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How To Be Spiritual In A Material World
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31 Oct 2023
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Becoming Super Conscious

 

Many many people (and animals and forests and oceans too) have become super conscious in these past few years. Is that you too? Here are what I see as the 12 sign of being super conscious now….

  1. We don’t get triggered by things in the way we used to. There’s a kind of calm understanding of what’s behind things and where they might lead if someone recognises its potential and greater purpose.
  2. We walk in awe of the natural world, going ‘look at that sky, the green of everything, the bursting wonder of flowers and the sheer joy of connecting with animals’.
  3. We KNOW things. Yup just simply know stuff we never learned or heard of before. I call this quantum intelligence and it seems to be catching on.
  4. We know who we are and at the same time it’s kind of irrelevant as we are now the source creators of ourselves. Identity has ceased to matter and fulfillment of greater purpose has taken its joyful place.
  5. We appear to be timeless in some way. Yes there are signs of aging, but at the same time there’s a radiant inner glow that supersedes any belief in getting older.
  6. We are radiant suns lighting up reality, not just in our close proximity, but in the greater field of us all.
  7. There is a strong sense of Source both within and without. We see source in everything and everyone. It seems we are now inner connected via what I like to call the Source mycelium network that connects all life now.
  8. We can commune with animals, trees, the stars, the universe. It’s more than telepathic, it’s communion at its most wonderful level.
  9. We are possibilitarians, apocaloptimists, transformers and transcenders of all that has come before. The past is maleable, we live in the presence of the present, co-creating a future too fabulous to even yet imagine.
  10. We talk with those who’ve gone on to the other side with great ease and grace, reveling in their next becoming. We are even watching a wave of loved ones being reborn right now as the next wave of super conscious beings on the planet.
  11. We are a collective force of wonder, of creation, of super connection, each with our own unique masteries and genius surging to the fore to innovate everything.
  12. We source new consciousness and quantum leap new possibilities into reality. We are future innovators, loving life, spreading Kindness with a capital K and living in a version of reality that is magical, synergistic, beautiful and naturally abundant.

 

About the Author:


Soleira Green is a visionary author, quantum coach, ALLchemist & future innovator. She has been creating leading edge breakthroughs in consciousness, quantum evolution, transformation, innovation, intelligence and more over the past 25 years, has written and self-published eleven books, and taught courses all over the world on these topics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Original post here

 

22 Oct 2023
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Is Dreaming Real?

 

“The farther away I go,” Alex wrote, “the closer I’ll be to you.”

A week later, she lay dead on the floor of a middle school bathroom in Thailand. That was three years after she had shown up late for dinner with a black eye from her first seizure. It was eight years after our first date climbing trees in Central Park.

“That breeze, that tickled your ear?” she wrote once, when there was just an ocean between us. “That was me.”

Her final letter ended with a question. “How long until we see each other again?”

It was the night of her funeral when it happened. She was there, waiting on the far bank of a raging river, radiant with red hair flying. I began to wade across, but the black current swept me away before I could reach her. She came again another night, as I slept, trapped behind thick glass we pressed our palms against. Then, another dream—this time of Alex in a hospital waiting room. “It isn’t her,” the nurse insisted, summoning security. Unable to contemplate nothingness, the mind can only shape the contours of the void. Death becomes an uncrossable river, a wall of unbreakable glass, an obvious lie.

I dreamed of Alex for years. Each dream was different, yet the theme was immutable: She could not be reached. Then, one night, I went lucid, and everything changed.

*   *   *

Dr. Keith Hearne, a psychologist, defines lucid dreaming as becoming “fully aware of being in a dream.” This realization is instantly transformative: Rather than a dream being something that simply happens to you, suddenly you can influence the dream’s content and direction.

 

As his wife sleeps unsuspectingly beside him, Liam flies through an endless cosmos of beckoning planets searching for sex.

 

Aristotle documented the phenomenon, as did the Buddha Shakyamuni. Depictions of lucid dreaming appear in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in the oral traditions of Australian aborigines. In a conceit shared by many modern practitioners, the Upanishads from the sixth century B.C. equate lucid dreaming with godhood. “Up and down in his dream, the god makes manifold shapes for himself, either rejoicing together with women, or laughing, or seeing terrible sights.”

Among scientists, the concept was widely considered a myth until Hearne proved otherwise. At 8:07 a.m. on April 12, 1975, research subject Alan Worsley sent a message to Hearne from within a lucid dream. Our bodies are paralyzed during REM sleep, except our unseeing eyes, which still flit around behind sealed lids, like captive butterflies. While an EEG confirmed that Worsley slept, the dreamer performed a series of choreographed eye movements, akin to Morse code. “The signals were coming from another world—the world of dreams,” Hearne wrote, “and they were as exciting as if they were coming from another solar system.”

For many lucid dreamers, or “oneironauts,” inner space and outer space converge. At the moment of lucidity, Clare Johnson delights in backflipping out of her current dream and landing in an infinite void. Felicity Doyle often begins by exploring a galaxy of “soap bubbles,” all portals to exotic locales. Another man, who asked to go by a pseudonym due to the nature of what he shared, summons a universe. As his wife sleeps unsuspectingly beside him, Liam, as we will call him, enacts the two most common lucid dream motifs: He flies through an endless cosmos of beckoning planets searching for sex.

“I usually take the approach that the women have been waiting for me,” Liam explained. “I transmit that thought to them ahead of time, telepathically, ‘I’m your long-lost love.’ ”

They couple—in ruined castles, on red sand beaches, in luminescent wilderness—and then he flies away, never to return. “There is only one particular woman that I search for again and again,” he confessed. “I’ll think, ‘Oh, maybe there’s something in that bed,’ and I’ll pull back the covers and sure enough, there she is. Maybe half the time, I’m successful.”

In waking life, the woman is a family friend—someone Liam knows through his wife. Objectively, they have never shared more than casual conversation, but in dreams, she is the ultimate lover, even boldly initiating sex with Liam in front of his wife and family. “I love those moments,” he grinned. “It’s almost like bragging—bragging to myself about my own lucidity. I’m so strong, I can do it in front of my own mother-in-law.”

In the morning, Liam feels no guilt. “This is a safe space to explore anything taboo,” he concludes. Other lucid dreamers report going even further, carrying out acts of rape, pedophilia, incest, and murder with impunity.

I first met Liam at a private gathering organized by Doyle. Over a light lunch, 10 oneironauts discussed recent nocturnal adventures: turning into animals, conversing with historical figures, shooting heroin. Some spoke about cutting through the fabric of dreams to see what lies beyond. Others advised the more reckless to tie silver cords to their dream bodies first, to keep them from wandering too far and being lost forever.

While a recent study found that 47 percent of respondents have had at least one lucid dream, Doyle’s guests reported frequent and prolonged experiences. It is unclear why certain individuals are predisposed to lucidity, but research suggests that oneironauts tend to possess a greater puzzle-solving ability. It was also evident, from my conversations with dreamers, that training is critical for developing any innate potential.

As lunch progressed, the discussion turned to matters of willpower. While even novice oneironauts are usually able to exert minimal control over their dream environments (levitating a handkerchief, for instance), more impressive feats are often stymied. The dream world possesses a kind of perverse and shifting logic. Concessions can often be made. If the dreamer cannot fly, for example, she might consider manifesting a magic carpet. If a dreamer wanted to move a mountain, she might first have to rig an atomic bomb.

As far back as Doyle can remember, this world of dreams always seemed “more real” than her waking one. “It’s brighter and more vibrant there. Everything sparkles,” she insists. “It’s crystal clear in all directions.” Other dreamers report synesthesia, viewing scenes from multiple angles simultaneously, and ethereal music beyond the capability of any earthly instrument. Jared Zeizel regularly visits an orchard bearing surreal fruit more delicious than any meal he has ever tasted.

“As a child,” Doyle later told me, “I had extreme social anxiety.” We sat amid the clutter of her suburban San Francisco home, eating oranges as her lively 8-year-old practiced piano across the room. “My parents got divorced when I was 3, and then my mom got divorced again when I was 15. There was fighting at home and at school. Kids threw their lunches at me, and shoved me into lockers. Dreams were my only escape.” Yet, even there, securely inside her own mind, the suffering continued.

