Bridging Consciousness And The Brain

It would not surprise many to discover that many neuroscientists today think human beings are automatons. Consciousness, they say, is an "epiphenomenon" of the biophysical rhythms of the organism - human being - that we are.

They say everything occurs through "perception-action" cycles, where whats perceived influences how the organism acts next - back and forth, back and forth - we are nothing but cycles.



It would also surprise many of you to discover that this view has a lot going for it. We know, for instance, that what happens in the brain from moment to moment passes through certain 'stages', or gateways. It's true, that the brain is always active, and its activity is constantly integrated, global, and thus system-like. But this does not mean that the brain doesn't give away some internal logic to the structure of it's design. Evolution, perhaps the most astonishing concept man has ever thought up - because it is so true, and makes everything that exists make sense (i.e. big bang, matter, biological evolution, mind) - provides us a framework to probe the logic of our construction.

Understood in a basic "3 step" way, the functioning of our organism is first assessed for it's "relevance" to the wellbeing of the organism. At the sides of our head lie the amygdala. Deep beneath the temporal lobes, almost like the front lights of a car, the amygdala scopes out the EXPECTANCY of the organism; it triggers behaviors by determining whether the object in the environment is A) safe or B) Advantageous.



The amygdala, as can be seen, is importantly positioned between the visual cortex (at the back of the brain) and the frontal lobes (the front of the brain). Said differently, it is between Perception (visual cortex) and action (frontal cortex). Action is planned in the front, while what is "picked up" in the environment is in the back.



The first stage, at the amygdala, the meaning of an action sends out signals to the front and the back (action and perception), which guides the visual cortex to focus upon certain aspects of the environment, and the 'executive consciousness' i.e. YOU, to think in a certain way about it.

It should be pointed out that the brain is an ENORMOUSLY complex structure with 86 billion neurons, 85 billion glia, and nearly 1 quadrillion synaptic points of connection between neurons (via dendrites and axons). The processing power of the brain is truly infinite, as the possibility of all possible connections is a number that requires a smaller number above it.

The number of cycles happening in the brain at all times is too mammoth yet for our scientific prowess to understand, but the basic logic of the materialist, "epiphenomenal" position is that one process activates another process which activates another process. Thought of differently, these neuroscientists and philosopher who believe in epiphenomenalism work from the point of physical matter (physics) towards the beginning of life (prokaryotic cells), to cells with a nucleus and a mitochondria (Eukaryote), to the development of "species" of multicellular units that formed larger and larger systems of interaction between themselves and the chemical environment outside them.

Eventually, we were born.



And what we are, according to these committed materialists, is a feedback loop that has taken on incredible complexity with its structure, built over evolutionary time, following the simple laws of "natural selection": directions which favored the current needs of the organism were "selected", and if they proved useful, they survived to pass their adaptation to the next generation.


Now, if you follow my threads, you would not be that surprised to know that I find this view enormously implausible. That is, I find the sheer dismissal of the paradox of consciousness not being anything "physical", and yet accepting it as an "epiphenomena", but demoting it to a mere "effect", because, of course, how could anything other then physical matter be causative, to be a ridiculous act of hypocrisy (since it acknowledges consciousness as a "by product" i.e. a duality, but refuses to acknowledge its causative powers).

The idea that the contents of mind and the concerns of consciousness and the attention and needs of the living, searching and sensing mind matter to the organization of physical matter (neurons) is not new, but was laid out by the great neuroscientist Roger Sperry in the late early 90's. Sperry called it "emergent interactionism", or, the notion that contents of consciousness provides the information needed for organizing the behavior of consciousness - and not neurons, since the latter are not qualia - percepts - and do not educe meaningful feeling states, that then 'inspire' changes in nervous structure.

So, the question ultimately is, what is mind? Mind, for a person who takes it seriously - and understands that its very 'existentially' quality designs the subsequent qualities it'll later experience (in a never ending cyclical flow with itself) is NEVERTHELESS 'tied up', or entangled within, the action-perception cycles of physical matter! An incredible, spellbinding, and magical enigma! Called the hard problem for a good reason, mind exists in matter, yet somehow, has become directive in it's functioning. Meanings - qualities - values - morals - pain - suffering - laughter - joy - play. Physical matter provided not merely 'building blocks', but a dynamic processes of mysterious feedbacks, leading up, as it were, almost invariably, to the construction of a being that could know it's own existence - and be inspired by it - amazed by it, and drawn forward towards a point just ahead, perhaps awaiting it, that says "I am that".

