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February 8 - April 16, 2022
I use this cloud weight example to demonstrate that we often question the veracity of particular theories or ideas simply because we know very little about them, or sometimes even because we’ve heard other people refer to them as unscientific and it would seem sensible to adopt the same viewpoint. We’re social creatures, after all.
Biology will always follow perception. When perception shifts, so does biology.
To a large extent, the brain doesn’t distinguish real from imaginary, and this underpins some aspects of the placebo effect. When you imagine that something is happening, it really is happening as far as your brain in concerned, and it releases the chemical substances necessary to confirm that what you’re imagining is indeed real.
Both positive and negative feelings can be induced in a real situation or an imagined one. Just as your brain doesn’t distinguish between a real stressful event and an imagined one, it’s the same with kindness.
In each case, you feel how kindness feels and your feelings trigger the physiological effects as a consequence. Thinking of things that annoy us fuels feelings of stress, and subsequently the physiology of stress. Thinking kindness does the opposite – thinking kind things about people, which generates kind feelings, can be a simple way to reduce stress.
One of the reasons for this type of effect, says Kristen Neff, an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, is that empathy is ‘I feel with you,’ while compassion is ‘I feel for you.’ When we feel compassion, we share the person’s suffering, as with empathy, but we also have an honest desire to see the person become free of their suffering. Some of our attention shifts from sympathizing with their pain to wishing them freedom from it. This is what loving-kindness practice helps us to do.
The practice in meditation isn’t not to think, but to notice that you’re thinking. The goal is awareness; stillness is a side effect.
People with higher ACE scores are much more likely to be hospitalized for an autoimmune disease, even decades into their adult years. In particular, one study found a 100 percent increased risk of rheumatoid arthritis in adults who had had an ACE score greater than two as children.14 ACE score is also linked with chronic pain in adulthood and research suggests that it’s caused by disruption in the development of pain-processing regions of the brain.
Writing helps us to get stuff out of our system, but that’s not the only thing that’s important here: writing also helps us to become more aware of how we’re really feeling about things. There’s a balance to be struck.
No matter how far inside we look, we tend to find smaller versions of the whole.
To see eternity in a grain of sand.
Empathy can make a person feel calm, but it can also stimulate the production of oxytocin – which has been shown to impact cardiovascular function by reducing blood pressure via the stimulation of nitric oxide release – boost immune function, and affect the rate of healing of wounds, even after surgery. For these additional reasons, empathy alone, before any prescription or treatment is given, can heal.
It’s estimated that more than 70 percent of all doctor visits are stress related.
Like Dr. Chatterjee, and a growing number of doctors who take lifestyle very seriously, she views five lifestyle-based active ingredients in doctor treatments as important beyond any drug prescribed. These five components that influence health are physical activity, nutrition, community, sleep, and stress.
As we discussed in previous chapters, anything that helps to make a person whole or helps restore them to health, then, is healing. This can mean the sights and sounds of nature, relaxing music, the warm smile of an empathetic doctor, or the gentle manner of a complementary therapist. It can also mean good nutrition, exercise, meditation, sleep, rest, and releasing repressed negative emotions. It can mean herbal supplements, vitamins, and it can be prescribed drugs or surgery.
Some of its effects may also include an active ingredient of ‘energy on energy’ – that is, the electric or magnetic field of a healer’s heart impacting on that of a patient.
A healer is someone who can maintain a state of calm in the face of someone else’s anxiety, fear, stress, or discomfort.
For more information on emotional contagion and how it works, see my book The Contagious Power of Thinking (Hay House).
Some birds even have a photopigment in their retinas containing a molecule called cryptochrome that allows them to see the Earth’s magnetic field as clearly as we might see a road with lines painted on it.
This is because representations and other symbols can and do affect our thinking, how we feel, and even our brain and body chemistry. For example, letters and words have no meaning of their own – they’re merely symbols that represent things for us. But these symbols clearly impact our feelings and behavior, and for this reason, some cognitive psychologists refer to the mind as a symbol operating system.23
How a person understands the way something works shouldn’t be of concern; in many circumstances, the fact that it does seem to work is more important.
Just because I may have formulated a scientific mechanism in my mind of how something works, it doesn’t give me the right to minimize a person’s practice by taking an intellectually superior position. And it also doesn’t make me more right than them.
Crystals, like drugs, have to be considered as part of a whole system of active ingredients, all working together – the person, the medicine (drugs, reiki, or crystals), the doctor, nurse, healer, or therapist, the environment, the sounds, and so on. In this way, there’s a psychological entanglement between the person and the medicine, whether it’s a painkiller, a person, or a crystal. We must treat the medicine, the therapist, and the environment as a whole.
Of the various forms of synesthesia, the most common is grapheme-color synesthesia, in which letters and numbers are always perceived as colored, even when written in black ink on a white page. In spatial-sequence synesthesia, numbers are perceived as locations in space; for example, the year 1970 appears smaller or deeper in the page than the year 2021 because it’s further away in time.
We think of our eyes as cameras that take snapshots of reality, but they’re not. No one sees actual reality. You just see your reality. Your perception shapes your experience.
