A new state of consciousness

from maplevalleyreporter

• July 17, 2014 at 10:00AM updated Jul 18, 2014 at 9:51AM

During the next few days, legal pot stores will start popping up all over King and Pierce counties. However, some of our cautious, duly-elected, local  officials have, diplomatically and politically, decided to slap a moratorium on legal pot within city limits. Of course, that’s only temporary, until they figure out how they want to handle the issue. In the meantime, to get your buzz on you’ll have to drive to retail weed stores in cities without a moratorium or just about any other wide spot in the road.

I knew this would happen sooner or later, but it’s still a bit boggling to realize the hour has finally arrived. Yet, upon the eve of this auspicious occasion, there are still many people who can’t get their heads around the idea. The other afternoon, a rather casual acquaintance and I were sharing coffee in the Lee, when he turned to me and said: “I just don’t understand why a fella wants to try that crap. Can you explain that to me?”

Well, yeah, I probably can. (And it isn’t very often I can explain much of anything.) There actually seems to be an innate, genetic reason for our desire to use not only pot, but a host of other stimulants and depressants and psychedelics, running the gamut from caffeine to heroin.

Yes, you read that correctly. Inherent in our very DNA, there appears to be a desire – a biological need – to experience and seek new and original states of consciousness. Social-psychological experiments have fooled around with this idea for at least 50 years and, in the last 30, the “hard” sciences have uncovered additional supporting evidence. A lot of it. While using CAT scans to map and define specific areas of the brain, scientists have isolated a particular region in our frontal lobes that quests and explores new experiences and new states of awareness.

Through the years, scholars have hung various labels on this region and each label suggests a slightly different interpretation of what’s going on there. Thus, it’s been called the “curiosity center” and it accounts for our desire to experience new stuff in general. Christian groups have sighted this area as a “spiritual center,” thereby claiming we have an inherent need for religion; that is, our brains are wired to seek “spiritual dimensions.” Hoping to be more objective about the whole thing, most scientists generally agree it’s a part of the brain that simply craves new states of consciousness.

So, we consume caffeine because we want to wake up an be more alert. We smoke nicotine to get the same effect. We often use alcohol to relax, to attain a more mellow and sociable state of mind.   Therefore, to answer the casual acquaintance I mentioned earlier, we try pot because we’re curious about the effects. Some people also try heroin.

The intensity of our inherent desire for new experiences varies from one individual to another, just as I.Q. or physical agility or sexual energy varies. Then too, outside social conditioning and situations can suppress or stimulate our natural, genetic legacy. Consequently, some people anxiously and willingly and recklessly try any damn fool drug that comes down the pike, while others think twice before having a second cup of coffee.

But – and this is my main point after all this scholastic babble – we all inherit, with varying degrees of intensity, a desire to seek and experience new states of consciousness.

Scientists Accidentally Discover The Brain's Consciousness "Off Switch"

from io9.com


George Dvorsky

Filed to: NEUROSCIENCE

• SCIENCE
• CONSCIOUSNESS
• CLAUSTRUM
• DEEP BRAIN STIMULATION

Today 7:00am

While performing deep brain surgery on a woman with epilepsy, neuroscientists from George Washington University stimulated an area of her brain that unexpectedly — and temporarily — caused her to lose awareness. It's a discovery that could shed light on the very nature of consciousness itself.

"We describe a region in the human brain where electrical stimulation reproducibly disrupted consciousness," write the scientists in their study. It's an important finding as the "neural mechanisms that underlie consciousness are not fully understood." No doubt, consciousness is still a profound mystery, so much so that we don't know how it arises — or how it switches off.

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Mohamad Koubeissi and his team were using deep brain electrodes to record signals from different brain regions to figure out where the woman's seizures were coming from. They placed one electrode near a part of the deep brain called the claustrum, an area that had never been stimulated before.

The claustrum is a thin and weirdly shaped sheet of neurons that's attached to the underside of the neocortex right smack-dab in the center of the brain. Though the precise role of the claustrum is not known, it's suspected to play a role in communication between the two hemispheres of the brain, specifically those regions that control attention. It works like a conductor in an orchestra, coordinating the cerebral cortex. But instead of synchronizing musicians, it synchronizes the timescale between various brain parts, resulting in the seamless quality of conscious experience.

Helen Thomson from New Scientist reports:

When the team zapped the area with high frequency electrical impulses, the woman lost consciousness. She stopped reading and stared blankly into space, she didn't respond to auditory or visual commands and her breathing slowed. As soon as the stimulation stopped, she immediately regained consciousness with no memory of the event. The same thing happened every time the area was stimulated during two days of experiments.

