Tag: Consciousness

I beg you to watch this video.  Embed has been disabled as “inappropriate” material on You Tube.  It is theoretical physicist Michio Kaku discussing the nuclear disaster for Japan and the world.  I think the embed was prohibited by the nuclear power industry out of fear for what he says.

What he says is inspiring.  Interviewed by Eliot Spitzer, Kaku ends with an incredible statement of where humanity will be by 2100 when/if we get by the Faustian bargain within which we all currently live.  

I couldn’t agree with Michio more, he clearly elucidates where we can and must go to accomplish the evolutionary imperative of the nuclear age.

With the splitting of the atom, everything has changed save man’s way of thinking.  And thus we drift toward unimaginable peril.

Since the embed has been disallowed, I can only cite the link.  Please go.  Do yourselves a favor:

Michio Kaku and Eliot Spitzer

Be inspired!

Thanks!

VARIATIONS ON THE MYTH OF ZEUS AND SEMELE: POETRY FOR THE ATOMIC AGE END OF TIME

                             Part One

                            EMERALD SEA

Once, as in a dream, Zeus came to her

Quietly slumbering on her emerald isle

Thought form wholly

Holy without form

Asleep upon her emerald isle she played in dream

Invoking out of emptiness

Some image, sub-atomic, non-particulate

Evoking echo without sound

     …and to her watery bed she took

        mankind as her groom…

Just as in a dream, Zeus came to her

He too a shadow of his glimpse of her

Appearing conscious

Yet not wholly formed

Echoing the formlessness of his perfection

Awake above the teal blue sea

He sought the body for his litany

Shakti dreaming by the emerald sea

The dream in his emerald eye

     …and to his sky bound heart he took

        the maiden as his bride…

He, taking her hand in hand

Gave her hyacinths from the sun god’s land

To weave in her sea wound hair

Just as in a dream they moved

Dancing in tidepools

Gems for their eyes

They gathered anemonies from the tidal pools

     …pink, purple, lemon and orange…

With anemonies for her bridal bouquet

Eels grass for her gown

She led her sky god lover down

To the church at the bottom of the sea

          ~~~pls follow below~~~

On Divine Intervention and Prideful Ignorance.

I gave up my short career in physics decades ago, after becoming seriously disenchanted with one of its most dangerous applications. Though of course general interest has led me to keep up with developments in the fields over the intervening years. With some amusement at the absurdity of it all, I might add.

Then as the millennium turned, I was prompted to get involved again by way of new theoretics about the nature of consciousness, having witnessed what became the first legally adjudicated ‘Miracle’ of human consciousness ever. Science and medicine had no explanations for what my family and a good number of other people witnessed, so I went looking for possible answers out there on the fringes. There are quite a few of those, including combo theories of cosmology and consciousness so mind-bogglingly complex that they could melt the brains of most people. Including me.

One such theory that caught my attention was developed over a quarter of a century by a Norwegian mathematical physicist named Matti Pitkaanen, who calls it Topological Geometrodynamics, or TGD. It’s definitely a mind-melter, though when I contacted Matti directly I found him pleasantly willing to review the evidence and descriptions of what we’d witnessed, and attempt to explain how this could have been accomplished within the confines of his physical theoretics and application to consciousness. It was the only fringe theory out there that could even have conceivably applied, and once I began to wrap my head around it (once your mind is sufficiently melted it becomes pliable enough to stretch and wrap…) it did begin to make a modicum of sense.

What I liked best about TGD was its reliance upon p-adic primes in its descriptive mathematics. These are infinite numbers, and get around those pesky singularities that crop up at every corner in standard physics, which have been ‘renormalized’ away so conveniently by cheats built into the math. I’ve always considered the infinite (or, if you prefer, eternity) to be all around us all the time – that which provides the counterfactual milieu of our existence inside of and bounded by time. It struck me that approaching the mysteries with a method that embraced the infinite instead of flat denied it might give us a more useful picture of the totality of the reality we inhabit. But that’s just me, of course.

I posted this diary a year ago, July 17, 2008 as part of the “Writing in the Raw” series.  This is the most recent writing I have done on evolution.  A few people here at DD have asked for more on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Evolution.  

Since I seem to be an ever-procrastinating lazy critter and haven’t come up with anything new and haven’t posted anything this year on those seminal events in the formation of the Evolutionary Imperative, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I repost the essay here with a few changes, mainly in format.  

This is especially for Lady Lib. For any who are truly intersted in this subject, I recommend going to my original post The Evolutionary Imperative — Writing in the Raw and read the truly cogent comments to see how others here are thinking about evolution and our current conundrum.  I begin with my poem:

URANIUM 235 / WHAT GOD SAID

                 by Sydney Vilen

What they remember is the light

Those scientists in the desert night

Ghostly iridescence, unearthly light

No color, merely shades of white.

Trinity Test at Alamogordo

Three…Two…One…Zero

Instantly into the still dark land

The light grew over the sand

Galactic secrets in the predawn night

Galactic secrets in atomic rite

And the light grew

Brighter than the light of twenty noons

And still it grew

An x-ray of the testing crew.

Trinity Test at Alamogordo

Three…Two…One…Zero

Shiva Yahweh Buddha Zeus

Father Son and Holy Goose

Humanity with its head in the noose

Glimpsed its form as god.

[Please glimpse consciousness as gods, beyond the fold]—  

When I had cancer, a close friend asked if I ever wondered: why me? I told her that I didn’t. I told her that given that one in three Americans will, at some point, be diagnosed with cancer, I felt why not me? Cancer happens. It’s sometimes random. It happened to me. There was neither rhyme nor reason. It just did.

