Jay Kshatri's Blog, page 8

Mystic Insights – No. 2

Allowance and full openness to the Divine Source lets more of its Light in. Remove any resistance and hesitation.

Tune your Being to the Speed of Light

The more clear and unclouded you can make your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual bodies, the more pure and undistorted the Light is able to come through.

Fill your day with pursuits that help tune your energetic frequency to the attributes of the Divine – Joy, Love, Bliss, and Peace.  Examples would include music, art, nature, meditation, reading, good food, exercise, and service to others.

The more clearly you allow the transmission of Light to reach you, the more of the Divine’s power you will have to co-create with in the material world.

The Divine Matrix of Light, carries your personal destiny code

When the Light is clear and strong, you are in alignment with the Divine Matrix and everything in your life goes smoothly because you are following the plan of the divine.

When you distort the Light with your ego and fear, that’s when things can go off track. However, when you calm the mind to receive the Light clearly, then alignment with the divine happens naturally. Your instincts and intuition guide your every move to be in synch with your higher purpose.

Therefore, be silent and listen, if you would seek to be in a state of joy, happiness, bliss, and peace all the time

Don’t let arising and transitory circumstances disturb you and instead shape them skillfully to higher energetic vibrations.

~Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

**Sign up for the Think Smarter World Newsletter here and download a Free Copy of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World**

Think Smarter World is a non-commercial site. All information is provided freely and with love for the benefit of humanity.

The post Mystic Insights – No. 2 appeared first on Think Smarter World.

Mystic Insights – No. 1

God is pure Source Energy, also called Love. It is flowing through everything – seeking to create and experience physical reality through its creations. Humans and everything in material existence are created and infused with the Source. The human mind however, is filtering this energy in various ways – through the Ego, Conscious-Mind, Free-Will – and as a result, distorts the Source Energy flowing through it. Our ability to create with the full power of the Source is compromised when this happens and we lose the full experience of truth, beauty, love, and joy.

The Ego in particular is a very effective blocker of Source. Its original intent was to be a “neutral density” protective filter allowing in all of the Light in and not adding any of its own particular distortion. It is there to step in when necessary to protect the human body from harm. Over time, however, the ego decided to try on various flavors of light, or blocking filters. This distorted the Source image. When the Ego filter is neutral, you experience the fullness of Reality. The Truth. There is no individual judgement or bias. There is only pure awareness and acceptance. In this mode, with the Ego not interfering, whatever someone else’s ego-filter displays, you don’t react to that. You always output your Truth. It is in this way, that you and God, the Source, the Divine, reunite into Oneness.

~Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

**Sign up for the Think Smarter World Newsletter here and download a Free Copy of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World**
Think Smarter World is a non-commercial site. All information is provided freely and with love for the benefit of humanity.

The post Mystic Insights – No. 1 appeared first on Think Smarter World.

The Perception of Separateness – The Root of All Fears

Is there an antidote to the hostility and conflict that widely permeates so many facets of our 21st century existence? Most definitely. It’s the one and only solution that can cure all of our problems and that has been calling to us for thousands of years to enable us to move forward into our next stage of evolution.

So much of our response to what is wrong in the world is to attack the symptoms rather than to deal with the root cause itself. These symptoms take the form of hyper political partisanship, military conflict, severe and un-ending economic disparities, racial conflict, and more. They are a result of too many of us fearfully viewing the world as a limited, zero-sum game where all our fellow players are opposing combatants with no real connection to us. And if in practice we don’t view all our fellow players that way, we allow only a very small “tribe” of people we care about and cooperate with while the rest of humanity remains fair game.

It is against that backdrop and the very sad political season we are experiencing in the U.S. (and with rising similar dynamics around the world), that I found the following passage about the true root cause of all our problems so important to share. This comes from the book Spiritual Politics, Changing the World from the Inside Out by Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson. I hope you find the passage as true and meaningful as I did. To better times ahead…

________________________________________________________

The Root of All Fears

“The apparent reality of separateness – especially saddening when it is based on religious beliefs – is caused by our consciousness becoming identified with our limited ego – with matter, with our physical body, with thoughts and feelings, rather than with our unlimited Soul / Spirit Self, which is unified with the whole, with God and the Universe. When consciousness identifies with the part, the ego personality, we begin to believe that our being, our self-awareness, can die and be extinguished. This false sense of separateness is is the root of all our fears, especially the mortal fear of death. Our ego-based identify rushes to pacify this great fear of annihilation through aggressiveness and competition to establish dominance. We do this by banding together with those of similar class, race, or ethnic background for security and out of fear of ‘the other’. We violently defend our prerogatives out of fear of losing material security and resist all change because it leads us to contemplate the ultimate change — death.

Based on our perception of separateness, we try to create islands of peace and security in our homes or neighborhoods, but we never truly experience peace, because subconsciously and psychically we constantly pick up the anguish of those in pain whether they be across town or across the world. We can’t shut others out even if we try to – because we’re all interconnected. Just as ‘No man is an island, entire of it self,’ as poet John Donne reminded us, so no nation is an island. Border issues between nations are symbolic of this deeper issue of separateness. The illusion of isolation and self-protection is being rapidly shattered in our modern age, which includes international communications and economics, as well as global crises of energy, pollution, and diseases such as AIDS, which do not respect national borders. Politically correct debates between the overly self-righteous on opposite sides of an issue only increase separateness and create deadlock.

Unity in Diversity

By observing the diversity of the natural biosphere, we can learn an important lesson. The many difference species, and the different genetic makeup of individual organisms within a species, are a source of great strength. When environmental stress threatens such a diverse system, it has many ways to respond and adapt to change. This increases flexibility and the chances for survival. Monoculture crops that are genetically identical and carefully bred for high yield have no genetic diversity. Thus they are extremely vulnerable to pests, diseases, and climatic changes. The same principle applies to human social dimension. Differences in race, culture, and religion are viewed as threatening and divisive when, in fact, they are essential to our developing a more accurate picture of reality, as well as more options for creative solutions to our problems.

In a recent speech the Dalai Lama said the following:

Whether it is under the guise of survival and self-defense or directly expressed through the dominion and greed, the failure to recognize the common humanity shared by us all lies at the heart of our difficulties. To overcome it, we should begin to develop, from the level of the individual through that of society to the world at large, what I call a sense of universal responsibility; a deep respect for every living being who lives on this one small planet and calls it home.

The esoteric spiritual traditions – whether Christian Mystics, Hebrew Kabbalists, Zen Buddhists, Islamic Sufis, or Hindu Yogis – all have specific practices to help individuals to overcome this great “illusion of separation” and to experience the One True Self, which is in all of us. For example, we can meditate on the heart, seeing it expand to include more and more of the abundance and creativity of all types of people in an outpouring of love, forgiveness, and acceptance.”

________________________________________________________

 To learn more about eliminating the illusion of separateness through non-duality states of being, visit the Think Smarter World Resources page and or explore the following recommendations:

Books

Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, by Marc Gafni
The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael A. Singer
A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles, by Marianne Williamson
A Journey to Oneness: a Chronicle of Spiritual Emergence, by Rasha

Think Smarter World Posts

Seeing the Oneness of our Reality
Core Principles of the New Spiritualist

~Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

**Sign up for the Think Smarter World Newsletter here and download a Free Copy of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World**

Think Smarter World is a non-commercial site. All information is provided freely and with love for the benefit of humanity.

The post The Perception of Separateness – The Root of All Fears appeared first on Think Smarter World.

Crucial Conversations

Doing the Right Thing for the Right Reason, as I wrote in a recent article, requires having a set of clear Core Operating Principles. In addition, to use that framework with others, requires we have an effective dialogue so that we can reach consensus about what are the Right Things and Right Reasons in any given situation. Failure to do so leaves us in the state of hyper-polarity we so often find ourselves in today.

With so many of us having such diametrically opposed opinions, we’ve become hesitant to have any real meaningful conversation for fear of arousing anger and resentment in others. But with the stakes so high in so many areas of our personal and public lives, do we really have any choice but to engage others in meaningful discussion?

That conclusion lead me recently to pick up a book that’s been on my shelf for a long time – Crucial Conversations, Tools for Talking When Stakes are High. Written in 2002, the book presents an excellent model of how we can have effective dialogue on important and challenging topics – at home, work, and in social situations. Importantly. it does so in in a way that aligns with many of my own core operating principles – taking a System Thinking approach to situations, striving for Unity Consciousness by placing ourselves in the shoes of the other person, Shrinking the Ego, Aiming for the Highest Intention possible in every situation, and always working towards Truth and Transparency.

The late Stephen Covey wrote the foreword to the book and his definition of what is a Crucial Conversation and his aspiration for what could be achieved by the book is a breath of fresh air:

The challenge has noticeably changed for our lives, our families, and our organizations. Just as the world is changing at frightening speed and has come increasingly and profoundly interdependent with marvelous and dangerous technologies, so too, have the stresses and pressures we all experience exponentially increased. This charged atmosphere makes it all the more imperative that we nourish our relationships and develop tools, skills, and enhanced capacity to find new and better solutions to our problems. These new and better solutions will not represent ‘my way’ or ‘your way’ – they will represent ‘our way’. In short, the solutions must be synergistic, meaning that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Such synergy may manifest itself in a better decision, a better relationship, a better decision-making process, increased commitment to implement decisions made, or a combination of two or more of these. What you learn is that ‘crucial conversations’ transform people and relationships. They are anything but transacted; they create an entirely new level of bonding. They produce what Buddhism calls ‘the middle way’ – not a compromise between two opposites on a straight-line continuum, but a higher middle way, like the apex of a triangle. Because two or more people have created something new from genuine dialogue, bonding takes place.

The authors of Crucial Conversations have created a wonderful framework and set of tools for us to allow this “meeting of the minds” to take place in a more intentional way. With these tools one is able to guide the tone and content of dialogue to the “apex of the triangle” as Stephen Covey described above. Here is a diagram that summarizes the overall approach:

 

 

If we start by looking at the outer ring of the circle, we see that the model aims to help us avoid the two extreme reactions of any conversation – either someone has gone into a “violent” mode, where controlling, labeling, and attacking define the tone of the conversation. While at the other extreme, someone can move into a “silent” mode, where withdrawing, avoiding, and masking (their true feelings or opinions) define what transpires in the dialogue. By avoiding these extremes we are more likely to reach our goal which is in the center of the circle – a pool of Shared Meaning. To enable both parties to achieve this conversational nirvana, we learn to See & Hear what each other is saying better, provide insight into why we feel a certain way about a topic by telling a story of how we got there, feel how our information is being received by the other party, and finally act upon that feedback with follow up actions.

Making it safe for people to have difficult conversations is the key to effective dialogue. By making it safe, we are more likely not to veer off into silence or violence and all of the relevant information that needs to come out can make its way into the Pool of Shared Meaning:

When two or more us enter crucial conversations, by definition, we don’t share the same pool. Our opinions differ. I believe one thing, you another. I have one history, you another. People who are skilled at dialogue do their best to make it safe for everyone to add their meaning to the shared pool – even ideas that at first glance appear controversial, wrong, or at odds with their own beliefs. Now, obviously they don’t agree with every idea; they simply do their best to ensure that all ideas find their way into the open. As the Pool of Shared Meaning Grows, it helps people in two ways. First, as individuals are exposed to more accurate and relevant information, they make better choices. In a very real sense, the Pool of Shared Meaning is a measure of a group’s IQ. The larger the shared pool, the smarter the decisions. And even though many people may be involved in a a choice, when openly and freely share their ideas, the increased time investment is more than offset by the quality of the decision. On the other hand, we’ve all seen what happens when the shared pool is dangerously shallow. When people purposefully withhold meaning from one another, individually smart people can do collectively stupid things.