To confirm that they were affecting the woman's consciousness rather than just her ability to speak or move, the team asked her to repeat the word "house" or snap her fingers before the stimulation began. If the stimulation was disrupting a brain region responsible for movement or language she would have stopped moving or talking almost immediately. Instead, she gradually spoke more quietly or moved less and less until she drifted into unconsciousness. Since there was no sign of epileptic brain activity during or after the stimulation, the team is sure that it wasn't a side effect of a seizure.

Koubeissi thinks that the results do indeed suggest that the claustrum plays a vital role in triggering conscious experience. "I would liken it to a car," he says. "A car on the road has many parts that facilitate its movement – the gas, the transmission, the engine – but there's only one spot where you turn the key and it all switches on and works together. So while consciousness is a complicated process created via many structures and networks – we may have found the key."

An exciting discovery, to be sure. But a word of caution; the woman was missing part of her hippocampus, which was removed to treat her epilepsy, so she doesn't possess a "normal" brain. Clearly, these results need to be reproduced in others before we get too carried away with the findings.

Check out the entire report at New Scientist. And read the entire study at Epilepsy and Behavior: "Electrical stimulation of a small brain area reversibly disrupts consciousness".

Image: styleuneed.de/shutterstock.

Follow me on Twitter: @dvorsky

The Journey to Ixtlan - Carlos Casteneda

from wikipedia

Journey to Ixtlan

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Journey to Ixtlan

Cover of Simon & Schuster paperback edition
Author	Carlos Castaneda
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Non-Fiction Memoir
Publisher	Simon & Schuster
Publication date	1972
Media type	Print (Hardcover &Paperback)
Pages	268
ISBN	0-671-73246-3
OCLC	24114170
Preceded by	A Separate Reality
Followed by	Tales of Power

Journey to Ixtlan is the third book by Carlos Castaneda, published as a work of non-fiction by Simon & Schusterin 1972.^[1] It is about an alleged apprenticeship to the Yaqui "shaman," Don Juan.^[2]

The title of this book is taken from an allegory that is recounted to Castaneda by his "benefactor" who is known to Carlos as Don Genaro ( Genaro Flores ), a close friend of his teacher don Juan Matus. "Ixtlan" turns out to be a metaphorical hometown ( or Place / Position of Being ) to which the "sorcerer" or warrior or man of knowledge without reason or thoughts is drawn to return. This is because his elevated perspective leaves him little in common with ordinary people, who now seem no more substantial to him than "phantoms." The point of the story is that a man of knowledge, or sorcerer, is a changed being, or a Human closer to his true state of Being, and for that reason he can never truly go "home" to his old lifestyle again.

In Journey to Ixtlan Castaneda essentially reevaluates the teachings up to that point. He discusses information that was apparently missing from the first two books regarding stopping the world which previously he had only regarded as a metaphor.

He also finds that psychotropic plants, knowledge of which was a significant part of his apprenticeship to Yaquishaman don Juan Matus, are not as important in the world view as he had previously thought. In the introduction he writes:

My basic assumption in both books has been that the articulation points in learning to be a sorcerer were the states of nonordinary reality produced by the ingestion of psychotropic plants...

My perception of the world through the effects of those psychotropics had been so bizarre and impressive that I was forced to assume that such states were the only avenue to communicating and learning what Don Juan was attempting to teach me.

That assumption was erroneous.

In the book don Juan takes Carlos on these various degrees of apprenticeship, in response to what he believes are signals from the supernatural world, "The decision as to who can be a warrior and who can only be a hunter is not up to us. That decision is in the realm of the powers that guide men."^[3]

The book shows a progression between different states of learning, from hunter, to warrior, to man of knowledge or sorcerer, the difference said to be one of skill level and the type of thing hunted, "...a warrior is an impeccable hunter that hunts power. If he succeeds in his hunting he becomes a man of knowledge."^[4]

Throughout the book Castaneda portrays himself as skeptical and reserved in his explanations of the phenomena at hand, but by the end of the book Castaneda's rationalist worldview is seen to be breaking down in the face of an onslaught of experiences that he is unable to explain logically.

An Interview With Deepak Chopra: There Is Only One Consciousness

from huffpost


Posted: 06/24/2014 4:43 pm EDT Updated: 06/24/2014 4:59 pm EDT

Deepak Chopra, one of the world's leading writers, teachers, and entrepreneurs in holistic health and healing, talks to Omega about meditation, transcendence, and the nature of consciousness.

