Category Archives: Conscious Universe

Both “Sides” Are Protecting America In Their Own Minds

Created November 6, 2020

If we can keep from becoming emotionally stampeded, we can reach compromises in a more pleasant way that are creative, innovative, bold, exciting, inspiring, and consensus based.

Isn’t that the whole point of Democracy?

How did we get so divided so fast? It seems hard to believe based on what had gone before.

We all grew up with the same values. Other countries were corrupt, we were taught, but here we had the privilege of living in a democracy, where there is concern for every individual.

Who could disagree that this is a core American value? No one. WE are united on this foundation. This is not red or blue it is America.

THIS is why we can get teary eyed hearing the national anthem or remembering the righteous things we have done. America is a noble cause and human beings are built to sense such things intuitively.

It helps, when we get out of perspective and exaggerate how far apart we are, to remember the common ground upon which we stand, with each other here at home, and with former allies around the world who had followed our guidance for two hundred years, and will be like the prodigal father when we return with them.

Relaxing, from the fight against the Left or Right, as we are doing together here, here’s two thoughts about how we got so split recently.

Factor 1: Please take into account that political advertising and more broadly speaking political propaganda, has recently so well learned its Internet lesson, that the Orwellian implications are becoming disturbingly clear.

While television has always been stabilized by common consent, it’s a ruder patois which rules digital. The mind frame into which one can be catapulted by a wrong keystroke, dwarfs the ability of television shows to give me nightmares as a subteen. The wildness of the Internet is its leitmotif, its taste. We are transfixed by its unpredictability. Whereas television has a product that relies upon dependability and therefore predictability.

It might help to picture the media as an actual alien being determined to take over our minds. In reality it has that equal power, although not alien.

Factor 2: When I was 8 years old I “knew” the Commies were my enemy.

The screen media hypnotic effect in my era was a firefly in relation to the digital sun today. But it was enough to inculcate me into believing in enemies and believing that Commies were my enemies.

Many propagandists on our side as well as folks like Joseph McCarthy pumped this “Pinko” thing up to humongous proportions from the 1919 Red Scare and it’s still with us today. That’s coming up on a century we have been conditioned to think of Commies as the enemy.

Then Donald Trump called Democrats Pinkos. Is it any wonder that Follower types would transfer all the hate, rage, and violence in their souls against Democrats, based simply on the anti-Communism perspective imbued into every American living today?

It’s an oversimplification to paint people who lean slightly left as if they are at the left pole. Just as it’s an oversimplification to do it to those who lean slightly right.

The middle is what really counts. Let’s come back to the middle together, voluntarily, individually, please dear reader, take the initiative yourself.

We all want the same things – with enough differences among us on the details to keep life interesting. Let’s not be driven into insane rage by media overdrive or people who will risk our minds and our peace to gain even more power over us.

Let’s stop before we hurt ourselves more. Our strength in in our unity, disunity only brings us weakness and ultimately defeat.

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular media blog contribution, In Terms of ROI at Media Village. Click here to read my latest post.

What Did They Die For?

Created October 23rd, 2020

No reason the number 1,304,679 should mean anything to you. Even the graph I looked it up in didn’t have a total line.

It’s the number of American Armed Services men and women who died in combat in all of our wars combined.

Why did they die for us? Was it just to protect their fellow Americans alive then? I don’t think so.

Of course, they died to protect and preserve not only the American people, but also the American way of life, a way that we wish to everyone in the world, hoping to set a good example for them to follow.

Even before the election is over, let’s start now to go back to that American way of thinking and acting, holding ourselves to the highest standard. We’ve done it for most of the country’s history – admitting FUBAR at all times – we can go back to it again, more easily than it seems right now, in the pressure cooker of the final days before election, in the year that never was.

This is a democracy: there will always be some hold-your-nose compromises.

Get used to it.

There’s a wide bell curve on every issue. Because of that fact, democracy ensures there will always be some people pissed off. Think about it. It’s mathematics.

However: democracy does much more good than harm.

Implication: if we want to keep democracy, we ought not give in to the impulse to escalate “pissed off” to “hate”. Democracy works when we accept what the majority voted for, even if we have to hold our nose for a few years every now and then.