So how do we swim to the promised land of Shared Meaning? I won’t try to summarize the entire book in this relatively short article, but here is an abbreviated top level view to give you a taste of how it’s done.

First, we need to agree with the other person to establish a Mutual Purpose. The authors label this sequence of steps with the acronym CRIB:

Commit to seek mutual purpose (just agreeing to an intended outcome is half the battle).
Recognize the real purpose (sometimes it takes a while to understand the real issue…).
Invent a mutual purpose (sometimes it’s not clear there is a mutual purpose, so invent one that everyone can agree on).
Brainstorm new strategies to address the situation (sometimes additional work may be necessary to arrive at a mutual purpose).

After you establish your mutual purpose, you can get into the heart of the dialogue by Stating Your Path:

Share your facts. Start with the least controversial, most persuasive elements from your Path to Action.
Tell your story. Explain what you’re beginning to conclude.
Ask for other’s paths. Encourage others share both their facts and their stories (the background on how they have arrived at their current conclusions).
Talk Tentatively. State your story as a story – don’t disguise it is a fact (this is what you currently believe – but you are open to learning more).
Encourage Testing. Make it safe for others to express differing or even opposing opinions.

Now, as you engage into deep discussion, you will need to stay vigilant to ensure safety is being maintained:

Whenever you notice safety is at risk, you should step out of the conversation and restore it. When you have offended others through a thoughtless act, apologize. Or if someone has misunderstood your intent, use contrasting. Explain what you do and don’t intend. Finally, if you’re simply at odds, find a mutual purpose.

To get other’s to share their path is not always easy. Some people don’t open that easily or perhaps have some other issues that are clouding their mind at that moment. Crucial Conversations provides a protocol of steps called AMPP to help:

Ask to get things rolling.

“What’s going on?”
“I’d really like to hear your opinion on this.”
“Please let me know if you see it differently.”

Mirror to confirm feelings.

We create safety when our tone of voice says we’re ok with them feeling the way they’re feeling. If we do this well, they may conclude that rather than acting out their emotions, they can confidently talk them out with us instead.

“You say you’re ok, but by the tone of your voice, you seem upset.”
“You seem angry at me.”
“You look nervous about confronting him. Are you sure you’re willing to do it.”

Paraphrase to Acknowledge the Story

Simply rephrase in your own words what the person has said and do it in a way that suggests that it’s ok, you’re trying to understand, and it’s safe for him or her to talk candidly.

Prime when you’re getting nowhere

Sometimes you have to offer your best guess at what the other person is thinking or feeling. You have to put some meaning into the pool before the other person will do the same.

Ultimately, we need to consolidate our mutual understanding to create our Pool of Shared Meaning. Use the ABC protocol as follows:

Agree when you do to build a shared base.
Build. If others leave something out, agree where you do, then build. “Absolutely. In addition, I noticed that…”
Compare. When you differ significantly, don’t suggest others are wrong. Compare your two views. “I think I see things differently. Let me describe how.”

Ultimately, having a successful Crucial Conversation comes down to some basics:

The best at dialogue speak their minds completely and do it in a way that makes it safe for others to hear what they have to say and respond to it as well. They are both totally frank and completely respectful. The key to sharing sensitive ideas is to blend confidence and humility. We express our confidence by sharing our facts and stories clearly. We demonstrate our humility by then asking others to share their views.

Conclusion

Crucial Conversations is a classic and indispensable book. Much like The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, it is one of those books that should be required reading for all of us humans experiencing the material world together on this beautiful planet. It educates us in a crucial skill necessary for us to live here in the most harmonious and productive way possible.

_________________________________________________________________________

Advanced Technique for Group Consensus Decision Making

For Advanced students of Consciousness and Spirituality, here is a process for group decision making called Attunement which was pioneered by the Quakers. This passage comes from the wonderful book – Spiritual Politics – Changing the World from the Inside Out, by Corrine McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson. Both authors have been trailblazers in working and living within alternative communities (Findhorn, Sirius) and have used this process in those groups.

A number of transformational groups use a process called ‘attunement’ to make decisions based on the inner spiritual guidance of everyone present. All participants are recognized as having the potential ability to reach a decision that is for the highest good of all concerned. The assumption is that there is a right decision that will work for everyone, and the task of the group is to discover it. Everyone in turn is asked to offer their unique perspectives and contributions to the governance of the whole.

This approach was first pioneered by the Quakers over two hundred years ago and is actively used today by many new transformational groups. At both Findhorn Foundation in Scotland and at our community, Sirius, in Massachusetts, we personally experienced how effective this attainment process can be, and we’ve used it for over fifteen years. Group members first discuss the facts about the relevant issue under discussion, then honestly express their own feelings about it. This is essentially like putting all the cards on the table, and it lays the groundwork for the next step. Participants then work on releasing their personal opinions and go into a quiet reflection or meditation to ask for guidance from their own inner source of highest wisdom, the Soul. For some, this source might be called the God within. For others it might be called the Universal Mind. For still others it is simply the Greatest Good.

Afterward everyone takes turns sharing what they experience in the time of silence – words, feelings images. Generally a clear consensus emerges from this – all the different views begin to fit together like pieces of a puzzle, forming a whole picture that comes clear to everyone. Guidance from a higher levels always reflects ‘Divine Economy’. It will serve the needs of the individual and the group at the same time and may also stretch people into new areas of growth. 

If no clear consensus develops, members may feel that it isn’t the right time to make the decision, as other factors or information need to come into the picture. Or perhaps one or more members of the group haven’t really released their personal opinions and may be still personally and emotionally involved in the outcome rather than detached. The group then tries to directly address the emotional issues of those involved to see if they’re able to work through them and so to release any blocks to consensus. On the other hand, an individual blocking consensus may not have any emotional issues to clear but instead have an important perspective that needs to be included in the decision. Learning to tell the difference requires intuitive listening. 

Imagine using this technique at your next business meeting! A radical new world indeed. If that’s too big a jump, perhaps start smaller by using it with your family. No better place for the uniting of heart and mind.

~Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

 

**Sign up for the Think Smarter World Newsletter here and download a Free Copy of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World**

Think Smarter World is a non-commercial site. All information is provided freely and with love for the benefit of humanity.

The post Crucial Conversations appeared first on Think Smarter World.

Doing the Right Thing for the Right Reason – The Essential 21st Century Framework

In the 21st century, we have an infinite array of choices. That unlimited buffet that we face everyday, at both home and work, often puts us in a “grey-zone” when it comes to choosing the right thing to do in any given situation. How do we know for sure? In many ways, that’s what life’s journey is all about – finding out through trial and error what choices worked well and those we wish we could do over. But, that’s if we are fortunate enough to have gotten and understood the feedback we need (and ideally sooner rather than later). The type of feedback that provides clarity and real learning around our decisions. We would be able to take that real knowledge about the impacts of our choices and ideally, use that information to make better decisions next time.

But in a highly complex world where the stakes are continuously rising and we are realizing how interconnected we are, wouldn’t it be great to make better decisions and choices in the first place? I actually think that this is no longer an optional desire because we are hitting the limits in a variety of societal systems in our lives that demand we become much smarter, wiser, and compassionate about the choices that we make. Not only for ourselves, but for our fellow citizens around the world. As the saying goes, time is running short…

My solution to the infinite choice problem is the Doing the Right Thing Matrix. I find that you can use this lens to effectively navigate any decision and guide yourself from a non-optimal choice to a more optimal outcome. In addition, as many of the choices and decisions we make in our lives are done jointly with others, the matrix provides a framework for “getting on the same page” and reaching consensus.

Here’s how it works:

On the vertical axis we have decision making from a rational, logical, or mind driven perspective (the What to do). And on the horizontal axis, we have decision making from an intuitive, right-brained, and heart-driven approach (the Why or Reason behind What we do). When these two aspects of who we are are balanced, then we end up in the top right box – we’ve done the right thing for the right reason. Or to state it in a different way, we would have thoroughly thought out the approach to a problem from a rational and logical perspective and come up with something that made a lot of sense. And, we would have done it from a place of motivation where our heart was in the right place – we wanted to do the right thing, and were operating from a place of caring and respect for others rather than a place of ego-driven self-concern.

If you let that sink in for a bit and ruminate on an example from your own life, you’ll start to see how to apply this in day to day situations. You’ll also see that it’s often easy to slip into the top left box – doing the right thing for the wrong reason or down into the lower right box, where you do the wrong thing for the right reason. In the first case, you’ve probably come up with a pretty good well thought out solution, but perhaps you’re motivation for doing it is based more on what’s best for you rather than how the solution is beneficial for all stakeholders. Often times, this type of outcome may survive in the short term, but over time, since it doesn’t meet the needs of the broader group (or even your own higher purpose), it may fall apart. It’s not sustainable.

Ending up in the bottom right corner is where you are operating from a place of compassion, caring, and empathy (you’re heart is in the right place), but you haven’t put enough intellectual horsepower into examining all possible solutions to identify the best one. As a result, the positive impact you seek may not fully materialize.

The lower left box is a place you want to avoid and where luckily, most of us don’t venture too often. This is where you’re rational mind and intuitive heart are not well developed at all and you’ve entered into a completely wrong solution or approach. Whereas the upper right box is where the Truth lies, the home of the Divine Consciousness. The lower right is its diametric opposite – the home of the False. Get out of there fast.

What this tool allows us to do is to be proactive in asking where we have landed in any situation. Just by asking the question, we have now started a process to become intentional and conscious about our decision making. It forces us to test the assumptions inherent in our thinking process in a way that challenges us to always migrate to the top right box – the balancing of heart and mind.

The Critical Ingredient: Core Operating Principles
__________________________________________________________
prin·ci·ple
noun
a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.

____________________________________________

For the tool to work, though, we do need one crucial set of data that allows us to effectively ask if we are doing the right thing for the right reason. I call that data your Core Operating Principles. Why those are critical to define is that your “right thing and right reason” will vary over someone else’s based upon how each of you view the world and your relationship to it.  Some people may think that being kind and considerate and bending over backwards to help others is a core part of who they are whereas someone else may think that being hyper-competitive and success driven, where winning at all costs is a central part of who they are. Those two people looking at an identical situation or problem, will come up with very different choices for doing the right thing for the right reasons.

Those differences in Core Operating Principles are in many ways the source of the world’s conflicts and problems.

We are hyper polarized and lack a sense of unity. It is the absence of agreement on how we view the world that is the missing link in evolving every aspect of our personal and collective lives to the next stage in their development. In the developed world, we have enormous amounts of wealth and technology, but we can’t seem to solve the most basic human problems. So first gaining clarity for ourselves on what our own Core Operating Principles currently are and what we ideally would would like them to be and then ultimately discussing with others, is essential in Doing the Right Thing for the Right Reasons.