Omega: You've had such a prolific career as an author, teacher, lecturer, and physician. How do you stay inspired and centered after all these years?

Deepak: I am always writing about things that I'm exploring; I find myself doing it quite effortlessly. I am disciplined. I practice meditation and yoga and do a workout almost every day. The rest of the time, I am writing about what fascinates me. At this moment, it's further elaboration of understanding consciousness -- its fundamental existence in the universe, and how it projects in our life as our body, our mind, our environment, and our universe.

Omega: How long do you think it will be before mainstream science accepts that consciousness isn't rooted in matter, catching up with both ancient teachings and the latest leading-edge science?

Deepak: It almost amuses me to think that consciousness is rooted in matter. It's a form of primitive animism to think like that.

How long will it take? It's happening slowly. I am getting some traction in collaborating with eminent physicists and neuroscientists who share the worldview that consciousness is fundamental and everything else is an epiphenomenon, including mind and matter.

We're getting some papers accepted in peer-reviewed journals. I had a paper accepted in the Journal of NeuroQuantology and another paper in the Journal of Philosophy.

Omega: You've talked about the rise and fall of what you called "militant skepticism." Can you elaborate on that? How does the skepticism that underpins the scientific method becomes militant?

Deepak: Skepticism is actually healthy. It is not the same thing as cynicism. Cynicism is to already start with mistrust. On the other hand, skepticism is open-minded and says, "I'd like to see the evidence. I'd like to understand more and I don't want to rely on belief." That skepticism underlies the scientific method.

However, if you really begin to understand how we perceive anything, then you'll realize that what we call evidence or empirical data is not really glimpsing at fundamental truth. It is a description of a mode of observation, through a human nervous system, to questions that scientific human minds ask. So, science is not looking at nature as it is, but nature as it reveals itself to a human nervous system and the questioning of a particular modality in a human consciousness by a scientist.

What we're seeing here is that our perception is the result of a cosmic censorship. Perception is species specific. It's culture specific. It's a learned phenomenon. We learn how to perceive. And then we end up thinking that what we perceive is what is really there. Actually, there's nothing out there.

All experience is created in consciousness, and the only way to explore this is through transcendence, through self-awareness, through self-reflection, through questioning perceptual reality, through making conscious choices.

Very slowly, what unfolds is the realization that there's only consciousness. You can't even say consciousness and its contents because the contents of consciousness are actually patterns of behavior of consciousness itself. Therefore, the universe exists in consciousness as a perceptual experience. The body exists in consciousness as a perceptual experience, and the mind exists in consciousness as a mental experience. There's only consciousness. If you were religious, you would say there is only God.

Omega: One way to explore consciousness is through meditation. If someone asks you how to begin meditating, what do you recommend? 

Deepak: Spend a few minutes every day sitting quietly and just reflecting on who you are, what you want from your life, what is meaning and purpose for you, or what you're grateful for. And then just sit quietly, either observing your breath, or feeling your body, or if you have a mantra practice, use it. But transcendence is the key and transcendence happens if you just give it time.

I think the biggest obstacle that people have is that they're impatient. They're very result-oriented, and also, they're not really diligent in their practice, even though they say they are.

Omega: If a student asks, "How do I know if I'm making progress in my meditation?" what do you tell them?

Deepak: You shouldn't be attached to progress, but yes, there are signs. On the level of cognition, you realize that your thoughts are not who you are. On the level of emotions, you are less drawn to melodrama, but you do have experiences of joy, love, compassion, empathy and equanimity. On the level of memory, you're not victimized. Your memory is sharp, but it's there only when you need it, so your internal dialogue, which is mostly memory and desire, is very quiet. On the level of sensory perception, it's a much richer present moment, multisensory experience. On the level of identity, your sense of self is no longer confined to your body.

Those are the earlier signs. Then later, there's more synchronicity, more flow, loss of fear of death, and less identity with the personal self. That takes a while, but it does happen. 

Omega: What can parents do to introduce their children to a meditation practice?

Deepak: During the first years, the more you can totally envelope them in love, attention, affection, and appreciation, that's the most important thing. At the age of five years, you can start playing games of silence or have one minute of silence every day. Then at six years go to two minutes, and at seven years go to three minutes, like that. When they're 10 or so, I think you can start the formal practice with them.

Deepak Chopra is teaching a workshop The Future of Well-Being, June 27-29, 2014 at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY.

Explore more in the category of Health & Healing

© 2014 Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, Inc. All rights reserved.

