I need to watch the movie again. This was a good reminder of the concepts, but the visuals and interviews make things stick even more. It's been over 10 years since I last saw the movie. Lots of stuff to practice once you understand the concepts. Practice, practice, practice.
"The goal of science in all these cultures was to gain knowledge in order to harmonize human life with the great forces of the natural world and the transcendent powers that all cultures sensed behind the physical world. People wanted to know how nature works, not in order to control and dominate it, but to live in accord with its ebb and flow." pg. 14
"Dr. Newberg continues: 'The brain has to screen out a tremendous amount of information that is really extraneous for us. It does that by inhibiting things. It does that by preventing certain responses and certain pieces of neural information from getting ultimately up into our consciousness, and by doing all of that, we ignore the chair that we're sitting in. That is, screening out the known. Then there's screening out the unknown . . . If we see something the brain can't quite identify, we grab onto something similar ("It's not a squirrel . . . but it's something just like that.") If there's nothing close, or it's something we know to not be real, we discard it with, "I must have been imagining things."'" pg. 54
"In Journey to Ixtlan, Carlos Castaneda recounts one of Don Juan's lessons: to 'Stalk Oneself.' In other words, to learn one's own habits like you were studying prey, so that you can trap yourself doing your habitual and do something totally new." pg. 57
"The bottom line, at least as far as science has gone up til now, is this: We create the world we perceive. When I open my eyes and look around, it is not 'the world' that I see, but the world my human sensory equipment is able to see, the world my belief system allows me to see, and the world that my emotions care about seeing or not seeing." pg. 57
"Memory (past) --> Perception --> Observation --> (affecting) Reality" pg. 85
"According to Dr. Dean Radin, there's a very good reason why we don't manifest things right away: 'Everything you do, everything you think, all your plans spread out and affect the universe. As it turns out, though, most of the universe doesn't care, and that's why our individual little thoughts don't immediately go out and change the universe as we see it. I can imagine that if that were the case, if each of us were so powerful that our fleeting whims would go out and affect the universe, we would go out and destroy ourselves almost instantly." pg. 119
"If all these theories prove to be correct, that means that an individual's consciousness is constantly scanning all the future possibilities, maybe even going into the future to 'taste' whether to marry someone or not, and then focusing, or collapsing that chosen possibility into reality. The 'how' gets handled by the immensely interactive superintelligent universe that automatically responds to consciousness because that's what it is. The universe IS the computer that keeps track--that's why it's here. And if it can create self-repliciting, self-conscious life forms, it can fix a flat tire.
And how does this view make creation more conscious? Well, to many people the future is on the other side of a great wall, past which they cannot go. So those possibilities lurking out there are not seen, and when they do show up it's a surprise, or a shock. But realizing that those potentials are real, and they can be developed, manipulated and collapsed, takes us over the wall and into the future where the new you awaits." pg. 134
"Who is the 'I' that is creating? If it's the personality, then the creations are from the existing structures, habits, propensities, neuronets, and from that old personality structure, all that will be created is the same old, same old. Creating what has already been is hardly creating.
Or creating is coming from the higher self, the God self, in which case it's usually unconscious and the workings of some deeply buried karma. So while the creations are wonderful to the spirit, to the disconnected personality, they seem arbitrary, unfair, and give rise to the feelings of powerlessness and victimization.
