How Media and Science Sell Us a Dangerous Delusion

I wanted to re-post this (slightly updated) article, because I think it speaks well, and with some immediacy, about what we see going on more and more these days. I hope you enjoy it. It starts with this:  

"Yeshua said: If you bring forth that which is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

Logion 70, The Gospel of Thomas

Denial is ignorance, accepted as truth through the force of will. Our personal will, and our collective will.

Popular Media and Science justify and enforce this will, misdirecting us from the self examination that makes us face our collective truths realistically, and psychically cornering us in the "The Way Things Are." They preoccupy us with good enough reasons for why things are like they are – and why they have to be like they are. Much of Media and Science is created and used to obscure the truth and replace it with a designed objective, to sell an idea or product – turning the truth into an obstacle that needs to be suppressed, where it becomes, as stated in our Gospel of Thomas quote again: "That which will destroy you." We end up confused, walking through a false world trying to find what's real. This is the Maya (or illusion) of Media and Science.

It may sound funny to call this Occultism, and to suggest that media operatives and scientists are occultists, but unfortunately it does work for a couple definitions of the word, in 1. The sense of using supernatural or paranormal means and methods: Media people know they are manipulating dark fears; and 2. In the sense of it being only for the initiated: Scientists and media people consort amongst one another to keep their stories straight. They both harbor scary secrets about what motivates them, shared only by a select few.

Popular Culture often harnesses the psychic energy of cruel self-judgement, "that which would destroy you," as it's chief attraction. The Collective Ego is always on the lookout for something to prove that humans are not particularly Divine and that we don't measure up, and so there must be something that can fix it – something that can calm or repair our shortcomings. So Media constantly stimulates those hot buttons of judgement and comparison – Fear, and the pathology of self-enhancement, to trick you to quite literally buy into it:

My clothes must be right. My lifestyle must be right. I must have the "right" friends, and the proper idols. My country must be right. My religion must be right. If you don't keep in line with these artificial demands, you won't measure up, or deserve material reward and the acknowledgment of others – which in reality can do nothing to assure happiness or fulfillment. You're made to fear that you might not even deserve Love unless you've achieved some cultural standard – and we all know the truth – that Love is the only thing that really assures happiness and fulfillment, and it's available to everyone for free.

These common fears are manipulated, heightened and kept activated by an intentional ever-increasing exposure to explicit violence, explicit selfishness, and explicit narcissism, without which there would be practically nothing on television, or increasingly at the movies, or on the radio either. And lately these fears are increasingly exploited to define our political choices too. In mainstream media's earlier years, human foibles were often pointed out as a lesson, or morality play. News programming reported events fairly objectively. But nowadays a corporate business model prevails that requires media to ruthlessly divide the audience by exploiting human faults and fears, in every format where selling products, ideas, or candidates is possible.

Television and film must be be watched very selectively to avoid these base, destructive urgencies; and while the internet also allows for content choice, you musn't forget the greatest selectivity of all: You have the choice not to take part in it at all, if you don't feel it's serving your best interests. And if you must take part, don't invest yourself in it spiritually. You simply will never find happiness with an unhealthy spirit; TV programmers and political strategists know that.

Remember what Marshall McLuhan said: "The medium is the message." If you are constantly carrying, sitting in front of and looking at a device that keeps you constantly attached to a false world, it will be impossible to live the easy, authentic, love-filled life that everyone deserves. If the forms of input you receive are superficial and fragmented and designed by people who don't have your best interests at heart, your life will always feel the same. Attachment to current media results in the collapse of your consciousness into a dark and selfish place.

In a generally (though not always) less intentional way, Science does the same thing by manipulating the agnosticism of the seeker. It's kind of like a religion whose dogma is always changing – a religion of logic, of data, of "empirical" observation, based solely on what our current senses and devices permit us to perceive and calculate. In the past, these means were limited, but even in those 'dark ages' Science was still very sure of itself and its authoritative description of the world. As means of observation improve, the world and being itself changes –according to Science – but still needs to be subjected to a healthier, more spiritual interpretation.

Now, as evolving Consciousness allows perception beyond our five senses (and is verified scientifically), and technology enables us to observe more and more of our (formerly invisible) nature of being, Science begins to resemble a dogma chasing a tale that Mysticism has been telling for a long, long time. And here's how that tale ends, and what it tells us about the real nature of our reality:

 Everything is connected and interdependent; and, if we aren't willing to investigate the truth behind our being, and the motivations that suppress that truth, then "That will destroy us."

