Eldon Taylor's Blog, page 22

Questioning Authority

In this week’s spotlight I wish to discuss the power of authority. We are all educated to respect authority. In our early years failing to do so can lead to serious repercussions. We first learn that declining blind obedience to our parents and custodians can lead to punishment, humiliation and more. We then enter school where once again the authority has a remarkable fist held over our heads. If we refuse to respect this authority we can be failed and even expelled. By the time we reach Middle School the pressures to conform have become well engrained, so even the ...

The Herd

This week I would like to draw your attention to the herd mentality. We are all herd animals and we often behave accordingly without paying any attention to the provocation, or stimuli, provided by the herd’s behavior. This is so hard wired into our very nature that a skilled manipulator can easily and surreptitiously take advantage of how we’re all wired. We can see this done with groups as well as with an individual. Interrogators will often use neuro linguistic programming techniques to guide a subject into a confession. We all have mirror neurons so mirroring a subject, matching their ...

Science or Politics–Another Gotcha!

This week I want to direct your attention to another interesting and subtle form of propaganda. Recently I spotted an ad on Reddit that read, “Science AMA Series: We are physicists Rush Holt and Frank von Hippel, here to answer your technical questions on the Iran Nuclear Deal (and anything else) AMA!” Wow—think of it. When I clicked the link this is what I read: The Authority Speaks We recently co-authored an open letter to President Obama, which was signed by several dozen prominent scientists, supporting the nuclear deal with Iran. We are physicists and experts in nuclear issues, and are ...

Caveman Like Decisions?

This week I would like to spotlight the approaching political arena. Regardless of your political orientation, all of us are about to hear more and more about the stuff we get and the stuff we should fear—and our vote may be the deciding factor. Fear Mongers We will hear fear mongers warn of dooms day events if we fail to elect certain candidates, and we will hear of a cornucopia of freebies and other gifts that we might receive if we but vote the right way. Unfortunately, politics today is often about the best liar, and that usually turns out ...

Letting the Wolf In

Today I wish to draw your attention once again to the ever increasing role information is playing in all of our lives. By now you are all aware of the collection of data that resides some where on virtually everyone of us. Much of this data is not about our medical health, or our insurance policies, or our driving record, or any other matter of this nature—for much of the data is about our profiles, our likes and dislikes, our attitudes, our ambitions, our favorite movies, preferred politicians, opinions regarding everything from the meaning of life to our involvement in ...

Duality and Oneness

In this week’s spotlight I want to address the notion of separation as we hear it taught in new age circles today. This teaching generally asserts that separation is an illusion and that we are all one. Further, if we but halted the attention given to duality, duality would cease to exist. In other words, the only evil in the world is in the mind of the perceiver. Change your perception, refuse to acknowledge lower vibrations, hateful energies, and negativity in the world and it will all go away—because it really doesn’t exist anyway except by way of perceptual recognition. ...

Music Reveals Your Style of Thinking

Music and its role in our lives is the subject of this week’s blog. Every week on my radio show, Provocative Enlightenment, we get three musical favorites from our guests that we play when we come back from breaks, and then I ask, “Why this one and what does it tell us about who you are?” It’s often interesting, to say the least, the amount of self-disclosure that comes from this exercise. For example, we have had guests who suggest everything is all about oneness, peace and plenty and then choose songs that sing the story of lost loves or ...

Minding Minds

This week I would like to return to our theme of minding minds, or is it mining minds? In weeks past I have discussed how technology promises to do everything from read our thoughts to literally direct them—and I’m not speaking of potential technologies! No—those technologies already exist and are being improved upon for deployment in the very near future in a number of overt, and I’m sure, covert trials. Mining Minds When most people think of the mind and our thoughts, they draw upon images of a linear lexical nature—words. However, our feelings are also rooted in our thoughts ...

Karma, Dharma and Consequences

In today’s blog I would like to draw attention to the role of dharma and karma in reincarnation. As most already know, karma is all about what the good book refers to as, “What you sow is what you reap,” so called karma-laden consequences. According to this proposition, one can accumulate both karmic credits and karmic debits during a lifetime. Further, this credit-debit system carries over to future lives and as such, one may be born into a life of suffering in order to square their karma. Indeed, the Eastern sages inform us if we were to do something like ...

A Thought Controlled World

In this week’s spotlight I want to draw your attention to the growing interest in thought-controlled robots. Indeed, it’s not just thought-controlled robots but thought-controlled everything. This is a rapidly expanding field. There are already thought-controlled prosthetic limbs, wheel chairs, computers, helicopters, and even genes. Indeed, Scientific American Mind, Volume 26, Issue 2, reported on work already completed in this area. Quoting from the article, “ A team of bioengineers in Switzerland has taken the first step toward this cyborglike setup by combining a brain-computer interface with a synthetic biological implant, allowing a genetic switch to be operated by brain ...