If a human tells a lie while hooked up to a polygraph machine, they will probably get busted.

That’s because telling a lie apparently creates a measurable, electrical, Pants-On-Fire reaction in almost all of us.

But now it turns out that a lie detector test can be used on plants!

And this discovery potentially changes everything about the way we think about our universe.

Researcher Cleve Backster, former head of the polygraph division of the CIA, is an expert in the science of the electrical responses and biocommunications of Lying People and Their Very Hot Pants.

Backster knows that in response to even the slightest surges of emotion, a galvanometer (the part of a polygraph that’s attached to a person by wires carrying a very weak current of electricity) will register a needle moving on a meter, or a pen tracing dramatic lines on a moving graph of paper.

And apparently the best way to make the galvanometer jump is to scare somebody by threatening their well-being.

So one day, sort of by accident, Backster got curious and decided to try to scare a plant.

He hooked up one leaf of his favorite office plant to the polygraph electrodes. (A polygraph can measure the changes in a plant’s conductivity and vibrational energy in exactly the same way it can Nail a Liar).

Then he dipped a leaf in hot water to see if anything registered on the graph.

Well, nothing much happened.

So Backster decided to up the ante.

He decided to BURN the leaf.

He THOUGHT about burning the leaf with a match.

And then an astonishing thing happened.

The instant Backster visualized a flame in his mind, the lines on the graph literally went CRAZY!

THE ELECTRICAL RESPONSE IN THE PLANT WAS VERY SIMILAR TO THAT OF A HUMAN EXPERIENCING FEAR.

So Backster left the room to get matches, then returned to discover that another sudden, crazy surge had registered on the chart, apparently caused by his determination to carry out his threat.

THE PLANT APPEARED TO BE REACTING TO HIS THOUGHTS.

(Backster never actually burned the plant, since just thinking about it apparently terrorized the poor thing.)

Since then, Backster’s thousands of meticulously documented experiments show that plants are sentient life forms that respond to external events. He has shown that plants react— to human negativity and to human caring—by responding with “fear” or “happiness” that looks exactly like the polygraph responses to those emotions in humans.

Next, Backster wondered if plants have memory.

He devised an experiment with two plants, both in the same room.  One plant would be “murdered” while the second plant “witnessed” the crime.  Then Backster would attempt to use the polygraph to try to identify the secret criminal.

Six of Backster’s polygraph students (veteran policemen) were blindfolded, and one of them pulled secret instructions out of a hat—to uproot, stomp on, rip and tear, burn, and basically murder one of the two plants.  The crime was committed in secret one night, and no one knew who the criminal was—except the second WITNESS PLANT in the same room..

Backster attached polygraph electrodes to the surviving plant.

One-by-one, the six suspects were paraded in front of the Witness Plant.

The plant had no reaction to five of the students. 

But the meter went crazy whenever the murderer approached.

( “No sooner did the murderer come near the plant than the recorder of the instrument went wild.  Not just nervous, the plant was afraid, it was horrified!” )

Busted.

With more experiments, Backster also showed that a special affinity appears to be created between a plant and its keeper, and this bond is unaffected by distance.  Once attuned to a particular person, plants appear to maintain a connection with that person, no matter where they go, and no matter how many other people are around.

With the use of synchronized stop watches and a notebook to record what he was doing and feeling at specific times, Backster showed that his plants reacted to his thoughts and attention from the next room, from down the hall, even from several buildings away.

Back from a 15-mile trip, Backster’s plants perked up the moment he decided to return home.

Another researcher, Pierre Paul Sauvin, who has gotten similar results, has proposed using the sensitivity of plants to detect a potential hijacker at airport security before they could board.

“Operation Skyjack,” a system using suited-up, polygraphed plants to pick up the turbulent emotions of a hijacker at a security screening, is already being researched by the US Army, interested in finding ways to use plants to measure the emotional responses of people.  They just have to figure out how to do it without having to sensitize the plants to a special person.

This is not a joke.

In addition to reacting to the harming of others like themselves, plants also appear to react to witnessing the death of other living beings and tissues, even at the cellular level (like the death of bacteria, for example).

So perhaps there is some sort of “cellular consciousness” that is common to all life. 

To explore this hypothesis Backster found ways to attach polygraph electrodes to all sorts of single cells, such as amoebas, paramecium, yeast, mold, scrapings from the human mouth, blood, and even sperm cells.  All these cells were monitored on polygraph charts.

Yogurt reacts in “terror” when it is injected with penicillin to kill unwanted bacteria.

And, according to these studies, a sperm cell can identify its own donor– even in a crowd–and react to its donor’s feelings, while totally ignoring any other males who happen to be in the vicinity. 

Backster dropped a dozen eggs, one at a time, into boiling water, while measuring them with the polygraph.  He found the first egg reacted in fear to his intention, and the second and third eggs were so “terrorized” by the first egg’s dunking that the rest of the eggs appeared to “faint” in anticipation.   Plants and other organisms appear to react self-defensively in a way similar to an opossum—or a human being—by passing out.

