Arguably the world’s authority on cosmic consciousness and the altered states of consciousness is American parapsychologist and author Dr Charles Tart, who has been investigating normal and altered states of consciousness for more than 40 years. Tart uses the term ‘cosmic consciousness’, coined by physician Robert Maurice Bucke in 1961, and also his definition: “The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is, as the name implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe.”
 
Similar episodes
According psychologist William James, all cosmic-consciousness experiences tend to have some similarities: the experience is usually spontaneous — you don’t turn in on like a tap; it tends to be transient — usually lasting about half an hour and rarely for more than two hours; the people involved invariably feel a sense of unity with all things as a ‘seamless whole’. They also have a sense of knowingness, says Tart, quoting James: “a direct insight into the nature of reality that is self validating”, resulting in a sense of authority and certainty about them in the future.

Finally, there is a sense of the ineffable nature of the experience, says Tart. It is utterly different from any other state of consciousness they’ve experienced, and can’t be described in words, or even by simile or metaphor.

Sense of interconnection
However individual the moment, there are several aspects that distinguish it as cosmic awareness.  In that moment, you move away from the tight boundaries of the ‘self’ of your own ego and embrace a more oceanic feeling of unity with the entire universe, with a sense of interconnectedness with all things. There is also an inner knowing that things will never be the same again.

It is invariably a profoundly transforming experience, usually lasting the rest of your life, having opened a window into a reality you never knew existed.

It also may be the experience that forces you to make an abrupt change in your life, as it did with Edgar Mitchell, who left NASA after returning to earth to found the Institute of Noetic Sciences. 

Self-actualizers
At the end of his life, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) turned his attention to these types of peak experiences.

Although all of us are capable of having a transcendent moment, it was Maslow’s view that certain people were more predisposed to experience them than others. Maslow came to believe this after studying the biographies and writings of historical figures who’d had such an experience ¬ – Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, William James, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Schweitzer ¬¬- for similarities of character. Maslow characterized all these notables as ‘self-actualized’, and noted that, as a whole, they

•  were problem-centered, viewing life’s difficulties clinically as a problem to be solved, not a personal issue inspiring anger or defeat
•   believed that the means — the journey of life — was often more important than the end result
•   enjoyed and were comfortable with solitude, but had deeper personal relations with a few close friends and family
•   liked to be independent of physical and social needs
•  were non-conformists without the need to be either well-adjusted or fit in a social situation
•  had a gentle sense of humor, able to joke at their own expense, or at the world
•   accepted both themselves and others as they were rather than changing them to what they should be; preferred to be themselves, too 
•   were motivated to improve their own worst qualities
•  were often quite conformist on the surface
•  felt a sense of humility and respect toward others
•  had a social conscience and compassion
•  had a strong sense of ethics and spirituality, but rarely a conventional religion
•  retained a sense of wonder

What all of these notables shared, in short, was a tendency to remain free of small and self-interested concerns and to recognize in every way that they were part of a greater whole.

That ties in with the work of neuroscientists about such experiences. Eugene d’Aquili, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Andrew Newberg, a fellow of the university hospital’s nuclear medicine program, carried out a two-year study of Tibetan monks. They found that feelings of calm, unity and transcendence, such as during peak moments, show up as more activity in the brain’s frontal lobes (behind the forehead) with less activity in the parietal lobes (at the back of the top of the head).

This part of the brain is responsible for the sense of ‘I’ and ‘other’. During this mystical experience, the ‘I’ part of the brain gets dampened down. What this suggests is the fundamental purpose of a transcendent moment:  to turn us into a bigger ‘self’ so that we move beyond the small sense of ‘I’ to the limitless sense of ‘us’.

Tart quotes Bucke’s own mystical experience as feeling “that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure, all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain”. There is often a sense of ‘God’, but more as the ‘Absolute’ than the anthropomorphic god of organized religion. This feeling is our birthright – our natural state of being.

Notice that his overwhelming sense of oneness included a ‘liberty and justice for all’ sensation.  His own transcendence required a similar situation for everyone.
 
We can recover wholeness in our lives and recapture our sense of the transcendent on a daily basis, but it requires a very different set of rules than the ones we currently live by.

We have to ask ourselves some fundamental questions.  We must look at our lives from an entirely different perspective, a larger vantage point, so that we finally see the interconnection. Once we change the very way we see, we may begin to experience the connections that tie us all together.

But during extraordinary experiences — during a mystic revelation, while taking a mind-altering drug, in a moment of madness, or even during a near-death experience (NDE) — all of us experience time rather differently: as an eternal moment of now or even, in the case of clairvoyants, as a moment in the future.

To a person on a hallucinogenic drug, time can even feel as
though it is flowing backward. However, mainstream physics does not have a theory able to embrace either our ordinary or extraordinary perception of time.

Time as a cube
Time to the physicist is still described in accordance with Einstein’s concept of space–time, where time and space represent one giant cube, and the moments we experience are dots residing somewhere inside it, a bit like a Christmas pudding (or a chocolate chip Brownie, to you lot in America).

There is no physics equation to account for the ‘flow’ of time or, indeed, for those anomalous moments when time stops, speeds up, or even suddenly jumps backward or forward. Indeed, to most physicists, time as a forward arrow is an illusion.

Frustrated by the Einsteinian view of time, a Slovakian physicist has come up with another model that embraces both our conventional notion of time as an arrow as well as the subjective time experienced by humans undergoing extraordinary anomalous events.

A new model of time
Metod Saniga, an astrophysicist at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, studied the NDE research of Dr Raymond Moody and others, and came up with his ingenious mathematical model of time.

Saniga began by poring through a batch of accounts of people who’d described extraordinary moments of time.  After gathering a large sample of these data, he began to construct a mathematical model of time elastic enough to represent time as either a flow or a moment, as an ordinary experience or an extraordinary state of consciousness.

But to do this, he required something more sophisticated andthree-dimensional than a linear model.