But there is a form of Maya that can free us from the delusional limitations of the other (scary) three: We can switch to a Maya of inner experience and collective ecological sanity...The Maya of Nature. Turn off your mind, open your heart and your senses to the beauty and balance alive in the natural world, and the truth will rise up out of the ruins of our false structures of ego—media and science.

The Universe is an awesome and beautiful mystery, activated by our shared Consciousness. If we bring forth that Universe that is within us—that we all share—then what we bring forth will save us.

Read about this and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it it at your local bookstore!

How Global Consciousness is Coherently Speaking To Us

Unfortunately, I'm often a little unconscious, and mildly incoherent – which is no laughing matter, because of all the things I want to experience in my life, consciousness and coherence rank pretty high up there. I prize my moments experiencing consciousness – that feeling of being awake and aware – and recognizing coherence, which in this case doesn't only mean occasionally making sense but refers to a fancier, more scientific way of talking about the profound connection of everything to everything.

Another unfortunate fact is that unconsciousness and incoherence is more or less a default condition for a lot of humanity these days (just look around) – but it needn't be, because true Consciousness (capitalized to emphasize Divinity) is constantly arising, and constantly speaking to us through the forms of coherence we witness around us.

At those times when I can really feel it, when I'm aware and accepting and full of purposeful direction, I feel completely connected – as though I'm being guided by an unseen hand. I understand this as a (momentary) state of my expanded consciousness, when a field of intuitive intelligence is informing my life. Consciousness is speaking to me in a direct, coherent way. It's speaking to me through the coherence that connects all of our existence.

Consciousness is a field that we engage in through the forms we take. Coherence is the connection of every part of those forms to one another through what the Buddhists call emptiness, the Hindu call brahman, and what science nowadays defines as the quantum field.

I happen to be a multiple near-death survivor, and I can tell you that in each of the three occasions while I was “out,” I wasn't really out – I was in deeper. I was still engaged by Consciousness at a very profound level – a level that I recognize is speaking to all of us everyday and in every way through the simple realization of everything being inexorably connected to everything else.

This is the experience of coherence, the fact that every part of me – of my body and mind – from the smallest cell up to my biggest brainstorm are clearly interconnected in a profoundly dynamic way. A flu virus (or a misplaced word) can ruin my entire week, and may simultaneously do the same to millions of other people – as is true for a laugh from a funny Youtube, or the effects of an explosion on the surface of the sun. Every part of me acts inexplicably in concert with every other part of me, as every part of the world (and universe) acts in a dynamic balance, or imbalance, with every other part of the world.

And so it is with the natural interactions we see everywhere – from the clearest examples in Nature of one species dynamically cooperating with another, to the most mysterious and extreme unlikelihood that all the “disconnected” forces alive in the Universe could come together from the vastness of space and somehow create this life on this planet. Stand back and look at our Earth and it's very easy to see that we are part of a coherent whole – a singular expression of an incomprehensible Universal Consciousness. At arms length, our world looks like the same thing (and our arms aren't very long...).

 "I am the true Self in the heart of every creature...the beginning, middle, and end of their existence."

                                    The Bhagavad Gita  10.20

Beneath everything lies that unifying intuitive understanding of our truest relationship to the Earth and all the life upon it – an ever-evolving expression of a conscious Universe, being eternally expressed. Quantum coherence and emergent self-organization aren't confined to waves or planets or particles, or only to anthills or flocks of birds either. All the life on Earth is chemically, psychically, and genetically connected at a profound level, at the same level as every other form of life – at the level of survival.

It comes as no shock, does it – that we share enough Consciousness for all of us to know that truth? Our being 'entangled' in non-ordinary ways, sharing a 'non-local' source is obvious in our present contracting reality, and blossoming into global Consciousness through our simultaneous personal realizations.

That's the reason why we can have so much hope – because we can always have faith in the fact that our forms are constantly rediscovering and rearranging "the Self" into a timeless, working whole – even in the face (or in the midst) of our impending catastrophes. Bringing the promise of that faith into reality requires that we follow those natural, intuitive impulses of our own groups, and our own hearts.