But the most exciting conclusion that Backster and others have found is that all sentient life—houseplants, sperms, eggs, and just about everything else—immediately react to the thought and intention of an act LONG BEFORE THE ACT ITSELF OCCURS.

The Backster Effect leads to the idea that we are part of a unique communications grid which binds all life together.  Maybe memory and sentience doesn’t stop at the cellular level, but continues down to even the subatomic level common to all of nature.

In other words, all our consciousnesses are connected.

In the science of energy fields, there is spectacular evidence to suggest that consciousness is a general property of matter, and that every single atom in the universe possesses a rudimentary consciousness or spirit.

Consciousness is an inherent quality of the whole universe.

The consciousness of a rock, or a lake, or a tree, or a houseplant is more complex, more interactive, more noticeable, and more widely distributed than that of an individual atom.

This does not mean that rocks think human thoughts. Rocks “know” things, but not the way we do.  Requiring sometimes hundreds of thousands of years to move a miniscule distance or change shape, theirs is a consciousness we can’t even imagine.

“Dumb as dirt” should take on a new meaning for you right about now.

All of this means that IF, LIKE ME, YOU’VE EVER WORRIED THAT A PLANT IS SCREAMING WHILE YOU’RE PRUNING IT, YOU MIGHT WANT TO RE-THINK WHAT YOU’RE DOING.

Because you’ll never get away with it.

 It’s not that easy being green.  Clearly.

Get Ignited!

Note: You can see a little demonstration in the trailer below, for the film “I AM” (which will be out soon).    http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/i_am_2011/trailers/11136629

 In New York City, we tend to think (affectionately) of pigeons as kind of dirty, irritating birds—-but no one can deny that they can fly like the wind. 

Pigeons are sort of like NYC itself—stinky, infuriating, but still soaring. 

Mike Tyson has been in the news lately because he has raised hundreds of homing pigeons over the years, including pigeons he races.  Of this unlikely union, he says he tries not to get too attached to his birds, because they sometimes get sick, injured, or caught by predators.  The less attached he is, Mike says, “the less difficulties I have in my home and in my everyday life.” 

NO ONE WANTS THAT.

Mike also knows that you should NEVER UNDERESTIMATE A HOMING PIGEON. 

Because a homing pigeon can be transported hundreds, even thousands of miles from its home roost, and as soon as it’s released, it will fly straight back home.  Pretty much no matter where or how far away from home they are.  With very little hesitation.

In fact—and this is truly amazing—they can find their way home EVEN IF YOU MOVE IT. 

Let me say that again.  EVEN IF YOU MOVE THEIR HOME SOMEWHERE ELSE, THEY CAN STILL FIND IT AND GO HOME.

WELL…we still don’t know how they do it. 

But lots of theories about how they do it have already been completely disproved, so you can pretty much forget about anything reasonably logical. 

Nope. They don’t do it by smell, memory, the sun, landmarks, sight, magnetic fields, or sensitive hearing. 

Instead, the evidence suggests that there is an UNKNOWN force, sense, or power that connects pigeons to their home, no matter where they are, and no matter where you move it. 

“Second to the left and straight on till morning.”  (Peter Pan’s directions home.)

Quantum physics (known as the Science of Consciousness) tells us that, at the sub-atomic level (where particles are unimaginably small), those particles are located at a specific place—like an address—in space and time. 

But those particles are ALSO wave-like at the same time, and in their vibrating form they spread out all over everywhere, which means that, like a wave, they’re also located everywhere at once.  (Don’t even try to understand this, no one does.)

An analogy would be that your Home is not only at, say, 172 W. 14^th Street (a particular place or location with a mailbox).  At the quantum level, in its vibrating, wavy state, home is also “anywhere (and everywhere) you hang your hat.” 

A perfect metaphor for this quantum situation is the Internet. 

Right now ask yourself, “Where is the internet?”

If you think about it, the Internet is sort of out there everywhere in the ether, and very hard to grab onto. 

But it’s also at the very specific address of your personal laptop, and your website’s URL.

With the Internet, Everywhere and Somewhere both exist at the same time.

Or, in the tender words of Elvis Presley, “Home is where the heart is, and my heart is anywhere you are.”  (Sigh.)

This is a very quantum situation.

And living organisms in nature somehow seem to open a doorway into this quantum realm.

 In fact, if we had the consciousness of a pigeon, we would have a consciousness that we can barely imagine. 

 So here is one fascinating, evidence-based theory suggested by Rupert Sheldrake (one of my all-time favorite science geniuses) about how pigeons get home.

Sheldrake thinks that the consciousness of a pigeon is very different than ours:

When a pigeon is born, it already has all the awareness it will ever have.  It already knows everything that will happen to it, almost like a map of its life that is spread out before it.   One continuous awareness that extends from its birth to its death. 

