Well Being

Basically, consciousness is the unfolding story that the brain tells itself about its own existence. But the brain is aware of much more sensation than what it weaves into the story of the "now" for each person. That story may interweave with events that happened previously as well as events that might happen in the future, but the "now" is the story of consciousness at each moment. Approach and avoidance is essentially about avoiding danger and finding food and a suitable mate. But the higher brain function also helps us in dealing with more transcendent themes.  There are those with transcendent causes who dedicate themselves to a sense of honor, a life of courage, and a commitment to something greater than themselves.       "A transcendent cause must be truly heroic, timeless, and supremely meaningful.”     - Robert Lewis According to Daniel Kahneman there are two concepts of happiness. In a presentation on TED TALKS  he referred to a story about a man who attended a concert of beautiful music, which he enjoyed very much. But at the very end there was a horrible screeching sound. The man said it had ruined the experience for him. This points out that there are two distinct parts to our experiences: the experiencing self and the remembering self. The brain is a powerful pattern-seeking device, always looking for meaningful patterns and associations between the information it is receiving and what is already stored.  The brain can even use co-incidences to create or discover patterns. It simplifies what it finds and reports the info to us as if it was a story. How this story turns out is often about its ending. The experiencing self lives its life continuously from moment to moment, and most of these moments are lost after a few seconds or minutes. So they are not transferred into long term memory, and are ignored by the remembering self. Yet, in a sense, these moments are our life in real time. Kahneman says the remembering self is the one that makes the decisions. We actually don't choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences and anticipated memories. There is a kind of tyranny of the remembering self, because it chooses whatever seems less bad. And actually we make future plans in the service of the remembering self. Industrialization has changed everything profoundly and rapidly, and the pace of change continues to accelerate. Stress levels are increasing along with increasing population, and complexities of the environment, and the economy. Many people are dealing with health issues complicated by addictions, violence, pollution, inadequate nutrition, and more. About half of the population is expected to get cancer and one-third to have diabetes. A toxic lifestyle significantly contributes to poor health and various disorders, causing body and mind to function less than optimally. Low energy, frequent or chronic sickness, irritability, allergies, trouble sleeping and mood problems are only a few symptoms. Bad air and water are also big factors, and soil depletion means food quality is seriously declining. Compounding the problem most of us eat highly processed or fast food which is usually grown with pesticides and herbicides, and likely preserved, colored, and flavored with synthetic chemicals, and high sugar, salt, an fat content. The brain is particularly susceptible to toxic chemicals, heavy metals, and inadequate nutrition. Factory food is ever more likely to be irradiated, or laced with antibiotics, synthetic growth hormones,  pesticides, and diseased animal parts, stimulants and even tranquilizers . Also, we are continually exposed to toxic household cleaners, skin care and body products made from chemicals, chlorinated and fluoridated water, and tens of thousands of untested synthetic chemical and plastic inventions.  Most people don't even get much exercise, and readily turn health responsibility over to insurance companies, HMOs, and conventional doctors who may have had little or no education about stress or nutrition. Which leaves the use of prescription drugs as the only option available. In the U.S about 77 % of people  regularly experience physical or psychological symptoms caused by stress. Psychological therapy, empathy, and love have too often been replaced by drugs. Over 60 million Americans are prescribed tranquilizers each year for anxiety and sleep disorders. After using the drugs, many users find that they can’t achieve happiness and relaxation without tranquilizers, and they become dependent on the substance. That helps explain why Pharmaceuticals Rank as The Most Profitable Industry, and are some of the most influential and richest companies in the world. The annual turnover in the pharmaceutical industry for prescription drugs is estimated to be worth 700 billion dollars - or $ 100 for each person on earth! Even with a prescription, tranquilizers are not recommended for long-term use. Addiction rates are soaring. Millions of tranquilizer addicts exist in our world today. This potentially dangerous class of drugs used to induce states of relaxation and feeling of artificial tranquility. The National Institute on Drug Abuse identified Barbiturates—a type of tranquilizer—as a factor in approximately one-third of all reported drug-related deaths. To some extent, toxic living is a lifestyle choice. But the problem is hugely complicated by a whole paradigm based on synthetics. Multinational corporations, governmental agencies, medical authorities, and the media combine to expose us to various harmful chemicals, and drugs prescribed to manage resultant conditions, creating even more toxicity and disease. We are hard wired to continually scan the environment for any threat of danger. Anything in that category gets our immediate attention and automatically takes priority over other sensory input. People who create movies and TV shows know a lot about how to use this to their advantage because advertising companies have spent big bucks on research about how to get your attention and sell stuff. The media is very negative. Perhaps you have noticed that as TV screens get bigger they also get noisier and more violent. The idea is to keep you riveted so you can't look away, just like when there is a car wreck, and traffic slows way down to do some gawking. But this has led to an toxic competition of "can you top this?"  