Most people experience this state as compassion. I see it as that, but also, amazingly, the concept of homeostasis, of stability within a particular state, seems almost synonymous with compassion. Compassion, when brought to the self, or to the other, stabilizes affective states and allows the mind to think more clearly about itself and it's embeddedness. Altruism - as the Buddhist Monk Matthieu Ricard, writes - is a homeostasis that we as a society need to move towards. A sense of good will, a sense of kindness, are not merely "etheral" states, but embodied - change the body - and change the brain, so that it becomes automatic to experience the world as a good place. And the need, or the cynical pity-party, some people unconsciously engage in, is entirely, and utterly, unnecessary.

The most amazing thing about consciousness is that it brings a moral and existential order to the world, that is in NEED of it, because we ourselves, born from species that consider its own regard above all others, are somewhat tied between two poles - the more ancient - and the more recent. About 400,000 years ago our brains evolved to know "the other". Homo Erectus was a self-absorbed ape. Homo Heidelbergensis evolved into a larger social creature. With the change in the number of people surrounding us (a quantitative feature of the environment) ancients humans evolved brains that were 400-600 cc's greater in volume. ALL of this cortex was the result in an deepening of social awareness, emotional and empathic awareness, with pride states, but also shame states to tame them; faces evolved to be visible and delicate, so as to communicate subtler micro changes in expression - thus communicating deeper parts of the mind within.

These ancient men and women are the source of our present day biological capacities. It is from them that we owe our awareness, our consciousness, and our intellectual abilities.

Intellectual skills, after all, are reducible to increases in memory capacity, and increases in situational awareness; with greater memory comes greater ability to 'link cognitions' together; and with greater sense of your position in your environment comes a sense of an individual self - the basic groundwork of being a complex, social being who creates languages, culture, and all the rest of it.

Evolution works on grand scales though! We really didn't speed up our evoution until recently - last 10,000 years, with agriculture. Then states, then kingdoms, then empires. And finally, we came to the time known as the "industrial revolution", which provides the means (as well as epistemological framework) for the scientific revolution.

I think consciousness, whatever it is, is causative. Because I accept the meaningful significance of the mind, how, then, does it bias the bevhavior of neurons? Some say its through the calcium ions that pass between the membranes.

Only time will tell....

I always bring up this point, but it is interesting to note that Protists neither have a brain or a nervous system, yet they can perceive the environment and make decisions based on what they perceive. They seek out food, and conditions, purposefully, coordinating their cilia to move in the direction they 'desire', avoiding dangers, etc. Observing them in a microscope, it seems that they are conscious of the environment, and of themselves.

----

Mind and consciousness are one of those words that people use, yet people have different notions about them. Notions are not reality and are false. So when you ask 'what is mind?' or 'what is consciousness?', it is a funny situation because there is no agreed notion of what you refer to, thus the question has no definite meaning.

originally posted by: Astrocyte
Bridging Consciousness And The Brain

We perceive 'thoughts' just like we 'perceive' everything else; sun, moon, stars, frogs, these bodies...
Neither 'thought' not 'Consciousness is manufactured/'created' in that wet lump of meat in our skulls! *__-

'Materialism/physicalism' is a long obsolete theory.
Quantum mechanics has hammered the final nails into 'that' coffin!

"It is neither the eye that perceives 'light', nor the ear that perceives 'sound', nor the brain that perceives 'thought'!" - Book of Fudd

Existence = the complete Universe = Nature = Reality = Consciousness = Truth = Love = 'Self!' = God = Brahman = Tao = ... etc....
ALL INCLUSIVE!!
'One'!

I have long thought that the brain is a transducer for the mind, which is elsewhere. Where? Don't know...

Heart/brain/mind connection....




www.mindfulmuscle.com...

On one hand you have the ideas that mind is non-local, on the other hand, in many cases of brain trauma or disease, there is a great effect upon thinking, perception and memory. So I think we can at least conclude that thinking and memory is dependent upon the brain. I am not sure this says anything about mind or consciousness..

originally posted by: nOraKat
On one hand you have the ideas that mind is non-local, on the other hand, in many cases of brain trauma or disease, there is a great effect upon thinking, perception and memory. So I think we can at least conclude that thinking and memory is dependent upon the brain. I am not sure this says anything about mind or consciousness..