This is very interesting to think about.  For us, that would be like having all your deathbed memories—looking back on everything that happened in your life—delivered  to you at the very moment you’re born.

Most of us probably wouldn’t really want that kind of consciousness. 

We prefer the surprises that make life so interesting. 

But Sheldrake helps us to imagine the consciousness of a pigeon, so different from our own.

In pigeon consciousness, it knows everything that’s going to happen. 

Sort of like going to a good psychic on the Upper West Side.  Except better.

And its life unfolds exactly as anticipated.  

BUT A PIGEON DOESN’T EVEN KNOW THAT IT KNOWS. 

Since the pigeon has no language, it doesn’t have the concept of “anticipated.”  Without language, its experience is all visual and sensory.  It doesn’t think or reason in words, like the endless chatter we have in our heads.  It doesn’t worry about the past or the future like we do.  Language is the source of most of our human angst about those things. 

“Yesterday I did this, tomorrow I hope THAT won’t happen.”

No, a pigeon is aware of its entire history from birth till death (no surprises!), but experiences it as one timeless moment.  The entire life history of the pigeon all exists at the same time, including the trip away from and back to the loft. 

In some sense, the pigeon never went anywhere. 

Sort of like when you rewind a cartoon or a film backwards, and there’s a spectacle of wild confusion, arms and legs flailing everywhere, but then amazingly everything still ends up in the right place. 

“Home, where my music’s playing.  Home, where my love lies waiting…”  (Paul and Art are forever figuring out how to get Home.)

Sooooo….The possible answer to how the pigeon finds its way home is that part of the pigeon’s mind is already home and never left home. 

“Gee, but it’s great to be back home.  Home is where I wanna be-ee.”

When a pigeon is released, the part of its mind that’s still at home guides it back to its loft. 

Because in some sense it’s already there.

Glinda: “You’ve always had the power to go back home to Kansas.”
Dorothy: “I have?”
Scarecrow: “Then why didn’t you tell her before?”
Glinda: “Because she wouldn’t have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.”

(Dorothy just had to learn that she was already there.)

The consciousness of the pigeon is distributed in time in a way that, from our point of view, makes it capable of performing miracles. 

But from the pigeon’s point of view, it’s just another ho-hum day in the life.

That means that, except for the poison of our human language telling us there’s a past, a present, and an unknowable future, tormenting us constantly about what’s going to happen next, we could possibly have the consciousness of a pigeon and see our entire lifetime all at once. 

With pigeon-consciousness, we would fall into a timeless quantum realm

—an Already-There existence—

the 4^th dimensional world of nature, where darkness holds no threat, and anxiety and fear would leave us— to forever go in peace.

Pigeon-Think would put a lot of psychics out of business.

And no matter where we went, we’d always, already, be Home.

The “doves” released at weddings and ceremonies are actually white homing pigeons. And every day, hundreds of pigeons find their way home–and right into Mike Tyson’s heart.  We can all be heartened by that.

“Home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in.”

Soner or later, we’re all Homeward Bound.  So perhaps, New York City,  we could cut our fellow winged travelers a little slack.  We all have a lot in common.  Pigeon poop notwithstanding.

Home: You’re already there.

Get Ignited!

As we are about to enter the second decade of the 21^st century (where did the FIRST one go????), it is good to get a little perspective on things.  For example, will radio DJs continue to exhort us to listen to the hits of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and now the “00s?”  How will they say it?  The “Zeroes?”  These are the kinds of things I wonder about.

In the 70s, there was a famous “Counterclockwise” study done by social-psychologist Ellen Langer.  In this study, Langer and her team created a historically accurate physical environment typical of the year 1959, and then got a group of elderly men to live exactly as if it was 1959.  For a whole week, they cooked, ate, slept, and lived in 1959, listening to the music and discussing the issues of the day. 

There was also a control group that spent a week together just reminiscing about 1959 but not acting as if it really was that time. 

The control group had a very lovely time together, but that was about it.

But—and this is truly amazing—the group of guys who put themselves into a 1959 state of mind experienced profound changes.  Their memory, physical flexibility, dexterity, vision, hearing, and general well-being all improved dramatically. 

Most important, after just one week of living as if they were younger, Langer’s old fellas showed improvements in finger length! 

Yes!!!  “Shriveled arthritic fingers got LONGER—as they released and embraced a younger, 1959 perspective.”  (Michael Gelb)

By the way, this story about LANGER’S LONGER FINGERS is soon to be a major motion picture starring Jennifer Aniston. (This is not a joke).

And if arthritis can be un-bent, this “living as-if” technique holds tremendous—albeit complicated—promise for wrinkles in 2011.

 Most everyone (in the Western world, at least) has surely heard by now that to live our best life, we should BE HERE NOW, be in the POWER OF NOW, try to LIVE IN THE NOW, and not worry about the past or the future.  It just makes sense, if you think about it.