The humane acceptance of mass global migrations; racial and sexual equality movements; the impulse to maintain net neutrality; personal participation in clean, free power; a responsible awareness of our changing climate and its effects; respect for our clean water sources; ecological awareness across the generations; a real awareness of global hunger and epidemic disease – all of these are examples of this movement, which is finding its identity in a modern mythology that reconnects us to Mother Earth. A recognition of humanity's spiritual evolution, grounded in altruism, activism, and personal responsibility is bringing us into step with our emergent Global Consciousness, and showing us our true direction. We mustn’t deny it.

"There is a community of the spirit. Join it, and feel the delight of [flying in the noisy flock, and] being the noise...Close both eyes to see with the other eye...Open your hands, if you want to be held...Sit down in this circle."

                      Rumi

It’s a humble path that leads us towards the shift we all know we must take (those without humility are the cause of our catastrophes). It’s actually an involuntary course we are already taking towards our survival and spiritual evolution. Recognizing it within oneself, and allowing ourselves to join the horizontal hierarchy that this undeniable impulse organizes itself within will guide our best actions.

It's gonna shake things up, alright (whether we want it to or not). It's nothing short of the conscious deconstruction of our systems of exploitative materialism, and the recognition of all the coherent life of the planet as Sacred. This is not just an evolution we’re talking about, but a revolution of humanity – a conscious movement away from the unnecessary waste and destruction we express now, towards the higher order directed by Nature and Consciousness. 

And this is not my idea…it's our idea.

"To the knowing, all of life is a movement towards perfection; so what need have they for the excessive, the extravagant, or the extreme?"

Tao te Ching, 29

Read about concepts like these and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it at your local bookstore!

Is God Consciousness (or Vice Versa)?

Eventually, we're all asked the big question: "Do you believe in God?" In that moment, there are a couple directions you may go in. You may directly (and wisely) give a simple yes or no answer; but if you're like me, you’ll experience a kind of systems freeze, and once again find yourself back in the place where you struggle to define what God really means to you. Where suddenly you have to focus all your limited (like me) mental powers on that limitless concept, and try to get in touch with enough profound inner intelligence to provide some honest meaning. You have to try to contact and express your highest consciousness. You have to try to find God.

"In the beginning was the word," it is said, but then no words–their forms or meanings or manifestations–are possible for us without consciousness.

Now I wish I had that Big Guy up on the marble throne, sporting a regally coiffed beard, and absolute omniscient creative mastery over all being. Or some universal intelligence like a giant extraterrestrial brain, seated in the center of a super galactic organism—but I'm afraid I don't really have either of those. Either—or both, may well be true, but I still seem to need something closer to home. Something I may not be able to understand, but that I can identify with. Like, what would the requirements and qualifications of God's job description look like?

 1. Must be able to create, energize, and animate all life and material creation, as we know it.

2. Must be able to define and direct all reality or realities, based on an infinite variety of material structures, natural processes, and perceptions–as determined and experienced by all the sentient and non-sentient forms you create.

3. Must be able, and willing, to provide constant, unconditional love; and to benevolently support and guide all of life by establishing eternal standards of beauty, ethics, morality, and evolutionary progress (in both a physical, and spiritual sense).

Consciousness itself is the only universal force I can think of that can conceivably achieve and sustain all of that. I know that what little of it I possess myself is the only thing that permits me some identification, and some means for understanding the miraculous nature of Life, writ very large. For me, that makes Consciousness a pretty good candidate.

Quantum Physics has been performing reliably for long enough, and has been specifically and exhaustively tested enough to indicate that it’s Consciousness that provides the link between energy and matter– both in the sense of conscious observation being the catalyst for material creation; and for the existence of an active, intelligent Consciousness at every level of being.

"No phenomenon is a physical phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon."

John Wheeler, Physicist

"Matter…is not an inert substance but an active agent…mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every electron."

Freeman Dyson, Physicist

I won't pretend to understand any of this too well, but all the evidence suggests that the connection of everything on a sub-atomic level ("entanglement" and "non-locality" in quantum physics' terms) demonstrates that there’s a transformational, creative force underlying our reality—a kind of connecting field that we, and everything else in our world, participates in. If we call that field Consciousness, we may be revealing the impossible magic trick that can make simple matter (like my brain) assume energy and intelligence. We may be pointing to the power that catalyzes the source and substance of all creation.

That sounds a little like a God requirement, doesn't it?

Look at all the forms of life that we easily associate with "The Divine," and they're natural, aren't they? The miraculous presence of life is so obvious in the forms of nature: cells, plants, animals, humanity. The Earth itself is alive—the ground and skies and seas—it's apparent to us in all those cumulative expressions of Consciousness like cell mitosis, the heliotropism of plants, the organic integration and sentience of animals, and the experience of this downright crazy life that we all share.