Well, of course it doesn't, otherwise we would not be able to survive death when the brain dies. The considerable evidence provided by NDEs, when full visual and auditory awareness by the patient of what was happening and what was said in an operating theatre when his EEG were flatlining and his eyes were covered, demonstrate beyond all reasonable doubt that consciousness is not a epiphenomenon as materialists claim.

a reply to: Astrocyte

There is a great deal we are not certain about for sure. You might like to look up Re-Discovering the Mind in Psychology Today of Aug. 1980. There is an article by a Yale Professor of Microbiology who documents Nobel Laureates in all hard disciplines of science had to acquiesce to the view that the mystics were largely correct. Today we have Gravitational Wave Theory facts rolling in and those researchers said (on Quirks and Quarks a year ago) that metaphysics will soon be viewed as more correct than old physics. I was a member of a John's Hopkins website called Brain-Meta now (was Mind-Brain.com) and had various debates with AI and professor types. The owner of the site (Sean) co-authored or gave input to my book Integrating Soul & Science. He was open-minded and already a member of the CDC even though still getting his doctorate (eleven years ago). I think I have seen him working on Epigenetic issues and carrying on where we left off.

A few months ago at the U of Va. they discovered what I knew when I first saw the Psychic Points chart and lymph system diagram. It also is connected with the neurophysiology design map and chakra diagrams. The head of the UVA research project correctly used the word esoteric in describing why what they proved makes all textbooks obsolete.

Although what is easily observed in the response to stimulus cycles you are simplistically addressing do happen - there is much more potential for actual conscious and unconscious realization (Bucky Fuller) and manifestation (Cardin, Heisenberg, Heraclitus etc.).

Here is a brief look in on some of that.

Synchronicity and Semiotics

Silence is my favorite moment when surrounded by sheep or going within.

Noise is better if disturbing growth can make me feel what I can know beyond a certainty or just a true fact.

Do I know the meaning of any entelechy or teleological process that ontologically and epistemologically confronts the landscape I read in books? Do the scholars who reduce observation gradualistically to remove all spiritual force ever know more than the juxtaposition of symbols or letters making those words? The distance between letters in a word does not make the energy in the symbol which became the letter after millennia of contemplation and changing dictionary defining agendas; disappear. That energy can gematrically and geometrically cause insight or memetic coalescence known as mind control. Fuller knew sacred geometry far better in a mathematical manner than I ever will. When I really try to read his work in books like Ideas and Integrities it takes me forever to grasp a small amount of what I know is there. His Spaceship Earth and my 'at - One - ment' are ships passing in the night, unfortunately. But I do try to DO what he called 'creative realization'.

Is it true that an event can never be duplicated? How, if that is true can we create a Template or perfect thought which Teilhard de Chardin spoke about? In the thought expressed about the Observer of the Observed by Bucky Fuller do we find design consciousness affecting each part being observed in a manner not unlike Heisenberg included in his Observer Principle or causes energy and matter to disappear due to measuring such as the Australia University people just observed when reducing light to particle and/or wave?

Can you truly have a soul mate if you and your loved one are changing, growing and knowing more about yourself and the Self? Or should I say how can you have a soul mate if you are not both changing and growing according to the same design inputs? Wouldn't it be wonderful to spend time with all the synchronous forces affecting each of your 'carass' type of relational experience with people. Kurt Vonnegut created the word carass from 'caring' and a 'morass' which becomes what most relationships are - not just a rut - a real morass.

What are those synchronous forces? I cannot simply label them as g-d or a similar word if I hope to know more than Jung who does something akin to that according to his interpreters. I do think he and I would agree words limit our ability to conceive what we DO and how every action has an effect though not always equal or opposite. I would love to know more about the vectors of energy design in Bucky's vision of sacred geometry and yet I would also love a moment alone with a person who does not want to know any of this. Trust unites a soul more than the Bodhisattva quest. A Rishi contemplating his navel might 'see' more than a logician like myself who waffles or wavers looking for a place to land.

Ah yes, Zeno's Paradox and Lynds who Wheeler supported even though Lynds had no sheep fool-owing him or the skin of sheep to prove he was right. Is there a point I am making? Is it possible to make a point with mere words? The continuum of energy from hot to cold or good to bad never stays static. Does the Oroborous snake or dragon ever eat it's tail? Can that snake ever wear a high hat and crawl under a rat's penis? Is Bohr right about a great truth having an opposite which is also true? There are an infinite number of possibilities and our science has tried to cram them into constants.