 The thing is, there really is no NOW. 

 I can prove it.  Right now, take a moment to try to measure the RIGHT-NOW-THIS-VERY-SECOND moment you are currently experiencing.  The instant you try to capture it—let’s say by looking at your watch—that moment has already vanished into the past.  No matter how hard you try to catch the Now—breaking it down into smaller and smaller increments all the way down to nanoseconds—it has already passed by the time you try to grab it. 

 So I think we might need to have a serious conversation with Eckhart Tolle.

 Because there really is no present, only the past and the future merging.  There is only trying to remember the kind of September when life was slow and oh so mellow—or worrying about whether I will see you in September or lose you to a summer love.  Just smaller and smaller moments of future-then-past, future-then-past, future-then-past.  And even those don’t really exist. 

 Even though it seems like time is moving, what we’re really experiencing is one thing vanishing and another appearing.  Our genius brains effortlessly connect these vanishing and appearing acts together, giving us the illusion of time passing.

 But it’s just a trick.

 Most of us have experienced the distinct feeling that time has passed either too quickly or too slowly.  When I sit down to write, I struggle for awhile, but once the words begin to flow, I lose all sense of time.  Hours can go by, and it can seem like minutes.

 On the other hand, time goes waaaaayyyy too slowly when I’m at the Dentist’s Office.  

 Human language is the main source of our feeling that time is moving forward in a linear way.  You’ve probably heard that in this modern world, we are mostly Human Doings instead of Human Beings.  We say, “Yesterday I did this, tomorrow I’ll do that.”  With our language, we’ve created the dreaded 40- (or 80-) hour work week, the stingy 2-week vacation, the rambunctious 5-minute speed date, the 60-second microwave Pop-Tart, and the “When I’m 64” Pop-Song.  As we’ve evolved, we have abandoned our own inner sense of time, and replaced it with clock and calendar time. 

 The indigenous Aborigines in Australia, on the other hand, still experience time based on the natural rhythms of the seasons and the lunar and solar cycles.   Their time is not linear but more circular.  Their days are marked in “sleeps”.  One hour might be measured by how long it takes to roast a Witchety Grub in the hot sand—a big, plump, yummy morsel that I happen to have personally sampled.  (I call it the “Witchetying Hour.”  Of course, most of the time they don’t roast the Witchety Grub, but just pop it—still wiggling—into their mouths.  At that point,  it’s a witchety swallow in a Witchety Second.)  

In other words, the Aborigines have retained their essential sense of how time feels.

 But linear clock time doesn’t really exist any more than subjective feeling time does.   Because actually, we live in Eternity.

 We live in a river of time in which the source of the river (our past) and its final destination ahead of us (our future) exist simultaneously.  Events that have already passed must still be around.  And events in the future must exist like new scenes just around the river bend.  Physicist Fred Alan Wolf puts it beautifully: “When we say time passes, we mean that we pass.  Time is an experience in itself that is, paradoxically, timeless.”   

 Or another way of putting it: “Diamonds are forever.” Everybody knows what that means.

 The river of eternity can flow both ways.  Most of us assume that everything we can remember has already happened.  And if asked why we don’t remember scenes from our future, we’d probably answer: “Duh, because they haven’t happened yet.”  But what if memory, like the river, goes both ways—and you can remember the future just as well as you can recall the past? 

 Animals, by the way, probably have no experience of time passing.  They don’t have language, and think exclusively with images.  They just Are. 

They are Animals Being.

In her study, Langer’s Finger-Growers were Time Travelers. And they didn’t really have to GO anywhere to get somewhere else. 

 Probably the biggest thing that limits all of us in our own time-traveling access to the future and the past is our illusion that we are each a separate, singular entity, an ego, or an “I,” living in a world of time and space. 

A Human Doing. 

 Our Doing-ness pins our mind in time rather than timelessness.

 By the way, I think the Beatles were on to something timeless and quantum-y (and maybe something drug-y) when they wrote one of my favorite songs from childhood:  

“Eight days a week, I lo-o-o-o-ove you (ba-dup), Eight days a week, it’s not enough to show I care.” (Human Being)

Then of course there was Prince, who famously sang, “Act your age, not your shoe size, mama.”  (Human Doing. Definitely).

So, Mr. Dee-Jay and the rest of us, as we enter the “10s” or the “Teens(?),” here’s my suggestion:  Don’t put Time in a Bottle. 

Instead, pull a Long-Finger.

Ask yourself, “What if we didn’t know how old we are?”

Keep reminding yourself that you’re not a Doing but a Being, and that you’re connected with everything, living in timelessness.

And try acting the age you feel, not the age you are.  Since you really, truly aren’t that age anyway. 

It will probably do more to keep the spring in your step, the song in your heart, and the length in your toes than any other single thing you ever do.

Young is the new old!

Get Ignited!