Robert Anson Heinlein was one of the most revered science fiction authors of all time. It would be correct to recognize him however as being more than that, he was a deep thinker and his writings, while fiction, reflected deep speculative thinking about every subject worth thinking about. Like H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley. His scenarios included utopias as well as dystopias, and utopias which turn into dystopias.

In his novel FRIDAY (1952) about a genetically engineered female human being whose name is Friday, Heinlein brings alive a world which is about to slide into dystopia, in which the U.S.A. has already split into smaller nations, three Confederacies, the Eastern, Central, and Western, accelerating further cultural decay everywhere. A world in which there is no more U.S.A.

Let’s look, like Henry Fonda’s character in “It’s A Wonderful Life” did, at how the world “would be better off without us”.

Here are some excerpts relevant to today, from Friday’s last conversation with her boss, the head of a secret paramilitary organization in which Friday is a courier.

“You should leave this planet,” her boss advises, “for you there is nothing here. The Balkanization of North America ended the last chance of reversing the decay of the Renaissance Civilization.”

“It is a bad sign,” Friday comments, “when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group.” Like a Party, I thought, reading this. She goes on, listing bad signs she has identified until he interrupts to tell her the worst sign of all.

“Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named… but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”

I personally don’t feel that the U.S.A. is heading that way, it’s only a few of us who have become rude. I pass these thoughts on in the expectation that the vast majority will recognize the truth when they read it, and a word to the wise is sufficient.

Good people everywhere are the hope of the world, and we have a lot of them here in America. People locked into negativity also exist everywhere, and can be brought gently out of it by the rest of us not losing our tempers at them – that’s just becoming infected by the very thing that maddens us, becoming a Borg ourselves.

Democracy is a way of being that gives everyone else room to be whoever they are, even if they disagree with you on seemingly every little thing.

Democracy is not a simple, old-fashioned idea. It is timeless. It is an ideal that has existed so long as consciousness has existed.

When I rhapsodize about America, people who are more knowledgeable remind me of all the things that were still wrong with the U.S.A. at the start – limited voting rights, slavery, snobbery.

We’ve already licked the first two.

I’d say we were generally on the right track until very recently, and even now there are many recent events we can be proud of, amidst other events that jar us to the very roots.

It would be silly to take on the heavy mantle of defeatism. We ARE going to rise above the muddy rut into which we’ve recently slid.

Nothing, not rudeness, not divisiveness, not ego, not virulent pandemics, not wars, nothing is going to stop the march of history upward from brutes to fully realized noble individuals unified everywhere by kindness and respect.

Education that starts at birth and never veers from this vector is the best that any one of us can do to prepare our progeny to continue this long hard climb when we are gone.

It has become common to imagine that being nice, being kind, is a sign of weakness. In any election, a macho candidate is instinctually more attractive to many people than one who exudes respect for others and conventional gentility. This is empowering old hard-wired circuits in the parts of our brains developed long ago, to rule our lives as if we don’t possess more effective, likely-to-be-right, intellectual and intuitive capabilities in these new cortex-wrapped brains we all have. We ought to make fullest use of all of our brains and everything else we have, bodies and souls, and make all decisions that way.

A Song for Today: Ragged Old Flag by Johnny Cash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfzJ8UBr-c0

May the Center Hold.

Best to all,

Bill

Appointment with Destiny

NEW Post!

 June 21, 2019

Every Life
embodies a concept,
a plan for a Life:
The One can see it all coming,
where it can go,
up, down, down, up.
Will it reach its Destiny Goal?

My theory of a Conscious Universe is not the first cosmology to conclude that a single Self is all that exists. It appears most explicitly in Kashmir Shaivism, almost as explicitly in Kabbalah, Esoteric Christianity, Sufism, Buddhism, Taoism, and implicitly in all other great religions.

My theory of a Conscious Universe is that Consciousness is defined as that which experiences, and everything that exists is a single Consciousness.

Here’s how I see this theory playing out:

  • Every life embodies a conception of a unique and novel individual, and an ideal plan for that life.
  • The One Self gets to live through that offshoot in the originalrole-playing videogame.
  • The Universe loves this creativity, as its form of play: avatar creation and living a unique new life.

