Grace

I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn’t stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace.

Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.

I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn.

I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn’t; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.

by Joy Harjo
from In Mad Love and WarWesleyan University Press, 1991

The Shock Remedy

Hexagram #51 from the I Ching = Zhen

Faulkner relates the tale of one pursued:
He falls back on the resource he knows best.
In crisis, there’s no slack with which to test
New methods; Improvise? he’s in no mood!

Our instinct is to tighten up the reins
When fear, discomfort, pain or even change
Affronts us. We are apt to shun the strange,
The mystical, and trust instead our brains.

It’s harder work, and ineffective, too.
Disaster is the natural result
When we ignore our native ESP.
He’s not vindictive, but what can God do?
How else induce us to forsake this cult
Of dead, material causality?

— JJM

Is there an objective physical world amenable to scientific investigation?

The culture and institutions of science have provided an answer: “Yes, of course. Let’s move on to the business of scientific discovery and stop fooling around with mystical mumbo-jumbo.”

Actual scientific investigation provides a different answer, however: “The objective, material view of reality is a very good approximation for some things, and the basis of a robust technology, but it is not the whole story.” The empirical evidence for this comes from tens of thousands of rigorous experiments on parapsychology that have yielded positive results. Also from millions of anecdotes, less rigorous but more dramatic, about ESP, precognition, NDEs, reincarnation, and other topics. The theoretical evidence comes from quantum physics, which implies that reality is co-created by the wave function “out there” and the consciousness that observes it.

Establishing the need for a new paradigm has been the subject of a vast collaboration over more than a century. The project is ongoing. But there is already more than sufficient motivation to take the next step. Only a few of our greatest thinkers have risen to the challenge of reformulating the rules of science and our fundamental conceptions of reality and what we can know about it.

This is the most interesting and fertile intellectual opportunity of our age.

Abandoning all pretext of modesty, I will propose a framework for this project. The challenge is to preserve all that mainstream science has discovered and verified, while accommodating unconventional science that on its face appears at odds with the scientific worldview. In quantum theory, half the information that projects the present into the future is in the wave function; the other half is missing, and postulated to be purely random. There is direct experimental evidence, compiled by Robert Jahn, Dean Radin, and others that the random half is not random, and can be influenced by conscious intent. This effect seems to be insensitive to distance and can propagate backward as well as forward in time. I propose that integrating this evidence with quantum biology and the inverse quantum Zeno effect is a fruitful place to begin.

Wall Street’s days are numbered

The majority that’s been abandoned by the managerial / ruling elites are increasingly aware that the unprecedented asymmetries of wealth and power that have undermined American social and economic life can be traced directly back to the Federal Reserve, tool of the Big Banks.

The same awareness of central bankers’ responsibility is spreading in other nations as well.

The political moment when the “losers” make the connection is approaching. Perhaps the wires will arc in 2020, or maybe another few years; but whatever the timing turns out to be, the all-powerful Cargo Cult of the central bankers will be swept away in a global political convulsion unlike any in memory.

Read more from Charles Hugh Smith

None of the above

The challenge for the atheist is rational argument leads to the One.

The challenge for the theist is the One seems like an unlikely candidate for “God” as defined by mainstream religions.

The problem for both is that they are making claims about the Real entire.

— Sci Patel

Start with your own heart—Maybe that’s enough.

In the presence of one firmly established in nonviolence, all hostilities cease.

— Patanjali

 

Biocentrism

Robert Lanza talks about the need that physics has for biology.  The standard explanation for our world offered to us by mainstream science attributes the fundamental laws of physics to chance.  But these laws are very special, and had they been just a little different, you and I wouldn’t be here.

Does it take a very special set of initial conditions and strengths of forces and sizes of particles to make a universe that is interesting enough to support life?  Yes!  This is true and it’s something that mainstream science agrees on.  The standard interpretation of mainstream science is that there must be an enormous number of universes, and almost all of these can’t support life, but of course we find ourselves in the rare universe that can support life.  Lanza says it’s not good science to postulate all those gazillions of dead universes, an insult to Occam’s razor.  It makes more sense to say that life has something to do with how the universe came into being.  There are other hints from different branches of science that also point in this direction.

Life is not an accident.  If we begin with a notion of life and seek to explain physics, we can get further than if we begin with physics and seek to explain life.