Conic pencils
He played around with fractal geometry until, in the mid-1990s, he discovered a picture in a book of what is known as a ‘pencil’ of conics, where each different conic section has four points in common.

Once he saw this pencil, Saniga realized that he had his model—something pliable enough to create a unified representation of time.

Saniga then resorted to a specialized branch of mathematics called ‘algebraic projective geometry’. Rather than delineating each event in time as a single point, he considers it more accurate to represent it as a curved line within an infinite series of curves arranged in a plane.

These curves are called ‘conic’ sections — circles, ellipses, parabolas and hyperbolas —formed whenever a circular cone is intersected by a plane. Geometry, which describes the mathematics of curves, and algebra, which describes the mathematical relationships between the curves taken together, could most accurately portray this new sense of time.

In the eye of the beholder
This is how Saniga’s model works. When you draw a pencil, each curve represents a moment in time. A dot on one of the curves is your own perspective, your place in the present moment as it is to you. The infinite number of conic sections outside of the point represents the past, and the infinite number of sections that the point lies inside of represent the future.

To represent an altered state of consciousness, take a point (your place in time) and place it on top of one of the four points in the pencil where all the curves meet. From that perspective, every moment exists as the present, so time is experienced as an eternal ‘now’.

To represent time standing still, says Saniga, you move the point (your perspective) to one of the two lines which cross at the centre of the picture.

Saniga has devised a similar description of space as an infinite set of lines that all pass through one point. To represent three dimensions, he has created three pencils of straight lines over three planes. At the point where all three pencils intersect, you are standing at the place where all space feels like one big
‘here’.

Spaghetti junction
Now, to create a complete model of space–time, as Saniga
describes, draw your pencil of conics, then draw three more pencils of straight lines on three other sheets of paper. Slot them into the pencil of conics so that all four pencils share the points where the lines intersect.

Then take a piece of uncooked spaghetti (representing yourself) and
slot it through the entire model. If you place yourself on one
conic and straight line, you are in a position of ‘ordinary’
perception of time and space.

But if your spaghetti lands in a place where more lines intersect, you may be at a point where you experience time as an eternal ‘now’ or space as a giant stretched-out ‘here’.

According to Saniga, there are 19 possible places to put your
spaghetti—analogous to 19 different possible experiences of
time and space.

If we can adopt this all-embracing science of time, all of our experiences outside of time — near death experiences, forecasting, retroactive intention — begin to make perfect sense.

As I wrote, it’s no good all of us demonizing BP. The bloodjet of oil pouring out of the earth now symbolizes something far deeper.  BP and all of Big Oil are engaging in deep drilling in response to overwhelming consumer demand for petroleum (manufactured or otherwise).  All of our modern-day lives are utterly intertwined with petroleum use. Petroleum is in virtually every manufactured product; it makes up the warf and woof of modern life. In order to keep up with the demand, Big Oil is drilling deeper and more dangerously.

We need to send positive intention to BP. With BP and its engineers, who are working to invent a cure, lays any potential solution. I’ve made this a Daily Intention for us – see our Intention of the Day on our website home page:  www.theintentionexperiment.com.

But there is a challenge for us far larger than simply ending Deepwater Horizon’s spill. To avoid another similar ecological disaster, we all have to begin the painful process of weaning ourselves off of mindless use of petroleum. Petroleum does not simply power our cars.  The use of petroleum in manufacturing has created modern industry, including plastic, synthetics, processing, and pretty much everything artificial in our lives.

On that note, I’ve written a little ditty about how to cut down on petroleum use, borrowing the tune from Paul Simon’s 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover.  And below that, I’ve got a serious list about cutting down your consumption of crude and another list after that about living a crude-free life.  Please feel free to add to either list.

 And thanks, Paul, for the tune. 
50 Ways to Leave Crude Oil
(with apologies to Paul Simon)

The problem is all inside your head, she said to me
The answer is easy if you take it logically
I’d like to help you in your struggle to be free
There must be fifty ways to leave crude oil

Just take the train back, Jack
Get rid of the van, Stan
You don’t need a new toy, Roy
Or an SUV
Hop on the bus, Gus
Or ride your bike like the Dutch
Just turn off the key, Lee
And set us all free

She said it’s really not my habit to intrude
But isn’t everything in your life made out of crude
So I’ll repeat myself, at the risk of being rude
There must be fifty ways to leave crude oil
Fifty ways to leave crude oil

Take the carpool back, Jack
Get rid of the van, Stan
You don’t need a new toy, Roy
Or an SUV
Hop on the bus, Gus
Or ride your bike like the Dutch
Just turn off the key, Lee
And set us all free

She said it grieves me to see the Gulf in such pain
I wish there was something I could to make the ocean smile again
I said I think there is and would you please explain
About the fifty ways

Just take the train back, Jack
Get rid of the van, Stan
You don’t need a new toy, Roy
Or an SUV
Hop on the bus, Gus
Or ride your bike like the Dutch
Just turn off the key, Lee
And set us all free

She said, why all that plastic makes a pretty ugly sight
Why don’t you think about the earth right now and understand its plight
And I believe in the morning you’ll begin to see the light
There must be fifty ways to leave crude oil
Fifty ways to leave crude oil

Take the carpool back, Jack
Get rid of the van, Stan
You don’t need a new toy, Roy
Or an SUV
Hop on the bus, Gus
Or ride your bike like the Dutch
Just turn off the key, Lee
And set us all free
And the following are the real 50 ways to cut down on your petroleum. All of the products listed below use it. This list includes only a fraction of the items containing petroleum.  As a rule of thumb, if it is heavily processed, it has petroleum in it.

I’ve deliberately avoided listing products where there aren’t obvious alternatives (such as the dashboards of cars, credit cards, hearing aids or toothbrushes). Also, although white dental fillings are made of bonded plastic, I would opt for these, rather than metal fillings, on grounds of safety.