My personal Core Operating Principles are the following:

Unity Consciousness – We are one highly interconnected and interdependent reality. Everything else is an illusion. Being in a state of acceptance and love in the world is what moves mountains.
Service to Others, not Service to Self – When you realize everything is interdependent, then serving others is in fact serving yourself. They are one and the same.
Aiming for the Highest Intention – Starting out with pre-conceived Limitations in a Universe with Unlimited Possibilities is like starting a race with your shoelaces tied together. Start by aiming for the ideal outcome – you’re ability to create that reality is stronger than you think.
Systems Thinking – Only by understanding the interconnections between things can you truly solve complex problems. The illusion of separation always provides the wrong answer and is against the direction of where the universe wants to evolve.
Living in the Present Moment – The past no longer exists, and the future waits to be created in the present moment. Once you leave the present moment, you have left the Truth, the only thing that really exists.
Truth, Transparency, No Politics – Everything else is False.
Inclusionary Leadership – Allow others to lead as circumstances and their expertise dictates. We are all here to help each other become the best version of ourselves that we can be.
Shrink the Ego – A “light” ego is essential to a fruitful life journey. Put the ego in its proper place – as a tool to help you navigate the material world, but don’t let it separate you from the spiritual truth that connects all of us.

These principles could also be called a model of personal ethics or values. They are the filters we use to experience and interact with the world around us. Something we don’t speak about nearly enough in our personal or professional lives. Yet, if you look carefully, it is this lack of ethics in every facet of our world today that causes us such suffering. From our non-stop violence and war, political stale-mating, economic inequality, unhappiness, hyper-competition, and much more. Some of these issues exist because, ironically, some people believe that it is fine to have two sets of core operating principles or values – one for their personal lives and one for their professional lives. This is truly strange as it would suggest that it’s ok to be two different versions of yourself throughout the day. An example would be the nice, caring parent at home and the tenacious winner take all corporate warrior at work. It’s a level of cognitive dissonance which leads to a level of inauthenticity that takes its toll on individuals themselves as well as those around them. The truth of course is that our culture actually accepts and promotes this concept.

To regain a holistic and unified society, it is imperative then that once we have honed our own Core Operating Principles, we then need to share and discuss them with others. We need to help each other bring ethics back into the conversation and place them center stage into the key decision points in our lives. We need to remove hesitancy in asking ourselves, our families, our neighbors, and our colleagues the critical question for the 21st century – “Are We Doing the Right Thing for the Right Reason”? We would ideally follow up that question by sharing our core operating principles how they guide us in our choices and decision making. Through this approach, we can begin to achieve the Unity Consciousness we so desperately need in the world.

Conclusion

You can use Do the Right Thing Matrix for virtually any aspect of your life. Once you start implementing it, you’ll find yourself asking the question for every significant thing you do at home or work. It drives clarity where previously there was grey area. Coupled with an effective set of Core Operating Principles, it can help all of us transform ourselves and the world into the best versions possible.

~Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

**Sign up for the Think Smarter World Newsletter here and download a Free Copy of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World**

Think Smarter World is a non-commercial site. All information is provided freely and with love for the benefit of humanity.

The post Doing the Right Thing for the Right Reason – The Essential 21st Century Framework appeared first on Think Smarter World.

How did we get here? 300 Years of Consciousness Evolution

 

As we exit a very tumultuous 2015 and the world teeters on the breaking point of our various economic, societal, and natural eco-systems, I thought it interesting to try and understand what are some of the root causes and significant milestones that have lead us to this point in time .

When one embarks on this journey, you are naturally taken back to the 18th century when Adam Smith proposed that market based economic activity and the aggressive pursuit of self-interest should be used to improve the material well being of all citizens. Smith published his Wealth of  Nations in 1776 and Issac Newton’s book on classical mechanics, Principia, was published in 1687. So the concept of the world as a mechanistic, matter (material) based world-view had close to 90 years of percolation before Smith came onto the world stage. And it is those two major fields of thought (along with Darwin) that have driven our economic, scientific, and societal development for the last three hundred years – man as maximizing his self-interest within a materialist scientific world view that sees no inherent connection between humans or their world – just objects that can be manipulated against each other to achieve a desired outcome.

These new fields of thought arose in the 17th and 18th century Enlightenment period which was ripe for a new world view.  The middle ages had left the world without enough economic development and the private and public lives of citizens were too dominated by the stranglehold of religious dogma.

What Enlightenment’s modernity brought to the scene was a move beyond the previous mythic-literal, religious, traditional era of development – where the Bible was the one source of literal, uncontested truth; humanity had one, and only one savior; and ‘no one comes to salvation save by through the ‘Mother Church’, whose dogmas delivered truth on all subjects, artistic to normative to scientific to religious. With the Enlightenment, representative democracy replaced monarchy; freedom replaced slavery, and the experimental modern sciences replaced the revelatory mythic religions (as source of serious truth)...So successful were the modern sciences that the other major domains of human existence and knowledge – from artistic to moral – began to be invaded and colonized by scientism (the belief that science, and science alone, can deliver any valuable truth). | The ‘dignity of modernity’ (the differentiation of the value spheres) soon collapsed into the ‘disaster of modernity’ (the dissociation of the value spheres), resulting in what Weber famously called the ‘the disenchanted universe’. Such was the state of affairs for some 300 years – a mixture of great advance and stunning discoveries in the scientific arena, accompanied with a reductionism and scientific materialism that rendered all other fields and areas as defunct, outmoded, childish, archaic. | Social Darwinism – the notion of the survival of the fittest applied to all aspects of human existence as well – began to insidiously invade all the humanities, ethics, and politics of humans, including the two major new economic systems, capitalism and socialism. |Scientific materialism – the ideal that all phenomena in the universe (including consciousness, culture, and creativity) could be reduced to material atoms and their interactions, which could be known only by the scientific method – and the generally liberal politics that accompanied such beliefs set the stage for the next three centuries. – Ken Wilber writing in the foreword to Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations.

So in essence, by pursuing the Smith/Newton/Darwin path, we certainly have benefitted greatly in terms of our material existence and the movement beyond religious dogma and superstition was a welcome relief to many. But along the way, we also ended up losing something very important – deep human values, morals, and spiritual connection. We threw true spirituality out with the bath water. Quantum Physics (QP), however, came along close to 100 years ago and gave us the scientific rationale to reunite spirituality with science. QP revealed that what spiritualists (not religious dogma) had said for thousands of years was actually grounded in scientific reality. Mystical truth of a universal interconnectedness between all people and all things was in fact the true nature of reality. Author Trevor Blakes explains the impact of two of the core aspects of QP in more detail:

Quantum Entanglement – Two particles can become entangled if they are close enough together and their properties get linked. They can stay linked even after they are separated. When you measure or affect one particle, you end up affecting the entangled particle no matter how far apart they are. Once connected always connected. If we change the way we pay attention to the past we can change how it affects us now, if we focus on a future we want we can connect it to us now.
Observer Effect – Also known as Wave-Particle Duality. Reality is unset jello. Everything is possibility until you observe it. Once an observer puts its focus on the wave/particle, the wave collapses into particle matter. Everything in our life only exists when we put our attention to it. An atom only appears in a certain place, until you measure it or observe it.

So why are we concerned with what a particle may be doing or whether it is waving or not waving when we are not looking at it? When we understand that our observations and expectations actually influence the apparent behavior of reality, then we are empowered to actively play with interactive reality-creation. Reality is neither particle nor wave. It is both and neither simultaneously, and as co-creators with universal consciousness, we influence how reality shapes itself. | Likewise, in our continual observations of our reality, and ourselves, we repeatedly collapse the wave function into a state of sameness, or a state of no-change. We perceive through the same lens of awareness, and that collapses the wave function from various possibility states into the ones we have chosen to observe for ourselves. Our limited lens of awareness creates perceptual biases that filter what we are able to notice and experience. How we perceive life is a result of how we collapse wave functions. Our perspectives, our observations, our opinions, our thoughts, and our beliefs are continually collapsing the wave function from unlimited possibilities, to probability states, into what we actually observe and perceive as our experience. |We see what we expect to see, and we are continually and consistently collapsing the wave function.The act of observation creates the entire universe. There are no objects, only relationships. The world is based on consciousness. Practice the skill of observation to change the reality of your life. Pay attention to what you really want, not want you don’t want. Where our attention goes, energy grows. [To learn more about Quantum Physics and the various proofs and experiments that have taken place over the last 50 years, see the very readable book by journalist Lynne Mactaggart – The Field, The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe.]

QP is an example of how knowledge evolves over time and so existing systems need to be updated accordingly. This is where we have plateaued in our evolution. Quantum Physics principles radically go beyond the foundations of classical Newtonian Physics but we have not integrated those concepts into all aspects of our society. In QP, everything is in fact connected. Life as we know it as all energy. And, energy is never destroyed (ie., we are spiritual, energetic beings having a material existence – life time after life time).

Quantum Physics helps us reclaim the spiritual truth that we are not isolated material beings – we are in fact highly interconnected to each other and to everything on the planet and the planet itself. What we say and do to others has a great effect not only on them but ourselves as well. We do not operate in insolation. Energy connects everything. We live in a holistic world, not an isolated, separate one.

But this updated understanding of reality has not made it through all our various scientific, economic, and social systems. We still cling to the world view of the past which unfortunately saw diminishing need for meaning and values within materialist reality.

So how do we move past the Smith/Newton/Darwin model into the 21st century Quantum reality? First, let’s review the basis of Adam Smith’s capitalist model. Quantum Physicist Amti Goswami explains in his book, Quantum Economics:

Adam Smith’s capitalism derives from the notion that if producers and consumers alike are left alone to pursue their individual self-interest, the invisible hands of the free market will establish equilibrium between production and consumption, allocate resources between sectors of the economy, and stabilize prices, etc. Over more than a couple of centuries, we find that although capitalism is workable, there are glitches. We have been searching for a right direction for changing capitalism ever since its shortcomings became clear, the boom and bust or business cycle – alternative periods of inflation and recession – for example. There is also the question of social good. Obviously when individual good sometimes comes in opposition to social good, what then? Smith implicitly believed that the invisible hands of the free market also guarantees social good.

Since Adam Smith’s model actually doesn’t work well enough in practice, Capitalist governments have had to intervene in the “free market” to remedy ever present imbalances. But as Goswami writes, ironically, these go directly against the core principle of free markets:

Many of these theories of convenience stand in direct contradiction with Smith’s pivotal notion of the free market…the demand side model creates middle class jobs through middle class tax cuts, unemployment benefits, and government funded public works infrastructure. The supply-side economics creates more capital supply by tax cuts to the rich; the idea that this will stimulate direct business investments, trickling down to the middle class by creating jobs. Currently in America, the two political parties are bogged down in a battle of these two alternatives with various new gimmickries. But when viewed through the lens of pragmatism, all these efforts are simply versions of the same old, same old. But the two parties do agree on one thing – we need to always be in a perpetual growth mode in order to deal with the problems of the capitalist system -‘Economists of all ilks seem to agree that we have to have indefinite economic expansion in order to deal with periodic but inevitable recessions, the bust part of the boom-bust cycle. But how can a finite ecosystem with finite resources provide such indefinite expansion?’

So where did it all go wrong? If we go back to the time of Newton’s discovery of modern materialist physics, we see an accepted co-existence between science and religion – with each saying to the other “I recognize your importance and let’s agree that we’ll each take care of our respective spheres and that both are important to the proper functioning of society and evolution of humanity”. Goswami points out that Adam Smith and Newton arose at roughly the same time and Smith implicitly understood the importance of mind and matter harmonizing together for society’s benefits:

Adam Smith understood quite well that capitalism crucially depends first on ethics and morality and second on creativity. Only when the market operates incorporating these features of the mind, does its invisible hands maintain overall social good. To summarize, Adam Smith’s capitalism had the following implicit message:

Producers and consumers, do pursue your self-interest with gusto, but…
When dealing with competition, do remember ethics;
And producers, don’t forget to fan the creative power of your team to forever create renewed interest in the consumer for whatever you produce;
And then, the invisible hands of the free market will distribute capital to make room for new innovation, will produce the needed economic expansion, will grow capital, and will maintain equilibrium and stability to bring not only your personal good but the good over everyone – social good.

