Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds – Stunning!

 

Did you ever wonder why people like Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson didn’t fare any better than you or I despite all their money, fame, and access to people of wisdom?

 

 

Forget the self-help books. No book or person can promise you happiness.

 

Christmas time is the most likely time of the year to experience depression. We share our love with friends and family, and get lots of gifts. So why aren’t we all joyous? What the hell is going on?

 

Did you ever wonder why people like Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson didn’t fare any better than you or I despite all their money, fame, and access to people of wisdom?

 

The answer lies in your own backyard. Look at the shrubs, tangled with vines, with here and there a sumac jutting out from the maze. Look at the pines pressed against the shingles for want of more sunlight, their roots reaching under the house to the length of 20 feet. In an effort to maintain themselves, I have known willows near the foundation to break into the cellar pipes for want of water.

 

What is a tree, after all, but a trunk with so many roots and leaves bringing food and water to the organism? After billions of years of evolution, it was inevitable that life would acquire the ability to locomote, to hunt and see, to protect itself from competitors. Observe the ants in the woodpile. They can engage in combat just as resolutely as any human. Our guns and ICBMs are merely the jaws of a more clever ant.

 

The goal of life is life. Every impulse and thought is a device developed towards that end. Consider our own species. We hunt and gather, do the dishes, and have sex. By day and night, we are serenaded by the notes of Beethoven modulating over the trump of the bullfrogs and the songs of the mating bird. Even poetry and art reflect our humanity and are impelled by instincts – by forms of fear and powerlessness, of pugnacity and mastery, of association and love.

 

To many creatures there are but a few necessities of life: food, water, shelter. To a bumblebee, these are a few flowers full of nectar. Even humankind is led by these primary drives, although we have invented not only the house and clothing but fire to cook our food. What pains we take during the holidays, with our mincemeat pies and rum cakes. The poor are wont to complain that they have no food for their families, and we devote a great deal of our economy to agriculture and housing.

 

Of course, the effort for self-preservation is vague and varied. There is, for instance, the need for understanding and knowledge to guide our emotions, to tame the beast in our animal nature. What shameless and chaotic lives many of us would live if we were not awakened by better desires from within.

 

Our behavior is motivated by needs and wants. Pleasure and pain consist in the extent to which these desires are satisfied or hindered. “Pleasure” according to Spinoza, one of the greatest philosophers of all time “is man’s transition from a lesser state of perfection to a greater. Pain is man’s transition from a greater state of perfection to a lesser.”

 

Here is a goal – completeness and power – that is wonderfully attractive to us at a time of recession, and when many lack the means to feed and clothe themselves. And when we have found all power, we may not be happier for it. When we have overcome our struggles and have no ambitions and no defeats, what do we do next? Build taller and more splendid houses, weave finer clothing? Where does the power to act come from when desire has been quieted?

 

Have you ever wondered why every TV show, movie, and book has villains? Every writer knows that the good guy has to be threatened somehow, perhaps chased by someone with a gun or an ax. Even Cinderella had an evil stepmother and had to sit in the cinders after she finished her work. Meeting the Prince just wouldn’t have been the same if she had been a spoiled little rich girl.

 

The keenest pleasures are for those who experience the keenest pain.

 

You can’t change the equation of life. And remember, while the world is celebrating the holiday season, if you’re depressed and have the blues it’s just money in the bank. And when your turn comes, spend it on something that you will be proud of.

 

Robert Lanza, MD worked with (and published a series of scientific papers with) the late Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner, the father of modern behaviorism. His new book – Biocentrism – lays out his theory of everything.

Link to article in Huffington Pos

 

I am convinced that the “mind reading” (assumption) habit that most people develop must be close to the top of our self-sabotaging hit parade.

An interviewer once asked me what I would select as the most self-sabotaging thing people do. I never really gave this question much thought, but responded in the following manner.

 

I am convinced that the “mind reading” habit that most people develop must be close to the top of our self-sabotaging hit parade. I explained that we have no clue what is going on in anyone’s head. We speculate, guess and randomly make up stories what we think depict what others are thinking at any given moment in time. We think we know what our partner, friends, children, the bank manager, our neighbor, our dog, cat and canary THINK and then act or react on our conclusions as if it’s the truth. We think we know what a person is thinking while we drive to work. We think we know what is going on in politicians’ heads. We think we know and understand what our sport stars and celebrities are thinking. Most of our problems that we face daily can be traced to this fallacy. The sooner we understand that we actually have no clue what is going on in anyone’s head the quicker we will get rid of this habit of jumping to conclusions.