“There is this boy, and we are blissfully in love,” Doyle began, describing a recurrent dream that has persisted for decades. His appearance changes from night to night, but his essence is the same. “Our love is deeper and stronger than any I’ve ever known, and in every dream, we are torn apart. I go questing after him—just bizarre scenes like climbing telephone poles in the desert to peer into the distance, or asking a series of giants, ‘Have you seen him?’ Or, I remember a wardrobe of uninhabited bodies—just skins on coat hangers, and I was desperately searching through, ‘Not him, not him,’ just sobbing and sobbing. I would wake up and be wrecked for weeks.”

At 19, Doyle lost a leg in a motorcycle crash. “I shattered my pelvis,” she whispered, to spare her daughter the details, “and my femur broke, and I severed my femoral artery. At that point, I had no pulse. They didn’t expect me to survive.”

“As far as the leg,” she continued, gesturing at her stump, “I find it a very useful tool. You may not be able to discern the difference between your physical body and your spiritual one, but I know what it feels like all the time.” Where her leg once was, Doyle now experiences a phantom limb permanently bent in the exact position the leg had been that day, straddling her motorcycle, at the moment of impact.

She has long since become accustomed to life on crutches, but every now and then, she will open a door in a dream and see herself across the threshold, back in the intensive care unit, suspended in a web of tubes and wires, somewhere between life and death. “I’ve learned to close that door, and walk away,” she stated. And, when she walks away in dreams, she walks on two legs.

In her dreams, the 47-year-old is young again. And she runs, over hills and rooftops, through houses. She leaps over fences. The last time Doyle saw her dream lover standing there with their daughters, she ran to them too. “I instantly knew them,” she explained. “Our wedding, the births of our children—I knew my dream family more than I ever knew my waking one.” They wept with joy at their reunion, but all too soon Doyle felt the harrowing sensation of being pulled back into a body. Her family begged her to stay. She clutched at them with all her strength.

Doyle awoke beside her real husband. “He has no interest in dreams,” she admits, though like her, he has his own double life. Among other revelations too painful to utter, Doyle discovered just three months ago that her husband has a cigarette habit. “He lied to me for nine years,” she confessed. “I’d smell it on him and he’d say things like, ‘I must have been standing next to a smoker.’ ”

The resulting marital crisis has provoked an enduring insomnia. Doyle juggles a pharmacopeia of sleeping pills, but the sleep is never deep enough to go lucid. Now, at a time when she needs her inner world the most, she is an exile.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, in a clinic outside L.A., Dr. Joseph Green works with patients suffering from the opposite problem. Many of them are terrified of falling asleep. The psychologist specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly the intrusive nightmares so characteristic of that disorder. Green teaches lucidity techniques that allow clients to re-engineer their nightmares from the inside.

 

While skepticism creates lucidity, faith is required to sustain it. Among oneironauts, the concept takes on an almost religious tone.

 

The therapist begins by advising patients to document their dreams—the first step to lucidity. Journaling helps strengthen the connection between the conscious and subconscious mind, and the dream material can be studied for recurring themes. Each theme is an opportunity to perform the vital task of reality testing. “For example,” Green explained, “I’ve always had cops in my dreams, so whenever I see a cop during the day, I ask myself, ‘Are you dreaming?’ ” Eventually, the subject asks that question in a dream. Some practitioners test reality by pushing an index finger through the palm of their hand, some pinch their noses and try to breathe, others jump to see if they can levitate. Confirmation instantly subverts reality.

While skepticism creates lucidity, faith is required to sustain it. Among oneironauts, the concept takes on an almost religious tone. As London-based lucid dreaming therapist Dr. Clare Johnson explains, “If you’re afraid there’s a monster around the next corner, lo and behold, there is. If you’re worried that a door won’t open, lo and behold, it’s locked.” If you believe you can fly, you can fly. If you begin to doubt it, though, down you go. Here, in the dream, the mind’s role in creating reality is absolute.

Johnson and Green train clients to reflect extreme confidence within dreams. Rather than flee from one’s nightmares, the dreamer is encouraged to engage. “Everything in the dream is part of you,” Johnson notes. Everything is alive, and everything has a message. “Instead of running from a monster, turn and face it. Try sending love. Try giving it a gift. Try asking what it wants.”

Green described a Vietnam veteran whose best friend died beside him in a firefight. The veteran relived the episode in eruptive nightmares for half a century until the therapist taught him how to rewrite the script. When the dream returned, the veteran became lucid. “Get up,” he told his dying comrade. “The war is over. We’re going home.” The stricken soldier smiled, and the two men strolled off the battlefield arm in arm. The veteran never had that nightmare again.

Christina Cha was 10 years old when her favorite aunt, Theresa, was raped and murdered. In a recent essay, Cha imagined herself as the girl she had been, addressing the deceased. “It was 1982. Purple is my favorite color, and rainbows and unicorns are important to me.” She had just been the flower girl at her aunt’s wedding. “When you are found, you wear black and white with red. … [C]loth pieces lying on the ground, empty of you. … Your body, dumped in a parking lot in Little Italy.”

The murder, Cha confided, sent “a nuclear blast” through her family. “This heavy seriousness descended—this heavy silence, just full of rage and sadness. Suddenly, I had to be tough. Being cute was a death sentence. Being girly was shameful. My father began teaching me martial arts. I became hypervigilant. I tried to be invisible.”

 

These therapeutic methods are so beneficial that, having vanquished all naturally occurring nightmares, some oneironauts begin creating their own.

 

As hard as she tried, however, she could not hide from her nightmares. Theresa had been strangled by her own scarf, and now on a nightly basis, so was Cha. Again and again, she dreamed of serial killers. Sometimes, Theresa appeared as well, only to greet her niece with a ghastly face-warping grin. Cha’s epiphany came one night as she lay bound in a dark basement somewhere in the depths of her own subconscious. A terrifying figure loomed over her. As always, she was to be raped and murdered—except this time, Cha became lucid. “I just started making fun of my captor,” she recalled. “ ‘Do it!’ I shouted. ‘Fucking kill me!’ And then, he couldn’t. He couldn’t even get an erection. It was ridiculous and disgusting, but it felt wonderful. I actually said, ‘Is that all you’ve got?’ ” That was the last serial killer dream Cha would ever have.

According to Johnson and Green, the successes of Cha and the veteran are common. “If you think of a dream as a subconscious message trying to reach your conscious mind,” Green explained, “when you lucid dream, the message is delivered. After that, there’s no reason for the dream to return, and that’s what we find time and time again.”

These therapeutic methods are so beneficial that, having vanquished all naturally occurring nightmares, some oneironauts begin creating their own. One of Jared Zeizel’s favorite methods is to summon a negative version of himself to embody his fears and shameful impulses. “I call him Dark Jared,” Zeizel expounded. “He’s a very gaunt-looking, shadowy clone. When Dark Jared is there, I embody Light Jared, and I’m able to separate the negative elements of myself from the positive elements.”

The summoning ability Zeizel demonstrates is integral to another important clinical process—bereavement. “If we dream of a deceased loved one,” Johnson believes, “it can help us maintain a connection with them and trust that they’re OK.” In the years I have spent collecting thousands of dreams from around the world, that theme is prevalent. When the dead appear, they are usually joyful and vibrant. The elderly return to the prime of life. The cancer patient has a full head of hair. The victim of dementia remembers everything.

*   *   *

That is how it was with Alex—at least initially. Seeing her began to instantly trigger lucidity. I could then overcome the barriers between us, leaping rivers, shattering glass walls with an operatic high note, or pummeling her wardens into submission. For a while, she was impervious to touch. My hand would pass through hers, but we persevered. It helped when she donned gloves. The sense of closure was visceral—even just to say “I love you” again and hear it back in her exquisite voice contoured by her conspiratorial smile.

Eventually, though, the process began to break down. I could not find Alex so easily anymore. She would appear only as a sound or a fragrance. I would try to fly to her, but a scrum of dream characters would pin me down. I would summon her, but a pile of bones or cured meat would appear instead. It was like a subconscious immune response had been activated.

Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman reported something similar in his own lucid experiments in the 1940s. After months of progress, Feynman had a dream in which he realized that his lucidity was caused by sleeping on a brass rod, which had disturbed his visual cortex. After casting off the rod in that dream, he was never able to go lucid again. His brain, Feynman theorized, was tired of him interfering with the natural sleeping process and had “invented some false reasons as to why I shouldn’t do it anymore.”

