administration and President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development; you’ve even taught meditation to some government agencies. How did these first-hand experiences shape your development as a practical visionary?

Corinne: I believe strongly that social change isn’t just about demonstrations in the street against the wrongs in society. There is also the path of the social innovator who creates new institutions and the path of the reformer who goes within an institution and makes incremental changes. Based on my own experience, I learned that implementing a vision in an institutional setting involves working with conflict resolution and a whole systems perspective. It’s important, for instance, to have a multi-stakeholder perspective — in other words, you can’t just go charging in with your own ideas, you have to appreciate people’s different perspectives, then work to find common ground and bring the various parties to the table in a respectful dialogue.

Because I frequently encountered obstacles such as old, entrenched ideas, ongoing power struggles, or the lack of staff and money, I also learned to develop patience and detachment. In federal, state and local governments, administrations, philosophies, and policy initiatives change. If your vision aligns with the values of the current administration you’re working with, you can make some progress — but that could all change in four or six years.

Pythia: Together with your husband, Gordon Davidson, you’ve also taught the path of “Ageless Wisdom” for many decades. What has this spiritual perspective brought to your calling as a practical visionary?

Corinne: What I’ve taken from my spiritual study is the wisdom of living a balanced life. My spiritual path has also helped me to be more emotionally centered, to be more understanding of those that disagree with me, and to learn how to let go of some of my power issues so that I can be more effective and bring a sense of humility to my work — while still having the self-confidence to be effective.

Pythia: You write about how easy it is for activists to burn out, and list different ways that they can stay “spiritually sane.” What contemplative practices do you teach activists that can help prevent disillusionment?

Corinne: Many activists just see what’s wrong: they want to stand up to injustice and educate people about it. But I think it’s equally important for activists to hold a more positive vision of what’s right with their country: what’s going well, and what they’d like to grow or see more of. I also like to encourage activists to take some time each day to sit silently or take a walk in nature as a way to be in touch with their inner wisdom and peace — and to remember why they are on this path in the first place.

to read more, go to:   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pythia-peay/spirituality-activism_b_859918.html?ref=spirituality

The Field and Everything

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The Field: The Reality of Things

fieldtheory.jpg 

The following is excerpted from The Basic Code of the Universe: The Science of the Invisible in Physics, Medicine and Spirituality,published by Inner Traditions.

 

Mechanistic thought conceptualized solid particles moving in a vacuum. Then came field physics, and prevailing notions were shattered once again. In the mid-nineteenth century, Michael Faraday introduced the idea of a field as “a space around a source of electromagnetic energy.” Opposing the concept of “full and void” from atomism, Faraday suggested the idea of “matter and force diffused in space,” according to precise lines of force. His was a nonmaterial vision of physical phenomena! It is with Faraday that fields became defined as physical dimensions in zones of temporal space. In the following century, Einstein extended the field principle with the inclusion of gravity: the universe is thus considered held in a single gravitational field that curves in proximity to matter.

Of the four elements of Pannaria, the field is the least studied but the most interesting. Mass could be matter combined with energy, which is an expression of the field. In that case mass would be the formation through which the senses perceive the field, the reality that the “veil of Maya” hides, as some insightful sages of India, along with some Western philosophers, have put it. Plato contrasted the truth (alètheia) with fiction, opinion, illusion (doxa). The senses fall under the category of doxa, projection, the shadow of the alètheia. The senses enable us to perceive only impressions, while the truth of the universe is unknowable. “Nature loves to hide” (ϕύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ), writes Heraclitus of Ephesus.* But a philosopher must try to reach it somehow, because truth is very sublime.

Plato used the “myth of the cave,” in which he describes a scene of slaves chained in a cave, who are forced to watch a strange “film” of speaking shadows on a wall. They believe what they see is real until one slave escapes and discovers an unexpected world: what the prisoners think are people are only the shadows of statues of humans and animals being carried on the shoulders of real men and women passing by; the slaves were hearing only their voices.5 The freed slave met the other side of things. Centuries later, the neo-Platonist Giordano Bruno of the Renaissance wrote De Umbris Idearum (The Shadows of Ideas), and indeed Platonic thought has also been revalued by some quantum physicists. The physical bodies that we can touch, see, and hear are only the shadows in the cave. Their fields, though they elude our senses, are in fact the true reality of the bodies. A researcher has to leave the cave in order to explore the other side of things.

