Kindle Notes & Highlights
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January 19 - February 28, 2020
Bill McGarey,
his work with intentionally imprinted simple electric-circuit devices that can enhance liver enzymes and shorten the lifecycle of fruit flies is revolutionary.
how humans can do extraordinary things. What kind of physics is required? After daily meditations on this question, six months into my time at Oxford, I realized that there was no one else to do it. It had to be me.”
Can human intention affect materials? And if so, how does this happen?
she and Tiller have a daily meditation practice, which they have done for more than fifty years.
Tiller often talks about “the bridge of understanding.” The main emphasis is on the general unifying principles that emerge from the great mass of detailed observations. A bridge does not “solve” problems or “explain” mysteries; a bridge merely helps us to locate them, identify them, and get across to the other side of greater understanding and coherence.
A bridge had to be built to benefit mankind, to unify two great and complementary pathways to Truth: science, and Spirituality.
Tiller offers advice—not all of it based on decades of theoretical physics or conducting lab experiments, on the big eternal question: How should we live?
Copernicus inked his quill
and assuredly placed it on the Sun as the still point and set both Earth and Mars orbiting.
it and the other planets must revolve
around the Sun.
With heliocentrism, the entire entourage of planets arrange themselves so that the planet with the shortest orbital period, Mercury, orbits closest to the Sun, and Mars as well as the rest, such as the sluggish Saturn, fall in order proportionately.
Copernicus’s system had a logical coherence that Ptolemy’s lacked.
Sooner or later, the Judeo-Christian world had to make a titanic shift in mindset and belief. No longer the center of God’s
Creation, the Earth became just one of the planets. By extension, this also diminished the primary position of God’s highest Creation, humankind.
Copernicus was a revolutionary because he showed us that there was an intellectually respectable alternative to the accepted conception of the universe at that time.
When doubt is wrapped up in prevailing political beliefs and cultural attitudes (what Germans call the “zeitgeist“), facts often not only fail to
persuade but may further entrench skepticism.
In the third dream, René Descartes saw an encyclopedia, the famous
“What path shall I follow in life?”
Descartes glimpsed the project that was to be his life’s work.
Descartes recalled “how many diverse opinions touching on the same subject matter there may be, all supported by learned men, though not more than one of them can ever be true.”
Descartes took the view that nature could be successfully conquered only by redescribing reality in the language of mathematics, thus purging the visual world of all that was merely visual, and then by testing these descriptions in experiments.
The Discourse on the Method,
a “practical philosophy” whose precepts yield “knowledge which is very useful in life.”
we could “render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.”21
a world of matter possessing a few fundamental properties and interacting according to a few universal laws.
Descartes formulated the modern version of the mind–body problem.22 The mere fact that you think or doubt proves your own existence. His famous phrase, Cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am,” captures this ethos.23
To appreciate the extent of Descartes’s continuing presence, consider the triumph of scientific rationality and its handmaiden, technology.25
Half of what you learned over the past five years (and will learn over the rest of your professional life) will be wrong. You just don’t know which half.
Descartes’s miraculous science—to “break down each part” in hopes of becoming “masters and possessors of nature”28—yields new chemical medicines.
pharmaceutical industry has been pulling rabbits out of its hat for fifty years and is starting to run out of rabbits.30
While genes play a role in life and disease, there are innumerable epigenetic triggers that differentiate us from mice and each other. Yet genetic testing will be as cheap as buying a few coffees.
Pay
attention to the body’s energy systems, as illustrious medical colleagues Kathi Kemper and James Oschman and qigong master healer Chunyi Lin have done.
The highest yield for future medicine will come from fields generating the most
interesting, exciting, and surprising sorts of information, most of all surprising.40
Barry Marshall, the hardscrabble Australian doctor
intentionally gave himself a stomach ulcer. He saw with fresh eyes surprising information about the presence of “corkscrew” bacteria in ulcers and solved the mystery of a deadly condition thought
to be caused not by infection but by stress alone.41
Stress cultivates H Pylori, which cultivates a duodenal ulcer
The beginning is to recognize that we are all Souls and we need a body, like a suit, to experience distance–time reality.
People are moving to complementary
and integrative medicine (CIM),
The main reasons they do so are disorders I see in my clinic every day: arthritis, back and neck pain, and fibromyalgia.
One category, however, was an outlier: energy
medicine, which includes reiki, tai chi, and therapeutic touch. Compared with the other categories of CIM, rheumatologists did not believe energy medicine approaches were beneficial for osteoarthritis nor would they recommend them.
The randomized clinical trial investigated the effectiveness of tai chi to alleviate fibromyalgia symptoms.47
Master healers have pointed out that qi is the vital force of life. Whatever this biofield or lifeforce is, it exists as a component within our space–time continuum, and, as with any continuum, no endings or empty places are allowed.
So if lifeforce is a field phenomenon, then the science that deals with physical fields should be able to explain life, and
