The Sage Age Blog

Archive for the ‘Consciousness’ Category

Downhill skier Lindsey Vonn injured her leg in a training run just a few days before the opening of the 2010 Olympic Games. I’ve been very impressed with her reaction to her condition.

An interview with her aired just prior to coverage of the opening ceremonies. The host questioned her initial reaction to the injury, wondering why she refused to get it x-rayed to see if her leg was broken. Lindsey replied that she wanted to see for herself how it was before any other examination was performed.

Now, to some folks, it may seem that Lindsey had so much at stake that she simply chose to be in denial about the extent of her injury. But, let’s follow the wise advice to consider the source and take a look at who made this statement.

Vonn is a world-class downhill skier, meaning that she routinely flies across the snow with little protective gear at speeds reaching 80 or 90 mph. She knows a little something about focus and intent. As a premier athlete, she is also very in touch with her body.

After the injury, the first thing Vonn did was to ask her body how it felt and what it needed. She didn’t need an outside authority to give her the answer. The next thing Vonn did was to give her injured body exactly what it requested, the main factor being rest.

If Lindsey were in denial, she would have continued to train and increased the injury, or she would not have dropped out of so many competitions. She was in the run for five medals. Instead, she chose to focus on her main discipline and stated that one medal would be plenty.

If she did not consider herself the authority of her own body, she may have tried to meet the demands of her sponsors and the expectations of the TV networks, who were counting on her to be the Michael Phelps of these games. To be in harmony with her body’s needs, she declined to march with the U.S. delegation during the opening ceremonies, denying herself one major part of fully enjoying of the Olympic experience.

You have to have a good head on your shoulders to make split-second decisions as you whisk down a slippery slope. Fortunately, Lindsey Vonn has plenty enough sense to put things in perspective and honor her long-term health. And, she obviously has honed many of the same skills as an intuitive healing practitioner and listens to her own body-voice as well as the skill of focusing intent toward a clear purpose.

She may have injured her leg, but the rest of her is doing just fine.

A recent Op-Ed in NewScientist Magazine demonstrates the controversy and struggle faced by all who are trying to understand the implications of recent advancements in neuroscience and its claim to be measuring the source of consciousness.

At this moment, there are two philosophical paradigms vying for dominance. They’ve both around since antiquity and have traded places over and over as the accepted working theory of the time. The first is material realism. The basic tenet is that matter is primary. As that concerns thought energy, it means that the brain is primary and thought is an epiphenomena of the brain. In other words, without a physical processing center, there is no thought.

The other philosophy has gone by many names and is in the process of being renamed again, but the basic tenant is that consciousness is the basis of all. Now, with material realism, quantum physics has shown that energy is as primal as matter, but the focus is still pretty much on matter. With consciousness as the basis of all, both matter and energy are epiphenomenon of it.

These are the two philosophies primarily behind the controversy of advancements in neuroscience being equated with honing  our ability to measure the manifestation of consciousness.

With material realism, the idea is that thought arises from the rapid and parallel processing occurring in the brain that eventually forms a cohesive, coherent thought.

Using the consciousness philosophy as the dominant theory, brain activity is seen as measuring the shadow of thought energy. That energy intersects the physical realm through a physical processing center. Some use the analogy of a radio broadcast to illuminate this idea. The broadcast signal is always present, but unless a receiver is on and tuned to that station, or frequency, it cannot receive the information.

One of the issues that drives the controversy between the two philosophies is the either/or Hellenistic way of thinking that has permeated all of Western culture since the rise of the ancient Greek civilization. With this view, there can only be one way that thought energy occurs. Another issue that fuels the fire is the pop-culture preference for simple answers.

Is it possible that we can reach a compromise and state that thought is a dynamic process that arises in the brain from two sources? Can we both receive and create thought energy simultaneously? That paradigm is easy to accept if you are inclined to view an entity as a function of mind, body, and spirit. It’s not so easy to accept if you are tasked with developing practical applications that pinpoint certain areas of the brain. Advancements in this area are bringing great hope to quadriplegics and amputees with the creation of mind-to-machine interfaces that help them manipulate physical objects and reconnect with the world by some form of interaction.

But, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about these promising experiments. I’ve read articles in e-zines that cater to intuitives espousing them as mind-over-matter. No such thing is happening. That would require some form of telepathy. At all times the subject is hard-wired to the physical thing that it is influencing. Even if no wires are involved, it’s like the difference in a corded phone and a blue tooth on a cell phone. It’s still considered a direct-connect system, not through-the-ether telepathy.

I’ve also read articles that this is some breakthrough in thought because the person using the device has to think differently. No more so than someone who has suffered a stroke has to think differently to learn to walk or talk again. They are simply re-wiring their brain around damaged areas to make new connections that control motor skills.

The only new things we have here are the ability to pinpoint certain areas of the brain with great precision and a better understanding of the true plasticity of the brain. With the rise of dementia, that’s getting a lot of attention these days.

A clear understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of these opinions will help us to better understand them so we won’t confuse the map for the territory. In other words, it will help us get past the novelty of the model and see it for what it promises to become, as well as its limitations.

In the first and second installments of this series, we looked at how REG devices were used to measure both an individual’s focused intent and the focused attention of global consciousness. In Part 3 we discovered why this experimental model is inadequate for studying the effect of energy healing. In this post we’ll explore why controlled experiments rarely display the dramatic results often encountered in real-life situations.

The data gathered in the PEAR, Global Consciousness Project (GPC), and other such studies has shown irrefutable proof that some phenomena is at work that cannot yet be accounted for by physics as it is currently understood. In other words, even with all of the experimental evidence based on quantum theory, we still have an incomplete understanding of reality, scientifically speaking.

These controlled studies often produce results that are only slightly above random. While that may not sound like much to a lay person, it gets the full attention of statisticians. Keep in mind that quantum physics is built entirely on the work of theoretical mathematicians such as Einstein. Statistics matter.

Both the PEAR and GPC data is based on the statistical deviation of a REG device as affected by an individual or group of “senders.” This model is significantly different from an experiment where two individuals are coupled to a common goal.

The bottom line is, a REG device does not care whether it spits out ones or zeros and the sender of the intent will not have their life turned upside down if the target is not reached. A mother with an endangered child both care about the outcome in a very intense way. When real need comes into play everything changes.

Countless books and videos are filled with stories of miraculous recoveries from danger and illness. In scientific terms, such incidents are considered anecdotal at best because there is no way to independently verify what single action brought about the final result.

Dramatic results like these are nearly impossible to reproduce in a lab. Consider this story. There is a car wreck and a bystander sees a baby trapped in one of the cars that is on fire. He rips through the tangled, bent metal as if it was plastic and retrieves the infant just before the car explodes. Even though he produced what seemed like super-human strength in that moment, he would be hard pressed to reproduce it under normal, or controlled conditions.

The sciences of physics and biology write off this scenario as the bystander’s physical reaction to his body being flooded with adrenaline. But, no such explanation exists for when a mother knows that her child has been harmed and needs “rescuing” only to find out later that the child was involved in the car wreck 100 miles away. And, there is no pardon for a one-time-only psychic event such as this in the mother’s life. The expectation is that she can reproduce this connection at will under controlled conditions.

The fact is, need, desire, and intent all play heavily into how our consciousness affects reality. These factors simply do not exist to the same heightened degree during lab experiments. So, in many ways, science is gathering data out of context. This is considered akin to “studying the cadaver.” In other words, biology only made so many gains by studying the anatomy of a cadaver. To advance, at some point they had to begin applying that knowledge to a living system.

The good news is that systems theory is gaining popularity among all branches of science. In ecology, for example, it was no longer enough to study just the animals and/or plants in a region. It became evident that studying how they interacted together was the only way to develop a real understanding of the whole.

With studying focused intent, it is also becoming evident that caring counts and new experiments must accommodate ways to include this fact. We are at a point where we are realizing that simply reading statistics from a baseball game without ever having seen a game is no longer a valid way to study what is happening. The emotional content of the game playing out is a significant factor in the whole endeavor.

The Sage Age – Blending Science with Intuitive Wisdom, was featured in Publishers Weekly shortly after its debut. Visit www.SageAge.net for more information and to read articles on many of the topics covered in the book.