50 Real Ways to Cut Down on Petroleum Use

Avoid or cut down your use of:

1. Gasoline or kerosene for any reason
2. Bottled water in plastic
3. Prescription and non-prescription drugs
4. Ordinary cosmetics
5. Baby oil or petroleum jelly
6. Synthetic rubber or latex pillows
7. Most paint brushes and rollers
8. Many kinds of mops and cleaning utensils
9. Ordinary paint
10. Processed food with artificial colors, flavors and preservatives
11. Any fruits and vegetables wrapped in plastic (complain to your supermarket)
12. Candles made of paraffin wax
13. Garden and personal insecticides and herbicides and insect repellents
14. Vinyl or other synthetic flooring
15. Ordinary cleaners for carpets and floors, including wax
16. Toiletries that don’t have natural ingredients, particularly hand and body lotions
17. Disposable diapers and all other ‘disposables’
18. Disposable contact lenses
19. Man-made fibers (lycra, polyester, nylon, rayon, spandex)
20. Acrylic paint
21. Asphalt
22. Plexiglas, fibreglass and latex
23. Teflon
24. Many types of carpets
25. Fabric softeners
26. Air fresheners
27. Cleaning agents that are not eco-friendly, including oven and toilet bowl cleaners
28. Plastic shower curtains
29. Plastic glasses
30. Perfumes and colognes with artificial fragrance
31. Ordinary nail polish
32. Plastic toys
33. Silver polish
34. Dishwasher detergent
35. Ordinary toothpaste
36. Artificial sweetener containing saccharin
37. Synthetic sponges
38. Many types of soaps
39. Chewing gum
40.  The insides of food cans, paper wrappers, paper cups and often boxes and cartons, and lids of jars
41. Picnic plates and cutlery
42. Many dyes, including hair dye
43. Plastic bags
44. Crayons
45. Vitamins contained in capsules
46. Rubbing alcohol
47. Latex bandages
48. Vaporizers
49. Any cooking utensil not made of wood or metal
50. Hairspray
And here are 20 things to do instead:
20 Non-petroleum Ways to Live

1. Use natural remedies instead of prescription or non-prescription drugs
2. Use eco cosmetics and fragrances, including natural nail polishes
3. Eat organic and local
4. Use eco-toiletries and re-use the containers
5. Use things that are bottled in glass, and fill your life with things made of wood, stone, paper, metal,  glass or ceramic
6. Always carry a reusable cloth bag with you for shopping
7. Consider natural family planning, which does not require a product made from plastic, such as condoms and diaphragms
8. Cook with metal and glass
9. Cook from scratch when possible
10. Use eco-paints and painting fluids
11. Sleep on natural pillows, if possible
12. Use organic and non-toxic forms of insecticides and herbicides in your backyard or garden
13. Wear cotton, silk, linen or wool
14. Whenever you go to use your car, think first:  do I really need to drive?
15. Think twice before upgrading your computer, phone, game consoles and other toys
16. Give your children toys made of natural materials
17. Use natural flooring
18. Breastfeed, rather than using plastic bottles
19. Use cooking and cleaning utensils made of natural materials
20. Take tablets, not capsules

The culpability for the Gulf Oil spill is being laid at Hayward’s door, as an example of individual corporate irresponsibility in the drive for ever increasing profits.

There is some truth to that, of course.  Cutting corners oN safety for profit is essentially the daily bread of corporate life. The banking industry and ongoing world financial crisis immediately come to mind.

Nevertheless, to believe that the entire problem stems from a single corporation’s negligence is to miss the entire lesson of this experience and its important role in our evolution.

AN OILY WORLD
BP is being demonized at the sole villain of the piece here, but the fact is that BP, like every other petroleum company, is simply doing what any corporation does, which is responding to demand. 

The modern industrial world is created from oil. Oil doesn’t just power our automobiles and heat our houses.  Most everything manufactured these days, in some way, derives from oil.  Virtually all plastics are made from petroleum.  Most prescription and over-the-counter drugs have some form of petroleum at their base, as do most cosmetics. 

As I write this, the lipstick and mascara I’m wearing contain petroleum.  The Apple computer I’m writing on is made of petroleum-based plastic. Even if I were to leave my car at home and bike to my office, I’d I’ll be driving over petroleum-based asphalt.  I could try to save oil by eating by candlelight tonight, but I’d still be using a petroleum product.  If I need to call my husband or children later I’ll be speaking to them via an instrument made of petroleum. We eat organic food and use eco-products in this house, but we, like everyone else, are drowning in petroleum.

Detergents, soaps, rubber bands, almost all cosmetics, perfumes, most of what we clean our houses with, flooring, sports equipment, contact lenses, disposable diapers, paints and paint thinners, garden hoses, many components of automobiles like batteries, most modern boats, virtually every toilet seat, balloons, shower curtains, crayons, golf balls, dental floss and toothbrushes, sunglasses, condoms — all this and much more are made of oil.

Every aspect of our modern-day food production and consumption requires petroleum, from the fertilizer used to grow it, to the mechanized processing used to produce it, the trucks used to distribute it, the refrigerators and plastic packaging required to keep it fresh, and the ovens used to cook it. 

Given the fact that oil has been so interwoven with modern mod-con life, it is not surprising that the earth is running out of it. All Western petroleum companies know this. Big Oil only owns some 10 per cent of global oil and gas reserves. All the rest is in the hands of the state-owned oil companies of Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela and Iran. That is why they are having to look deeper and deeper into the earth to find whatever stores are left. 

All the petroleum companies are moving out further into the sea and drilling deeper to get oil.  There are 12 deepwater oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico deeper than 40m, and 15 off the coast of Brazil.  Besides BP’s Deepwater Horizon, 31 other rigs drill in deep water in the Gulf, seven of them just set up in 2008. About a third of our oil is now being obtained offshore, with a marginal amount from shallow waters. 

RISKY BUSINESS
Deep water drilling is inherently risky. The difference in temperature between the water (at 41 degrees Fahrenheit) and the boiling oil puts enormous stress on all equipment used.  The platform itself is unstable.  But the biggest problem of all is the extraordinary pressure in the underground reservoirs, in which every square centimeter contains the weight of an ordinary-sized car. 