A different friend recently asked the same about a close friend of mine, who was just killed in an auto accident. A speeding semi veered into his car, in a national park, in Uganda, killing him and leaving his wife widowed for the second time and seriously injured. My friend wondered: why? Why him? Why her?

Another friend asked how I took the news. If I tried to think my way through it. If I tried to look for cosmic explanations, or if I was angry at the Universe, or if I was trying to look for silver linings. I wasn’t. My friend wanted to make sure that I wasn’t trying to think my way through it, because he wanted to make sure I was allowing myself to feel my way through it. To allow the pain to wash over me, and through me. Which is the only real way to respond to emotional trauma. Did I allow myself to cry? I certainly did. And I have, off and on, for days.

“The conflict dates from the day when one man, flying in the face of appearance, perceived that the forces of nature are no more unalterably fixed in their orbits than the stars themselves, but that their serene arrangement around us depicts the flow of a tremendous tide—the day on which a first voice rang out, crying to mankind quietly slumbering on the raft of Earth, ‘We are moving!  We are going forward!”

“It is a pleasant and dramatic spectacle, that of Mankind divided to its very depths into two irrevocably opposed camps–one looking towards the horizon and proclaiming with all its new-found faith, ‘We are moving’, and the other, without shifting its position, obstinately maintaining, ‘Nothing changes.  We are not moving at all.’  These latter, the ‘immobilists’, …
forbid the earth to move.  Nothing changes, they say, or can change.  The raft must drift purposelessly on a shoreless sea.”

“But the other half of mankind, startled by the look-out’s cry, has left the huddle where the rest of the crew sit with their heads together telling time-honored tales.  Gazing out over the dark sea they study for themselves the lapping of the waters along the hull of the craft that bears them, breathe the scents borne to them on the breeze, gaze at the shadows cast from pole to pole by a changeless eternity.  And for these all things, while remaining separately the same–the ripple of the water, the scent of the air, the lights in the sky–become linked together and aquire a new sense: the fixed and random universe is seen to move.
No one who has seen this vision can be restrained from guarding and protecting it.  To testify to my faith in it, and to show reasons, is my purpose here.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, THE FUTURE OF MAN, 1959

More on Teilhard next time…If anyone wishes to add graphics, I will say thanks.

About 25 years ago, I woke from a good night’s sleep filled with words.  The words went something like this:

—If evolution is now the evolution of consciousness (and I believe it is), ergo, whatever species is evolving in consciousness must become aware of increasingly more aspects of the totality of being, must become aware of that part of being which is death— 

When awareness of death began dawning in the evolving consciousness of homo
sapiens (although animals have some sense of death, they don’t wake in the morning thinking, ‘I’m going to die some day’), the human species reacted largely with fear, denial, and avoidance.  This ‘significant’ awareness of death in the evolving human consciousness seems to have coincided with the transition from a matriarchal to a patriarchal orientation in society.

I state these only as interesting possibilities, to be examined, thought about, researched, felt with the heart, contemplated…

Early literatures, like the Gilgamesh Epic, have themes of searching for the fountain of eternal life.  From fear and attempted denial, the effort to escape, the effort to transcend death, became a driving force of western civilization, and led to much of our cultural and technological progress. 

Through various religious constructs, humans sought to continue existence in an afterlife where we join our loved ones who have gone before, to continue where we left off, so to speak.

Other means of ‘escaping’ death were such devices as fame, power, control of nature, wealth.  So, if you are as rich as Walt Disney (of the Happy, Magic Kingdom) you can, at that  moment of imminent death, have your body frozen in cryonics until science comes up with a cure for whatever it was from which you were about to expire.

But I apologize for being on the brink of slipping into sarcasm and humor in what is a  very serious subject.  Yet I love to laugh!

There are many means by which we have attempted to avoid and deny.  Find your own examples.

But, as the psychologists say…

  “Whatever we deny is bound to come back to haunt us, writ large, barring the
  way forward!  Saying, “This denied content is what is blocking the way
  forward.”  Saying, “Deal with this.  Integrate this.  This psychic content
  is what is barring your way forward, is barring your further growth, is
  barring your evolution…”

Our very attempts to avoid death, our attempts to dominate nature, to control natural processes in a non-integrated manner–have brought us to this point where we have created…

  DEATH WRIT LARGE ACROSS THE PLANET

…saying, basically, deal with this, integrate this, awareness and acceptance of death is the way forward.

And so the very threat to our survival is the gateway and the impetus to our evolution forward. 

—With the splitting of the atom, everything has changed save man’s way of thinking, and thus we drift toward unimaginable peril—

With our technological advances we have taken into our own hands the power which was once attributed only to Gods.  This mandates that we evolve man’s way of thinking to become at least somewhat more equivalent to the thinking of the Gods.  Evolve or die!  Thus it has always been.

Be excellent to each other…we’re in this together…this is all we have…

cross posted at Dailykos.com

Just thinking about the amount of change that our country needs to return to an actual Democracy is extremely taxing mentally, spiritually and emotionally.

As I have read these diaries I have almost decided to stop even bothering with politics or believing in social change.  It seems that we are stuck in a society that feeds upon human blood, takes advantage of the poor, and begins war out of a desire for quick profit for the rich, while keeping it out of the eyes of a media dazed public…AND NOBODY CARES. 

DailyKos must make this information from this website available to the world.  Some have taken to the streets in D.C.  Others make documentaries, post things on our car windows, houses and etc. 

These things will attract more attention, however, we need a complete revolution of conciousness if change is to occur.

In the hope that seeds of vast change will blossom before we are screwed 30 years from now with even more war, death, poverty, overpopulation; I suggest the soothing, meditative qualities of music to bring us back to the present challenge.

So music lovers of DKOS:  What songs are most enlightening to you right now as you seek change?