Reality and Illusion

 

Have you ever had a dream that you were so sure was real? What if you couldn't awaken? How would you know the difference between dream and reality? The Matrix took the world by storm when it was first released in theaters. It chronicled humanity’s post-apocalyptic war against the machines they helped create. Space and time are traditionally thought of as the backdeop to the universe, but new research suggests they may not be fundamental but an elaborate illusion. Physicists are starting to suspect physical reality is an illusion. The idea that we may be living in a matrix-like universe is called the simulation theory. Physicist Max Planck said "I regard consciousness as fundamental…" And other and scholars argue that consciousness is a fundamental quality of the Universe. "If we are living in a simulation, then the cosmos that we are observing is just a tiny piece of the totality of physical existence"   - Nick Bostrom Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. Beliefs inherited from family or tribe influence people's values and actions strongly. So your eyes and ears don’t tell you the truth. That’s not what they are for. The senses evolved to enable us to survive in the world, not to represent it accurately. The reality that we experience each and every day is what we must use to survive in our environment. A human body comes equipped to interact with only certain frequencies. But that doesn't mean other realms are not real. The visible spectrum is the tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to the human eye. The electromagnetic spectrum covers electromagnetic waves with frequencies ranging from below one hertz to above 10 25 hertz, corresponding to wavelengths from thousands of kilometers down to a fraction of the size of an atomic nucleus. So the visible light spectrum is only a tiny part (0.0035%) of the much bigger electromagnetic spectrum. In a similar way we ordinarily see ro experience only a small bandwidth slice of what we call physical reality.Increasingly there are reports from people who have experiences with what we think of as non-ordinary reality. Richard Feynman once suggested that nature is like layers of an infinite onion. With each new experiment, we peel another layer of reality; because the onion is infinite, new layers continue to be discovered. And they need not be simulations. A parallel universe, also known as an alternate universe, parallel world, parallel dimension, or alternate reality, which is a hypothetical self-contained plane of existence, co-existing with our own. The sum of all potential parallel universes that constitute reality is often called a "multiverse". Our universe would constitute just a small or subset of this multiverse. A person having a dream, or hallucination, or a Near Death Experience (NDE) tends to argue that the experience didn’t have the disjointed quality of being unreal. Some are able to describe details and events that happened around them while they were unconscious or clinically dead.  A lucid dream is a type of dream in which the dreamer becomes aware that they are dreaming. During a lucid dream, the dreamer may gain some amount of control over the dream characters, narrative, or environment. Lucid dreaming has been studied and reported for many years and has shown potential for overcoming fear and other healing effects. In ancient shamanic tradition, there are 3 worlds-states of non-ordinary reality that are richly layered over our consensual reality (the physical world most of us walk around in most of the time). You reach each reality level through the process of shamanic journeying. The lower world in shamanic reality, contrary to what many might think, is a place of discovery, exploration, learning, and healing. And the middle world in shamanic reality is the non-ordinary reality version of our physical world in which your consciousness first leaves your body, before you head to the upper or lower worlds. The concept of an otherworld in historical Indo-European religion is reconstructed in comparative mythology. Hinduism is a major world religion, with one of the longest-surviving pantheons in history. Within its rich mythology, elephant-headed gods clash with powerful demons and titans, preserver gods send out their avatars to restore the righteous order of the universe, and powerful sages challenge the gods themselves. Years, or even lifetimes of spiritual disciplines were thought to bring enlightenment to some. Our understanding of reality has changed over time. From the scholars of ancient Greece to the modern physicists of today,  there have been changes and breakthroughs about the way we view the world. Beginning with Anaximander’s discovery of the Earth floating in the sky and Democritus’ discovery ot the atom. There is now a twentieth-century paradox in modern physics. The West as a culture or civilization historically evolved out of Greco-Roman classical antiquity. But the rigid power structure of Western religion was