Every physical body can be seen as an event that is constantly changing on the world stage, and the director of the changes is precisely the field, which the ancient sages identified with fire, a great natural alchemist. The quantum field is everywhere. The particles are not corpuscular, but local condensations of the field. Solid? No. They are quanta, but they are packets of energy of the field’s vibrations. The protons are vibrations in the field of the protons, electrons in that of the electrons, and so on. It is revolutionary in the history of human thinking to imagine that the world is not built with solid bricks, but rather with vibration, energy. Matter is a particular vibration of its own field, which overturns everything so far studied in school.

Since our childhood we have wanted to humanize the world, and we imagine even the microscopic driving energies of life as solid objects. But things are not like that. The Italian doctor and physicist Massimo Corbucci writes that the atom is an abyss filled with electrons and the particles of the nucleus.6 The harder you search the abyss, the more you realize that mass itself does not exist. What exists is a game of attraction and repulsion (therefore a balance) between different polarities of charge, between “breathing emptiness.”

The field is pulsation in the emptiness, that is, vibrating emptiness, a pulsating vacuum. The particles that make up mass might actually be disturbances of the field, ripples in the vacuum. We are not far from the discourse of the strings. Now consider that the first description of matter, as being like “the crest of a wave, curling like the sea,” was written as early as the hermetic treatises of the second century C.E.! It is only these disturbances that are perceived by the senses, which then turn them into perceptions-visual, tactile, auditory-namely feelings from forms, bodies, heat, sound, light.

What appear to us as particles are probably field fluctuations, in which some of a field’s regions oppose one another (for example, the protons and the electrons). In physics’ “double slit” experiment, an electron sent toward a plate with two parallel slits close to each other passes through both simultaneously, suggesting that the electron is traveling more like a wave than a particle. Actually, an electron can be in either wave or particle form, a variation of field fluctuation.

During our journey, we will discover further that the fields of physical bodies have extraordinary properties, that they are “organized masses” and that to date nobody has been able to uncover what organizes them and how. The physical, chemical, and biological sciences continue to largely ignore these questions. In fact, the field may not only be the result of what happens to mass, but rather the director of what happens to mass. To begin to understand how this can be, we are aided by the concept of morphogenetic fields, which offer us insight into fields with organizing disposition.

to read more, go to:    http://www.realitysandwich.com/field_reality_things

Science & Spirituality

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Steven and Michael Meloan

Authors of ‘The Shroud’

 Science and Spirituality Can Transform Our World .. Together

For hundreds of years, science has illuminated the mysteries of our universe, allowing us to conquer diseases, manipulate genomes, visit other planets and explore the wonders of space and time. But as a result of these profound and inarguable successes, science has also become the de facto cultural filter through which our broader societal norms, behaviors and institutions have developed and evolved. Newtonian physics established a physical reality composed of discrete and separate objects, operating according to predictable laws of time and space — the universe as a giant billiard table. And Darwinian evolution established the biological world as a tooth-and-claw realm of scarcity, competition and “survival of the fittest.” The end conclusions of this centuries-old scientific story is that we are accidents of the cosmos, living on a lonely planet in the cold depths of space, vying for limited resources in a frequently violent and tumultuous competition for supremacy. The implicit notion that we are walking husks for “selfish genes” pervades everything, from our economic and business institutions to our day-to-day interactions.

But an increasing number of scientific, philosophical and spiritual thinkers are arriving at the conclusion that this mechanistic take on the human story is fundamentally incomplete. Darwinian narratives of “survival of the fittest,” and mechanistic Newtonian physics are increasingly being seen as elements of a far greater and richer tapestry. Quantum entanglement, or Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance,” demonstrates that our universe is interconnected in ways we might never have imagined, down to the most basic particle level. And the discovery of “mirror neurons”in humans and other primates demonstrates that simply seeing something happen to another creature lights up the same neurons as if it were happening to us. In a very real sense, we don’t entirely distinguish between “the self” and others. And this is particularly true when witnessing suffering. Compassion and empathy seem to be hard-wired into us.