Every time you drill into the rock layers of the seabed you risk a Deepwater Horizon type explosion, in which the fuel shoots out of the ground and cannot be contained. Deepwater drilling is an accident waiting to happen.

No matter how careful an individual company, there is no plan B if something goes wrong. Containment of an explosion requires cutting-edge measures that essentially haven’t been invented yet.

EVOLUTIONARY EVENT
The point here is that as tragic as this explosion was, for the animals, for the Gulf residents whose livelihood is destroyed, and for all of us watching helplessly as the oil slick grows the size of a small country, it was necessary and important to our evolution.  Giant ecological disaster seems to be the only way to wake up human beings to the need to do things differently.

In a sense, it was also necessary that it happen in America — and I say this as an American myself.  The world consumes 85 million barrels of oil per day, and America consumes nearly one-quarter of that. America is the sole country in the world that refused to sign the Kyoto Agreement. It is one of the few developed countries to spend almost none of its public money on alternatives to the automobile, such as high rail travel. Unlike Europe, the US continues to eschew high taxes on gasoline as
a disincentive to drive.

Many of the Senators who were so highhanded about Tony Hayward have consistently opposed a Clean Energy Bill and attempted to pass a bill preventing the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing pollution standards against greenhouse emissions. In fact, the petroleum industry oils a fair portion of their campaigns.

BIGGER THAN SUV’S
Lately, we Americans have cut back on their reliance on big SUVs and cars in general, but the problem is far greater than driving a little less.

We must all realize that this is no one company’s or country’s problem. We don’t just have to drive differently.  The Gulf disaster signals the end of a petroleum-based world.  What this requires is that we come to terms with the fact that that we have to live differently, produce things differently, consume things differently.

It’s time for us all to take responsibility for Deepwater Horizons by doing whatever we can, individually and collectively, to evolve a society that does not depend on oil at every turn.

Since the Gulf of Mexico explosion, words from an old Rolling Stone song keep rattling around in my head. The song is Sympathy for the Devil, and the line goes like this:

I shouted out, ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’
Well, after all, it was you and me.

I have an intention that we heal the area, but mostly that we heal ourselves and our division from the natural world.  It is important to view the Gulf disaster, however painful, as something positive — nature’s early warning signal to make changes in our lives now before it is too late.

For this exacting job, he’d had a special iron bar made that was nearly four feet long, an inch-and-a-half in diameter and weighing more than 13 pounds. After a hole was drilled into the rock, and powder, a fuse and sand inserted, the job of the iron bar was to tamp down the sand, which contains the explosion within the rock.

Freak accident
One afternoon, a freak accident occurred, when a distracted Gage tamped in the powder, but without the sand in place. The striking of the iron bar on the stone caused a spark, which lit the fuse, and the entire explosion blew up in his face.

The force of the explosion sent the iron bar up like a rocket through Gage’s left cheek, the base of his skull and the front of his brain and out the top of his head. Gage was thrown to the ground but, to the shock of his fellow gang members, he not only survived the accident, but also was still able to walk and speak coherently.  His terrible wounds were dressed by a young doctor named John Harlow and, two months later, he was completely healed, suffering only the loss of one eye.

Mind-snatched
Although Gage was, to all intents and purposes, his old physical self, his body appeared to be inhabited by a totally different person.

Harlow, who maintained a keen interest in Gage’s case, kept a careful record of the fact that Gage appeared to no longer have a connection between his intellectual capacities and his ‘animal’ propensities. He was invariably socially inappropriate and also appallingly profane, with little regard for his fellows. He also appeared to be utterly unable to plan any future operation without vacillating or changing his mind.

These new personality traits so differed from the thoughtful and well-balanced character he’d displayed before the accident that his employers were forced to let him go. Afterwards, he invariably chose work that did not suit him: on horse farms, as a stagecoach driver, even as a freak in a circus act. Unable to secure steady employment, he, like many misfits of the time, traveled to California, where he eventually died of an epileptic fit.

More than 150 years later, this case fascinated he Portuguese behavioral neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who’d long suspected that cool-headed reasoning did not produce intelligent choices unless there was an emotional component. And Gage had not only been incapable of making good choices, but was also impelled to select situations for himself that were downright disadvantageous.

Living without feeling
As Damasio put it, Gage “worked hard at his downfall”. Although his mental skills for language, memory, perception and intelligence had remained intact, somehow all his value judgements were seriously impaired. He’d been unable to behave in an ethical manner, observe social conventions and, most important, make decisions that were advantageous to his survival.

Damasio went on to study a number of modern Gages.  Like Gage, they’d suffered damage to the ‘ventromedial’ (or underbelly) region of the frontal lobe, the area of the brain relating to emotion. As Demasio discovered in his research, they were incapable of having any sort of emotional response to any aspect of their lives. As Damasio described it, they “could know but not feel”.

They had had, in short, lost their ability to act on a gut hunch.

The emotional hunch
From cases like these, Damasio began to suspect that reduced emotion has a central role in inhibiting the ability to make sound decisions about the future. In cases like Elliot or Gage, he believed that the loss of the emotional center of the frontal lobes robs someone of their gut hunches. When faced with logic alone, people invariably make the wrong decision. 

To test this, Damasio gave a patient of his called Elliot a popular psychology test called the Gambling Test. In this test, which imitates ordinary gambling, a subject is given $2000 to gamble with and four decks of cards. Certain cards, which are ‘wins’, result in the gambler being paid money. Others, deemed ‘losses’, require the gambler to pay the experimenters a fine. 

Two of the decks—decks A and B—had been stacked so that Elliot would get high wins, but also high losses. Similarly, decks C and D were laced with small wins and small losses. 

Ordinarily, a normal person will begin to get a bad feeling about the first two decks, and his gut hunch will tell him to avoid it. But, with Elliot, he ended up losing, attracted to decks A and B for the high wins, but unable to intuit that he was losing all his money with them.

