Showing posts with label intention and attention. Show all posts
Showing posts with label intention and attention. Show all posts

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Body - Mind


If the old paradigm was about taking things apart, 
the new paradigm is about putting things together.

When you want a cup of tea,  you boil water by adding heat which causes the water molecules to vibrate faster. When the rate of vibrations increase to the boiling point the molecules are moving so fast they begin to escape as steam. If you want cold tea, you add ice which is water that has been cooled to the point where water molecules vibrate so slowly that water becomes a solid.

Emotional energy changes your experiences in a very similar way. Anything that is alive has two basic motivations which are approach and avoidance (this-this or not this-not-this).  Approach is mostly about eating and procreation, while avoidance is mostly about safety and protection. Love and hate are the basic emotions. The more you love or hate something, the more energetically you approach or avoid it. Anytime you do anything energetically, or with feeling, it changes you.

The two basic ways to focus your energy are attention and intention. Using both at once synchronizes the brain and the mind which yields intensity, and if sustained, actually changes the structure of the brain and the body. A violinist strengthens the muscles of the fingers and arms as he practices the music and at the same time the brain actually grows additional cell structures to accommodate the understanding of  reading musical notes, key signatures, and dynamic notations.

Until fairly recently it was thought that you were born with all the brain cells you would ever have in your life. Neuroscience has shown that brain plasticity is very dynamic so that everything you do changes brain structure. If you develop an coffee addiction, then suddenly stop drinking coffee, you will get a headache because your brain has developed additional neurons to accommodate the additional stimulus from the caffeine. When you take away that caffeine, those neurons actually swell up and die, which causes physical pain. Similarly, your mind and body becomes addicted to anything you do repeatedly with intensity. That intensity can be focused attention and intention, or it can be a chemical stimulus (drugs).

From one point of view, the brain is an bio-electro-chemical mechanism. Input from the five senses is converted in chemicals that create electrical impulses that move through the nervous system firing neurosensors and synapses. It is like a two lane road with traffic going in both directions. The traffic going from the body to the brain senses our environment, while the traffic going from the brain to the body regulates movement, respiration, assimilation, and the growth and maintenance of the body.

But a mechanistic view of life has proven to be dangerous.  The mechanistic perspective is the idea we find in classical science which views truth as something to be discovered outside the mind, in the world.  It is empirical, rationalistic, reductionistic, and materialistic rather than idealistic.  In fact, it tends to denigrate the ideal, even while it seeks universal laws.  It is the most likely view to condemn subjectivism and to emphatically strive for a pure objectivism.  Since the goals of the mechanistic perspective remain independent from all subjectivity, it tends to focus on measurable quantity as the only significant quality, and on cause and effect over all other relations.

The mechanistic view often goes so far as to deny the existence of non-material qualities, even consciousness itself. Rationalism tends to denigrate matter, considering it corrupt, and sometimes dismissing it altogether, oblivious to the contradictions involved in such denial. This commonly results in a tendency to replace older explanatory structures, without consideration of the possible truths they may contain, with the “religion of science” we might call scientism.

In scientism, reality was seen as a universal machine, set in motion, perhaps by a Big Bang, constructed of elementary particles, governed by mathematical laws, and fully determined. This mechanistic view is often found, in people growing up in a modern society, especially among adolescents and young adults. It is a superficial, seemingly exuberant perspective  of power and practical application. Much of the successful side (and some of the dark side) of the modern world is due to mechanistic thinking.

According to the mechanistic world view the organism is passive. The body seen as mass object containing discrete parts. This medical doctors adopt Descarte's physics of physiology, a mechanistic view of life, for practical purposes. They examine and measure the machine-like workings in the body. The "constructiveempiricist" view of design is already part of practice of biology. Behaviorism is more concerned with behavior than with thinking, feeling, or knowing. It focuses on the objective and observable components of behavior. The behaviorist theories all share some version of stimulus-response mechanisms for learning.

Until recently, most doctors saw the human body is a machine and to cure the ills of that machine involves a mechanistic process, and the mind as being just an organ like other organs in the body. The severed view of the mind and the body that our society has embraced for so long has proven to be both inaccurate and tragic. It is amazing how little most people know about their own mind and emotions, never gaining real control of either.