While inter-species and intra-species competition is an inarguable biological fact, we are discovering compelling new examples of connection, cooperation and community. In reality, we may have even misinterpreted Darwin. In his “The Descent of Man,”published in 1871, Darwin only mentions the phrase “survival of the fittest” twice, while he mentions the word “love” 95 times. Dig beneath the surface of the natural world, and a tooth-and-claw narrative is clearly not the only one to be found. Bonobo apes, with which humans share more than 98 percent of their DNA, live in highly cooperative societies based on matriarchal structures. These and other recent scientific discoveries may prove pivotal in creating newer and more accurate cultural narratives. The Human Genome Project has revealed amazing commonalities among all living organisms, and the project has also found that there is greater genetic variability within a given race than between them. In short, in spite of superficial appearances, we are far more alike, at a fundamental genetic level, than we are different.

Even so, we retain hard-wiring from a primitive past that was directed toward survival-based judgments and assessments of others. Studies find that this programming leaves us constantly primed to gauge others as “in-group” or “out-group,” based upon such criteria as race, gender, age and perceived cultural and socio-economic status — and that such analyses occur within milliseconds. This tribalism can be surprisingly fluid and dynamic. In one study, teen boys were exposed to the art of either Kandinsky or Klee. Even though the boys were previously unfamiliar with either and had been randomly assigned to view the works of only one artist, the Kandinsky “gang” quickly showed a greater willingness to loan money to other Kandinsky in-group members. And the same proved true of the experimental Klee “gang.”

Because such tribal-bonding is so dynamic and shifting, however, it is also highly malleable. Once recognized and understood, this hard-wiring can be consciously subverted. A measurable aversion to the image of a homeless person or drug addict can be rapidly transformed by an assignment to participate in a soup kitchen and choose appropriate menu items for people in need. In this way, out-group members almost instantaneously become fellow in-group members as part of a joint undertaking. The key to such subversion of tribalistic tendencies is that cross-group members must share a larger common goal, and have the support of recognized authority figures.

While competition and tribalistic bonding are inarguable aspects of our world, science increasingly makes clear that this is only one part of an expanding conceptual landscape. Our entire universe is profoundly interconnected, in ways that we are only beginning to decipher. This is true at the elementary particle level, at the genetic level, at the organism level and at a global level via the Internet. Ultimately, the same scientific milieu that helped form our current conflict-ridden cultural narratives may now be instrumental in defining not only a more productive world view, but a more accurate one.

Steven and Michael Meloan are authors of “The Shroud,” a science-adventure novel exploring the spiritual impulse, tribalism and its manifestations in human behavior, and the intersection between science and spirituality:

from:   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-and-michael-meloan/human-narrative-_b_955039.html

Cheryl Richardson on Empowerment

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Recipe for Success: The habits that create an exceptional life

Cheryl Richardson
a message from Cheryl Richardson
Monday, 22 August, 2011  (posted 7 September, 2011)

On September 20th I’ll be releasing my next book, You Can Create an Exceptional Life.  This book is written with Louise Hay.. and it’s a teaching story that unfolds over the course of a year of traveling together throughout the US and abroad.  I’m excited to share this experience with you.  It certainly has been an extraordinary journey that has changed my life….

During one of our first meetings, I asked Louise about her spiritual journey – the path that led her to touch the lives of millions.  As I listened to her story, a recipe for success – both in business and in life – began to reveal itself.  This week, I thought I’d share a bit of this wisdom with you.  Here are a few habits that, when practiced, contribute to living an exceptional life…

Optimism-putting attention and energy toward solutions rather than focusing on problems.

Simplicity-focusing on small, simple, and manageable steps instead of making things complicated.

Trust-learning to trust Life by seeing the perfection and opportunity for growth inall our experiences.