Ordinarily, intuition improves with experience. When normal subjects took the Gambling Test, they learned to predict from the situation. Their gut hunches helped them to anticipate the best moves.

Damasio does not understand how this predictive capability develops, attributing it to some a non-conscious estimate of success and failure that becomes more acute over time.

Many of the emotions that form our gut hunches could result from two types of information flow — what Joseph LeDoux of New York University refers to as ’low-road’ unconscious information to the amygdala, and conscious ‘high road’ cognitive information to the neocortex.

Psychic prediction
However, there is likely to be a third road, too.  Parapsychologists suspect that intuition arises from information not contained within the boundaries of time and space. Dutch psychologist Dick Bierman, for instance, has been keenly interested in whether our bodies can actually predict bad news.

To test this hypothesis, he used the Gambling Test, but wired up his participants with skin-conductance devices that measure ‘fight-or-flight’ responses. He discovered that, as the game went on, his participants became more stressed a few moments before they selected a bad card. Although they didn’t show such predictive ability at first, this ability increased as they got further into the game. Their ability to receive a gut hunch improved with time.

This suggests that what we term the ‘gut’ hunch doesn’t reside in our bodies it all.

As with animals, so much of the information we receive about our lives may be filtering into us all the time, without our cognitive awareness. It may be that our unconscious intuition is constantly receiving sensory and intuitive data that our ‘sensible’ neocortex dismisses.

Unlike animals, which act on their own highly specific unconscious fears forever, unless desensitized, humans often ignore these subtle warning signals at their peril.

Walls of extremely precise design and construction have been firmly placed between dwellings, at the end of backyards, between sections of the community — including the wholly enclosed school and local stores — and particularly between the community and the outside world. Bans are in place prohibiting residents from altering the walls in any regard, even those on their property.

High-end properties also rest behind a gated entrance with a security guard, and no one is admitted without a security check. Stores, parks, sidewalks, playgrounds, open spaces, even the local school also rest within its walled center, serving their exclusive community.

Presently, some eight million Americans live behind walls and gates in gated communities, with eight of every 10 new urban building projects established to be gated. One half million of the country’s gated communities reside in California alone; some 40 per cent of new homes in California are built behind gates or some sort of security device.

Gated world
Nevertheless, this trend, particularly in the West and South and in suburbs outside large urban sprawls, is not unique to America. 

Gated communities are now popular in such diverse areas as China, South Africa, where land developers first wall off an area, then fill it in with roads and houses; the Middle East, such the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, where armored vehicles patrol to protect Westerners with interests in oil; and the United Kingdom, where much of London urban renewal in the Docklands is occurring behind bars.

Even the less developed parts of the world, such Mexico and the rest of Central and South America, find the idea of walled towns and neighborhoods compelling; Nordelta in Argentina, the largest ‘barrio privado’ in the country, even offers its residents their own exclusive hospital.

Marginal effects
Although residents cite crime and security as the main reason for living behind a gate, research into the effect of gated communities shows that they have a marginal effect at keeping crime at bay.

The best two studies, carried out by the police in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, comparing the rates of all manner of crime before and after a neighborhood had closed off its streets, found no significant difference in violent or personal crimes.  Auto theft, burglary and other types of crimes at first drastically fell, but returned to similar levels after a short time.

The second study, examining the crime rates of several closed neighborhoods with that of Fort Lauderdale as a whole found no real difference in deterring crime. Although crimes against the person are permanently affected, incidence of burglary or car theft drop in the first year and then rise to the levels outside.

Green Valley was built specifically to deter crime and outsiders.  Nevertheless, recent crimes include serial rape, domestic murder, various robberies, a drug problem in the schools and chlorine-gas pollution from a neighboring industrial plant – in short, all the problems of ordinary, ungated suburbs.

In fact, even the most elaborate security in gated communities does not appear to have worked as well as simple Neighborhood Watch schemes, which have been shown to decrease robberies and burglaries by 24 and 33 per cent respectively, according to a study by Florida International University.

Shutting out strangers
Although the residents may feel safer than they actually are, the real point of a gated community is to shelter its inhabitants from outsiders. In the case of the more exclusive, high-end communities, the residents can already afford to live in ungated areas of negligible crime. 

As Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder note, in their book Fortress America:  Gated Communities in the United States, ‘ traffic equals strangers, strangers are bad and bad means crime.’

The other point of a gated community is the keen desire for upward mobility and status; as the authors note, ‘They feed on aspirations for exclusion and the desire to differentiate. . . . Their motivation for gates is a desire to project an image, protect current investment, and control housing values.’ 

As a builder noted to Blakeley during his 1994-5 study, what buyers want is a home that ‘makes a clear statement about themselves and their lifestyles.’ Consequently, the most recently built communities create especially elaborate entrances, its own exclusive country club – a finger in the eye to anyone else outside its walls. 

Law unto itself
A gated community is very like a country that has seceded from the union – supplying its own services and security, answerable to very little outside its wall, encouraging its inhabitants to abdicate any
civic duties involving anything on the outside. 


What many people actually seek, behind a locked gate, is what is fast disappearing in our modern landscape – a romantic view of neighborhood – that place where our kids can play safely in the streets, where we know the parks and schools are safe, where neighbors wave over the garden fence and come together in common purpose. 

Nevertheless, not only is there no evidence that gated communities create a better neighborhood or more ‘social capital’ – the sociological term for community spirit and togetherness — the gate itself in fact prevents social capital from flourishing precisely because it encourages an in-group and ‘out-group’.

I was speaking with a translator I had once in the Middle East, a young woman called ‘Nour’.  When she was growing up, she says, the residential areas outside the country were grouped into small villages.  The villagers tend to live in 200-year old buildings of rough concrete and blockwork, passed down from many generations, and deliberately left unpainted.