almost too precarious to be analysed. Holy wars and the inquisition took a great many lives. Even mentioning possible alternate realities was forbidden. The 8th Ecumenical Council of Constantinople even  "abolished the human spirit" (as an abstraction). But just because we had it all wrong for a long time doesn't mean thhere is no divinity, though perhaps different than what we thought. And similary our idea of reality might also have all wrong.We think of matter as atoms that are an organized group of electrons and protons zooming around a neutron, but this figure is completely wrong. The particles that make up the atoms have no structure or size, no weight, and are just vibrating electrical energy. There could be infinite frequencies or types we don't  know about. Perhaps there is only one real thing which is the sum of all frequencies. It is similar to the idea that drops of water can exist without the ocean, but the ocean cannot exist without dtops of water. And this water can be solid, liquid, or gas. As gas it may be clouds or steam. As liquid there may be lakes, rivers, oceans or even floods. As solids there may be hail, sleet, snow and solid ice. But it is still just water. Human beings are conditioned to hold onto culture, beliefs, tradition and politics, even at the expense of our well being. Without knowing it, we usually live and express these distorted ideas, practices, and patterns that influence our perceptions of reality and in turn create our reality. Emotion is said to be the trigger that activates thoughts. Emotional reality, unlike physical reality, is created rather than observed. By and large, people create the emotional reality in which they live. Unfortunately the choice of which reality we create is usually made by default, a kind of habitual automatic pilot derived from temperament, metabolism, and experience. The human brain filters information within its default choices, processing that which conforms to them and excluding that which deviates from them. Beliefs inherited from family or tribe influence people's actions more strongly than those with weaker genetic bases. Indeed, highly heritable attitudes, such as political persuasions, may even steer our choices of the social "niches" we carve out for ourselves. If challenged we my not have reasons to justify inherited beliefs becuse to us it is a given that they are the truth. People simply believe that they are right in their own ideologies and cannot accept the ideologies of others which causes conflict. People's political beliefs actively demand of them that they ostracize those who do not fit with the party's agenda. Inclusion rather than isolation is the key to peace and happiness. There are basically only two human motives: approach and avoidance. But like other apparent polarities such as hot/cold,; light/dark; good/bad, each is only a degree of the opposite.   How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Many people want to believe that there are some extrasensory powers like the ability to read minds, foretell the future, communicate with the dead, or with "spiritual helpers." The internet offers many "psychics," and some offer "proof" of their abilities. As finite creatures we look to the infinite for true identity. Parapsychology is a growing field of research that studies a number of ostensible paranormal phenomena, including telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, near-death experiences, reincarnation, and apparitional experiences. Is mankind alone in the universe? Or are there somewhere are there civilizations more advanced than ours, civilizations that have achieved interstellar communication and have established a network of linked societies throughout our galaxy? Such questions are bearing on the deepest problems of the nature and destiny of mankind. Today for the first time in human history extraterrestrials have entered into the realm of experimental science. They may not all come  from other planets or galaxies, but from other realities, sometimes being invisible to us, to bring about drastic changes in our reality. So it may be that ultimate reality is like 3D TV with uncounted channels and bandwidths. Our body is like the TV and our brain (consciousness) is the tuner. And whatever channel we focus on seems more real than the other channels. Reality and Illusion "Reality" is constructed by your brain. How the Brain Resolves Ambiguity Unreal political beliefs Time and space proved unreal The Quantum Law of Being 3D, 4D and 5D Mass Awakening of Humanity Near Death Experiences Reincarnation - Suzanne Giesemann Some people say that Beyond the Illusion - there is no death The Next Big Shift

Shamanism

