"But we, who have made no effort whatsoever to filter, who in our works have made ourselves into simple receptacles of so many echoes, modest recording instruments who are not mesmerized by the drawings we are making, perhaps we serve an even nobler cause." - Andre Breton
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Emotional States and Attention As Directed Energy
"Turing, in Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. 42 (1936), p. 250, gives an argument which is supposed to show that mental procedures cannot carry any farther than mechanical procedures. However, this argument is inconclusive, because it depends on the supposition that that a finite mind is capable of only a finite number of distinguishable states. What Turing disregards completely is the fact that mind, in its use, is not static, but constantly developing. … Therefore, although at each stage of the mind’s development the number of its possible states is finite, there is no reason why this number should not converge to infinity in the course of its development. Now there may exist systematic methods of accelerating, specializing, and uniquely determining this development, e.g. by asking the right questions on the basis of a mechanical procedure. But it must be admitted that the precise definition of a procedure of this kind would require a substantial deepening of our understanding of the basic operations of the mind. " -Kurt Godel
Can we theoretically unite physics and psychology as an equation to study the anomalous?
Several days ago, I responded to a post over at The Nightshirt, Eric Wargo's provocative blog. The subject was synchronicity and we got into a dialog about emotional states as carrier waves as he had linked to a post of mine in relation to that more profound form of coincidence.
I had brought up the strange series of incidents leading up to the fire which consumed our house and in particular our emotional state in relation to a series of events such as my precognitive dream, our negative attitudes directed at the house, as well as several other milder forms of synchronicity that followed that conflagration. In hindsight it seems the fire was a form of twisted wish fulfillment.
High emotional states or even more mild variations appear to be entangled in information exchanges of the anomalous kind and it occurred to me there was a missing link in this, which is the fact that attention is a form of directed energy. Emotional states according to their strength or focus are are a form of directed attention that focus on relationships of information that may create an observer effect that appears to come from without as it is experienced from within, while it seems it's both, neither here nor there in what some time ago, I called the "third state" which also relates to the strangeness that information fields can express themselves physically.
Anticipation....and intention wrapped up with a bow that is our emotional state seems to form a multiplex of signals in a interdependent relationship with energy as information focused by attention.
What do I mean by attention as directed energy?
You go to your local store and buy a seedling with the intent to grow it into a plant. Your anticipation is that it will bloom. Your attention is focused on making this happen. If you dont direct attention to the plant, nothing happens. All of this is based on information exchanges of a more positive emotional state. As I said in the last post, it seems information has a life of it's own and we are it's carriers as well as being part of it's entire field and yet we definitely have physicality.
I looked back on all this in relation to John Dee and his purported invocations of "angels" and as Erick pointed out, the role of ritual as a focusing tool. What seems primitive as PD Ouspensky pointed out may actually be sophisticated. However this has a warning label attached to it that falls under the purview of one of my favorite theoretical physicists, who famously took apart predictability as a ruling projection toward the universe. File this under unintended consequences.
The old bromide of being careful what you focus on may apply in terms of this matrix of forces..intent, anticipation, emotions and attention.
We see this demonstrated in others all the time however I think there is a strange parallel in the anomalous. Its difficult to have a state of self awareness where we can observe these forces in ourselves which was one of the observations of GI Gurdjieff. Its difficult to chew gum and walk at the same time.
In have said before, that this blog was never intended to be an encyclopedia as the presumption on my part was to provoke self directed explorations of these odd topics. The assumption is that you the reader has the wherewithal to go further in these areas if you chose to or already are a carrier of information already in regard to them.
That being said, do we have a good example of this? So I asked myself and one name stood out, one that is very familiar to me due to my age that may be unfamiliar to younger readers.
Ted Serios..the creator of images projected upon film. In Ted we have all the ingredients I have mentioned...a high emotional state he achieved with a large supply of alcohol, attention as directed energy, anticipation as related to intention, The results?
One could say Ted was a fraud, a bellhop who somehow managed to invent a seemingly useless application of technology whose only purpose was to deceive science and this may be true. However it's value as an illustrating principle rather than a provable fact has everything to do with the nature of theory and uncertainty whenever we place a rigid architecture on what is patently fluid, meaning the truth in the eyes of an observer.
I seem to be on a approach on these subjects and to what end... have no clue and yet my own healthy self skepticism fortunately keeps me from diving off the deep end. There is undoubtedly however something afoot behind physicality that stubbornly resists sitting still long enough to have its picture taken....or maybe it has been captured in the image above. Does this represent the sum of the equation between psychology and physics?
You may or may not decide on a menu choice in this proverbial restaurant, all I can do is hand you my menu. It may be delicious or it may give you indigestion or as a Taoist would say, it may give you both. One aspect of this is clear, one of the aims of our transience may be to expand our menu choices here without becoming obsessed over one versus another. That would seem to be an automatism to avoid while for others it is an addiction as belief. Discernment is a hard won attribute that has to be paid for and it pays our bill at this corner bar and grill as a credit card plied against debits.
At the same time, we seem to be surrounded by this enfoldment of starnge actions at a distance through our own states that are mirrored by the anomalous and the anomalous may prove to have our fingerprints on it's provocative evidence. If this is so, the proverbial shifting of phase between a field of information and our own containment as a carrier of it, of which we are deeply immersed in, may be in a relationship we have yet to recognize. Between our inner universe and our environment may be a third state of affairs that has the potential of being triangulated.
And of course discernment is subject to contingencies. One aspect being contingent upon another with no apparent right angles of direct observation allowed when it comes to the anomalous. All we are privy to is effects.
Attention as directed energy, requiring an emotional carrier wave focused with the anticipations attached to intention may be an equation that proves useful. Or, it may be wadded up and best consigned to a waste basket.
Time provides the answers often enough when we do not receive immediate gratification such as putting the answer before the question.
Bruce, I totally agree with you about attention as energy. I got interested in this a couple years ago when my Tai Chi instructor offhandedly remarked that "where your attention goes, your energy flows." I subsequently started hearing this same phrase everywhere in New Age writing, and finally traced that phrasing to a popular writer of pseudo Hawaiian shamanism (a book called The Urban Shaman), although it seems to be an ancient idea that corresponds to various conceptions of an "energy body," Ka, etc. What interested me, though, is the possibility that maybe these postulated subtle energies are just cultural ways of symbolizing or understanding the "force" of attention itself--that is, focused consciousness as a creative, shaping factor in the universe.
ReplyDeleteGood post.
I agree that" New Age Speak" as a positivist language paves over the possibilities inherent in many conceptual models as they use terms as if a description is the same thing as what is described...which is all over pop culture...the message might be the medium as a confluence of forces rather than a singularity of one aspect over another seems more probable. As Vallee suggested as well as many others, I suspect there is "a physics of information" yet to be understood. Dualism tends to underline a strict interpretation of physicality, whereas what do we see the medium of broadcast signals as ...we cannot see them anymore than thoughts yet they have a physicality while not being amenable to our senses "visualizing" them by detection.
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