Dear Friends,
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http://thebiggeststudy.blogspot.com/2010/02/where-is-mind-science-gets-puzzled-and.html
Be Well.
David
Paste the link if you don't recieve the images
http://thebiggeststudy.blogspot.com/2010/02/where-is-mind-science-gets-puzzled-and.html
Be Well.
David
Where is The Mind?: Science gets puzzled and almost admits a non-local mentalscape.
This will be the last "home-produced" blog entry for a while [save the short "Everyday Spirituality" which will follow it as a sign-off] . West Virginia beckons tomorrow morning and off I will go to whatever that entails. As I said in one of the commentary responses the other day, I hope that reading two journal runs "cover-to-cover" will bring up a few thoughts worth sharing. This day's entry was inspired by two articles bumped into coincidentally which had scientists puzzling about a holographic universe and a non-local mind. Those scientists would cringe to see how I've taken their sign-posts-on-the-path, but that is their hang-up, not mine.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The first of these articles [both from the New Scientist] was "Where in the World is the Mind?" The "mind", as the article talks about it, is not the brain. It is not the specifically-dedicated "facilities" of the brain, such as where one feels pain, moves a finger, hears the musical note "C". The authors' view of what they're talking about is that aspect of our consciousness which seems to "observe" all of these bits of data and, perhaps, do something about them. A quote: " The mind-body problem is about where the mind is located. Is it bound by the confines of our skull or does it lurk nearby, non-physically?" After the required dissing of the "ghost-in-the-machine" sort of theories [or, in my tradition, the Soul in the body], the writers go on to remark how puzzling this all really is, and that "Minds are smeared out over more space than neuroscience would have us believe". The reductionist theory that the mind is simply bound within the brain as another part of the meat-machine is deemed insufficient to account for the facts. The writers really don't want to give aid and comfort to the spiritually-inclined "enemy", but even in their waffling they seem to be saying that some kind of wider view of the Mind and it's different nature from the stimulus-response brain is looking to be necessary. They are reduced to a bit of speculative babbling at this point, in my opinion, but it reminded me of someone who presented a clearer vision of this some time ago. ----I once attended a lecture by Karl Pribram. It was quite insightful, as far as I was concerned. Pribram was also a [even honored] member of the neurocognitive tribe, at least until he began scaring them with his ideas of a holographic mind. Pribram was very aware of the phenomenon that after certain, even extensive, surgeries, the patients didn't loose memories, but rather those memories seemed to get dimmer [if anything]. It was as if the memory storage was holographic in nature--not located in one place discretely, but rather "smeared out" as a holographic storage was. I even went so far as to buy a cheap hologram [plastic] and cut it up to witness that phenomenon for myself.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
That brings in the second serendipitous article. In this one, the New Scientist's cover screamed "YOU ARE A HOLOGRAM"! It talked about the "new" idea that our sense perceptions pick up not "direct" linear contact with commonsense solid stuff, but that the whole of our reality is composed of "force projections" [sort of concretely-solid holograms] being imaged on the stage of three dimensional space by whatever the underlying mechanics of the Universe is doing in its multi-dimensional ways. Strange as this might sound, it is where I think our understanding of "physical" reality is heading. It is what, at bottom, all the hype about superstring dimensions and theories-of-everything is about. What "Science" is not ready to stomach, and what will frustrate its ability to find that Theory-of-Everything, is the inclusion of "dimensions" of consciousness, and thereby [horrors] an element of reality beyond sub-atomic particles, the four physical forces, and their interactions. Such an admission would cast science into the bigger study of the realms of consciousness, the paranormal, and all that entails.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It reminded me then, also, of a moment when I was able to spend a [too short] time with David Bohm, the famous theoretical physicist. He, at the same time as Pribram was suggesting a holographic model of consciousness, was suggesting his version of a holographic model of the universe [to deal with quantum mechanical paradoxes]. I was, of course, not competent to converse on much of this [meaningfully] with him, but I asked him if he thought it was possible that whatever the "driver" was for the measurable actions of "light" in our three-space wasn't acting out of our three-space at all, but rather did what it did from another dimensional platform, and instead "conditioned" areas of our three-space so that we only detected light when we stuck some detection mechanism in there, and that there would be no "light" anywhere except where the "interfering material" had been inserted. He surprised me [because I was 99% sure that I was speaking nonsense] by saying: yes, you can envision it that way. That has continued to encourage me to view the universe as this sort of holographic [but much more "forceful"] projection from the other dimensions. And, with Pribram, that the Mind, the "Observer" within us, [for me, my Soul] operates similarly from the vantage point of its own sort of dimension/platform, equally part of the total reality. It is this privileged position in the scheme of things, which allows us "Quantum Observership", free will, altered states of consciousness, and occasional paranormal awarenesses. It is in fact the model of reality that allows me to imagine enough "size" in reality to allow all of "the biggest study". -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am happy to be [in body] a holographic projection of force dimensions--not from the "edge" of the universe but its core reality. I am much happier about that than the image of a clever meat-machine who blunders about fooling himself that he is making true choices and has any meaning at all. In an only slightly lesser way, I am happy that I live in a universe which allows the non-local healings studied by Larry Dossey, the range of encounters studied by Catherine Crowe, and the Global Consciousness Project of Roger Nelson to be real and not at all ridiculous to contemplate. To Larry and Roger [and all their exploring colleagues in the biggest study], GOD's speed and health. Catherine is there, in one of those "forbidden" dimensions, her consciousness still cheering us on. 
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