The idea is to avoid ostentation precisely so that you do not ‘break your neighbors’ hearts’, she told me, by making them feel envious or bad about themselves:  the beauty of your house is created within  — in the warmth you have inside. 

Unfortunately, this custom is given way to creeping westernization, and new homes are now built with showy exteriors.

In his classic poem Mending Wall, Robert Frost wrote: 

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall’. . .
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know 
What I was walling in or walling out.

I have to chuckle when I think about this rosy-hued view of the way medicine works.  It’s reassuring to think that there are big organizations out there so wedded to our best interests that they are beyond reproach, impossible to buy or sell.

WHO cares
The premiere organization with this kind of impeccable reputation the world over is the World Health Organization, one of original agencies set up by the newly formed United Nations. Its objectives were lofty; as described in its founding constitution, it was intended to “combat disease, especially key infectious diseases, and to promote the general health of the people of the world”.

The WHO, as it’s commonly known, was set up three years after the end of World War II, and its headquarters—as if to underscore its even-handed mandate—were in formerly neutral Switzerland.

At the time of its inception, polio raged around the world. In short order, the WHO’s main line of focus became infectious disease. In 1980 the WHO triumphantly declared that smallpox had been wiped off the face of the earth and set as its next target the eradication of polio.

So, it came as a shock to me recently to find out just how cozy a relationship there had been between senior members of the WHO and the pharmaceutical industry in the swine-flu affair of last year.

The pandemic that wasn’t
As you may recall, it was the WHO that first raised the alarm over swine flu, predicting a phase-6, or runaway, pandemic that was expected to claim the lives of millions of people just in the US, the UK and Europe alone. This, of course, persuaded countries in Europe and in North America to splash out millions for supplies of Tamiflu and flu vaccines.

As we all now realize, the pandemic never arrived, leaving many countries with huge unused stocks of antivirals and vaccines that were not needed—and lots of egg on their faces.

As my magazine What Doctors Don’t Tell You recently learned, senior representatives of the drug companies making the drugs in question funded a group of scientists claiming to be an independent working party on influenza, headed by someone who is among the WHO’s most influential scientists on vaccines.

Furthermore, a batch of senior execs met with the WHO’s Director-General to press her into revealing when she was going to announce a phase-6 pandemic. These disquieting relations led to worldwide fear, damage by unnecessary (and dangerous) drugs and, of course, record profits for Big Pharma.

Rounding up renegades
That the line between regulation and commerce is becoming ever thinner is also apparent in the cancer industry. Recently, my husband Bryan Hubbard (also a journalist) unearthed an enormous body of evidence shows that cancer may be caused by bugs after all—specifically, by an imbalance in our usual bacterial flora caused by environmental insults.

Nevertheless, every scientist who has ever touched this proposition has been vilified or even imprisoned by the regulatory agencies or big cancer organizations—again largely advised or funded by the pharmaceuticals.

Monkey business
I also refer you to the case of Dr. Andrew Wakefield.  The US and UK governments and the press are exulting in the recent highly public hanging of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, recently found guilty of misconduct by the British General Medical Council.  Wakefield, you may recall, is the British gastroenterologist who first raised the alarm bells over the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (MMR).

Wakefield never maintained that the MMR vaccine caused autism.  All he did was to raise a cautious alarm after finding that a number of children with autism were presenting with the same gut problems that seemed to have developed right after their MMR jabs.

He and his colleagues in America have carried out a subsequent study on monkeys, which demonstrated that the hepatitis B vaccine can cause neurological damage and progressively severe chronic inflammation in gastrointestinal tissue—exactly what he originally discovered with the MMR vaccine and autistic children.

Despite being exhaustively peer-reviewed and accepted for publication, Wakefield’s monkey study was subsequently pulled as ‘not suitable’ for publication after the GMC delivered its verdict.  The more the editors of my publication WDDTY have dug into this issue, the more layers of deceit we have uncovered in the form of censorship, data-massaging and burying of damning data.

We have found dirty tricks at the very heart of medicine that would have made Richard Nixon’s Watergate henchmen proud.  We havefound journalism ought and paid for by drug companys.

Journalism in collusion
But what has been most shocking to me as a journalist is the misinformation spread about by my own colleagues in the press. Virtually no major newspaper, TV or radio station (save The Huffington Post) has bothered to look beyond the official releases of the GMC or government agencies to learn the truth about MMR.  Some journalists have even allowed themselves to get in bed with drug companies.

Recently I heard from one of Wakefield’s colleagues.  His phone is tapped, and all his good research – much of it having nothing to do with MMR – is all getting publicly repudiated by the various publications in which he has published in the past.  Wakefield is like a character in a Kafka novel, whose footprint on the planet slowly being erased, one research article at a time.

What needs to be put on display is not false promises about winning the War on Cancer or an honest scientist like Wakefield, but the level of deceit that is now routine — among scientists, researchers and reporters — all in the name of the public ‘interest’.

The more interesting question, to my mind, is what makes Desdemona – or indeed anyone — good?

Every story that we are told ingrains in us the idea that we were born to be selfish.  Left to our own devices, without the taming influence of a religion or social contract, we would act according to our true natures, which is to say meanly cold-bloodedly and entirely for self-preservation.

As the philosopher Thomas Hobbes once put it, altruism is an illusion; anyone appearing to act unselfishly did so simply ‘to deliver his mind from the pain of compassion.’ According to this mindset, we do nice things, basically, out of guilt; a kindness is essentially hypocrisy.

Altruism and evolution
I’ve been thinking about this after reading about an eccentric American scientist called George Price, who became obsessed with the origins of kindness.  He could not square altruism with biology – specifically evolution as it was understood at the time.

As he thought about it, altruism was completely at odds with Charles Darwin’s notion of survival of the fittest.  Acting unselfishly out of a concern for the needs or interests of others, regardless of the personal consequences, is potentially deleterious to the self; in fact, helping another in a tight spot can also reduce your possibility of survival. 

Altruism, one could argue, is ultimately an act of purposeful self-destruction. In a zero sum game, it is deliberately choosing the shorter straw. 