But Newton’s materialist world-view overtook the spiritual / ethics counterpart and over time as we entered the industrial revolution, we saw a world which looked very much like individual machines that could be controlled and manipulated through scientific and mathematical principles.  That view steam rolled into our current situation which began in earnest after WWII with the desire to fully utilize all the spare manufacturing capacity that we now had. We needed to find buyers for the output of those factories and the age of consumerism was born. For the economy to grow, and for lifestyles to increase, people had to increase their consumption. And to feed that consumption machine, they needed to find ever new ways of making money. I wrote earlier this year in Dear America: Have We Gone Too Far?:

This “making money off of money” started in the 1950’s as a way to increase economic growth through consumption. With America’s post-war manufacturing capacity fully charged up, someone needed to buy all the things it could produce. Advertising and Consumer Marketing tactics were accelerated and financial instruments were created to give consumers and businesses the capital they would need to make purchases and investments.

​Consumerism was on the rise in America, but still in its infancy, when Thorstein Veblen coined the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ in the late nineteenth century. Wars and the Great Depression kept it in check, but it sprang into its adolescence in the 1950’s. That’s when the economist and marketer Victor Lebow wrote his article “Price Competition in 1955” in the Journal of Retailing. With stunning frankness, Lebow laid out this vision for the shopper society: ‘Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today [is] expressed in consumptive patterns.’” – from Enough is Enough by Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill

In many ways, this system has provided many advantages. Many of us have benefited from this increased availability of capital and the ensuing economic growth that it produced. The downside is that the need for growth is perpetual and there are no real mechanisms to limit it within safe operating levels – this is why we have boom and bust cycles. The system exceeds its safe operating limits, breaks, and then we have a bust again. We inject more capital (mostly money that doesn’t exist) through tax breaks or government expenditures (public debt) in order to get the system going again. In fact, since 2008 world debt levels have increased by close to 25% or $35 Trillion Dollars.

In order to pay all of this back, the prescription by government leaders and corporate and finance executives is – more growth. That’s right, we need to grow the economy larger and faster in order to have some chance of managing this debt. But with interest rates at or near zero in most of the developed world, and governments straddled with too much debt and not enough revenues, its hard to see how this will be done so easily.

More importantly, the “more growth” model, is running up against one element in the “system” we cannot easily resolve with money – Climate Change. In fact, in order for us to have any chance at managing the effects of climate change, we need to do less economic activity (which is based on using ever increasing amounts of energy and the pollution it causes). But what we are in fact doing is pursuing a “growth with no limits strategy” in the context of climate change along with a rise in global population from 7 billion today to 9 billion by 2042.

This then is the major problem facing the world today – global capitalism and finanicial markets are set up to reward and pursue growth at all costs, while the biggest threat to the viability of our “earth system”, climate change, requires we do less.

And so here we are. We have arrived 250 years after Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations into an era that has lost the critical understanding of our inherent interconnectedness and spiritual oneness. Without that, money was allowed to become god and the source of all happiness.

Money became the new God of economics. However, this God is very different from the old God of religions. The old God favored spiritual values – ethics and love, meaning, creativity, and the like. The new God favors only material values or ego values, if you will, centered around pleasure. Helped by the media, younger generations around the world are lapping up these pleasure-centered ego-values. – Goswami, Quantum Economics

If we end up equating consumption with happiness, then a perpetual economic growth strategy that seeks to maximize material pleasure and profits with no care to social costs or degradation of the planet is a logical conclusion. The problem of course is that we’ve pushed our planetary boundaries to the breaking point (if not already past them) which is pushing humanity over the cliff to extinction. We therefore have no choice but to seek a new path.

The new path must follow a Quantum mindset – a science which allows us to see the true nature of our reality.  A reality that reunites heart and mind and provides us with the insight to control and integrate our internal and external lives through the power of our consciousness:

Quantum economics is the extension of Adam Smith’s capitalism in the right direction because it is based on a scientific worldview that incorporates the matter-mind, religion-science compromise that prevailed in Smith’s time and clearly influenced him. The new economics makes room once more for both mind and matter in the economic arena, only this time in an integrated scientific way. Consequently, the new economics makes capitalism every more appropriate for conscious human beings. It puts not only our gross material side into the economic equation, as Adam Smith had, but also our subtle side – consciousness, feeling, meaning, and intuition – which Smith failed to include explicitly; it was premature in his time. – Goswami, Quantum Economics 

But the time is certainly right now. So, how would a new Quantum focused world look like? If we allow ourselves to think freely, I have a feeling it may have the following elements of Unity Consciousness:

Winning and losing would be anachronistic ideas. Competition would seem counter-productive. Those ideas breed separation between individuals and not unity. Working for collective good would be a goal of all participation in human systems.
People would enter the field of Governance and Stewardship, not Politics. Politics implies arguing for your particular “special interest” whereas Governance and Stewardship implies working towards the good of the whole and not just some of the parts.
Our school systems would be radically changed from factories where memorization and test scores are the top priority to institutions teaching creativity and self-mastery. As Robots will do more and more mundane intellectual tasks, humans need to un-leash the combined power of their minds through the harnessing of both their left and right brains and the integration their minds with their hearts (the latest science in fact has shown that we have three brains – in our heads, around our heart, and around our gut. The brain in our heart actually sends more signals to the brain in the head than the other way around…see the Heart Math Institute for more information). And, we would start teaching children as early as 3 the concepts of meditation and mindfulness so they can obtain mental and emotional self-mastery and intuitive capability to allow them to navigate a highly complex world.
Violence and War would seem to be bizarre concepts and only taken on in extreme need for self-defense. Having understood how Quantum reality shows the underlying connectedness of all reality, we would profoundly understand the concept of “the other is actually us”. Harming others is the same as harming ourselves as all energy is interconnected. Quantum Physics shows that by observing or putting our intention on something, we collapse the wave function into material reality. What we observe, think about, and choose is what we experience. In this way, the reality we experience is a mirror of our thoughts. If we choose to be hostile, hateful, and the like, then that is what we experience back in return.  Not necessarily back from the target of our thoughts and actions, but more likely from someplace or someone else. Everything is connected and the energy finds its way back to the source even from different pathways. The science is simple – the more we attack, the more we suffer. The more we love, the more we prosper. [As an example, the solving of our current predicament in the Middle East would require an end to the cycle of attack and counter-attack. We would need to proactively do things that were in the best interest of all parties. Seeking to maximize our security and oil interests to the exclusion of the health of the whole will always be a losing proposition. And, seeing others as “less-than” us, only exacerbates the problem].
Our monetary systems would be altered to reflect a shared success reality. Investors and businesses would use capital to improve the health and well being of all citizens globally. Producing products and services to maximize profit would be replaced with stakeholder objectives that sought to improve the human condition and the enhancement of human development as a first priority. Taking advantage of someone in a business transaction, charging exorbitant interest rates and fees, or manipulating consumer behavior for monetary gain would be recognized as counter-productive (the quantum-mirror again…), whereas proactively seeking to do the right thing for the right reasons would be seen as the most efficient way to karmic and material success.
Our media would not be gauged to the lowest-common-denominator. Generating fear would not be a primary selling strategy as Humans, having fully understood their reality as energy beings, would seek to positively manage their energy levels toward love, joy, happiness, and compassion rather than fear, anxiety, and hatred. It would be understood that the latter only leads to degradation in our personal energetic fields and ultimately poor health and early physical death. We would therefore seek only to consume media that helped us, not hurt us.
Freedom would mean the freedom to be creative. It would move away from “Freedom for Me” to “Freedom to be Creative for We”. We would all learn the techniques to uncover the spiritual divinity that resides in and is beaming through each of us. Co-Creating with the power of the divine force of love for the benefit of all life, would be considered the highest aspiration of humanity. Technology and the Arts would all seek to maximize this freedom of creative expression. And as we are all energetically interconnected, the more we created at the highest levels of divine consciousness, that consciousness would rapidly spread to all beings and thus rapidly raise the level of consciousness on earth.
Once it is understood that all living things – humans, animals, and the earth itself – are connected and from one underlying source of creative energy, then harming not just other humans, but animals and the earth would be unthinkable. Sustainability would cease to be a buzz word and a business strategy, it would again become a moral imperative as it has existed in ancient cultures in the past. Abusing the earth for personal gain would be recognized as ultimately hurting ourselves as its energy is intrinsically tied to our own. Polluting the earth’s climate and destroying its eco-systems would be foreign concepts. The quantum-mirror would have shown us (as it is doing now), that the earth will mirror back to humanity the abuse and destruction that it has been given.
Lastly, we would understand that since energy cannot be destroyed, and that everything including us is energy, then reincarnation and coming back for multiple life times is not a strange concept. We would then ask why do we come back over and over again. That answer has been revealed by mystic traditions (Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu) for thousands of years. Our birth into material reality is for educational purposes. In our case, earth is our school. We come to it to in fact to learn only one lesson – the concept of unconditional love for all beings and all reality. Our various life times allow us to experience different perspectives of the “other” to first hand experience that the “other” is an illusion.  It is all us. All Oneness. And, the quicker we learn our lesson, the quicker we graduate…and move on to the next grade. If we all understood that, I think you would agree, we would all be much better students during our time on earth and our school would be a much happier place.

Yes, in a Quantum Reality, life on earth would be a much more kinder, gentler existence where the best of humanity was allowed to flourish.  May we all experience a taste of it in the coming year.

~Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

**Sign up for the Think Smarter World Newsletter here and download a Free Copy of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World**

Think Smarter World is a non-commercial site. All information is provided freely and with love for the benefit of humanity.

The post How did we get here? 300 Years of Consciousness Evolution appeared first on Think Smarter World.

Andreas Weber and the Concept of Enlivenment – Nature as a Model for Optimizing Human Systems

German scholar Andreas Weber has written an excellent essay on how we should look to Nature as a model for optimizing Human Systems. The 70 page paper is titled –  “Enlivenment: Towards a fundamental shift in the concepts of nature, culture and politics.” Below is a small subsection of the paper that speaks in particular to how nature can guide us to a more enlightened economic system than the current Darwinian / NeoLiberal model currently in place.