Even our scriptures defining "The Divine" suggest that at the heart of it all is the radiance of Consciousness:

I am the light that shines on everyone

I am the All.

The All came forth from me

and the All came into me.

Split the wood and I am there.

Turn over the stone,

and you will find me.

The Gospel of Thomas, Logion 77

I am the true Self in the heart of every creature...the beginning, middle, and end of their existence.

            The Bhagavad Gita 10.20

As for that last job requirement, the power and potential of unconditional Love can’t be denied by anyone. The world itself, at every level, undeniably responds to that force and calling. The characteristics of transcendent human behavior, like compassion, humility, tolerance, forgiveness, and generosity that also describe an ideally benevolent 'Great Spirit,' are the same ones we attribute to connecting to our "Higher Consciousness;" the connection that merges us—in Love—with the beauty of all being.

            "...my own true inner being actually exists in every living creature...[and] is the ground of that compassion upon which all true, that is to say, unselfish, virtue rests..."

            Arthur Schopenhauer

And tell me, where does our sane and charitable "voice of reason" come from, if not from the field of Consciousness, independent of the selfish gymnastics of human ego? The idea that ‘thought requires consciousness, but consciousness does not require thought,’ is something to keep in mind.

When we sit in the stillness of meditation, we encounter that radiant fluctuation–the effervescent ground of being that is Consciousness. There, in that field where anything is possible, we lay out the parameters of the workspace that we call imagination. And they are false borders—strictly of our own individual, and collective, design. Beyond them is the limitless possibility of Consciousness, alive and awaiting our willingness to explore. You might even call that uncharted territory “The Mind of God.”

The clear bead at the center changes everything. There are no edges to my loving now.

Jalal ad-Din Rumi

In the radiance of the limited senses we possess, we are clearly a part of this creation. We are all an expression of this Consciousness, and I wouldn't be the first to suggest that as an expression of that Divine Consciousness, you (like everyone and everything) are an expression of God—however you choose to define that field, that being, that infinite possibility.

In pop technology we say that “if the application (consciousness) is free, the user (life) is the product (God).”

I guess it would have been a lot faster if I'd just given a yes or no answer to that big question, but apparently, I need to run it around a bit until I can let go and simply experience what appears to be real to me—that Consciousness is God.

…Or was it vice versa?

The latest book: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor from Llewellyn Worldwide can be ordered direct on this page or online; and the first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for them it at your local bookstore!

"The Play of Life, Through a Glass Darkly" at Soul Life Times

"…There is light within people of light, and they shine it upon the whole world. If they don't shine it, how dark it gets!"   Yeshua, Logion 24, The Gospel of Thomas

 Head over to Soul Life Times Magazine, for my latest article about the nature of "reality," shining a light on being a being of light, the thin veil of nature, and how to look in a different way.

The Neuroscientists' Map of Heaven

Recently, I was being interviewed about my three Near Death Experiences and the spiritual realizations that grew from them. The interviewer asked me if there was any scientific support for my views, or if my assertions were "just a matter of opinion."  But all profound spiritual experience is a matter of opinion. There is no proof I could give her, other than to show her what's in my heart. What has happened for me. 

For that variety of spiritual skeptic devoted to "proof" – to results of the scientific method – profound spiritual experiences always present an intriguing problem: finding a provable explanation for mysterious, personal phenomena. When one has predetermined that any extra-dimensional cause, or “magical” explanation is impossible, the problem is how to simply reveal the source of the phenomenon by applying scientific methodology. Like flicking on the lights on at a fraudulent séance. 

These days, the favorite way to conduct that search comes through "mapping" the human brain, whose incredibly complex workings are currently being captured and cataloged by ever-expanding artificial intelligence. Since there's so much going on inside of our brains, naturally the paranormal – even "The Divine" – has simply got to be in there somewhere too.

  

The idea that there's a spiritual part of the brain, an area where cellular electro-chemical activities generate sensations of unity and transcendence (neurotheology) isn't really new, but thanks to advances in brain-mapping, it's been getting a lot more airplay lately. Locating and documenting the "God Part" of the brain could provide a tidy explanation for the persistent belief that an external, or even cumulative, intelligence is at work in the world. It could decisively debunk all the claims of transpersonal, extra-dimensional spiritual experiences, like those made by the growing ranks of near death survivors, and other such witnesses of the sublime. 

