The Origins of Human Concioussness

An interesting (as always)  interview with Graham Hanock via a link from the pages of Veritas Magazine in PDF format.. This one largely focuses on  the scope of his research as well as touching upon the origins of his new book, "Origins of Concioussness." The interview also covers his other areas of investigations as well, such as the nature of comparitively advanced pre Ice Age civilisations that are somewhat equally controversial, depender upoin who the reader happens to be.

http://www.grahamhancock.com/images/forum/HancockG2/Origins-of-Consciousness--Veritas--Graham-Hancock.pdf

An Indecisive Universe?

The Improvisations of The Paranormal or Is all Memory Living Memory?

A Question of Distinctions
Is the universe being eternally rewritten? Are we more verbs than nouns? Are our memories eaten as we eat "life" by digesting experience, attenuated oddly enough by again, the vagarious forms and natures of both human and non human memory? Where do we end and the outer world begins? If so, are we speaking of what Dr Irvine Laslo called the quantum plenum, the transpersonal memory and it's relationship to a energetic genome of stored data we call a database? What he called a plenum, I called a hive. Who recalls Stewart Brand who created the term coevolution prior to the advent of systems analysis? Art Kleps once said his car performed according to the mood he was in long before Princeton opened the PEAR experiment that explored human influences on statistical probabilities and the influence is there. Coevolution?  Chose your associations and throw your hat into the ring of fire that are the referents we utilize as descriptors..  From a virus to a human being in the whole of nature in the context of the paranormal, their shared nature is improvisational upon forms. Once the genome of their memory is altered through improvisation, the parameters of laws that apply to them would change.

Is God An Experimenter Rather Than A Rule Maker?
If this is so, than the scrapbook of postcards from the universe is less an Askatic Record than Borges Library of Babel in The Crimson Hexagon, with each book an infinite variable of a volume lacking a key, an index that by means of it would compress space itself into a comprehensible form rather than the incommensurable nature of the aggregate sum of  variability in the Library's volumes. .Another words, it is the recombinate library of a what could be called far from static. Perhaps it would be continually expanding in search of it's own nature, which is missing, hence the patrons, or librarians are like bees, collecting variations in search of patterns. Is this the nature behind the shorthand theism most utilize when they refer to God? Is God a plenum of energy as information as non judgmental as to not play favorites? Does an accident have a role that defys our conceptual dreams that the universe is a fine Swiss watch? Godel weighs in. Gurdjieff's notation of intervals in the Pythagorean musicology. Accident and uncertainty are the bane of rational calculation but perhaps we should allow them back into the room.

The Lost Transpersonal Memory of History
The concept of myth as a legominism or transmitter in the nature of a carrier wave to be captured by a concept similar to quantum coherence, where depending on who is looking either the myth as a carrier of inner knowledge is taken literally or one begins to reconstruct a sort of lost language that Joesph Cambell was intimately familiar with perhaps. Or the reader of "Hamlet's Mill" discovers, that not all transmissions across space are external but utilize external forms to coat memory as a metaphor in story book form taken as fairy tales by what RA Wilson termed naive realism.
The resurrection of memory from the body of myth. Accident and uncertainty point to self comforting revisionism to be taken literally, just as language can objectify the incommensurable.   A sort of double twist, or as Rd Laing might say  a knot becoming a series of knots.

The Human Experiment
In this we see thru the mediums of transmission daily that the quantity of information is disproportionate to it's quality.Oops, the human factor..stumbles. The Hindu expression of human nature as a monkey gathering bananas from a tree or the Gnostic interpretation of Man through the parable of a Christian Jesus riding atop a stubborn donkey he must master, the entanglement of the perceptual senses. The irony of a literal interpretation focused on the external in a literal historical sense. Or as one Sufi expressed, "religion ( from the root word of relinking) turned strange."  Or, perhaps Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerers Apprentice, that illustrates the disproportionate balance between Knowledge and Being.



Rule Makers
We seek the theory of everything while the spaces between visibility define materialism as in the universe of G Spencer Brown's "distinctions." held within " The Laws of Form." When I first came across his theory what came to mind was more than a bit surrealistic.