During the pre-launch phase of each and every avatar/life, The One envisions each life ahead of time. The Original Self sees the challenges each life will face and where that life could get distracted, what experiences each will need to grow into their fullest potential, and what experiences could hamper them. The One also can see the outcome of each life and individual, when the unique gifts packaged in each avatar are fully expressed to a grateful world.In my theory, the Universe provides us with clues as to the best action to take to achieve our greatest potential.

Will each individual reach their destined goal? Because of Free Will it can go either way; there’s the fun. If it was totally predictable it would be no fun for The One. That’s how Free Will benefits The One who bestows it to HerHimself in the infinite roles played out through each unique individual.

We knowselfness, each person’s essential individuality, exists. Imagine with an open mind for a moment that all of the above is true.

I believe my life’s destiny is to reinterpret, demystify and integrate theories and new models about the purpose of life, first for myself and then to share my conclusions with others.

What’s yours? What is your ideal life, based on your unique gifts?

What is your Appointment with Destiny?

P.S. I wrote a book that delves more deeply into my theory of a Conscious Universe and explores the Single Self theories from the spiritual disciplines — not what I know to be true, but my best shot at a theory that makes everything fit together for me. Click to read a free excerpt of You Are The Universe.

Best to all, Bill

Follow my regular media blog contribution, In Terms of ROI at MediaVillage.com. Here is the link to my latest post.

 

Because the Universe Is Conscious, Everything Happens for a Reason that Makes Sense to Consciousness

Originally posted on December 29, 2011.

We suspect this is what Einstein really meant in his famous quote “God does not play dice with the Universe.”

Think about it for a minute. If you’ve been reading these posts you know what I am saying is that the universe is one infinite field of consciousness at play. The One has sent out parts of Itself to separately experience for a time — that’s us. Everything in the universe is made out of The One’s consciousness. And therefore each part itself is conscious, living The One’s experience through that part’s senses — so looking out our eyes is not who we thought was “me” but actually “ME”.

We sense our experience as being separate because there is a memory plug. It is temporary. When the expeditionary self is fit to be taken back into the Selfhood of The One, that part is re-identified by The One as a personality aspect. There is no longer a memory plug, and in the reabsorption the traveler has a sudden flashback to before he/she was the person he/she knows. Now he/she sees all the way back to being The One, and everything else that happened along the way before the plug was activated.

The One Self in this way endlessly bootstraps itself into ever higher levels of wisdom and understanding, always becoming more than Itself again and again. The game in itself is so much fun — and the only thing to do under the circumstances — that it needs no rationalization.

If The One had not N-furcated Itself into all of us, all of the Universe, it would have been an eternity of boredom.

If The One had not implanted the temporary memory plugs in Itself when out here on walkabout, the fun would be greatly reduced. The One in any creature role would not make mistakes if it were not for the memory plug. And there would be no drama for the tentacle-self as it could not feel any sort of dramatic feelings, knowing it is invulnerable to any lasting harm. Good thing we all don’t know that, so we can have these huge emotional swings up and down all the time. Let’s face it: we actually enjoy them. Life would be dull without them. But it’s hard to realize this when one’s perspective has shrunken to a dwarfed vision of oneself, due to Acceleritis overcoming our natural abilities to rise above our challenges and face them with nobility and grace. The One who is also looking out our eyes — in fact The One is the only being that is looking out, we are that Being — is here to enjoy all this. We form an assumed separate identity that I call the Robot, and the Robot is in defensive mode not enjoyment mode. The Robot’s defensive mode attracts all kinds of trouble to itself.

A fantastic theory, you will observe. Yes, the most fantastic I’ve ever heard. However, I hypothesize it is what is really happening here.

It is logically deduced from certain experiences I have had, experiences all of us have had, that require more explanation than materialist science (even with the latest God Particle) has offered to date. Despite these ideas having sprung as speculation intensely felt to be truth, there is now also scientific validation for the key idea. The most seminal leader of the new physics, John Wheeler, postulates that consciousness and information are the fundamental stuff out of which the universe is made. This substantially validates the core of my theory, and with the further extrapolations that I’ve shown in the Theory of the Conscious Universe (TOTCU)*, everything else in my theory is a logical deduction from Wheeler’s basic statements. For example, I postulate that a conscious being alone in space will create something to occupy His/Her attention and capacity for love. (Capitals seem appropriate for the Only Being in a postulated universe.)