If energy is in thoughts as I do think - and it coalesces with like energy - you have synchronous effects which can affect outcomes also including different energy.

In that sentence you have the next great revolution if WE can maintain or regain control of the World Mind.

designconsciousness.blogspot....hronicity.html...

This is out of date but still worth reading - Poseidonius living on Rhodes is the probable source for the Antikythera which is still being researched. His writings were all destroyed because they told of prior 'keltoi' (ancient ones) who had advanced knowledge which Greeks and subsequent Empire builders (to this day) seek to usurp and deny. After all if normal people knew Brotherhood worked for many millennia they might want to try it again. I would prefer co-operation to Synarchy - but I do not blame the elite, I blame ignorant average people more. Poseidonius is quoted in the writing of other scholars like Herodotus who was denigrated as a fiction writer because he told the truth about the Amazons. His account of Sybaris was proven in the 1970s by archaeology. Homer lead Evans and others to Troy and Knossos. here is the article I wrote near the beginning of my effort to tell some truth about humanity.

www.redicecreations.com...

a reply to: rtb1234

Hi there.

You seem to know a lot, but I feel the need to share something with you.

Living 'ecologically', is all about paying attention to what exists around you. What value do we want to bring to the world we relate with? The cognitive scientist George Lakoff points out that fear and empathy (or compassion) activate mutually inhibiting networks in the brain (this has been experimentally demonstrated with fMRI), so that when were exposed to a 'fear' word, or image, action or vocal sound, our brain becomes activated to respond to the world with reference to pre-existing evolutionary modules, or habits "embodied" as physical neural structure (proteins, nucleic acids, fats, sugar etc) which, as studiously explained by the biochemist Nick Lane, themselves represent STABLE thermodynamic states.

We should - and can never - let go of the awareness of thermodynamics, lest we allow ourselves to fall into this:



What should we pay attention to? When we think, we should be far more concerned with epistemology - that is, in how we think - than with ontology ((or how we assume, or reduce, the world when we make propositional statements). This is why I give evolutionary theory precedence in all my thinking. All around us exists an organic world that follows thermodynamic laws. Only in a state of 'dynamic equilibrium' can an organism persist to reproduce itself. Notice the logic in this thought: we assume 'life', only after physical matter has found a positive feedback that operates through the logic of quantum-chemical reactions. This means 'stability' precedes life. Life emerges, and evolves, from a state of physical stability.

Throughout your post I saw some interesting ideas, but I was also a little "off-out", that is, physiologically activated, by the manner in which you communicate yourself. If you understand systems theory (and I imagine you may know much about it) then you should know that the physical 'boundedness' of our brain, and the psychological openness of our minds, means that we are always unconsciously "linked" to the world around us, which unconsciously activates parts (or what the UCLA neuroscientist joaquin Fuster calls 'perception-action' cycles in the brain, themselves "sentineled" by the relevance detection of the amygdala) of our personal history.

For me, psychoanalysis is the highest science. When people become too idealistic, too hyper-aroused by their own ideas, they often fall into "dissociation". What I called idealization, is what the brain does. We have a whole pre-history before the emergence of our self-awareness. Keep this in mind: the parts we need to control are the parts which have been shaped by evolutionary exigencies: throughout our being, and in our minds, lies tendencies towards dissociation of contents that interfere with our personal needs in the moment.

If you even register a feeling of shame, or anger, or impatience, or irritation, you have it within your being to be selfish, and intolerant, of the other. I have a lot of this in me: but I try my darndest to be aware of it! The same cannot be said for the majority of people, which is not quite their fault either. The mind, as said, is 'compartmentalized' an naturally dissociative. Different situations (ecological contexts) can draw out of us certain ways of being, or certain 'selves'. This is because there is an evolutionary 'logic' in our construction that gives precedence to biological functioning over psychological well-being. I want to emphasize that this is basic neuroscience - from my own field, traumatology - which has been experimentally demonstrated, as well as seen in any person who has suffered early life abuse.

Psychoanalysis - or paying attention to our psychodynamics, with reference to evolutionary (adaptive) logic, allows us to monitor ourselves so that we don't get carried away in our statements, assertions, or unconsciously enact actions designed to sustain positive affective states.

Nothing you have written strikes me as wrong, and in fact, I'm sure you have very many interesting views on things.