Maybe this theme of lawful behaviorism could be applied to automobiles, and we could make a law that outlawed accidents. Or, post a sign to the portal of the universe and make it clear that we do not tolerate improvisation around these here parts. We only accept the navigation of  our ruts as a condition of your behavior and if you try to improvise your way around them, we will flatten your creativity with a sledge hammer. We here you all speak the same language, eat the same food and think the same thoughts.
Maybe the law of circles was a spiral across three dimensions, that was traversing  a multiverse that was terminally indecisive continually experimenting in search of a self image.  One man's law is another's outlier that does not require stinkin badges as an edict of the universe's vast capabilities. The allowed versus the outlawed in familiar domesticated forms whose laws  that we only as provincial  rubes obey.Why? Perhaps we have no mind of our own. The transpersonal may be closer to our jugular veins than we assume it to be by the borrowed and threadbare name games we play.

Parallel Processing On A Vast Scale
In this, I suspect we have parallel processing, imagine every human being on this planet as a processor all all of the processors are networked, interpreting what they see in the billions every millisecond and of course as every physics student knows energy is information, making the chaotic coherent by various interpretive mediums that are simply referents. Language is not an object yet it is treated as one. The more I research various aspects of the paranormal, what I observe seems to follow the dynamics of genetics in it's variability, which seems to be coevolutionary in relation to improvisation, We are altered in variability and the rules follow a game of improvisational adaptability. The paranormal experience seems to have evolved and continues to do so without our direct knowledge and the only trace effects we can observe are as random as snowflake patterns yet all of them are snowflakes in direct comparison to laws of form as we understand them.

Amnesia: The Eternal Return To Childhood In The Universe
As a potentially self aware observer of myself I can only exist by the nature of my senses in the present. You are much the same and yet we both also exist in the past, as well as within any future space we may occupy. All of this an incomplete expression of the relationship of memory to the present for both of us.
The older I become, the less I know, and the more I know, the more what I do know is of a theoretical nature hence a deeper appreciation for small things, even forgotten things like antique toys, the smell of fresh cut grass and broken promises. Magic that both bodes the cynic as well as the optimist, but perhaps it is all a  matter of the vicissitudes of memory. Or like the lost metaphors of the human condition, it may be a case of amnesia due to the thrall of perception itself. Knowledge itself may be a knot of inferred relations based on the suggestibility of a imbalance of animal senses to the environment where we become convinced of this or that...based on a language that is disproportionately entangled to material objects. Call it biological hypnosis of consciousness that keeps planetary species systems of reproduction, gathering and self induced population controls ( war ) maintained.. 

 

The Language of Spacial and Energetic Information
Time is space as space is time and transpersonal space is an eternity, and eternity is a subjective noun to the observer of this night country, illuminated by an irradiating sun.
What of us as being both similar creatures and yet differentiated by our memory and what of locality both near as far and far as near? Here is one point of view, one that comes as always with qualifiers and yet  there is an echo of the transpersonal as well as a human scale , directed to the audience, perhaps a bit sleepy after having eaten their lunches before Vallee's lecture at TED. I first viewed this video after a series of exchanges with an acquaintance of mine, Rick Phillips on the equally theoretical non existence of what is called Now, which is so deeply entangled in the past present and future of variability that any infinitesimal parsing of it's meaningful valuation appears to be, to say the least, arbitrary.  To make ourselves terms that allow us to understand one another on the most fundamental terms is also a sort of prismatic prison, what W.S Burroughs called "the virus of language".




Recombinations Of Memory to The Material to The Intangible
Yet what of the relationship of memory to space and can all that exist be termed simply and elegantly as "information" within this virus of language? Listen for a moment and then recall a particularly vivid memory. Is this memory transpersonal in it's actual nature by being in relationship with all the relationships of information we digest and process as suggested by Persinger to be akin to a networked system? Or what John Lilly termed the human condition of energy as transception, a verb termed  transceiving that is one of billions of attenuation's of variability in a field so vast, we are perhaps invisible to ourselves from this perspective but remaining integral to a genome that adapts, transforms and itself as both a material and immaterial hologram, that as al Arabi noted, the spiritual becomes material while the material becomes spiritual. The vision of Jacobs ladder borrowed by the Gnostic Alchemists through the earliest written conceptual basis of what became Gurdjieff's system of Octaves, originally penned by Pythagoras. It may be more jazz than we can imagine.

 Language as a virus that is transmitted and we it's common carriers but not ourselves alone. Our associations as filters of language based on our own contexts, yet this variability adds to a body of work.. Substitute Al Arabi's spiritual with the term  non-material or ,as physics terms it, a Wave. Take the material as Particles and the transmission between a wave and a particle is a transception that is attenuated by it's local nature wherein it is manifested by various lens of a more global integrated awareness, whether it is  of a Worm or that of  Homo Sapiens in a co-evolutionary context..Systems Analysis something that Vallee is keenly aware of. A great deal of Al Arabi's cosmology can be gleaned from transcribing his vocabulary to our own. His cosmology is a memory he generated through the medium of his time. Books of information, what I call meta-novels of memory perpetually being rewritten....by an indecisive universe that over writes it's memory through us.
 Then again, if information is material as Gurdjieff and Vallee suggest to us that it is maybe how it's played is a factor. More like jazz than scripts.