 

We are often told that dreams are not real, but Einstein’s experience subverts this idea.

 

Feynman’s fascination with the intersection of dreams and reality was shared by several of his colleagues, including Wolfgang Pauli and Albert Einstein. In adolescence, Einstein had a momentous dream that he would always remember. “I was sledding with my friends at night,” he recounted. “I started to slide down the hill, but my sled started going faster and faster. I was going so fast that I realized I was approaching the speed of light. I looked up at that point and I saw the stars. They were being refracted into colors I had never seen before. I was filled with a sense of awe. I understood in some way that I was looking at the most important meaning in my life.” The experience would eventually inspire his theory of relativity. “My entire scientific career has been a meditation on my dream,” he reflected in his later years.

We are often told that dreams are not real, but Einstein’s experience subverts this idea. Ultimately, his dream represents a deeper and more enduring reality. That belief is echoed by many oneironauts, paying out their silver cords, as they venture further and further into the dream world. For them, the distinction between waking life and dream life has become meaningless. Doyle, for example, is unable or unwilling at times to acknowledge a boundary between her worlds. “I truly believe that I could regrow my leg,” she insists, “if I absolutely, and 100  percent beyond the shadow of a doubt, believed that I could.”

Thomas Peisel recalled his own journey with lucidity, which culminated in him converting to Buddhism. “Lucid dreaming is like an amusement park. When you first get lucid, you want to go on all the rides. After being in the park a thousand times, though, the rides begin to lose their appeal. You start to wonder, ‘Who built this park and why?’ ”

For Peisel, one of his most profound dreams hints at the answer. “I could see an entire city before me—the people and buildings were crystal clear all the way to the horizon. I remember thinking—not only am I in this dream, but this dream is inside me.” It is a return to the Upanishads. Everything is God, the text claims—God hiding from himself in the form of a cloud, a tree, you, me.

In the end, Alex died twice. First, in waking life, then gradually in dreams—one reality reflecting another. “You have gone too deep,” she once warned, in a particularly vivid dream, “you shouldn’t be here.” After that, Alex began to appear less frequently, and only in peripheral roles: a supernumerary, a silhouette in a window. Eventually, a kind of amnesia arose. In a jostling crowd, we collided softly, apologized, and carried on without recognition. It was the last time we ever spoke.

Even though she has vanished again, the memories from my dreams have relieved the sense of loss. I think about how she once wrote, in life, about measuring distances by the degree to which we can comprehend them. The more I comprehend, the more the distance collapses, and the more the dreams become real. For a little while, we were there together inside of the illusion—two separate beings generated by a single sleeping mind.

 

 

 

Original article here

15 Oct 2023
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Pick Your Hard

I fast once a month. It’s hard. Even though I’ve been doing it for years, I start dreading my fast day the night before; fretting about how I’m going to be able to pass through the discomfort. And where I’m typically not hungry until around 11am, on a fasting day I wake up hungry. Then, I stumble through what I need to get done as best as I can, given how lousy I’m feeling. Even though I know what to expect, it never seems to get easier.

This week I heard someone say, whether you choose to take care of yourself or not, both are hard. So, pick your hard. This flies in the face of the world we inhabit, where we are constantly being steered towards doing what’s easy, what’s fast and what’s convenient. More to the point, we’ve been educated to believe that nothing has to be hard. We’re all supposed to feel good all the time. We’re all supposed to be winners.

But, here’s the thing. Experiences in life that are difficult, and that we find a way to meet and be strengthened by, give us something to be proud of. These moments give us a sense of who we are and what we are capable of, helping us cultivate an inner strength and grit to turn to when the going gets hard. Best of all, the empowerment that becomes available to us offsets the tendency to be subject to all the forms of escapism the modern day world offers up so we don’t have to feel the sting of living.

That’s why I fast. Because it strengthens my resolve and my determination to embrace what it means to be alive in the times we are living in. The “hard” of fasting helps me to remember and honor the preciousness of food. And it serves as a counterbalance to all the excesses we are constantly being force-fed to indulge in. Best of all, choosing what is hard reminds me of what it takes to walk my talk, even when it feels difficult.

Because here’s the truth:

  • It’s hard to have a long overdue conversation, and it’s hard to carry what is unresolved.
  • It’s hard to make changes in your life, and it’s hard to not feel good.
  • It’s hard to take the time to discover what your offer to the world is, and it’s hard to work at a job you hate.
  • It’s hard to admit to the limitations of what you can and cannot influence, and it’s hard to try and control what you cannot control.
  • It’s hard to learn about who you are and what makes you tick, and it’s hard to live believing the wrong things about yourself.

 

So, pick your hard.

 

Original article here

 

01 Oct 2023
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The Power of Next

Whenever I am faced with life’s uncertainty, I ask myself the following questions: Why is this happening? What can I do to make it go away? How can I navigate this effectively? What can I learn from this experience?

Being at a crossroads can be challenging when what you know to be true suddenly isn’t. The straight and expected path you are on veers sharply, does a summersault, and flings you into unchartered territory leaving you unsure of what direction you are facing. Disoriented, the task of righting yourself can seem daunting. What do I do now? What are my next steps? So many asked questions, so many unanswered responses.

The ‘not knowing’ can be fertile ground for stress, anxiety, and fear to insidiously creep into your awareness. The question then becomes, “What can be done to mitigate the fallout and find direction?”

Baby Steps

Many years ago, I took a workshop on handling change, where the facilitator asked us to do one exercise every day for the rest of our lives (a pretty bold ask!). He asked us to change one thing every day. Simple, easy tasks that gently challenge any resistance to change thinking. Drive a different way to work. If you normally put your right shoe on first, today put your left shoe on first. Please note, I tried changing hands to brush my teeth and got toothpaste all over!

The goal of this exercise is to become more comfortable with daily changes, even small ones, thereby making the bigger, more challenging ones less scary. Now, I can’t say that I do this every day, but this exercise has provided comfort for me in times of turmoil.

While this exercise can be a preemptive approach to handling stress, I also found I needed an immediate touchstone that would provide me with some reassurance in the current moment that things were indeed going to be okay, I was going to be okay, in troubled times.

Next…

That touchstone for me lies in the concept of the word “next.” The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes the word next this way: in the time, place, or order nearest or immediately succeeding. It even has the word “succeed” in the definition!

When life gets challenging and I have been thoroughly flung into the unknown, I boldly (and sometimes confidently) say, “Next!” out loud. This shifts my energy, focus and intention away from the quagmire I find myself in and points me in a new direction. It’s amazing how saying this one word while keeping a curious spirit and open heart can provide a sense of comfort and possibilities.

Rather than dwelling on the unforeseen changes, I choose to look toward new possibilities. I may have no clue as to what those possibilities may be or when I will experience them, but I believe I will be guided. Many years ago, I purchased a greeting card that I had framed. On the card was a quote from Emily Dickinson that says, “I dwell in possibility.” That has been my sacred mantra and has served me well.

Next is possibility. Next is hope. Next is new beginnings. Next is sewn into the very fabric of forward motion. What are my next steps? What’s the next chapter for me? What’s next on the agenda?

As we get swept away and sometimes flung by life’s changes and challenges, stand in your power and declare…

Next!

 

 

 

Original article here

22 Sep 2023
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Selfishness Is Learned

Many people cheat on taxes — no mystery there. But many people don’t, even if they wouldn’t be caught — now, that’s weird. Or is it? Psychologists are deeply perplexed by human moral behavior, because it often doesn’t seem to make any logical sense. You might think that we should just be grateful for it. But if we could understand these seemingly irrational acts, perhaps we could encourage more of them.

It’s not as though people haven’t been trying to fathom our moral instincts; it is one of the oldest concerns of philosophy and theology. But what distinguishes the project today is the sheer variety of academic disciplines it brings together: not just moral philosophy and psychology, but also biology, economics, mathematics, and computer science. They do not merely contemplate the rationale for moral beliefs, but study how morality operates in the real world, or fails to. David Rand of Yale University epitomizes the breadth of this science, ranging from abstract equations to large-scale societal interventions. “I’m a weird person,” he says, “who has a foot in each world, of model-making and of actual experiments and psychological theory building.”

In 2012 he and two similarly broad-minded Harvard professors, Martin Nowak and Joshua Greene, tackled a question that exercised the likes of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Which is our default mode, selfishness or selflessness? Do we all have craven instincts we must restrain by force of will? Or are we basically good, even if we slip up sometimes?