However, I feel you are allowing yourself to communicate in ways that necessarily activate unconscious programs in other peoples brains. Which, I wish to stress, is not an ecological way of existing vis-a-vis other sentient creatures.

I do not write this with any desire to denigrate you, but just as a mindful reminder, said with as much awareness as I can muster about the way the world can make us self-organize, that you would be much more effective in your communications if you resisted, for example, describing something I've written as "simplistic" - knowing, of course, what kind of unconscious frames (feelings, since it suggests something negative about me) will be activated in me.

It's important to care about these things. If an 'earth mind' exists, it probably depends on our understanding the way we relate to one another - how we affect one another; and perhaps this process of "self-discovery" or "mind discovery", is all about realizing how evolutionary processes have constructed us.

Finally, we are people, with personal histories, and so 'history' should always take precedence in our thinking when we make assertions about things. What we need to pay attention to is how other people affect us. Because our brains, and our minds, were themselves constructed out of evolutionary dynamics that turned the "other" - whom we were unconsciously seeking an interest in - to become internalized within us as the 'subject-object' duality.



It was through empathy, or the emotion of "connection", that the mind emerged. However, we still have a "reptilian" brain that motivates primitive behaviors - such as getting away from what harms us and seeking advantages for the organism. This logic, it needs to be emphasized, is built in us at the most basic, neuronal level. Neurons self-organize in these ways. And the brain stem-vagus network, in particular, is the part that organizes primitive body-brain homeostasis, with the 'self' as being primary and the 'other', a mere object which we can project our needs upon.

These two diagrams attempt to explain how the intrauterine-2 year period forms a fundamental 'background' upon which later-life mental functioning derives.





The point is, always be aware and concerned with the other, otherwise your attempts to communicate your knowledge will unconsciously be dissociated, because the speaker didn't apply the fundamental logic of word-brain-affect processes in framing our perception of things.

All very interesting and yet biased to your own area of expertise. Trauma is indeed important and fMRI and SPECT-PET and other brain-mapping does prove many things MORE than your limiting "off-putting" scope. I would appreciate knowing if you read Re-Discovering the Mind or my shortened version of it as well as other insights in the links provided.

Psychoanalysis was fathered by Jung (Freud even said he was it's Prince) and Jung is the originator of the current word or use of Synchronicity.

The other word in one of my titled parts of that one post, is Semiotics. Like ontology and entelechy or epistemology it covers and overlaps many things. You also sue the word Ecology in a specialized jargon related manner. It gets really "off-putting" (your phrase) when you further demonstrate limited uses and meanings of the word Empathy.

Now if we took each of these words and agreed on what meaning we would use in further dialogue we might have a basis for what Covey calls Active Listening in his first book on 7 Steps. His next book addressed Empathic Listening but I will say he too only knows part of what Empathy is. His specialty being more vernacular application in conflict resolution. Such expertise is valuable and especially in Interventions such as you probably deal with - in what you mention about family or relationship areas of abuse. It is probably my third best expertise after ancient history and philosophy and metaphysics or what is called the Occult (as Jung attempted to know).

Proceeding as if you followed what I said , or presuming you saw some area of further discourse would offer you some opportunity to learn - WHICH might be foolish. I am a fool in the good sense I hope. It is my major hero's best quote perhaps - "A fool thinks he is a wise man, a wise man knows he is a fool." Or as in the Tarot card "Fool" which is one of the best cards to get despite many thinking otherwise. It indicates a willingness to grow and learn, without which people never get away from your perception/action brainwashing cycle.

Jung was going to try to get a team together towards the end of his life (Marie Louise Franz was one who was willing) to demonstrate the way divination works and what meaning is available (NOT pre-destiny I expect). He also is a hero of mine.

His collective UNconscious would have changed (It was already in the process) to a unification of conscious and the layers called UNconscious. It would in fact mean (If he had achieved that - as others subsequently did with machines - see Futurescape) a whole lot more than your "earth mind" or 'animus mundi' and even more ancient Gaia.

In that regard you might find an article of mine titled Mind-Machine Interfacing (It was once on Sharon Weinberger's blog at The Washington Post), then get past your chest-thumping about neuroscience and start into the rabbit hole of the God Helmet. As you say " you would be much more effective in your communications if you resisted," - I say - we are world's apart but we could be ONE. "Love is absent space" as Sartre said.