Game theory
To answer this question, Price moved to London and sought out the evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton.  Together they worked out a mathematical equation for altruism, using game theory to work out how altruism aids evolution.

Their theory explains altruistic behavior from the perspective of the gene and its need to replicate. The gene that promotes the desire to help other family members aids its own replication because it will help the spread of individuals bearing copies of that gene. In other words, birds will feed the young of relatives in order to increase the number of their shared genes in future generation.

The other face of this theory is the ‘helper’ idea –that an animal that offers itself as a helper increases its own chances of survival and future reproduction or ensures the survival of the family. For instance, the white-fronted African bee eater will fight snakes and other predators, forage for food for its relatives and put off having its own young to help its close relatives raise their own young. Helping is also a means of propagating the gene.

A variation on this idea is ‘group selection’ or group adaptation, or operating on behalf of the group’s gene pool.  This is thought to occur because most of the members of the group, as with bees, are ultimately related to the queen. All of the worker bees are deliberately sterile and forfeit their reproductive fitness because the bees within any particular colony are mostly relatives of each other and so are simply hardwired by a biological evolutionary imperative – to ensure that queen survives in order to pass on their genes. 

Finally, there is the ‘I’ll-scratch-your-back theory’:  a chimp will groom another chimp only because he’s fully expecting reciprocity. Richard Dawkins even offers a ‘cost-benefit’ equation that calculates the point at which it becomes genetically advantageous for an animal to display altruism.

Random acts of kindness
The ultimate problem with the theory is the vast number of exceptions to the rule.  Extensive studies of animals offer countless instances where animals are capable of random acts of extraordinary self-sacrifice, compassion, courage and generosity toward members of their own species, members of other species and even toward humans, often to their own detriment.

Many species of animals employ alarm and information systems about danger and food, even when this would endanger them.  Ververt monkeys use alarm calls to warn other monkeys of impending attack, even though raising the alarm could increase their own chances of being harmed.

Animals also routinely evidence moments in which they put aside the most fundamental drive of all: the need to eat. In innumerable instances, animals have shared food or ensured that weaker individuals in a pack or herd be fed, even if it means giving up their own food. This occurs even in species like red foxes, known for jealously guarding of their own catch.

Animals have been known to protect and share food with the injured or less successful in a pack – again, in situations where they themselves may face harm. In one instance Tatu, a mongoose, whose paw had been injured in a fight was unable to fight. The other mongooses in her pack began foraging close to her, so that she’d have more food and even gave up some of their daily food to her.

The Dawkins’-eye view of the universe would argue that altruism is impossible among animals that are not closely related as it runs counter to survival. This reductive argument also falls down in the face of many examples that describe assistance and cooperation by unrelated animals for no apparent self-serving purpose.

Friendly chimps
It is now possible to argue otherwise now, thanks to technology that can analyze fecal samples and from the DNA determine which animals are related to each other. This technology served a recent German-American field project of primatologists in Kibale National Park in Uganda studying the social relations of entire colony of chimpanzees. 

From an exhausting and messy analysis of the excrement gathered in the chimp’s grounds as they went about their days, the scientists were able to determine that although chimps spend more time with their relatives, they also are highly cooperative among those with whom they lack any sort of genetic kinship.  Kevin Langergraber and his colleagues concluded that ‘males in the majority of highly affiliative and cooperative dyads are unrelated or distantly related.’ And this is among highly competitive chimps.

Explaining altruism requires acknowledging a quality in living things that drives stake into the very heart of biology as we know it.  It’s more likely that we weren’t born to be selfish at all, but born to be good. 

Maybe it selfishness is the real pathology — bred into people who grow up in a pathological environment — and goodness is hardwired and abandoned out of cultural necessity in our eat-or-be-eaten society.

If this is true, we need another view of how evolution works.

We see this at its purest with animals.  An animal acts as it must,without a new set of cultural rationalizations (such as our most recent one: greed is good).  They help to remind us who we really are.

My indifference also stems from the fact that I can’t do anything about the state of affairs here, since, as an American alien resident in Britain, I can’t vote and so don’t have any say about who is in office.

But ever since the extraordinary outcome of the recent election, which resulted in a hung Parliament, and the new coalition created between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, I have been riveted by the course of events and by all the lessons we can learn from this turn of events in living life according to a new set of rules.

How it all works
For those of you who don’t understand the British system, here’s a short course in how it works over here.  When British citizens vote, they don’t vote for a prime minister or party to rule, but only for their local Member of Parliament (MP), who represents their constituency, or local district (much as a member of the House of Representatives does in the States). 

The system, like the American electoral college, is winner-take-all; whoever gets the most votes in each constituency (no matter whether they are a minority of the total) wins the seat.  There are currently some 650 seats in the House of Commons; the party with a clear majority (or 326 seats or more) is then the governing party.  The leader of that party then becomes the prime minister. 

Virtually all the time, either the Labour or Conservative Party gets a majority.  This gives them a clear mandate to shove through pretty much any law they like for their term in office without opposition. In fact, it’s the only way Britain can govern, under the current system.

With very little check and balance, after a time, as I’ve seen with both the Thatcher and Blair governments, the reigning party initially pushes forward enthusiastically with its agenda, but before long, flushed with unopposed power, it turns fat, sleazy, irresponsible and corrupt. 

The new deal
This time it was different.  The British people did not vote in a clear majority, which resulted in a ‘hung’ Parliament.  Although the Conservatives won the most seats, about 50 more than Labour, they didn’t reach the magic number.  The Liberal Democrats, the center-left third party, held the election in the balance. If they  joined the Conservatives, they’d have a clear majority.  With a Labour party, they’d still have to round up all the other parties in order to produce a ‘rainbow’ majority

David Cameron, the Tory leader, made Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, a big, open offer. For several days representatives of both parties eventually hammered out a deal, giving a little here, taking a little there, until a centrist compromise they could both live with was struck, signed and planned for the next five years.