[Dr. Andreas Weber holds a diploma in Marine Biology and a doctoral degree in Cultural Studies. He writes non-fiction books, magazine features and is one of the few representatives of «Nature Writing» in German literature. As an independent scholar he explores new understandings of life-as-meaning or «Biopoetics» in science and in the arts. You can find more about him at: www.autor-andreas-weber.de]

From the Foreword:

This essay contributes to the most crucial quest of our times, which also lies at the heart of the work of the Heinrich Böll Foundation: How is it possible to provide a life of dignity for all human beings, to live in coexistence and respect with the natural world and accept the planetary limits? From the margins of hegemonic discourse, this essay invites the reader to look at the world afresh. It challenges the familiar terms of conventional politics and policy and their underlying assumptions. Can we continue to solely rely on the Enlightenment heritage that our rational thinking and technological creations can «appropriate nature» and «unlock its secrets» to serve our needs? Is nature really nothing but a game of winners and losers, of efficiency and self-interest? The idea of «Enlivenment» as proposed here by Andreas Weber, challenges these assumptions as blindness to the realities of living biological and ecological systems. Instead of the mainstream, dualist metaphysics that treats the world as «dead matter», Enlivenment sees a pluralist world of living beings constantly entangled with each other within a biosphere that must be understood as a continuous unfolding of diversity, freedom and experience. As Weber explains, an ongoing paradigm shift in the life sciences is providing us with a new picture of biology. It is moving away from a reductionist worldview that sees nature as a deterministic machine whose parts and processes can eventually be understood by rational, «outside» human observers, to an enlivened worldview that situates human beings deeply in a web of dynamic, living and unfolding creative relationships. Discarding a mechanical perspective of nature, science is beginning to see that the great, unexplored territory is the nature of life itself. Subjectivity, sentience, agency, expression, values and autonomy lie at the centre of the biosphere. This conclusion is not a matter of mere opinion or speculation; it is increasingly being validated by empirical evidence. Biological sciences are undergoing a massive transformation that has been compared to the one that physics experienced in the 20th century as it came to grips with the peculiar realities of quantum physics and relativity. Weber gives us a glimpse of the different scientific paradigm now coming into focus. He calls it «Enlivenment» because the new sciences are revealing organisms to be sentient, more-than-physical creatures that have subjective experiences and produce sense. Organisms embody meaning and express a «world-making» sensibility. Their subjectivity and feelings of being alive are not incidental to their evolutionary history, but central to it. Weber sees Enlivenment as an «upgrade», not a replacement, of the deficient categories of Enlightenment thought – a way to move beyond our modern metaphysics of «dead matter» and acknowledge the deeply creative, poetic and expressive processes embodied in all living organisms. – Dr. Heike Loschmann – Head of Department for International Politics, Heinrich Boll Foundation

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Section II: Bioeconomics: The Hidden Megascience

In this section I want to explore on a more specific level why we living beings have mostly forgotten or marginalised the notion of life. To do this, I wish to draw attention to the astonishing interconnections and mutual support between the two guiding metaphysics of our culture. These are (Neo-)Darwinism, with its big idea of biological optimisation, in which functional adaptations supposedly create biodiversity, and (Neo-)Liberalism, with its concept of economic efficiency, supposedly creating wealth and equal distribution.

For more than 150 years, both assumptions have become intertwined streams of one coherent pattern of thought that forms the basic matrix of our social under- standing of reality. The premises of neo-Darwinism and neoliberalism constitute the tacit, taken-for-granted understanding of «how the world works». Inside its deep and compact logical structure, the two currents of biological and economic optimisation theory are so mutually reinforcing and normative that respectable thoughts considers them beyond question.

It is not by chance that «eco-nomy» and «eco-logy» are nearly identical terms. Both build on the metaphor of housekeeping and the provisioning of existential goods and services (the Greek word «oikos» means «house», «householding» or «family»). Both concepts have a particular and related manner of treating the organisation of this existential supply. Both start from the idea that keeping a house – or making a living, for that matter – is a theatre of competition and contest whose object is an ever-more-optimal efficiency. In the neoDarwinian, neoliberal narrative, the household is not, however, a place where feeling agents pursue their individual good. The householding process is strangely conceived of as completely subject-less. Its logic does not need to take account of the actual presence of agents. Indeed, it does not need to take life into account at all.

The process is subject-less and self-organised in the sense that eternal, external laws (that of selection and that of economic survival) punish or reward the behaviour of atomistic black boxes called «Homo economicus» – economic man – or in a more modern telling, the «selfish gene». To yield results in this framework of thinking, neither contemporary economics nor «eco-sciences» need to consider actual, lived experience. The framework has excluded life in the existential, experiential sense. We might therefore say that the prevailing «bioeconomic megascience», the deep metaphysics of our age, is a science of non-living.

The metaphysics of eco-efficiency mirror 19th century social reality

Both Darwinism and Liberalism were born in pre-Victorian England at about the same time. Their theoretical premises explicitly and implicitly refer to the social conditions and practices of a country undergoing the wrenching disruptions of industrialisation. At that time there existed a rigidly stratified society without any structured system of social care and cooperation.

Through their intellectual proximity to each other, Darwinian evolutionary theory and Adam Smith’s free-market theories became a sort of «political economy of nature». While Charles Darwin was struggling with an explanation for the diversity of living nature, political economist Thomas Robert Malthus proposed an idea that became a pivotal point in the development of evolutionary theory and hence for the still-valid understanding of biology as result of evolution-by-optimization.

Malthus was obsessed by the idea of scarcity as a driving force of social change. There will never be enough resources to feed a population that steadily multiplies, he argued, and a struggle for dominance must necessarily take place in which the weakest will lose. Charles Darwin adopted this piece of socio-economic theory, drawn from Malthus’ observations of Victorian industrial society, and applied it to his comprehensive theory of natural change and development. Interestingly, even the more empirical-biological part of Darwin’s theory dealing with «selection» was not based on observations of long-term natural change. It was based on the experiences and practices of Victorian breeders (Darwin himself raised pigeons and orchids).

The resulting discipline, evolutionary biology, is a more accurate reflection of pre-Victorian social practices than of natural reality. In the wake of this metaphorical takeover, such concepts as «struggle for existence», «competition», and «fitness» – which were central justications of the political status quo in (pre-)Victorian England – tacitly became centrepieces of our own self-understanding as embodied and social beings. And they still are – especially in those parts of the world that even now resemble pre-Victorian England. Biological, technological, and social progress, so the argument goes, is brought forth by the sum of individual egos striving to out-compete each other. In perennial rivalry, fit species (powerful corporations) exploit niches (markets) and multiply their survival rate (profit margins), whereas weaker (less efficient) ones go extinct (bankrupt). This metaphysics of economics and nature, however, is far more revealing about our society’s opinion about itself than it is an objective account of the biological world.

This reciprocal borrowing of metaphors between the disciplines did not only transform biology. It also mirrored back onto economics, which came to see itself more and more as a «hard» natural science. It deliberately derived its models from biology and physics, culminating in the formulation of the mathematical concept of Homo economicus. If you study the liberal classics, which are widely taught in universities, the textbooks still invoke 19th-century economists who mingle concepts from the natural sciences with economic theory. William Jevons was the British economist and logician who postulated that economics describes the «laws of the heart», and Léon Walras was the French economist who claimed that «economic equilibrium» follows deterministic laws imported from physics.

The resulting picture – the individual as a machine-like egoist always seeking to maximise his utility – has become the implicit but all-infuencing model of human values and behaviour. Its shadow is cast over a whole generation of psychological and game-theoretical approaches to economics. For its part, evolutionary biology has also taken inspiration from economic models. The idea of the «selfish gene» for example, is not much more than the metaphor of Homo economicus extended to biochemistry.

It should not be surprising in the least that biology and economics have come to function as two branches of one and the same science. Each works with the same structural assumptions and equivalent perspectives in their respective fields of inquiry. And they both exclude the sphere of living beings and lived experience from their description of reality. The great danger of this closed, totalistic pattern of thinking is its capacity to obscure reality and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we are convinced that we have to describe reality as non-living, and treat it accordingly, life and living processes become highly problematic fields of thought and action. They become inscrutable if not suspect.

This is our predicament today. If our formal systems of thought about the biosphere see it as nonliving, this will inevitably engender a lack of concern toward life and to a loss of species and a gross indifference to experience. How many times have the Wall Street Journal or The Economist sneered at the vulnerability of the snail darter and other endangered species threatened by development projects? If we conceive of human beings as Homo economicus, as non-sentient automatons whose behaviours can be described by algorithms, sentience will be ignored if not forbidden and felt experience will be seen as irrelevant. This is exactly what is happening.

By contrast, to see reality as a living process would literally change everything. This is the challenge of Enlivenment as a «transcendent paradigm». Its insistence that our policies focus on living experience provides the deepest possible ethical leverage for intervening in our global system. Of course, this approach is moot in today’s political culture. But political change must start with our imagining of a different reality. Only by imagining a different world have people ever been able to change the current one.

How dualism encloses the freedom of embodied individuality

We can call this alliance between biology and economics an «economic ideology of nature» or «bioeconomics». Today it reigns supreme over our understanding of human culture and world. It defines our embodied dimension (Homo sapiens as a gene-governed survival machine) as well as our social identity (Homo economicus as an egoistic maximiser of utility). The idea of universal competition unifies the two realms, the natural and the socio-economic. It validates the notion of rivalry and predatory self-interest as inexorable facts of life. You have to eliminate as many competitors as possible and take the biggest piece of cake for yourself. The economic ideology of nature amounts to a license to steal life from others. In truth, the roots of this thinking precede pre-Victorianism. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously viewed the world as a «war of all against all» and his times also saw the forcible enclosure of the commons – the private theft of nature’s abundant supplies, which had previously been open in principle to everyone.

This unfolding of modern economic thinking with its endless focus on competition developed in tandem with dualism – the metaphysical division of the world into «brute matter» to be exploited and «human culture» permanently casts human livelihood in a problematic – or even «absurd» – relationship to the rest of the universe.

It is noteworthy that liberal economists openly acknowledge the inadequacy of their worldview even as they cling obsessively to it. John Maynard Keynes, for example, clearly criticised the standard framework of economic thinking as perverting life’s most noble attitudes. «For at least another hundred years, we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still«, Keynes claimed. He had a point: Our cultural tradition can only be described as a bond with the devil. But to deny the character of reality never has been a good strategy for resolving a problem.

How nature’s inefficiencies result in enlivened ecosystems

What are the most prominent flaws of our bioeconomic view? What can we say about the validity of the common assumptions of the bioeconomic paradigm? Most if not all of them ignore the fact that we are living subjects in a living world constituted by subjective, creative agents. The orthodox assumptions of bioeconomics already violate the state of the art research in the physical sciences that show that no relationships between subjects and objects are possible if you clearly separate the observer and observed. But what observations in ecology – the natural household – could also push a shift toward an economic Enlivenment?

The prevailing biological view of the organic world – and the picture of man within it – is changing. New research is shifting the paradigm from the Darwinistic idea of a battlefield between antagonistic survival-machines to that of a complex interplay among various agents with conflicting and symbiotic goals and meanings. In the new biological paradigm, the organism is starting to be seen as a subject that interprets external stimuli and genetic inuences rather than being causally governed by them. An organism negotiates the terms of its existence with others under conditions of limited competition and «weak causality». This shift in the axioms of «biological liberalism» is opening up a new picture of the organic world as one in which freedom evolves and organisms, including humans, play an active, constructive role in imagining and building new futures. The natural world as it actually works refutes many axioms of the bioeconomic worldview:

Efficiency: The biosphere is not efficient. Warm-blooded animals consume over 97 percent of their energy only to maintain their metabolism. Photosynthesis achieves a ridiculously low efficiency rate of 7 percent. Fish, amphibians and insects have to lay millions of eggs only to allow for the survival of very few off spring. Instead of being efficient, nature is highly redundant. It compensates for possible loss through incredible «wastefulness». Natural processes are not parsimonious but rather rely on generosity and waste. The biosphere itself is based on a «donation», the foundation of all biological work – solar energy – which falls as a gift from heaven.