Mary Poppins, Nanny Extraordinaire, quickly had her young charges believing that cleaning their room could be magical and fun.  In essence, she gave them the placebo effect!

 Any “sugar” treatment that we believe to be real medicine is called a placebo. 

 Throughout human history, lots and lots of people have been cured of serious illnesses after they’ve taken SUGAR PILLS, all the while believing that their sugar pill was actually medicine.  

 And that’s the awesome power of the placebo effect. 

“Spit-spot!”

 Until the early 1900s, the most common medical practice performed by doctors was blood-letting (deliberately cutting the skin open and draining large amounts of blood). 

 And patients LET their doctors do this to them. 

That’s probably why it’s called blood-LETTING. 

Since there wasn’t much actual medicine available, they also LET their doctors treat their wounds with arsenic and prescribe rattlesnake oil drinks for lots of other things. 

And yet, at least one third (maybe more) of our ancestors who were seriously ill got better, simply because they believed that letting their doctor bleed them, or drinking something really disgusting, would heal them.   

Mary Poppins would surely agree that they were on the right track.

 In fact today, if you truly believed on every level that chewing on waterbugs would cure your asthma, you’d have about a 50/50 chance that it would work!   

 “…makes the medicine go down, the medicine go dow-wown, medicine go down.”

In modern studies, sugar pills and other placebos have successfully alleviated pain, depression, anxiety, diseases, inflammatory disorders, and even some cancers.

The U.S. Dept of Health (the ultimate in Consensus Reality) reports that 50%  of severely depressed people get better if they take an antidepressant like Prozac.  This same agency also reports that 32% of depressed people get better if they take a sugar pill they THINK is an antidepressant.  

One woman who participated in an antidepressant study was cured after 30 years of debilitating depression.  But she was on sugar pills the whole time!  She was totally shocked when she found out, because she even experienced side effects!  And her brain scans actually showed huge before-and-after differences. 

 Then there are also PLACEBO SURGERIES.

A big study was done with patients with severe, debilitating knee pain.  Some groups of these patients had knee surgery, and most people improved. 

The real surgery really helped.

 But there was also a group that had a totally fake, Placebo Surgery. 

 Those patients were sedated, and given standard incisions in their knees.  During the surgery, Dr. Just-Kidding talked and acted authentically—including all the appropriate sound effects—and then sewed them back up without doing anything at all. 

 Yes! The placebo surgery group’s knees improved just as much as the real surgery groups! 

 Mary wouldn’t be surprised.

 There are even PLACEBO BRAIN SURGERIES.

 In studies, real surgeries are performed to implant dopamine into the brains of Parkinson’s patients, who suffer from a lack of it.  This surgery really helps to improve the quality of life for some people. 

 But FAKE Brain Surgeries are also performed. Those patients don’t get any dopamine.  All they get is having their brains opened up and exposed to the air. 

Hannibal Lecter, the Anti-Mary, comes to mind.

In other words, their brains only THINK they’re getting a dopamine implant. 

 But whether the surgery is real or fake, all the patients do just about as well.

 What seems to matter isn’t the implant itself, but that patients’ brains THINK they’ve gotten it.

 What I want to know is: HOW DO YOU GET PEOPLE TO SIGN ON FOR A BRAIN SURGERY STUDY LIKE THIS?????

 “Yes, definitely, I WOULD like to sign up for a brain surgery that might be totally fake.”  

Well, that’s the ULTIMATE Mary.

“You see, in every job that must be done, there is an element of fun.  You find the fun, and snap!  The job’s a game!”

All this points to the fact that when you believe something, your biology sometimes appears to adapt very effectively. 

Our beliefs seem to act as filters—just the way a pair of colored sunglasses filters the light to our eyes—changing how we see and experience the world. 

The human brain cannot deal with conflicting information unless it can be integrated, so it picks one side of the conflict, and then suppresses everything that does not fit with that dominant belief.   Just like sunglasses, our beliefs only let certain information in, and block out anything that conflicts with that position. 

That’s why a person who believes they are stupid will see confirmation of their stupidity everywhere, even if there is enormous evidence to the contrary.  

The brain leaves very little room for doubt.

Those blinders work in our favor in many ways, like when we decide, say, to walk across hot coals with bare feet at a Firewalk.  If there was ever a time when you don’t want any kind of internal conflict, this would be it.

I take it back.  THIS  is the ULTIMATE Mary.

“And every task you undertake becomes a piece of cake.  A lark, a spree, it’s very clear to see!”

A deeply held belief can create one’s reality. 

The way we look at something changes the thing we’re looking at.  (And that’s what quantum physics tells us too, by the way.) 

What a message!  Think what we’ll be able to do in the world when we learn how to effectively harness that truth!  (Sweet.)

 The power of belief may be only a small piece of the enormous complexities of healing illness in the human body.  But it may also hold one of the keys to freedom from suffering. 