After all, even we mystics and navel-gazers ourselves suggest that it’s an inward path to spiritual realization, so doesn't it just make scientific sense that divine experience doesn’t originate from without, but from somewhere within – within the circuitry of our brains, that is?

The real problem is that every direction you look in turns magical pretty quickly. Looking outside of our brains, we’re immediately assailed by the totally incomprehensible domain of our very being. That darn infinite cosmos. First, there's the fabric of Time/Space, loaded with the galaxies and question marks that we see when we look into the night sky. Then, there's the limitless sub-atomic universe, described by the ridiculously magical – yet scientifically reliable – quantum mechanics. In both cases, Science's very best explanations are at best conditional, and otherwise reliably subject to change.

In our larger, avowedly "magical" context, mapping the mysterious processes within our brain may someday function to demonstrate how the neural pathways of the brain work, but not necessarily what the brain may actually be capable of doing. It's a bit like capturing lightning in a bottle.There's a whole lot more to it than just how it works.  

It seems to me that the real questions posed by the neuroscientific skeptics are: How are all of our sensory – and "extra-sensory" – expe-riences explained by the idea that each of our brains is independently conscious? Are our brains exclusively the generators of everything we perceive (including "God") – or aren't they quite possibly receivers, and projectors too? The answers to those questions almost seem obvious.  

Naturally, there's a part of my brain that experiences spiritual sensations. There's a part of it that experiences heat and cold and hunger and heartbreak, too. There's a degree to which all sensations are received, and generated, and projected out into my life (and yours sometimes) by me, and my little ol’ eight pound brain. And the same is true for you too. That’s how we process this life, whether our “reality” reaches us from the outside, or grows out of the many ways we create it ourselves, utilizing these clunky (but elegant) vehicles we run around in. (No wonder they're so expensive to maintain.) 

No scientist worth his salt would suggest that temperature only exists because my brain tells me it does, though how sensitive I am to it, or how much of it I generate myself can vary quite a bit. The same holds true for the experience of profound spiritual realizations. The reality of spiritual awareness, consciousness, and extra-dimensionality is, no doubt, realized in the part of our brain that takes care of all that for us. Why wouldn’t it be? We’re only human, after all.

For thousands of years, we have been describing spiritual experiences of an extra-dimensional nature with far more solidarity and consistency than the scientific community has managed to muster in its comparatively brief life. And  even the proposition that there's an individual, brain-centered experience of the spiritual, that manifests a kind of spiritual mass delusion throughout humanity, suggests the participation in a shared field of consciousness  – the conceptual lightning that quantum mechanics let out of the bottle long ago.

And what of the human heart? Can we map that as well? Studies now demonstrate conclusively that the heart, with cellular similarities to the brain, serves a cognitive function, at times controlling intellectual judgment, as well as emotion. 

Feelings of sublime connectedness, the generation of Love, and our compassionate impulses are all processed by a mixture of mind and heart. So, too, those deep, transformative realizations of a spiritual reality, most convincingly testified to by meditators and trauma survivors (including near death experiencers). But as usual, the people who have the most trouble “scientifically” squaring these kinds of testimonials with their own expectations are those who may never have had such profoundly spiritual experiences themselves. Once they do, they usually change their tunes in pretty short order.

While we don’t seem to be evolving much physically these days, we unquestionably are spiritually. The internet, synchronicity (a connecting principle without cause, according to Jung), measurable instances of global consciousness, spiritual realization of all sorts on a mass scale (not just on Oprah), as well as the incredible potential revealed by mapping the human brain, all point to an increasing awareness that demonstrates this evolution. 

Like the evolution of those parts of our brains that have allowed us to process logical thought, vision, communication, creativity, and cooperative effort, our brains –and hearts– are evolving to process our growing spiritual potential. We’re not just simply generating spiritual sensation, we’re becoming more and more capable of observing, receiving, and projecting spiritual energy through our shared field of consciousness.

I hope the skeptics discover what we believers found “within” a long time ago – namely serenity, compassion, and the deep understanding of the nature of our absolute unity. And that maybe, Love is a kind of quantum field itself.


How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying) is available now, from Llewellyn Worldwide, and will help you realize Heaven as a state-of-being—not just a wishful destination. The book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond, based on lessons (learned the hard way) by a three time near death survivor is now available everywhere – but ask for it it at your local bookstore!