Whereas this technique takes advantage of the moment of no-self, or, new-self. From this 'I' something truly new can be manifested. Something that you consciously create. And to create this way forever undoes the trap of victimization and disempowerment." pg. 136-137
"But this excuse network comes crashing down if we accept that consciousness creates reality (CCR). This is the most practical aspect of CCR. It means that you have created your life and your world. You may bitch and moan because you can't seem to have what you want, when in fact, you do have what you want. You are living the life you chose to live, the life you believed you could live." pg. 143
"It is that the non-determinism of the quantum level of existence, the randomness and the fact that probability rather than absolute certainty governs quantum reality, gives us the only possibility for free will. . . . In short, says Satinover, 'Quantum mechanics allows for the intangible phenomenon of freedom to be woven into human nature. . . .The entire operation of the human brain is underpinned by quantum uncertainty.' This is because 'at every scale, from the cortex down to individual proteins,' the brain 'functions as a parallel processor. . . .These processes form a nested hierarchy, an entire parallel computer at one scale being but a processing element in the next larger one.'" pg. 161-162
"What this says is that by continually holding the same intention over and over and over, by posing the same question to the universe over and over and over, we change the quantum probability away from randomness. . . .But Dr. Stapp thinks that this phenomenon may show how the insubstantial 'mind' controls the very substantial brain: 'Quantum mechanics contains a specific mechanism that in principle allows mental effort to hold at bay strong forces arising from the mechanical side of nature, and allows mental intent to influence brain processes.'" pg. 164
"It's not surprising. It has been calculated that there are more possible connections in one human brain than there are atoms in the entire universe. Even in a small brain, the workings are incredible. It's been estimated that to solve the problem of a bird landing on a branch in the wind, the largest supercomputer would take days to calculate a solution, if it could. This problem may be computationally unsolvable. Yet bird brains do it all the time, and in no time." pg. 168
"Emotions help you. So emotions, which are themselves, in part, a neuronet, are tied into all the other neuronets. These connections allow the brain to find the most important memories first. They also insure that something important, like not putting your hand on the stove, is not quickly forgotten. It's why everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when they heard about 9/11 and the World Trade Centers coming down, or President Kennedy being shot." pg. 174
"The downside with associative memory is that because we perceive reality, and treat new experiences based on our stored mental/neuronal database of the past, it's difficult to see what is really out there in the moment. Instead, the tendency is to just reference experiences from the past. This would seem to create a perpetual Groundhog Day, where the same old, same old happens day after day.
And who would the same old be happening to? Who would be reacting to situations based on the past? That vastly integrated cluster of neuronets that we've been calling 'the personality.' Just like all the cells of the body come together and interrelate with each other to produce a functioning organism, so the neuronets all interrelate, or associate, to produce that entity that we think of as our personality. All the emotions, memories, concepts and attitudes are encoded neurologically and interconnect, the result being what has been variously called the ego, the son of man, the lower self, the human, the personality." pg. 175
"What this says is that every emotion has a chemical [molecules of emotion] (MOE) associated with it, and it's the absorption of this chemical in our body by the cells that gives rise to the feeling of that emotion." pg. 186
"As Dr. Dispenza explains, 'We're making an analysis of every situation to determine if it's familiar, and that familiar feeling then becomes the means by which we predict a future event. Anything that has no feeling, we automatically discard or we reject because we can't relate to the feeling.'" pg. 189
"The very beauty of the stimulus and response shortcut is the very thing that seems to trap us. Instead of evaluating a truly new experience from a fresh perspective, we tend to assume it's an experience we've already had.
When the same chemical events repeat themselves over and over again, the result is a cumulative emotional history. This history comes with identifiable patterns and predictable responses, which become embedded or 'hardwired' in our brains.
That means our patterns and responses repeat without our having to think about them: stimulus-response-stimulus-response-stimulus-response. The survival shortcut mechanism becomes a trap into the same thing over and over." pg. 189
"Joe Dispenza says: 'Well, I don't have a scientific definition for soul, but what I will say is it is a register of all the experiences that we own emotionally. And the things that we don't own emotionally, we continuously re-experience in this reality, all other realities, in this life, all other lives. So, we don't get to evolve. If we keep re-experiencing the same emotion, and never retire that emotion into wisdom, we don't ever evolve as a soulful person. We're not inspired. You don't have the ambition or the desire to be anything else other than the product of the chemicals in our physical body that keep us on the wheel of living our genetic destiny.
A soulful person overcomes the genetic destiny, overcomes the feedback from the body, overcomes the environment, overcomes their emotional propensity. Think about it. You want to evolve as a person, pick one limitation that you know about yourself and consciously act to alter your propensities. You'll gain something. . .wisdom.'" pg. 191
"But, of course, we can't really blame the world for our lack of focus. That's victim mentality. Rather, in order to get really good at exercising intent, we must desire to get good at it and make the choice to develop it. It's a chain reaction with extraordinary results." pg. 215
"To change, we intend the change. Intention is the result of a decision (free will) to change, and that decision arises out of a desire to change.