A Human Scale To Paranormal Studies

A Note To Paul Kimball

What are the questions that are the foundation of other questions at the deep end of the pool? Where is the round table? I do not mean the usual didactic set up of believer versus skeptic which is nothing but language games and rhetorical flourishes. Rather I am thinking of the observer as an integral part of the story they publicly portray in terms of their quests. Where is the backstory? Stories that are the quintessential point of the arrow that are as old as mankind...

I admired John Keel for many reasons, just as I admired Mac Tonnies, or admire Nick Redfern or Paul Kimball. What all of them have in common in their writing that is largely missing from the subject of the anomalous or paranormal is the sense that their involvement in this area of exploration was fleshed out and placed into the context of a human scale in that they recognized as I have, that this area of interest is not an arm's length transaction by it's very nature.

Of course, there are extremes in what has been called "new journalism" best characterized by it's recognized founder, Hunter S Thomson, which in turn has led me away from some books, blogs etc, due to that fact that they struck me as hopelessly self absorbed to the point of experiencing their writing was akin to being exposed to a long term neurotic personality tick. Or some, at the other extreme, acting out the role of the hard boiled detective, a cynical, wise cracking skeptic, who has another sort of extreme personality trait. 

My point is just how shallow this all seems in retrospect. The lack of philosophic rumination, the lack of a fleshed out narrator who experiences self deceit, doubt, flights of imagination, has a healthy sense of humor, as well as a healthy sense of a larger context in this journey, which in the end, is not so much a tale of science as it is a tale of ourselves, as curious and as difficult to please as any agnostic, who has the nagging sense that something is missing.

You look at the United States whose lack of introspection or unwillingness to be retrospective, and internally transform themselves has made every issue an exteriorised projection , whether it is war, gas prices or cults of personality..everyone assumes that every issue has nothing to do with them personally..as if reality were a management style, except that no one is home, no one is in charge or actually participating..it simply runs on suggestion. Extroversion run amuck that has lost any ability to focus. This modality seems to have infected our topics as a erstwhile community of the curious. What is missing is why this all matters. I am not referring to national security or some other goofy exteriorised stage play. Rather what makes this clock keep ticking when it has to a large extent, run out of gas? It is perhaps not the search for what is possibly there, but what is missing. Missing for you...missing for John Keel..a nagging fire in the belly perhaps full of pratfalls and gestalts. An adventure that does not require climbing gear.

What would be interesting is to have Paul Kimball remake "My Dinner With Andre" and gather all the paranormal experts around  dinner table and focus on what is missing, the reasons for their journeys, their doubts, their misadventures..and I suspect that what is missing from paranormal studies is a human scale of philosophers, jokers, as well as the darker side of their experiences..it might be a healthy exercise to realize that there are no experts, no cardboard standup characters, in this, the most personal existential quest of our time, akin to questioning our questions, what is missing, what is curious..After all, most of us are thought of as cranks...but perhaps we need to show that we are functional cranks who have real lives, and are asking the questions far away from the shallow end of the pool. 

The Entanglements of Suggestibility

"Suggestibility varies as the amount of disaggregation, and inversely as the unification of consciousness".

Boris Sidris, The Psychology of Suggestion: a Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society (1889)

 “Conscious faith is freedom. Emotional faith is slavery. Mechanical faith is foolishness.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff

The Meat and Potatoes of Intangibles That Determine Outcomes

The lasts posts on ghost phenomenon, the strange role of magnesium, neurology and the entanglements of discontinuous consciousness lead to my thinking on suggestibility, visual cues, associations, and our state of semi-hypnotic albeit unconscious minds that are dubbed fully aware, which is rather silly. Compared to what? That is the leading question. The emotional faith that perhaps posits extraterrestrials in our midst and the mechanical cycles that all lead back to the metaphorical desert of Roswell. Do ghosts beget ghosts? Do we haunt and are haunted by suggestion, inferences that may be one of the tumblers that unlocks anomalous experiences, not that those we call anomalous do not exist, but in the manner and context that they do exist, which may be all the stranger if any of this is true.