 Cleaning our rooms may still not always be fun, but Mary Poppins demonstrates something to us all that is much, much sweeter—the healing power of belief.  

 So…what if our ancestors hadn’t whole-heartedly believed in blood-letting? 

(That would have been called blood-KEEPING, and it sounds like a good idea to me.) 

 Well, thank goodness they did believe, or lots of us wouldn’t be here now… 

 Mary Poppins, you were way ahead of your time. 

 In a most delightful way!”

Get Ignited!

For every single human being on the planet, there are at least 1.5 million ants.

That basically means that the total mass of all the ants on the Earth is equal to the total mass of all the people on Earth. 

Did you know this????

Of all insects in the world, the ant has the largest brain.  (This also explains why huge NYC waterbugs are so DUMB.)  Below right is a picture of an ant brain. (How did they GET this??)

In fact, the processing power of an ant’s brain and a Macintosh II computer might just be pretty similar!

In other words, they’re smart.

For example, during a flood, rafts of fire ants can float to the shore on the flood waters. The rafts are made entirely of ants. The individual ants on the bottom die, but the colony survives.  And if that’s not smart enough, then there’s the strain of ants that forms into a ball and rolls across the river.  Since they keep rolling, nobody dies.  Wow!  We should take lessons from these little buggers.

An ant brain has about 250,000 brain cells.  A human brain has 10,000 million.  So a colony of just 40,000 ants has, collectively, the same size brain as a human. 

Ants have large, super-strong jaws that open and shut sideways, LIKE SCISSORS.  (I just threw that in because it’s weird.) 

They can’t swallow solid food, so after they scissor (?) out all the juice from pieces of food, they leave all the dry stuff behind.  In your house.

I AM going somewhere with this…

When a few ants are placed in a sandpile, they wander around aimlessly, and seem totally oblivious to everything. 

BUT HERE’S THE IMPORTANT PART.

If you keep adding more ants, at a certain critical point they spontaneously start organizing into a working colony.  And then they each automatically take on a specific job in the larger structure.  How do they already know exactly what to do????

A different kind of awareness seems to be ignited when they’re surrounded by others like them, and they begin to act interconnected.

At a certain point, the ants become a brain.

And now on to human heart cells…

If totally random, individual heart cells are placed in a Petri dish, each cell contracts with its own specific rhythm. 

But if you keep adding heart cells, when a critical number of cells is reached, they all start beating together and acting like a normal heart. 

At a certain point, the cells become a heart.

There seems to be a collective consciousness that takes over—with ants and with heart cells—and even though each part has its own particular role, they also each somehow contain an awareness of the whole structure, and begin to function as one entity. 

That is, EVERY PART CONTAINS THE WHOLE.

And that’s the definition of a hologram.

Over our human history, we have developed a powerful block against our awareness of the whole of which we are each a part.  But, like ants and heart cells, we each contain the whole of something much greater. 

We are each a hologram of the entire universe. 

Our thoughts are the universe’s thoughts. 

What power that gives us!

Once, it must have served us not to know it, and to shelve that awareness away, but it definitely doesn’t serve us any more. 

We all get glimmers of it once in a while, and deeper parts of us know it’s true, but that information is largely hidden from us in our day-to-day reality. 

We don’t let ourselves know what we know. 

And that has brought us to where we are today.

But science, specifically quantum physics, is now presenting us with PROOF (which appeals to our logical, analytic left brain) that there is another level of reality in which everything is connected, anything can happen, and unlimited creativity rules. 

Our left brains can’t talk us out of this one!

Ants and heart cells already know it.

Individually and collectively—as part of a whole, global, universal brain—we won’t be able to not know what we already know for very much longer.

This is a great time to be alive and aware, and become a part of this colossal transformation.

And just because ants scissor their food doesn’t mean they don’t have a brain in their heads.

Get Ignited!

(Above, Galatea, by Salvadore Dali, with permission.)

Our place in the universe is about to be clarified.

The LISA satellite is going up next year (2011).  LISA is three satellites that are connected by laser beams in a triangle 3,000,000 miles across, the largest satellite system ever. 

LISA will actually be able to look back in time and detect the shock waves coming all the way back from the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago. 

 Hubble telescope observations have suggested that the universe began with the Big Bang, and that ever since, our universe has been getting bigger and bigger, and will just keep expanding until all the energy from that colossal explosion basically runs out. 

Then, about five billion years from now, when the Big Bang finally loses all its juice, gravity will take over, all the matter in the universe will stop expanding, and will instead begin to contract until it totally implodes and becomes a Black Hole.  

 In a Black Hole gravity is so strong that it sucks in everything around it.   And the more stuff (like us) that it sucks in, the smaller and denser that stuff gets, which makes the gravity stronger, which then increases the suck.  

 Eventually gravity gets so strong in a Black Hole that even light can’t get out.   And that’s when it becomes totally invisible–because if light can’t get out, then we can’t see anything. 