Service-focusing more on how we can best encourage and assist those in need, as opposed to getting lost in our own personal vision and quest for success.

Action-making a commitment to show up and walk through the doors that Life opens for us on our journey.

Faith-being willing to take chances and keep moving forward without knowing the outcome.

Magnetism-developing and tapping into the ability to attract what we need by putting (and keeping) ourselves in the right state of mind.

fr/http://spiritlibrary.com/cheryl-richardson/recipe-for-success-the-habits-that-create-an-exceptional-life

Lee Carroll Kryon on “The Humanization of God”

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The Humanization of God

Lee Carroll
a message from Kryon channeled by Lee Carroll
Saturday, 16 July, 2011  at Totowa, New Jersey  (posted 6 September, 2011)

Greetings, dear ones, I am Kryon of Magnetic Service. So I return again with a message about perception. The shift that is going on now within this planet, at the moment, is about you. It’s about communicating. For that which is inside you called your Higher-Self, which remains unidentifiable, simply cannot be defined properly in three dimensions. So it’s often misunderstood.

It is time for all to hear this message, even though there will be pieces and parts of it you may not understand. The box that you are in is a survival box in three dimensions. It’s all you know. So you will base all things you see and make decisions only upon that which you think you know. In fact, for you to base things on that which you don’t know, is impossible – yet we ask you to try.

Multidimensional things are difficult for humanity to ponder. If you step outside the paradigm you were born in and the reality you have survived in, it would be a confusing experience. How then, can we ask you to think in ways that are beyond what you know or have experienced?

The energy on this planet is changing. You might say the toolbox of the Lightworker is being enhanced. So the new toolbox is the key to having the ability to do what I am saying is now possible, and to start thinking in a multidimensional way even without knowing that that’s what you’re doing. You see, part of the toolbox is new help. It starts with the increased intuition of the old soul.

Let us begin, therefore, with an affirmation, a statement of intent for understanding. As you sit before Spirit in a group like this, or alone and listening or reading as some of you are now, ask for a dispensation of wisdom: “Dear Spirit, help me to understand at a multidimensional level the concepts that are being presented.” For if you can enhance your wisdom, it will increase communication between the two sides of the veil.

The Humanization of God

I’m going to title this channelling so that my partner will not. I don’t always title them, for labeling items is something done for 3D reasons. In your reality, you want a label for the message you’re about to hear. So I’ll give it to you, just as a dichotomous exercise. Its title will be, “The Humanization of God.”

to read more, go to:    http://spiritlibrary.com/kryon/the-humanization-of-god

Science & Spirituality

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My Take: Science and spirituality should be friends

Editor’s Note: Deepak Chopra is founder of the Chopra Foundation and a senior scientist at the Gallup Organization. He has authored over 60 books, including The Soul of Leadership, which The Wall Street Journal called one of five best business books about careers.

By Deepak Chopra, Special to CNN

For most people, science deserves its reputation for being opposed to religion.

I’m not thinking of the rather noisy campaign by a handful of die-hard atheists to demote and ridicule faith.

I’m thinking instead of Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution has proved victorious over the Book of Genesis and its story of God creating the universe in seven days. Since then, God has been found wanting when measured against facts and data. With no data to support the existence of God, there is also no reason for religion and science to close the gap between them.

Yet the gap has indeed been closing.

Religion and spirituality didn’t go away just because organized religion has been losing its hold, as suggested by showing decades of  declining church attendance in the U.S. and Western Europe.

Despite the noisy atheists, two trends in spirituality and science have started to converge. One is the trend to seek God outside the church. This has given rise to a kind of spirituality based on personal experience, with an openness to accept Eastern traditions like meditation and yoga as legitimate ways to expand one’s consciousness.

If God is to be found anywhere, it is inside the consciousness of each person. Even in the Christian West we have the assurance of Jesus that the kingdom of heaven is within, while the Old Testament declares, “Be still and know that I am God.”

The other trend is a growing interest by scientists in questions about consciousness

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/02/15/my-take-science-and-spirituality-should-be-friends/