They collected data from 10 experiments, most of them using a standard economics scenario called a public-goods game. Groups of four people, either American college students or American adults participating online, were given some money. They were allowed to place some of it into a pool, which was then multiplied and distributed evenly. A participant could maximize his or her income by contributing nothing and just sharing in the gains, but people usually gave something. Despite the temptation to be selfish, most people showed selflessness.

 

The fuzziness of psychological ideas makes them hard to test. If an experimental result doesn’t fit your theory of human behavior, you can fiddle with the definitions.

 

This finding was old news, but Rand and his colleagues wanted to know how much deliberation went into such acts of generosity. So in two of the experiments, subjects were prodded to think intuitively or deliberately; in two others, half of the subjects were forced to make their decision under time pressure and half were not; and in the rest, subjects could go at their own pace and some naturally made their decisions faster than others. If your morning commute is any evidence, people in a hurry would be extra selfish. But the opposite was true: Those who responded quickly gave more. Conversely, when people took their time to deliberate or were encouraged to contemplate their choice, they gave less.

The researchers worked under the assumption that snap judgments reveal our intuitive impulses. Our intuition, apparently, is to cooperate with others. Selfish behavior comes from thinking too much, not too little. Rand recently verified this finding in a meta-analysis of 51 similar studies from different research groups. “Most people think we are intuitively selfish,” Rand says — based on a survey he conducted—but “our lab experiments show that making people rely more on intuition increases cooperation.”

The cooperative impulse isn’t confined to an artificial experimental setting. In another paper, Rand and Ziv Epstein of Pomona College studied interviews with 51 recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal, who had demonstrated extreme altruism by risking their lives to save others. Study participants read the interviews and rated the medalists on how much their thinking seemed intuitive versus deliberative. And intuition dominated. “I’m thankful I was able to act and not think about it,” a college student who rescued a 69-year-old woman from a car during a flash flood explained.

So Rand made a strong case that people are intuitive cooperators, but he considered these findings just the start. It’s one thing to put forward an idea and some evidence for it — lots of past researchers have done that. It’s quite another to describe and explain that idea in a rigorous, mathematical fashion. Ironically, Rand figured he could make better sense of humans by stepping away from studying real ones.

The overwhelming majority of psychological theories are verbal: explanations of the ways people act using everyday language, with maybe a few terms of art thrown in. But words can be imprecise. It may be true that “cooperation is intuitive,” but when is it intuitive? And what exactly does “intuitive” mean? The fuzziness of psychological ideas makes them hard to test. If an experimental result doesn’t fit your theory of human behavior, you can fiddle with the definitions and claim you were right all along.

Rand has sought to create quantitative models. “Science is about developing theories,” he says, “not about developing a list of observations. And the reason formal models are so important is that if your goal is theory-building, then it’s essential that you have theories that are really clearly articulated and are falsifiable.”

To do that, he has developed computer simulations of society — The Sims, basically. These models represent collections of individual people described by computer “agents,” algorithms that capture a specific package of traits, such as a tendency to cooperate or not. You can do controlled experiments on these computerized citizens that would be impossible or unethical to do with real people. You can endow them with new personalities to see how they’d fare. You can observe social processes in action, on time scales ranging from seconds to generations, instead of just taking a snapshot of a person or group. You can watch the spread of certain behaviors throughout a population and how they influence other behaviors. Over time, the patterns that emerge can tell you things about large-scale social interaction that a lab experiment with a few real people never could.

 

 

One of the first such models, in the early 1970s, studied housing segregation. It represented a city as a 16-by-13 grid of squares, populated by two types of people: stars and circles. Each star would move to the nearest location in which at least half its neighbors were also stars — it had a slight bias to be among similar others. Circles did the same. Even these mild biases led quickly to stark segregation, with all-star and all-circle regions of the board — a much more extreme partitioning than any one agent sought. The researcher, the economist Thomas Schelling, used his model to help explain racial segregation in American cities. A neighborhood can splinter into homogeneous patches even when individual residents are hardly prejudiced at all. (Of course, in reality, segregation also reflects outright racism and explicit policies of exclusion.) Schelling’s work became a case study of how a group’s collective behavior can diverge from the desires of any one agent.

Such models have also been used to explore cooperation. In an influential paper in 1981, the political scientist Robert Axelrod programmed agents to play a simple game called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Two players have to decide whether to cooperate with or betray the other, and they receive points based on their choices. The scoring system is set up to mimic an essential dilemma of social life. Together the players perform best if they both cooperate, yet each can maximize his or her own individual outcome, at the expense of the other, by acting selfishly. The game takes its name from a scenario in which the police interrogate two thieves, offering each a reward for ratting out his or her accomplice. The thieves aren’t able to communicate to reach a joint decision; they have to make their decisions independently. Acting rationally, each should rat out the other. But when they both act “rationally,” they actually end up with the most combined jail time.

 

It’s possible we’re born with a tendency to cooperate, but frequent cooperation (with beneficial results) is required to sustain our benevolence.

 

The game gets more interesting — and more analogous to real life — when you play multiple rounds with the same partner. Here, repeated cooperation is best not just for both partners as a unit but also for each individually. You can still occasionally double-cross your partner for extra points, however, as long as it doesn’t trigger later betrayal.

What is the best strategy, then? To find out, Axelrod solicited Prisoner’s Dilemma strategies from mathematicians, biologists, economists, political scientists, computer scientists, and physicists from around the world. Axelrod programmed his computerized agents with these strategies and made them play a round-robin tournament. Some strategies were quite sophisticated, but the winner was a simple one called tit-for-tat.

Tit-for-tat resembles human reciprocity. It starts with cooperation and, after that, does whatever the other player did on the previous round. An agent using the strategy extends an olive branch at first. If its opponent reciprocates, it keeps cooperating. But if its opponent double-crosses it, the tit-for-tat agent rescinds its peace offering until its opponent makes amends.

 

 

By combining the short-term temptation to be selfish with the long-term benefits of collaboration, the Prisoner’s Dilemma is an ideal model for human cooperation, and Rand has built on Axelrod’s work to understand why evolution might have favored intuitive selflessness. 

Rand and his grad student Adam Bear considered a variant of the Prisoner’s Dilemma in which matchups were either one-shot or multiple-round, chosen at random.8 The computerized agents faced a tough choice. In a one-off, they would score more points by betraying their opponent, whereas in repeated play cooperation made more sense. But the uncertainty made it unclear which strategy was best. Rand and Bear then added a twist. An agent could elect to pay some points at the start of an encounter—representing the efforts of deliberation—to suss out what kind of matchup it would face, so that it could tailor its strategy.

The agent had to decide whether the advantage of foreknowledge outweighed its cost. The price of the tip-off varied randomly, and each agent was programmed with a maximum price it would agree to pay; if the price exceeded that amount, the agent did not receive any advance information and instead chose some default behavior, following its “intuition.” In this way, the simulation allowed for different personality types. Some agents intuitively cooperated, others intuitively betrayed. Some occasionally deliberated, others didn’t.

Is deliberation helpful? That’s not immediately obvious. Intuitive thinking is fast but inflexible. Deliberative thinking can achieve better outcomes but takes time and energy. To see which strategy excelled in the long run, Rand and Bear’s model simulated a process of evolution. A large population of agents played the game with one another and either proliferated or died depending on how well they did. This process can model either genetic evolution or cultural evolution, in which the weak players don’t actually die, but merely adopt stronger strategies through imitation.

 

Most of us are genuinely good. And if we’re not, we can be encouraged to be. The math is there.

 

Typically, one strategy swept through the population and replaced the alternatives. This victorious strategy depended on the precise parameters of the game. For example, Rand and Bear varied the probability that matchups would be single- or multiple-round. When most were multi-round, the winning agents defaulted to cooperating but deliberated if the price was right and switched to betrayal if they found they were in a one-shot game. But when most were one-shots, the agents that prevailed were no longer willing to pay to deliberate at all. They simply double-crossed their opponents. In other words, the model produced either wary cooperation or uncompromising betrayal.

This outcome was notable for what was missing. Agents that always cooperated usually died off completely. Likewise, almost no set of game parameters favored agents that defaulted to the double-cross but were sometimes willing to deliberate. Bear and Rand stared at this asymmetry for several weeks, baffled.