I hope your quote from Frost does not mean you are fool-owing The Secret. It is appropriated and derivative at best - at worst it leaves whole areas of necessary meaning behind and causes more pain for society seeking power rather than the wisdom of the Magi it was stolen from/ Stolen is perhaps harsh. it is good to read The Kybalion it was taken from - and begin the process of awakening which wisdom acquisition allows.

I do not know how to create a new thread here yet, maybe it will just take time before I am allowed to do so.

Because you have an interest in abuse I presume that interest includes what this little post addresses.

I would have posted it under the tile War on Women along with my article Women are More Powerful if I could have.

Just in case you think the title War on Women is over the top the women who lead the Cathars like Esclaramonde du Foix were definately in a war. It is dealt with a little in this quote about a beginning and purpose to make women the equal of men (parfailts and perfecti being the titles of their men and women priests) especially rare as late as the 13th Century but it certainly was a war. There are minor errors and typos in this site and article.

"In the Languedoc, famous at the time for its high culture, tolerance and liberalism, Catharism took root and gained more and more adherents during the twelfth century. By the early thirteenth century it was probably the majority religion in the area, supported by the nobility as well as the common people. This was too much for the Roman Church, some of whose own priests had become Cathars. Worst of all, Cathars refused to pay their tithes.

Innocent III, called a formal crusade, appointing a series of leaders, to head his holy army. There followed over forty years of war against the indigenous population. During this period, some 600,000 men women and children were massacred; the Counts of Toulouse, their vassals were dispossessed and humiliated, and their lands annexed to France.

Educated and tolerant rulers were replaced by relative barbarians; the Dominican Order was founded and the Inquisition, was established to wipe out the last vestiges of resistance; persecutions of Jews and other minorities were initiated; the height culture of the Troubadours was lost; lay learning was discouraged; tithes were enforced; the Languedoc started its economic decline, and the language of the area, Occitan started its descent from one of the foremost languages in Europe to a regional dialect.

At the end of the extirpation of the Cathars, the Church had convincing proof that a sustained campaign of genocide can work. It also had the precedent of an internal Crusade within Christendom, and the machinery of the first police state. This crusade was one of the greatest disasters ever to befall Europe. Catharism is often said to have been completely eradicated by the end of the fourteenth century. Yet there are more than a few vestiges even today, apart from the enduring memory of their martyrdom and the ruins of the famous castles. There are even people claiming to be modern Cathars.

Vatic Note: This is beyond incredible. I had no idea about half of this stuff and its amazing but fits right in with much of what we found out about humans and their ability to do amazing things. Remember Michael Tsarion studied about the human condition for 30 years or more and he published 9 videos called “The Origins of Evil”. Very well worth the watch.

In it, he said that we, humans, were incredible creatures living ordinary lives. He said the evil ones spend hundreds of years and trillions of dollars trying to hide our power from ourselves. This below confirms that point along with other blogs we have put up about RH negative Blood.

In reading about the Knights Templar way back in their heyday in France, I discovered that the Catholic Church was losing membership to the Cathars and at the same time, The knights templar themselves, were under scrutiny and challenge, because they:

1. controlled wealth and land that the King of France wanted to control,
2. Had been to the Middle East and to Solomon's Temple and discovered many writings that supported the Cathars beliefs and that made these Cathars, such a threat to the Catholic Church. "

______beforeitsnews/power-elite...m-2447080.html

a reply to: Astrocyte

It is easy to refute: everything is created and annihilated in the same instant. There is no artificial construct called time.
No need for physical evolution: see above.
So what we are perceiving as evolving is either an illusion or the evolution of conscious awareness as represented by the mirror of matter.

originally posted by: cryptic0void
a reply to: Astrocyte

It is easy to refute: everything is created and annihilated in the same instant. There is no artificial construct called time.
No need for physical evolution: see above.
So what we are perceiving as evolving is either an illusion or the evolution of conscious awareness as represented by the mirror of matter.

You are so, almost, exactly on the button, except for that 'creation/causality' is impossible; See above!! *__-

It is not as if 'time' is 'artificial' and other things 'natural', 'time' is naturally existing as an appearance in the imagination.
We imagine a 'future' and a 'past'... but it always happens Here! Now!
Even imagining a stroll down memory lane, you are still perceiving that thought Here! Now!
Every moment of existence is Here! Now!
Every moment of existence is a unique Perspective of the One (unchanging, all inclusive) Universal Reality/Self!