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"Godfather of Ecstasy" Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin Dead At 88

from tyt.com

Consciousness - Phenomenon or Reality?

from newindianexpress.com

By Sri Aurobindo

Published: 29th May 2014 10:24 AM

Last Updated: 29th May 2014 10:30 AM

CHENNAI: But what is consciousness and what its relation to existence? How and why did it come into being in an inconscient universe, a universe which even if it originated by an inexplicable chance, has assumed the proportions of a huge and complex inexorable mechanism repeating the same processes through the aeons without respite or cessation? By what spiritual or mechanical necessity? By what mechanical chance or accidental process of energy? To what end of purpose, if any purpose there can be in an inconscient mechanism of brute necessity or inexplicably organised chance or any end in a movement which never had any reason for beginning?  Does consciousness exist or is it a fortuitous illusion?  Who or what is it that becomes conscious in the animal and in the body of the human being?

Three possible solutions. Consciousness has not come into being but was and is always there, a fundamental power of existence, latent or involved or concealed from our mind and sense even in what we call inanimate and unconscious things.  It has not come into existence but has emerged from existence; involved it has evolved in the general evolutionary process. Or consciousness is only a phenomenon, a surprising result of certain inconscient processes of nature, unintentional but actual, unnecessary and accidental or else somehow inevitable as an output of chemical and other physical energies which could not help imposing itself at certain point of their activity in the natural course of things.  It did not exist before that point was reached; when another point has been reached it may go out of existence. Or again the world is a creation of an extra-cosmic or immanent conscious being personal or impersonal who has either put his consciousness or a consciousness resembling his into his mechanical creation to be an element there or else has infused it from within into the mechanical self-expression in which he has chosen to dwell as it upholder, inspirer, inhabitant.

What is meant by consciousness? What is this phenomenon which seems to have so small a part in the vast inconscient mass of things and is yet the sole element here that can give any value to the universe?

And to come to the heart of the difficulty — is it indeed only a phenomenon, an appearance that has emerged in the course of the workings of an energy which was, is and will always remain inconscient? Or is it something fundamental, an inherent reality or a latent character or power of that energy and bound to emerge at some time once it had begun its workings? It is to a mass of ill-connected and ill-understood phenomena that we give this name of consciousness; when these are at work we say that a man or animal is conscious, when they are suspended we say that he or it is unconscious; where they are absent, as in a tree, we suppose the object, even if it has life, to be inconscient by its very nature, incapable of sensation no less than empty of thought and will.  Where life is not, inconscience seems to us a still more self-evident character of the thing or being.

Man alone is fully conscious, for he alone is aware of himself, reflective on things, in full possession of mental capacities and their aware and observant use. 

All things are inhabited by this consciousness, even the things that seem to us inconscient and the consciousness in one form can communicate with or contact the consciousness in another or else penetrate or contain or identify with it.  This in one form or another is the true process of all knowledge; the rest is ignorant appearance. All things are one itself; it is the one knower who knows himself everywhere, from one centre or another in the multiplicity of his play. Otherwise no knowledge would be possible.

Excerpt from the book Essays Divine and Human by Sri Aurobindo

Quantum and Consciousness Often Mean Nonsense

from slate  

Lots of things are mysterious. That doesn't mean they’re connected.

By Matthew R. Francis

Cartoon courtesy of SMBC

Possibly no subject in science has inspired more nonsense than quantum mechanics. Sure, it’s a complicated field of study, with a few truly mysterious facets that are not settled to everyone’s satisfaction after nearly a century of work. At the same time, though, using quantum to mean “we just don’t know” is ridiculous—and simply wrong. Quantum mechanics is the basis for pretty much all our modern technology, from smartphones to fluorescent lights, digital cameras to fiber-optic communications.  

If I had to pick a runner-up in the nonsense sweepstakes, it would be human consciousness, another subject with a lot of mysterious aspects. We are made of ordinary matter yet are self-aware, capable of abstractly thinking about ourselves and of recognizing others (including nonhumans) as separate entities with their own needs. As a physicist, I’m fascinated by the notion that our consciousness can imagine realities other than our own: The universe is one way, but we are perfectly happy to think of how it might be otherwise.

I hold degrees in physics and have spent a lot of time learning and teaching quantum mechanics. Nonphysicists seem to have the impression that quantum physics is really esoteric, with those who study it spending their time debating the nature of reality. In truth, most of a quantum mechanics class is lots and lots of math, in the service of using a particle’s quantum state—the bundle of physical properties such as position, energy, spin, and the like—to describe the outcomes of experiments. Sure, there’s some weird stuff and it’s fun to talk about, but quantum mechanics is aimed at being practical (ideally, at least).