Since that time, many members of the public and the press from either side of the fence have spoken bitterly of their party’s ‘betrayal’ and abandonment of its conservative or liberal principles, and the fact that Clegg and Cameron, formerly so combative during the election, are now, thick as thieves.

To blame this all on politics as usual is to miss the bigger picture here and the lesson for all of us.  Of course the inexorable drive for power played a role in the deal; no one enters politics without that basic instinct.

Nevertheless, the point is both parties were able to put aside their differences, have a respectful, grown-up negotiation and find a good deal of common ground.  Some of the worse ideas in either party got thrown off the bargaining table. In a situation that hasn’t occurred in British politics for nearly a 100 years, members of both parties are sitting in the inner cabinet and making policy together; five members of the Lib Dems were appointed in the cabinet, including Nick Clegg as deputy prime minister.  A seasoned Lib Dem financier is sitting beside the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer to decide on bank-reform policy.

Bigger goals
Call me naïve, but what I think is happening with this government only tends to happen during war. The incoming government knows that Britain is not only literally engaged in two wars, but also at war financially. Our ‘external debt’ – that is, what we owe the rest of the world — is estimated at 400 per cent of gross domestic product. We are in the worst financial state of all countries in the G8  -  four times worse than the US.

Psychologists call putting aside differences and working for the common good a  ‘superordinate’ goal – a goal only achieved by large cooperative teamwork. The native American Cherokees call working together in this manner ‘gadugi’. Engaging in sharing and teamwork tends to transcend differences, because it emphasizes the very heart of humanity — that we are all in this together.  And if we are all in this together, we are no longer competing and scrapping with each other.

Discrimination doesn’t require conflict or indeed much besides the flimsiest designation of otherness.  As American psychologist Henri Taifel demonstrated in a study, when a batch of adolescent boys were simply told that certain others had scored the same score as them at a computer task, they began to band together and discriminate against those who hadn’t achieved the same score.

Difference of any sort that gets emphasized is enough to create a ‘minimal group’ and, consequently, an outgroup. All it takes is any kind of a wall, no matter how flimsy.

A social scientist called Doise observed the very human tendency to place ourselves into categories and suggested that one way that we can come together is in ‘cross cutting categories’ — attaching ourselves to more than one group.  That not only reduces the prejudice against out groups but tends to stop people from comparing themselves to other groups. 

It also reduces our need to relate to just a single factor — religion, or gender, socio-economic background or, in this instance, politics — in order to feel that we belong.

Let’s for God’s sake, join hands and give them a chance — and perhaps even learn from the British experience. At this decisive moment in history, everywhere around the world, we are indeed all in this together.

Singing, to a Suya, is hard and soft science.

Math lesson
This particular researcher was investigating the level of sophistication of the Suya concerning mathematics.  Many scientists examining cultural differences over number systems operate on the assumption that many native cultures basically don’t have language to describe quantities of things; for instance, the Piraha people use the same word ‘hoi’ to describe ‘about one’ and ‘about two’; the only difference is a subtle alteration in inflection of pronunciation.  The much-studied Munduruku in the Amazon have words for numbers only up to 5.

This has led many scientists to examine whether human beings have innate numerical skills or whether it is simply a part of cultural conditioning.  Is it possible to operate entirely without numbers?

So this particular researcher asked a member of the Suya tribe what was the correct answer to the following numerical problems:  If you had 10 fish and gave away three fish, how many would you have?

The Suya answered without hesitation and as though the researcher were a bit dull-witted to have even asked the question. 

As anybody in the village could tell you, the answer, of course, is 13. 

Minus equals plus
This was how he worked it out.  In the Suya tradition, whenever you give something away to someone else, the recipient pays you back double.  So if he gave three fish to his brother, he said, his brother would have to give him back two times three fish, or six.  So added to his 10 original fish he would first have 16 fish.

Once he deducted the three fish he originally gave his brother, he would have a net increase of three, or 13. 

So, 10-3 = 7 in Western mathematics transforms into 10 + (2×3) – 3 = 13 in Suya mathematics.

In fact, the native was dismayed at the American version of the equation.  He does not view giving away as equivalent to subtraction.  He finds the entire notion of it abhorrent. 

“Why is it that ‘giving’ is always seen as a ‘minus’ for white people?’ another member of the tribe asked.  “I know that you want me to use the minus sign instead of the plus sign, but I don’t understand why.”

This was a little shocking to Alex Bellos, the author of the recently published Alex’s Adventures in Numberland (Bloomsbury, 2010), a study of cultural differences in mathematics.  He began the study of his fascinating book with the belief that numbers are a universal language – the way in which we could, say, communicate with extra terrestrials — only to find that our basic understanding of arithmetical relationships depends upon cultural context.

Relationships in the numbers
I find the story delightful for several reasons. 

It reveals something very profound not simply about mathematics but about how different cultures view relationships in general, particularly how we view ourselves in relation to other things.

Our sense of mathematics very much depends upon how we define our world, and whether we view ourselves and all the things around us as individual entities separate from each other or inherently intertwined.

Many non-Western societies — pre-literate cultures such as the Aborigines, the ancient Greeks and the Egyptians, the adherents of Eastern religions such as Buddhism, Zen and Taoism, and a number of modern indigenous cultures  —  conceive of the universe as inseparable, connected by some universal energy ‘life force’. The beliefs of many tribal societies about this central energy force have many similarities, suggesting that an intuitive understanding of the interconnectedness of all things is fundamental to human experience.

This central belief breeds an extraordinarily different way of seeing and interacting with the world.  These traditional cultures believe that we are in relationship with all of life – even with the earth itself.  They hold a very different notion of time and space as one vast continuum of ‘now’ and ‘here’.

They even perceive the world out there very differently.  We see the thing; they see the totality, the relationship between the things.  To an indigenous native, math and the song are equivalent —  all about the plus sign, the connection, in this instance, between the man with the fish and his brother. 

We would do well to take a few math lessons from the Amazon.