The Sage Age Blog

Archive for the ‘Consciousness’ Category

Everywhere you look now there are oodles of ads for books, DVDs, and conferences that will teach you the secret of attracting your heart’s true desires. They contain two key ingredients, which are clarity of vision followed by taking action. Some folks confuse clarity of vision with omniscience; that you can see, know, and understand all with perfect precision. But that’s not what clarity of vision is.

A few forms of non-dualistic meditation require resting the mind on something, perhaps an object. Clarity is achieved when the mind takes on the shape of that on which it is resting without any distortion. One can then say, “I am that.”

Neuro-science maps the shape of the mind holding a clear thought another way; by using functional MRI (fMRI). It literally constructs a topology showing the active areas of the brain while it is engaged in various tasks.

Many ancient belief systems contain narratives of beings who can manifest anything just by thinking about it. What’s not so popularly known is that some of these narratives also state that such beings are a little envious of the human capacity to play with a multiplicity of ideas before settling on one, and delaying the enactment of it. In other words, we can play within the confines of our imagination. Or can we?

The idea that our thoughts create our reality is a very, very, very old one. It has been resurrected into pop culture by clever marketers capitalizing on the New Age Thought movement and the mind-bending notions of quantum physics. Even if folks don’t fully understand these ideas, most everyone is attracted to being in the mystery they present.

Once folks realize they can think their way into a better reality, the target then becomes to master thought control. One tool used to achieve this is known as setting an intent. The result is that once the thought is perfectly clear, it will manifest.

While contemplative meditation focuses primarily on the being side of existence, most of us spend our time thinking about the how, where, when, why of doing. That includes what we are doing now and what we want to be doing.

Over the years, it has become increasingly important to me to develop clarity of vision in all ways as a tool to learning and growing. About a decade ago, I began to notice that whatever I had become clear about manifested within a short period of time, usually in a matter of days.

What I’m experiencing now is that the clarity in long-range vision is much more difficult to achieve. When it does manifest, it’s usually before I’m ready. These days, if I’m standing anywhere near the pool when clarity comes, a universal wind gust throws me into the deep end. In other words, when clarity comes, I don’t have to motivate myself to take action. It’s an automatic coping response to manifesting.

I’ve begun to consider why those beings who can instantly manifest their thoughts might envy us. Some days that instant-manifestation thing seems a little like a Midas touch problem.

I’ve also wondered if the change is with me and if I’ve moved into a place of power that carries with it another level of responsibility. Once my ego finished playing with that idea, I noticed that those same sorts of upheavals or deep-end diving changes are happening with most everyone I know. It’s almost like the universe saying, “Here’s the new life you asked for. Deal with it.” All of this is a side-effect of living during the Shift. It’s not about lack of clarity as much as an under-estimation of how fast things are changing.

There’s no omniscience with my clarity these days. I used to be able to easily recognize the manifestation. Now I often only know it in hindsight; after I’ve unwrapped the box, taken it out, and played with it in the sandbox for a while.

So, maybe there is no real downside to clarity of vision, but I am having to learn to adapt and adjust more quickly as the manifesting changes come, including those that are personal as well as global. And, having to adapt to recognizing the package wrapping that the manifestation comes in now is not always so pretty. I think about Hawaii. That lush place is so beautiful, but the volcanic land didn’t look that way when it was first manifested.

How are you doing with the changes and how has it affected your clarity of vision?

There is no doubt that what we say is a reflection of how we think. In fact, what we think becomes our belief system, that becomes our philosophy, and shifts the culture we live in every day. That is one way our thoughts become reality.

Most every adult in the U.S. remembers when the term politically correct turned into the verb being PC. We began to wholeheartedly embrace the fact that being mindful of our language changes attitudes.

While most of that thought reformation has been targeted toward social justice in recent decades, it’s worthwhile to note the changes it has brought to our rational understanding of reality as well.

It took many years for folks to come to terms with the principles set forth in Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and his work Opticks, which is about the nature of light. After that, scientists were ready to close up shop, stating that everything that needed to be known in physics had been revealed.

Thankfully, human curiosity cannot be so easily satiated. About 100 years later, Einstein showed that Newton’s laws were merely a subset of a larger truth. Einstein’s bold statements began the quantum revolution that ensured we would never stop investigating because the new theories clearly demonstrated the profoundness of our ignorance.

Most of us weren’t alive in 1905 when Einstein released his first papers that changed everything. We have no way to remember what it was like to live through an intellectual revolution of Copernican magnitude. Most believe that E=mc2 was as popular then as it is now. Unfortunately, Einstein suffered the same shunning and disbelief as Newton until others could check the math and see the truth for themselves.

We are sentimental creatures who are hard-pressed to relinquish what brings us pleasure or security in our world. For instance, even though we know full well that we live in a solar-centric system, we are still enamored with the words sunset and sunrise. When folks in the U.S. and in Australia both point up, they are actually pointing in different directions out. And, think about our casual use of the word universal when, thanks to Einstein and every astrophysicist since, we clearly have evidence to show that what we experience on this planet is anything but universal.