Yet the mysterious aspects of quantum physics and consciousness have inspired many people to speculate freely. The worst offenders will even say that because we don’t fully understand either field, they must be related problems. It sounds good at first: We don’t know exactly how some things in quantum physics work, we don’t know exactly how to go from the brain to consciousness, so maybe consciousness is quantum.

The problem with this idea? It’s almost certainly wrong.

Oh, sure: In a sense the brain is quantum, simply because all matter is described by quantum mechanics. However, what people usually mean by quantum isn’t ordinary stuff such as molecules that let brain cells communicate. Instead, the term is usually reserved for the deeper processes that rely on the quantum state. The quantum state is where fun stuff like entanglement lives: the coupling of two widely separated particles that act like parts of a single system. But that level of analysis is not generally helpful for describing the motion of molecules across the gap between cells in the brain.

That’s not to say that quantum effects are entirely ruled out in biology. Some researchers are investigating how photosynthesis or even the human senses of sight and smell might work in part by manipulating quantum states. The retina in the eye is sensitive to small numbers of photons—particles of light—and the quantum state of the photon interacts with the quantum state of the retinal cell. But once those signals are translated into something the brain can process, the original quantum state seems to be irrelevant.

The overwhelming success of modern physics does not give physicists the ability to pronounce judgment on other sciences.

I’ll hedge my bets: Maybe there’s room for some small quantum effects in the brain, but I sincerely doubt those will be directly relevant for consciousness. That’s because almost anything involving individual quantum states requires isolation from environmental interference for the weirdness to show up. For example, most particles aren’t entangled in any meaningful way, because interactions with other particles change their quantum state. That process is known as decoherence. (If someone wants to propose a theory of the mind based on decoherence, I might listen, especially on days when I’m distracted.)

However, other people go much further. In his bestselling 1989 book The Emperor’s New Mind, mathematical physicist Roger Penrose proposed that the problems of interpreting quantum states implies that the conscious mind will need a new kind of physics to describe it. Penrose is no crackpot in his area of expertise (the mathematics of general relativity, which also happens to be my area), but his foray into the mind and consciousness is a cautionary tale.

Just because you’re a world expert in one branch of science doesn’t qualify you in any other discipline. As Zach Weinersmith’s painfully funny comic points out, this is a particularly bad habit among physicists.

Cartoon courtesy of SMBC

Some of them think that the overwhelming success of modern physics gives them the ability to pronounce judgment on other sciences, from linguistics to paleontology. Celebrity physicist Michio Kaku is a particularly egregious example,getting evolution completely wrong (see this critique) and telling infamous crackpot Deepak Chopra that our actions can have effects in distant galaxies. Then there are the physicists—including Freeman Dyson, one of the architects of the quantum theory describing interactions between light and matter—who contradict climate scientists in their own area of expertise.

Physicists aren’t the only culprits, though. A new book by neuroscientist W. R. Klemm implies that the edges of physics could provide answers about human consciousness. Ironically, he writes, “I just hate it when physicists write about biology. They sometimes say uninformed and silly things. But I hate it just as much when I write about physics, for I too am liable to say uninformed and silly things—as I may well do here.” Nearly everything that follows in the book excerpt is either wrong or misleading. I could write a point-by-point response, but suffice to say: The problems and incompleteness he cites about quantum physics are overblown and frankly incorrect.

I take it back: I will rant briefly about two of his points. First, Klemm writes, “But is mass really identical to energy? True, mass can be converted to energy, as atom bombs prove, and energy can even be turned into mass. Still, they are not the same things.” That’s an unnecessary obfuscation: Einstein’s equation E = mc2 does connect mass and energy in a fundamental and entirely unmysterious way. Probably no other single equation has inspired as many popular explanations, so it’s safe to say we get it: Mass is a form of energy. To be precise, it’s the energy a particle has when it’s at rest. Sure, there are complications in particle physics collisions at high speeds, but the basic concept is really simple.

Second, dark energy—which I have written about for Slate—does not impart energy to galaxies or anything smaller. If it turns out to be “vacuum energy,” which looks probable, then the only way dark energy could have anything to do with human consciousness would be if our heads were empty.

The problem with Klemm’s assertions, as well as those of many others who misuse the word quantum, is that their speculation is based on a superficial understanding of one or both fields. Physics may or may not have anything informative to say about consciousness, but you won’t make any progress in that direction without knowing a lot about both quantum physics and how brains work. Skimping on either of those will lead to nonsense.