Finally, they had a breakthrough. They realized that when your default is to betray, the benefits of deliberating — seeing a chance to cooperate — are uncertain, depending on what your partner does. With each partner questioning the other, and each partner factoring in the partner’s questioning of oneself, the suspicion compounds until there’s zero perceived benefit to deliberating. If your default is to cooperate, however, the benefits of deliberating — occasionally acting selfishly — accrue no matter what your partner does, and therefore deliberation makes more sense.

So, it seems there is a firm evolutionary logic to the human instinct to cooperate but adjust if necessary — to trust but verify. We ordinarily cooperate with other people, because cooperation brings us benefits, and our rational minds let us decipher when we might occasionally gain by acting selfishly instead.

The model also ties up a loose end from Rand’s earlier studies of public-goods games. In that research, time pressure caused some people to cooperate more, but never caused anyone to cooperate less. This asymmetry now makes sense. The only people who would have shown that behavior were those who were willing to deliberate, but defaulted to betrayal; the time pressure would bring out their Machiavellian inclinations. Evidently such people are rare. If someone is deep-down selfish, rational deliberation will only make them more so. And the evolutionary model shows why. Defectors who have qualms are quickly winnowed out by genetic or cultural evolution.

When it comes to getting people to cooperate more, Rand’s work brings good news. Our intuitions are not fixed at birth. We develop social heuristics, or rules of thumb for interpersonal behavior, based on the interactions we have. Change those interactions and you change behavior.

Rand, Nowak, and Greene tested that idea in their 2012 paper. They asked some subjects whether they’d ever played such economics games before. Those with previous experience didn’t become more generous when asked to think intuitively; they’d apparently become accustomed to the anonymous nature of such games and learned a new intuition. Unfortunately, it was a cynical one: They could get away with mooching off others. Similarly, subjects who reported that they couldn’t trust most of the people in their lives also didn’t become more generous when acting on intuition. It’s possible we’re born with a tendency to cooperate, but frequent cooperation (with beneficial results) is required to sustain our benevolence.

Happily, even the Grinch can expand his heart by three sizes, as Rand demonstrates in a recent study. First, he had test subjects play the Prisoner’s Dilemma for about 20 minutes with a variety of opponents. For half of the subjects, the average game lasted eight rounds, meaning cooperation was the best strategy; for half, the average game lasted a single round, which discouraged cooperation. Afterward, everyone played a public-goods game. Those stewed in cooperation gave significantly more money in the second phase of the experiment than did those without it. In less than half an hour, their intuitions had shifted.

How do you encourage cooperation in places where cooperation isn’t the norm? Corporate America comes to mind. “In a lot of situations people are basically rewarded for backstabbing and ladder-climbing,” Rand says. Rand and Bear’s modeling paper, in which intuitive defectors don’t trust each other enough even to consider whether cooperation would pay off, points to an answer. Rand suggests that, at least at first, incentives could come from above, so that the benefits of cooperating don’t depend solely on whether one’s partner cooperates. Companies might offer bonuses and recognition for helpful behavior. Once cooperation becomes a social heuristic, people will begin to cooperate when it benefits them, but also even when it doesn’t. Selflessness will be the new norm.

When selflessness is the norm, encouraging people to make decisions quickly can bring out their better angels. Extensions of this research reveal that we see quick or unthinking acts of generosity as particularly revealing of kindness, and that people may even use this signal strategically. In recent work, Rand and his collaborators have shown that people are faster to make decisions to cooperate when they know someone is watching, as if aware that others will judge them by their alacrity. Among other puzzles, Rand is currently trying to untangle this apparent paradox—the strategic use of intuition.

Rand’s work offers a correction to those misanthropes who peer into the hearts of men and women and see shadows. Most of us are genuinely good. And if we’re not, we can be encouraged to be. The math is there.

If you think seeing life as a set of economics games and cooperation as self-interest in disguise sounds dismal, it is actually not so distanced from what you might call virtue. “When I’m nice to other people, I’m not doing it because of some kind of calculation. I’m doing it because it feels good,” Rand says. “And the reason it feels good, I argue, is that it is actually payoff maximizing in the long run.”

Rand then adds a crucial clarification. “It feels good to be nice — unless the other person is a jerk,” he says. “And then it feels good to be mean.”

Tit for tat indeed.

 

 

 

Original article here

02 Sep 2023
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This Is Where Your Childhood Memories Went

We called them fairy rocks. They were just colorful specks of gravel—the kind you might buy for a fish tank—mixed into my preschool’s playground sand pit. But my classmates and I endowed them with magical properties, hunted them like treasure, and carefully sorted them into piles of sapphire, emerald, and ruby. Sifting the sand for those mystical gems is one of my earliest memories. I was no older than 3 at the time. My memory of kindergarten has likewise been reduced to isolated moments: tracing letters on tan paper with pink dashed lines; watching a movie about ocean creatures; my teacher slicing up a giant roll of parchment so we could all finger-paint self-portraits.

When I try to recall my life before my fifth birthday, I can summon only these glimmers—these match strikes in the dark. Yet I know I must have thought and felt and learned so much. Where did all those years go?

Psychologists have named this dramatic forgetting “childhood amnesia.” On average, people’s memories stretch no farther than age three and a half. Everything before then is a dark abyss. “This is a phenomenon of longstanding focus,” says Patricia Bauer of Emory University, a leading expert on memory development. “It demands our attention because it’s a paradox: Very young children show evidence of memory for events in their lives, yet as adults we have relatively few of these memories.”

In the last few years, scientists have finally started to unravel precisely what is happening in the brain around the time that we forsake recollection of our earliest years. “What we are adding to the story now is the biological basis,” says Paul Frankland, a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. This new science suggests that as a necessary part of the passage into adulthood, the brain must let go of much of our childhood.

Sigmund Freud gave childhood amnesia its name in the early 1900s. He argued that adults forgot their earliest years of life in the process of repressing disturbing memories of sexual awakening. While a handful of psychologists saw merit in this claim, the most commonly accepted explanation for childhood amnesia was that children simply couldn’t form stable memories until age 7—even though there was little evidence to support this idea. For nearly 100 years, psychologists assumed that memories of infancy did not endure because they were never durable in the first place.

The late 1980s marked the beginning of a reformation in child psychology. Bauer and other psychologists began to test infant memory by performing a series of actions—such as building a simple toy gong and striking it—and then waiting to see if a child could imitate the actions in the right order, after a delay ranging from minutes to months.

 

“Mice performed worse on certain kinds of memory tests after living in a cage with a running wheel.

 

This work laid bare the contradiction at the heart of childhood amnesia: Infants can create and access memories in their first few years of life, yet most of these memories eventually vanish at a rate far beyond the typical forgetting of the past we experience as adults.

Maybe, some researchers thought, enduring memories require language or a sense of self, both of which we lack as infants. But although verbal communication and self-awareness undoubtedly strengthen human memories, their absence could not be the whole explanation for childhood amnesia. After all, certain animals that have large and complex brains relative to their body size—such as mice and rats—but do not have language or, presumably, our level of self-awareness, also lose the memories they make in infancy.

Perhaps, then, researchers reasoned, the paradox had a more fundamental physical basis that was common to people and other big-brained mammals. The question was, what?

Between birth and our early teens, the brain is still laying down some of its fundamental circuitry and thickening its electrical pathways with fatty tissue to make them more conductive. In a massive surge of growth, the brain sprouts innumerable new bridges between neurons. In fact, we have far more links between brain cells in our earliest years than we end up with in adulthood; most are pruned away. All that excess brain mass is the wet clay from which our genes and experiences sculpt a brain to suit its particular environment. Without such limber brains, young children would never be able to learn as much as quickly as they do.

As Bauer and others discovered, this adaptability comes with a price. While the brain undergoes this prolonged development outside the womb, the large and complex network of disparate brain regions that collectively create and maintain our memories is still under construction, Bauer explains, and not as capable of forming memories as it will be in adulthood. As a consequence, the long-term memories formed in our first three years of life are the least stable memories we ever make and highly prone to disintegrating as we age.

In early 2018, Frankland and his colleagues published a study indicating another way the brain relinquishes our childhood memories: not only do they degrade, but they also become concealed. A few years back, Frankland and his wife Sheena Josselyn—also a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children—started to notice that the mice they studied performed worse on certain kinds of memory tests after living in a cage with a running wheel.