Sensationalism and gratuitous violence has run amok. Research indicates that media violence has not just increased in quantity; it has also become more graphic, sexual, and sadistic. Adam Curle writes that  much modern violence stems from peoples' alienation from their societies and from their sense of common humanity. And an antidote to alienation might be a positive response to contemporary violence. Not only is there a lesser focus on objective journalism in favor of a profit motive, but is also dominated by a type of editorial bias in which events and topics in news stories and pieces are dramatically over-hyped to increase viewership or readership numbers. This media violence is desensitizing the mind to violence and leads to more real-life violence. The American Academy of Pediatrics reports that by age 18, the average American child will have viewed about 200,000 acts of violence on television alone. Many people think that violent media have no effect because they’ve never killed anyone after watching a violent TV program or film or after playing a violent video game. Of course violent media isn’t the only thing people enjoy that might harm them. There are many other examples, such as French-fries, chocolates and other unhealthy food, alcohol, tobacco, and street drugs. Researchers have consistently found that people believe the media have a much stronger effect on others than on themselves—called the third-person effect. People may also believe that media violence may affect some “susceptible” people (e.g., the mentally ill), but it will not affect them personally. But hundreds of studies conducted over several decades have shown that violent media are in fact harmful. "A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself." - Joseph Pulitzer In America. Rarely does the public gain a glimpse of how tightly controlled is the entire media establishment. 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media.  Hollywood, the television industry, big-time sports, and the commercial publishing houses are mostly run by the same few people. Concentration of media ownership (also known as media consolidation or media convergence) is a process whereby progressively fewer individuals or organizations control increasing shares of the mass media. All of the media industries experienced significant corporate reorganization, beginning in the 1980s, as they became concentrated under the ownership of fewer and fewer companies. "Following the same course that virtually every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless  series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths. "The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state."   -David McGowan The top one percent of the population now own about 40% of all wealth in the US, including half of the country's stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. The top five percent own an additional 29%. The Institute for Policy Studies illustrates this massive disparity in financial investment ownership, noting that the bottom 50 percent of Americans own only .5 percent of these investments. Only 147 Companies Control Everything (Forbes). In fact, only one percent owns half the world. The weapon of media silence....An iron curtain has been drawn in front of Western audiences who are maintained in a state of ignorance about important current events....   Manlio Dinucci And as a result, their operations have been almost totally deregulated which has allowed media conglomerates to become even bigger Goliaths. They've been given substantial public assets at no cost and with few obligations to the public. Because a vigorous and vigilant media is essential to a democracy, Bill Moyers has devoted significant reporting time not only to press coverage of specific issues, but also to ways in which media's impact and journalistic power have been diluted by media consolidation, government deregulation. Moyers and others believe that "Dollarocracy" is Destroying America through a lethal combination of big money and big media which is sabotaging our elections and government in general. Big Business Has Taken Control of the U.S. Government. The Tyranny Of  The Remembering Self works on a subconscious level. When the brain doesn't  find a conscious pattern we're just "going by our gut," unconsciously. There are so many stressors and global problems that as individuals the temptation to despair may become overwhelming. Avoidance is instinctual self-preservation, while approach is learned, except for the basics such as food and sex. Happiness and well being are very different. The remembering self is narrow minded and only wants happiness. But the experiencing self is better able to be objective. The problem is that in today's world there is much to be avoided. What ordinary consciousness does is to act as our guide through time and space, telling us what to approach and what to avoid. But conscious is more than just combining bits and bytes of data like a computer, because it also integrates emotion and even intuition. Higher consciousness or "mindfulness" is where we begin to become aware of consciousness itself. This shift into higher consciousness is helpful in learning what makes us happy or unhappy.  As an alternative to escaping reality, mindfulness is a state of active, open attention to the present. When you're mindful, you observe your thoughts and feelings without judging them good or bad. Instead of letting your life pass you by, mindfulness means living in the moment and awakening to experience. Mindfulness has various approaches, but a good start is to unplug or better manage media intrusion into your personal serenity. If we focus on the endless problems of the world, our sense of  being overwhelmed can immobilize us. But rather than seeking to escape reality, we need to find a positive approach. The more negativity we experience, the more we need a coping strategy. If we take baby steps, we begin to move forward again. Listen to our podcast Avoid negativity (especially in the media) - it only drags you down. Look for what is right, not for what is wrong. Practice optimism and hope.  Experience positive emotions fully and show some self-compassion.  Believe in something bigger, something better. Remember your dignity when making choices.  Well Being  -YouTube  Aaron Abke - polarities  .

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  Mind - body - youTube There is a place on the Internet where you will find on a single page many links to media files of people discussing these and similar ideas. Lynne Mc Taggart  http://www.wddty.co.uk/thefield/  http://sec.noaa.gov/SWN/  http://www.wddty.co.uk/thefield/conference_main.asp