"Ghosts! […] I almost think we are all of us ghosts. It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that ‘walks’ in us. It is all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we cannot shake them off. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.”
― Henrik Ibsen

Are we in a state of continual suggestibility? Is the organic or is this learned or is it some of both? I suspect it is nature's way of intentionally creating a state of distraction in a selfish manner of self interest that promotes the avoidance of deeper issues and to keep us multiplying, more concerned with one suggestion leading to another. We easily pontificate on "the layers of the onion" when it comes to anomalous phenomenon, as Terrence McKenna once opined, and yet very, very few equally opine on the layers that exist as props in the human mind, and just how easily we lead ourselves astray due to emotional and mechanical forces within and those we create without us as a sort of seamless bubble, we are all largely "crib blind" toward..This is the hidden story of Ufology, Demonology and a sort of tragicomedy of the human condition. Perhaps populist religion as well. Was Moses an extraordinary human rights activist rather than a scriptural archetype?

A subliminal theme here is a loss of personal freedom of choice in regards to what or whom determines what our nose follows by inferences and suggestion and what or whom eaves a bad taste in our mouths as a defacto valuation by the very same process of suggestibility.. A person experiencing intense emotions tends to be more receptive to ideas and therefore more suggestible. Generally, suggestibility decreases as age increases. However, psychologists have found that individual levels of self-esteem, assertiveness, and other qualities can make some people more suggestible than others, which has resulted in the concept of a spectrum of suggestibility.

 "Research seems to support the idea that extrovert personalities may be more highly suggestible than introverts, especially in the female population. Studies conducted at Giessen University and at the Institute of Psychology in Prague, have demonstrated a possible standardized measure of suggestibility using the sensation of warmth. In their studies, Gheorghiu, Polczyk, and Kappeller have conducted trials in which respondents were told that they were experiencing the sensation of applied warmth, when in fact, it was only being suggested. The outcomes of a significant number of the trials demonstrated that the suggestion of applied warmth was enough for each individual to believe that he was actually feeling its presence..."

 http://www.helium.com/items/1372033-is-suggestibility-a-trait-of-some-personality-types

Moving away from the core of the fundamental question of Why an I here and is there a fundamental personal purpose to this?, we have exponentially compounded personal and cultural mythologies that fill in the blanks by suggestion, inference, and self hypnotic processes. You may be wondering what this has to do with what I have been writing about lately, I think it relates to a game of musical chairs as an analogy related to those who believe we are visited by ET. In effect, the music stopped and they have a chair, and this chair indicates to them an answer may be had ( on a external basis) the answers to the aforementioned questions, of reason as related to purpose.

Notice that the minds of many have been externally misdirected in attention as well by a technological science that places a number of factoids before them without the luxury of having any complete coherent theory to those aforementioned questions and in our age, one's personal exertion in deriving personal theories on this has not only been supplanted by science, but more more increasingly fundamentalist religious cults. Is all this connected? I suspect it is.

 "A social aggregate which has chosen the fatal path of organic evolution must succumb to the same law of organic development to which all organisms are subject, namely greater and greater organization, increase of structure, greater differentiation, decrease of critical, personal, consciousness, loss of individual liberty, increased activity of the subconscious forces, falling into a state of somnambulism which can only be redeemed by revolution or by death." -Boris Sidris

Think of this issue as related to the suggestion that anomalous phenomenon is related to a material ET, despite the fact there is no direct material evidence that this is so. Does suggestibility play a role?  More importantly, does suggestibility play a role in what are considered close encounters with other beings from another physical world. In other words was the suggestion there prior to the experience having the egg come before the chicken?

Going further into the connection which I suspect is connected to ET encounters, that of other ghost phenomenon, does the environment suggest what will occur in terms of encounters, and taking this further, are EVP phenomenon arising from the observers unwittingly? Is there a sort of quantum cryptography at work here, whereas one must have a matching anticipatory key that suggest certain outcomes before the answer is received as one would from a equation posed to a dispassionate computer?
The answer is that we have a suggestion planted beforehand, that is undoubtedly a bias projection. Ask yourself if ghost hunters hunt ghosts without the anticipation of encountering one?

Same from the last post where I suspect there is a discontinuity to consciousness, when the external environment neurologically affects self awareness to create a processing of memory very similar to a dream state, which, in turn, our experiential normal state of affairs suggests to us there was no discontinuity, no break which then mixes up the issues of ontology and epistemology, which are premixed beforehand. In another words, a preexisting knot simply becomes..knotted a second time without the ability to deconstruct an inverse causation of critical thinking, or reversal of such processes..