 

We read a story in a newspaper and think that we are now well informed. We see an advert on TV and think we now have a good idea about of product or service. We look at the news or read someone’s blog and think we know what there is to know about the owner. It is imperative to discover that nothing and nobody is what we see superficially. Everything and everyone is made up of many layers. We see selectively because our “filter system” (belief structure) blocks important data from reaching our objective and rational mind. People in turn only show us the layers of their personality that they think would create the best impression. Can you see that you are more often than not flying blind with your filtered detection system and the many un-revealed layers of everyone or everything else. Nothing my friend is as it seem. It will thus be most beneficial if you live your life one moment at a time. We must also stop writing fantasy plays in our head about people and places. Our biggest disappointments come from people that fail to act according to the scrip we wrote for them. Dare to enjoy the moment, but remain vigilant because nothing that you see or experience can be deemed as real and sustainable. All you have is what you have in front of you right now. Deal with it and stop speculating or making up stories that might be based on fantasies or myths.

 

Rene

 

 

The amazing mystery of “time”.

“Time” is the most used noun in the English language, yet it remains a mystery. We’ve just completed an amazingly intense and rewarding multidisciplinary conference on the nature of time, and my brain is swimming with ideas and new questions. Rather than trying a summary, here’s my stab at a top ten list partly inspired by our discussions: the things everyone should know about time.

1. Time exists.

 

Might as well get this common question out of the way. Of course time exists — otherwise how would we set our alarm clocks? Time organizes the universe into an ordered series of moments, and thank goodness; what a mess it would be if reality were complete different from moment to moment. The real question is whether or not time is fundamental, or perhaps emergent. We used to think that “temperature” was a basic category of nature, but now we know it emerges from the motion of atoms. When it comes to whether time is fundamental, the answer is: nobody knows. My bet is “yes,” but we’ll need to understand quantum gravity much better before we can say for sure.

2. The past and future are equally real.

  

This isn’t completely accepted, but it should be. Intuitively we think that the “now” is real, while the past is fixed and in the books, and the future hasn’t yet occurred. But physics teaches us something remarkable: every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment. This is hard to see in our everyday lives, since we’re nowhere close to knowing everything about the universe at any moment, nor will we ever be — but the equations don’t lie. As Einstein put it, “It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.”

3. Everyone experiences time differently.

 
This is true at the level of both physics and biology. Within physics, we used to have Sir Isaac Newton’s view of time, which was universal and shared by everyone. But then Einstein came along and explained that how much time elapses for a person depends on how they travel through space (especially near the speed of light) as well as the gravitational field (especially if its near a black hole). From a biological or psychological perspective, the time measured by atomic clocks isn’t as important as the time measured by our internal rhythms and the accumulation of memories. That happens differently depending on who we are and what we are experiencing; there’s a real sense in whichtime moves more quickly when we’re older.

4. You live in the past.

 
About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious — clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds.

 

5. Your memory isn’t as good as you think.

 

When you remember an event in the past, your brain uses a very similar technique to imagining the future. The process is less like “replaying a video” than “putting on a play from a script.” If the script is wrong for whatever reason, you can have a false memory that is just as vivid as a true one. Eyewitness testimony, it turns out, is one of the least reliable forms of evidence allowed into courtrooms.

6. Consciousness depends on manipulating time.

  

Many cognitive abilities are important for consciousness, and we don’t yet have a complete picture. But it’s clear that the ability to manipulate time and possibility is a crucial feature. In contrast to aquatic life, land-based animals, whose vision-based sensory field extends for hundreds of meters, have time to contemplate a variety of actions and pick the best one. The origin of grammar allowed us to talk about such hypothetical futures with each other. Consciousness wouldn’t be possible without the ability to imagine other times. (Via conference participantMalcolm MacIver.)

7. Disorder increases as time passes.

 

At the heart of every difference between the past and future — memory, aging, causality, free will — is the fact that the universe is evolving from order to disorder. Entropy is increasing, as we physicists say. There are more ways to be disorderly (high entropy) than orderly (low entropy), so the increase of entropy seems natural. But to explain the lower entropy of past times we need to go all the way back to the Big Bang. We still haven’t answered the hard questions: why was entropy low near the Big Bang, and how does increasing entropy account for memory and causality and all the rest?

8. Complexity comes and goes.

 
Other than creationists, most people have no trouble appreciating the difference between “orderly” (low entropy) and “complex.” Entropy increases, but complexity is ephemeral; it increases and decreases in complex ways, unsurprisingly enough. Part of the “job” of complex structures is to increase entropy, e.g. in the origin of life. But we’re far from having a complete understanding of this crucial phenomenon.

9. Aging can be reversed.

 
We all grow old, part of the general trend toward growing disorder. But it’s only the universe as a whole that must increase in entropy, not every individual piece of it. (Otherwise it would be impossible to build a refrigerator.) Reversing the arrow of time for living organisms is a technological challenge, not a physical impossibility. And we’re making progress on a few fronts: stem cells, yeast, and even (with caveats) mice and human muscle tissue. As one biologist told me: “You and I won’t live forever. But as for our grandkids, I’m not placing any bets.”

10. A lifespan is a billion heartbeats.

 
Complex organisms die. Sad though it is in individual cases, it’s a necessary part of the bigger picture; life pushes out the old to make way for the new. Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats — about one and a half billion, if you simply must be precise. In that very real sense, all animal species experience “the same amount of time.” At least, until we master #9 and become immortal.

Source: Discover Magazine