A shaman is a person who is typically thought to have the ability to heal the sick, to communicate with the otherworld, and often to escort the souls of the dead to that otherworld. Shamanism has evolved through many cultures and some form of it apparently goes back to the early human cultures. The word shaman originated among the Siberian Tungus (Evenks) and literally means "he (or she) who knows. The Evenki language is still spoken by Evenks in sparsely populated areas of Russia, Mongolia, and China. The shaman usually had  exceptional functions in traditional societies, including the leadership of the tribe, the development and direction of the rituals, the healing, and the knowledge of plants, herbal remedies, the advice and education. These roles are often combined. They often live away from villages, in a quiet and secluded place. The actual techniques and methods of the shaman are so unique that there is no way to standardize a comparison. The abilities of shamans are supposed to be: extra sensory perceptions, psychic powers that vary according to the traditions and individuality of the shaman (telepathy, prescience, vision at great distances, etc). And it can connect the underworld, the afterlife, that of living through a series of personal transformations and unusual thought forms, and awareness of hidden energies. Shamanism is apparently the oldest mystical tradition. It has a perception of the world that is now called holistic methods of healing based on the human body by using the Human Energy Field and & Universal Energy Field which among others includes the Chakra and Meridian systems. In this perspective of our body, mind spirit and soul, each of these modalities is integrated in Energy Medicine. Shamen were not "normal" people. The use of what we now call "the clairs," clairvoyance, clairsentience, clairaudience, clair cognizance are today likely to be thought of as psychological aberrations to be medicated into oblivion with psychotropic medications. There are those who have the psychic gifts and those who know that there is only one mind, and it is the mind of all things, the mind of the universe. We humans seem to individuate like so many drops of water to be lifted into the clouds by the light energy of the sun, only to fall as rain back to the mother sea. The New Physics and the New Biology tell us, or remind us that all is one. But the demons of self doubt trap us again and again. The five hundred year old Science Myth binds with its darkness that says only what can be weighed or measured or quantified can be real. Curious that the invisible corona pandemic brings us to a halt, forcing us to look down the throat of this dark demon that has been killing the forests, polluting the air and the sea, and cursing us with deadly diseases of the heart and making our  flesh cancerous. In the last century we  murdered 200 million people in wars and cursed the survivors with PTSD that takes the lives of veterans in even greater numbers than the actual military operations. And we allow the hedious demon of the military industrial complex to devour almost half of the Federal budget, with little or no accountability. This demon is very real and threatens all life on this planet.   As it becomes ever more clear that our present social and economic structures are unsustainable. Many people are earnestly searching for answers -- for a new way. But one of the oldest belief systems is seeing a huge resurgence. Shamanism is at least tens of thousands of years old. It is a way to connect to nature in ways that most do not Antique communities often depended on the shamans to protect and to mediate in assuring their well being. By monitoring the fertility of the land, the growth of the crops, the abundance of game and various aspects of the weather, especially the rain fall, they served the community. For example, in many Central and South African nations, kings and queens have been shamans who were expected to perform such magical feats as rain making and transformation into totem animals. Imposters were put to the test, and severely punished if they were unable to perform. So long before there were any scientists, doctors, or priests, shamen were usually expected to assume these and other roles in society, often had considerable responsibilities of leadership. Originally shamanism was a way of relating to the invisible forces of nature, the weather, changing seasons, night and day, the sun, moon and stars - and emotional issues such as coming into being and passing away. But eventually shamanism came to be a pawn of religion and politics. And more recently shamanism has been hijacked again, this time by the drug culture, and used as an excuse for excesses of that nature. But in spite of all this, shamanism may well be a viable approach to dealing with some of our current problems. People who were involved with drug use in the 60’s also began looking to religious ceremonies of Native Americans where peyote and mescaline were used. There are also references of marijuana use for spiritual and medicinal purposes in ancient texts, and books of Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, and Carlos Castaneda (his 12 books have sold more than 28 million copies). To these men getting high on drugs supposedly meant opening the doors of perception to a higher reality. They helped to define a new psychological landscape, but for many people it led to tragic drug addictions. Dangerous mind-affecting drugs may actually deepen a state of spiritual poverty and a lack of meaning in life. For many people the flower-power promise of self-centered, drug-obsessed anti-heroes has been a very real disaster. If someone claiming to be a shaman offers to sell you illicit drugs, they are probably a trickster or worse. So the more there is talk of drugs or money, the more caution you should apply.  