Growth: The biosphere does not grow. The quantity of biomass does not increase. The throughput of matter does not expand; nature is running a steady-state economy – that is, an economy where all relevant factors remain constant in relation to one another. Also, the number of species does not necessarily increase; it rises in some epochs and falls in others. The only dimension that really grows is the diversity of experiences: ways of feeling, modes of expression, variations of appearance, novelties of patterns and forms. Therefore, nature does not gain mass or weight, but rather depth.

Competition: It has never been possible to prove that a new species arose from competition for a resource alone. Species are rather born by chance: they develop through unexpected mutations and the isolation of a group from the remainder of the population through new symbioses and cooperations (the process by which our body cells arose from bacterial predecessors cooperating in intracellular symbiosis, for example). Competition alone – for example, for a limited nutrient or ecological niche – causes biological monotony: the dominance of relatively few species over an ecosystem.

Scarcity: Resources in nature are not scarce. Where they become so, they do not lead to a creative diversification, but to an impoverishment of diversity and freedom. The basic energetic resource of nature, sunlight, exists in abundance. A second crucial resource – the number of ecological relationships and new niches – has no upper limit. A high number of species and a variety of relations among them do not lead to sharper competition and dominance of a « better» species, but rather to richer permutations of relationships among species and thus to an increase in freedom, which is at the same time also an increase of mutual dependencies. The more that is «wasted» – and thus consumed by other species – the bigger the common wealth becomes. Life has the tendency to transform all available resources into a meshwork of bodies. In old ecosystems where solar energy is constant, as in tropical rainforests and high oceans, this brings forth more niches and thus a greater overall diversity. The result is an increase of symbioses and reduced competition. Scarcity of resources, experienced as the temporal lack of specific nutrients, leads to less diversity and the dominance of few species, as for example in temperate coastal mudflats.

Property: There is no notion of property in the biosphere. An individual does not even possess his own body. Its substance changes permanently and continuously as it is replaced by oxygen, CO2, and other inputs of energy and matter. But it is not only the physical dimension of the self that is literally made possible through communion with other elements, it is the symbolic as well: language is brought forth by the community of speakers who use it, and in the process, creates self-awareness and identity. Habits in a species are acquired by sharing them. In any of these dimensions the wildness of the natural world is necessary for the individual to develop its innermost identity. This world has become, and not been made by any particular individual, nor can it be exclusively possessed. Individuality in both its physical and social and symbolic senses, can only emerge through a biologically shared and culturally communicated commons.

These observations are being corroborated by biological science, giving rise to a new, emergent paradigm that is transforming a science of natural objects to a narrative of natural subjects.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

~Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

**Sign up for the Think Smarter World Newsletter here and download a Free Copy of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World**

Think Smarter World is a non-commercial site. All information is provided freely and with love for the benefit of humanity.

The post Andreas Weber and the Concept of Enlivenment – Nature as a Model for Optimizing Human Systems appeared first on Think Smarter World.

The Next Generation Economy: From Ego-System to Eco-System

Otto Scharmer of MIT over the last decade has created a model of how the 21st century organization and economic system will evolve from a hierarchical command and control structure to one where cooperation, interconnectedness, and service to others are what drive success. His book Leading from the Emerging Future, co-written with Katrin Kaufer, provides a wonderful playbook for transforming ourselves, our organizations, and eventually society through understanding issues from a Systems Thinking perspective.

People, societies, and systems all evolve over time. The impetus for that evolution is usually that the current way of doing things is no longer optimal or is causing significant problems.  Scharmer shows us in the systems thinking ice-berg graphic below that our current organizational economic model is producing a number of issues that are leading to break-downs in various societal systems.  The three major areas are: (1) An Ecological Divide; (2) A Social Divide; (3) And, a Spiritual Divide.

In the Ecological Divide, we have exceeded the safe operating limits of the Earth and are currently using 1.5 times the amount of sustainable resources the earth can provide and are headed up to 3X as the global population rises from 7 billion to 9 billion over the next 30 years.  We have essentially become disconnected from our Natural Environment which sustains us. The causes of this are driven by our financial system which is based on a constant need for growth with little regard to the societal and environmental impacts of that growth.

There is a disconnect between the infinite growth imperative and the finite resources of Planet Earth. The disconnect between the infinite growth that current economic logic demands and the finite resources of Planet Earth has produced a massive bubble: The overuse of scarce resources such as water and soil has led to the loss of a third of our agricultural land globally in roughly one generation’s time.

A perpetual growth financial model exists because with abundant, almost free money being loaned by banks (who actually don’t have most of the money they loan as their reserve ratios are very low – it’s as if nonexistent money magically creates more nonexistent money), that money is constantly chasing things to invest in and make a financial return on (a bit like a Ponzi scheme…). This causes ever more natural resources to be used (ok, until you use up all of  the sustainable amount of your finite natural resources – which we have already done). With the constant  production of new goods, companies must gin up consumer demand to buy those items (which we really don’t need). In the process, prices rise for most goods and services. Eventually, the loaned money needs to be paid back and (ironically) more loans (of fictitious money) are taken in order to do that. The cycle of credit and debt then begins again, and again, and again until the bubble bursts. This time however, the bubble that is bursting is the Earth’s environment itself.  But as should be apparent, catastrophic climate change is a burst bubble we can’t afford.

Our Social Divide stems from our mistaken belief in seeing ourselves as separate from others. The “Us vs. Them” mindset pervades almost every aspect of our lives as we take as gospel that “as long as we get ours, that’s what counts”. This can be called a “Service to Self” mind set. This thinking seeps into our work places, our sports, our schools, and of course our politics. It’s a sort of Tribalism that violates the fundamental reality of our inherent interconnectedness and wholeness. When we re-engage with that interconnectedness, we naturally migrate to a “Service to Others” mindset as we begin to realize that the “other” is actually ourselves.

Transforming  our current ego-system economy into an emerging eco-system economy means reconnecting economic thinking with its real root, which is the well-being of the whole house rather than money-making or the well-being of just a few of its inhabitants. But while the whole house was for he Greeks something very local, today it also concerns the well-being of our global communities and planetary eco-systems.

Our Spiritual Divide, as Scharmer identifies it in the book, is that we have lost touch with who we really are. Too many of us still don’t see our spiritual truth – that we are spiritual beings having a material experience. The illusion has not been unveiled by enough of us. Yet, optimistically, there are signs that more are waking up and elevating their level of consciousness.

These divides create a number of different bubbles: Ecological, Income, Financial, Technology, Leadership, Consumerism, Governance, and Ownership. They in turn produce issues such as exceeding the earth’s resources and destabilizing our climate, creating artificial financial markets versus focusing on the real economy, losing ourselves in technology and entertainment versus addressing real human needs, ending up in political paralysis, and confusing GDP with true happiness.

At the core of resolving these issues is that our Ecological, Social, and Spiritual Divides are based on a crisis in consciousness.  We need to elevate our level of awareness of the true nature of reality – one that is inherently holistic, rather than the separate and atomistic vision we have been operating with over the last four hundred years. That vision – which is Ego focused –  results in conflict, hyper-competition, political gridlock, large economic disparities, and a lack of happiness and well-being across vast swaths of our population.

Lastly in the diagram above, Scharmer describes the four stages of organization evolution we have seen over the last few hundred years:

The 1.0 Economic Operating System is based on traditional awareness and hierarchical thinking. The 2.0 Economic Operating System is based on ego-system awareness and me-centric thinking (in neoclassical economics, this ‘me’ is referred to as homo oeconomicus, an idea of a human being who acts only by maximizing self-interest). The 3.0 Economic Operating System is based on institutional stakeholder awareness and some negotiated coalitions that internalize concern for the well-being of key stakeholders. For example, corporations negotiate with and partner with labor unions. The emerging 4.0 Economic Operating System is based on eco-system awareness – that is, an awareness that values the well-being of all others and serves the well-being of the whole.

2.0 is of course where most modern profit maximizing businesses operate. 3.0 is where you see non governmental organizations serving those in need around the world as well as non-profits addressing the most pressing social issues at home. 4.0 is where it starts to get really interesting and you start witnessing the emergence of organizations that are addressing People, Planet, and Profit (Benefit Corporations as an example), or progressive companies where the standard pyramid of organizational hierarchy has been turned upside down and decision making and work planning are handled completely by self-managed autonomous teams (see Frederic Laloux’s excellent book – Reinventing Organizations – for good examples).

The transition to 4.0 organizations for Scharmer come down to three key items:

The Journey from ego-system to eco-system awareness, of from “me to we”, has three dimensions: (1) better relating to others; (2) better relating to the whole system; and (3) better relating to oneself.

The approach encapsulates the best of holistic thinking – which unfortunately is the opposite of how most things work in today’s world.

What we do instead is address issues and problems in a piece-meal basis – from education, fighting poverty, health care, economic growth, and more.  Let’s take health care as an example – the whole system is meant to address a problem after it happens. That’s when the insurance system will pay and that’s when a doctor will take action. And, the action the doctor will take will be to treat the specific symptom you came in with – but the compensation model does not incentivize him or her to look at your health holistically and find the root cause of your illness.  This would require a multi-disciplinary, team based health care approach – say where a primary physician is working with a psychologist, nutritionist, and exercise specialist to take a proactive team based approach to someone’s health. In this approach the team is analyzing the patient from a systems viewpoint and focused on total health of the individual not just resolving the symptoms of one issue. More importantly, understanding the state of one’s health is influenced a wide variety of physical, mental, and environmental circumstances where the dots need to be connected to resolve the root cause of poor health.

So how do we have more people understanding the interconnections between themselves, others, and various systems overall? Otto Scharmer’s solution has been to create the Theory U and the art of Presencing. Essentially it is a form of raising one’s consciousness through a practice of mindfulness.

The model is about increasing our awareness to new levels, to see with fresh eyes and a perspective that allows us to move beyond the dualistic model of you and me to the holistic model of us and we.  When your awareness moves to that level you look to create solutions that are in the best interests of everyone, not just a small group of stakeholders. As Scharmer says :

The gist of the framework is simple: The quality of results produced by a system depends on the quality of awareness from which people in the system operate. The formula for a successful change process is not “form follows function”, but “form follows consciousness”. The structure of awareness and attention determines the pathway along which a situation unfolds.

Awareness and attention in the model is generated by the idea of Presencing: “Presencing is a blended word combining sensing (feeling the future possibility) and presence (the state of being in the present moment). It means sensing and actualizing one’s highest future possibility – acting from the presence of what is wanting to emerge.”

When we are truly present, we are able to remove the filters that we have built up over a life time of conditioning (from parents, society, schools, media, etc) and more accurately seeing the truth. That’s at the heart of the left side of the U – hearing, seeing, and sensing without these filters so that we can allow in a new reality. As the diagram shows, to do this we need to open our hearts and minds, and allow our intuitive self to connect to the Source of All. Once we make that connection, we move to the right side of the U and we start receiving guidance in any situation that goes beyond the small hard-drive in our heads and connecting to a much more powerful information source which can guide us to a new way of being and thinking that connects us to others. These new connections allows us to co-create new solutions that create win-win outcomes that go beyond the win-lose, win-at-all-costs, self-focused mindset of much of modern society.

As a global community, we must ask ourselves whether we are willing to accept that we are not separate from one another, but are ecologically, socially, and spiritually highly interdependent and connected. And if we agree that we are, are willing to lend a hand to one another?

Leading from the Emerging Future is an important and timely book. Many of our societal, economic, and environmental systems are under grave threat. Addressing these issues means we cannot keep looking at them through the same lens or consciousness that sees separation between things versus the connections.