Opposed to both the old mechanistic and vitalist interpretations of life and the universe is the new organismic view, which holds that the universe itself is a whole--a fundamental nondivisible unity --or that the wholes familiar to us that make up the universe or organic life are themselves basic. Organicism is the explanation of life and living processes in terms of the levels of organization of living systems rather than in terms of the properties of their smallest components

The hermetic tradition has long been concerned with the relationship between the inner world of our consciousness and the outer world of nature, between the microcosm and the macrocosm, the below and the above, the material and the spiritual, the centric and the peripheral. The hermetic world view pictured a great chain of being linking our inner spark of consciousness with all the facets of the universe.

Carl Jung thought that the collective unconscious contained the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual. In the Far East, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism refer to a Unitive Consciousness that transcends personality. This occurs when we (temporarily) deeply know that everything is connected, there is no individual self  because there is no meaningful distinction between self and other—the person is simply aware of being an integral part of the evolution of the cosmos.

Now we hear of the unified field theory using sacred geometry to link everything -- and ascension to multidimensional existence.  Apparently we exists in an intentional field comprising our mind, body, society, culture, and environment. The separable aspects of the intentional field cannot be understood apart from the field, and their relative importance in influencing social behavior is given by the field. Thus, the field is organismic, in the sense that its parts are not separable without changing both the part and the field. And the field is more than the sum of these parts.

Lynne McTaggart  writes about the Zero Point energy field, a potential power source she called a "cosmic free lunch," if it could be tapped into. Such energy systems also relate to intent and psychic experimentation, she noted, adding that it has been demonstrated that mental intentions are actually a tangible energy.  She explores the potential of intention, which she views as being more powerful when focused on positive purposes such as healing. To use intentions effectively, she suggests positing an outcome in the mind, as if it has already happened, and then forgetting about it.

A unifying quantum energy or "field" connects the universe, and shared various pieces of scientific evidence that relate to this theory. We can train our brains for extra-human potential, she reported. For instance, by practicing meditation, she said the brain becomes more synchronized as the quantum particles "speak" to each other better. And because of the way subatomic structures function, the world is not as fixed or final as it might seem, and all matter and  all living things are subject to influence from the power of thoughts. On this level humans are connected on a subatomic level, and as such are not separate from each other., and can access the farthest reaches of the cosmos.

McTaggart reported on the results of her initial intention experiment. In this experiment, she instructed a group of 16 experienced meditators in England to direct their intentions to four remote targets (two kinds of algae, a jade plant and a human volunteer -- all under stress) located in physicist Fritz-Albert Popp's laboratory in Germany. According to McTaggart, Popp and his team measured a change in the amount of light being given off by the targets during the times intentions were sent by the meditators.

McTaggart's extensive research of numerous scientific studies involving 'spiritual healing' has led her to conclude that the human mind has the capacity to change physical matter. As an example, she cited Elisabeth Targ's study, which examined the effects of distant healing and prayer on a group of patients with AIDS.

In a remote corner of Brazil, the man known as John of God is changing people's lives in astonishing ways, helping and healing many of the hundreds who daily come to his free clinic. Many thousands of people have been cured in the over 50 years that John of God has been fulfilling his life mission as a transmedium.

Apparently by the skillful use of attention and intention you may be able to affect the energy field of the body and improve your health by tapping into the powerful Subconscious Mind.  We all have this ability, and we all choose to utilize it to a greater or lesser degree. The effects of nature, nurture, random events, and past decisions are not eliminated, but can be modified by our ability to project consequences and by our power to influence choices - by our awareness.




"The next big frontier in medicine is energy medicine...."As we get better at understanding how little we know about the body, we begin to realize that the next big frontier … in medicine is energy medicine. It's not the mechanistic part of the joints moving. It's not the chemistry of our body. It's understanding for the first time how energy influences how we feel."     ~ Dr. Mehmet Oz

"Human biology is both an energy and matter field .... "The challenge for acceptance of such a radical view that the human biology is both an energy and matter field will come from many fronts but the fact is that the contemporary physics worldview fully supports this amalgamation of matter and energy. By understanding the subtle biologic energy field we can begin to understand not only the biological origins of disease but we can usher into our healing traditions a true system of disease prevention."     ~ Dr. Bill Dean

"The human cell is a teeming, electric-magnetic field of possibility or potential....Quantum physics has found that there is no empty space in the human cell, but it is a teeming, electric-magnetic field of possibility or potential. If we are creating ourselves all the time, then it is never too late to begin creating the bodies we want instead of the ones we mistakenly assume we are stuck with."     ~  Deepak Chopra