As humans, we mostly see the same sort of picture, but that doesn’t mean it’s the true picture. If we underwent some fundamental change in the way our senses perceive things, then the world would suddenly appear alien to us. It would be the same world, but we’d perceive it differently.
Many neuroscientists and physicists believe that the 3D world we see is a shadow of something more fundamental, not unlike the shadows on the walls described in Plato’s allegory of the cave. Each species, or perhaps each consciousness, creates ‘reality’ in a different way, forming the colors and...
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Our perception of the passage of time depends on how old we are, and time appears to speed up as we age.
don’t see reality as it is, but as we are – as a representation of our conscious and unconscious states and beliefs.
‘Knowing that reality is one of the symbols in an interface, can we manipulate reality with our consciousness?’ he wrote: ‘I’d say we’re doing it all the time. We’re so conditioned to believe that what we see is hard reality that the strength of this belief prevents us from seemingly changing reality. But the reality is that we’re changing it all the time, but in a way that fits with our belief, hence we tend to not notice, or interpret the experience as chance or normal.’7
Galileo established mathematics as the official ‘language’ of science. But the problem with this, according to Goff, is that while math is great at helping us understand how things work and how they interact, it doesn’t tell us anything about what things actually are.
If you wish to know more about panpsychism, I’d recommend Galileo’s Error by Philip Goff; if you’d like to explore the nature of consciousness and the hard problem, The Conscious Mind by David Chalmers is a good choice. If you’re interested in a Buddhist fusion of science, spirituality, and consciousness, try The Universe in a Single Atom by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Avoiding either of these hard problems is idealism. In his paper ‘Idealism and the Mind–Body Problem,’ David Chalmers writes, ‘When I was in graduate school, I recall hearing “One starts as a materialist, then one becomes a dualist, then a panpsychist, and one ends up as an idealist.”’
Consciousness is a unified whole. In an ocean, each wave seems individual – each might even experience itself to be individual – but it’s part of the whole ocean. The wave rises out of the ocean and eventually, at the end of its lifecycle, it falls back into it again. Everything that we know is simply a part of the whole.
As I sat with Anita and her husband, Danny, one evening in Glasgow, Scotland, after we’d both spoken at a conference there, I asked her what it was like. The only words that can adequately describe it, she told me, are ‘I Am.’ It was an infinity of experience, a one ness with all things, she explained. To add anything to those two words would make the infinity seem smaller. This type of experience has been shared by thousands of people who have had NDEs.
Is this where Judeo Christian I Am That I Am came from
However, there are thick strands connecting you with the people with whom you do feel a bond, whether they’re family, friends, or loved ones, and perhaps even with people you’ve not yet met but who are likely to play an important role in your life.
This phenomenon is called telepathy, or the less mystical-sounding ‘correlations between the neural states of people who are separated by a distance.’
They’re telling us about a measurable effect of consciousness irrespective of physical distance – that we can sense things and that if we hold a compassionate intent for someone, we can sometimes help them.
One of the pillars of science is to investigate and understand phenomena, not to dismiss it without looking at it.
In discussing this and other general psi research, Dick Bierman, a Dutch psychologist with a background in molecular physics, wrote, ‘We’re satisfied that people can sense the future before it happens. We would now like to move on and see what kind of person is particularly good at it.’4
We’d conclude that no human could run this distance in under 10 seconds; it’s a preposterous idea. But this is what actually happens in psi (and other) experiments. In many other fields of science, we can (and do) easily miss phenomena when it appears to be far from the norm.
consciousness of the person or people doing the research can’t be separated from the experiment itself.
In physics, the concept that an experimental result can be tracked back to the consciousness of the experimenter is known as a von Neumann chain (or von Neumann-Wigner interpretation). It relates to observations of quantum mechanical systems in which the consciousness of an observer is thought to ‘collapse the wave function’ and determine an outcome being measured.
Wishes Fulfilled: Mastering the Art of Manifesting, Dr. Wayne Dyer wrote, ‘If you believe it will work out, you’ll see opportunities. If you believe it won’t, you will see obstacles.’3
Perhaps the most common misuse of imagination is stressing what you don’t want for yourself.’
Practice maintaining calm when things seem chaotic. Practice holding your focus on what you want – even when reality is showing you something different or when people around you are critical. Practice being kind, even when others aren’t. Meditation can help with all this. Even against the backdrop of circumstances, mental practice can help you paint the kind of picture you want of your life.
Many events, then, happen not because they’ve been causally created – although there will seem to be a logical series of events that led to them – but because the real force shaping them was that they were already connected. Those involved in these occurrences are simply drawn to make conscious and unconscious choices that result in them happening.
Predestined
Those by Dean Radin are a good place to find much of it collected together. I used some of Dean’s books, including Real Magic and Entangled Minds, as the basis for some of the sections in this book, and then read the papers to which he referred. Larry Dossey’s excellent Prayer Is Good Medicine and The Power of Premonitions are good resources too, along with Lynne McTaggart’s The Field and The Intention Experiment, and the titles by Rupert Sheldrake I refer to in Chapter 9.
I've read or collected most of these