 A Black Hole is sort of like a really, really good vacuum cleaner.  

 There’s one out on the market now (Oreck) that can pick up a bowling ball with its sucking capacity!

 This is not a joke.

Scientists have been able to find Black Holes in our universe—even though they’re invisible—because the other heavenly bodies, like planets and stars, act really STRANGELY around them.  (They probably act like they’re trying to avoid that Black Hole thingy like the plague.) 

 I know I would.

 Soooo….one of the big science questions is “What happens to all that stuff after it gets sucked into a Black Hole and disappears?”   

 Most scientists now believe that it all gets blown out the other end.

 Wow!  So a Black Hole is more like a DRAIN.

 All that matter and light gets sucked down the cosmic drain, and then gets blown out the other end, into…….a White Hole! 

 A White Hole is pretty much an anti-Black Hole.  

Unlike a Black Hole that sucks and swallows, a White Hole spews and expands, like a sort of cosmic garden hose. 

 A Black Hole shrinks everything, but then a White Hole blows it all back out again, with a really Big Bang.

 That means that the Big Bang was the actual birth of our baby universe.  After an interminable bun-in-the-oven gestation and a very rough labor, we popped out of an extremely tight birth canal—the mouth of a Black Hole from another universe.

The delivery room was literally smokin’!

 According to physicist Dr. Michio Kaku, our universe blew out into a White Hole that quickly expands from the matter spewing into it.  And maybe we are connected by an umbilical cord we can’t see—to a parent universe we haven’t even known about. 

And that means that the word “Universe” no longer means “everything.”

It just means “PART of everything.” 

 It means that there are multiple universes, or what science calls “the Multiverse.”

 According to the Multiverse Theory, what we have been calling our “universe” is just a fragment of a much more awesome system made up of infinite numbers of other universes. 

 Our own vast baby cosmos is actually just a single bubble of space among an infinite number of other bubbles.  Maybe the Black Holes in our universe have also given birth to other universes.  Our bubble can sprout other bubbles!

Next year, LISA could give us our baby pictures–our moment of creation itself.

 This possibility is staggering in its theological and philosophical potential.    If LISA confirms the theory, it will turn science on its ear.  And it will be the greatest revolution in consciousness since Copernicus discovered that the earth revolves around sun (instead of the other way around). 

 Just another reason why this is an exciting time in human history to be alive and aware.

Plus, it gives new meaning to the phrase,

“Recycled Material,” since that would be—specifically and undoubtedly—us.

Life imitates Universe(s) imitates Kitchen.

 Get ignited!

(Black hole fractal by Sven Geier, www.svengeier.com)

“We are non-local awareness residing temporarily in a physical body.” 

Russell Targ, physicist and really smart guy, said this.

Russell helped to develop the laser beam. He also co-founded the Stargate Project, a 23-year, $25-million, top-secret program of research funded by the US government, into psychic abilities and their use for the CIA and the Defense Department. 

 That is, Russell and his colleagues very successfully teleported themselves all over the world to get information for the CIA.

DID YOU KNOW THIS??? 

The psychic abilities they studied and practiced are referred to collectively as “remote viewing.”  

Remote viewing is just a code phrase for clairvoyance. They probably chose that phrase to cut down the giggle-and-eye-roll factor, since they were often roaming the corridors of the Pentagon trying to explain how they were training psychic spies.

Remote viewing is a process of “seeing” things from a distance, and a crucial piece of the training is learning to diminish mind chatter. 

The remote viewer is asked a question like, “What’s in this bag?” or “Describe what you see at longitude ABC, latitude XYZ.”

They are then asked to draw or write whatever comes to mind, as they focus their intention on learning about the target, while keeping their mind from analyzing whatever images and thoughts they get.  (The mind likes to fill in any gaps of unknown information with whatever it does know. This analysis interferes with the success of the process. But if you’re given a question like, “What’s at coordinate 63535?”, there’s no way for the brain to guess or analyze what that random number connects with.)

The viewer just  has to sort of feel and see their way into the remote location and notice what they pick up.

In the film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Richard Dreyfuss’ character was obsessed with thoughts and visions of a specific mountain.  He finally built a huge model of Devil’s Tower in his living room, not even knowing what it was until he was compulsively drawn to the actual location and recognized the very mountain he’d built. That’s a good example of a kind of remote viewing process. 

In a way, Richard had been picking up information about the mountain as if he was ALREADY THERE. 

Experienced remote viewers in the Stargate Project experimented with “seeing” not only geographic locations, buildings, weapons and other objects, but also “seeing” into other people’s minds, and then looking at nearby objects through those other people’s eyes (they were  especially interested in getting into Russian minds at the time). 

Whenever someone from Washington came to see some proof, Russell would make THEM do the remote viewing.  Apparently, everyone can do it, and the more you practice, the better you get at it!