And its predictions work in my life. This has been the strangest part. And the most appreciated.

So, given this is my picture of the universe, what I call the Theory of the Conscious Universe, what does this have to do with the title of this piece, which claims that events make sense on some larger scale. Surely the reader would challenge me to prove that massive suffering is supposed to happen, in Voltaire’s/Candide’s farcical manner.

Alas, The One is the one who receives all that suffering. There is no separate self. There is only The One. You and I think we are separate selves because of the memory plug. To The One these sufferings are drama, because there is no way they can hurt The One except in terms of compassion — ah, there’s the rub, as Shakespeare had Hamlet say of dreams — for each of our lives is as one dream to The One. Our experience offers positive proof that The One can “take it” in terms of our suffering. At the same time, following logical deduction from what is now Wheelerian science, The One has two reasons to want to reduce suffering:

  1. It is not fun for those of us down here, and He/She is the one having these sufferings in a dream — so therefore it is not fun for The One in that dream.
  2. The One is compassionate. Even if someone else were suffering, The One would want to help that being — if there were any other beings — which there are not. The prime realization of intuition is ultimately that there is only One of us. But even if there were a true Outsider — as in the Zoroastrian/Manichean belief — The One would not want that being to suffer either. Why do we say this? Through our own experience of direct intuition of The One. The Flow State makes this direct intuition not only possible but probable.

The problem that causes all suffering is that Acceleritis™ blocks Flow State. This is what makes it probable that we will not have functional intuition, one of Jung’s four behaviors/functions of consciousness (the others being perception, cognition, and feelings; he saw memory as being a subset of each). This is a temporary pandemic aberration due to the slowness of functional integration of the new brain in relation to its physical evolution. The prefrontal cortex and cortex are fully formed but only slowly making ground in not being dominated by the older parts of the brain where feelings, perceptions, memories, and instincts (hereditary intuitions, intuitions that made it onto the genes) are mediated.

As Shakespeare and Milton knew hundreds of years ago, free will is what explains suffering. You cannot have free will without mistakes, and suffering comes along with mistakes.

The One can either play with dumb dolls from the outside, or can have this universe, where S/He plays the dolls from the inside and really believes s/he is the doll during the playtime. You and I are among the many dolls. The One has avatars in so many forms that the word “doll” is inappropriate.

What more fun could you have as The One?

It’s lonely and boring out there as a dimensionless sentient point source.

You can, sure, use up a few quintillion years just thinking, but after that you want to do something! You want some company. You have superpowered imagination and so you know you could have feelings — but this would require you to have goals that can be helped and thwarted (see earlier post that establishes there are no feelings without motivations).

You decide it would be great to have feelings! But that would mean you actually have to want something, which means you cannot be allowed to remember who you are or you would never want anything.

So humor me for a moment — if this is the universe as it really is, of which  each of us is a rather important part in the cosmic sense — this means there is an unseen and important audience watching our life like a movie —from the “inside” as well as from the “outside”.

Everything that happens, in order to be important to The One, must have deeper meanings, revelations that our explorer-pod of Self needs in order to evolve back toward union with the original Self.

All it takes is a stolen few moments in time and imagination to find reasons why something that is happening today, had to happen. Imagination allows us to see that there could be a worse future if this bad event did not happen now, that a much worse event could happen in the future, which might be prevented now that we have this case to teach us.

As an experiment, we propose that you test this in your own life. Look at the events you wish had not happened that occurred — recently or long ago. Without committing to believing anything, allow yourself to imagine an explanation based on this lens of preventing a worse harm in the future. See if there is any applicability and what action decisions you might make to arm you for recurrence of similar challenges.

If you begin to look at the happenings moment to moment in your own life through this lens, you will in all likelihood have a similar experience — things will make more sense, and you can find solutions faster. You see the problem from the cosmic point of view. You understand better what is happening. You see what has to be done and as you do it, things go well.

After this happens again and again you will start to entertain the possibility that these theories explain what’s actually happening in and around Us.

My best to all,

Bill

*The Theory of the Conscious Universe was the working title of my book, “You Are the Universe: Imagine That”, released in 2014 .

Follow my regular media blog contribution, “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com under MediaBizBloggers. Read my latest post.