Altered states of consciousness achieved by the use of hallucinogens is literally playing with your sanity, and in doing so, you just may lose it. Shamanism is a term that covers a wide assortment of beliefs and practices, generally for the purpose of enlightenment and healing. Mystical  and/or visionary states are sometimes employed by using various techniques, sometimes unseen,  such as breath control, fasting, meditation, drumming, yogic practices, and medicinal plants. Even under the guidance of an accomplished teacher these skills usually develop over time. A bit like learning to walk for the first time, it takes practice but for some,  is well worth the effort. Shamanism  claims the ability to travel to a pathway between heaven and earth (which in religion is known as the axis mundi).  As in the Garden of Eden, since Creation there has been the spiritual battle between dark and light, good and evil.  Enoch the patriarch of the Bible speaks of the language of light as waveform geometries of harmonic resonance that mimic the properties of light. The Enochian knowledge describes sonic equations, encoded within the ancient mantras and god names, capable of directly affecting the nervous system and producing profound effects of healing and higher consciousness states. The Divine Light and Kingdom of Light references can be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi, the Pistis Sophia and various other Egyptian, Persian and Syrian writings. The returning to the light from which we came, this merging of the light within ourselves with the Divine, is what the great Eastern Orthodox mystics called, Theosis, others call it Christ Consciousness, Nirvana, Bliss, Oneness, and Enlightenment.  Animism is the worldview that non-human entities, such as animals, plants, and inanimate objects, possess a spiritual essence. Shamanism has long asserted that the act of entering certain states of consciousness has the ability to affect the objective world around us. During the mid-20th century, advancements in theoretical physics led to a new view of reality among quantum physicists that resembles the shamanistic world view in fundamental ways. Modern Shamanism unearths age old body-mind techniques, bringing them back to the forefront of modern healing  practices through a lens filtered from training in a variety of physical sciences, such as biology, neuroscience, bioengineering, and psychology. In this way, shamanism becomes a unifying agent between the opposite ends of the spectrum - science and spirituality, creating and strengthening the link between these two fields.  It shares the benefits of neuroscience and ancient techniques of self-help, personal growth and transformation, and healing. Its purpose is to transcend the dullness and disenchantment which has become endemic to modern living and replace it with a renewed and authentic sense of wonder and enthusiasm, and restore our sense of meaning and purpose in life. Joseph Campbell said we live in a time without an adequate mythology suitable to live by. Whether we're aware of it or not, we long for wisdom and love, and knowledge of what seems to exist just beyond what we know as our reality. This other universe is commonly called non-ordinary reality and it is natural for humans to have questions about the forces of nature, the meaning of life, purpose, self, identity, death, and knowledge of the divine. Once every people in the world believed that the sun and moon were divine. We want to know about ancient myths about creation, and the elements of water, fire, earth, and air, as well as plants and animals and the wisdom of the ancestors.  There are not very many actual shamans but some of us can practice some of their abilities such as developing your intuition, and learning yogic practices.  Russell Targ teaches Remote Viewing. Jeffery Mishlove hosts a whole series of interviews with mind-over-matter experts and parapsychology. Other people teach Reiki and other healing techniques. Jesse & Jeane Stern and many others teach meditation and stress reduction techniques. Also Energy Healing Techniques are available. Links: Shamanism -theseer Shaman Portal Shamanism -Eastern Healing Arts.com Shamanic Traditions Shamanic Podcasts    Sounds True  Hank Wesselman Sandra Ingerman on YouTube Jose & Lena Stevens, The Power Path Sian Sullivan -Shamanism and Environment The Psychosis of Spiritual Awakening Ancient Realities  Quantum Physics and Shamanism The Rebirth of Nature Teacher Plants