Language is a living thing. Currently, there are two key words in cultural flux that are shifting us into another revolution. They are heart and brain. Material realists would have us believe that without a brain, or another physical processing center, there would be no thought. The other philosophy vying for dominance right now is that consciousness is the basis of everything and both matter and energy are an epiphenomenon of it.

The tenuous compromise being struck is that perhaps the organ in the head is not the only intelligence processing center. The term emotional I.Q. came into vogue a few decades ago and now the term heart intelligence is gaining in popularity.

With recent advancements in technology, science has been able to start measuring the subtle energy fields emanating from the hands of healers and Qigong masters. Even molecular biologists are jumping on the bandwagon by showing how our thoughts affect us at the cellular level.

The fact is, the physical body is a sophisticated, multi-faceted antenna system that transmits and receives all manner of informed energies. That’s what the first four chapters of The Sage Age are all about.

We may very well be adopting the language that will lead into another Copernican-level revolution. And our great, great grandchildren will think that all these theories and ideas must have been as popular with us as it is to them. And, they will be able to clearly see that what their great, great grandparents knew was merely a subset of a larger truth.

While researching topics covered in The Sage Age, I read many popular books that attempted to tie quantum physics to spirituality. They all made heroic attempts to translate the basic tenets of physics, which can only be truly understood in the language of mathematics, into accessible terms for the layman and then bind them to the ineffable concepts of spirituality, the true knowledge of which can only be gained through direct experience.

Some succeeded at this task more than others. When the author did find just the right analogy to convey the main point, it became a beautiful passage of words to highlight in yellow.

But, what I found glaringly missing from most of these books was a sufficient nod to the underlying philosophical principles behind the topics. Perhaps that’s because the masses, to whom these books are targeted, find philosophy either boring or too legalistic in nature.

Philosophy is the single most critical element in having any true understanding of the Shift we are currently experiencing. As Billy Joel sang, “We didn’t start the fire.” We didn’t get to where we are from a vacuum. With all of the attention being given right now to minding our mind and being more aware of our thoughts, it’s important to recognize that our thoughts become our beliefs that become our philosophy that shifts our culture and creates the world we live in.

At this moment, there are two main philosophical paradigms vying for dominance as the basis of reality. The first is material realism and the second is consciousness. Both have existed for thousands of years and have traded places over and over again throughout our history as the accepted theory.

The coup being waged now by the consciousness adherents, who see both matter and energy as an epiphenomenon of a wholistic something, is to overthrow the hardcore material realists, who see nature as a machine that they can bend to their greedy will regardless of consequence.

While both philosophies endeavor to vault humans to a central platform of being far more than just voyeurs in the universe, the pop culture currently co-opting the consciousness philosophy espouses that we are critically important co-creators of “All That Is.” That has spawned a multi-billion dollar industry of self-help instruction aimed at creating a self-regulation regiment that will restore Eden on Earth.

But, there’s a real danger in going overboard with that idea. The philosophy of material realism last came into prominence in the West during the Protestant Reformation, which was a revolt against science based on a moral code and idealism. Because it had gone unchecked and unbalanced for so long, the consciousness-type philosophy led to beliefs based on superstition and outright myth.

Now that a consciousness-type philosophy is attempting to rise again, it is serving the beneficial purpose of balancing material realism that is out of control. It is showing that the current way is aggressive, invasive, and destructive to the point of annihilation if it is not constrained.

There is another philosophy that can mediate this balancing act. It’s called existentialism. What most folks know of existentialism is either the famous quote from Nietzsche, “God is dead” or the neurotic parodies of Woody Allen on Nietzsche’s Being and Nothingness. In fact, if it had not been for the enduring quality of Allen’s work, existentialism may have phased out quickly as just another pop culture fad.

But there’s far more to existentialism than that. The focus is still on the human element, but it does help place humanity in its proper position with regard to the whole by leaving a little room for the great mystery of existence in general.

One of the best descriptions I’ve found of existentialism comes from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which states:

“On the existential view, to understand what a human being is it is not enough to know all the truths that natural science—including the science of psychology—could tell us. The dualist who holds that human beings are composed of independent substances—“mind” and “body”—is no better off in this regard than is the physicalist, who holds that human existence can be adequately explained in terms of the fundamental physical constituents of the universe. Existentialism does not deny the validity of the basic categories of physics, biology, psychology, and the other sciences (categories such as matter, causality, force, function, organism, development, motivation, and so on). It claims only that human beings cannot be fully understood in terms of them. Nor can such an understanding be gained by supplementing our scientific picture with a moral one. Categories of moral theory such as intention, blame, responsibility, character, duty, virtue, and the like do capture important aspects of the human condition, but neither moral thinking (governed by the norms of the good and the right) nor scientific thinking (governed by the norm of truth) suffices.”

It’s good to learn all we can from science and morality. It’s better to hone both ways of knowing in order to have a full understanding of either. It’s best to balance the head and heart equally. When we, as individuals, learn how to do that, the culture will reflect it and balance itself out too. Perhaps then we will be in a position to move beyond this dualistic pendulum swinging between two philosophies and find a new way forward together.