You gotta want to change. We mean want to change, desire it like you desired your first . . whatever. For the material world, the world of matter, runs like a clock and resists change, while the unseen world of the spirit calls it forth. The choice is which world to live in." pg. 218
"So is ESP (extrasensory perception) some sort of spooky action? Dr. Radin finds that by looking at the entire range of ESP phenomena as different applications of entanglement, they are brought under a unified theory. 'Let's assume that experience is entangled, then how would it manifest? And we can start going through ways in which it would manifest. If there's a connection with other minds, call it telepathy; if there's a connection to some other object somewhere else, call it clairvoyance; if there's a connection that happens that transcends time, we call it precognition. If there's a connection in which my intention is expressed out in the world somewhere, you might call it psychokinesis or distant healing. So you can go through a list of perhaps twelve kinds of psychic experience that have gotten labels over the years like telepathy, but this is really just the tip of the iceberg.'" pg. 248
"Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist who began investigating the anomalies of biologic systems. In response he has developed: 'The Hypothesis of Formative Causation [which] states that the forms of self-organizing systems are shaped by morphic fields. Morphic fields organize atoms, molecules, crystals, organelles, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, societies, ecosystems, planetary systems, solar systems, galaxies. In other words, they organize systems at all levels of complexity, and are the basis for the wholeness that we observe in nature, which is more than the sum of the parts.'" pg. 253-254
"The Entangled Minds theory brings the curtain down on the discussion by saying that the life force is the morphic field, which is an aggregate of minds large and small on the viability of life itself. It says life is not just random mutations, but emerges from an ever evolving, non-physical source. Consciousness creating reality." pg. 257
"We know coherence does something. It somehow, some way pushes random quantum events around.
Coherent intent does something even more, to borrow Dr. Laszlo's words: 'It marks the full achievement of divine creativity.'" pg. 261
"Nevertheless, think of all the times you didn't do something because you might be wrong or fail. In science there is no such thing as a failed experiment. That experiment was successful--it told you that reality does not work that way." pg. 266
"'How can we say that we have lived fully every day by simply experiencing the same emotions that we're addicted to every day? What we're actually saying is, I have to reconfirm who I am, and my personality is, I have to do this, I have to go here, I have to be that. A master is quite a different cat. It is one that sees the day as an opportunity in time to create avenues of reality and emotions that are unborn, of realities that are unborn, that the day becomes a fertilization of infinite tomorrows.' -- Ramtha." pg. 268
"And you just gotta wonder, why do we have these tools? These talents? Either it's an accident of nature or it's why we're here. It's pretty much one or the other. Obviously, the thrust of this book has been on the 'it's why we're here' side. All the creations of humanity spring out of the abilities, the human potentials, that we are in possession of. And we have them for a reason, which we're all in the process of discovering.
We have the amazing brain--the most complex structure in the known universe--that can and does rewire itself to continually maximize whatever you want to experience. Whereupon the brain rewires in response to that new experience--all under your control. Then there's the body: self-healing, self-replicating, and let's face it, a thing of beauty. And the mind, which has the ability to delve into the tiniest corners of space and time and then get huge and contemplate the big bang. And beyond." pg. 270-271
"Is the observer going to be a meddling one who always meddles and tries to become the central part of the experience, or can the observer be a witness and let the experience unfold itself? Some traditions are very good at it. The Hopi Indians apparently don't have a word for 'I' or 'we.' They emphasize the verb, the happening. They would say raining, loving. See what is happening? Ordinarily I make love to this person, right? But instead, if I say: Loving is taking place; two people are involved. One me and one my significant other. And then what is happening is loving. There is no I, there is no it. It's just loving. See the beauty of that transition? - Amit Goswami, Ph.D." pg. 280
"The self-imposed limitations are the hardest, well-nigh impossible to see, for the creator is in the creation, and by this all limitations are realized. . . . 'The greatest problem we as a human race have is accepting our own greatness. We just do not want to do that. We run screaming from anybody who would suggest that we are all-powerful in ourselves. Therefore, we're not able to manifest what it is we would wish to have.
If we could only accept who and what we are, and the real power that we have, then what we call the miraculous, which has shone forth in unfortunately all too few individuals in the past, that'll become commonplace. And we would learn the new science of manifestation, which is to realize that we have always, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year, been creating our own reality. There are no new powers to be learned. We already have them. What we need to change is the type of life that we are creating for ourselves. (Miceal Ledwith)'" pg. 284
Book: borrowed from SSF Main Library.