 

“Our earliest memories are often insoluble blends of genuine recollections, narratives we sponged up from others, and imaginary scenes dreamt up by the subconscious.

 

As the couple knew, exercise on a running wheel promotes neurogenesis—the growth of whole new neurons—in the seahorse-shaped hippocampus, a brain region that is essential for memory. But while neurogenesis in the adult hippocampus likely contributes to the ability to learn and remember, Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University and others had suggested that it might also necessitate a certain amount of forgetting. Just as a forest has room for only so many trees, the hippocampus can hold only so many neurons. New brain cells might crowd the territory of other neurons or even replace them altogether, which could in turn break or reconfigure the small circuits that likely store individual memories. Perhaps, then, the especially high rate of neurogenesis in infancy was partly responsible for childhood amnesia.

To put this notion to the test, Frankland and Josselyn transferred infant and adult mice from the plastic shoebox-sized cages they had known all their lives to larger metal cages they had never seen before. In these new containers, they zapped the rodents’ feet with mild electric shocks. The mice quickly learned to associate the metal cages with the shocks, stiffening with fear whenever they were returned to those enclosures.

While baby mice began to forget about this connection after a single day—relaxing when they found themselves in the shock cages—adult mice never forgot about the danger. But when adults ran on a hamster wheel after the shocks—thereby stimulating neurogenesis—they started to mirror infants in their forgetfulness. Prozac, which also encourages neural growth, had the same effect. Conversely, when the researchers hindered neurogenesis in infant mice with drugs or genetic engineering, the young animals formed much more stable memories.

To get a really close look at how neurogenesis might change memory, Frankland and Josselyn used a virus to insert a gene encoding a green fluorescent protein into the DNA of the mice’s newly sprouted brain cells. The glowing dye revealed that the new cells were not replacing old ones; rather, they were joining existing circuitry. That suggests that, technically, the many little circuits of neurons that store our earliest memories are not wiped out by neurogenesis. Instead, they are thoroughly restructured, which probably explains why the original memories become so difficult to recall. “We think it’s an accessibility issue,” Frankland says, “but it’s sort of a semantic issue too. If a memory becomes impossible to access, then it is effectively erased.”

This restructuring of memory circuits means that, while some of our childhood memories are truly gone, others persist in a scrambled, refracted way. Studies have shown that people can retrieve at least some childhood memories by responding to specific prompts—dredging up the earliest recollection associated with the word “milk,” for example—or by imagining a house, school, or specific location tied to a certain age and allowing the relevant memories to bubble up on their own.

But even if we manage to untangle a few distinct memories that survive the tumultuous cycles of growth and decay in the infant brain, we can never fully trust them; some of them might be partly or entirely fabricated. Through her pioneering research, Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine has demonstrated that our earliest memories in particular are often insoluble blends of genuine recollections, narratives we sponged up from others, and imaginary scenes dreamt up by the subconscious.

In one set of groundbreaking experiments conducted in 1995, Loftus and her colleagues presented volunteers with short stories about their childhood provided by relatives. Unbeknownst to the study participants, one of these stories—about being lost in a mall at age 5—was mostly fiction. Yet a quarter of the volunteers said they had a memory of the experience. And even when they were told that one of the stories they had read was invented, some participants failed to realize it was the lost-in-a-mall story.

When I was a toddler, I got lost in Disneyland. Here is what I recall: It was December and I was watching a toy train loop through a Christmas village. When I turned around, my parents had disappeared. Dread dripped down my body like cold molasses. I began blubbering and wandering the park, searching for them. A stranger approached me and took me to a giant building filled with TV screens playing feeds from security cameras all over the park. Did I see my parents on any of the screens? I did not. We went back to the train where we found my parents. I ran into their arms, overcome with joy and relief.

Recently, for the first time in quite a while, I asked my mom exactly what she remembers about that day in Disneyland. She says it was spring or summer and that she and my family last saw me beside the remote control Jungle Cruise boats, not the railroad near the entrance of the park. As soon as they realized I was missing, they went straight to the Lost and Found Center. A park official had indeed discovered me and brought me to the center, where I had been placated with ice cream.

It was unsettling to have what I thought was a pretty accurate memory so thoroughly contradicted, so I asked my mom to search our family photo albums for some hard evidence. All she could find were pictures from an earlier trip. We will probably never have any tangible proof of what happened. We are left with something far more elusive: those tiny embers of the past, embedded in our mind, twinkling like fool’s gold.

 

 

 

 

Original article here

03 Aug 2023
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2023 So Far

 

 

 

We’re now 7 months into 2023 and I’ve been noticing some things that are quite different from previous years.

  1. People are curious for something new, something fresh and different. Almost like folks have stopped saying that’s woowoo and started saying ‘Whatcha got?’
  2. There are most definitely two distinct realities emerging. The old hierarchical one where everything is scary and scarce. And the new quantum one where everything is available for you to create your own version of life and reality.
  3. While the weather might seem unpredictable, at the same time there’s an increase in the miraculousness of Nature. One wonders if the weather gods aren’t putting purpose in people’s faces and saying ‘Time to act.’, while at the same time the Nature gods are enticing us into a more wondrous interconnection with all of life.
  4. The quantum field is present all around us now. The air we breathe is packed with great possibilities. Super flow of genius, ideas & innovation have become easy to access.
  5. We believe … we create. In other words, you think a subtle thought and minutes later whoosh there it is staring you in the face in your reality. So make your thoughts and beliefs great ones! Coz they’re gonna become real real fast from now on.
  6. There is Joy, oh so much Joy, if you just let yourself experience it. It’s really just a matter of raising your vibration and poof a smile comes on your face with laughter bubbling up from inside. One wonders if that godness that dwells within us all isn’t eager to burst through into our daily lives now. Big smile at that thought.
  7. And the animals … omg! Spectacular. Sentiently more conscious than ever before. Perhaps they have an ability to let that inner godness burst free more easily than humans.

All that to say that while this might be a really weird year so far, in my books it’s truly an awesome one. Here’s to more great wonders to come.

 

About the Author:

 

Soleira Green is a visionary author, quantum coach, ALLchemist & future innovator. She has been creating leading edge breakthroughs in consciousness, quantum evolution, transformation, innovation, intelligence and more over the past 25 years, has written and self-published eleven books, and taught courses all over the world on these topics.

 

28 Jul 2023
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Super Powers … Everybody’s Got ‘Em!

I believe this with every fibre of my being and I live it, in myself and witnessing it in others, in every way I can. So what are some of these super powers that we’re seeing these days? I’ll try to encapsulate a few of the ones I’m aware of.

ENERGETIC FREQUENCY GENERATOR … There are a lot of new technologies that can generate higher frequencies for us these days. I actually prefer to do it for myself. We can generate higher frequencies from deep within ourselves (our source centre) as well as able to draw them in from the limitless energies of the universe in creation. We can use these frequencies to source high vibe vitality in ourselves and others. We’re also experimenting right now the possibility of using these self-generated frequencies to eliminate disease and activate the physical body’s miraculous capacities.

THE ABILITY TO REACH OUT TO COMMUNICATE WITH THOSE ON THE OTHER SIDE AND TO PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD … It’s the same skill, no matter who you’re talking with, those alive or those who’ve passed over. My way of doing this is to reach out to connect with their greater being and commune being to being. Others may do this in a variety of ways. We are all infinite fields of intelligence, mastery and power that are available in shared communion, especially for greater purpose insights.

ALCHEMICAL SOURCE CREATOR … An alchemist has the ability to take something as it is and unleash its miraculous potentiality and possibilities. Doing this as a source for Life to thrive makes it a deliciously wondrous thing to do for anyone or anything, unleashing their awesomeness that simply awaits an alchemical touch.

REALITY CREATOR … I’m not just talking about creating our own lovely reality, but about being able to source the creation of a brilliant reality for the world to thrive upon. We can do this in a variety of ways. By innovating consciousness (the beliefs, possibilities & frequencies by which we live our lives). By sourcing a new matrix of high vibrational frequency as the vibe we all get to live and create within. By uplifting all beings upon the planet, seeing them in their sourceness, calling their magnificence present and quickening their evolutionary callings into who and what we’re all meant to become next for this world to elevate and thrive.