Today’s real economy is a set of highly interdependent eco-systems, but the consciousness of the players within them is fragmented into a set of ego-systems. Instead of encompassing the whole, the awareness of the players in the larger system is bounded by its smaller subparts. The gap between eco-system reality and ego-system consciousness may well be the most important leadership challenge today – in business, in government, and in civil society.

Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer have given us a wonderful model of how to do that at a personal, organizational, and societal level and move from ego-system to eco-system thinking. You’ll find the book a wonderful and meaningful read and hopefully a great source of tools to put into practice into your own personal and organizational life.

You can also take Otto Scharmer’s MIT class for free on line at edX:  Transforming Business, Society, and Self with U.Lab

-Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

**Sign up for the Think Smarter World Newsletter here and download a Free Copy of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World**

Think Smarter World is a non-commercial site. All information is provided freely and with love for the benefit of humanity.

Here are some additional resources to aid in the elevation of your personal consciousness:

Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, by Marc Gafni
Mindfulness, Pathway to Divine Consciousness
The (re)-Discovery of the Human Energy Field
The Core Principles of the New Spiritualist
20/20 Consciousness
Seeing the Oneness of our Reality
Mindfulness – Experiencing Reality in HD
How Yogic Breathing Transforms the Mind and Body
What the Mind Needs to Tune into Cosmic Intelligence
Co-Creating with Source Energy – The New Paradigm of Success
Eckhart Tolle – Living with Meaning, Purpose, and Wisdom in the Digital Age (video)

The post The Next Generation Economy: From Ego-System to Eco-System appeared first on Think Smarter World.

Tech Icon Federico Faggin and the Scientific Search for the Source of Reality

The designer of Intel’s first microprocessor, physicist Federico Faggin, who went to on to start a number of other pivotal companies including Zilog, Cygnet, Synaptics, and Foveon has now turned his prodigious technical talent to reconciling spirituality with science and answering the question – What is Consciousness? Faggin has created a non-profit foundation to drive scientific inquiry into the origins of consciousness and hopes to use his deep understanding of quantum science to more clearly understand the true nature of reality.

In the last two years he has authored a couple of excellent papers outlining his thoughts on the origins of consciousness and how and why science should set its sights on investigating consciousness more deeply. In the article, “What is Consciousness”, Faggin tackles a wide array of topics surrounding consciousness including how to define it, is it possible to reproduce in machines, and how Quantum Physics gives us the clues that it is not a by-product of brain activity.  His explanation of the Quantum Physics behind consciousness sets the stage for how our current scientific paradigm of pursuing solutions as separate pieces to complex problems is ultimately futile:

We know from quantum physics (QP) that physical reality is an undivided wholeness, and that what appear to be separate parts is only a human construct, a fiction, an approximation. There are no disconnected parts because there are no real boundaries between parts and wholeness. An elementary particle in its unobserved and unconstrained state is everywhere at once. Only when it is observed it appears localized as a particle. Everything is connected with everything else. Therefore, the knowledge that can be gained by studying the individual parts in isolation will not be sufficient to understand the operation of the whole. Something vital will be inevitably left out. Therefore, the generally accepted idea that we completely explain the operation by knowing the operation of its parts is fundamentally flawed.

There are now many examples in our modern life where we have split into specialized separated units where the parts are being studied and focused on but the whole is being ignored.  Think of medicine – where specialists dominate the profession and often seem unable or unwilling to consider the health of the whole person, or higher education where cross-discplinary teaching is still rare.  You take a class from an expert in one area, which can be very beneficial, but in the real world, rarely do things stay neatly separated. And, if one looks at the current turmoil in financial markets, it’s painful to watch how the analysts and policy makers seem to make their judgements of the health and outlook of markets and economies through very narrow lenses.

Rarely do you see people making connections in a holistic way to the broader situation of our lives. This extends to things like dealing with climate change when people believe geoengineering (blocking the sun with particulates as an example) will solve the problem. Our environment is a highly complex interconnected whole, if you tinker with one part of it, you really don’t know how damaging it is on the rest of the system. The side-effects could be catastrophic. Naomi Klein highlighted this fact in her important book, This Changes Everything:

To quote Sallie Chisholm, a world-renowned expert on marine microbes at MIT, “Proponents of research on geoengineering simply keep ignoring the fact that the biosphere is a player (not just a responder) in whatever we do, and its trajectory cannot be predicted. It is a living breathing collection of organisms (mostly microorganisms) that are evolving every second – a ‘self-organizing, complex, adaptive system’ (the strict term). These types of systems have emergent properties that simply cannot be predicted. We all know this! Yet proponents of geoengineering research leave that out of the discussion.

The same goes for something like GMO’s – scientists say we’re just changing just one small piece of the organism – but that organism’s complexity is beyond their full understanding, so the repercussions could be dire. Faggin shows that this view has been built up through our current mainstream Newtonian physics paradigm over the last four hundred years:

Despite the evidence provided by Quantum Physics that reality is an undivided, nonlocal wholeness, we cling the Newtonian view of reality provided by classical physics (CP) where separate parts are held to exist in isolation; a view that has proven to be false. Further, non-locality is a fundamental property of quantum systems that defy CP because it instantaneously connects entangled particles, like two electrons that share a common property for example, as if space and time didn’t exist.

Mainstream science and medicine of course extends this thinking to the functionality of the brain, which they believe by the interactions of its parts, creates consciousness.  It’s as if the hardware in your computer, magically created its own software.  Faggin, who was the chief engineer on Intel’s first microprocessor and who certainly understands hardware and software, says that can’t be:

I believe we resist facing the fact that reality is much more complex than what our mathematical models say it is, in part because the complexity of our models is already daunting when we separate the parts, and if we had to also include the residual coupling between the parts, then the problems we need to solve would become impossible to compute. Consciousness is a holistic property, a property of wholeness, and there is no shred of solid evidence that consciousness emerges from the operation of the brain and is the results of atoms banging against each other. It is just assumed that consciousness must be produced by the brain, and therefore it must be an epiphenomenon of the brain since there is no other plausible way to explain  how it might occur by the interaction of atoms and molecules. But this is circular reasoning, and I believe it is time to scientifically investigate the possibilities that consciousness might have a different origin.

For Faggin, Consciousness is the prime creator, and the source of our universe.  He has postulated that the Big Bang itself was a result of the primordial energy or consciousness in the process of creation:

In the late nineties, I started considering the idea that consciousness may be a primary aspect of reality. In other words, consciousness may be an irreducible property or, aspect, of the primordial energy, or substance, of which everything is made. If true, this means that the energy of the Big Bang, the energy that created space, time, and matter is aware energy; i.e. in addition to containing the seeds of space, time, and matter this energy also contains the seed of consciousness, and therefore anything that exists must be inherently conscious. And the more I reflect about this conjecture, the more unification potential and explanatory power it seems to have.

If everything is consciousness, then everything is highly interconnected.  It doesn’t mean everything is the same – one only need look to nature to see the myriad amount of complex forms, shapes, colors, and textures. But underneath, you can sense the harmony and unified field of nature.  We humans are part of that unified field of consciousness, but unfortunately, we don’t all recognize that yet.  That’s what breeds conflict and the pursuit of ways of living that are not in the best interest of the whole.  The surface level differences fool us and hinder us in seeing the connecting matrix underneath. This is what the great mystics and spiritualists have been saying for years…”the other is actually you…”.  Imagine what a different world we would experience if more of us obtained this vision – of seeing the oneness among all of us.

Luckily, more people with Frederico Faggin’s technical background are helping us to put a modern scientific lens on the subject of consciousness so that we can better make sense of this illusive aspect of our reality. Especially as science is one of key tools of material creation, the sooner we realize that underlying all creative capability is consciousness, then the sooner we can accelerate our technical progress beyond the plateau we have currently reached:

From this hypothesis, it follows that the objective and the subjective worlds are then two faces of an individual wholeness right from the start. In other words, the nature of reality has inherently an inner and outer aspect, and the two are co-emergent and co-evolving. The inner aspect is consciousness; the outer aspect is the physical universe of energy-matter and space-time. Therefore the physical evolution of the universe mirrors the evolution of consciousness, and vice versa. One supports the other, and thus the physical world represents the outer manifestation of universal consciousness, and consciousness connects everything from the inside. The aware energy of the Big Bang is non-physical energy in the sense that it comes from “outside” the physical universe that it is forming, and the physical universe emerges within this  “expanding” aware energy. Consciousness and the physical world are just two aspects of wholeness.

So what does this mean for our modern scientific understanding? Well, a lot.  Over the last hundred years, two ground breaking discoveries in physics changed the landscape of our Newtonian understanding of the world:  Einstein’s theory of relativity and the unearthing of Quantum Mechanics.  They both brought the observer (us) into the aspect of creating our universe:

Believe it or not, Quantum Physics and General Relativity, let the genie out of the bottle when they discovered the intimate connection between the observer and the observed. The observer affects what is observed and there is no totally objective world out there that is independent from its observation.  [In other words, your thoughts create your reality and what you put your attention on is affected by that observation]. These new findings can no longer be wished away, and their implications about the nature of reality must be deeply explored, despite being difficult to accept. Since the nature of the observer is central to each of the two fundamental physical theories that have resisted unification for 90 years, I believe that physics cannot afford to ignore the study of consciousness because it might just be the missing link. By refusing to accept that consciousness may be fundamental, or perhaps the fundamental property of nature, physics may not be able to unify its two most successful theories.

Mystics and Spiritualists have spoken of the Source or God experiencing (observing and creating) life through us.  And in our human form, we then are co-creating reality with God. Scientific advancements over the last century have pointed us in the direction that this is in fact true.  Federico Faggin is asking his scientific peers to put their resources into furthering our understanding and confirmation of these findings.

Hopefully, more of the scientific community will take up his call to action. Because, imagine if we could all harness the divine creative energy of the cosmos. We could then transcend the limitations of our rational mind and elevate our consciousness into the realm of gods. We don’t actually need science to do that, but having the principles scientifically validated may allow us to control our physical reality in ways we are no where close to doing.  It could lead to new breakthroughs in medicine, energy production, space travel, food production, and much, much more. Now that would be Science worth pursuing!

-Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

Another Faggin article worth reading is his “A Framework for the Union of Science and Spirituality”.

 

*Sign up for the Think Smarter World Newsletter here and download a Free Copy of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World**

*Think Smarter World is a non-commercial site. All information is provided freely and with love for the benefit of humanity.

 

The post Tech Icon Federico Faggin and the Scientific Search for the Source of Reality appeared first on Think Smarter World.

Trevor Blake and the Physics of Success

Trevor Blake, the author of Three Simple Steps, has lead an inspiring life. Rising from poverty and a dysfunctional home in his childhood in Britain he eventually became an elite officer in the British military and most recently started and successfully sold a couple of medical / biotech companies.  What allowed him to make the transition from difficult conditions to ample life success was frequent trips to the library in his youth as a way to escape the difficult conditions at home.  There, he began to study the lives of successful people who had discovered how to harness the power of their thoughts to create and bend reality in their favor. Further along, he discovered there was a scientific basis for their techniques and though, most mainstream scientists did not view the world in this way, there were clearly connections to be made between quantum science principles and these techniques of the mind.

Blake went on to use these skills to achieve success in both his college, military, and corporate career in the medical device / pharmaceutical industry.  As he rose into corporate leadership positions, he even began teaching his colleagues how to use the same skills with good results.  With that track record in place, he decide to bring what he had successfully learned and lived into the form of the book Three Simple Steps. The book is both a biography of his very interesting life and his techniques to manifest his goals and desires into reality.