"For every Perspective, there is an equal and opposite Perspective!" - The First Law of Soul Dynamics (Book of Fudd)

The very moment opposite Perspectives arise into Consciousness, they instantly self-annihilate!
Like matter and antimatter!
All Universal Self Knowledge in a single synchronous moment!
Talk about a 'Big Bang'!

a reply to: namelesss

As Teilhard de Chardin said "we are spiritual beings having a brief illusory physical experience."

That does not extricate us from using or trying to understand our brain or any other word and concept simple people use to grasp and limit "What IS". A Doctor of Psychology who participated in developing the drug that restores Schizophrenic brains to normal size was given less that two weeks to live 15 years before I met her. I lived with her and tried to teach her enough that she would no longer be a victim of things like sexual abuse and rape. After I moved out she was the one who had to finger the Long Beach rapist who was found guilty of 27 rapes.

The abuse of words and memes or NLP is all the rage in psychological modalities taught to novitiates in schools seeking to homogenize society. Some derived modalities such as Narrative Therapy )self esteem and back slapping) are almost funny. Wireheading since the time of Wilder Penfield (in my teens, he was mapping the brain) has come some distance past Dennis Waitley's GIGO (see article on Red Ice addressing the I O Torus and Boulean math). That is psychocybernetics, add some Transactional Analysis and Skinnerian behavior plus more Garbage IN = Garbage Out (GIGO) and you have most social workers who are paid to keep people where they are not to do more than risk management - generality I know.

Better modalities take what Eastern Thought and spirituality teaches, I like Logotherapy, Jungian, and Erickson among others.

originally posted by: rtb1234
a reply to: namelesss

As Teilhard de Chardin said "we are spiritual beings having a brief illusory physical experience."

That does not extricate us from using or trying to understand our brain or any other word and concept simple people use to grasp and limit "What IS".

That is the nature of 'thought/imagination', to fragment that which is One that it might be Known in Our Entirety!

A Doctor of Psychology who participated in developing the drug that restores Schizophrenic brains to normal size was given less that two weeks to live 15 years before I met her. I lived with her and tried to teach her enough that she would no longer be a victim of things like sexual abuse and rape. After I moved out she was the one who had to finger the Long Beach rapist who was found guilty of 27 rapes.

The abuse of words and memes or NLP is all the rage in psychological modalities taught to novitiates in schools seeking to homogenize society. Some derived modalities such as Narrative Therapy )self esteem and back slapping) are almost funny. Wireheading since the time of Wilder Penfield (in my teens, he was mapping the brain) has come some distance past Dennis Waitley's GIGO (see article on Red Ice addressing the I O Torus and Boulean math). That is psychocybernetics, add some Transactional Analysis and Skinnerian behavior plus more Garbage IN = Garbage Out (GIGO) and you have most social workers who are paid to keep people where they are not to do more than risk management - generality I know.

Better modalities take what Eastern Thought and spirituality teaches, I like Logotherapy, Jungian, and Erickson among others.

I really have no clue why you just shared this with me?
Of course Eastern philosophy has been validated by quantum mechanics, while it discredits the West.

As far as Healing, unconditional Love heals us all together!
Unconditional Love is the only mode of 'therapy' from which I have observed consistent results! *__-
All 'health' is based on Love; physical, mental, emotional, spiritual...
Anything else is sinsanity, Hell!

True, unconditional Love is ALWAYS recognized by It's unconditional Virtues; Compassion, Empathy, Sympathy, Gratitude, Humility, Charity (charity is never taking more than your share of anything, ever!), Honesty, Happiness, Faith...
ALWAYS!

originally posted by: namelesss
Here! Now!

Where is here, exactly?

And, when is now?

a reply to: namelesss

I shared what you see nothing in because it is an excellent example of the power of the mind and science including herbs she studied when she went to China later. But she would not have lived to get there if not for her mind and nothing to do with what you say.

originally posted by: PhotonEffect

originally posted by: namelesss
Here! Now!

Where is here, exactly?

And, when is now?

'Here', exactly, is what is says! Here!
Every 'Here' lasts a single moment!
'Now' is exactly what is says, 'Now'!
'Now' lasts for a single Planck moment!
Every 'Here/Now' exists for a single moment.
Every single moment, is Here! Now!

Capisce'? *__-

originally posted by: rtb1234
a reply to: namelesss

I shared what you see nothing in because it is an excellent example of the power of the mind and science including herbs she studied when she went to China later. But she would not have lived to get there if not for her mind and nothing to do with what you say.

Fine, whatever...