SYNERGY SYNCHRONIZER … I had to stretch to find a name for this one. It’s one I’ve been playing with in the past year. It’s about aligning a person or circumstance to the perfect synchronization with all that they are meant to become and source in this world. As if all this great stuff is just waiting for us in a field of us somewhere and generally folks aren’t aligned with that level of synergistic opportunity. So I align them with their own field of brilliant flow and, ‘zing’, amazing things happen for them effortlessly and graciously.

As I said, these are just a few. There are soooo many. It’s an exciting time as we explore and unleash these in ourselves throughout the world.

 

 

About the Author:

 

Soleira Green is a visionary author, quantum coach, ALLchemist & future innovator. She has been creating leading edge breakthroughs in consciousness, quantum evolution, transformation, innovation, intelligence and more over the past 25 years, has written and self-published eleven books, and taught courses all over the world on these topics.

26 Jul 2023
Comments: 0

The Chords of the Universe

 

My interest in the relations between music and mathematics started at an early age. My grandfather played his violin for me when I was about five years old, and I still remember it clearly. Later he explained to me various topics in his physics book, from which he himself had studied when he was young. In the chapter on sound there was a musical staff with the note A, and next to it the number 440, the frequency of that note. That image must have engraved itself on my mind – my first glimpse into the role that numbers play in music. While my grandfather’s violin is no more with us, his tuning fork did survive; although rusted, it still faithfully vibrates at 440 cycles per second. I recently gave it to my percussionist grandson. I hope he will one day pass it on to his grandchildren.

But it is not enough just to study music: one must play it. I started my musical journey playing a recorder. There are numerous Baroque-era works for this simple instrument, but for an appreciation of classical music (‘classical’ here meaning the era of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, roughly 1750 to 1830), a recorder just won’t do, so I took up the clarinet. This instrument was Mozart’s favourite wind instrument, and he wrote for it – or rather for his friend, the clarinetist Anton Stadler – some of his most sublime music. The clarinet has the unusual feature that when you open the thumb hole on the back of the instrument, the sound goes up not by an octave, as with most woodwinds, but by a twelfth – an octave and a fifth. This greatly intrigued me and made me dwell into the acoustics of wind instruments. I was fascinated – and still am – by the fact that a column of air can vibrate and produce a musical sound just like a violin string, even though the vibrations are totally invisible: you can hear them, but you cannot see them.

Music and mathematics have always been intimately intertwined. Anyone who has ever played a musical instrument is aware of the presence of mathematics on every page of the score – from the time signature that sets a piece’s rhythm, to the metronome number that determines the speed at which the piece should be played; and, of course, the very act of playing music requires us to count 1, 2, 3… and arrange these numbers into groups, called bars or measures. So it comes as no surprise that mathematics has had a significant influence on music. Much less known is that the influence extends both ways.

The Greek philosopher Pythagoras, active during the 6th century BCE, might have been the first to uncover a quantitative relation between music and mathematics. Experimenting with taut strings, he found that shortening the effective length of a string to one-half its original length raises the pitch of its sound by an agreeable interval, an octave. Other ratios of string lengths produce smaller intervals: 2:3 corresponds to the musical interval of a fifth (so called because it is the fifth note up the scale from the base note); 3:4 corresponded to a fourth; and so on. Pythagoras also discovered that multiplying two ratios is equivalent to adding their intervals: (2:3) x (3:4) = 1:2, so a fifth plus a fourth equals an octave. In doing so, he unknowingly came up with the first logarithmic law in history.

The octave, the fifth and the fourth produced pleasing combinations of tones, or consonants, whereas more complicated ratios, such as 9:8 or 15:16, led to dissonances. This revelation made a deep impression on the Pythagoreans, prompting their belief that everything in the Universe – from the laws of musical harmony to the motion of the Sun, Moon and the five planets – was governed by simple ratios of whole numbers. Number rules the Universe was the Pythagorean motto. It would dominate scientific thought for the next two millennia.

In Greek tradition, music ranked equal in status to arithmetic, geometry and spherics (astronomy), which together comprised the quadrivium, the core curriculum of four disciplines that a learned person was expected to master. We should note, however, that the word ‘arithmetic’ had a different meaning to the Pythagoreans than it has today: it meant number theory, the study of the properties of integers, rather than the practical skills needed to compute with numbers. Likewise, Pythagoreans regarded the music component of the quadrivium as referring to music theory – the study of harmony – rather than the practice of playing music. This was typical of the aloof attitude of the Pythagoreans to all things practical. Theirs was a perfect universe, governed by notions of beauty, symmetry and harmony, but removed from mundane considerations. It might have been one reason why they kept all their discussions secret, fearing that they would be ridiculed by their fellow citizens, the vast majority of whom had to toil daily to eke out a living.

Though no Pythagorean writings survive – if they left any at all (everything we know about them comes from much later writers) – the Pythagorean legacy lasted well over 2,000 years. Number rules the Universe became a rallying motto to generations of scientists and philosophers, who sought to explain the mysteries of the cosmos on the basis of musical ratios or simple, elegant geometric figures. The planets, for example, had to move around the Earth in perfect circular orbits; it was inconceivable to the Greeks that any shape other than the perfectly symmetric circle could rule. It was all part of their grand view of a Universe ruled by beauty and harmony – their musica universalis, or music of the spheres.

Among the last Pythagoreans was the eminent German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), considered one of the fathers of modern astronomy. At once a devout mystic and an ardent believer in Copernicus’s heliocentric system, Kepler spent more than half his life trying to derive the laws of planetary motion from those of musical harmony. He believed that each planet, in its motion around the Sun, plays a melody that our ears are unable to hear, being below the range of audible frequencies (not to mention that it was produced in the vacuum of space, where sound cannot propagate). He even assigned each planet a celestial tune and wrote it down on the musical staff – resurrecting the celebrated musica universalis. It was only after decades of following this blind path that Kepler finally abandoned the Greek circular orbits and replaced them with ellipses.

 

Every periodic function can be written as an infinite sum of pure sine waves

 

Half a century after Kepler, Isaac Newton formulated his universal law of gravitation, thereby providing a rational, mathematical explanation for the planetary orbits, and adding the parabola and hyperbola to the possible orbits of the celestial bodies. But he too was obsessed with musical ratios, devising a ‘palindromic scale’ in which the intervals were the same whether you went up or down: 9:8, 16:15, 10:9, 9:8, 10:9, 16:15, 9:8. He compared it to the seven rainbow colours of the spectrum.

The newly invented differential and integral calculus, developed independently by Newton and G W Leibniz in the decade 1666-1676, made it finally possible to put the relations between numerical ratios and musical harmony on a firm mathematical basis. One of the outstanding problems that the calculus was able to tackle was to find the exact shape of a vibrating string and the nature of the sound it produces. Was it the sum of many – perhaps infinitely many – sine waves or pure tones, each with its own frequency and amplitude? Or was it a combination of waves propagating back and forth along the string’s length? In what became known as the ‘Great String Debate’, four of Europe’s foremost mathematicians – Daniel Bernoulli, Leonhard Euler, Jean le Rond D’Alembert and Joseph Louis Lagrange – argued passionately over this issue, and laid the foundation of post-calculus analysis along the way.

But the definitive solution to the string problem had to wait another half-century, when the eminent French mathematical physicist Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) showed that every periodic function, subject to certain restrictions, can be written as an infinite sum of pure sine waves, whose frequencies are integral multiples of the fundamental, lowest frequency of the function. These individual sine waves are known as overtones or harmonics; they are the building blocks of all sound, and they give each sound its characteristic tone colour, or timbre – the quality that distinguished the sound of a violin from that of a clarinet, even when they play the same note.

As my musical interests expanded, I gradually ventured beyond the Baroque-Classical-Romantic period (roughly 1600 to 1900), and turned to modern music. In the 1960s there was still much talk about Arnold Schoenberg and his atonal or serial music. He devised it in the early 1900s, convinced that it should replace a sacred cornerstone of classical music: the principle of tonality. Tonality required that a piece of music should centre around a given key, called the tonic, such as C major or G minor. Granted, as the piece developed, it could stray from its designated key to related or even remote keys, but ultimately it would return to its home key, the tonic. The key thus served as a musical frame of reference, in which every note had a specific relation to the tonic; for example, in the key of C major, the note G (a fifth above C) was the ‘dominant’ note, while the note F below C was the ‘subdominant’.