He’s also begun teaching an on-line course called The Physics of Success and if you have the opportunity, it is well worth experiencing.  Trevor excels at getting across scientific concepts in an easily digestible way and he brings what is inherently spiritual, into mainstream language without those references.  His is a more humanistic approach to the concepts of intention and manifestation and with a business man’s focus on using these things for personal success (an attractive approach to the “spiritually squeamish”…).  I of course think there are much more important reasons to use these techniques (for spiritual development and societal transformation) but if Blake can be a “bridge” to a wider audience to see the world beyond materialist reality, then that’s a positive.

That said, I’ve summarized some of the key points from The Physics of Success and I hope you will find it useful:

Lesson One

E=MC’2 – Energy and Matter are Interchangeable.  Energy in an isolated system never changes.  Thoughts are energy. Energy in an isolated system is constant.  Thoughts never die, they always exist in one form or another (matter or energy). Therefore, change your thinking and use the power of thought to create the reality you want.
“Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it.  Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality.  It can be no other way.  This is not philosophy.  This is physics.”  – Albert Einstein.

Three Quantum Physics key drivers of Energy:

String Theory – Inside Quarks, we witness dancing filaments of energy – like strings.  Vibrate at different patterns and make up the different particles around us.  String theory mathematics don’t work in standard 3 dimensional space.  It only works in 10 dimensions of space and one dimension of time.  Changing vibration of the ripples in the energy field changes the way “particles” appear to the observer.  If we change something in one of the dimensions we cannot sense, it has to show up in our 3-dimensional, five sensory experience. ( the recent movie Interstellar strove to bring String Theory to life for the big screen ).
Quantum Entanglement – Two particles can become entangled if they are close enough together and their properties get linked.  They can stay linked even after they are separated. When you measure or affect one particle, you end up affecting the entangled particle no matter how far apart they are. Once connected always connected.  If we change the way we pay attention to the past we can change how it affects us now, if we focus on a future we want we can connect it to us now.
Observer Effect – Also known as Wave-Particle Duality.  Reality is unset jello.  Everything is possibility until you observe it.  Once an observer puts its focus on the wave/particle, the wave collapses into particle matter.  Everything in our life only exists when we put our attention to it.  An atom only appears in a certain place, until you measure it or observe it.

So why are we concerned with what a particle may be doing or whether it is waving or not waving when we are not looking at it? When we understand that our observations and expectations actually influence the apparent behavior of reality, then we are empowered to actively play with interactive reality-creation. Reality is neither particle nor wave. It is both and neither simultaneously, and as co-creators with universal consciousness, we influence how reality shapes itself. Likewise, in our continual observations of our reality, and ourselves, we repeatedly collapse the wave functioninto a state of sameness, or a state of no-change. We perceive through the same lens of awareness, and that collapses the wave function from various possibility states into the ones we have chosen to observe for ourselves. Our limited lens of awareness creates perceptual biases that filter what we are able to notice and experience.

How we perceive life is a result of how we collapse wave functions. Our perspectives, our observations, our opinions, our thoughts, and our beliefs are continually collapsing the wave function from unlimited possibilities, to probability states, into what we actually observe and perceive as our experience. We see what we expect to see, and we are continually and consistently collapsing the wave function.

The act of observation creates the entire universe.  There are no objects, only relationships.  The world is based on consciousness. Practice the skill of observation to change the reality of your life.  Pay attention to what you really want, not want you don’t want.  Where our attention goes, energy grows.

How do you Match Frequency to a Certain Reality?

Thoughts

Brain has 100 Billion Neurons, 125 trillion signals/sec (more than all cell phone signals on the planet).  Some of those signals turn into kinetic energy, some into thoughts.
Thoughts produced by energy-driven neurotransmitters
Thoughts contain kinetic and potential energy
1gm water contains same energy as 20,000 tons of TNT
Brain is mostly water which weighs 1400gm  (you have a very powerful weapon sitting on top of your shoulders!)

Mentality control then is

Thought is isolated energy.  Therefore thought can only exist in all 12 space-time dimensions.
Thought entangles with similar thoughts effecting each other thoughout time.
Thoughts only exist when we pay attention to them.
Therefore, let go of the past and the future, live in the moment, focus on what you want.
Let go of the past and the future – “I did my best with the information that available to me at the time.  I release everything in my past and send it on with my love and best wishes.”  and   “By worrying and hoping for my future I destroy the present, by living in the present I control my future.”

Positive thinking is an illusion

You are bound to have unpleasant thoughts from time to time.  Thoughts are happening at the speed of light.  The key is how do you react to the thought you just had – change your thoughts to what you actually want no matter what thoughts have occurred just before.  Create a mini-movie in your head of the reality you do want to experience.  After that “React Forward”, take some action in support of your positive reality.  Think-Do, Think-Do, Think-Do.

Manage what we expose our minds to

When you watch something fearful, the thoughts you have are about you would feel in the same situation.  Have enough of those thoughts and you could create what you have been watching back into your life.

Be careful of complaining

Our brain works like a muscle.  What we get used to doing, our brain craves more of .  So, we keep complaining as a matter of muscle memory and continue to attract those things into our life.  Complaining is always about venting against something you don’t want.  Which is the opposite of mentality control – to focus on what we do want in our lives.

So:

Wear mentality shield at all times – visualize yourself wearing a an invisible protective cloak against negative energy.  take breaks away from people periodically during meetings to break the cycle of negativity
Watch inspiring media
Break neural connections with complainers / gossipers
Select commercials that are for what you want
Subscribe to beneficial sites and mags
Notice the love all around

Lesson 2

Higgs Boson

Called a particle, but actually a ripple in the quantum field
Higgs field is what gives subatomic particles their mass
Higgs field pervades all of the universe
Without Higgs we would exist only as consciousness

How do we improve connectedness through the Higgs Field?

If we improve connection strength we can change time events
If we improve connection strength we can access anyone and anything

“To experience everything, we must travel by the way of nothing.” –essentially we must let go of all fear, doubt, and expectation.

To strengthen your connection to Source Energy, Meditation and spending time in Nature are two of the most powerful tools available to us:

Benefits of Meditation

Increased Brain Functioning
Increased Flexibility of Brain Functioning
Increased Efficiency of Information Transfer in the Brain
Improved Perception
Improved Problem-Solving Ability
Increased Resistance to Distraction and Social Pressure
Increased Intelligence
Increased Creativity
Increased Self-Confidence and Self-Actualization
Improved Verbal and Analytical Thninking

Benefits of spending time in nature (validated through university studies)

4 % decrease in stress cortisol
Increased concentration
Boosts serotonin
Immune system boost
Increased test scores

Lesson 3

Intention Setting

Lewis Terman Study (inventor of IQ test):  Self confidence, discipline, and a tendency to set goals were the leading determinates for success (among high IQ children).

The difference between goal setting and intentions

GS:  Logic based, baby steps, believable, time dependent, outcome led.
Intentions:  Intuitive based, unlimited, belief not required, time is an illusion, purpose led.

Logic will get you from A to B.  Imagination will take you Everywhere. – Albert Einstein

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.  We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. – Albert Einstein

Key study on brain in 2011 (Cambridge) – brain cannot distinguish between what is real and what is imagined.  Both light up the corresponding brain centers.  [imagination is the key to creating our reality]

Properties of Ordinary Imagination

Instantaneous
Permanent
Unrestricted
Unlimted
Creates thought-energy
Exists in all dimensions
Time independent

Additional Properties of a (Mental) Wizard’s Imagination

Vivid
Wild
Huge
Detailed
Sexy/hot/vibrant/energetic/emotional
Happy
Love of Life

Imagination is a sexual/creative energy.  It is a state of ecstasy. Happiness, fun, dancing – is a great way to get into this high energy state.

Also, visualize a time where you were in that state – perhaps in childhood – no cares, just fun, and high energy.  You need to find what makes you ecstatic – you will manifest your intentions much more when you can often do that thing that gets you into that state.  When they say – ‘do what makes you the happiest’ – they’re not kidding!

Intentions are for achieving dreams.  An intention can only be one if:  When you imagine it you are awestruck and when you work on pulling present and future together to experience it now, you fall into a state of flow.

Flow = Superfluidity = All Doubt Removed

Superfluidity is a physics terms used to describe a “a state in which matter behaves like a fluid with zero viscosity; where it appears to exhibit the ability to self-propel and travel in a way that defies the forces of gravity and surface tension.”

When your neurons harmonize and create a neural network of peak clarity and performance with zero friction or viscosity you are in a state of maximum brain connectivity.  Superfluidity is the state of ultimate mental and physical performance.  You are in a state of knowing. –from Psychology Today:  The Psychology of Peak Performance

Make your intentions deeply personal

Imagination = Thought = Energy
Competing energies can cause destructive interference
Beware energy vampires
You can only have intentions for yourself

Constructive

Be for something you want, not against something you don’t want.
Imagine how it feels to be living your ideal future…now!
Use “I Am” or “I Did” – be present focused.

Intentions:  The 5 P’s

Purpose
Personal
Present Tense
Positive
Private

Removing Doubt with Superfluidity

Window shopping (go visit and look at the things you want)
Mini Mind Movies (happy scenes that keep you motivated to achieve your intentions)
Imagine your Ideal Day every day
Hyperbole, Sexy, Vibrant Daydreaming

The Winding Staircase

There is nothing to do on a staircase except climb the steps
Faith is unnecessary
Hope is poisonous
Discipline defines the winner

(Life fills in the details – you don’t worry about the things that are going to happen along the way to your goals and destination.  This is synchronicity.  You have to let the process work).

Discipline is all it takes

Take quiet time 20 minutes in the morning (in other words, meditate)
Mentality shield and disconnect
React forward
Imagine often your dreams as already here
Window shop
Remain unflappable
Specific imagineering creates self confidence

Life / Energy Field will sort out the rest

Lesson Four

Recap of highlights

Meditate every morning without fail
Go out in nature every single day.  You expand your senses and heighten your ability to experience other dimensions.
Bend time.  Imagine things already existing.  Re-imagine what has happened in the past, release from past events (forgive yourself and others), and new things related to those events will arise and happen, and in essence then, you will change the past.
Thoughts create 3D reality.
Set vivid, present tense intention.  Write out in paragraph form, read every day after / before meditation.
Create mini mind movies for yourself about what you intend.
Try to physically put yourself into your intended future – go see and touch what you want, buy products that remind you of the experience or product, etc.
Keep mind free of low-energy media.  Instead, flood life with positive media. [see 21 Ideas to Free Your Mind from Mass Media ].
Where focus goes, energy grows.
Let go of the past, keep mind clear, forgive yourself and everyone.  Throw all doctrine out.   Live in the moment.
Write out your key intentions every day (hidden) on whiteboard or pad, etc.
Read books about people who want to become like.

Trevor Blake has provided through his book Three Simple Steps and his Physics of Success course a fresh modern day look at using the Power of Thought to craft the life we desire. Take a look at Trevor Blake’s website where you can sign up for his Monday Morning Podcast series which is very good. Also visit his page where you can sign up for the online Physics of Success course.

~Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

Sign up for the Think Smarter World Newsletter here and download a Free Copy of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World.

*Think Smarter World is a non-commercial site. All information is provided freely and with love for the benefit of humanity.*

 

The post Trevor Blake and the Physics of Success appeared first on Think Smarter World.