The Sage Age Blog

Archive for the ‘Noetic Sciences’ Category

This week, Dan Brown’s latest novel, The Lost Symbol, is being released in paperback. Besides the thrill of the story itself, Brown has such a wonderful way of mixing fact and fiction that it invites the reader to figure out which one is which.

In this novel, one of the real entities he uses is The Institute of Noetic Sciences IONS). And, one of the main characters, Katherine Solomon,  is the head researcher. Her real-life counterpart is Dr. Marilyn Schlitz.

If you haven’t read the book yet, you’ll find it to be a entertaining introduction to the very serious research being conducted all over the world on topics that were once taboo in scientific circles.

If you have read the book and you’re ready to go deeper, I invite you to visit the IONS website at www.Noetic.org. There you will find a wealth of information on their three main areas of research including consciousness and healing, worldview transformation, and extended human capacities. This is not the woo-woo stuff. It’s real science conducted by respected researchers and has real-world applications that are making real changes in people’s lives, as well as in ecology, economics, and community systems.

And, if you want to get a real handle on the blending of science with intuitive wisdom in one book, pick up a copy of The Sage Age. I have just a few on-hand from my last lecture tour, if you would like one personally autographed for yourself or someone you would like to gift.

Here’s a brief description of what you’ll get in the book.

• Harmonizing the full range of frontier science with current intuitive wisdom and practice.
• Demystifying science jargon and metaphysical buzzwords with easy to understand examples and illustrations.
• A seekers guide bringing new models for new thought.

In these changing times, it’s important to have clarity of where we are headed. I’m delighted that The Lost Symbol has highlighted such a vital organization like IONS where you can find a host of articles, blog posts, audio and video downloads, research papers, and other publications to help you make sense of it all. And, did I mention membership is free? Be sure to take note of their past and future Wednesday teleseminar series info too.  I’m usually on those calls. Maybe we’ll get to chat there too.

Here are a few other blog posts you may find interesting:

The Research Behind The Lost Symbol
The Noetic Scientist in The Lost Symbol

Do you know the date of your birth? How do you know this?

Recently I listened to the Dalai Lama teach on three ways that we come to know things. The first is perceptual knowledge that comes to us through our senses. The second is experiential knowledge. Even though we may be able to convey the knowledge we gained, the experience of obtaining it may remain mostly ineffable.

The third way of knowing is information we accept on faith as completely true. The analogy the Dalai Lama used to demonstrate this point is how you know your birthday. You were told. You have no perceptive, and likely, no intuitive way to conjure the date on your own with absolute accuracy. However, you may have a way of discerning how you feel about what you were told.

The further point He made about this third way of knowing was that until you reach the stage of enlightenment yourself, you will need to accept on faith what other enlightened humans tell you about it and how to attain it. Now, He didn’t say that faith needed to be blind. In fact, He encouraged using discernment to consider the teacher’s character and to see if they had any reason to lie to you.

It has never occurred to me to question my mother, or any member of my family, about the date of my birth. And, the whole analogy He used may seem trivial and useful only because it’s common to all. But, I found it quite profound.

Think about it. Your date of birth is one of the most important identification markers in your life. If you believe in astrology charts, your birthday has everything to do with how you relate to your world for the entire time you are here. Recall how many legal documents you’ve filled out that required both your name and your birthday. In fact, your birthday is a more stable I.D. than your name, which could be legally changed. Or, you could prefer to be addressed by a nickname or alias.

Considering that the date of our birth is so intimate and so important to our identity, it’s amazing that we accept this information about ourselves on pure faith and have no way to independently verify it within ourselves as absolutely true. Every fact we encounter about it depends entirely on someone telling someone.

The key to Buddhism is that the Buddha was a human being who attained enlightenment. We have no way to independently verify this statement. If those who are inclined to this teaching cannot accept it on faith, then they cannot practice Buddhism. Otherwise, it would be striving for a fairy tale.

Until I attain enlightenment, the best I can do is place myself among teachers that I believe to be telling me the truth in so far as they can speak the ineffable, and in so far as they know the truth of ultimate reality. It is up to me to discern what I can about what I am told and about what I experience. The rest I take on faith until I have a way to know directly.

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.