But in the second half of the 19th century, composers gradually began to deviate from a strict adherence to the principle of tonality, making it difficult to sense where the music stood in relation to the tonic. Schoenberg, believing that tonality had run its course, was determined to supplant it with the series, or tone row. In a series, each of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale of semitones appears exactly once; a note could be repeated only after the series had been completed. This gave a composer a staggering number of combinations to choose from: 1 x 2 x 3 x … x 12 = 479,001,600, to be exact (not counting shifts by octaves, which Schoenberg allowed). In serial music, complete democracy ruled: no single note held any preferred status over the others. Every note was related only to its immediate predecessor in the series; gone were the roles that different notes had played in relation to the tonic. At its heart it was a mathematical system, and Schoenberg was determined to impose it on music.

As a mathematician, I see a striking similarity between Schoenberg’s serial music and Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, as though a parallel dismantling of the canonical structures of music and physics were happening simultaneously. In 1905, Einstein gave the ether its coup de grâce: there is no ether, no single universal frame of reference at absolute rest; rather, every observer has his or her own reference system, related only to its infinitesimally close neighbouring system in spacetime. One cannot fail to note the similarity to Schoenberg’s atonal music, in which each note is related only to its immediate predecessor in the series. You might call it relativistic music.

 

Schoenberg worked on the design of a musical typewriter; Einstein invented a refrigerator

 

Schoenberg and Einstein were almost exact contemporaries, born within five years of each other to middle-class Jewish families. Their mothers, both named Pauline, were steeped in classical music, so the two youngsters were raised in music-loving homes. They started their careers as low-level employees – Schoenberg as a bank clerk in Vienna, Einstein as a clerk at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. At a young age, both turned their backs on traditional Judaism, only to return to it late in life, having been deeply affected by the rise of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust that followed. Both men were essentially self-taught: Schoenberg never got a formal musical education, while Einstein (though he graduated from the University of Zurich) got his education by studying the great physics treatises of the 19th century on his own.

Following the Nazi rise to power in 1933, both men emigrated to the United States. Schoenberg immediately got rid of the German umlaut of his original name, Schönberg, while Einstein had to get used to the American pronunciation of his name (pronounced ‘Einshtein’ in German). Both passionately pursued their hobbies – Schoenberg as a painter and avid tennis player, Einstein playing his iconic violin and enjoying an outing on his little sailboat. They also liked to tinker with gadgets: Schoenberg worked on the design of a musical typewriter, while Einstein, with his fellow physicist Leo Szilard, invented and patented a refrigerator.

Following the Nazi dismissal of all Jewish professors from German universities, both men worked tirelessly to help displaced academics find jobs in their countries of refuge. Neither Schoenberg nor Einstein ever set foot on European soil again (although Schoenberg’s remains were buried in his native Vienna), and they died within the same time-span that separated them at birth, in their 76th year.

The revolutionary ideas of Einstein and Schoenberg came against the backdrop of groundbreaking changes in other fields, all happening as the 19th century turned into the 20th. Gustav Mahler premiered his First Symphony, Titan (1889), conducted by the composer himself. Sigmund Freud published his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Pablo Picasso entered his ‘Blue Period’ (1901-1904), and Max Planck introduced into physics a new concept that would soon revolutionise all of science: the quantum of energy. If all that weren’t enough, David Hilbert, Germany’s foremost mathematician at the turn of the century, challenged the Second International Congress of Mathematicians, held in Paris in 1900, with a list of 23 unsolved problems whose solutions he regarded as of utmost importance to the future growth of mathematics – as indeed they would prove to be.

Whether these developments had any effect on Einstein’s and Schoenberg’s work is difficult to say, but it is revealing that several of the actors in this new world were actively involved with music: Einstein’s violin immediately comes to mind; Planck was an accomplished pianist; and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg seriously considered pursuing a career in music before turning to quantum mechanics.

In his quest to unify music and mathematics under a single universal umbrella, perhaps Pythagoras was right after all.

 

 

 

Original article here

14 Jul 2023
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The 8 Types of Boundaries We Should All Be Setting

A friend overstepping, a family member oversharing or a work colleague who you’re fed up with talking to you like crap. It may feel like these are just the occasional, yet inevitable, less-than-ideal parts of life, but really there’s an answer to minimising them all: better boundaries.

We all have boundaries, but many of us struggle to express them, particularly in tense situations where we want to avoid conflict as much as possible. However, it’s true that, like a muscle, the more you practice setting boundaries, the stronger you feel doing so.

Why are boundaries so important?

In an Instagram post, Nawal Mustafa, aka The Brain Coach, set out the importance of clear, firm and supportive boundaries in every aspect of our lives. “Boundaries are a way for us to honour our needs, set realistic expectations, and teach others how to treat us,” she explains. “They are a form of self-care and self-love that allow us to protect our energy and psychological health.” 

Physical boundaries

Mustafa explains that this includes who is allowed in your personal space, who can touch you and how close someone can get to you, as well as what you choose to put into your body. Subtle violations of this boundary might look like pressure to drink alcohol when you’ve said you don’t want to (“Go one, one won’t hurt”) to unsolicited comments on your appearance (“You’ve lost weight since I last saw you!”).

Even in situations where these breaches are more annoying than damaging, remember that you are always within your right to ask someone to stop.

Emotional boundaries

Some of the hardest to maintain, emotional boundaries can look like not taking on other people’s emotional burdens (aka trauma dumping) and not engaging in triggering topics.

Especially in close relationships like with family and friends, it can be awkward and difficult to express your need for some distance. Mustafa suggests helpful phrases like “I want to support you but I have too much on my plate right now” and “I don’t have the emotional capacity to talk about politics” as ways you can kindly but firmly reclaim your emotional space.

Communication boundaries

These can often be most apparent in the workplace, where you may have to raise issues with how someone is speaking to you, as well as what you yourself can and cannot say. However, they also come into play in other areas of our lives, such as wanting to maintain privacy.

Being clear on what you deem acceptable is the best route to success, Mustafa indicates. If you’re not ready to talk about something, dislike the tone you’re being spoken to in or feel demeaned by name-calling or being dismissed, be explicit about your barriers.

While you can’t guarantee they will react in kind, you’ll know that you’ve done everything you can to protect your wellbeing.

Financial boundaries

Money has long been taboo, particularly with family and friends, but amid a cost of living crisis and rising inflation, now is also the time when we’re feeling the most stretched and need to put limits in place.

Whether you’ve been invited somewhere that’s too expensive, need to ask a friend to pay you back or want to politely decline loaning someone money, try not to let any feelings of guilt or embarrassment overpower you.

The reality is that every person has different spending priorities, salaries and financial boundaries, so it’s time we all stopped being so awkward about communicating them.

Mental boundaries

We often forget how important it is to set boundaries with ourselves, too. Instead of a punishment or indication that we’ve done something wrong, it helps to see personal boundaries as practice in self-trust and confidence.

Mustafa shares that important mental boundaries include allowing ourselves to have personal thoughts, beliefs and opinions that differ from others, and being OK with others not agreeing with us.

If you have people-pleasing tendencies, these may be hard to maintain, but the mantra: “It’s OK if you don’t agree with me” is a good one to keep in mind.

Time boundaries

If you’re the kind of person that gets sucked in helping out a friend before realising you’ve no time left to work on yourself, take note. Mustafa explains that we should also monitor how much time we choose to spend with others, as well as how others should respect our time.

A family member that’s always late? Tell them. A friend that will call and call and call until you pick up? Let them know that you can chat, but only for 15 minutes.

The same goes for rejecting invitations. Don’t feel pressured to spend your time somewhere you don’t want or need to be.

Energy boundaries 

Similarly, continually putting the wants and needs of others before our own can be seriously draining, leading us to emotional exhaustion.

While “protect your energy” might sound like just another therapy slogan, it’s actually a valuable lesson in how the people you surround yourself with can impact your mood.

If a family member, friend or colleague is going beyond needy and veering into enmeshed relationship territory, it may be time to set some firmer boundaries.

Relationship boundaries

Encompassing all of the previous elements, relationship boundaries relate to how people can treat us, how they behave around us and what they can expect from us.

“Boundaries can be applied in many different aspects of life, such as our time, our emotions, our physical space, and our mental energy,” adds Mustafa.

“Setting boundaries is not easy to do, especially if you have lived most of your life in an environment where we don’t see other people setting or respecting boundaries. It may feel very uncomfortable at first, but with time, it will get easier and you will feel more confident and at peace.”

 

 

 

Original article here