He tells the story that once, after a presentation, a Russian physicist stood up in the audience and said, “It seems pretty clear that an experienced remote viewer can focus their attention anywhere on the planet and describe what’s there.  Doesn’t that mean that it’s not possible to hide anything anymore?”

The idea that it’s not possible to hide anything anymore is a revolutionary one!  

“We are non-local awareness residing temporarily in a physical body.” 

In 1982, a team of physicists discovered that subatomic particles, such as electrons, are able to instantaneously communicate with each other, regardless of the distance separating them.  Just like human twins–who often know how the other is feeling even when they’re separated–if you “tickle” one of the particles, the other one in the pair also acts “tickled” AT EXACTLY THE SAME TIME, even if they are 10 million miles apart. 

This phenomenon is called “non-locality.”

Einstein said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, yet these particle communications occur instantaneously, or in “no time.” 

That means that the information didn’t travel (traveling would take time), so it is in some sense ALREADY THERE.  The particles are connected, as if they’re together, even with millions of miles between them.

This shocking discovery is considered one of the most momentous in the history of science.

Our most common human experience of the  physical world is that things in space and time tend to be LOCAL.

In other words, when object A affects object B by touching it, or by touching something else that touches it, that’s LOCAL.  “Local” makes logical, predictable sense to us.

But our world is also filled with un-measurable, non-local things like love, thoughts, dreams, insight, intuitions, synchronicities, etc–that we know are absolutely real and powerful.

When object A affects object B without touching anything, that’s NON-LOCAL.

Object B doesn’t have to touch object A to affect it, because in some sense it is already, always connected.  It’s already there.  

And if it’s already there, then THERE’S NO “THERE” THERE.

And if subatomic particles communicate in an already-there way, then non-locality is a property of the entire universe.  An undivided, seamlessly connected wholeness exists in the cosmos, and in every aspect of our physical reality.  And the mind–or human consciousness–can’t just be local and confined to only the  brain. 

The mind has to be non-local, because its thoughts are not bound by any of the rules of space and time.  There are no limits on the mind’s ability to instantaneously go anywhere in our imagination and our dreams.

“We are non-local awareness residing temporarily in a physical body.”

Russell Targ’s approach is that if subatomic particles are making the Already-There connections, then so are we.  Since that’s what we’re made of.

Remote viewing is another demonstration that we are only a breath away from knowing and proving that the universe is not so much composed of matter but of a Consciousness that connects everything.

You’re already there.

Sooooo…..Get Ignited!

Dolphins (like homing pigeons and other extraordinary animals) have navigational powers that seem inexplicable by Consensus Reality standards (the “reality” we all agree upon).  Their extrasensory feats simply defy belief. 

Basically, humans have tried to invent highly advanced machines that end up barely mimicking what dolphins can do with their hands tied behind their backs.  So to speak.

For example, just like a ship’s sonar, dolphins project sounds (pitched way above our hearing range) that create a visual image from the returning echoes.  Powerfully focused through their forehead into a virtual sonic beam, this ultrasound can penetrate their potential prey just as effectively as an x-ray. 

So when we swim with dolphins, we can’t hide a thing, since they can see our skeletons, our lungs, even a fetus in the womb. They can hear fetal heartbeats, and seem utterly fascinated and excited by pregnancy.

Dolphins love pregnant women! 

Thousands of shipwreck survivors have been saved from drowning by dolphins who have brought them to the surface and held them there, while repelling sharks until they were rescued.  Dolphins do the same thing for their own, since they too can drown. 

Maybe they recognize our similarities and thus our vulnerabilities. 

Remember that humans have words and language—and as a result we experience life with chronic thoughts that we “hear” in our heads. 

Language is the main source of our feeling that time is moving forward in a linear way.  We say, “Yesterday I did this, tomorrow I’ll do that.” 

But dolphins— like all other animals— don’t have language (as far as we know).  So they experience life exclusively with images.  Just pictures.  And without language, they have no sense of time passing. 

They live right in the moment.

Theirs is a consciousness so different from ours that we can barely grasp it.

It’s likely that dolphins have a visual/sonar/sensory understanding of the earth that is much more three-dimensional than ours is.  For example, when we look out at the horizon we see it as flat.  But they—from underwater, by the way—may actually sense the entire planet much more accurately, with its curvature and all.

Some scientists hypothesize that a group of dolphins can share information with another group of dolphins–about a new location they’ve just visited, for example. (Warm water! Good fishing! Nice reefs! No oil spills!). 

They share this information—and this may be their ultimate genius—by projecting to the new group a three-dimensional holographic map of the newly-explored place and exactly how to get there. 

That way, as a result of this map exchange, the dolphins who haven’t been there yet can easily find their way, get around the area— and cover all the Points Of Interest—by projecting the 3-D map and then swimming INTO it. 

Please take a moment now to imagine this.

You CAN get there from here. 

Get Ignited!  

Top photo by Eric Cheng.